Jill Jones has published 11 full-length books of poetry, including Viva the real (UQP 2018), Brink (Five Islands Press 2017),  and The beautiful anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann 2014), which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015. Her work is represented in a number of major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN anthology of Australian literature, Contemporary Australian poetryand The Penguin anthology of Australian poetry. She teaches at the University of Adelaide where she is also a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

www.jilljones.com.au

‘an arrangement in a system to pointing’

doing things with things

This essay explores ideas of materiality and affinity in poems through the kinds of things poets refer to or place into a poem, and how they place or structure things into poems. It considers three very different poets doing different things with things: Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara and Inger Christensen. It examines how these writers use things in their works to say something, variously, about connections and discontinuities, sensibilities and the indexical, and ideas of scale via the public and/or the private. These three writers do this via interpretative modes which raise questions about representation either by resisting signification, or by tracing materiality through objects either as systems of objects or as ‘found’ or encountered objects.

Keywords: Poetry – things – objects – materiality – Gertrude Stein – Inger Christensen – Frank O’Hara

Every Day, Streams of Changes

Networks in Time, Place, Process in the ‘Snapshots Project’

This essay examines an email poetry project, the Snapshots Project, as an example of poetries that work with dailiness as a form of serial associative writing. Using responses to a survey of some of the participants and some examples of poems written for the project, I explore the various ways poets can experiment with dailiness in their writing and the ways they interpret ‘the moment’ variously, from the report, the description and the anecdote, through a range of more formal linguistic preferences. Time and location markers attached to the email posts provided a kind of mapping or network for these poems. Many respondents noted the project created both a sense of communality, of network, by providing a long view of how a day unfolded across longitudes and latitudes, and a venue for responsiveness.