Pagination
1-1Location
West End, Qld.ISSN
1449-6445Language
engResearch 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 poem foregrounds both intensely personal and elegiac subject matter but also the generative power of the historical field, signalling how autobiographical poetry gives expression to the personal only through culturally mediated practices of creativity. Thus this poem is structured as an interview between two poets. The tension between the poem’s autobiographical and elegiac mode and the work’s sociocultural or 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 journal foam:e; its international publication 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.Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkCopyright notice
[2019, Maria Takolander]Issue
16Publisher
light-trap press
