In thinking about the relationship between poetry and the extreme, we wanted to examine how poetry functions in a number of ways: how it creates the space – and new forms of language – to articulate events which seem inexpressible; how poets innovate to enact resistance; how poetry helps to break silences and taboos; and how poetry, and the role of the poets, is so often linked to the transgression of boundaries. The submissions we received embraced the notion of extremity in a variety of ways, considering the mathematical complexities of the work of Louis Zukofsky, for instance, and the desire for liberation in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life, Caio Yurgel writes, might be understood as “a long preparation for suicide”. We received work on provocative ideas about nationalism and resistance, politics and disaster, about collaboration through the extremities of climate change and COVID, and how women poets might “disrupt and disturb” patriarchal systems to construct new visions of autobiographical memory, as Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton examine. The poetic responses also echo these themes, often eerily, focussing on abject bodies and the taboo, on autobiographical memories, on places overwhelmed by the devastations of extreme weather events, and on the “phenomena of perception” as a reaction to the alienating nature of pandemic ‘normal’. Importantly, the responses, both scholarly and creative, demonstrate the centrality of poetry to the difficult, wrestling with questions about selfhood and belonging, for example, as well as with language itself, its contortions and transformations in seeking to find new shapes for the ineffable.
{"title":"Introduction: Poetry and extremity","authors":"Alyson Miller, Ellie Gardner","doi":"10.52086/001c.88232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88232","url":null,"abstract":"In thinking about the relationship between poetry and the extreme, we wanted to examine how poetry functions in a number of ways: how it creates the space – and new forms of language – to articulate events which seem inexpressible; how poets innovate to enact resistance; how poetry helps to break silences and taboos; and how poetry, and the role of the poets, is so often linked to the transgression of boundaries. The submissions we received embraced the notion of extremity in a variety of ways, considering the mathematical complexities of the work of Louis Zukofsky, for instance, and the desire for liberation in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life, Caio Yurgel writes, might be understood as “a long preparation for suicide”. We received work on provocative ideas about nationalism and resistance, politics and disaster, about collaboration through the extremities of climate change and COVID, and how women poets might “disrupt and disturb” patriarchal systems to construct new visions of autobiographical memory, as Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton examine. The poetic responses also echo these themes, often eerily, focussing on abject bodies and the taboo, on autobiographical memories, on places overwhelmed by the devastations of extreme weather events, and on the “phenomena of perception” as a reaction to the alienating nature of pandemic ‘normal’. Importantly, the responses, both scholarly and creative, demonstrate the centrality of poetry to the difficult, wrestling with questions about selfhood and belonging, for example, as well as with language itself, its contortions and transformations in seeking to find new shapes for the ineffable.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136277100","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}
The extremities of a state of pandemic lockdown intensify, through physical and emotional constraints, an aesthetic of perceptual experience involving the senses, or sense perception. Part of this pandemic perception requires living “with uncertainty, […] which involves living with the [cognitive] dissonance” (Aronson & Tavris, 2020). So many artists found sensuous aesthetics to live with these dissonances (Sarasso et al., 2021), such as street performances while emptying the bins, or orchestra members performing via Zoom (managing transition delays to suggest harmonies across isolations). Wallace Stevens enlarges an aesthetic of the sensuous through a non-mimetic form of practice, what he terms “the phenomena of perception”. The phenomena which illustrate the pressures of imagination and reality infuse Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the model and catalyst for this poetic suite on lockdown. This suite is rhizomatic, exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “rhizome [which] has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”(27). The intention is to map a mass of roots, avoiding a structural tree system (beginning, middle and end) which suggests binaries or dualities. This rhizomatic presentation of extreme moments of “being between” presents an array of mappings or tracings, “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions” (Berry & Siegal, n.d.).
