Issues
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 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.
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.
The pull towards poetry is strong. Owen Bullock approaches the theme with reference to Sylvia Plath, Page Richards offers a close reading of Derek Walcott, and Dennis Haskell brings in T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Slessor and Stephen Carroll. Lachlan Brown investigates the meeting of poetry and computer games.
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.
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.
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.