Ep 68. Ali Alizadeh on power, influence, anxiety and hope

I still remember buying a copy of Ali Alizadeh’s Ashes in the Air and the immediate effect the book had on me. In this interview Ali looks back on what it was like to write that book and talks about aspects of writing poetry in Australia today including power, influence, hype, popularity – and hope.

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Ep 67. There will be time (I’m pretty sure)

Time and I are not friends. Sometimes we have massive fights. Usually I don’t win. But poems help.

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Ep 66. What we read last summer

If you’re a fan of Chat 10 Looks 3 (which you should be) you’ll enjoy this episode. Prolific poet and reviewer Maggie Ball and I catch up to talk about what we read over the summer and what we hope to achieve writing-wise in 2018. We also casually start up a Michael Farrell reading circle.

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Ep 64. Stuart Cooke’s Opera

Stuart Cooke’s Opera is one of those books that’s changed my understanding of what a poetry collection can do. (It also includes one of my favourite poems, An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World.) In this interview I get the chance to nerd out with Stuart about how he wrote Opera and the poetry that’s been important to him.

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Ep 63. Ed Tato on poems that must be spoken

Talking with Ed Tato reminded me how many rooms there are to discover in the house of poetry. We go from Ulysses to Kansas to a workshop with Mary Karr, wondering about categorisation, why certain writing resonates, and returning to the fact that some poems demand to be spoken aloud.

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Ep 62. Amanda Anastasi on poetry at the mic

After finally getting up to read at Owl and Cat, I was lucky enough to have Amanda Anastasi around to chat about all things open mic, the highs and lows of being a poetry gig convenor and her own approaches to getting something down on the page (in between gigs).

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Ep 61. Dave Drayton on PMs and poetry demo tapes

Dave Drayton joins me to chat about his recent book P(oe)Ms, the role of constraint, productive and preventative barriers in writing, and some of the poets who inspired him to try new things when performing his work. We also get into the fraught area of ‘networking’ in the poetry community – is it all just about who you know?

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