Hello poets and readers, At the 2019 Poetry on the Move festival, hosted by the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra, I hosted a panel titled ‘Poetry and Process’. Festival Director Shane Strange made available a podcast of the panel presentations by our guests, national and international poets Angela Gardner, Judith Beveridge,…
Reading and writing poetry about unknowing
Hello poets and readers, How do we read a poem? Do we analyse it, interpret it, critique it, or just feel and experience our way through it? Multiple readings trouble the idea that we can master a text, but not its potential for openness. Lucinda McKnight, Ruby Todd and myself (all poet-researchers) decided to conduct…
The Poetic Vocation
Hello poets and readers, At a time when the work of many artists is sidelined by COVID, the issue of earning a living from art is more glaring than ever. As a poet you know that very few poets earn a living from their work and have to do something else to survive. So why…
Found text manipulation by Alison Whittaker
Hello poets and readers, In an earlier blogpost about the work of Gomeroi poet and lawyer Alison Whittaker, I discussed her work with trigrams and the process behind the creation of poems like ‘the skeleton of the common law’ from her collection Blakwork, which Alison expanded on in our podcast. Thanks to her generosity in…
Some thoughts on Alison Whittaker’s process
Hello poets and readers, Our podcast with Gomeroi poet and lawyer Alison Whittaker was full of insights. We introduced the podcast by quoting her comment about the similarity between the law and poetry, in terms of reducing things to essentials: “The logics of law and poetry boil meaning and power down to their barest components.”…
Creativity and Innovation Short Course Online
Hello poets and readers, If you’ve been following Poetry in Process and would like to delve further into some of the findings of this research, I’m running a short, intensive online course based on the findings of Poetry in Process called Creativity and Innovation, from the 27th-30th July. The course takes the form of four…
Podcast: Alison Whittaker’s process
Hello poets and readers, “The logics of law and poetry boil meaning and power down to their barest components.” We’re delighted to be able to bring you an interview with Alison Whittaker, a Gomeroi poet and author of the collections Lemons in the Chicken Wire and Blakwork, shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for…
Cristina Savin on Vasile Baghiu’s poetic chimerism
Hello poets and readers, Welcome to our guest blogpost by Cristina Savin:- At the heart of Baghiu’s poetry and process there exists a concept coined by the poet himself, chimerism. The concept encapsulates a tendency to escape everyday realities and to create a parallel universe, a counter-reality in which the poet lives. Baghiu remembers the…
Multilingual poem by Merlinda Bobis
Introducing our podcast with Filipino-Australian poet Merlinda Bobis, I mentioned her poem ‘siesta’, an innovative multilingual work. In the podcast, she spoke about her writing in Filipino and English, and the way in which it is mediated by her first language, Bikol. Thanks to Merlinda’s generosity, we are able to reprint her poem ‘siesta’ in…
Some thoughts on Merlinda Bobis’ process
Hello poets and readers, In our recent podcast with poet Merlinda Bobis, she notes that consciousness of process comes about after the fact. While writing, she is too busy leaping from one thought to another to allow for this kind of reflection. Something captures her and makes a poem possible. She describes the initial impetus…
Podcast: Merlinda Bobis’ process
Poetry – “Most of the time, it’s an accident of composition.” Hello poets and readers, We’re delighted to be able to bring you an interview with Filipino-Australian poet Merlinda Bobis. Bobis’ assertion that the writing of poetry is accidental is reflected in the title of her most recent collection Accidents of Composition (2017). Her poetry…