I went into this interview with Maxine Beneba Clarke with a bunch of very earnest questions. Our conversation reminded me that it’s ok to have fun, even in poetry. Even, or maybe especially, right now.
We also get into whether we need a poet laureate, what you can learn from bad poetry open mics, and whether publishing power structures are changing quickly enough.
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In my first interview for Red Room’s Poetry Month, I spoke with John Kinsella about why poetry needs many voices, the critical response to False Claims of Colonial Thieves, travel, how his thoughts on poetry and writing have changed, and finding empathy late in the game.
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The podcast is coming from inside the radio! Throughout August, Poetry Says will become part of Red Room’s inaugural Poetry Month. Across four episodes broadcast around the country via the Community Radio Network, I’ll be talking to the Red Room team, and a selection of special guests…
In the meantime, if you miss your fortnightly Poetry Says updates, don’t forget you can always dive into podcasts like:
For now, I’ll leave you with Andrew Scott, reading Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is going to be alright’.
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A conversation with my friend and co-producer, Shane Henry, about white-knuckling it through poetry open mics, learning a new art form, building something from the ground up, waiting, and a 2003 indie rock album called The Meadowlands.
Find out more about Impossible Machine & Lost Weekend.
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Can’t pronounce their proper title, but here are my thoughts on what poems do and don’t do when they show up at weddings, with help from Sarah Jessica Parker and Cameron Diaz.
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It was a joy to speak with Thuy On about Turbulence, her 2020 collection from UWAP cataloguing heartbreak, passion, loss and pleasure. She talks about writing the book in a ‘wild gush’, the mechanics of getting it edited and published, how poets around her have supported her work, and what she really thinks when she opens up a contemporary Aussie literary journal.
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I’ve never been very good at sleeping. Luckily, there are plenty of poets who share this deficiency.
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Ella O’Keefe‘s poetry works with ‘the grit and offcuts we collect in the course of living’. With her new book Slowlier just out from Cordite Books, we talk about how she puts her poems together, whether experimental work can be fun and/or personal, how slowness is different from mindfulness, and what it was like to launch a book in Melbourne in early 2021.
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Bonus notes
Follow-up notes from Ella:
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For the past five weeks I’ve had the pleasure of studying the sonnet with a fabulous group of poets, led by Joshua Mehigan, in a weekly workshop through Brooklyn Poets. Here are some thoughts on the benefits (and challenges) of diving into a poetry workshop.
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Where to begin summarising the work of Christian Bök? He’s a Canadian poet, the author of the bestselling experimental poetry collection Eunoia, a founder of the poetic school of Conceptualism, and most recently, Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. In this interview Christian talks about what it’s been like to move between poetry worlds over the years, where he’s at with his mammoth project The Xenotext, elements of playfulness versus priestliness in poetry, work he’s envious of, and the moon landing.
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