posted on 2021-01-28, 00:00authored byMaria Takolander
Grieve, Repeat
History
Pagination
1-1
Language
eng
Research statement
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POETRY AND THE NEW MATERIALISM
Research Background
Autobiographical poetry is associated with individual—often pathological—expression. Redfield Jamison, Kyaga and Stone Horton are among scholars who account for autobiographical poetry in relation to the mental illnesses of individual poets. However, the materialist turn in creativity studies (as seen in the work of Csikszentmihalyi, Glaveanu and Tanggaard, for instance) reminds us how creativity always emerges from individuals working with the specific traditions and materials of an art form, presenting a problem for ‘expressive’ theories of autobiographical poetry.
Research Contribution
Contributing to knowledge generated in the Field of Research 190402 Creative Writing, this formally experimental poem about grief foregrounds both intensely personal and elegiac subject matter but also the generative power of the material field, signalling how poetry gives expression to the personal only through mediated practices of creativity. The tension between the poem’s autobiographical and elegiac mode and the work’s material and networked genesis is something I have also explored in scholarly work that reflects on my creative practice (including in an essay published in the Q1 journal Life Writing).
Research Significance
The value of this poem is attested to by: its commissioned publication in the Australian poetry blog SleazeMag; its international publication as the lead work in Inverted Syntax (US); and its inclusion in my new book of poems (Trigger Warning) with the prestigious University of Queensland Press, a book already named as one of the most anticipated releases of 2021 by The Australian.