AB: Oh, I love the interpretation of your flying commutes, that’s magical! We often put on ABC Classic FM in the car and collectively paint a visual picture of a scene to match the music of the moment to – mostly it’s of animals, Fantasia-like!

And yeah, I’ve been thinking about the deep sea a lot lately, writing about it. I listened to a scientist speak about how we might interact with companion species that live in the dark abyss of the ocean that we cannot be in physical proximity to, so that we might care more about protecting them, and her suggestion was that we do so through aesthetics. We have such sophisticated means of transmitting the colours, textures and movements of these creatures that scientists are only just learning about, often for the first time.

It makes me think more into these encounters and forms of play that shape our daily reality of getting from ‘A’ to ‘B’ so to speak – an aesthetics of relation. The permission inherent in viewing life as a game, as a magical scene of our own making, is not limited to being in the orbit of children by any means. I just read a passage from your essay ‘On “panther” by Ania Walwicz’ for HEAT which really resonated: “some of us have big vehicles and some of us have poetry.” Poetry as vehicle, as container that gives shape to how we move through the world (the sky, the ocean, all the while being on land). ‘A’ and ‘B’ as our entry into the alphabet we fondle curiously on the tongue, on the page, at the same time as representing the geographic orbits of our brief time here. In the beginning these modes were not separate, not in the ways you suggest they are shunted and compartmentalised on the second day of school, and so we must work to keep them in the same game!

The knife as productive cut and poetry as violence – I’m interested in what you suggest here. Weapons as equalisers is such a good way of putting it. Audre Lorde’s decree that we must break the silence that has us shackled and controlled is a call for poetry as violence in the same way that revolutionary struggle against oppression is a form of violence; it’s a double negation that has us intent on surviving, but in the fullest sense of how she understands survival – as aesthetic, emotional and spiritual abundance. After that time that Kitaj was wielding the big, serrated knife, his other mum Fleur bought him his own knife (maybe the kind of blunt knife that Ezgi also adores). As well as the joy of cutting strawberries with it, Kitaj’s put it to use locking us in the toilet, from the outside. It doesn’t matter that on our side of the door we have the means to activate/deactivate the lock, it’s the hottest new game to ‘lock us in’ with his new knife. There’s something in this again about the double negative of violence as resistance as play as joy.

There’s another way I’m thinking about your question of shape with regards to violence and equalisation. I recently read a theory about how the autistic brain is not as efficient as other brains when it comes to synaptic pruning – a critical form of brain development whereby excess neurons and synaptic connections are eliminated as a means of making the neural networks more efficient. The autistic brain seems to hoard all the little bits of information that are born between the synaptic connections, so that there is all this noise kicking around, like the way I hang onto egg cartons, padded bags, scraps of bubble wrap, buttons (maybe my own version of charms for shaping new forms). The writing/editing process feels very much like a brute pruning of this synaptic debris, like how you say you exhaust the writing and then step back, pass the poem on to clip the excess away. It’s both an act of cleaning up and of generating new forms. And this can feel violent as a means of making way for more mental space, or in that it has a fervent energy to it when it’s also about trying to keep up with the pace of a brain that’s always running hot, in the same way that you have to eat to satiate a voracious appetite – to keep the blood sugars happy. I must keep the brain sugars happy! I suspect a lot of us do. Writing is a demand that the brain is making on the hands, so that it feels necessary as a form of maintenance, as much as it does a total thrill of invention, or at least reappraisal.

My practice seems to move in and out of a desire to make shape poems in the traditional sense of calligrams (which feels like a natural symbiosis of my visual art and poetry practices) and then in wanting to write blocks of run-on poetry that utilise the forward slash in place of the line break. Ariana Reines writes somewhere, I think in Wave of Blood (2025), that the way the line breaks says something true about the body writing it, and this has really stuck with me. The forward slash is an interesting way of visualising a process of the body trying to catch up with the way it consciously (or otherwise) thinks; to annotate it or outrun it; to run its impressions into the ground, page, world. I also return to CAConrad’s epiphany when one day they were compelled to write away from the left justified margin of the page, which they see as a decidedly queer aesthetic. In either case I think my sensibility gathers around a certain pace and a weave that reflects how my brain is constantly firing and hoarding – the repetition and zig-zag and looping patterns that you speak of. And yes, the dialectics of how kids think is a space for constant movement and inspiration, the way they so naturally speak back to contradiction.

