Special August 2017 issue of the journal Axon: Creative Explorations www.axonjournal.com.au

This issue builds on work emerging from the Poetry on the Move festival hosted by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in September 2016. There may be a further, associated IPSI symposium at the University of Canberra in May 2017 (see below).

This Special Issue of Axon aims to explore ways in which contemporary poetry fashions its various forms of utterance, with particular attention to form and how poets abide by, manipulate or ignore its restraints. We would like to hear how poets understand their own creative practice, as well as the poetry of their contemporaries in whichever part of the world they may be situated. We would like to know how poets approach the formal requirements or expectations that writing poetically may (or may not) impose on them. We would like to understand the extent to which poetry represents a crossing of boundaries for poets, what those boundaries are, and what poets are trying to achieve in making these crossings.

We are particularly interested in papers that relate to:

• How poetic form is used by poets and how they understand poetic tradition
• Inventive, subversive or transgressive poetic forms or strategies
• Prose poetry and other ‘hybrid’ poetic forms
• Poetry at the margins, wherever they may be
• Poetry as ‘alternative’ knowledge

We welcome papers that explore the above with reference to a variety of broader themes, such as:

• Poetry and the contemporary zeitgeist
• How poets make poetry out of autobiographical material
• How contemporary poetic language ‘works’
• Contemporary poetry’s relationship to the quotidian
• Contemporary poetry’s relationship to the ‘sublime’
• Poetry as a way of knowing the ‘other’, however that may be defined
• Connections between poetry and culture
• Poetry and its relationship to language more broadly

What we would like from contributors:

1. A 150-word abstract of your proposed paper by 10 December 2016.
2. If your abstract is accepted (we will notify you by 28 February 2017), a full written paper of between 4,000 and 6,000 words by 31 May 2017.
3. If we run an IPSI symposium on this topic we may invite selected authors to the University of Canberra to participate in May 2017.

The editors of this issue of Axon: Creative Explorations journal are Professor Paul Hetherington, Professor Jen Webb and Dr Paul Munden.

All abstracts, papers and related correspondence should be addressed to Dr Paul Munden at Paul.Munden@canberra.edu.au