Axon: Creative Explorations

For poets in rural and remote areas, the experience of COVID lockdown was one in which online opportunities for readings, spoken word performance, poetry workshops and courses, allowed easy access to the creative community that had previously been largely inaccessible. This was also the case for those with intersectional challenges of limited mobility through economic issues, disability, age, and cultural restrictions. By using a hybrid approach that combines prose analysis with extracts from personal poetry, autoethnographic reflection, as well as extracts from the poetry and reported experience of other poets, this paper demonstrates that COVID lockdowns opened up new possibilities for creativity and poetry and networking. This paper also recognizes the importance of poetry as an art form that not only gives a voice to the marginalised but can communicate the challenging experiences to create empathy and understanding, foster creativity and community connection, and produce texts with their own inherent artistic value. A version of this paper was presented at the Australasian Association for Writing Programmes Conference 2023, ‘We Need to Talk’.

When exploring the relationship between her Irish ancestry and her creativity, Roxanne learned that women’s poetry in Ireland was largely obliterated from the literary canon and missing from the archives. Early Irish poetry was often anonymous, and scholars presumed this indicated male authorship even when written with a female persona. However, while women’s poetry may have, as Mary N Harris says, gone ‘unnoticed and unpublished’, the lack of archival evidence does not indicate that women were not composing poetry and an increasing body of academic research supports this argument. The mythological collection makes significant references to female poets, and oral poetry such as the lullaby and the lament commonly went unrecorded. Irish poets, including Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, demonstrate that contemporary poetry can bridge the gap where female poets were actively written out of history to a new understanding of the importance of their contribution.