Ep 116. Daniel Swain: Straight men, tarantulas and institutional absurdity

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.

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Ep 115. Michael Farrell & the swimming pool of poetry

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.

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We touched on these books of Michael’s:

Ep 114. On publication

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.

Ep 112. Laurie Duggan: ‘Fragments, fragments, thefts and blunders.’

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’.

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Ep 111. Poems that got me through 2019

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.

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Ep 110. Elena Gomez on Marxist feminism and Friday Night Lights

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).

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Ep 109. The frustration of Five Bells

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.

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Ep 108. Bonny Cassidy on image, history and reckoning

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.

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Ep 107. Joanne Kyger’s triple rainbow

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.

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