Americarnage

Research Background: This poem is from a broader project titled Limiting Entropy (a collaboration with the visual artist Dr Tony Curran). Ekphrasis and ekphrastic practice have a long and studied history both internationally (see Heffernan, Hollander, Kreiger) as well as in Australian literature (see Dominic Symes, 'Ekphrasis as Event', 2017 or Tegan Bennett's 'The kaleidoscope of visual poetry,'2011). Through a series of visual-poetic calls and responses, Limiting Entropy is a contemporary Australian instantiation of what Paul Frosh has described as 'a dynamic intersection of images and words that is both generative and propulsive.'Research Contribution: Limiting Entropy is a series of poems and artworks that radiate and refract outward, as different stimuli provoke artistic responses which then, in turn, become stimuli for other pieces of writing or drawing. Thus the result is a rhizomatic proliferation of meaning (in the Deleuzean sense), a creative mise-en-abyme where endless reflections signify the endless potential of art itself. Curran's images all stem from digital life drawings, which have then been fragmented piece by piece. The fragments are then loaded into a digital database and program titled The unconscious is a rectangle and remixed to produce new forms of narrative and abstract paintings. As this database builds the images have grown more complex and included more figurative forms. Brown, on the other hand, has composed a series of 14 line sonnets, taking on the weight of the form's poetic history and its stringent technical demands. In this way the project demonstrates how two modes of constraint (the 4:3 rectangle and the 14 line sonnet) can interact to produce a symbiosis. The significance of the works is that it represents an ambitious attempt to broaden, extend and test the boundaries of ekphrastic poetic/artistic stimulation and counter-stimulation. The value of the work is attested by the exhibition Limiting Entropy (ANCA Gallery 1-20 March), the publication of poems in various Australian and International journals and anthologies (including Cordite, If You Can Hear This: Poems In Protest of An American Inauguration, and Marathon Review), and the exhibition at Noted Literary Festival in 2017.