Paul Hetherington

‘Unconscionable Mystification’?: Rooms, Spaces and the Prose Poem

Since the 19th century, when a number of French writers – most conspicuously Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud – introduced what we may think of as the modern prose poem into European literature, prose poetry has been part of a debate about the contemporary usefulness of existing literary modes and genres. While early French practitioners partly used the form to problematise traditional poetic prosody, once this aim was achieved prose poetry remained a significant contemporary literary form. In the context of contemporary developments in prose poetry, this article discusses John Frows observations that texts are able to perform or modify a genre, or only partly fulfil generic expectations, or be comprised of more than one genre. It also discusses the authors Rooms and Spaces project, which explores ways in which prose poetry may be considered ‘poetic’; how it may be room-like and condensed; or open and highly suggestive (sometimes both at once); and how prose poetry is intertextual and polysemous. Prose poetry may be generically problematic but the authors suggest that this may make it an exemplary post-postmodern form; and that reading prose poetry may provide significant insights into how unstable genre boundaries really are.

Essaying images: image and text in contemporary lyric essays

ABSTRACT As electronic publishing offers more opportunities for short form publication and the affordable reproduction of images alongside text, contemporary essayists are increasingly incorporating images into their work. This article investigates the interplay between image and text in three lyric essay collections—by Charles Simic, Susanne Paola Antonetta and Elizabeth Reeder—using the frame of Bakhtin’s dialogism and exploring new chains of responses that may be read into a textual work when images are incorporated alongside, between, or around the text. Such images are often inflected and construed by their essayistic contexts to the extent that they begin to be read poetically or lyrically, and when the ‘author(s)’ of such images are different from the author of the text that accompanies them, the reader may interpret the images as part of a polyphonic heteroglossia. By presenting examples of the conjunction of text and image in the lyric essay form, and by examining how visual imagery functions in narrative, we suggest creative ways of understanding such juxtapositioning.

Fragments of the place itself: Boston neighbourhoods in prose poetry

ABSTRACT As complex and geographically discrete life environments, city neighbourhoods are invested with a great deal of personal meaning as well as with general cultural significance. Pierre Moyal argues that ‘the city is poeticized by the subject’ and explores the refabrication and consumption of space by the city dweller, along with the outsiders creative and fractious presence. Boston, MA, has been touted as ‘the city of neighborhoods’ by Anthony Bak Buccitelli and our practice-led research project, Fragments of the Place Itself, investigates insider and outsider creativity, rupture and poetic form in Bostons North End, Beacon Hill and Cambridge neighbourhoods through prose poetry. Our project considers the notions of perambulation and drifting, and the idea of genius loci. Further, we argue that prose poetry is well suited to writing about neighbourhoods because prose poetrys fully justified text is able to set up a demarcation or ‘plot’ that readily accommodates both insider and outsider viewpoints.

Broken forms: Prose poetry as hybridised genre in Australia

It would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources is straining the natural world to its limits. The consequences of staying on this path may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind. At this time, when the ecosphere which sustains us all is so fragile, it seems imperative that we address the nature of the fundamental relationship between humans and their environment. Hence, we should perhaps undertake to reimagine our relationship with nature, with place and with each other if we are to counteract such malign influences. This paper will argue that localised, direct democratic action offers us one way in which we may begin to redeem these relationships by providing an account of the way in which an assortment of subcultures in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales united to successfully oppose mining for coal seam gas. The Northern Rivers is renowned for its natural endowments and a community which boasts great diversity. A variety of motivations led to an array of groups exerting their collective power and unity at grassroots level to defeat the attempt to introduce unconventional methods of gas extraction. In this process, a sense of place emerged as an important factor for many of those resisting the mining. The movement as it unfolded ‘on the ground’ proposes an alternative way of being and belonging, developed through a different relationship to place, community and the ecosphere.More than 50 years after American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” Australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. In order to reimagine an Australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of violence of this nature. This paper reports on Australian research that uses innovative arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and embodied impact of childhood rape. The research holds important insights for women’s and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable.The history of Perth, Western Australia, has been characterised by the incremental loss of its wetlands. While disputes about wetlands are often framed solely in terms of the environment, they are places of cultural significance too. The extensive wetlands of central Perth, food gathering and meeting places for Noongar people are now expunged from the landscape. Urban dwellers of Perth are largely unaware that the seasonal lakes and wetlands of the centre of the city were the larders, gardens, hideouts, dumps and playgrounds of previous generations; both Noongar and Settler. The loss of social memory of these lost cultural/natural places entails the framing of wetlands as aberrant and continues to influence Perth’s development and the sense of place of its inhabitants. Reimagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands was a project which attempted to reimagine the pre-colonial landscape using archival material. Reimagining the past allows connections to be made to the last remaining wetlands in the wider metropolitan area. The fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in southern suburban Perth as a cultural/natural place illustrates the changing value of wetlands and the laying down of social memories of place.This paper takes as its starting point, the acknowledgement that the Indigenous nations of the continent of Australia have never ceded their sovereignty and as such the current nation-state of Australia constitutes a nation in occupation of other people’s lands. From a philosophical perspective, the Settler-citizens of the occupied territories of Australia therefore emerge into the world as occupier beings. As the inheritors of a still post-colonising nation, can contemporary Settler Australians find a way to live together ethically with the Indigenous population? This paper uses topologically based philosophical thinking of place in an effort to seek more expansive ways of thinking that might furnish us with productive questions about the meanings of place and identity in a settler-colonial context. I apply topological thinking to reveal the interrelated nature of Settler identity and the key constructs of settler-colonial Australia, the “possessive logics” of the political and legal systems that enact and maintain the occupation. The paper concludes with a call to thinking for place as a mode of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of a place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it. Through recognising and relinquishing Occupier subjectivity, Settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves and engage in a process of becoming other than Occupier.This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative). Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground. This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poeticsLiving with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of coexistence.This special double issue of Coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at Reimagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility , the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference 2016, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 7-9 December. The double issue addresses the urgent need for Australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. Key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in Tony Birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay.

