The difficult balance of maintaining discernible links to the painter’s artefact against the drive toward originality in her own is one of the ‘parallels that don’t hold forever’. Origins and conception are frequently alluded to through Jones’ lexicon, including ‘sperm’, ‘womb’, ‘blue birth passage’, and ‘DNA’; the effect of this suggests a tension against the desire to create originally. Comparing Bolt’s definition of ‘trekking paths others had trekked before’, with Jones’ line ‘Trails mix trails evolving a dark script’ allows us to arrive at the apotheosis of the performance of ekphrasis in Australia: a Methetik trace, a walking-along-with the painting.
This is possible by conceiving of the ekphrastic poem as an (arte)fact; as the lived experience of the artwork, relayed through the process of the poet in what I term the private event. Considering Jones’s poem as part of Poets Paint Words, it is indebted to the public event curated by Slade and Minter, in that it provided a platform for her work to perform due to the spatiotemporal conditions afforded by the exhibition’s ideal mode of dissemination. This allows us to glimpse the performance of an ekphrasis beyond description and by using the site-specific nature of the exhibition as a test case, project what is possible for ekphrasis in Australia when conceptualised in this way.
Dominic Symes (he/him) was born on Kaurna country (Adelaide) in 1990. He writes poetry, some of which has appeared in places as various as
Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit, Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal and
Best of Australian Poems 2021. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Award for Poetry and the Woorilla Poetry Prize, and won the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize for Poetry. He helps curate NO WAVE, a monthly poetry reading series at the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Adelaide, which has been running continuously since 2018. From 2016 to 2019, he completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, under the supervision of the poet Jill Jones, that explored contemporary ekphrastic poetry and for which he was awarded a Dean’s Commendation. Previously he has worked as an academic at the University of Adelaide, Swinburne University of Technology and La Salle College of the Arts (Singapore), teaching English Literature and Creative Writing, and also as a touring musician in folk and indie music projects which took him around Australia, to New Zealand and across Europe. He currently lives on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people in Naarm (Melbourne) where he works as an editor. His first book,
I saw the best memes of my generation, was published by Recent Works Press in 2022.
http://www.domsymes.com/
