Talking with Alan Wearne felt like taking a poetry masterclass. The poet Alan chose was Arkansas land surveyor and prolific writer Frank Stanford, who may well enchant you if you’re not careful. We look at his work from all sorts of angles and cover just about everyone from Ted Berrigan to Benjamin Frater, Gig Ryan, Joyce, Browning, the term ‘spoken word’ and when to bow out of poetry competitions.

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Even the editors of poetry anthologies feel uncomfortable about the format at times. I’ve now discovered there’s at least one poet, maybe still living somewhere in Melbourne, who’s happy to take matters into their own hands.

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As a First Nations poet, Ellen O’Brien says Alison Whittaker’s poem ‘Willi Willi Will I’ from Lemons in the Chicken Wire speaks directly to her experience of doing late night research into family history. We take a close look at the poem before getting into questions about making compromises in writing, finding your primary motivation, accepting rejection and whether ‘bad’ poetry exists.

Keep an eye out for Ellen’s work in the upcoming Indigenous issue of Rabbit.

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I had a lot of fun talking with Melbourne-based writer and spoken word artist Rhea Bhagat for this episode on Robin Coste Lewis’s poem On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari. We covered plenty of ground…

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‘It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.’ A few thoughts on poetry and the news along with a must-listen poetry podcast.

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