Panel #3 Session 3
Wednesday 29 November - 15:00
Building 25, Main Room
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Chair: Paul Magee
Oral Improvisation as Compositional Method: The Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Share, the David Antin Talk Poem, and Talk Recovery
- Rose Hunter
Griffith University
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Talk Recovery is a memoir in progress that details my recovery from alcoholism in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). To write my memoir I wanted to use a form that would recall the (oral) AA share, which is central to the program of AA. When I came across the talk poems of the US performance poet David Antin (1932–2016), I was struck by certain similarities they had with the AA share. An AA share occurs when AA members speak in an improvised and uninterrupted way about their experiences with alcoholism recovery in an AA meeting. David Antin’s talk poems were also improvised and (mostly) uninterrupted oral performances – composed during, not for, performance. To write Talk Recovery I am drawing on elements of Antin’s improvisational method as a compositional tool – a crucial step on the way to my final written memoir, which will exhibit those features of improvised oral performance characteristic of the AA share. In my paper I will describe my speaking-then-writing process derived from Antin’s practice. Then I will read a short section of Talk Recovery and analyse one type of oral feature found in it as well as the larger meanings this feature generates in my manuscript.
Rose Hunter is the author of six books of poetry, including Body Shell Girl (Spinifex Press, 2022) and glass (Five Islands Press, 2017). She has been widely published in literary journals in Australia, the USA, and Canada, and has received an Australia Council grant. She is currently a PhD student at Griffith University, where her research looks at autobiographical writing about Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) recovery. From Australia originally, Rose lived in Canada for ten years and Mexico for ten more. She currently lives in Brisbane/Meanjin.
Speaking Silence: Poetics of Contemplation
- Rose Lucas
Victoria University
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I have recently spoken about poetry’s capacity to create a space of ‘silence’ that operates not as a gap or a negativity but rather as a space of potentially productive resonance and reflection. This paper makes explicit the interdependent relation between the possibilities of what can be said and what isn’t or can’t be said. That is, we only become aware of non-transcribable spaces through the specificity of the named. Arguably, this linguistic and semantic interplay between articulated and non-articulated may be true more broadly across all modalities of language. However, I argue that it is particularly apparent in the kind of language we refer to as ‘poetic’: rather than seeking to incorporate everything into a sphere of articulation, poetry plays in a space of evocation, delighting in a dance of light and shadow, talk and silence. In this paper, I consider two poems – Mary Oliver’s ‘The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, But the Attention that Comes First’ and my ‘Invite the Bell’ – to track ways in which instances of contemplative poetry might navigate this apparent divide, forging an interstitial language which speaks beyond any solipsistic sense of self, identifying the connective tissue shared with others, across permeable borders of the spatial and the temporal.
Rose Lucas is an academic in graduate research, literary studies and creative writing at Victoria University. She is also the author of four poetry collections (Even in the Dark, Unexpected Clearing, This Shuttered Eye and Increments of the Everyday) as well co-editor or Lockdown Poetry and The Poetry of Encounter. Her next collection, Remarkable as Breathing is forthcoming in 2024. She is also founding Publisher and Editor at Liquid Amber Poetry Press.
Forming, Transforming - a reading from Moon Wrasse
- Willo Drummond
Macquarie University
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In this session I will read from my debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse, a creative work born of my PhD research into creative cognition and the transformative dimensions of literary influence.
The work is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also a love song to reading in the dialogic tradition of the lyric mode. Alert to questions of intersubjectivity and 'what shapes us' these poems arise from encounters with Australian and international poets—chief among them, Denise Levertov and Rainer Maria Rilke—as well as with contemporary philosophy and science, popular music and ecological non-fiction.
Jill Jones says of the collection “Moon Wrasse is bounteous, sinuous and queer, haunting in its embrace of grief, shifting identities, and transformation. Here is an invigorating fertility of voice, especially notable in the book’s agile sonics, its hum of presence, and its ardent dialogue with other poets and writers. This is a striking and richly lyrical debut, vibrant in its singing, intensely mobile, and compelling in its recuperative gestures.” And Quinn Eades notes “Moon Wrasse is a trillion fragments held lightly, a love letter, a glimmer flick at the corner of an eye. Here is a poet …who gifts us queer and trans bodies, lives, and ecologies. Desire, pain, love and hope play in and through this collection that simultaneously shimmers and cuts. On these pages you will find bodies touching, turning, and all ways transforming; ghost orchids, grasses, the quiet shadow work of roots and moths... On these pages you will find 'a message in the moss'. This is a collection to come back to many times, with and through the body, with love.”
Dr Willo Drummond is a poet, researcher, sessional lecturer, and supervisor in creative writing who lives and writes on Dharug and Gundungurra land. Her poetry is published in Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, The Canberra Times, and elsewhere. Willo’s PhD research into creative cognition was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for excellence. She has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant for poetry from the Australia Council for the Arts, shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award, and runner-up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Her debut collection Moon Wrasse was published by Puncher & Wattmann in March 2023 and shortlisted for the Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry.