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On the Mend

Axon: Creative Explorations Vol 11, No 2, December 2021

December 13, 2021

There has been a growing creative interest and scholarly engagement with practices and frameworks of care and repair and their real and implied relationship to breakage and acts of restoration. While not specifically directed at the year that was 2020, there are many ways in which the worlds in which we now live might be in need of mending. And how might we envisage recovery? This issue takes a broad interpretation of the theme and submissions explore, challenge and respond in a multitude of ways.

Poetry as Speculation

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 11, No 1, July 2021

July 27, 2021

This issue of the Axon journal investigates ways in which contemporary poetry speculates about the world, modes of being, reality, creativity, writing itself and ways of understanding the quotidian.

Manifestos, diatribes and creative interventions

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 10, No 2, December 2020

December 11, 2020

The theme for this issue of Axon emerged during a conference in late 2019, where paper after paper combined coherent research with impassioned critiques of the state of the university, the state of the environment, and the state of politics. Evident in these presentations was both a determination to generate positive change, and impatience at the apparent slowness of senior members’ responses to the what-is of the current moment. It seemed timely to provide a platform for these concerns, and invite contributions that combine personal, political and scholarly passions; and the manifesto form seemed to have the right combination of elements for this context.

Poetry: Small Leaps, Giant Steps

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 10, No 1, May 2020

May 25, 2020

— In preparation, this issue of Axon went under the title of Poetry on the Move, the name of the poetry festival initiated by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in 2015. Since that first year, however, the festivals have had distinguishing themes. In 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the theme — and title of the festival symposium — was ‘Small Leaps, Giant Steps’, and this issue brings together a number of papers presented at the symposium, as well as contributions from poets who were not able to attend the event.

Living in the World: Creativity, science, environments

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 9, No 2, December 2019

December 6, 2019

Canberra is home to a surprising number of creative and research-oriented events, and two of them are reflected in this issue of Axon. The first is the product of the 2018 annual DESIGN Canberra festival, which centred on the generative contributions of the architect Enrico Taglietti and the built environment he helped create in this city. The second event addressed the natural environment, with particular reference to the marriage of science and poetry, and what affordances this provides for the building of knowledge and understanding. The product of the editors of the poetry journal Not Very Quiet working in collaboration with the Axon editors, it brought together sixteen women poets and nine women scientists / scholars to present a public reading in mid-2019.

Writing from the UK

Axon: Creative Explorations, Capsule 4 (Special Issue), April 2019

May 18, 2019

Members and affiliates of the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra have, for some years, been visiting the United Kingdom, and collaborating with colleagues at universities across the country in symposia and other creative/research events. During 2018, poets and poetry scholars at the University of Reading (with colleagues from Oxford Brookes), and creative writers from the University of Winchester, included the IPSI folks in the Absent Presences, the Secret and the Unsayable symposium in Reading, and The Beautiful and the Grotesque symposium in Winchester. Along with a number of deeply absorbing and informative papers on the themes of each symposium, presenters showed film and still images, and read both poetry and creative prose. The great majority of presenters at each event work primarily in English, but despite the shared language, and the shared cultural traditions for people from the UK, the USA and Australia, there are very distinct differences in scholarly concerns, intellectual and creative traditions, and modes of practice. Events such as these, that illuminate differences as well as sameness, global frameworks as well as local specificities, provide real opportunities to extend both critical and creative thought, disseminate knowledge and understandings, and test out new modes of exploration. As editors of Axon: Creative Explorations we are grateful for the generous support and enthusiasm of our partners in the UK, and delighted to present a taste of what happened at each symposium. 

Inhabiting Language

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 9, No 1, May 2019

May 13, 2019

When discussing metaphors of inhabitation and dwelling and their relationship to language, Heidegger’s enigmatic claim in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1946), comes to mind: 

Turning points: Narratives, health, and speaking the self

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 8, No 2, November 2018

November 7, 2018

The contributions in this issue have been gathered together from various sources including a number of events addressing the themes of this issue. Primarily, these were the Turning Point: Creative Arts and Trauma symposium (University of Canberra, 7 June 2017), and the Narratives of Health and Wellbeing Research Conference (CQUniversity, Noosa campus, 26–27 October 2017). In addition, a series of interviews generated from the ARC-funded project, Understanding Creative Excellence: A Case Study in Poetry (DP130100402) sparked the idea of recruiting more conversations between creative practitioners working in a range of art practices: poetry, prose fiction, film and visual art in particular. Together, these contributions comprise a fascinating, revealing and sometimes provocative collection.

Uncanny Powers

Axon: Creative Explorations, Capsule 3 (Special Issue), October 2018

October 16, 2018

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock writes, ‘Our contemporary moment is a haunted one’ (2013: 61). Weinstock attributes the ‘spectral turn’ in contemporary cinema, television, literature and academic inquiry to a ‘general postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives accentuated by millennial anxiety’ (ibid.: 62, 63). While the fascination for hauntings is nothing new—ghost stories have never gone out of fashion—the proliferation of spectral presences speaks to a pervasive need to be able to comprehend and express human experiences in ways that are non-linear and non-binary. In a post-9/11 era punctuated by unimaginable occurrences on a massive scale—environmental disasters, refugee crises, terrorist attacks, state-sanctioned violence against not only the Other but also its own citizens—how does one make sense of that which is irrational, if not in ways that challenge the limits of what ‘rational thinking’ (and being rational) is?

Materiality, creativity, material poetics

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 8, No 1, May 2018

May 24, 2018

Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries between creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.