Judith Bishop’s second full-length poetry collection, Interval (UQP, 2018) won the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize, and was a finalist for the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award. Her first collection, Event (Salt, 2007), won the FAW Anne Elder award and was shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the ASAL Mary Gilmore Prize. 

Lyric poetry

Resonance and attunement

Lyric poetry is an affective art: it engages with emotional experience, and seeks to communicate an experience to others, through the deft use of all the technical means available to the poet. The peculiar agency of the lyric poem has been formulated in myriad ways over time by poets and philosophers alike. This essay proposes that recent philosophical, neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic research into the nature and experience of resonance and attunement provides a way of understanding the specifically emotional effects of a lyric poem on a reader.

Keywords: Poetry – Lyric – Music – Neurobiology – Neurophenomenology – Neuroscience – Affective – Emotion – Psychotherapy – Philosophy – Resonance – Attunement