A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay

ABSTRACT This paper arises from a collaborative practice-led research project between an essayist and a poet/prose poet that theorises the lyric essay as mosaic-like in terms of its form and patterning. The project involves on-site creative practice in four cities and examines five primary themes – time, hands, identity, brokenness and risk. Raymond Edouard Isidore’s highly suggestive pique assiette mosaics are our initial point of departure for this paper, representing as they do the joining and juxtapositioning of material that would otherwise be dispersed and fragmented. We read Isidore’s work as an analogue for the fragmentation and juxtapositioning of the texts of lyric essays which, in turn, enables us to consider the lyric essay’s positioning between narrative explicitness and poetic compression, and the relationship between time and space within such essays. We make use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to tease out ideas of literary time and space, and also employ Erwin Straus’s idea of ‘presentic’ space and movement, ‘free of direction or limits’. We discuss lyric essays by Paul Hetherington and Brenda Miller to illustrate and exemplify our key points.

Borrowings; or Ways of Making Poetry by Taking, Working and Returning: A Study in Creative Practice

The collaborative poetry project ‘Borrowings’ investigates and theorises some of the processes of poetic composition. Two collaborators, by making use of incepts from each others work, have generated new poems by exploring the nature of intertextual genesis. This paper presents key ideas generated by this activity and, in doing so, applies Deleuzes analysis of games to its consideration of the nature of poetic composition, along with his contention that ‘[t]o pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression … It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes’. The project explores some of the ways in which poetry makes ‘sense’, both to the writer and reader; as well as questioning the extent to which poetry depends on its authors ‘decision’ about what to write. It also teases out some of the implications for how we understand authorship if authorial decisions may be generated by incepts of one kind or another that occur to the poet apparently randomly, or may be given to them by a line or phrase that they encounter while reading. This papers ultimate wager, and one put to the test in the project itself, is that limitation has an expansive effect on the generation of creative work.

Poetic Self-Inventions: Hoaxing, Misrepresentation and Creative License in Poetry

Abstract Poets have always created personae, inventing masks through which they may voice their works. Even contemporary lyric poetry – a key strand of which emphasises autobiography and confession – presents a multiplicity of voices, many of them at least implicitly claiming to sincerely register authentic feeling and experience and to tell the ‘truth’. But are truth claims in poetry – even ‘confessional’ poetry – a masquerade? Further, in acknowledging that Romanticism and the primacy of the individual and subjective voice in poetry was partly ushered in by a hoaxer, Thomas Chatterton, how much does the post-Romantic lyric retain a vestige of the hoaxers art? As poets project themselves into imaginative spaces in their poetry can their work ever be said to be authentic or sincere? Starting with some of Simon Critchleys perspectives on poetry I will discuss works by Thomas Moore, Anne Sexton and Emily Dickinson, among others, in order to address these issues.

Spectral Resemblances and Elusive Connections: A Practice-led Research Dialogue between Poetry and Digital Imagery

Abstract In the early 20th century the function of poetic imagery was given international attention through the Imagist movement in London and, ever since, many poets have self-consciously employed and exploited imagist techniques. At the same time poets and visual artists have frequently explored connections between each other’s works considering, as Art Berman writes, that “the visual can provide direct and even prelinguistic knowledge since the psyche presumably has operations that precede or take logical precedence over […] language” (49). Interart comparisons suggest that poetry and the visual arts can be talked about as if “work in one medium […] were operating in another” (Dayan 3). However, it is often unclear what it might mean to describe a work of visual art as “poetic” or a poem as “visual.” This paper explores these ideas with reference to Paul Hetherington’s and Anita Fitton’s practice-led research project, Spectral Resemblances. The project is investigating some of the ways in which written poetry and still visual imagery may convey related meanings. It asks whether meaningful connections between poetic and visual imagery are at best “spectral” and elusive. It explores how the juxtapositioning of complementary works in these different media may allow resonances to play back and forth in the conceptual spaces between them.

The Past Ahead: Understanding Memory in Contemporary Poetry

The connections between memory and poetry have long been asserted and are present, for example, in the mythology and writings of the ancient Greeks. The nature of memory has been discussed by numerous ancient and modern writers, including Sigmund Freud. While Freud acknowledged that memories were sometimes fantasies, he nevertheless frequently likened the retrieval of autobiographical memory through analysis to an archaeologists work in digging up objects from the past – as if in memory the past might remain intact and unchanged. Yet autobiographical memory is increasingly being understood as unreliable, as constituted of ‘temporary mental representations’ and as configuring present understandings rather than simply detailing past events. While many contemporary lyric poems are based on autobiographical memory, these poems often use material from the past to construct new narratives of the self. Thus the past is in front of, rather than behind the poet who makes use of autobiographical material.