Following on associatively from Vickery’s provocations, I will be looking at models for alternative kinships and affinities, touching on those suggested by Helene Cixous, Avital Ronell and Judith Butler at a recent panel in NYC, Lee Edelman in his post – Lacanian queer polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, and recent critiques of the neo-colonial impulse in Australian poetry by Peter Minter and Bonny Cassidy. My response, building on Vickery’s call for cell-based networks, will suggest that the non-family, the archipelago, and the dysfunctional hive are worthwhile structures for a contemporary Australian poetics.

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  Poetic Craft and White-Settler Colonialism

  This workshop brought together eminent Australian and South African poets and critics to consider how poets in societies with a white settler history think about their world through their poetry making.

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  Ann Vickery: Against Colony Collapse Disorder

  Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees have suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from a hive. It has also been mobilised as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens has also used the term to describe aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as “being caught dead” given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past.

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  Rory Dufficy in response to Ann Vickery

  Moving laterally from Vickery’s initial gambit, I will look to explore the conditions from which ‘colony collapse’ might be understood as Clemen’s “being caught dead”.