"I Really Wanted to Write Novels That Are Poems": The multiple Effects of Poetry in Thea Astley's Fiction"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1944, nineteen-year-old Thea Astley published “Poetic Fire” as her first contribution to Barjai, an arts magazine founded a year earlier by Brisbane State High students Laurence Collinson and Barrie Reid. Brave and witty but also defensive, Astley’s essay presupposes her identity as a poet and marks a stage in what was to be a continuing investigation of poets and the writing and reception of poetry. Astley began this investigation when she was a schoolgirl and continued it in the fiction she wrote between 1956 and 1999, i.e. throughout her career as a prose author. In 1986 she affirmed in an interview that she “really wanted to write novels that are poems” (Richey 99-100). This aspiration explains both the poetic personas and quotations from Astley’s poems that abound in her fiction and the “idiosyncratic, image-encrusted style” (O.C.A.L) that has sparked critical debate for decades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".