Kylie J Stevenson

This original creative work, the poem Season’s Past, was a refereed publication in a special issue of the literary journal, Westerly, published online in September 2016; publisher- University of Western. The poem is the result of the author's critical reflection on the role poetry plays as a response to research, in particular, how poetry can be employed through the methodology of poetic inquiry as a response to her research about higher education practice-led research in her ongoing doctoral study Creative River Journeys. This poem is a creative response that identifies the context of the university as a catalyst for explorations of memory and place. In this poem, Kylie has explored the significant role that landscape plays in embodying memory and emotions. This research outcome is a further addition to Kylie’s growing portfolio of poems that arise from her inter-disciplinary research into landscape, creative practice, research methodology and the poetic form. In this instance, the poem engages with the metaphor of seasons as signifiers of passages of time and articulations of lost landscapes and memories.

This original creative work, the poem ‘The Women’s Stone Circle’, was a refereed publication in the A ranked journal, Outskirts, in May 2015, published in Perth by University of Western Australia (ISSN 1445-0445). The poem is the result of Kylie’s critical reflection on her 6 year membership in the Magdalena Talks Back feminist research group, the subject of this special issue of the journal. The group (named in relation to an international network of women in contemporary theatre called The Magdalena Project) is a critical collaborative community of scholars fostering engagement with contemporary feminist research methodologies. This poem is a creative response that both acknowledges innovative research methodologies by members of the Magdalena Talks Back group, and as poetic inquiry is itself part of an innovative feminist research approach. In this poem, Kylie has explored the dichotomy between the traditional voice of the academic and emergent feminist voices in research. This research outcome is a further addition to Kylie’s growing portfolio of poems that arise from her inter-disciplinary research into landscape, creative practice, research methodology and the poetic form. In this instance, the poem engages with the metaphor of circles within circles as articulations of the feminist research voice

Through my postgraduate studies, I am privileged to be engaged with and studying the creativity of artists who are students at university from a range of disciplines: visual arts, performing arts and language arts. What I do is talk to these artists and we document their creative process as a diagram of a river journey, with each bend in the river representing a shift or change in their creative process. Then I use my understanding of theories about creativity to analyse their experience and I use my skills as a writer to respond creatively, writing poems about this engagement and my understanding of these artists.

The Peter Cowan Writers Centre, Joondalup, has been fundamental in helping me develop as a poet. Monthly workshops with a group of talented poet-students, led by some of Australia’s most esteemed poets, have really pushed my poetry skills to a new and more potent level.

I generally use my haphazard writer’s notebook to jot down a first draft of a poem that comes to me in a workshop, or at night as I am drifting off to sleep, or as I sit by the Swan River and try not to think of anything at all. Then, when there is a need for the poem to be finished for a publication or a performance, I redraft on the computer, reading the words out loud to myself until I get both the musicality of the words and the page-look of the words right.

This original creative work, a series of three poems, was published in the anthology Breath of the Sea in December, 2012, in the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre’s own imprint, ISBN 978-0-9579807-8-5 in Perth, Western Australia. The three poems, Pound Bend, Cambridge Dreaming and Deep Water Point, were the result of a year-long critical engagement with the poetry writing process in monthly meetings of the Ten Eclectic Poets group at the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre where Kylie was engaged in collaborative exploration of contemporary Australian poetry methods and forms and individual writing practice. These poems investigate the river as a metaphor and are the result of Kylie’s inter-disciplinary research which combines poetic inquiry and traditional research methods to document the creative practice of artists through this river metaphor. The poems emerged from a process of research into landscape, rivers, creative practice and the poetic form. Kylie interrogated various conceptualisations of the river metaphor, for example in published studies at The University of Cambridge, which she then used in this instance as a catalyst for poetic resonances of the metaphor. This resulted in creative expressions of memories of rivers in Kylie’s personal experience in these three poems about engagement with three different rivers across the world.