Tag: experimental writing

Australian Experimental Poetry: Critical and Historical Perspectives

SoutherlyBlog

by A.J. Carruthers These blog posts will contain some critical explorations, reflections and polemics concerning my second book project titled The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014. This project comes after Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011,[i] a book I have called a “critical experiment” which examines the use of notational methods and actual musical scores in expansive works by Langston Hughes, Armand Schwerner, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and Anne Waldman. These are disruptive and radical case studies, poetries that test our reading practices, oftentimes engaging in trenchant cultural critique through the registers…

… read more

‘Solastalgia’ at Cementa15 Arts Festival, Kandos NSW

SoutherlyBlog

by Anna Gibbs Writing, art and performance are increasingly intertwined in new forms of creative cultural activism. Writing is central to our understanding of images, and of art  – even art that is not text-based. Even if visual experience can’t be reduced to language, language nevertheless plays a key role in configuring our sensory experience and enculturating our perception of it, as art theorist WJT Mitchell has shown. And new forms of interaction between writing and image are also having an impact on the literary, the shorter forms necessitated by it often giving rise to more experimental modes of writing.…

… read more

Mycelial Dreamings at Cementa15

SoutherlyBlog

by Anna Gibbs Photo credit: Nell Schofield Cementa15 is the second iteration of a biannual arts festival held in Kandos, NSW, a ‘postindustrial’ town out back beyond the Blue Mountains. Originally established as housing for the workers at Australian Cement, Kandos was abandoned by the company – though not by its residents – when the former closed around 2012. The town is also home away from home to  Sydney art writer Ann Finegan, who runs Kandos Projects, a shopfront in the main street, as an artist residency, and home to artists Alex Wisser, Christine Macmillan, co-directors (with Finegan) of the…

… read more

&Now: Blast Radius – writing and the other arts

SoutherlyBlog

by Anna Gibbs Experimental writing often seems like a rather small and obscure – if vivacious and highly engaged – field of practice in Australia. But a trip to the biannual ‘&Now’ festival of experimental writing at CalArts in Los Angeles last week served as a reminder of the different kinds of energy that can be created both by critical mass and by the cross-currents activated in the expanded field formed when writing conjoins, cooperates or collides with other practices. The festival, whose theme this year was ‘Blast Radius: Writing and the Other Arts’, covered work ranging from the relationship…

… read more