Author: PoetrySays

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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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.

Show notes

• Certain Fathoms (Puncher & Wattmann)
• Final Theory and Chatelaine (Giramondo)
• Mike Grey
• Verity La Poetry Podcast on Final Theory
• Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets)

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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’, along with her 1997 interview in Jacket magazine.

Show notes

• Kyger’s collection On Time from City Lights Books
• Robert Adamson’s The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems from Black Inc.
• New York Times obituary: ‘Joanne Kyger, Zen-Infused Beat Generation Poet, Dies at 82’
• Ep 32. Cid Corman
• Ep 47. Jack Spicer
• Diane Wakoski
• Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
• Anne Waldman
• Double rainbow

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