In this special Poetry & Poetics event, three writers will hold a critical conversation about three poets: Danish innovator Inger Christensen, Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, and Canadian poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. Join three of WSU’s leading researchers in poetics – award-winning poet and translator Dr Peter Boyle, critical theorist Dr Jason Tuckwell, and poet and editor Emily Stewart – as they perform a collaborative reading of three contemporary writers, while reflecting upon their own creative and research practices.

Peter Boyle brings to the panel Inger Christensen’s iconic work alphabet (1981). He will reflect upon traces of Christensen’s influence within his own new book-length poem Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, due for publication late in 2018. Jason Tuckwell will discuss excerpts from M. NourbeSe Philips’ influential work of archival poetics Zong! (2006). Via critical readings of key modernist texts, he will ask how Philips repurposes modernist textual methods away from l’art pour l’art and towards explorations of race, archival decolonisation, and the poetical work of mourning. Emily Stewart will address Lisa Robertson’s “Fourth Walk” from Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (2003; revised ed. 2010), speculating on the contemporary significance of urban walking as a mode of creative and critical praxis.

The event will be facilitated by Dr Kate Fagan as part of the WSU Poetry and Poetics research node. It will conclude with readings of original work by all three panel participants, followed by afternoon tea. Free event; all welcome.

The post “The Untold Story that Tells Itself”: Talking Poetics appeared first on Poetry and Poetics.

Abstract: Along with anything inherently personal and experiential in my writing I have turned to a range of processes deliberately linking my work to that of others – both predecessors and contemporaries. This has involved the exploration of translation as a form of composition, but also related procedures like collage, appropriation, and the making of large anthology-like works such as Technicians of the Sacred and Barbaric Vast & Wild, the totality of which I speak of as “othering”. My presentation here will offer a chronology of such works of mine and others, with an emphasis on “total translation” in the 1980s and “variations” and “autovariations” in the present.

Professor Jerome Rothenberg (UCSD) is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist and performer who is renowned as an instigator of the 20th century critical movement known as ethnopoetics. His publishing career includes over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry including Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poems from Africa, America, Asia & Oceania (1968), which celebrates its fiftieth year with a revised and expanded edition, to be launched while Rothenberg is in Australia. Additonal anthologies include Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), Exiled in the Word (a.k.a. A Big Jewish Book), and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, Volumes 1-3. He has been a longtime practitioner and theorist of poetry performance. His most recent long collections are Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013) and Barbaric Vast & Wild: Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present (Volume 5 of Poems for the Millennium, 2015). A new book of poems, A Field on Mars: Poems 2000-2015, has just appeared in separate English and French editions.

Professor Jerome Rothenberg continues to have a profound impact in contemporary poetry, translation and poetic theory. The English Department of the University of Sydney will host Professor Rothenberg on a week-long visit to Sydney, following his keynote address at the “Literary Environments: Place, Planet and Translation” Conference at Griffith University. The Poetry and Poetics Project and the Writing & Society Research Centre are honoured to present this research seminar at Western Sydney University as part of that visit.

Jerome Rothenberg’s blog

Jerome Rothenberg on the Poetry Foundation website

The post Professor Jerome Rothenberg on Translation & Othering as Forms of Composition appeared first on Poetry and Poetics.

Co-hosted by the Writing and Society Research Centre and the Centre for Modernism Studies Australia
UNSW, Randwick (Dec 13) and Western Sydney University, Bankstown Campus (Dec 14-15)

Keynote speakers

Justin Clemens (Melbourne)
David Nowell Smith (UEA)
Meredith Martin (Princeton)

Most studies of poetry, whether historically or theoretically inclined, tend to reserve close attention for exemplary poems – works that in some way embody and make tangible the theoretical propositions or historical narrative being elaborated. The recent emergence of ‘historical poetics’ has challenged the old opposition of history and theory by focussing attention on the historicity of prosodic theories. If, as critics in this field variously assert, historical poetics can restore the historical thinking that poems do, are we destined only to restore the thinking of those poems that exemplify the claims the critic hopes to make? Might we end up looking only at the reflection of our methodological apparatus rather than at that which is particular (or historical) in the poem? The central aim of this symposium is to test the notion of historical poetics against the idea of the individual poem. We will examine how the individual poem presents challenges both for a historical understanding of poetic form and for a formalist understanding of poetry’s history.

