Creative Writing and Its Contexts

CREATIVE WRITING AND ITS CONTEXTS
A SYMPOSIUM FOR DENNIS HASKELL

Hosted by the Westerly Centre and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) at The University of Western Australia, 17-18 February, 2011.

Programme

Thursday February 17, 2011
Banquet Hall & Foyer, The University Club, UWA

5:00pm ~ Opening, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Western Australia, Professor
Alan Robson
~ Welcome to Country, Ben and Alf Taylor

5:10pm ~ ASAL President, Paul Genoni

5:30pm ~ Keynote address, Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Sound and Sensibility:
English Aesthetics and Minority American Identities’

6:30pm ~ Readings, Andrew Taylor, John Kinsella and Tony Curtis

7:30-9:30pm ~ Celebratory Function

Friday February 18, 2011
The University Club, UWA, Case Study Room

8:30-9:00am REGISTRATION AND COFFEE

9:00-9:45 am Welcome and Introduction – Chair: Tony Hughes-D’Aeth

Bruce Bennett ‘The Civilising Value of the Humanities’

SESSION 1 – ‘Asia and Australia’

9:45-11:15am Chair: Kieran Dolin
Megan McKinlay ‘Jumbled Island Paradigms: Travels With Dennis’
Kirpal Singh ‘Australia-Asia Relations’
Miriam Wei Wei Lo ‘Poetry and the Problem of the Heart’

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11:15-11:45am MORNING TEA

SESSION 2 – ‘Creative Writing: Theory and Practice’

11:45-1:15pm Chair: Brenda Walker
Isabela Banzon ‘The Appeal of the Ordinary’
Graeme Kinross-Smith ‘How Do I Know What I think Until I See What I Say?’
Ian Reid ‘Framing “Creative Writing’”

1:15-2.00pm LUNCH

2.00-3:15pm SESSION 3 – ‘Poetry and Poetics’ – Chair: Philip Mead

Geoff Page ‘Something to Celebrate: Australian Women Poets born since 1968’
Page Richards ‘The Lyric Impulse’
Tony Curtis ‘Father to son: threading the dark’

3:15-3:45pm AFTERNOON TEA

3:45-5:00pm SESSION 4 – ‘Australian Literary Studies’ – Chair: Paul Genoni

Anne Brewster/
Alf Taylor ‘Who’s Laughing? Reading Alf Taylor’s short stories’
Kim Scott That Deadman Dance, a reading
Chris Wortham ‘An uncertain smile: humour in the poetry of Dennis Haskell’

5:00-6:00pm BOOK LAUNCH

Dennis Haskell, Acts of Defiance: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2010)

Creative Writing and its Contexts – Symposium for Dennis Haskell
17-18th February, 2011

ABSTRACTS

Thursday 17/1/2011

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Sound and Sensibility: English Aesthetics and Minority American Identities’

In Anglophone societies like the United States and Australia, the two components—ethnic and linguistic—often are collapsed in the ear and imagination of non-Anglophone immigrant subjects as one and the same. Learning/speaking the English language ‘like an American’ or Australian has served as a trope for a desired transformation and assimilation forces. In the U.S. the ability to speak English is contractual in the rhetoric of citizenship and also viewed as a means toward social and economic agency. The act of learning/speaking English is both coerced and appropriative, the dynamics for stealing/losing the original immigrant language and itself the original stolen from native speakers. English's difficulties that mute first-generation ethnic immigrants, whether in the U.S. or Australia, track the physical challenge of changing subjectivities in the poems of the Hispanic American writer Julia Alvarez and Korean American writers like Theresa Huk-Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. A common sensibility expressive of tenderness toward the language itself threads these poems of identity crises rising from the uneven contact zones between recent immigrant-refugee subjects and national collectivity. Such deep-structured ‘feelingness’ toward the English language often figures English as Anglo female, as in Li-Young Lee’s poems and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker and shapes a unity between content and form, the politics of identity and pure being itself, suggesting that the Eros of English may offer an epiphany dissolving and resolving the figure of the ‘foreign’ immigrant. The lecture will include audio-visual materials.

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Friday 18/1/2011

Bruce Bennett, ‘The Civilising Value of the Humanities’

I will refer to the four topic areas of the symposium and Dennis's contribution to them. The paper will propose that the humanities, and literary studies at their best, offer both a skills education and modes of self-knowledge necessary to an advanced civilisation. In the hands of skilled and humane teachers and scholars, a literary education offers ways to develop writing and reading skills while learning to ‘understand ourselves and others’ -- the central function of the humanities. Along the way, many students will develop their emotional intelligence, a sense of humour and some of the arts of rational conversation.

