Peer Reviewed Research Papers

I’m presenting a creative stream paper at the Australasian Association of Writing Programs 21st annual conference at University of Canberra, Monday, November 28 • 1:30pm – 2:30pm. I will be reading from Aboriginal to Nowhere: The Song Cycle of The Postmodern Dispossessed, a poem which is a homosemantic emulation (HoEm) of Les Murray’s 1977 poem The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle which itself, is a ‘respectful parody’ of Ronald M. Berndt’s 1948 English language translation of a non sacred song of the Sand-fly Clan: the Song Cycle of The Moon-Bone. Aboriginal to Nowhere is not a respectful parody of Murray’s poem, it’s not a parody at all. I make no apologies for how I feel about touching down from oblivion into Australia.

Read my abstract here

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Thanks for reading.

Brentley

mickey_prozac — Prozac Mickey by Ben Frost http://benfrostisdead.com/

A brief history of a prescriptive English language discipline known as English Prime (E-Prime), a method of writing without use of the copula (the verb to be). Writing in E-Prime requires the author to expose the agent of a sentence and therefore lends itself favourably to other techniques of mimetic storytelling. An examination of my experiments using this constraint for creative writing demonstrates that utilising E-Prime enhances vernacular authenticity, improves clarity, readability and the quality of immersion in a text. The E-Prime constraint offers access to dynamics of language ordinarily subliminal. The little word ‘is’ has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger. – George Santayana (1955: 71)

English Prime (E-Prime): Writing/speaking in the English language without the copula, i.e. excluding tenses of the verb to be (are, am, is, was, were, be, been and being) and / or their contractions. (Bourland 1989: 203)

Full paper online at Journal of Poetics Research