大流行封锁状态的极端，通过身体和情感上的限制，加强了涉及感官或感官感知的感知体验美学。这种流行病的部分看法要求生活在“不确定性中，[…]这涉及生活在[认知]失调中”(阿伦森&安普;泰吾瑞斯,2020)。因此，许多艺术家发现感官美学与这些不和谐共存(Sarasso et al.， 2021)，例如在清空垃圾箱时的街头表演，或管弦乐队成员通过Zoom表演(管理过渡延迟，以暗示跨隔离的和谐)。华莱士·史蒂文斯(Wallace Stevens)通过一种非模仿的实践形式，即他所说的“感知现象”，扩大了感官的审美。史蒂文斯的《观察黑鸟的十三种方式》(Thirteen Ways of Looking ata Blackbird)中充斥着描绘想象和现实压力的现象，它是这本诗意的禁闭套书的典范和催化剂。这首组曲是根茎式的，探索了德勒兹和瓜塔里(1987)的“根茎没有开始也没有结束;它总是在中间，在事物之间，相互作用，中间穿插”(27)。其目的是映射大量的根，避免结构树系统(开始，中间和结束)，这意味着二进制或对偶性。这种“介于两者之间”的极端时刻的根茎状呈现呈现了一系列映射或追踪，“由于不可预测的并置而向新概念领域的迁移”(Berry &Siegal,无日期)。
{"title":"13 ways of looking at lockdown","authors":"Karen Le Rossignol","doi":"10.52086/001c.88244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88244","url":null,"abstract":"The extremities of a state of pandemic lockdown intensify, through physical and emotional constraints, an aesthetic of perceptual experience involving the senses, or sense perception. Part of this pandemic perception requires living “with uncertainty, […] which involves living with the [cognitive] dissonance” (Aronson & Tavris, 2020). So many artists found sensuous aesthetics to live with these dissonances (Sarasso et al., 2021), such as street performances while emptying the bins, or orchestra members performing via Zoom (managing transition delays to suggest harmonies across isolations). Wallace Stevens enlarges an aesthetic of the sensuous through a non-mimetic form of practice, what he terms “the phenomena of perception”. The phenomena which illustrate the pressures of imagination and reality infuse Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the model and catalyst for this poetic suite on lockdown. This suite is rhizomatic, exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “rhizome [which] has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”(27). The intention is to map a mass of roots, avoiding a structural tree system (beginning, middle and end) which suggests binaries or dualities. This rhizomatic presentation of extreme moments of “being between” presents an array of mappings or tracings, “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions” (Berry & Siegal, n.d.).","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313674","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}
The eastern European poet Paul Celan (1920–70) asserted that poetry is non-aesthetic: neither a work nor a process of art. His uncompromising approach, which became increasingly concerned with language’s capacity not only to broach the unspeakable, but also bring that unspeakability into his poems, continues to influence and shape the work of contemporary scholars, translators and poets. In this paper, I use apophasis – a centuries-old philosophical and rhetorical approach developed to deal in language with what lies beyond language – as a lens through which to examine Celan’s extraordinary relationship with and handling of words; and how he manages to shave language to its sheerest extremes. I investigate his diction and register, his wrenching and deforming of the German tongue, his inventive reworking of selected vocabulary into neologism, and the effect of this compressed energy on the structure and tone of the poems. Arguing that Celan achieves a verbal and dynamic dislocation that draws attention to what the poems stop short of saying, I consider what might usefully be drawn from his radical example, in order to shape a contemporary poetics whereby a poet might deal with what can be said against the mightiness of what cannot
{"title":"“All that has room within it / even without / language”: the poetic technique of Paul Celan","authors":"Mags Webster","doi":"10.52086/001c.88233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88233","url":null,"abstract":"The eastern European poet Paul Celan (1920–70) asserted that poetry is non-aesthetic: neither a work nor a process of art. His uncompromising approach, which became increasingly concerned with language’s capacity not only to broach the unspeakable, but also bring that unspeakability into his poems, continues to influence and shape the work of contemporary scholars, translators and poets. In this paper, I use apophasis – a centuries-old philosophical and rhetorical approach developed to deal in language with what lies beyond language – as a lens through which to examine Celan’s extraordinary relationship with and handling of words; and how he manages to shave language to its sheerest extremes. I investigate his diction and register, his wrenching and deforming of the German tongue, his inventive reworking of selected vocabulary into neologism, and the effect of this compressed energy on the structure and tone of the poems. Arguing that Celan achieves a verbal and dynamic dislocation that draws attention to what the poems stop short of saying, I consider what might usefully be drawn from his radical example, in order to shape a contemporary poetics whereby a poet might deal with what can be said against the mightiness of what cannot","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313680","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}
The Venetian lagoon is a geographical extremity imperilled by extreme weather events. Increasingly regular flooding endangers the lives and livelihoods of Venetians, not to mention the built and natural environments around them. In response to the documentary film Saving Venice (Bulling, 2022), I have produced a short series of poems that address the existential threat that climate change poses to Venice. The first poem refers to the MOSE sea-gates project, a feat of engineering designed to prevent catastrophic flooding of the lagoon. The second takes up the motif of the foundations of Venice, specifically the use of wooden pylons that excise oxygen and moisture and prevent the city from sinking. The third poem deals with the effects of erosion caused by shipping. This poetic work builds upon my previous creative and critical output focussed on Venice as a liminal and literary space, notable for the in-between-ness that comes from being a city built on water (Venzo, 2015; Venzo 2019; Venzo 2022). Extending this scholarship on Venice as a city both real and imagined through writing, these poems represent this watery terrain as simultaneously poetic and ecological (Bryson, 2002). Using the technique of concrete poetry (Draper, 1971; Bray, 2012), each poem syncretises these hidden elements that speak to the effects of extremity, to address the “slipperiness” of this physical environment and construct new foundations in word and image.