I also think a lot about the meaning of ‘child minding’ in its literal sense, as a process of shaping the mind of the child in your care (through language, play, moral instruction, etc.) To more directly answer your question, I think parenting shapes my mind as much as it does the kids, in various ways that are highly playful, where the shaping on the page is also about seeking out a level of control that is often hard to grasp in the midst of the chaos of child minding. Perhaps it’s akin to the process of writing and editing, this ‘being with’ and ‘being apart’ pendulum that is constantly swinging.

I remember hearing a poet talk about how, when she had a new baby, she couldn’t write poetry anymore and started writing fiction. She would have 20 maybe 30 minutes to work when the baby napped, and poetry didn’t seem possible in that allotted time. She could write sections of fiction though, and even if they were bad, she could edit later. The point she was making was that she needed a new challenge of writing, and this feels true of my experience of the transformational nature of becoming a parent for the first time. It struck me that you and I were both writing prose before Ettael and Dilân were born, and it’s interesting to think about the economy of language and how fully we both embraced poetry under similar circumstances. I’d love to hear you elaborate when you say that you realised as a new parent that what you needed most was language, and not time. How did time (or its diminishment) alter your way with language as a challenge/or not, that you needed?

EB: I’m really interested in your description of the brain constantly firing and hoarding. I feel you! I must have a similar experience of mind. As poets we’re often questioning why and how our mind moves the way it does. Sometimes it’s the experience of being on the brink… a precipice, and the abyss is avoided or replaced by the page/poem/story/words/language. Maybe time is chaos and language is its counterpart . . . I like the Deleuze and Guattari concept of the ritornello (little return or refrain) borrowed from music. We might think of it as a repetition of a phrase or a tune we come back to as something familiar, a protective mechanism against chaos. Now I’m just ripping this from the net via the book A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy (2018): “the ritornello encompasses three functions, establishing a center, creating boundaries, and opening towards novelty. Ritornellos mediate the tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity, enabling the regulation of identity and difference. This notion is pivotal in shaping the spaces and times of subjectivity and experience.” These ritornellos feature everywhere in my days and poems! I think I’m imparting this tendency on my kids too . . .

I’m kind of surprised to hear a new parent switch to prose fiction because poetry wasn’t possible. I suppose each writer’s practice appears to have different features and requirements. The way I understand poetry is not necessarily through a lens of economy but of intensity. Yes, fewer words but different (higher/lower?) frequency/pitch? I think becoming a parent made me question my practice and the form of my days. Like a tree or a shrub growing on a cliff face, writing, my compulsion, had to continue in some place in some way. I had all these gut feelings about writing that I had probably ignored or repressed and suddenly the flow of life became too strong and I just had to kayak along the rapids. I’m grasping for metaphors here, but I think they’re helpful. What as poets and writers we need is words, that’s our material, our fabric. And so, we make the fabric and then later it becomes a shirt, a sock, a poem. When Sophie goes op-shopping she says that she looks for good fabric above all, her eye scans for it – and I guess I’m doing the same in language . . .

But yes! The material of language can be accumulated at (almost) all times and this realisation was a huge relief.

You mention your friend writing prose and “even if they were bad, she could edit later.” I’m wondering what your thoughts are about this. When I think of making material, I’m not using the word ‘edit’, maybe even protecting myself against it like it’s a dirty word. I know the poet Ouyang Yu is not a fan of editing but rather insists on ‘bad poetry’ meaning what comes first is best and the work losing its life (I’m paraphrasing) with editing. He also speaks of there being just as much censorship in Australia as in China, but the censorship here is self-censorship. The poet Ghayath Almadhoun speaks to this too, when he talks of the poems in The New Yorker being ‘clean’ poems. In the mess of parent-life, what can a ‘clean’ poem mean?

