AustLit

'In this volume, five prose poets explore the Five major oceans as they are currently classified: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Southern and the Arctic. Each 21-part sequence of poems is a particular-and sometimes oblique-rumination on one of these vast bodies of water. Together they offer an inspiring and sometimes troubling exploration of our relationship with what is, essentially, a single oceanic entity.'  (Publication summary)

'Poetry as an art form has traditionally registered tropes of feeling and memory, often with astonishing power, especially since the Romantics began to focus on projections of the self. Yet, when poetry invokes memory, anchoring people to their pasts and identities, it frequently reveals that, at best, memory offers a precarious connection to what is certain or secure – and this is particularly the case for women writers. For example, much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry reveals that memory’s recesses are often uncomfortable, and studies in autobiographical memory confirm poetry’s intuition that all may not be what it seems within the “house” of the recollecting self. This paper explores ways in which poetry’s elusive suggestiveness, and memory’s more fraught instances, confirm the provisionality and precarity of what most people are inclined to take for granted – that they know themselves and can speak securely of who they are. This has always been a challenge for women in patriarchal societies as gender inequality and precarious work – often in atypical employment – has informed and affected their expressions of self and identity. We conclude with examples from the work of two contemporary women poets, Emma Hyche and Mary A. Koncel, in order to focus on their particular approaches to precarity in their poetry and prose poetry and to posit that women poets often disrupt and disturb aspects of the patriarchal language system to offer new constructions of autobiographical memory.' (Publication abstract)

'For a long time, Australia has had a conservative poetry culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when modernist poets in Europe, Asia, America, and – somewhat belatedly – the United Kingdom revolutionised international literature, Australian poets continued writing mainly conventional verse.' (Introduction)

'Although James A.W. Heffernan influentially defines contemporary ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (1993, 3), we argue for a more dynamic and fluid understanding of ekphrasis. In particular, we focus on the multiple and indeterminate perspectives created by ekphrastic poetry, emphasising the way ekphrastic poetry develops complex and interart relationships that cause a fracturing and/or stretching in the perspectives of both the poem and the artwork(s) it invokes. A powerful in-between or liminal ekphrastic space is created in which meanings tug, pull, swirl and merge. As new meanings are created ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, Victor W. 1979. “Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, 234–243. New York: Harper and Row, 234), an ekphrastic point of view emerges, problematising and questioning both-artworks-at-once and highlighting the provisional as it probes what can possibly be said in language about modes of artistic representation in artworks. Additionally, because poetic ekphrasis cannot fully represent, and always reinterprets, another artwork, it is engaged in processes of substitution through which poetic tropes stand in for some of the content of the original artwork. In applying these ideas to the relationships of ekphrastic prose poems to works of visual art, we explicate works by David Grubbs and Lorette C. Luzajic, as well as our own ekphrastic prose poetry.' (Publication abstract)  

'Imperial Greek rhetoricians defined ecphrasis as ‘descriptive speech which brings the subject shown before the eyes with visual vividness’ (Squire 2015: n.p.), since which time understandings of ekphrasis have evolved and narrowed. Recently, however, definitions of ekphrasis have been expanding to incorporate new media, digital images and augmented reality that engage with haptic and auditive experiences. The ancient concept of energeia—‘the evocation of a visual scene in all its details and colours’ (Cave 1976: 6)—is relevant to these new understandings, including in the presentation of the kind of archival material housed in the Helen Shea collection at Emerson College. Digital ekphrasis, such as one finds in the Klimt: The Immersive Experience installation, open up possibilities for fluid and wide-ranging representations of archival material, along with powerful considerations of this material’s relationships to complex social interactions. Such digital ekphrasis is able to evoke visual scenes in great detail and cast new and creative light on ekphrastic relationships.' (Publication abstract)

(Publication summary)