WLC Seminar Series 1 September 2021

Our WLC September seminar features a presentation from Ann Vickery: ‘Towards a Hospitable Poetics: Accommodating Dementia through Contemporary Lyric’.

When: Wednesday 1 September from 12.00 noon to 1.00 pm (AEST). 

Where: Join Zoom Meeting

https://deakin.zoom.us/j/86175900555?pwd=Rjd6eHIvdXJSSWFpWk5pUVVIRlFQUT09

Meeting ID: 861 7590 0555

Password: 02130197

Abstract:

Dementia is one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. Dementia is currently the second major cause of death in Australia and the number of people with dementia worldwide was fifty million in 2020 (Australian Bureau of Statistics; Alzheimer’s Disease International).  Dementia forces us to scrutinise how community, care, and personhood are defined. While there has been increasing representation of dementia through narrative-driven forms, it is precisely poetry’s capacity to move beyond the meaning-making functions of language and narrative that enables it to better accommodate the morphic nature of dementia and to challenge its stigma. While considering how the impact of dementia may vary between vocational writers, those new to writing, and those in positions of care, this article considers how contemporary lyric may offer a space of hospitality that enables us to live with and alongside dementia ethically. Focusing predominantly on Australian examples, it considers how poetry seeks to provide a space, at times paradoxical, enabling agency, recognition, and freedom while also navigating forms of attachment and belonging. It considers how poetry can articulate dementia as historically and culturally nuanced and how poetry may also be able to navigate states of difficulty and precarity.  

Bio:

Ann Vickery is Head of Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin. She is the author of 3 poetry collections, most recently Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack (Vagabond Press, 2021). She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan UP, 2000) and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt 2007), and co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009). She co-edited Poetry and the Trace (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry and co-editing The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry.