Staff from the Mabo library and English Studies joined forces to promote the written word during JCU Open Day. Members of the community were invited to discover exciting new units in the English Major, to learn about the study of Australian literature in the tertiary sector, and to participate in a poetry competition linked to research by scholars associated with the Roderick Trust and the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (FALS).
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| Thomas Bristow and Helen Hooper at JCU Open Day (zoom in for Helen's fine spine poem) |
Book Spine Poetry is something you can do in your local library, your university library, or at home. These competitions are popular right across the world. A book spine poem is a free verse poem, using words from spines of books stacked on top of one another! You simply have to carefully stack a lot of books, scan the spines for words that attract or interest you, write those words down on a piece of paper, sit down and bring the words together to make a short poem. Spend as much or as little time as you like in transforming these ‘found’ words into lines of poetry that might interest your reader. Here’s an example of free verse from the JCU Open Day competition:
This poet has taken the phrases “Devil’s eye” “WildLife and “Bone Ash” from book spines and arranged them with extra words and a title to create a short poem that ends humorously with the voice of a cow – the deep and dark world of death and the devil is set in contrast with the everyday pastoral. Its simple and effective. From here, if the poet wishes to, a long poem might form with other titles from other book spines.“Free verse” refers to a literary device that is free from regular meter or rhythm – also known as the limitations of “prosody”. Practioners of irregular, syllabic or unrhymed verse include Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence; in Australia there’s A. D. Hope, Les Murray, Judith Wright, John Kinsella and many many more. These poets also write in traditional form but they use free verse to be conversational, direct, and natural, or to focus on images and feeling rather than the musical side to poetry. Words come with their own stress and intonation; ordinarily, poets exploit these attributes to form patterns of rhythm and sound. This approach to writing takes time, and comes from lots of practice. Free verse, however, does not follow any rules, but provides artistic expression through other means: combining obscure or deeply meaningful words complementing, drawing on alliteration (words beginning with the same sound), and picking words for their cadence (lilt or accent that comes with speaking the word aloud).
This next entry sits comfortably with nothing but titles from the spines doing all the work:the title, of the poet’s own making, brings together the lines and themes taken from the books: friendship lives on beyond failure (‘the break’), it is based on sharing our worlds with others (‘collected stories’), it is defined by care and compassion (‘affection’), and it has to have more than one person!
The competition winner, local high school student Antony, wrote a supercharged couplet based on several titles of Australian novels sculpted into a soundscape that speaks profoundly to a postcolonial world that is listening deeply to the calls of nature in our late moment of diminished existence on the planet:
Emma Maguire and Claire Hansen guided prospective English and Creative Arts students, and members of the public with a general interest in literary and writing studies, by outlining the many ways to follow a BA degree at JCU. Literary studies at JCU (or ‘English’ studies as it is sometimes known) is a robust programme of study offering of diverse range of topics across sixteen units at first, second and third year levels, including: Creative Writing, Life Writing, Australian Literature, Shakespeare, and Children’s Literature. There are also units for study that cover the history of the book, its form and reception, and broad societal studies of print culture (from the early printing presses to contemporary online books).
Students are prepared and examined in the early years of their degree to forge their own pathway towards advanced study in the third year; units at this level include Short Stories, Australian Urban Fictions, The Gothic, Green Worlds and Postcolonial Narratives. These advanced units require students to complete one or two prerequisite units; they have been developed with input, from what is an unique asset in Australian Universities: the Roderick Scholars specialising in literature within Humanities and Creative Arts. Unparalleled in the Australian humanities, the Roderick investment in scholarship on Australian literature in a global context has involved many scholars since the 1960s; at present the Roderick scholars are Michael Ackland, Allison Craven, and the new Roderick Research Fellow, Thomas Bristow, who joins JCU this year from Durham University in the UK.
FALS – Researching the Australian Novel
The Book Spine competition used novels selected by JCU librarian, Bronwyn Mathiesen. Bronwyn chose interesting titles from the excellent collection of Australian literature on the top floor of the Mabo library. Haunting, ironic, philosophical, moody, the narrative pulse of the Australian novel has intrigued and delighted readers since the 1830s. See if you can find out who is considered as the first Australian novelist (clue: the book was published in Hobart).
The island continent’s novel has travelled a long way since its early inception as a technology of the frontier of the Australian outback; many contemporary writers are drawn to the novel to speak of their natural environments, the politics of family, and the imagined futures that only literature can shape, describe and share. It is a source of life’s great truths, but perhaps the Australian novel is most robust when it turns away from an attempt to reveal the essence of a nation, instead feeling out the emotional contours of experience (conflict, confession, conciliation). Here, we might find the novel resting comfortably within complexity and diversity rather than wishing to shape these attributes into a singularity or a fixed description of nationhood and its experience.
More advanced and involved readings of the Australian novel, alongside studies of Australian poetry and drama, have been supported by the Colin and Margaret Roderick Trust; Prof Colin Roderick was a former JCU Professor of Australian Literature and founder of ‘FALS’:
https://www.jcu.edu.au/foundation-for-australian-literary-studies
The new Roderick Research Fellow, Thomas Bristow, joins a long history and strong team of literary scholars in the Humanities and Creative Arts at JCU. Tom’s contribution to Roderick Research is to prepare research papers focusing on the Australian Novel while finding new ways to disseminate research. On Open Day, Tom was on hand to discuss Australian literary studies, and its role in the context of Australian cultural studies. Fortunately, owing to the Book Spine Poetry competition, a huge pile of novels where at his disposal; so too the shortlist of books for this year’s Colin Roderick Award. This award is one of the most prestigious literary awards for a book published in Australia in the previous calendar year. This year’s short list is HERE.
Look out for more news on this year’s award and come along to the Colin Roderick dinner on the 31st of October when the winner will be announced; Readers interested in Australian Literature should follow up this BLOG by checking the links online and the journals listed below. If you want to know more, why not join FALS?
Further Reading
Journal of the Association of for the Study of Australian Literature
Australian Literary Studies
AUSTLIT
Try spine poetry yourself or with a class:
https://www.australiancurriculumlessons.com.au/2014/08/03/year-3-poetry-ideas/
https://australianchildrenspoetry.com.au/tag/free-verse/
Share it with us:
- Create your poem using book spines (not echidna, or sea urchin although we would also be interested in seeing this form of poetry)
- Take a photo
- Upload it to your Insta account and tag @jcu_libraryinthetropics or at us on Twitter via @JCULibrary and @jcuCASE
- Give us a follow while you are there
- Bask in the appreciation of your great work
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