Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. She has long written across genres and disciplines, including literature, critical theory, pedagogy and psychoanalysis. Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing (2015) deploys this intermingling of interests. Her creative works include a novel, three collections of stories and eight books of poetry. Hecq’s poems and stories have been widely published in anthologies and journals. Often experimental, these explore love, loss, exile and the possibilities of language. After Cage (2019) and Kaosmos (2020) are her latest books. Among other awards such as the Melbourne Fringe Festival Award, the Woorilla Prize for fiction, the Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry and the New England Poetry Prize, Hecq is a recipient of the 2018 International Best Poets Prize.

Uncaged

Poeming, choreographing, dancing

This paper examines the enmeshing of three themes: poetry's relationship to the real, intersection with and use of other disciplines, and its rendition of embodied knowledge(s). Drawing on the making of After Cage: A Serial Composition for our Time (Hecq 2019), the paper teases out the first two themes by focusing on the textual making of the work. Spawned by a response to global politics, the poem evolved through encountering a composer, a choreographer and a company of dancers. Research into avant-garde music gave the text its edge. The paper then turns back findings upon the premises put forward at the outset of the investigation by invoking the experience of sharing knowledge with a choreographer in the dancing of the poem in rehearsal and full production. It interrogates the process of revision and transformation experienced in both performance and theorising, drawing upon psychoanalytical and phenomenological resources.

Keywords: poetry; interdisciplinary collaboration; creative activity affect; body