Dr. Anna Westbrook is NYU Sydney’s lecturer in Creative Writing. Anna was shortlisted for the prestigious Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished manuscripts by writers under the age of 35, and next year will publish a novel, The Quiet Noise. She shares a recent experience below.
‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’
– Emily Dickinson
This past semester, in the first week of April, NYU Sydney Creative Writing students heard guest lecturer Dr. Tamryn Bennett, Education Manager for the Red Room Company, talk about comics poetry and her innovative work that spans Australia, Mexico, and the United States. Tamryn gave us a vivid introduction to our fortnight’s focus on poetry. She explored the concrete and haptic tradition of the line from its Futurist origins to its current playful and irreverent incarnation in zines, comics, and street art. Tamryn appeared with a Mary Poppins bag of treats: visual and tactile examples of the ‘aliveness’ of poetry, represented by both commercial and DIY published morsels and anthologies from around the world.
In this class students explored a variety of poetic form. We experimented with cento, haiku and letter poems, and watched clips of spoken word. We talked about poetry’s power to evoke the personal and the political, as well as the aesthetic sublime. Tamryn’s organisation, The Red Room, made and updates a free-to-download app called ‘The Disappearing’ that “maps Australia to things lost or being lost”, which features Australia’s best known and emerging poets writing poems about places in flux that resonate to them, mapped out with drop pins and cartographically navigable. Students went on a field trip in the Rocks (Australia’s site of British colonisation), near NYU Sydney’s campus, and there discovered the significance of the area through poetic imagining – historic and contemporary. Students were tasked to write their own site-specific poem in response to their surroundings.
Before we left the classroom, Tamryn provided every student with a flat stone on which to write something, and leave in a place of their choosing (conspicuous or inconspicuous), to augment or disrupt peoples’ experience of the corporate, urban, central business district of Sydney. Through this activity students learnt about the power of the word, the significance of poetry to cultural efficacy, and became more aware of and practiced in their own tools of expression. Witnessing the ways in which words can be activated and invigorated, on and off the page, we learnt about how words may take our scalps off; the turns of words that are the axe for the frozen sea within us.