{"title":"Women Poets in the Archive: Making space for impulse, imagination and implication","authors":"Kimberly K Williams","doi":"10.54375/001/qi50uspzmi","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/qi50uspzmi","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the space that is created when poetry meets the archives, a unique space wherein a poet can use the historical materials found in archives together with her imagination to reconstruct women’s lives and narratives that hitherto have been marginalised or ignored by more traditional historical texts and outlets. The article considers the impulse that occurs when creativity, language, and history meet, and uses the lens of some of Susan Stanford Friedman’s ideas on feminism and history found in her book Mappings. Often, this kind of imaginative rendering takes space, and the use of the women’s long poem in providing a form for this work is also considered. The ideas and work of other poets, such as Jordie Albiston, Susan Howe and Helen Rickerby, further inform the discussion, and two manuscripts by Kimberly K. Williams are analysed and discussed.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134030422","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 Bones/Say what/Cannot be give/Voice': Archival untelling in M. NourbeSe Philip's 'Zong!'","authors":"Alyson Miller","doi":"10.54375/001/3hrkq45j2v","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/3hrkq45j2v","url":null,"abstract":"Rachel Kaufman argues the ‘archival poem brings to bear the rhythms of the past through the language of the present’ (2021: 21). Indeed, it is a unique genre for its ability to ‘hold in balance discordant images and thoughts’ (26) in its presentation of dissonant simultaneities—a quality critical to representing historical traumas, particularly those related to slavery and race. Through processes of disassembling and fracturing, archival poetry exposes the silences and redactions within ‘official’ histories by marking and blurring the borderlines of past and present, subject and object. Examining M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, poetry grounded in the materiality of archival sources, this paper explores how the past might be defamiliarized to reveal that which is hidden or suppressed. In doing so, it contends that creative practice engaged with the archives offers the subversive potential to resist totalising historical accounts, whilst conveying the complex horrors of racial violence and oppression.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114670922","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":"Rilke's Bees and the Archive as Hive: Cognitive transformation and the distributed mind in the poetic practice of Denise Levertov","authors":"Willo Drummond","doi":"10.54375/001/au2awsvpzl","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/au2awsvpzl","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines a unique personal archive of ‘brief and essential texts’ created by UK born US poet Denise Levertov, with a focus on her particular creative relationship with the letters of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Using the metaphor of ‘Hive Poetics’ (Hollingsworth) and considering the archive as an artefact of ‘distributed mind’, the analysis draws upon contemporary theories of distributed and ecological cognition (Clark; Hutchins; Menary; Sutton) to demonstrate both how poets engage with archives as part of poetic practice and how as researchers we might approach the archive in ways that extend beyond the teleological. That is, how we might consider archival materials as artefacts of creative cognition and practice rather than of value simply for the supporting role they play in the analysis of a finished text.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"14 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122585822","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":"'Crazy Lin-ups all over the Place': Notes wandering toward a research choreography","authors":"J. Wilkinson","doi":"10.54375/001/aqjx6ozxwd","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/aqjx6ozxwd","url":null,"abstract":"This essay discusses the revival of a failed creative/biographical poetry project, on Australian ballerina Lucette Aldous. I had begun this project in 2015 but, despite several years of research—both archival (Ballet Rambert and Victoria & Albert, London; Australian Ballet archives at the Arts Centre, Melbourne) and through interviews with Aldous in Perth—I was unable to find a way to structure and convey the ‘life’, and the project was put aside in 2018. Lucette Aldous passed away in 2021, and this loss was followed by Australian poet Jordie Albiston’s unexpected passing, in February 2022. In part, it was the proximity of these two losses that sparked the revival of the Aldous project, fuelled as I was both by a sadness that I had not been able to deliver a completed manuscript to the retired ballerina before she died, and also by my revisiting of the poems in Albiston’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Albiston’s poems, often documentary in nature, and ruled by mathematics and constraint yet open to possibility, multiplicity, irony, opened a way for me to move forward with the Aldous project.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131493903","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":"Archives as 'Thin Places': Resurrecting ghosts of Australia's earliest refugees through poetics of resistance","authors":"Anne Casey","doi":"10.54375/001/pdxtybqcgb","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/pdxtybqcgb","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the Irish notion of a ‘thin place’ (where the veil between us and the spirit world is so thin that we can sense those on the other side), this paper outlines an approach to archival research and creative practice which seeks to reawaken and give voice to the ghosts of some of Australia’s earliest refugees. This work uncovers new connections between the Great Irish Famine, a humanitarian crisis which halved Ireland’s population and the cyclical incarceration and abuse of young women in New South Wales in the 1860s and 1870s—to highlight a small but significant, yet largely unwritten, chapter in Irish-Australian history. Employing poetics of resistance incorporating elements of these young women’s outlawed native Irish language and culture, this work seeks to decolonise their memories and restore voice to those who suffered the brutal consequences of colonisation in both their native and adopted countries.","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130527878","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":"Bee in the Bonnet","authors":"Jonathan P. Taylor","doi":"10.54375/001/f4cv38k59q","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54375/001/f4cv38k59q","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":311705,"journal":{"name":"Axon: Creative Explorations","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122506946","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}