Poetry Says

Mid-August, 2020. Some thoughts on energy, podcasting, poetry, the news, and why I dropped out of journalism school. Show notes The Poetry Gods Ocean Vuong ‘Extraordinary Voices for Extraordinary Times’ Ep 1 . with Ellen van Neerven and Eunice Andrada If You Are Over Staying Woke by Morgan Parker Self-Portrait as Kendrick Lamar, Laughing to the Bank by Ashanti Anderson Asphodel, That G...

Gayatri Nair is one of the many women of colour who are part of Sweatshop —a literacy movement out of Western Sydney that aims to empower ‘culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing and critical thinking’. We talk about how a community like this can support new writers, why critical feedback on your work is important (even at the early stages) and hear G...

I discovered Hilda Morley and her poem ‘ Song of the Terrible ‘ while hunting for something else, but this was exactly the poem I needed in the moment I found it. It reminds me of one of my favourite sayings: ‘Relax. Nothing is under control.’

Every interview I do for this show offers its own rewards. Speaking with Antonia Pont , I got to hear a message of truly radical gentleness that helped me turn the corner out of a recent stretch of darkness . We also ate whiskey cake. Antonia’s stunning new book, You Will Not Know In Advance What You’ll Feel , gave us the starting point for this conversation that covers themes like ero...

The other side of having a border collie brain is, occasionally, having to look after ‘the black dog’. In this episode I look at the persistent myth that being a poet is somehow connected to poor mental health. Show notes Quora: ‘ Do poets get depression or do depressed people write poetry? ‘ ‘ 30 depression poems to get you through tough times ‘ The Sylvia Plat...

Mununjali author Ellen van Neerven’s new collection Throat , just out from UQP, has incredible breadth. The book moves from themes of love, sexuality and gender to ideas like ecopoetry , queer elders and the exchange of power between writer and reader. In this conversation we touch on all those ideas, always returning to the question of comfort—our own and other people’s. Show notes Co...

I used to be (still am?) a hypochondriac. When I read Anne Boyer’s new book The Undying recently, I was reminded of some long months (years?) spent trawling online health information for a sense of comfort—and not finding it. In Anne’s work, I saw again how poetry resists the flat, reductive language we read and hear when we’re trying to get well. Show notes Anne Boyer’s in...

‘If this book can be a memory for us, then I would consider it successful.’ So says Alison Whittaker of the new anthology Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today , just out from UQP. In this episode, Alison and I talk about everything that went into creating this new collection and why it was important to hold the reader’s hand a little more tightly than usual. We also discuss issue...

‘The poetry community is a living thing,’ David Stavanger says. With all in-person poetry events on hold when we recorded this interview, that statement has never felt more true. David and I talk about his latest book, ‘Case Notes’, along with the joys and challenges of being a producer in the arts, the work of investigating and questioning accepted language (‘gig eco...

Daniel Swain describes himself as ‘a gay man but also so much less than that.’ Self-depreciation aside, Daniel is just as funny and intriguing as the poems in his new chapbook You Deserve Every Happiness But I Deserve More . In this episode we talk about life in isolation, the absurdity of higher education, why straight men are funny/like tarantulas, self-exposure, and whether name-dro...

On March 19th, 2020 I sat under a tree with Michael Farrell – one of the most influential poets working in Australia today. We were meeting at a strange moment in history, but spent a lot of our time laughing. We discussed everything from One Direction to the role of Catholicism in Michael’s poetry, the processes he uses to create his work, and whether he’ll ever take on ABBA’s D...

There are as many paths to publication as there are writers. Still, I wanted to share the process of bringing my first full-length collection, The Empty Show , into the world. I’m not the best at discussing my own achievements, but I hope this episode is useful to those who want to see their own collection on a bookstore shelf one day.

Rejection is part of writing for publication. Here are my strategies for dealing with it, thoughts on how it can function in poets’ lives, and an example of how not to deal with rejection.

