Panel #5 Session 3
Thursday 30 November - 9:00
Building 25, Main Room
Chair: Carmel Summers
Digital writing, artificial intelligence and a poet’s desire: A methodology of creative coding with GPT as co-pilot
- Jenny Hedley
RMIT Sydney
Any poem can be made to be digital, but under what conditions might a poem—or rather the poem’s author—desire a digital incarnation of their creative outputs? And for a writer with only hobbyist coding skills, might they find in ChatGPT a suitable partner for creative coding? Faced with three digital poetry commissions and the terror of the blank screen, the author explores questions of poetry and desire, artificial intelligence and authorship, and the tools which enable her digital writing practice. Since no one can agree what can be done with diaries (Paperno), the author’s main research question is what can be done with journals-as-archives. As a subset of this methodological inquiry, the experimental, multi-modal approach of digital poesis breaks wide open the notion that static containers such as memoir or biography are the best ways into literary archives. The digital space is a playful place of pure potentiality in which even a beginning poet-programmer can work beyond their inner world or external reality, much like Winnicott’s mother-child play space. Through practice-based research this paper tracks the methodology of the three digital poems from ideation to execution and publication, offering exegetical insights along with a detailed accounting of the tools and processes used in the making.
Jenny Hedley is a neurodivergent writer, digital artist, PhD student and Writeability mentor whose work appears in Archer, Cordite, Crawlspace, Diagram, Mascara, Overland, Rabbit, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Verity La, Westerly, and the anthologies Admissions: Voices in Mental Health and Verge. Her narrative nonfiction placed runner-up in the 2022 Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards and her digital poetry was shortlisted for the Woollahra Digital Literary Awards. Her memoir My Archive Fever is funded by Creative Victoria and her PhD research involves experimental interventions with journals as archives. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website: jennyhedley.github.io/
Talking in Fragments: the Urdu ghazal in English
- Jinendra Jain
An ancient Persian poetic form belonging to a sung tradition that predates the sonnet, the ghazal is a collection of independent couplets tied together—not by theme or thought—but by prosodic structure, refrain, and rhyme.
Searching for “an equivalent for the kinds of fragmentation … and confusion” she was feeling at the time, Adrienne Rich found in the ghazal, “a structure which allowed for a highly associative field of images”. “There is no traditional Western order,” she claimed, “that [could] contain all these materials.” Her beautiful ‘ghazals’ did not, however, adhere to the strict conventions of the form.
After discussing the “fragmentary thought-structure” of Mirza Ghalib’s hazāroñ ḳhvāhisheñ aisī, this paper explores the challenge of writing original and translated English ghazals with unique rhyme-refrain signatures uniting their thematically disunited constituent couplets—a challenge that, if the English ghazal were to also sound musical, is, perhaps, impossible, because of the limitations imposed by the English language, which neither has the complex rhyme-rich conjugations and declensions of Urdu nor the flexibility to place verbs after their objects.
Jinendra Jain is an emerging writer and a seasoned banker with over twenty-seven years of trading, risk management, and advisory experience at ANZ Grindlays, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Westpac, and ING.
His fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Meniscus, Rattle, TEXT, The Best Asian Poetry 2021-22, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021, The Punch Magazine, and The Best Asian Short Stories 2022.
An MA in Creative Writing from Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore, a degree conferred by Goldsmiths, University of London, Jinendra is working on his first book, a personal-memoir-cum-spiritual-travelogue set against the stunning backdrop of the Mustang Trail Race in Nepal.
We need to talk about the pedagogical challenges of poetry workshops and re-imagined possibilities
- Lynnette Lounsbury, Carolyn Rickett & Judith Beveridge
Avondale University
The accomplished poet Billy Collins in his poem entitled “Workshop” wryly observes the
nuanced context of a workshop process:
In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.*
Depicted in his poem is a shared space where themes and trajectories take on a life of their own as the workshop participant attempts to stay focused and useful as literary forms and shapes are retrieved and recognised.
The process of sense-making and trying to make corporate meaning from a poet sharing their drafts with a supportive group is one of foundational practices that many creative writing educators employ to provide ‘constructive’ feedback to students in classroom contexts.
This pedagogical approach, largely influenced by the Iowa workshop model, can yield rewards and challenges. One of the key challenges can be an over-reliance on peer- reviewing and the assumption that an undergraduate apprentice writer will be able to bring the requisite critical acumen and literary skills to ensure a productive feedback process.
This paper explores poetry workshop praxis with a view to sharing innovative ways to heighten the quality of the experience, enhance peer learning and provide feedback that improves a student’s knowledge and application of craft.
Dr Lynnette Lounsbury is a Senior Lecturer, writer and filmmaking and the Head of the School of Arts and Business at Avondale University. She has written two novels, is the film and television producer and her research publications focus on young adult literature, speculative fiction, creative writing and school resistance.
Associate Professor Carolyn Rickett is a Senior Lecturer and creative arts practitioner and the Dean of Learning & Teaching at Avondale College of Higher University. She is the co-editor of several poetry anthologies and her research publications include the areas of: trauma studies, writing as therapeutic intervention, cancer narratives, journalism, literary studies, poetry praxis and pedagogy, HDR supervision, healthcare chaplaincy, and professional ethics.
Judith Beveridge is an experienced educator and has worked as a lecturer and supervisor of university students, along with teaching community members in writing workshop settings. She is one of Australia’s preeminent poets and has published seven volumes of poetry and has edited or co-edited a number of anthologies including Contemporary Australian Poetry, (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016). She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005-2016. Her work has been studied in schools and universities and translated into many languages. Her latest volume Sun Music: New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2018), won the Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize in 2019.