Poetry Says

‘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 issues of audience, reception and the questions we need to keep asking—even if they can’t be answered.

Show notes

• Feminist Writers Festival Q&A: Alison Whittaker
• ‘A means of resistance’: Susie Anderson Interviews Alison Whittaker
• Not My Problem: on The Colonial Fantasy — Alison’s review in the Sydney Review of Books

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‘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 economy’, ‘sleep hygiene’ and ‘self-care’ to name a few), and why sometimes it’s important to remember that poetry isn’t saving lives.

Show notes

• Case Notes by David Stavanger, UWA Publishing, 2020
• Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word edited by David Stavanger & Anne-Marie Te Whiu, UQP, 2019
• The Special by David Stavanger, UQP, 2014
• I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion by Folding Ideas (‘We remember January but it has as much presence in the mind as childhood.’)

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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-dropping in poems is an invitation or a way to shut readers out.

Show notes

• Bookworm podcast
• New Yorker Poetry Podcast
• Sara Ahmed: On Complaint
• Ep 91. Kate Lilley’s anti-pastoral
• Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas
• Robyn Schiff
• Jericho Brown
• George Herbert
• Wayne Koestenbaum

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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 Dancing Queen as a poetic subject.

Show notes

We touched on these books of Michael’s:

• Family Trees (Giramondo, 2020)
• Ashbery Mode (Tinfish Press, 2019)
• I Love Poetry (Giramondo, 2017)
• Open Sesame (Giramondo, 2012)
• thempark (BookThug, 2010)
• ode ode (Salt Publishing, 2002)
• More Poetry Says episodes on Michael’s work from Geraldine Burrowes and Corey Wakeling

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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.

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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.

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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 to be ‘a poet among poets’.

Show notes

• Laurie Duggan 2: The Sydney Years, 1972-1978
• The Collected Blue Hills (Puncher & Wattmann, 2011)
• Allotments (Shearsman Books, 2014)
• Crab & Winkle (Shearsman Books, 2009)
• Let’s Get Lost by Laurie Duggan, Ken Bolton & Pam Brown (Vagabond, 2005)
• A Northern Winter (Cordite, 2016)
• Laurie’s blog Graveney Marsh
• Paul Blackburn
• Philip Whalen
• William Carlos Williams
• Cid Corman
• J. H. Prynne

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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’s For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut

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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

• Not Writing by Anne Boyer
• Capital (PDF)
• Silvia Federici’s ‘Wages Against Housework’
• Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day (excerpt)
• Commonplace: Shelia Heti and Sarah Manguso (a great episode on writing and motherhood)

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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’s death
• Ep 60. On John Blight
• John Olsen’s Five Bells

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