Owen Bullock
Owen Bullock's research interests are writing and trauma; poetry and process; semiotics and poetry; prose poetry; collaborative poetry; and haikai literature. He has a website for his research into process at: www.Poetry-in-Process.com. His scholarly writing has appeared in Antipodes, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Arts Therapy, Axon, Journal of New Zealand Literature, Ka Mate Ka Ora, New Writing, Qualitative Inquiry, Social Alternatives, TEXT and Westerly, and he has a book chapter in British prose poetry: The poems without lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He has published three collections of poetry, 'Work & Play', 'semi' and 'sometimes the sky isn’t big enough'; five books of haiku, 'Summer Haiku', 'River's Edge', 'Urban Haiku', 'breakfast with epiphanies', and 'wild camomile '; the novella, 'A Cornish Story', and several chapbooks of poetry, haiku and haibun.
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Papers by Owen Bullock
poetry in engaging participants of an intensive four-week creative
arts programme known as ARRTS (Arts for Recovery, Resilience,
Teamwork and Skills) for wounded, ill or injured serving military
personnel people with injury or illness, to prepare and assist
them in writing their own stories. Poetry can deal with
experience and perception in unique ways, as can haiku, which
are invaluable for their accessibility and depth. The open qualities
of our reading matter invite discussion and models the fact that
poetry gives us permission to feel and to express ourselves. This
discussion and engagement with readings is a key aspect of any
prospective writer’s development, and, supplemented by the
identification of specific techniques such as enjambment, creates
awareness of ways in which it is possible to ‘re-author’ experience
for healing effect.
Creative Writing stream of the four-week intensive residential
programme, Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills
(ARRTS), with Australian Defence Force participants diagnosed
with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety disorders.
The programme is hosted twice annually by the University of
Canberra. As a Creative Writing Mentor for the programme, I have
developed these exercises, which have specific goals: metaphor
creation, writing from the senses and using detail, and writing
about movement and the body to assist engagement; these
exercises are generative. These approaches are predicated on the
idea that the therapeutic value of writing is assisted by trying to
write well. They highlight the need to both restore and explore
symbolic language, an ability which is sometimes lost following
trauma; to use sensory detail; and the value of writing in
embodied ways. After discussing each exercise, the paper reflects
on their usefulness to participants.
Discussions of prosody are prone to the limitations of convention,
though the poet may strive for more freedom in the line. This
paper begins by noting an example of a radical use of page space
from Mallarmé and goes on to describe recent innovations and
experiments with line breaks in work by Australian and New
Zealand poets, and to summarise the functions of the line breaks
used. These explorations of form show that the poetic line is
neither static nor redundant in contemporary practice, and
suggest the need for poets to reappraise the possibilities made
available to them by the work of their peers.
poetry in engaging participants of an intensive four-week creative
arts programme known as ARRTS (Arts for Recovery, Resilience,
Teamwork and Skills) for wounded, ill or injured serving military
personnel people with injury or illness, to prepare and assist
them in writing their own stories. Poetry can deal with
experience and perception in unique ways, as can haiku, which
are invaluable for their accessibility and depth. The open qualities
of our reading matter invite discussion and models the fact that
poetry gives us permission to feel and to express ourselves. This
discussion and engagement with readings is a key aspect of any
prospective writer’s development, and, supplemented by the
identification of specific techniques such as enjambment, creates
awareness of ways in which it is possible to ‘re-author’ experience
for healing effect.
Creative Writing stream of the four-week intensive residential
programme, Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills
(ARRTS), with Australian Defence Force participants diagnosed
with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety disorders.
The programme is hosted twice annually by the University of
Canberra. As a Creative Writing Mentor for the programme, I have
developed these exercises, which have specific goals: metaphor
creation, writing from the senses and using detail, and writing
about movement and the body to assist engagement; these
exercises are generative. These approaches are predicated on the
idea that the therapeutic value of writing is assisted by trying to
write well. They highlight the need to both restore and explore
symbolic language, an ability which is sometimes lost following
trauma; to use sensory detail; and the value of writing in
embodied ways. After discussing each exercise, the paper reflects
on their usefulness to participants.