Download the symposium program.

Post-war American Poetics

Mark Byron (Sydney): East – West Riprap: Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End as Alluvial History

Jennifer Crone (Sydney): ‘Passion and Form’: Louise Glück’s ‘Mock Orange’

Chris Oakey (UNSW): Ron Silliman’s ‘Albany’ and the Question of Exemplarity

Chair: Sean Pryor (UNSW)

Keynote

David Nowell Smith (UEA): The single artificer of the world / Makes nothing happen: On Historical Poetics

Chair: Ben Etherington(WSU)

Modernist Poetics

Elizabeth Pender (Sydney): Exemplarity vs. Quotation: The Limits of Close Reading

James Jiang ( Melbourne ): Historicity, Periodicity, Rhetoricity: Wallace Stevens’ Poetics of Copia

Christian Gelder (UNSW): ‘A course in mathematics would not be wasted on a poet’: William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and the Mathematical Imagination

Chair: Alix Beeston (Sydney)

Inheritances, Limits, Forms

Alys Moody (Macquarie): Ping, Or, Exemplarity at the Limits of Poetry

Toby Fitch (Sydney): The Exemplary Poem is A Fluke: Chris Edwards’ Mistranslation of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés

Ann Vickery (Deakin): ‘[T]hinking of time and typing’: Travel Exhaustion in Martin Johnston’s In Transit: A Sonnet Square

Chair: Hazel Smith (WSU)

Orality and Writing

Ben Etherington (WSU ): ‘The Liquid Negro Language of the South’: Claude McKay’s Exemplary Doggerel

Paul Magee (Canberra): Composing a poem someone else wrote

Sean Pryor (UNSW): We Never Had Paris: Hope Mirlees and Modernist Poetics

Chair: Meredith Martin (Princeton)

Keynote

Justin Clemens (Melbourne): First Fruits of a Barron Field

Chair: Matt McGuire (WSU)

Australian Poetics

Michael Farrell (Melbourne): Unbeautiful Relations: The Turns of ‘Waltzing Matilda’

Ivor Indyk (WSU): How Radical is Radical?

Sam Moginie (Sydney): ‘Four Heads’: Genre and the Conceptual in Australian Poetry

Chair: Kate Fagan (WSU)

Contemporary Poetics

Andrew Brooks (UNSW ): The poem as: restaurants, yoga mats, poems, former boyfriends or girlfriends, wives and husbands (and their photographs)

Holly Isemonger (WSU): Unassuming and Furtive and Stiff and Absurd: Pleasure and Genre in a Poem by Matthew Welton

Astrid Lorange (UNSW): The Exemplary Poem is the Non-Poem

Chair: Chris Conti (WSU)

Convenors and Contact

Ben Etherington (b.etherington@westernsydney.edu.au)
Sean Pryor (s.pryor@unsw.edu.au)

The post A Poem: Historical Poetics and the Problem of Exemplarity appeared first on Poetry and Poetics.

14-16 April 2016

Active Aesthetics was a conference and festival of contemporary Australian poetry that took place over four days in April 2016 at the University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Center for New Music.

The conference was initiated by Professor Lyn Hejinian (Department of English, U.C. Berkeley) and was convened by Professor Hejinian together with Dr Kate Fagan (Writing and Society Research Centre, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, WSU), Dr Ann Vickery (School of Communications and Creative Arts, Deakin University) and Associate Professor Eric Falci (Department of English, U.C. Berkeley) with the assistance of Daniel Benjamin, Serena Le and Claire Marie Stancek, and with the kind support of our respective institutions. The event combined critical panels with a series of poetry readings, performances and live collaborations.

