Archiving the Undercommons: An Infrastructural Reading of Contemporary Australian Poetry

In this chapter Lilley considers the archival and psychogeographical turn in contemporary Australian poetry from John Tranter’s Jacket Magazine to Natalie Harkin’s Archival-Poetics. She argues that the familiar parameters of deixis and epideixis shaping “Australian poetry” are shifting along with its demographics and modes of technological mediation, to create a new sense of aesthetic, ethical and political possibilities. Distributed processes of writing, reading, curating and judging (epideixis), with their complex deictic underpinnings (location, genealogy, embodiment, relative position), not only produce the field but reveal its internal contradictions and fissures. This lively infrastructure of small presses, journals and events constitutes an “undercommons” (Harney and Moten), created and sustained by the community, neither unified nor static, from which it emerges and to whom it is addressed.