Axon: Creative Explorations

Quarantine Public Library is a US-based repository of books made by artists, which Tracy Honn and Katie Garth established in July 2020. The books in the library are for anyone to freely download, print and assemble—to keep or give away.

This photoessay explores the creation of a collaborative book Not Thinking about the Circus at the Circus, a finalist in the ArtSpace Mackay Libris Award and recently acquired by Artspace Mackay fortheir artist book collection. It particularly addresses the social and political uses of creative publishing, creative art/text publishing relationships and collaborative shifts.

Sarah Bodman reflects on 13 years of Bookarts at UWE Bristol’s World Book Night (WBN) project; a text and image / artists’ books-based event which has evolved from an initial collaboration with the artist and poet Nancy Campbell into an annual, international, participatory celebration of reading and creative making. Inspired by our shared interests in literature, poetry, artists’ books and mail art, WBN introduces ourselves and other artists/writers to particular books and ways of working together.

Text | Page | Art is a heady mix of compassion, collaboration, visual poetry, visual art, ekphrasis, protest, exhibition, memoir and exploration. Participate fully by self-printing the various zines on offer. Run with the thought of being a small publisher. 

This article discusses the space that is created when poetry meets the archives, a unique space wherein a poet can use the historical materials found in archives together with her imagination to reconstruct women’s lives and narratives that hitherto have been marginalised or ignored by more traditional historical texts and outlets. The article considers the impulse that occurs when creativity, language, and history meet, and uses the lens of some of Susan Stanford Friedman’s ideas on feminism and history found in her book Mappings. Often, this kind of imaginative rendering takes space, and the use of the women’s long poem in providing a form for this work is also considered. The ideas and work of other poets, such as Jordie Albiston, Susan Howe and Helen Rickerby, further inform the discussion, and two manuscripts by Kimberly K. Williams are analysed and discussed.

This paper examines a unique personal archive of ‘brief and essential texts’ created by UK born US poet Denise Levertov, with a focus on her particular creative relationship with the letters of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Using the metaphor of ‘Hive Poetics’ (Hollingsworth) and considering the archive as an artefact of ‘distributed mind’, the analysis draws upon contemporary theories of distributed and ecological cognition (Clark; Hutchins; Menary; Sutton) to demonstrate both how poets engage with archives as part of poetic practice and how as researchers we might approach the archive in ways that extend beyond the teleological. That is, how we might consider archival materials as artefacts of creative cognition and practice rather than of value simply for the supporting role they play in the analysis of a finished text.

Three artefacts thought to belong to Anna Magdalena Bach, soprano singer, harpsichordist (and second wife to Johann Sebastian)—ring, thimble and buckle—are mentioned in the Bach archive in Leipzig. Much uncertainty surrounds them; perhaps they have been ‘lost’, or were destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, or perhaps they didn’t even actually belong to her. The uncertain status of the objects is emblematic of how poorly the knowledge about this ‘creative woman of accomplishment’ has been treated over the centuries, overshadowed by interest in, and information about, her eminent spouse. This has allowed authors to project their own views onto Anna Magdalena, in some instances leading to misrepresentations (Talle 2020), and even misappropriation by the Nazis (Yearsley 2019). However, as poetic biographer, it has also given me rich opportunity to imagine into her life.

Anna Magdalena is one of the research subjects about whom I am writing poetic biographies, a project of restitution seeking to redress the omission of creative women of accomplishment from the historical record. This paper looks at the composition process I employed in writing about her thimble (one poem in a sequence), taking a quote from Susan Howe as its starting point which suggests that archival objects are ‘pre-articulate theatres’ (1985), positioning the archival object, even if missing, as a site for unfolding drama.

Notions of home and unhomeliness have long been discussed by scholars in relation to Australian poetry, but little scholarly work has explored how contemporary Australian poets interrogate the relationship between renting and constructions of home. As the great Australian dream of homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible and the availability of public housing declines, a larger proportion of the population privately rent their houses in a lightly regulated and highly competitive rental market (Morris et al 2021: 72). Poetry has long been used to record and preserve the affective dimensions of home, and in this paper I examine a series of poems concerned with finding rental properties, moving in and out of them, and with attempts to create a sense of home in houses that always already belong to others. I discuss the work of three poets whose recent collections grapple with notions of home, stability and security in relation to rented houses: Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition (2019), Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017), and Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior (2017). I argue that in these collections, houses are sites characterised by anxiety, instability, and erasure, rather than stable and secure archives of personal identity and domestic ritual.

This essay discusses the revival of a failed creative/biographical poetry project, on Australian ballerina Lucette Aldous. I had begun this project in 2015 but, despite several years of research—both archival (Ballet Rambert and Victoria & Albert, London; Australian Ballet archives at the Arts Centre, Melbourne) and through interviews with Aldous in Perth—I was unable to find a way to structure and convey the ‘life’, and the project was put aside in 2018. Lucette Aldous passed away in 2021, and this loss was followed by Australian poet Jordie Albiston’s unexpected passing, in February 2022. In part, it was the proximity of these two losses that sparked the revival of the Aldous project, fuelled as I was both by a sadness that I had not been able to deliver a completed manuscript to the retired ballerina before she died, and also by my revisiting of the poems in Albiston’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Albiston’s poems, often documentary in nature, and ruled by mathematics and constraint yet open to possibility, multiplicity, irony, opened a way for me to move forward with the Aldous project.