SESSION ONE – Australia and Asia

Megan McKinlay, ‘Jumbled Island Paradigms: Travels With Dennis’
When I first met Dennis Haskell, I was a floundering Asian Studies PhD student. I couldn't get a foothold on my topic. My supervisor was about to abandon me. I was considering a job in the public service. ‘Talk to Dennis,’ someone said. ‘He knows everything about Asia.’ Some fifteen years later, I am still talking to Dennis about Asia. In this paper, I reflect on the travels we have taken in the course of our research, writing, and teaching – literary and cultural journeys which have carried us from Yackandandah to Yokohama, into mainland China, and the labyrinthine length and breadth of Southeast Asia – considering how the challenges and pleasures we have encountered along the way speak to the notion of ‘Asia and Australia’ in a broad sense.

Kirpal Singh, ‘Australia-Asia Relations’ have always been bouncy and have been taking exciting tumbles through the past several decades. The recent incidents with the Indians, especially in Victoria, have not done much to alter this state, nor has the continued demonisation of Muslims and Islam in certain quarters of Australian society. On the Asian side, most are totally ignorant of the REAL Australia and those who have some knowledge are often not willing to come out and articulate their views and love for the great lucky country. We have, thus, issues on both sides - whether its the unease of Paul Keating calling Malaysia ‘recalcitrant’ or of Asians viewing Aussies as being too laid back, generally indifferent to Asian affairs and wanting only a good time while visiting Asian countries.

I am going to explore some of these attitudes and the values associated with them, raising the point that we need more academics and writers like Dennis Haskell who go out of the way to understand and then discuss the many challenges and issues which beset the Asian-Australian connections. Literature is an excellent way forward and the honest discussion of literary texts coming out from both continents will go a long way in helping mend - or at least help alter - the uneasy relationship that has been an on-going feature for at least the past 40 years since my first direct connection with Australia.

Miriam Wei Wei Lo, ‘Poetry and the Problem of the Heart’
My paper takes Dennis Haskell’s eloquent argument, in his recent Asialink essay, for the benefits of reading Asian literatures as its starting point. I will explore the work of Singaporean poet Alvin Pang and of Australian poet Lucy Dougan as a way of giving meaning to the terms ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia’ and then consider my own (Asian-Australian) poetry in relation to this. With this context in mind, I respond to Dennis’ essay by considering some of the difficulties in the relationship between Capitalism and Art. How, for example, does the humanising influence of literature co-exist with the tendency for businesses to put profit before people? Poetry illuminates the human condition but can it solve the problem of the human heart?

SESSION TWO - Creative Writing, Theory and Practice

Isabela Banzon, ‘The Appeal of the Ordinary’

The word ‘ordinary’ in blurbs and other sources to describe the poems of Dennis Haskell stands out, particularly to a non-Australian reader with little exposure to things Australian like myself. What is ordinary about his poems? How is the ordinary connected to poetic art? With what means does he link the ordinary to the ‘unsayable’? In an interview with Lucy Dougan, Haskell as poet remarks that the best reaction to poems is not literary criticism but ‘that sort of silence, a gasp before the applause.’ This paper will attempt to explore Haskell’s way with words, described inversely as ‘extraordinary’, by giving voice to that silence through an account of how his poems are mirrored in mine.

Graeme Kinross-Smith, ‘How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?’

In a cheeky, confessional, declarative, self-indulgent and ficto-critical reminiscence sown with readings of some of his recent poetry and short fictions Graeme Kinross-Smith recalls the cultural climate that surrounded his establishment of the nation’s first tertiary level creative writing stream at the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, in 1969.

Ian Reid, ‘Framing “Creative Writing”’

In the context of a symposium that builds on past achievements in the fields of literary study and practice with which Dennis has been closely associated, I propose a short paper that will look at assumptions that have framed (defined and positioned) ‘creative writing’ in Australian universities for more than a quarter of a century. My intention is not to make this an historical conspectus, but rather to scrutinise the assumptions that usually distinguish the teaching of creative writing from the teaching of literary criticism, and to situate some current curriculum practices (and their theoretical expression) in relation to those of two or three decades ago.