Active Aesthetics enabled a transcultural exchange between innovative and activist poets of Australia and the San Francisco Bay Area. Together participants began a series of ongoing conversations about issues in poetry research and practice that are of mutual urgency to our writing communities, regardless of different local expressions. Themes addressed at Active Aesthetics included ecological crises, worlds of species presence, persistent colonialism, race and sovereignty, the surveilled life, Asia-Pacific regions and networks, transnational and transcultural thinking, aesthetic work under late capitalism, the apocalyptic lyric and small press poetry publishing.

To coincide with the conference, an anthology of poetry by participating Australian poets was published jointly by Tuumba Press and Giramondo Publishing. Cordite Poetry Review also published a companion feature of work by U.S. poets of the San Francisco Bay Area, curated by Lyn Hejinian and Sofie Ramos.

15 APRIL 2016

Panel 1: Australian Genealogies of Active Aesthetics

Philip Mead: The Territory of Activism: John Kinsella’s Upending of Dante in Western Australia

Ann Vickery: Luxurise This!: Contemporary Poetic Practice and The Communal Imaginary

Peter Minter: Opposing Natures: Extraction and Proliferation in Twenty-first Century Australian Poetry

Q&A Discussion

Panel 2: Keynote Panel – Contemporary Aboriginal Poetics

Ali Cobby Eckermann: Give Me Back My Mother’s Heart

Natalie Harkin: Archival-Poetics

Stuart Cooke: Australian Bricolage: Decolonisation, Compost, Country

Q&A Discussion

Panel 3: Politics, Activism, Innovation

Sam Langer: ‘After the bombs we invent the future’: A Poetics of Threat

Astrid Lorange: Poetry After the Future: Conspiracy, Ecstasy and Hopelessness in Contemporary Australian Writing around Art

Marty Hiatt: ‘How long have we been doing this’: Reduction and Bearing in Some Poems by Tim Wright

Q&A Discussion

Readings and Performances

16 APRIL 2016

Panel 4: Pan-Tropic Poetics

Toby Fitch: Inversion: A Down Under Conceit

Michael Farrell: Break or Connection? Species Catalogues and the Conceptual Episteme in Australian Poetry

Corey Wakeling: The Comic Scenario Towards the Commons: ‘No colony can con’

Q&A Discussion

Panel 5: Poetics of Decolonization

Matthew Hall: The Origins of Black Aesthetics, Radicalism, and Linguistic Innovation in Lionel Fogarty’s Poetic

Bonny Cassidy: unbidden |ʌnˌbɪd(ə)n|

R D Wood: The Politics of Poetic Repatriation: Western Pilbara Song Poetry in the Digital Humanities Era

Q&A Discussion

Panel 6: Feminist Countercultures, Queer Affiliations, Alternative Histories

Pam Brown: F A R O U T  A M N E S I A C: Collaborating with Susan M. Schultz and Maged Zaher

Kate Lilley: Voices Off: Tilting at Australian Obliquity

Kate Fagan: Archives of the Present: Temporal Shift, Maternal Legacy and Ontological Repair in the Poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann and Natalie Harkin

Q&A Discussion

Panel 7: Experiments in Scale and Subject

A.J. Carruthers: Experiments in Expansion: Contemporary Australian Innovative Long Poems (on Ania Walwicz, Jessica Wilkinson, Astrid Lorange)

Jessica Wilkinson:  Contemporary Australian Long Poems and Biographical Experiments

Fiona Hile: ‘Woman Exists’: The Logic of the Archive in Ann Vickery’s Devious Intimacy and Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined by Rachel Briggs

Q&A Discussion

Readings and Performances

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13 September 2013

Session I

Jarad Zimbler : Guy Butler Reconsidered: Poetics and Poetry in the South African Literary Field
Respondents: Tony Voss and Sam Moginie

Session II

Michael Farrell: Craft: An Unsettled Concept
Respondents: Peter Minter and Robert Wood

14 September 2013

Session III

Ingrid de Kok: “Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds?” Between Parts of Speech and Body Parts.
Respondents: John Mateer and Kate Middleton

Session IV

Ann Vickery : Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Australian Poetry
Respondents: Astrid Lorange and Rory Dufficy

The post Poetic Craft and White-Settler Colonialism appeared first on Poetry and Poetics.