{"title":"Poetry as Presence: Working with personae. A survivor's manifesto on poetic practice.","authors":"Claire Gaskin","doi":"10.54375/001/sucww1nvon","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/sucww1nvon","url":null,"abstract":"This piece adopts the voice of public declaration to assert poetic practice as survivable resistance to abuses of power. It proposes that poetry is the best means to identify, expose and reconfigure what is implicit in dominant discourses that discredit the way a survivor of sexual assault may communicate. It is found that a poetic use of language that is allusive, evocative and associative can reinvigorate annihilated perspectives so as to add them to public discourse. Poetic methods can be employed to resist and subvert the supposed supremacy of linear and logical narrative structures considered essential for sense making and validity. Furthermore, they can be employed to excavate family and state histories to resurrect, sometimes from fragments, the perspectives of those that have been silenced.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"8 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140443265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Blue Hills Archipelago: Longform poetics & the ecological anti-epic","authors":"Jake Goetz","doi":"10.54375/001/gungzusra7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/gungzusra7","url":null,"abstract":"This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages – a key influence on Duggan’s own series – I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills – as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method – can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"2 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140442912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stressed? Unstressed? Attentiveness to Metre: A journey towards intentional practice","authors":"Miriam Wei Wei Lo","doi":"10.54375/001/nq2qgq918w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/nq2qgq918w","url":null,"abstract":"How do you scan a line of poetry? This creative-critical essay explores the faultlines opened up by this simple, but dangerous, question from the perspective of a poetry-writing practice and pedagogy. It argues for a distinction between metre and rhythm, then proposes that quarrels over scansion often come down to different assumptions about which metrical system is in use. The paper demonstrates this by examining the contradictory positions of canonical heavyweights Robert Hass and Gerard Manley Hopkins on the matter of the dactyllic foot. This paper goes on to outline a few challenges and strategies in teaching poetic metre to beginner poets. It considers the difficult task of discerning what ‘sounds right’ in a poem, using Annie Finch’s theories of metre and meaning to prompt reflective questions for the practicing poet. While an app or digital tool that could scan oral readings of poetry would be useful (both for pedagogy and practice), this essay contends that attentiveness to metre and rhythm is primarily a discipline of the body.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"105 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140444263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"I think things are precious","authors":"Vahri McKenzie","doi":"10.54375/001/k4vz5gp93t","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/k4vz5gp93t","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139355889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Run as fast as you can","authors":"Nicci Haynes","doi":"10.54375/001/4s2pux8er7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/4s2pux8er7","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction + downloadable zine","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139356002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Not Thinking about the Circus at the Circus","authors":"Angela Gardner, Gwenn Tasker","doi":"10.54375/001/","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/","url":null,"abstract":"This photoessay explores the creation of a collaborative book Not Thinking about the Circus at the Circus, a finalist in the ArtSpace Mackay Libris Award and recently acquired by Artspace Mackay for their artist book collection. It particularly addresses the social and political uses of creative publishing, creative art/text publishing relationships and collaborative shifts.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139355954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}