Volume
27Pagination
1-4ISSN
1327-9556Language
engResearch statement
Background
The concept of poetic extremity in this poetic suite explores the constraints and aesthetic forms of living in pandemic lockdown. The extremities this lockdown state intensify, through physical and emotional constraints, an aesthetic of perceptual experience involving the senses, or sense perception. This pandemic perception requires living “with uncertainty, […] which involves living with the [cognitive] dissonance” (Aronson & Tavris, 2020). So many artists found sensuous aesthetics to live with these dissonances (Sarasso et al., 2021), such as street performances while emptying the bins, or orchestra members performing (with transition delays) via Zoom.
Contribution
The poet Wallace Stevens enlarges an aesthetic of the sensuous through a non-mimetic form of practice, what he terms “the phenomena of perception”. The phenomena illustrating the pressures of imagination and reality infuse Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” (1917/1923) the model and catalyst for this poetic suite on lockdown. This suite is rhizomatic, exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “rhizome [which] has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”(27). The intention is to map a mass of roots, avoiding a binary structural tree system (beginning, middle and end).
Significance
This rhizomatic presentation of extreme moments of “being between” presents an array of mappings or tracings, “migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions” (Berry & Siegal, n.d.). The poetic suite was double peer reviewed for acceptance in the Poetry and Extremity special issue of the writing-related creative/academic journal TEXT. This journal has a long-established reputation both nationally and internationally.Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkScale
NTRO OtherIssue
Special Issue 70Publisher
Griffith UniversityPlace of publication
Brisbane, Qld.Source
TEXT Poetry and Extremity
