Residue

Abstract

Research Background Professor of Creative Writing, Jen Webb (UCan), refers to prose poetry as, among other things, an acting of ‘bearing witness’ (2012, 8). As she and other scholar-writers suggest, the prose poem has a particular facility for articulating the confrontation between the shock of materiality and the sensitivity of imaginative apprehension that characterises my aims. The underlying question of this seemingly small piece of work is, how can we express the unrepentant traces of horror left by loss.

Research Contribution. The claims of this work lie in the realm of engagement with the elusivity and viscera of being, and the interplay between them. This prose poem extends my track record in the field of the prose poem. In part, it reflects on personal grief after a death, a memory triggered by the shock of bush and wildlife destruction at the time of the 2019 national bushfire disaster. Research Significance The piece was written in response to a call for contributions to the literary journal Not Very Quiet and published in March 2020. In this publication context, it speaks to the conversation that the contributors and editors about what writing can do to express suffering and hope for change. Its significance also lies in its extension of my own research theory practice as a writer-scholar as a performative investigation of prose poetry as an highly particularised form of engagement with the elusivity and viscera of being.