Non-Fiction / Scholarly
Poetry as Presence: Working with Personae
https://www.axonjournal.com.au/issues/13-2/poetry-presence-working-persona
This piece adopts the voice of public declaration to assert poetic practice as survivable resistance to abuses of power. It proposes that poetry is the best means to identify, expose and reconfigure what is implicit in dominant discourses that discredit the way a survivor of sexual assault may communicate. It is found that a poetic use of language that is allusive, evocative and associative can reinvigorate annihilated perspectives so as to add them to public discourse. Poetic methods can be employed to resist and subvert the supposed supremacy of linear and logical narrative structures considered essential for sense making and validity. Furthermore, they can be employed to excavate family and state histories to resurrect, sometimes from fragments, the perspectives of those that have been silenced.
From ‘Poetry as Presence: Working with Personae’
On teaching and mentoring writers – published on The GW Review, 26 June 2023
When I am teaching and mentoring, I constantly come across writers worried about being self-indulgent or imposters. This is in part due to brilliant, inventive writing by women and other minorities being reviewed as self-indulgent or hyperbolic in Australia, whilst their white middle-class male counterparts are reviewed as brilliant and inventive. We internalise that we need to be given permission and approval to write. From whom? I encourage students to internalise that they do not need authorisation to write from those who assume power. And I encourage students to examine and acknowledge their own privileges and power bases.
From ‘On teaching and mentoring writers’
writing + boxing = Left / Write // Hook – Lyon D, Gaskin C, Everall G (2022). TEXT 26 (Special 67): 1–18.
There are knowledges that are felt before they are thought: ‘poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought’ (Lorde, 1984, p.37). Boxing is a way to give form to that which has been overpowered by the abuse, to invite out of hiding what the abuse told us was not permitted.
From ‘writing + boxing = Left / Write // Hook’
Claire Gaskin Poetry 