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)

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

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)

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

‘Some of the things we hold most dear about poetry may be things that we have to clear our minds of, in order that we see other things more clearly.’

After admiring his work for many years, I had the chance to talk with David Brooks at his home in the Blue Mountains back in June. We talked about his latest book The Grass Library (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2019) along with the role of poetry in his life today, how he sees his previous collections, animal rights, ancient Chinese poetry, recognition and more.

Show notes

• The Balcony (UQP, 2008)
• Open House (UQP, 2015)
• Urban Elegies (Island Press, 2007)
• Ep 93. On two of David’s poems