Paul Magee
Biography
Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. His first book, From Here to Tierra del Fuego, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2000. It was based on fieldwork in the far South of South America. His second, Cube Root of Book, was published by John Leonard Press in 2006. It was shortlisted for the Innovation Award at the 2008 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and highly commended in the Ann Elder and Mary Gilmore Awards for best first book of poetry. Paul was director of the UNAUSTRALIA conference in December 2006, which included the opening of the UNAUSTRALIA online art gallery in the National Museum of Australias Garden of Australian Dreams and a cocktail party in the Marble Foyer of Parliament House. He has abiding interests in questions of creativity, stagnation, boredom and revolution.
Paul is working on two main projects at present:
Poetry and Knowledge is the title of the project on which he, Professor Jen Webb, also of the Writing Programme at the University of Canberra, and Professor Kevin Brophy of the University of Melbourne, are currently collaborating. The project is inspired by the sharp increase over the last decade in higher research degrees by creative research. For, in spite of this sudden institutional recognition of creative research, there is a near total lack of consensus on how art in general, and poetry in particular, might constitute a substantial contribution to knowledge. Turning to the literary, scholarly and philosophical archive one discovers a similar lack of consensus on these questions, fundamental though they are to any vision of a creative / innovative knowledge economy. There is a very real gap in thinking here. The project involves in-depth interviews with some 60 poets from Australia, the U.K., Ireland, the United States and Canada, on the relation knowledge and research bear to the actual moment of poetic composition. Key among the project's preliminary findings has been the suggestion that poets, with all their years of training and thinking, in fact often write very fast, too fast consciously to think through what they are actually saying. Could poetry be a form of sudden knowledge?
The Daily Letter to Iraq is a themed collection of poetry that Paul is currently writing, with ArtsACT funding. It focuses on two specific social formations: the excessively paranoid and violent regime of Sadam Hussein, and the comparatively liberal atmosphere prevailing at 380 Latrobe st Melbourne, the offices of the Australian Wheat Board. The collection concerns the points of intersection between these two worlds in the years prior to the breaking of the AWB scandal in late 2005. More specifically, it presents the perspective of the AWB employee detailed to write what will be figured in the collection as the daily letter to Sadam. This letter represents the various documents and meetings whereby the company offered the dictator, Australia's then national enemy, money to buy the right to sell him their wheat, and so improve their immediate profits, and the more general cause of Australian productivity. Subplots concern the letter writer's picture-postcard tour of the mosques and medrasses of Baghdad, and his travails at home, in failing to deal with a daughter whose poor school performance, truancy and drug-taking are making home-life a nightmare.
Paul is a Senior Lecturer in Poetry in the Faculty of Arts and Design.
Cube Root of Book
http://jlp.johnleonardpress.com/?id=27211058#magee
From Here to Tierra del Fuego
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/77rgn8rz9780252025556.html
UNAUSTRALIA website and art gallery
Triple J news report on UNAUSTRALIA
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/notes/mp3s/un_australian.mp3
Strange Directions in Future Research
http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct06/magee.htm
Contact Information