2,409 research outputs found
Northern Long-nosed Potoroo
No full textThis is a commissioned work that forms part of the Red Room's 'Extinction Elegies' series. Each poem in the series is about a species that is either extinct or threatened with extinction.
An artist's statement is available here: https://redroomcompany.org/blog/red-room/stuart-cooke-extinction-elegies/
A 3-part radio program about extinctions was also produced by Red Room. I took part in the 3rd episode: https://redroomcompany.org/projects/extinction-elegies-radio-series/No Full Tex
Against Place (the Lyrebird Shows the Way)
No full textIn this essay Stuart Cooke argues against poetics of place. He begins by outlining three ways in which place-based thinking perpetuates elements of imperialist practice. Chiefly, thinking about place negates the diverse lives and forces upon which a habitat depends. Drawing on the work of Heriberto Yépez, Cooke concludes that place is an “absolutist fiction.” Instead, he turns to the lyrebird (Menura alberti and novaehollandiae) as a conceptual totem for an ethical, Australian poetics. Examining the presence (or absence) of the lyrebird in a selection of late twentieth-century and contemporary Australian poems, Cooke outlines how non-Indigenous Australian poets might learn from the lyrebird an alternative, ecological poetics that is not predicated on the eradication of multispecies complexity. The essay concludes with a brief account of a superb lyrebird’s poetics.Full Tex
Human Room
No full textStuart Cooke is a poet, translator and critic based in Queensland, Australia, where he lectures at Griffith University. His books include the poetry collections Opera (2016) and Edge Music (2011) and a critical work, Speaking the Earth's Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013). His translation of Gianni Siccardi's The Blackbird is forthcoming.No Full Tex
Toward an Ethological Poetics: The Transgression of Genre and the Poetryof the Albert’s Lyrebird
No full textIn an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to nonhuman semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating nonhuman poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, Stuart Cooke outlines a method of criticism for nonhuman creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cooke begins by theorizing a poetics that attends to the ecology of forces that produce, and are produced by, a work rather than the intentions of a single artist. Cooke proposes that an ethological poetics emphasizes the expressive capacity of materials across a range of written, musical, visual, and performative structures. By studying these expressive forces, Cooke argues, we can extend our appreciation of art and poetics into multispecies domains. The challenge is not to focus on the “meaning” or intention of nonhuman artworks but to study their disruptive, and exciting, forces. The third part of the essay is a case study of an Australian songbird, the Albert’s lyrebird, whose remarkable performance Cooke reads in terms of an ethological poetics. Producing an operatic complex of song, instrumentation, dance, and stage design, the male lyrebird’s composition is thoroughly entangled with the flora and fauna of his umwelt. Resistant to categorization by any generic label, Cooke argues that the lyrebird’s composition is best approached in the terms of transgressive, avant-garde performative and sound poetics—although it escapes such terms, thinking about the bird’s composition in this way compels us into a relation with its territory.Full Tex
Gordon Cooke Oral History
No full textExecutive vice president of sales and promotion for Bloomingdale's in the 1980's, Gordon Cooke, interviewed by Estelle Ellis on November 5, 1986.This interview mostly discusses Marvin Stuart Traub, president of Bloomingdales from 1969 and CEO from 1978 to 1991, who was being honored with the "One Person Makes a Difference" award at the Educational Foundation of the Fashion Industries Dinner Dance at F.I.T.This interview takes place at a time when Bloomingdale's President Marvin S. Traub was being awarded the "Person Who Makes the Difference" award from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Gordon Cooke discusses the various ways in which Traub's style of leadership and business has made a difference in Bloomingdale's success not just as a department store but as an innovator in the world of promotions and business relations. Cooke uses Bloomingdale's country promotions as examples of Traub's creativity and insight regarding promotions. Cooke discusses the team-syle development of ideas, describing the equal value placed on promotions, design, sales, etc. as being instrumental in the creative development of Bloomingdale's. Cooke credits Bloomingale's with opening up trade with various countries before even the U.S. government had fully developed trade with these countries. Finally, Cooke talks about Traub's collaboration with both established and cutting-edge artists in advertisements and promotions.Gordon Cooke was the Executive Vice President for Sales Promotion at Bloomingdale's throughout the 1980s, eventually leaving Bloomingdale's to work for Time Warner in 1992. While at Bloomingdale's, Cooke worked under Marvin S. Traub, who was in his final decade as the chief executive at the department store. This interview was conducted by Estelle Ellis, founder of Business, Inc., a business market research firm
Lyre
No full textResearch Background
Lyre responds to ongoing discussions in contemporary poetics, animal studies and the environmental humanities about the representation of non-humans in literature. In the vast majority of Western literature, non-humans are largely ornamental and function as the backdrop to human dramas. When they do speak, non-humans are often given human voices in order to function as archetypal symbols of human concerns. Lyre is part of a growing body of work that seeks to listen more carefully to more-than-human languages, and explore some of the ways that such listening might transform human modes of writing and speaking.
