INTERVIEWS
‘The poem in progress is molten, malleable’: Cassandra Atherton in Conversation with DeWitt Henry
I met DeWitt Henry on an online poetry reading series, LitBalm. I’d read his book Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (2018), and I knew he had founded the famous literary journal Ploughshares, and was an emeritus professor at Emerson College.
‘In the night air by the smoke’: Amelia Walker in Conversation with Barrina South
I also want to acknowledge Ngunawal and Ngambri people and recognise that I live and write on their unceded sovereign lands.
‘Constellations and contradictions’: Chelsea Hart in Conversation with Elena Gomez
I first heard of Elena Gomez when a friend of mine who was living in London DM’d me a link via Instagram with the message ‘another commie poet in Melbourne!!’. I had just started writing poems, so this was kind of like when a parent notices you are in an awkward phase of identity, and naively suggests you hang out with the cool girl at school who is two years above you.
‘I am happy to disport in any language that will have me’: Lia Dewey Morgan in Conversation with Jerry Pinto
I must admit that I discovered the language Saint Tukaram spoke, Marathi, in the same breath that I found his poems – a robed form of Saint Tukaram first appeared to me on the cover of a book that was buried in the classics section at the hypermodern Lulu’s mall, in Kochi, India.
‘Bombala Boss’: Harry Reid in Conversation with Michael Farrell
How on earth to interview Michael Farrell? I once introduced Farrell at a reading as one of my ‘top five dead or alive’ Australian poets. I still believe this to be true. I once watched him eat a falafel during the open mic section of a poetry reading in Sydney. Once, while driving the work van, I saw Farrell on the way to the pool and honked the horn, realising later he’d have no idea it was me. What does this all mean?
‘Share what you’ve learned’: Amelia Walker in Conversation with Samantha Faulkner
Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi/Wuthati peoples of Cape York Peninsula. She is the author of Life B’Long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (Kuracca, 2018) as well as the forthcoming nonfiction anthology Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (Black Inc, 2024).
‘The Edge of Reality’: Paul Magee in Conversation with Paul Collis, Jen Crawford and Wayne Knight
Chapter 4, which follows immediately below, was composed later that afternoon, when we stopped at an Information Shelter on the red dirt road back to Bourke.
‘The slippage of speakers’: Lia Dewey Morgan in Conversation with Shastra Deo
Shastra Deo’s writing effortlessly transcends cultural rifts, striving from modernist allusion through indulgent fan fiction and out into something entirely unique.
‘It turns into a new language’: Saaro Umar in conversation with Elyas Alavi
And once you’ve gone, you can’t come back anymore. The almost-end of an exchange that comes close to passages between James Baldwin’s David and Giovanni; here between the voice of Magaye Niang and Marène Niang, as she glides naked across thick Alaskan snow, breasts upwards, the foreground close to the colour of the sky, she replies, I think I’ve already heard this song.
‘Like all change, it happens in the margins’: Joan Fleming in conversation with Jeanine Leane
Jeanine Leane and I met in the Spring of 2022 to plot this interview over coffee. Jeanine has a quick, ferocious intelligence that moves associatively, while her fingers make languid circles in her hair. She is fine-boned and extremely upright.
‘Collective generosities’: Sara M Saleh in Conversation with Jazz Money
Jazz Money is a poet and artist of Wiradjuri heritage creating work across installation, digital, performance, film and print. Money’s first poetry collection, how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) was the 2020 winner of the David Unaipon Award.
‘Atrophy and entropy’: Tiarney Miekus in Conversation with Darcey Bella Arnold
Language is crucial to Darcey Bella Arnold’s paintings and installations. Words appear throughout the Melbourne-based artist’s work, in rhythms and forms that are almost impossible to replicate with typed script, as the text in one 2020 painting, é dit, reveals.
‘To encounter the unexpected’: Kate Fagan in Conversation with Miro Bilbrough
On 26 March 2021, in a window between lockdowns, author and filmmaker Miro Bilbrough and I met to discuss her free-wheeling memoir, In the Time of the Manaroans (Ultimo Press, 2021).
‘You think this is poetry’: Liang Luscombe in Conversation with Chunxiao Qu
Chunxiao Qu is prolific in the creation her short and often very sharp, ridiculous, and often very funny poetic works. And when I say short, I mean short – her poems are a sentence, a phrase that one might encounter on social media or a text message that someone sent you when they were drunk.
‘A poem is not a puzzle with a correct answer’: Anne Brewster in Conversation with Hazel Smith
In an incisive review of Hazel Smith’s fifth book of poetry, ecliptical, Chris Arnold gestures to Smith’s reputation as a ‘relentlessly experimental’ poet.
‘Energy is Art’s force’: Dan Disney in Conversation with Joyelle McSweeney
‘In a station of the vortex pick me up and hurl me’ writes Joyelle McSweeney in the poem ‘Oocyte’, appearing in their celebrated collection Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020). In this heady exchange of ideas, the author of ten books (poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, translation) reveals a formidable erudition swirls through the heartlands of their elemental writing.
‘It’s no gift to have this kind of knowledge’: Indigo Perry in conversation with Dani Netherclift
Indigo Perry and Dani Netherclift are sisters living and writing in Victoria. Their father and older brother both drowned in an irrigation channel in 1993. Below is a conversation about the ways that this tragedy has shaped their creative practices both singularly and in dialogue with each other’s work.
‘Revolt and remembrance’: Joel Scott in conversation with Don Mee Choi
I’ve known Don Mee Choi now for more than 10 years. I got to know her work as a poet and a translator simultaneously, through her first book of poems, The Morning News is Exciting, and her first book-length translation of the work of Kim Hyesoon, Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers.
‘Thinking is not a problem’: Alice Allan Interviews Antonia Pont
Antonia Pont’s debut collection of poetry, You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel came out with the Rabbit Poets Series at the end of 2019.
‘We’re masters at taking the way we speak and communicate’: L-FRESH The LION in Conversation with Simone Amelia Jordan
The first song I wrote was called ‘The Beat’. It went like ‘do you ever feel the beat when you’re walking down the street?’
Lunchtime Variations: Dominic Symes Interviews Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton
I became interested in how Ken and Peter worked with one another, with an eye to discovering the conditions which allow poetic collaborations to remain fresh and full of humour, in the same way people examine the diets of people in Blue Zones, like Okinawa and Ikaria.
Accepting the Gift, Doing the Work: Angelita Biscotti Interviews Sara M Saleh
Yesterday I may have gone back to working from home too quickly, so I decided to give my body the rest and hydration it needs because clearly, it’s in overdrive. It’s been a precarious time. I feel grateful to be supported right now.
‘A poet is a worker in language’: Debris Facility Interviews π.ο.
To forefront the anarchist politics within poetry is to invest in the liberatory potentiality within the agency of reading and writing.
‘Poems are Alive’: Aïsha Trambas Interviews Thabani Tshuma
Thabani Tshuma is a Zimbabwean writer and performance poet. His work can be found in publications such as dichōtomi magazine and Next in Colour.