{"title":"Poetic foundations for watery terrain – three poems below Venice","authors":"Paul Venzo","doi":"10.52086/001c.88243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88243","url":null,"abstract":"The Venetian lagoon is a geographical extremity imperilled by extreme weather events. Increasingly regular flooding endangers the lives and livelihoods of Venetians, not to mention the built and natural environments around them. In response to the documentary film Saving Venice (Bulling, 2022), I have produced a short series of poems that address the existential threat that climate change poses to Venice. The first poem refers to the MOSE sea-gates project, a feat of engineering designed to prevent catastrophic flooding of the lagoon. The second takes up the motif of the foundations of Venice, specifically the use of wooden pylons that excise oxygen and moisture and prevent the city from sinking. The third poem deals with the effects of erosion caused by shipping. This poetic work builds upon my previous creative and critical output focussed on Venice as a liminal and literary space, notable for the in-between-ness that comes from being a city built on water (Venzo, 2015; Venzo 2019; Venzo 2022). Extending this scholarship on Venice as a city both real and imagined through writing, these poems represent this watery terrain as simultaneously poetic and ecological (Bryson, 2002). Using the technique of concrete poetry (Draper, 1971; Bray, 2012), each poem syncretises these hidden elements that speak to the effects of extremity, to address the “slipperiness” of this physical environment and construct new foundations in word and image.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313681","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}
The poetry of Herberto Helder assumes the writing as an “extreme calligraphy of the world”, as he presents in Photomaton & Vox. On one hand, his poetry merges poem, body, and world, fabricating in the poem an original metaphor of the world and the body. On the other hand, this extreme calligraphy is also rooted in a Dionysian nature. This idiom destroys the conventional syntaxes, without losing the musical rhythm of the pulsation of the heart and the earth. His poetry is a body full of secrets and taboos working on the transmutations of substances, matters and sensations. Therefore, the presence of the alchemical thought and the Dionysian principle are strong lines in this investigation, which leads us to an innovative poetic form, and, consequently, to a new world. This article will aim to describe how the poetry of Herberto Helder builds an extreme calligraphy through the body, reinforcing the correspondence between it and the world and the transmutation of the poetic matter. Thinking about the alchemical process and the Dionysian power, the article demonstrates how the poet destabilises the limits of language, in a movement of destruction and reconstruction of poetic matter.
{"title":"The extreme calligraphy of the world in the poetry of Herberto Helder","authors":"Sérgio das Nevesis","doi":"10.52086/001c.88238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88238","url":null,"abstract":"The poetry of Herberto Helder assumes the writing as an “extreme calligraphy of the world”, as he presents in Photomaton & Vox. On one hand, his poetry merges poem, body, and world, fabricating in the poem an original metaphor of the world and the body. On the other hand, this extreme calligraphy is also rooted in a Dionysian nature. This idiom destroys the conventional syntaxes, without losing the musical rhythm of the pulsation of the heart and the earth. His poetry is a body full of secrets and taboos working on the transmutations of substances, matters and sensations. Therefore, the presence of the alchemical thought and the Dionysian principle are strong lines in this investigation, which leads us to an innovative poetic form, and, consequently, to a new world. This article will aim to describe how the poetry of Herberto Helder builds an extreme calligraphy through the body, reinforcing the correspondence between it and the world and the transmutation of the poetic matter. Thinking about the alchemical process and the Dionysian power, the article demonstrates how the poet destabilises the limits of language, in a movement of destruction and reconstruction of poetic matter.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313676","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}
Alejandra Pizarnik’s life was a long preparation for suicide. But instead of letting the Argentine poet’s death define her legacy, this article will focus on her intellectual sparring with the notion of God – and her ultimate strategy of turning God into a strawman for her own processes of creation. In her diaries, Pizarnik vows – like a prayer – never to call on God, never to invoke him. This is, she writes, the ultimate test: her blood may boil, her screams may consume her, her veins may burst, but she would rather keep her mouth shut. Pizarnik couldn’t bring herself to believe in God – which means she couldn’t stop writing about him. This article will centre its analysis on Pizarnik’s most famous poem, “Awakening,” in which she repeatedly invokes the Lord (“Lord / the cage has turned into a bird / and taken flight”) until she turns him into something else, something darker still. By resorting to her diaries spanning the late 50s until her death in the early 70s, as well as her connection to the oeuvres of Sylvia Plath, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jacques Lacan, this article will show how Pizarnik – labeled as a “gifted girl” – was placed (and placed herself) in the impossible position of being expected to be ambitious (because she was gifted) but not too ambitious (because she was a woman). “Awakening,” written and published between 1956 and 1958, articulates the turning point of Pizarnik’s extreme position toward God: how can someone who pushed herself so hard accept a God that would be willing to forgive anything?
