Author: PoetrySays

Speaking to me from Alyawarre Country in the Northern Territory, Michelle Cahill shares how this new environment is shaping her poetry and her thinking. We talk colonialism, cross-cultural writing and the flowering of POC voices in Australian poetry. We also touch on what the writing life asks of us as people and some of the challenges that have been brought to the Australian literary establishment recently.

Show notes

• Michelle’s recent poetry collections Vishvarupa and The Herring Lass
• Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun
• Mascara Literary Review
• The deciBels3 series from Vagabond

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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 Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams

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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 Gayatri read some of her poems for the very first time from Sweatshop Women Volume Two.

Sweatshop Women is funded by: The Australia Council for the Arts, The Packer Family Foundation, Crown Resorts Foundation, Red Room Poetry and Information and Cultural Exchange Centre and Campbelltown City Council.

Show notes

• Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays by Durga Chew-Bose
• America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
• Interviews with Ellen van Neerven & Alison Whittaker
• my dad asks, “how come black folk can’t just write about flowers?” by Aziza Barnes

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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.’

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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 eroticism, resisting neoliberalism, building and dismantling the self, and ‘steadiness, laziness, pleasure, kindness’.

Listen with tea, wine or your favourite snack.

Show notes

• Excerpt: ‘The Anatomy of a Trigger’ by Antonia Pont (The Lifted Brow, October 2019)
• The Writer Antonia Pont vs. Envy (Literary Hub, June 2019)

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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 Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers by James C. Kaufman
• I Thought You Were A Poet by Joshua Mehigan

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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

• Comfort Food (UQP, 2016)
• Ellen’s poem Water on Water in Cordite
• Danez Smith’s Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020)
• Ali Cobby Eckermann
• Charmaine Papertalk Green

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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 interview on Commonplace
• Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance (Giramondo, 2015)

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‘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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