Innovation and Aesthetics in Contemporary Australian Poetry and Poetics
14-16 April 2016
Active Aesthetics was a conference and festival of contemporary Australian poetry that took place over four days in April 2016 at the University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Center for New Music.
The conference was initiated by Professor Lyn Hejinian (Department of English, U.C. Berkeley) and was convened by Professor Hejinian together with Dr Kate Fagan (Writing and Society Research Centre, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, WSU), Dr Ann Vickery (School of Communications and Creative Arts, Deakin University) and Associate Professor Eric Falci (Department of English, U.C. Berkeley) with the assistance of Daniel Benjamin, Serena Le and Claire Marie Stancek, and with the kind support of our respective institutions. The event combined critical panels with a series of poetry readings, performances and live collaborations.
Active Aesthetics enabled a transcultural exchange between innovative and activist poets of Australia and the San Francisco Bay Area. Together participants began a series of ongoing conversations about issues in poetry research and practice that are of mutual urgency to our writing communities, regardless of different local expressions. Themes addressed at Active Aesthetics included ecological crises, worlds of species presence, persistent colonialism, race and sovereignty, the surveilled life, Asia-Pacific regions and networks, transnational and transcultural thinking, aesthetic work under late capitalism, the apocalyptic lyric and small press poetry publishing.
To coincide with the conference, an anthology of poetry by participating Australian poets was published jointly by Tuumba Press and Giramondo Publishing. Cordite Poetry Review also published a companion feature of work by U.S. poets of the San Francisco Bay Area, curated by Lyn Hejinian and Sofie Ramos.
15 APRIL 2016
Panel 1: Australian Genealogies of Active Aesthetics
Philip Mead: The Territory of Activism: John Kinsella’s Upending of Dante in Western Australia
Ann Vickery: Luxurise This!: Contemporary Poetic Practice and The Communal Imaginary
Panel 2: Keynote Panel – Contemporary Aboriginal Poetics
Ali Cobby Eckermann: Give Me Back My Mother’s Heart
Natalie Harkin: Archival-Poetics
Stuart Cooke: Australian Bricolage: Decolonisation, Compost, Country
Panel 3: Politics, Activism, Innovation
Sam Langer: ‘After the bombs we invent the future’: A Poetics of Threat
Marty Hiatt: ‘How long have we been doing this’: Reduction and Bearing in Some Poems by Tim Wright
Readings and Performances
16 APRIL 2016
Panel 4: Pan-Tropic Poetics
Toby Fitch: Inversion: A Down Under Conceit
Corey Wakeling: The Comic Scenario Towards the Commons: ‘No colony can con’
Panel 5: Poetics of Decolonization
Bonny Cassidy: unbidden |ʌnˌbɪd(ə)n|
R D Wood: The Politics of Poetic Repatriation: Western Pilbara Song Poetry in the Digital Humanities Era
Panel 6: Feminist Countercultures, Queer Affiliations, Alternative Histories
Pam Brown: F A R O U T A M N E S I A C: Collaborating with Susan M. Schultz and Maged Zaher
Kate Lilley: Voices Off: Tilting at Australian Obliquity
Panel 7: Experiments in Scale and Subject
Jessica Wilkinson: Contemporary Australian Long Poems and Biographical Experiments
Q&A Discussion
Readings and Performances
Related Posts
Philip Mead: The Territory of Activism:
John Kinsella’s upending of Dante in Western Australia. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Australian Genealogies of Active Aesthetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Ann Vickery: Luxurise This!
Contemporary Poetic Practice and The Communal Imaginary. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Australian Genealogies of Active Aesthetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Peter Minter: Opposing Natures:
Extraction and Proliferation in Twenty-first Century Australia Poetry. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Australian Genealogies of Active Aesthetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Ali Cobby Eckermann: Give me back my mother’s heart
This paper was presented in the panel ‘Contemporary Aboriginal Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Natalie Harkin: Archival-poetics
This paper was presented in the keynote panel ‘Contemporary Aboriginal Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Stuart Cooke: Australian Bricolage:
Decolonisation, Compost, Country. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Contemporary Aboriginal Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Sam Langer: ‘After the bombs we invent the future’:
A Poetics of Threat. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Politics, Activism, Innovation’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Astrid Lorange: Poetry after the future:
Conspirary, ecstasy and hopelessness in contemporary Australian writing around art. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Politics, Activism, Innovation’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Marty Hiatt: ‘How long have we been doing this’:
Reduction and bearing in some poems by Tim Wright. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Politics, Activism, Innovation’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Toby Fitch: Inversion:
A Down Under Conceit. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Pan-Tropic Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Michael Farrell: Break or Connection?
Species Catalogues and the Conceptual Episteme in Australian Poetry. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Pan-Tropics Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Corey Wakeling: The comic scenario towards the commons:
‘No colony can con’. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Pan-Tropics Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Matthew Hall: The Origins of Black Aesthetics, Radicalism, and Linguistic Innovation in Lionel Fogarty’s Poetic
This paper was presented in the panel ‘Poetics of Decolonization’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Bonny Cassidy: unbidden
|ʌnˌbɪd(ə)n|. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Poetics of Decolonization’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Pam Brown: F A R O U T A M N E S I A C:
Collaborating with Susan M. Schultz and Maged Zaher. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Feminist Countercultures, Queer Affiliations, Alternative Histories’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Kate Lilley: Voices off:
Tilting at Australian Obliquity. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Feminist Countercultures, Queer Affiliations, Alternative Histories’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Kate Fagan: Archives of the present:
Temporal Shift, Maternal Legacy and Ontological Repair in the Poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann and Natalie Harkin. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Feminist Countercultures, Queer Affiliations, Alternative Histories’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
a.j.carruthers: Experiments in expansion:
Contemporary Australian Innovative Long Poems (on Ania Walwicz, Jessica Wilkinson, Astrid Lorange). This paper was presented in the panel ‘Experiments in Scale and Subject’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Jessica Wilkinson: Contemporary Australian Long Poems and Biographical Experiments
This paper was presented in the panel ‘Experiments in Scale and Subject’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Fiona Hile: ‘Woman exists’:
The Logic of the Archive in Ann Vickery’s Devious Intimacy and Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined by Rachel Briggs. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Experiments in Scale and Subject’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.