{"title":"God, a metaphor: A meditation on Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Awakening”","authors":"Caio Yurgel","doi":"10.52086/001c.88237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88237","url":null,"abstract":"Alejandra Pizarnik’s life was a long preparation for suicide. But instead of letting the Argentine poet’s death define her legacy, this article will focus on her intellectual sparring with the notion of God – and her ultimate strategy of turning God into a strawman for her own processes of creation. In her diaries, Pizarnik vows – like a prayer – never to call on God, never to invoke him. This is, she writes, the ultimate test: her blood may boil, her screams may consume her, her veins may burst, but she would rather keep her mouth shut. Pizarnik couldn’t bring herself to believe in God – which means she couldn’t stop writing about him. This article will centre its analysis on Pizarnik’s most famous poem, “Awakening,” in which she repeatedly invokes the Lord (“Lord / the cage has turned into a bird / and taken flight”) until she turns him into something else, something darker still. By resorting to her diaries spanning the late 50s until her death in the early 70s, as well as her connection to the oeuvres of Sylvia Plath, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jacques Lacan, this article will show how Pizarnik – labeled as a “gifted girl” – was placed (and placed herself) in the impossible position of being expected to be ambitious (because she was gifted) but not too ambitious (because she was a woman). “Awakening,” written and published between 1956 and 1958, articulates the turning point of Pizarnik’s extreme position toward God: how can someone who pushed herself so hard accept a God that would be willing to forgive anything?","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313678","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}
When examined retrospectively, some poetry can be seen as using scandal and rebellion to defy social norms. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry criticised the repression and conservatism ingrained in the fabric of Tsarist Russia; a society defined by bourgeois, capitalistic and heteronormative values. As a passionate Bolshevik, the alienation induced by the restrictive external world caused Mayakovsky to use poetry for its most extreme, subversive means in inciting revolution. While viewing Mayakovsky as a political voice for the proletariat is a commonly held view, an often overlooked aspect is how poetry was used to convey his sexual expression. When considered amidst the repressive views on sexuality that were characteristic of both Tsarist and even Soviet Russia, the flamboyant poet was consistently prone to controversy.
{"title":"Seeing the pen as a bayonet: The extremities of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s utopian imagination","authors":"Mark Markovic","doi":"10.52086/001c.88235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88235","url":null,"abstract":"When examined retrospectively, some poetry can be seen as using scandal and rebellion to defy social norms. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry criticised the repression and conservatism ingrained in the fabric of Tsarist Russia; a society defined by bourgeois, capitalistic and heteronormative values. As a passionate Bolshevik, the alienation induced by the restrictive external world caused Mayakovsky to use poetry for its most extreme, subversive means in inciting revolution. While viewing Mayakovsky as a political voice for the proletariat is a commonly held view, an often overlooked aspect is how poetry was used to convey his sexual expression. When considered amidst the repressive views on sexuality that were characteristic of both Tsarist and even Soviet Russia, the flamboyant poet was consistently prone to controversy.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"158 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313685","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}
Poetry already exists that broaches taboo or extreme topics for women such as abortion, rape or domestic abuse (Petit, 2001, 2010; Moore, 2015, 2021). Chronic illness and/or disability are being explored too (Sluman-Brenchi, 2015, 2021; Atkin, 2021), with cancer being arguably the most common illness addressed (Darling, 2003). But whilst the extremes of surgery, hospitals and blood are now shown, bodily functions of the guts are rarely depicted. Matthew Seigel does end his collection Blood Work, sitting on a toilet – but he is passing blood. Poo and vomit still appear taboo. My PhD supervisor once asked why I didn’t write about my childhood. I said I’d had a happy childhood and did not feel compelled to explore it. Yet, I found primary school difficult because other children sometimes found me…disgusting. For the longest time I had no proper name for my affliction. Heartburn or reflux are milder versions; regurgitation or vomiting come closer. Poets such as Kathleen Jamie (2000) have said that a poet needs to give themselves “permission” to approach difficult subjects, whilst Eavan Boland has spoken of needing to de-centre herself and write from a position of defeat, from the margins rather than from authority (2006). Regurgitation is not readily poetic, and I had to overcome my own embarrassment/defeat and find a ‘way in’ that worked. I found that locating an additional subject axis (the Tin Woodman story, the science of vultures, a family photo album) illuminated my physical experiences in ways that made the poems feel permissible rather than gratuitous.
