AAWP 2016: Authorised Theft

Monica Carroll & Donna Hanson: 

Election Triptych

Using the found poetry of on-line forums, we create permanent compositions from an ephemeral stream of words and words as image. These works explore the phenomenological capacities of the page and seek techniques that build poem-compositions that account for space as much as line to give expression to the idea that a poem is ‘felt’ rather than ‘read’.

Caitlin Maling: Spending a Month with William Stafford in Oregon

This creative research project engages with the idea of process-driven writing as a potential method for ecopoetics. Such a method draws of Heideggerian ideas of ‘dwelling’ to propose that through daily directed engagement with the immediate environment the poet can in some way be permitted access to the ‘four-fold’ of things.  Adding an additional layer of complexity to the process, the composition is created in concert with the creative and critical work of the great mid-west poet William Stafford. Stafford pioneered ideas of process-driven writing before the development of ecocriticism. Heavily identified with the pacific north west, his work Averill (2001: 279) proposes allows everyone to feel centered ‘-in place, in language, in sensibility’. My creative work emerges from a daily practice of reading Stafford’s work and writing my own in response. February in Oregon collages my impressions of the Oregonian landscape with those of Staffords, seeking a way to feel at ‘home’ in the foreign landscape of Oregon. My paper is evenly divided into a critical section addressing the development of my compositional method and a performance of the resultant poem.

The Poet Jackson: A dao of poetry? Non-intentional composition, emergence, and intertextuality

Ten poems are presented, sampling my PhD research exploring how poetry might harmonise “Western” scientific and “Eastern” spiritual worldviews. The poems invite a liminal consciousness where science’s epistemic authority may meet on equal — not privileged — terms with the more ancient authorities of body and Earth. My chosen primary foci are modern physics, philosophical Daoism, and the ecosystemic perspective afforded by complexity theory (Capra & Luisi, 2014), in which large-scale patterns emerge unpredictably from relatively simple processes. This emergence, as Smith (2006, p. 172) remarks, is helpful in theorising how an artwork frequently “develops its own autonomous identity and ... takes the creator in directions quite different from his or her original intentions.” My methodology carries this further by seeking to abandon intention entirely. To achieve this I choose randomly from lists of sources and writing experiments. Influenced by the aleatory processes of conceptual writing and LANGUAGE poetry (Dworkin, n.d.; James, 2012), I appropriate, combine and re-present ideas and text from creative and non-fictional works. I take words from books or from what Tobin (2004, p. 126) calls the mind’s “other place” of poetry. A poem may or may not emerge; if one does, I have little idea what it may say or do. I work with eyes and fingers, pointing, highlighting, cutting and shuffling. I select and place text using body and instinct, not the thinking self. This non-intentional composition strives for the Daoist ideal of wei wuwei, action without action — egoless, selfless, apparently-effortless action. Moeller (2004) likens wei wuwei to Csíkszentmihályi’s (1990) concept of flow, the focused, effortless mental state also called “the zone”. Aspiring to become daojia shiren, “poet of Philosophical Daoism”, I practise yun you, “wandering like a cloud”, “searching everywhere” for the Way (Chen & Ji, 2016, pp. 178, 188).

Ali Black:  To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests itself: Writing for repossession and transformation
It is said stories support growth and transformation—personally and collectively, socially, culturally and spiritually. We can see this truth on ancient walls and history books, we can hear it in the words of elders passed down through the ages. In this space, I reflect and story my personal experience. Messages contained in the interpersonal of my everyday life (dis)connect with those of contemporary culture. In my dark cocoon-like experience of the everyday—depression, death, grief, loss, invisibility—the butterfly does not come. And so I (re)present to repossess using multi-layered, arts-based forms of narrative, image, poetry and creative writing—forms that embody and represent how change can happen, and the time it takes. These forms respond to deep desires to know and understand change and transition, to make meaning of experience—to make repossession visible. In this piece, contemplative storying creates sparks in the darkness, offering catalysts for dialogue and thinking, and possible frames for re/emergence.