Axon 14: Materiality, Creativity, Material Poetics

Late last year I was invited to be a co-editor for an issue of the University of Canberra’s peer-reviewed arts journal, Axon: Creative Investigations. It was an interesting experience, with a few learning curves, but I really enjoyed the process.

We’ve just released the relevant issue, titled Materiality, Creativity, Material Poetics, co-edited by myself, Jen Webb and Jordan Williams, and it includes an internal capsule on ‘The Line’, edited by Owen Bullock. Together it’s a rich mix of offerings, from video (‘Inside a radio‘ by Nicci Haynes) to visual arts (such as ‘Read to me‘ by Sarah Bodman) to design (‘Individuality & yet another book‘ by Ulrike Stoltz), experimental writing (such as ‘Vocal Womb and the Ekphrasis Machine (We Die)’ by Quinn Eades and Virginia Barratt) and visual poetry (such as ‘Natural Selection‘ by Kay Are).

That’s just a sliver of the contributions. I have a paper in there as well, called ‘Axonalogue: five years of experiential materiality‘, which looks at the letterpress workshops that I’ve been facilitating with staff from the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. Here’s the intro:

Sometimes interest and opportunity converge: an interest in materiality within the practice of writing, the opportunity to use a letterpress studio. The chance to put theory into practice is taken, five times, and the initial, informal research question What happens to a poem when the poet prints it by hand? quickly turns into What happens to a poet when they print?

I’m very excited about this journal issue, I hope you enjoy it.