{"title":"Gutted: Three Poems on Irregular Stomachs","authors":"Cath Nichols","doi":"10.52086/001c.88245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88245","url":null,"abstract":"Poetry already exists that broaches taboo or extreme topics for women such as abortion, rape or domestic abuse (Petit, 2001, 2010; Moore, 2015, 2021). Chronic illness and/or disability are being explored too (Sluman-Brenchi, 2015, 2021; Atkin, 2021), with cancer being arguably the most common illness addressed (Darling, 2003). But whilst the extremes of surgery, hospitals and blood are now shown, bodily functions of the guts are rarely depicted. Matthew Seigel does end his collection Blood Work, sitting on a toilet – but he is passing blood. Poo and vomit still appear taboo. My PhD supervisor once asked why I didn’t write about my childhood. I said I’d had a happy childhood and did not feel compelled to explore it. Yet, I found primary school difficult because other children sometimes found me…disgusting. For the longest time I had no proper name for my affliction. Heartburn or reflux are milder versions; regurgitation or vomiting come closer. Poets such as Kathleen Jamie (2000) have said that a poet needs to give themselves “permission” to approach difficult subjects, whilst Eavan Boland has spoken of needing to de-centre herself and write from a position of defeat, from the margins rather than from authority (2006). Regurgitation is not readily poetic, and I had to overcome my own embarrassment/defeat and find a ‘way in’ that worked. I found that locating an additional subject axis (the Tin Woodman story, the science of vultures, a family photo album) illuminated my physical experiences in ways that made the poems feel permissible rather than gratuitous.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313686","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}
Based on a chapter of my dissertation’s exegesis, my paper will discuss using disaster as a theme and motif in my petropoetic project as a way of mediating and renegotiating the ways hegemonic petrocapitalism is experienced in the Global North. Oil extraction leads to disasters across very different spatial, temporal and visual frames. Oil spills, for instance, may be localised and devastating, while all “successful” oil consumption draws us incrementally closer to global catastrophe. In the meantime, disaster cinema often positions oil use as both exciting, for its implied role in both narrative and visual effects, and as a saviour, for its ability to get protagonists out of trouble. The challenge, as Graeme Macdonald puts it, is “how to demonstrate the catastrophic in the everyday life of ‘banal’ oil, to advocate that the fundamental disaster inheres in the productive volume of the ‘efficient,’ operative, and regularized extraction-emission cycle” (2017, p. 55). Poetry can act as a critical space to observe these lived contradictions, while drawing a reader’s attention to the prominence of both petroaesthetics and oil’s prominent materiality in popular screen entertainment.
{"title":"The writing of the disaster poem: Knowing oil through global apocalypse movies","authors":"Connor Weightman","doi":"10.52086/001c.88240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88240","url":null,"abstract":"Based on a chapter of my dissertation’s exegesis, my paper will discuss using disaster as a theme and motif in my petropoetic project as a way of mediating and renegotiating the ways hegemonic petrocapitalism is experienced in the Global North. Oil extraction leads to disasters across very different spatial, temporal and visual frames. Oil spills, for instance, may be localised and devastating, while all “successful” oil consumption draws us incrementally closer to global catastrophe. In the meantime, disaster cinema often positions oil use as both exciting, for its implied role in both narrative and visual effects, and as a saviour, for its ability to get protagonists out of trouble. The challenge, as Graeme Macdonald puts it, is “how to demonstrate the catastrophic in the everyday life of ‘banal’ oil, to advocate that the fundamental disaster inheres in the productive volume of the ‘efficient,’ operative, and regularized extraction-emission cycle” (2017, p. 55). Poetry can act as a critical space to observe these lived contradictions, while drawing a reader’s attention to the prominence of both petroaesthetics and oil’s prominent materiality in popular screen entertainment.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313675","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}
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.
{"title":"Poetry and precarious memory: Ways of understanding less and less","authors":"Paul Hetherington, Cassandra Atherton","doi":"10.52086/001c.88242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.88242","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":36392,"journal":{"name":"Text (Australia)","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135313682","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}
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