I would also sketch briefly a connection between such considerations and some interests that Dennis and I have each pursued in our different ways, over many years, in neo-Romantic aspects of writing and reading in Australia.

SESSION THREE – Poetry and Poetics

Geoff Page, ‘Something to Celebrate: Australian Women Poets born since 1968’

Since Bronwyn Lea’s first collection, Flight Animals in 2001, there have been about thirty outstanding first books by Australian women poets. Many of these were born in the years from 1968 to the mid-1970s. The youngest is Sarah Holland-Batt (b.1982). This paper considers the likely influences on these poets, examines what they have in common, both technically and thematically, notes their increasingly pre-eminent position in Australian poetry today and then discusses the work of seven of them in more detail.

Page Richards, ‘The Lyric Impulse’

Drawing from historians and poets, this paper will briefly explore deep lyric impulses, including ‘irruption’ and resistance, dislocation and mixed languages.

The lyric past offers frank and architectural ways of seeing how we find in language a layered pause between our place and its sudden unrecognisableness. From the historically moving perspective of lyric, this paper will look at several of Dennis Haskell’s poems and celebrate the lyric throb that they perpetuate and make new in his layering and provocation of language.

Tony Curtis, ‘Father to son: threading the dark’

The poetry of Dennis Haskell's first collection, the beautifully titled Listening at Night.

SESSION FOUR - Australian Literary Studies

Anne Brewster and Alf Taylor, ‘Who’s Laughing? Reading Alf Taylor’s short stories’
This paper addresses the issue of humour in Aboriginal writing, referring briefly to Alexis Wright’s fiction and Romaine Moreton’s poetry and, in more depth, the short fiction of Alf Taylor. I draw on and reconfigure Freud’s model of humour and Bhabha’s model of postcolonial ambivalence in order to analyse the effects of Taylor’s humour in a cross-cultural context.

Kim Scott, reading from That Deadman Dance

Chris Wortham, ‘An uncertain smile: humour in the poetry of Dennis Haskell’
Much Australian poetry is characterised by humour, but humour comes in many different shapes and sizes. The humour of Dennis Haskell distinctive and also engaging in a variety of ways. This paper will seek to identify Dennis's distinctive characteristics through discussion of a small group of representative poems drawn from different stages in his career as a poet.

Creative Writing and its Contexts – Symposium for Dennis Haskell
17-18th February, 2011

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Isabela Banzon

Isabela Banzon teaches at the University of the Philippines. She researches poetry writing and Philippine literature in English in context of other Philippine languages. Her published work includes a poetry collection Lola Coqueta introduced by Dennis Haskell.

Bruce Bennett

Bruce Bennett is Emeritus Professor of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra. A Rhodes Scholar from Western Australia, he is a graduate of the Universities of Western Australia, Oxford and London. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree of the University of New South Wales in 2004 for his research and publications in Australian Literature. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

His books include The Literature of Western Australia (1979), An Australian Compass (1991), Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry (1991), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998) with Jennifer Strauss, Australian Short Fiction: A History (2002) and Homing In (2006). He is currently working on two Australian Research Council projects – on Australian expatriate writers and the literatures of espionage.

Anne Brewster
Associate Professor Anne Brewster teaches at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Aboriginal Women's Autobiography (1995). She co-edited, with Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg, an anthology of Australian Indigenous Writing, Those Who Remain Will Always Remember (2000). She has widely published in journals and in edited collections including Literary Theory and Criticism in English, ed David Carter (in press), Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, eds Roger Dean and Hazel Smith and The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges, eds Barbara Baird and Damien Riggs. She was the Regional Chair of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South Pacific and Southeast Asian Region) for 2009-10.

Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis was born in Dublin, and studied literature at Essex University and Trinity College, Dublin. The Well in the Rain: New & Selected Poems, is the latest of seven warmly received collections. Days Like These (with Theo Dorgan and Paula Meehan) was published by Brooding Heron Press, in 2007. Two new collections are due out shortly: Folk and An Elephant Called Rex: an A to Z of Poems for Children. A winner of the Irish National Poetry Prize, he was also the 2003 recipient of the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia. Much in demand as a teacher and reader, Curtis performs extensively throughout Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland and North America. He has toured Australia four times, and been a friend and admirer of Dennis Haskell for over a decade. He is a member of Aosdāna, the Irish academy of the arts.