Journal
Cordite Poetry ReviewLocation
Castlemaine, VICLanguage
engResearch statement
Background
This interview sits within the field of Australian poetry & interviews with contemporary Australian poets. Its conversation begins with a discussion concerning my 2019 work You Will Not Know In Advance What You’ll Feel (Rabbit Poets Series) asking questions about the role of thought in artistic & daily practice, how to write an erotics of & within femininity, poetic strategies & process & the work for poets at a pointy moment in the climate crisis/COVID-19 pandemic. This publication is a developed version of an original podcast interview on ‘Poetry Says’, which contains over one hundred with interviews with Australian working poets.
Contribution
This edited interview raises & responds to questions pertinent to contemporary poetic practice: why writing sexy poems without abjection & a pornographic lens is difficult & necessary? how body practices impact poetry writing & making? how poetry is a form of thought in/with the body? how to approach conceptualisations of “self” & challenging problematic formulations of these? how poems can place us within multiple registers of time at once? The interview works as collaborative thinking between poet & her interviewer (also a poet), & began as live conversation, then (via extensive proofing & improvement) was refined for the large-reach Cordite readership.
Significance
This interview was commissioned by the peak online outlet for peer-refereed poetry in Australia, Cordite. Running to 7 full-length webpages, it is an unusual length for an interview of this kind. Its process (beginning as podcast and moving to textual artefact) attests to an effective methodology for collaborative making between female interlocutors to surface clarity and candour on questions of sexual politics, non-instrumentalist practice, expression and creative method. The interview articulates (as knowledge in a poetic and philosophical register) a wide array of often-unspoken problems and concepts for the female maker.Publication classification
C3 Non-refereed articles in a professional journalPublisher
Cordite Publishing
