Poetry Says

“Who on earth would sing, if song were merely an effortless warbling until kingdom come?”

Show notes

• Vagabond’s new work campaign
• Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
• Everything you need to know about Rachel Hollis
• Ep 158 with Matthew Buckley Smith
• Sleerickets Ep 39
• Envy by Contrapoints
• The Writer Antonia Pont vs. Envy
• Envy of Other People’s Poems by Robert Haas
• Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt
• Growing a Bear by Hannah Gamble
• Suns by Tim Wright
• Moons by Toby Fitch
• praise song by Nate Marshall
• Sonnet for the good meat by Ursula Robinson-Shaw
• Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown
• The Poetry of Death by Donald Hall
• Gwen Harwood

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And what is the fastest fish?

Show notes

• Archives Fine Books
• My interview with Shastra Deo
• Helen Allan
• John Blight
• Two absolute icons

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Just before New Year’s I got to meet up with Shastra Deo in Brisbane. She spoke about expectation, regret, her award-winning collection The Agonist, how that book continues to follow her, and the weird, frustrating tension between poetry and the industry around it.

Show notes

• Shastra’s interview with Terri Ann Quan Sing for Hello Poet
• Eileen Chong
• Evelyn Araluen’s Dream Sequence piece As We Know It
• Shastra’s poem गुम; or, Lexical Gaps
• Shastra’s interview with Elena Gomez for Liminal & my interview with Elena
• Mindy Gill
• Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today & my interview with editor Alison Whittaker
• The Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize
• Plath’s bee poems
• Shastra’s poem I Saw the Devil in the Cane Fields
• Jill Jones
• Liam Ferney 
• Justin Clemens
• Bronwyn Lea
• Sharon Olds’ poem I Go Back to May 1937
• Felicity Plunkett’s book Vanishing Point
• Tegan Webb
• Rory Green
• Zenobia Frost’s poem Meditation on the Body
• Wilfred Owen’s Duce Et Decorum Est
• Rae White’s Twine poem How to Haunt

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Matthew Buckley Smith is a poet who makes a podcast called SLEERICKETS.

You’re welcome.

Show notes

• SLEERICKETS Ep 33: Pudding Day
• More starter episodes: Ep 14: M*****f****r of the Arts: (includes discussion of Ben Lerner’s The Lights), Ep 24: Musée des NSFW Arts (includes discussion of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn) & Ep 13: Against Hope (my favourite).
• Shane McCrae
• Frederick Seidel
• William Logan
• Christopher Childers
• Justin Clemens
• Ryan Wilson & Matthew’s essay about his friendship with Ryan
• Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist
• Joshua Mehigan
• Terrance Hayes
• Anseo by Paul Muldoon
• Kevin Young
• Joshua Beckman
• Katy Lederer
• Jonathan Farmer, his journal At Length & Matthew’s dramatic monologues published there, including ‘Ankou’
• Austin Allen’s article Hard Line Politics: On the Myth of Free Verse

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Turns out I just really like pop music.

p.s. Since recording this I’ve learned that A. E. Housman rushed out his Last Poems hoping straight boy crush Moses Jackson would read it. Girl, same.

Show notes

• No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats
• Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
• The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
• Mibu Tadamine
• The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
• The In Our Time ep on Fitzgerald’s bitter motivations for translating said Rubaiyat
• Anne Sexton’s For My Lover, Returning to His Wife (still no clue what an ‘aggie’ is)
• Ouyang Yu’s Self Publishing
• Morgan Parker’s Now More Than Ever, When a Man I Love Jerks Off in My Bed Next to Me and Falls Asleep & Magical Negro
• Chats with Justin Clemens & Laurie Duggan
• Laurie’s The Epigrams of Martial
• pov ur anne sexton

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Giving up on poetry, the luxury of regret, and relapse. With help from Liz Taylor & Van Johnson.

Show notes

• Jennifer Mills’ piece On Quitting Poetry & her books
• Alison Croggon’s Giving up poetry & her New and Selected Poems 1991-2017
• Adrienne Rich
• Rimbaud
• Vauxhall & I
• Finding Neverland
• Berryman by W. S. Merwin

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I interviewed Luke Beesley on a rainy Friday, keen to ask about some of what came up when I spoke to Matthew Buckley Smith on Sleerickets episode 30, and not to ask about process, or influence. (I failed to avoid those areas.)

Luke reads from his latest collection Aqua Spinach as well as from Jam Sticky Vision, and we talk about the fact that we have oceans of patience for weirdos like David Lynch, but very little for contemporary poetry we don’t immediately ‘get’.

Show notes

• Australian Poetry 1969, selected by Vivian Smith
• The Generation (not School) of ’68
• James McAuley
• Ep 69. on Ern Malley
• The Sons of Clovis by David Brooks
• Cordite 24: Children of Malley
• Barbara Guest
• Ashbery Mode edited by Michael Farrell
• Eileen Myles’ new poem pencil & pen
• Ep 143. on Impossible Machine
• Martin Duwell’s review of Lemon Shark
• In the Mood for Love
• Mulholland Drive
• Gerald Murnane
• Helen Garner
• Tony Tuckson

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A story.

With thanks to ford. for allowing me to use his beautiful track Dusk as the outro here. Also to Lauren Bacall, Andre Prévin & Dinah Shore.

Show notes

• Mary Karr’s Tropic of Squalor and her poem The Voice of God
• The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon selected by Donald Hall
• Sleerickets Ep 30 in which we chat about blurbs, among other things
• Mark Doty almost definitely has read the book
• Having it Out with Melancholy by Jane Kenyon
• Waking in the Blue by Robert Lowell
• Excerpt from Anatomy of a Trigger by Antonia Pont

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I ask the inimitable Jennifer Compton about her poem Dear Les, why we have no boys in our poetry group, and gaining control by losing it. We also chat about a new poem of hers, and then I get a rejection in real time.

Show notes

• Jen’s poem Law and Order
• Jen performing Love is not Love
• Sonnet 116
• Black Inc.’s Best Australian Poems
• Australian Poetry’s Best Australian Poems Vol 1, 2021

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I fail to explain poetry.

With thanks to K, who only agreed to this after the fact.

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