Lisa Gorton lives in Melbourne. She studied at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, and at Oxford completed an MPhil in Renaissance Literature and a DPhil on John Donne’s poetry and prose. Her awards include the John Donne Society Medal for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for the Poetry and the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. Lisa has published two collections of poetry, both with Giramondo: Press Release (2007) and Hotel Hyperion (2013). She edited Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2013. Her novel The Life of Houses came out with Giramondo in 2015. 

 

Dream Collaboration

 

This paper explores the philosophical underpinnings of certain poetic collaborations. It proposes that philosophies of memory underpin how poets think about images; and furthermore that the way in which they think about images shapes how they collaborate. It briefly takes up Freud’s figuration of memory as underpinning the surrealists’ exquisite corpses, then, by way of comparison, how Bergson’s and Deleuze’s figurations of memory shape the collaborative process in curator Lisa Harms’ exhibition, ‘Conversations in Ellipsis’ (31 July - 24 August 2012, SASA Gallery). Gorton argues that collaborative processes are as intimate as style is to the work: ‘there can be no single poetics of collaboration. The ways in which artists collaborate bring out different figurations of memory, different figurations of what a true conversation could ever be.’