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You Will Not Know in Advance What You'll Feel

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posted on 2019-12-01, 00:00 authored by Antonia PontAntonia Pont
You Will Not Know in Advance What You'll Feel

History

Series

Rabbit Poets Series; no.13

Pagination

1 - 73

Publisher

Rabbit Poetry

Place of publication

Melbourne, VIc.

ISBN-13

9780648534334

Language

eng

Research statement

Background This collection is in conversation with the poet’s traditional scholarly work on time, silence, absence, memory, the conditions for transformation and event. It takes up provocations from 20th century French philosophy, namely accounts of time and repetition in Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson and draws on Alain Badiou’s conceptions of both the event and subjectivation. A number of poems work ekphrastically with works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin and Hokusai, as well as the writings of Sebald and Foster Wallace. Contribution This collection seeks to excavate and complicate the notion of uncertainty and not-knowing, as these play out in various temporal registers: the anticipated present, the elusive and expansive past and the empty, pure form of time known as future. Poems both remember times—self-reflexively dipping into the archive of the insisting past—as well as create new times, via formal techniques of enjambment, rhythm, spacing and repetition. The aphoristic title signals the collection’s radical commitment to holding open what is not certain, in the effort to prevent preclusions of genuine futurity and gaps where desire gets in and can move. Extending work on the concept of ‘plainness’ (see essay ‘In Praise of a Plain Life’), poems also activate accessible, transitory vernaculars, entangling these with philosophical and technical vocabularies. Significance The work was short-listed for the national ASAL Mary Gilmore Award for new poets, and endorsed by poet and critic, Lisa Gorton (PhD). The work generated two launches (one as part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival 2020), and a pod-cast interview in Poetry Says. A review, noting the feminist and emancipatory commitments of the work, claimed that the poems contain ‘the best sex positions ever written in the English language’, and that its femininity, belying Kristeva, is ‘abjectless’.

Publication classification

J1 Major original creative work

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