Research Contribution
Lyre performs a number of radical innovations. Most obviously, the book presents an entirely new concept of poetic pagination by employing a wide range of forms which often run over numerous pages. Syntactically, the poems effectively blend the languages of the natural sciences with samples of contemporary poetry (from numerous languages) and field observation, and thereby propose examples of a genuinely 'interdisciplinary' language of both arts and sciences.
Research Significance
Lyre was published with University of Western Australia Publishing, one of the country's premier poetry publishers. However, to reflect its scope and originality, the book was not published as part of UWAP's regular poetry series, but rather as a stand-alone title. Lyre received glowing endorsement quotes from Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee, leading animal philosopher Vinciane Despret (Belgium) and renowned ecopoet and scholar Jonathan Skinner (US/UK). A number of the poems in the book have won awards and been published in places such as The Best Australian Poems. Lyre was also featured recently on the J2 blog of iconic US poet Jerome Rothenberg: http://jacket2.org/commentary/stuart-cooke?fbclid=IwAR3UKj_zsASnsKpkDfaKE--7LOD3uOX9BcbDRVTU1e87M4df1s_cLzou240No Full Tex
Land Art
No full textBackground
1) The art of the land: Land Art draws on my ongoing interest in more-than-human agencies and creativity. The poems attempt to evoke living, breathing landscapes in which human participation and observation is only one component.
2) The land art movement (circa 1960-70) expanded the boundaries of art to include soil, rocks, vegetation and water, and sites that were often distant from population centres. Land art extends the older tradition of plein air painting, but for poetry there is little if any discussion of how such practices might also be productive for composition.
Contribution
Land Art responds to a wide variety of more-than-human phenomena, and employs a concomitantly wide variety of forms to do so. The title sequence engages with a series of paintings by Paul Cézanne, in which objects become enmeshed in a lively, sensuous world. This exploration leads into the main poem, ‘Bundanon’, which establishes a ‘field poetics’, or a series of poetic fragments and field sketches/drawings. Similar to the photographic documentation of the land artists, this poem serves as record of the land’s art—in this case produced by the land, to be witnessed by the poet.
Significance
This collection was commissioned by Calanthe Press to form part of their new poetry list. Many of the poems had been published previously in leading national and international locations. The main poem of the collection, ‘Bundanon’, was composed during a residency at Bundanon Trust. The collection was launched by poet Liam Ferney at Under the Greenwood Tree Bookshop on Tamborine Mountain in March 2022. In his launch speech, Ferney said that the poems aim to “shake us loose from our tired habits of perception,” which “is a crucial step towards responding to the challenges of our climate crisis,” and that the book’s best moments do “more than the laws of language would suggest is possible.”No Full Tex
5 Gabriela Mistral Translations
No full textResearch statement can be accessed via http://cordite.org.au/translations/cooke-mistral/ (page 1)No Full Tex
The Trees
No full textStuart Cooke’s latest poetry collection is Lyre (UWAP, 2019). In early 2020 he was the BR Whiting Fellow in Rome, Italy. He lectures in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University.Full Tex
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