Panel #6 Session 4
Thursday 30 November - 11:00
Building 25, Teal Room
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Chair: Elizabeth Smyth
The book as poem: writing silenced themes through collection contents and ordering
- Amelia Walker
University of South Australia
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The phrase ‘book as poem’ signals the idea that the ordering of individual poems within a collection can be read as a macro-poem. For poets and poetry readers, the concept of a book as poem is likely to seem familiar, even obvious. Yet it receives scant attention in the literatures of writing theory and practice: the decisions we make when ordering collections and the effects these decisions create remain in need of research exploration and discussion. My presentation explores possibilities of the book as poem with focus on uses of patterns and variations to promote reader attention to what is not present in each text, as much or even more than what the text explicitly presents. I pose strategies for approaching books as poems to articulate silenced themes including those of personal trauma, socially taboo topics, and experiences to which words do poor justice. To illustrate, I discuss poetry collections by contemporary authors in which the book as poem seems to operate in this way. I then discuss the ordering of poems in my forthcoming collection, alogopoiesis, the structure of which was informed by autofiction and the short story cycle, alongside theories of poetic form and metaphor. My aim is to raise awareness among poets and readers regarding techniques for curating and interpreting book-length collections as poems.
Amelia Walker lectures at the University of South Australia, on Kaurna Yerta. She has published four collections of poetry and is currently co-chief investigator on an Australia-Korea Foundation grant project called Invisible Walls, which partners Korean and Australian poets to exchange poems and produce new work exploring intercultural learning.
‘Split Level’: Articulating Lost Houses Through the Uncanny
- Ella Jeffery
Griffith University
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The uncanny has always been a phenomenon characterised by its indescribability. In Freud’s seminal essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (‘The Uncanny’), he describes the uncanny as something better defined by what it is not than what it is, a phenomenon difficult to precisely identify or articulate (2003). The home is also at the heart of the uncanny: Freud’s use of the term Unheimlich, sometimes translated at unhomely, calls up its opposite, the Heimlich or homely. In this paper I extend on ideas I have explored in relation to other Australian poets whose work articulates anxieties about insecure and unstable dwelling (Jeffery 2022) to consider the role of the uncanny in my own writing practice as I use the lyric poem to articulate my own unsettled – at times unspeakable, dissolving, destroyed – history of dwelling. I examine a suite of poems, written as part of the manuscript for my second book, which traverse my hometown destroyed by floods, unsafe rentals, and forgotten rooms in distant cities, and I interrogate how uncanny conventions can help speak about dwellings which may seem lost, abandoned, or erased – spaces which, as Royle says of the uncanny, ‘should have remained secret and hidden, but ha[ve] come to light’ (2003). I examine my own creative practice using contemporary and foundational theories of the uncanny, from Freud’s seminal text ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919) to Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny (2003) to Anneleen Masschelein’s The Unconcept (2011), and contend that through the irruption of uncanny tropes in my poetry the unspeakable spaces of the past – houses lost or left, places destroyed or changed forever – inevitably return again and again.
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References:
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Jeffery, E. (2022) ‘General Tenancy Agreement: Rental Stress, Memory and Home in Contemporary Australian Poetry’ Axon: Creative Explorations. http://doi.org/10.54375/001/hq50rlcsi5
Royle, N. (2003). The uncanny. Manchester University Press.
Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny. Penguin.
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Dr Ella Jeffery is a Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of Humanities, Languages and
Social Science at Griffith University. She researches intersections between contemporary literature, television, and renovation culture and is particularly interested in conceptions and
representations of unstable or insecure dwelling in twenty-first-century Australia. Her debut
collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattman Prize for a First Book of Poems, the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award. She is Special Issues Co-Editor for TEXT: The Journal of Writing and Writing Programs.
A Rush of Grief: Ekphrasis and emotionally intelligent understandings of pain in children’s picture books
- Shannon Horsfall, Ross Watkins & Jules Richards
University of the Sunshine Coast
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Pain is a complex, biopsychosocial phenomenon that can be instrumental in forming our corporeal, social and emotional selves. But pain is also ‘invisible’ and difficult to verbalise in explicit terms, so we rely on figurative language to communicate experiences of pain, or pain narratives. Children’s picture books offer an opportunity to articulate pain and its biopsychosocial impacts through the synergy of visual and verbal texts, a powerful way to approximate pain’s nebulosity. But how might readers summon empathy for a character in pain if they have no experience of that pain, or if indeed that pain is not visible? This research, led by three creative practitioner academics, presents findings of a comparative analysis of two Australian picture books regarding emotion ekphrasis and the representation of pain as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. Our paper takes up Maria Nikolajeva’s charge (2014) that cognitive theory offers new methods of interpreting picture books in relation to the development of emotional intelligence and the exploration of germane social contexts. We build on our established research by presenting close textual analysis of emotion ekphrasis and pain in Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks’s Fox (2000), and Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood’s Banjo and Ruby Red (2016). The paper aims to raise awareness of this underrepresented area of research and prompt further debate on the challenges of representing pain through visual and verbal literature for children.
PhD Candidate in Creative Writing and author-illustrator Shannon Horsfall has published six picture books for younger readers including Was Not Me! (HarperCollins) nominated for the Speech Pathology Award in 2017 and Nomax! (HarperCollins), a CBCA Picture Book Notable in 2018. Her current research centres on representations of women and the wild in traditional fairy tales and their modern revisionings with a focus on how the interplay of word and image influences and manipulates readers’ understandings of narratives.
Ross Watkins is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where he specialises in Creative Writing and Publishing. He is an author and illustrator for both children and adults, and his scholarly research explores practices in illustrated narrative, representations of grief, and radical modes of scholarly writing. Ross is Senior Editor for TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. ORCID 0000-0002-2251-4737
Jules Richards is a Nurse Practitioner who has worked with young people who have chronic pain for the last fifteen years. She has a Bachelor of Nursing and a Master of Nursing, and has recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing, in which she explored the lived experience of young people with chronic pain through a fictional narrative. She is passionate about advocating for young people with chronic pain and exploring the link between the creative arts and health. She is published within academic journals in the area of paediatric pain management.