I had the chance to talk with Laurie Duggan at the end of 2019 on a smokey day in Sydney. We began with the Malley poems (what else?). From there we covered how Laurie gathers and shapes his poetic material, what the Sydney poetry scene was like when he first arrived (and how he sees it now), his relationships with contemporaries, how his poems are received, and why he feels it’s important t...

I’ve keep these poems within reach all year. Here are my 2019 go-to poems and the reasons why they’ve been so important to me. Show notes Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Ashbery’s Some Trees W. S. Merwin’s Berryman Hannah Gamble’s Growing a Bear and my episode about it Morgan Parker’s Now More Than Ever and her Commonplace episode Hanif Abdurraqib&#...

In this chat with Body of Work author Elena Gomez (which also features my cat early in the piece), we dive deep into the thinking behind this intriguing collection. Elena talks about confronting feelings of perfectionism and inadequacy, the book’s relationship to technology/late capitalism, and breaks down what a Marxist feminist poetics might look like (for a beginner like me). Show notes N...

Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells has frustrated and eluded me for years. In this episode I wrestle with its strange legacy, entertaining the idea that this poem isn’t so much an elegy for a specific person as it is a lament for lost potential among artists in Australia more generally. Show notes Radio National’s Poetry Special on Five Bells Slessor’s description of Joe Lynch&#8...

In this episode I finally sit down with my friend and poetry mentor Bonny Cassidy . We talk about her relationship to visual art, how she sees her earlier work, the poets and writers her books have been in conversation with (and how that’s changed) and her new project on bearing witness to First Nations’ experience. We also touch on what it is to be an emerging poet in Australia today....

I previously wrote off Joanne Kyger as too enamoured with her first drafts, but after reading Robert Adamson’s Bolinas Bay, an Ode (dedicated to Kyger) I’ve had a change of heart. In this episode I look at Kyger’s poems June 7 , ‘I’m Very Busy Now So I Can’t Answer All Those Questions About Beat Women Poets’ and ‘Stoutly Maintains I Never Rewrite&#82...

‘Some of the things we hold most dear about poetry may be things that we have to clear our minds of, in order that we see other things more clearly.’ After admiring his work for many years, I had the chance to talk with David Brooks at his home in the Blue Mountains back in June. We talked about his latest book The Grass Library (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2019) along with the role of poetry in his...

Look, I don’t love e e cummings. But his influence is hard to ignore completely (even if I have ignored it for 104 episodes). Here I look at a poem of his – found handwritten in a very old anthology – and talk a little about springtime, legacy, old-school avant-gardism and future echoes. Show notes in time of daffodils In Her Shoes: ‘I carry your heart’ cummings reads at the 92Y...

Plastic orchids, a foggy morning, the differences between ‘basically’ and ‘literally’ – Pam Brown could make any material into a poem and it would somehow work. It was an absolute joy to talk to Pam about what she’s reading, how Sydney continues to change, how she puts her poems together, what it is to write poetry in the early 21st century, and what the purposes of s...

I’ve resisted reading Donald Hall for so long, probably as a misguided act of loyalty to my favourite poet, Donald’s late wife Jane Kenyon . Recently I was given his book A Blue Wing Tilts At The Edge Of The Sea and finally opened it up to find another view on Hall and Kenyon’s relationship through the poem ‘Long Days’. Show notes The Third Thing by Donald Hall Episod...

In this conversation, Chris Wallace-Crabbe discusses his latest collection, Rondo , which brings together around a decade’s worth of new writing. He talks about how the collection tracks parts of his family history, the use of language that defines his work, his experiences as an Australian poet living in the US, and how poems come to him.

My dear friend Eleanor Smagarinsky is one of the most diligent readers I know. In this episode, we talk through the books she’s considering letting go of, but none of these decisions are easy… Show notes Poems by Elizabeth Bishop The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams Shakespeare’s Metrical Art by George T. Wright The Grand Permission: New Wr...