Land Art

The AALITRA Review, 2015

How do the disciplines of translation studies and creative writing relate in an institutional setting or in current practice more broadly? What role does translation play in the creative writing workshop or classroom, especially for students writing in English as a second language? What benefits are there in the interchange? What can translation add? The article considers these questions in a wide-ranging discussion of writing processes that recognize translation as both a constraint and a highly elastic and enabling concept. Reference is made to writers such as Juan Pablo Villalobos, Ben Lerner and Merlinda Bobis whose work is thematically concerned with issues of translation, and the author’s own novel, The Red Thread, which adapts a Chinese text, as well as pedagogical experiments in creative writing involving literary texts from languages other than English. This contributes to an argument that translation is an integral part of contemporary creative practice in a world characterized by mobility, multiplicity and transculturalism.

HEAT (22), 2010

Rabbit: Journal of Non-fiction Poetry, 2021

Non-fiction poetry using archival material. I have been experimenting with archival materials in poetry and this is one of the first works I did.

An overview of Stalin's library collection and the books he read and annotated.

This chapter in a book-length anthology looks at Amy Brown's epic contemporary poem "The Odour of Sanctity" in terms of how it manipulates and subverts conventions of epic writing, biography, and hagiography.

Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, 2013

This essay explores the ecologically sensitive properties of oral poetics, or of written poetries with a close relationship to oral traditions. Looking in particular at the work of contemporary Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf (from southern Chile), I outline some of the important links between his written work and the Mapuche oral tradition. I then show how the proximity of Lienlaf's poems to songpoetry - and, by extension, to the voice and to the limits of breath - produces a highly ecologically sensitive poetic. Several parallels are drawn between properties of Mapuche songpoetry and of Aboriginal songpoetry, suggesting that a similar concern with ephemera, bodily location and movement can also be found in the work of some contemporary Aboriginal poets.

Environmental Humanities, 2019

In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to non-human semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating non-human poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, I outline a method of criticism for non-human creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I begin by theorising a poetics which attends to the ecology of forces that produce, and are produced by, a work, rather than the intentions of a single artist. I propose that an ethological poetics emphasises the expressive capacity of materials across a range of written, musical, visual and performative structures. By studying these expressive forces, I argue, we can extend our appreciation of art and poetics into multi-species domains. The challenge is not to focus on the 'meaning' or intention of nonhuman artworks, but to study their disruptive, and exciting, forces. The third part of the essay is a case-study of an Australian songbird, the Albert's lyrebird, whose remarkable performance I read in terms of an ethological poetics. Producing an operatic complex of song, dance, instrumentation and stage design, the lyrebird’s composition is thoroughly entangled with the flora and fauna of his umwelt. Resistant to categorisation by any generic label, I argue that the lyrebird’s composition is best approached in the terms of transgressive, avant-garde performative and sound poetics—even as it escapes such terms, the bird’s composition nevertheless compels us into a relation with his territory.

TEXT, 2021

This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).

21st Triennial World Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, University of Vienna, Austria; 21-27 July 2016, 2016