Axon: Creative Explorations

Sarah Bodman reflects on 13 years of Bookarts at UWE Bristol’s World Book Night (WBN) project; a text and image / artists’ books-based event which has evolved from an initial collaboration with the artist and poet Nancy Campbell into an annual, international, participatory celebration of reading and creative making. Inspired by our shared interests in literature, poetry, artists’ books and mail art, WBN introduces ourselves and other artists/writers to particular books and ways of working together.

This essay presents a poetic life writing practice developed through material exploration with diaries, to expose hidden, unwritten traces of anorexic experience that escape the archival page. Anorexia flouts tenets of traditional autobiography, skewing memory and breaking the ‘autobiographical pact’ of a truthful and consistent narrator. This article presents poetic digression and fragmentation to perform physical and cognitive anorexic intensities. This writing offers a counter-history to archival documents, leaden as they were with the voices of anorexia and medical discourse.

Female poets seeking to have their work published in Australian literary journals in the second half of the twentieth century faced a predominantly male culture: most positions as poetry editor for major journals were held by male poets. This study of the rate of publication of female poets from 1945 to 1990 in those journals also investigates the rate of submission by female poets. Using archival material not previously researched for this purpose, it is shown that the rate of publication of female poets is well below their rate of submission for most of that period. The misogynistic attitudes of some male editors are also evident.