New Adventures in Poetry and Poetics: A Postgraduate Panel
Benedicte McGowen (UNSW), Rachel Schenberg (UNSW), and Susan Xia (UNSW)
Benedicte McGowen, "we will be closer: poetic possibilities in rupturing wounds"
Abstract
Rather than enabling permanent and incapacitating injury, wounds hold capacity in poetry for movement, an excess to incision. This paper reflects on poetry that ruptures woundedness, by overthrowing the seemingly assured futurity of a lacerating inflictor in imperialism. This paper suggests that poetry is a provision for understanding wounds as bearers of memories not restrained solely to violence, though that violence may be unrelenting. When reckoned with and attended to, woundedness (and its entanglement with writing and vocalisation), can viscerally compose loving conditions that resolutely care for and safeguard resonances of hurt and pain. For Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven, to Bleed is to avow ‘we are close/we will be closer’; a promise that blood pulses beyond borders of sealed systems, and that the outline of a lesion can be lovingly compressed by a poetics in closeness, a detailing of care.
Bio
Benedicte McGowen is a PhD student and writer whose research turns towards First Nations poetics, writings and testimonies, to consider how the work of writing in the written work or published text is an unsettling practice, whose composition always continues, undead.
Rachel Schenberg, "The Hermitage Motel"
Abstract
For this panel I will present an excerpt of my in-progress poet’s novella — the practice-based component of my PhD thesis. Set at The Hermitage Motel in Campbelltown NSW, the text is structured around 14 rooms and set over the course of 14 hours, with each room covering the duration of one hour in the narrative. The novella centres a young woman who spends a night at the motel to seek out what she misunderstands. But she cannot arrive at an understanding because she is perpetually in a state of waiting. Each room, or chapter, follows an associative set of questions, and dynamic modes of poetic iteration, as the narrator explores what the state of waiting — an experience that is conditional on another person — reveals about her desires, fears, and complex relations to intersubjectivity. The novella is part of my broader research, which asks how methods of iteration (the act of repeating or versioning as a way to speak-with) in contemporary lyric poetics facilitate an exploration of situated and relational subjectivity, both in the poem and in other literary forms.
Bio
Rachel Schenberg is an artist and writer based on Gadigal land. She is a PhD candidate researching iterative poetics in the school of Art & Design at UNSW, where she also teaches. Alongside her solo practice, Rachel collaborates with Jordi Infeld on time-based poetry projects — their book of middle-of-the-night writing, Certainly (certainly), was published by no more poetry in 2023, and they are currently working on a collection of poems written over the course of 24 hours. With writer Toyah Webb, she facilitates Occasional Writing, an expansive writing workshop organised around ideas of ‘mis-writing’, and co-ran the ad hoc reading and film-screening series && with Mitchel Cumming (now on hiatus).
Susan Xia, "When Poetry Meets Narrative: The Case of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'"
Abstract
Poetry is constrained. A poem cannot tell a story the way a novel can, for example, and perhaps it does not want to. Because while a poem may indeed be governed by the expectations mediated by genre, it is also more free in its expression of the story. Keats’s controversial poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci", a ballad written in 1819, makes for an interesting study of this relationship between poetry and narrative. On the one hand, the story is narrated in such a matter-of-fact way that implies nothing could be more simple or straightforward. On the other hand, there is hardly a single line in the poem that does not give rise to multiple, contradictory and contesting interpretations. This paper will analyse how the poetic constraints of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" contribute to the contradictory interpretations of the narrative, and argue that it is the “strange language” of poetry that allows for the Belle Dame to be so various, multiple, and resistant to singular interpretation.
Bio
Susan Xia is a third-year PhD student at UNSW studying the representation of women in Keats’s narrative poetry.
Event details
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Date
Wednesday 11 March, 2026
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Time
3:00pm to 4:30pm
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Place
Matthews 307