Anthologies and the anti-republic of Australian gay and lesbian poetry

This is the first article to examine anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry from Australia and New Zealand.

Poetry descends from the sacred : an interview with Camille Paglia

An interview with writer Camille Paglia is presented. When asked of the people she criticized in her book "Break, Blow, Burn," she says that no name is known in the second half of the book. She also mentions that there has been a estrangement from poetry's visibility in education or even for magazine and newspaper reader. She adds that compared to prose, poetry is more magical.

Health-related religious rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church : their uptake and meanings

Aim
To examine the uptake of religious rituals of the Greek Orthodox Church by relatives of patients in critical condition in Greece and to explore their symbolic representations and spiritual meanings.
Background
Patients and their relatives want to be treated with respect and be supported for their beliefs, practices, customs and rituals. However nurses may not be ready to meet the spiritual needs of relatives of patients, while the health-related religious beliefs, practices and rituals of the Greek Orthodox Christian denomination have not been explored.
Method
This study was part of a large study encompassing 19 interviews with 25 informants, relatives of patients in intensive care units of three large hospitals in Athens, Greece, between 2000 and 2005. In this paper data were derived from personal accounts of religious rituals given by six participants.
Results
Relatives used a series of religious rituals, namely blessed oil and holy water, use of relics of saints, holy icons, offering names for pleas and pilgrimage.
Conclusion
Through the rituals, relatives experience a sense of connectedness with the divine and use the sacred powers to promote healing of their patients.
Implications for nursing management
Nurse managers should recognize, respect and facilitate the expression of spirituality through the practice of religious rituals by patients and their relatives.

Powerful poetry linked with Australia

This is an obituary of the Australian poet, Rosemary Dobson (1920-2012)

Poetry, terrorism, and the uncanny : “Timothy McVeigh’s ‘invictus’”

While Timothy McVeigh—the Oklahoma City Bomber—made no verbal statement before being executed in 2001, he did offer as his ‘final written statement’ a poem (without attribution): W.E. Henley’s ‘Invictus’. This paper offers a reading of this text as ‘Timothy McVeigh’s “Invictus”’, a limit case for our understanding of poetry, quotation, and the relationship between literary and non-literary discourses. The paper will demonstrate how McVeigh’s enigmatic act of appropriation produces a poetry of the uncanny, so that categories such as ‘poet’ and ‘terrorist’ become disquietingly porous. It will also demonstrate how ‘Timothy McVeigh’s “Invictus”’ offers unexpected insights into some basic concerns of contemporary literary theory, especially with regard to quotation, obscurity, and poetic address. Lastly, it will show how ‘Timothy McVeigh’s “Invictus”’ illustrates the unpredictable ways that a supposedly marginal cultural practice—poetry—can act in times of crisis.

Fear of music : sounded poetry and the poetry soundtrack

This essay proposes the term ‘poetry soundtrack’ for a form of sounded poetry that I have been practising for some years (examples of which can be found in this issue of Axon). The poetry soundtrack is a sonic object made up of original poetry, music, and sound design. Such a form is now being produced—under various names—by numerous poets, thanks to the development of the Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW). In my essay, I argue that the poetry soundtrack has occupied an aesthetic no man’s land between avant-garde ‘sound poetry’ and documentary-style recordings of poetry readings. I propose that a general ‘fear of music’ has led critics to favour such forms, and concomitantly to ignore musico-poetic forms of sounded poetry. In addition, I analyse the ‘digital poetics’ that can be found in producing sounded poetry with a DAW, especially with regard to the ‘vocal staging’ that such technology can produce in the poetry soundtrack.

Books of the year - poetry collections

Brief review of poetry collections published in 2012

Teaching or preaching — Max Charlesworth and religious education

In this essay I elaborate on the theoretical framework – that of Millian liberalism – that Max Charlesworth brought to many public issues, including that of the relation between education and religion. I will then apply this framework to a debate in which I have been recently involved myself: a debate around the provision of religious instruction in public schools. In the first section I expound Charlesworth’s rejection of secularism in education in a liberal pluralist state and his defence of faith-based schooling. In the second section I uncover the religious motivations behind the Victorian government’s 1950 amendments to the apparently secularist Victorian Education Act of 1872. In section three, I explore the notion of secularism more fully and suggest that the struggle between those who espouse religious instruction in state schools and those who oppose it while advocating a more general form of education about religion is a symptom of a deeper tension between liberalism and communitarianism within the culture of modernist, liberal states.

The spiritual implications of sexual abuse : not just an issue for religious women?

Although there is now some recognition that sexual abuse, particularly that which occurs in religious settings, has spiritual implications for women who have been abused, the spiritual implications of sexual abuse which occurs beyond the confines of specific religious practices and beliefs tend not to be acknowledged. Taking a stance that all people, irrespective of their involvement in a formal religion, are inherently spiritual, this paper identifies the key concepts associated with spirituality as meaning, identity, connectedness, transformation and transcendence. Examples as to how each of these may be issues following the experience of sexual abuse are provided. This approach challenges prevailing notions that sexual abuse only has spiritual implications for women who identify with a particular religious tradition. Instead it is argued that an experience of sexual abuse can be critical for the spiritual life of any woman who is subjected to abuse.

Heritage destruction and violence in Iraq : bombing mosques and ethno-religious sectarian violence, 2006-7

Since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has suffered an extraordinary era of both heritage destruction and devastating spikes in violence. While cases such as the 2003 attacks on the Iraq National Museum and the Iraq National Library and Archive, as well as the systematic looting of Iraq’s sensitive archaeological sites, understandably caused outrage among scholars of heritage studies across the world, little attention has been paid to the destruction of Iraq’s many significant Islamic sites – particularly during the ethno-religious sectarian violence that raged across the nation in 2006-7. This paper presents the first results of a three year project funded by the Australian Research Council which aims to empirically test the assumption that a significant relationship exists between this spike in violence and the targeting of sites of Islamic heritage (mosques, shrines, etc.). To do this, the paper will compare and contrast the information in the world’s first database of heritage destruction (created by the author) and existing measures of violence in Iraq (such as the Iraq Body Count database). This will set the precedent for studies of both heritage and violence and enable policy formation towards the minimization of heritage destruction and spikes in violence during times of conflict.

Religious/spiritual well-being, coping styles and personality dimensions in people with substance use disorders

Religiosity and spirituality have been found to be negatively associated with a range of addictions. It has been suggested that religious/spiritual well-being might play an important role in the development, course and the recovery from addictive disorders. A sample of addiction in-patients (n=389) was assessed using the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSWB) and compared with a matched group of non-addicted community controls (n=389). RSWB was found to be substantially lower in people with substance use disorders compared to the normal sample. Discriminate functional analysis showed that Experiences of Sense and Meaning, General Religiosity and Forgiveness were the dimensions of RSWB which strongly distinguished the groups. Within the group of people with substance use disorders, RSWB was strongly positively associated with the personality dimensions of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Openness as well as Sense of Coherence and positive Coping styles. The study suggests that therapeutic intervention programs focusing on building a positive and meaningful personal framework, akin to that of a religious/spiritual orientation, may contribute to positive outcomes in addiction treatment.