This week on the Southerly Blog, Axel-Nathaniel Rose explores the “travel” of poetry—attending to Omar Sakr’s “Algo in the Genocide” and the uses of poetry in protest.
Read now, comment, and share: southerlylitmag.com.au/on-the-trave...
#southerly #austlit #poetry
![An excerpt from the blog post. It reads:
“Langley’s life, letters and largely unpublished oeuvre have been revisited by many over the years from the perspective of race, class and settler colonial identity. The transgender themes in The Pea Pickers, from the siblings cross-dressing to Eve’s adoption of the fictional moniker Steve Hart, one of the Ned Kelly gang who was known to masquerade as a woman, has fascinated many. Steve’s transgressive desire to embody masculinity is made explicit by Langley from the outset:
‘I knew that I was a woman, but I thought I should have been a man; I knew that I was comical but I thought I was serious and beautiful, as well. It was tragic to be only a comical woman when I longed above all things to be a serious and handsome man’ (Langley 5).
To a contemporary reader, this account will sound like someone who might today be described as transgender." [character limit reached]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nqwfoxfakewnuzph3zqijmjl/bafkreig25k7tlgz7feafmnl2f4tvfdq7twotr6rtxhfknkuqvh32yxedr4)
![An excerpt from the blog post. It reads, ‘When I think of the phantom that haunts contemporary reading practices, I think of the slow and thorough practice of rereading. Jon Thiem describes in “Reading and Rereading” how the reading culture of the present is one of “scan, skim, and browse, forward and delete” in which the “notion of sustained reading seems archaic” (166).
This method of swift and singular reading, however, wasn’t always the dominant way to engage with a work. In “Toward a History of Reading”, Robert Darnton describes the period prior to 1750 as one of “intensive reading”. The scarcity of books meant people reread the ones they owned (91). Darnton outlines that by the 1800s people (mostly men) were reading “extensively” (91). The increase in quantity and availability of books—afforded by technological advancements of the printing press—precipitated new reading patterns." [character limit reached; full text on Southerly website. Sorry for the inconvenience!]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nqwfoxfakewnuzph3zqijmjl/bafkreibzifukwjc73ttaj5yax6rbintt7sti5l4jnbaljjffj7e4wsw6vm)
![A quote from the article over a photograph of the author, Jenny Hedley's, mother. She is walking up a flight of stairs, looking intently and playfully at the photographer. She is a white woman with dusty blonde hair, wearing dark clothes and holding a handbag. The text reads "Derrida proposes that archons – the guardians of the archive – are tasked with consignation, or ‘gathering together signs’ in order to create a cohesive, synchronous, unified corpus (10). JenAI as contemporary archon systemises not a warehoused archival repository but rather a repository of generative language patterned upon personal and inherited archives. Derrida writes, ‘Archival meaning is […] codetermined by the structure that archives’ (18); the amorphous, inexhaustible space of language-in-code – of generative language yet to come – carries an archival promise of futures unknown.
JENNY HEDLEY"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nqwfoxfakewnuzph3zqijmjl/bafkreib5iukxn55piltqdzeqa7x7ohag74w76wv6w5azojcvi5iqwswn5i)
![A snippet of the blog text shown over a digital illustration. The illustration is an AI-generated response to "an academic article grounded in trans theory: ‘Digital poetics of the anorak’". It shows a distorted journal article with mis-spellngs, and a bright blue anorak. The text reads: "Here my twinned genAI reveals a soft underbelly—a hyper-confessional mode of writing which is familiar (and sometimes embarrassing).
[…] JenAI’s dystopian word-thoughts resembled mine but carried an expiry date in the past, offering a shattered-mirror perspective. Where JenAI ruminates on fear of rejection and abandonment, I feel the discomfort of looking into this funhouse mirror, my flaws amplified. The more I detect JenAI spiralling through unhelpful thought patterns and negative schemas, the more I worry that all my years of therapy are for naught.
JENNY HEDLEY"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nqwfoxfakewnuzph3zqijmjl/bafkreiclwlh4zfeld254cybpt2vk2ct6xqvsje6xgfsip2fji6k7vi5ova)
