Home » Issues » Page 3

Inside/Outside/Carnival

Axon: Creative Explorations, Capsule 2 (Special Issue), February 2018

February 11, 2018

When we first announced the international symposium, Inside/Outside/Carnival, that took place at the University of Winchester, UK, in June 2017 (a collaboration between the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra, and the University of Winchester, with invited guest speakers from the USA, Australia and the UK) we prefaced it with, ‘Into the cauldron of 21st century writing – Tipping a hat at Bakhtin the word Carnival is ambiguous. It tilts at blurred edges, a world upside down and inside out.’ We had no idea what would come about and a cauldron seemed a relevant metaphor at the time. And so it proved because we now have this collection of articles, essays, prose, prose poetry and poetry, which shows how a simple idea can have such a remarkable melting pot response.

Contemporary boundary crossings and ways of speaking poetically

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 7, No 2, December 2017


December 13, 2017

This issue of Axon is the second to relate directly to Poetry on the Move, the series of festivals run by the International Poetry Studies Institute based within the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. The theme of the festival in 2017 was Boundary Crossings, and it was offered – in a slightly expanded version, as a focus for poets and academics to interpret in their own fashion within this issue. Some but not all of the contributions here were presented within the festival; equally, not all festival contributions were shaped for journal publication; there are boundary crossings but divisions and distinctions remain.

Creative Play

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 7, No 1, April 2017


April 11, 2017

“[P]lay is the laboratory of the possible. To play fully and imaginatively is to step sideways into another reality, between the cracks of ordinary life. Although that ordinary world, so full of cumbersome routines and responsibilities, is still visible to us, its images, strangely, are robbed of their powers.” (Henricks 2006: 1).

Creative Work

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 6, No 2, November 2016


November 23, 2016

The academic critique of the conditions of creative work has always been slightly disingenuous. In the name of a ‘workerist’ critique – one which highlights the poor returns to artists according to normative models of labour market analysis – the study of creative labour has de-emphasised the fact that the modern notion of ‘work’ is itself placed in question by artists. But the artistic critique of work, as Luc Boltanski an Eve Chiapello usefully describe it, has been central to the vocation of the artist since at least Industrial Modernity. Despite the rise of a commercial cultural economy in the twentieth century, it is hard to imagine an arts sector without the prolific moral economies which, although enabling of appropriation and exploitation due to the weak formalisation of exchange, sustain alternative models of value that contest the commodification of creative activity. Indeed, it is this critique that has in recent decades placed the artist at the avant-garde of discussions of changes to work in general.

Axon Capsule 1: Poetry on the Move

Axon: Creative Explorations, Capsule 1 (Special Issue), August 2016

August 17, 2016

Poetry on the Move was initiated in 2015 as a three-year poetry project hosted by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) based within the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR), Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra (UC). 

The Poetics of Collaboration

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 6, No 1, March 2016


March 4, 2016

The question of collaboration is one that arguably can't be ignored in contemporary academia, creative fields, or current philosophical and critical landscapes. The word ‘collaboration’ at once brings to mind the conspiratorial nature of crime as well as the cooperative nature of teamwork and the harmonious meeting of minds and practices. It is, then, a slippery word, and for this reason serves as a fertile provocation for the inquiries unpacked and developed in this special issue of Axon.

Assemblage

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 5, No 2, November 2015


October 29, 2015

This issue brings together various explorations of assemblage theory with a number of critical and creative works that relate to it in subtle and surprising ways.

Creative Cities

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 5, No 1, March 2015

February 16, 2015

In this issue, I wanted to escape the recent incarnation of ‘creative cities’ as a policy provision for artist-led urban renewal in western cityscapes rapidly transformed by de-industrialisation and the continued expansion of suburban living.  Instead I wanted to return to a basic sense of the interaction of art and city: to see how artists, writers and poets worked within and tried to understand ‘the city’ or ‘the urban’ in and through their own practice: as inspiration, as material, as context, as milieu.

Nonfiction poetry

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 4, No 2, December 2014

December 21, 2014

This issue of Axon brings together a number of papers presented at the 2013 symposium, ‘The Real Through Line,’* as well as additional works, including new poetry, solicited in response to the symposium’s foci. The symposium aimed to investigate the rapport between the genres of poetry and nonfiction, and also to propose possibilities for both practice and theorisation of a poetics which, to draw on philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept, becomes a literary space for the distribution of the non-poetic, of ‘the prose of the world’, of that which one may refer to, however generally, as the real.

Poetry

Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 4, No 1, July 2014

June 19, 2014

This issue of Axon explores many aspects and facets of poetry—how poetry constitutes knowledge; how it is made; how poets think about their work; and how poetry may be understood as research. There are reflections on poetry as voice; the efficacy of learning by rote; ways of conceiving a prose poetry sequence; the relationship of song lyrics to poetry and memory; poetry and the digital revolution; poetry and time; poetry and philosophy; poetry and grief; visual poetry; René Daumal, para-surrealism and pataphysics; the relationship between creativity and poetry; poetry and heteronyms; poetry and place; the intersection of poetry and biography; and notes towards a poetics. There are interviews with Katharine Coles, Liz Lochhead and Nigel McLoughlin. Individual poems are by Tracy Ryan, Marcella Polain, Peter Rose, Maria Takolander, Will Eaves, Bronwyn Evans, Corey Wakeling, Russell Erwin, Kevin Gillam, Melinda Smith and Joyce Parkes.