Walt Whitman’s famous line ‘I sing the body electric’ could well serve as the epilogue to Etchings 2, whose dynamic offerings are gathered under the theme of connectivity and the generation of energy. indeed, being ‘wired’ has become a predominant feature of modern existence. This is obviously true of our relationship to the internet and of our addiction to instantaneous transactions and connections. Yet we are wired in other ways as well. To be wired is also to be anxious and edgy; it implies a disconnection, a nervous distance. The pieces showcased in Etchings 2 examine the multifariousness of this experience.

Among the issue’s highlights is an interview with John Tranter, who talks about the online poetry magazine Jacket and about the concerns that animate his own writing. In the 1960s, Tranter claims, his work was energised by dissent, but what motivates him now is a mystery. One might be glad for this obscurity. It results in a compelling speculation about why one participates in poetry – a practice, Tranter argues, that is ‘useless’ but one that ‘helps us understand the way we live from day to day’. But obscurity, as Tranter describes it, is also a tangible attribute of poetic experience. Like a dream, a poem ‘seems very intensely meaningful’, although it is difficult ‘to explicate what the meaning is’.

The Melbourne artist and poet Basil Eliades echoes this sentiment. Like Tranter, Eliades claims that the ‘parts’ of a poem or a painting affect us through the illogical workings of a ‘subconscious or dream state’. In his essay ‘Energy as Essence’, Eliades celebrates this energetic essence of art: ‘I am more interested in the energy of a word, of an object, than the shape of it. For me, essence is more essential than form.’ More than a vocation, for Eliades art making is not simply a way of living but the way of being alive – and of knowing that one is so.