Discussions of prosody are prone to the limitations of convention,
though the poet may strive for more freedom in the line. This
paper begins by noting an example of a radical use of page space
from Mallarmé and goes on to describe recent innovations and
experiments with line breaks in work by Australian and New
Zealand poets, and to summarise the functions of the line breaks
used. These explorations of form show that the poetic line is
neither static nor redundant in contemporary practice, and
suggest the need for poets to reappraise the possibilities made
available to them by the work of their peers.
of what the relational axes can tell us about poetry which can then be used in practice. After due consideration of the implications of binary oppositions in the discourse and of features such as codes, the discussion considers Jakobson’s insights into the relational axes and ideas that problematise understandings of the sign, such as Riffaterre’s theory of representation and Derrida’s elaboration of the originary nature of writing. The analysis accommodates theoretical evolution from structuralism to poststructuralism, postmodernism and assemblage
theories.
Poetry is richly susceptible to semiotic analysis because of the way it highlights language. I describe examples of the interaction between the axes through techniques such as metonymy and metaphor. Work that features distinctive layout invites a discussion of how the use of
page space may be conceptualised and what effects are gained by it. The idea of space being used to score music was made popular by Charles Olson and has been a justification for experimental typography, but this is just one possible function. I describe various functions
for the use of space in the poetry discussed, and I argue that its use is paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic, since it often subverts the definition of the syntagm (which is singular and linear). I argue that the use of space constitutes an act of substitution for language.
I have encountered few attempts in the literature to systematically articulate the variety of effects which space can yield, and this is important work that I extend here. The appendix attempts a provisional taxonomy of the use of space, via reference to the analysis of poetry in
chapters two, three and four. These instances are charted and grouped together to gain a better understanding of how space contributes to meaning, and to encourage the use of page space in suggestive and embodied ways. At the same time, I acknowledge that it is one
avenue of many by which multiplicity of meaning can be achieved, and reflect on the way Michele Leggott’s poetry, for example, has moved away from spatial experiments yet found other ways to attain multiplicity, often through an articulation of competing codes. My
creative project responds to ideas in both the poetry analysed and the theoretical components, investigating formal structures as syntagmatic confines; the idea of the centre being outside structure; the place of written language (as opposed to speech); social context; selection and
substitution in poems; spatial relations, misdirection and the unity of the whole. It does so in a variety of forms with an emphasis on hybrids.
From my reading, I conjectured that the literary canon with regard to poetry was formed in New Zealand by the mid-1970s, on the strength of publications from Penguin and Oxford University Press. The 1945 and 1960 anthologies by Allen Curnow were extremely influential - particularly the second of these two - and the editors of future anthologies from the larger publishers diverged comparatively little
from his choices. Curnow’s anthologies are the subject of Chapter One, and in Chapter Two, I look at Vincent O’Sullivan’s series of three anthologies for Oxford (1970, 1976 and 1987), which confirmed and expanded that canon.
However, from the mid-1960s, and especially in the early 1970s, new trends emerged in New Zealand writing, linked to a consciousness of post-modernist literary theory. Some of the new trends, together with material that supplemented existing perspectives on poetry, are discussed in Chapter Three. The greater degree of acknowledgement of writing by women poets - which began in the late 1960s in smaller literary journals - reached a point where the first anthology of women’s poetry, Private Gardens, could be published in 1977. The first major anthology to be edited by a woman appeared five years later. The gradualness of these changes is stressed, however, with regard to women’s poetry included in the larger anthologies
themselves.
A new bias emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s in favour of work from the University presses. Nevertheless, anthologies that presented some alternative point of view on our literary history proliferated at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taken together, the anthologies Big Smoke and Real Fire form a more holistic picture of what went on in the 1960s and 1970s and are discussed in Chapter Four of this thesis. Concluding remarks focus on the prejudices that appear to have guided the publishing of poetry in New Zealand anthologies, the influence of major poets, and the possibilities for further study of this body of literature.
This exhibition took place in Canberra, Australia, in April 2017 as the major creative component of Caren's PhD with the University of Canberra. It is staged to allow the various pieces of furniture to create distinct zones of activity and 'introduce' the texts to the reading audience.