AK: I was thinking about repetition earlier today. I caught a slide online from Lucy Van’s presentation at a conference celebrating Frantz Fanon at 100. It was a passage from the British poet Nisha Ramayya about repetition in tantric poetry. For her, repetition isn’t intent on marking successes or failures, but rather it’s used to make the same demands over and over; it’s about asking the same questions, raising the same issues –“insistence has no conclusion” as Gabriel says so beautifully in this essay of his.

I love that you refer to the ritornello. The ‘little’ here feels important – it’s like a soft strategy for living alongside the drama of the poetic volta (Italian for “turn”); it’s a little snippet of information, or it’s from a little mouth – Ezgi’s “more more more more”. In looking it up I see that a ritornello is a repeated passage in orchestral or choral music from the renaissance and baroque periods, so specifically a music made by many! The little returns of repetition of poetry for the people, for insistence itself. I often aim for a poetry that can express the collective, despite being someone who needs a lot of solo time; your poetry for sure is always about and with and for other people. In this it feels important, I think, to bring the people that touch us together so that we lose the boundaries of their so-called ‘little’ or ‘big’-ness, and I wonder if you agree? I go to a project of mine from last year, Anti-aria for ater-. I refer to this as it was about the chorus; aria being a solo piece for voice, so anti-aria being a call for bringing others (both living and deceased, familial and historical) into the work: the world.

I love how you say too that the ritornello is like / a protective mechanism against chaos / and I think here of Ghayath speaking about humour as a protective mechanism against trauma, like the function of the ritornello for Deleuze and Guattari being in establishing: a centre, a boundary, a novelty. Little repetitions have the effect of a humorous breaking down of barriers, in the way they can pierce through to truth and bring people together through the shared experience of laughter. Also too, how you say / maybe time is chaos and language is its counterpart / and I wonder, what exactly is this counterpart here, order? If so, I think it’s of a different order than one that attempts to control, though there is something in this of language being a way to control the inputs, the hoarding chaos, for sure. Is it a sorting order? Are we trying to ‘orchestrate’ our experience of the chaos through the warp and weft of the fabric being made? I love Sophie’s scanning for quality textiles, like the tongue feeding the brain with juicy words and phrases and refrains in the thrift store of the day-to-day.

I recently relayed my observation to you that both yours and Ghayath’s book I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (2025) open with shirt poems: his is the shirt of a lover; yours are knock-off footy shirts from the spice bazaar and later the shirt off your back used to muffle the sound of the coffee grinder for the self-love of some solitude in the morning. I’d recently seen a clip of Toni Morrison invoking to an audience of students the African saying “be careful when someone naked offers you a shirt” – the point here being that we must focus the attention on self-love, of clothing ‘the self’ first. She turns this into a really beautiful sentiment about stepping into a room and making sure to bring all the people who have ever loved you along, as an act of self-love, so you’ll never be small. The poem is the shirt is the little return for all the people who have ever loved you! So, then I can’t help but go to your question of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ poetry and cast a thought to π.ο.’s ‘The Dirty T-Shirt Tour’!

But yes, this is a great question about ‘clean’ poetry amidst the ‘mess’ of parenting. To backtrack a little and to clarify, the poet (whose name I can’t recall) isn’t someone I know, rather I heard her speak on a podcast. While I found myself feeling quite alienated from how she spoke about her writing process, I found it interesting to consider the drama of this writerly volta with the birth of her first child as catalyst; her turn and transition into fiction as both resonant and inverse of our own experiences of being jolted into poetry. But yes, I agree that ‘shaping’ rather than ‘editing’ feels right here; editing seems a dirty word in the context of poetry, it’s true! Mostly when I try and work back into a poem I’ve written, to add or alter the cognition (‘meaning’), it almost never gels. It’s mostly always out of step with the rhythm and texture of the first impulse, the fast and thick of it. And that’s because poetry is about the energy and the sound of the thing that first arrives, rather than necessarily the meaning, right? I mean it’s both; it’s always a dance.

Clean poetry. What is clean poetry? I’m curious to know what Ghayath means when he says that about The New Yorker – are these compliant poems, clean as in not bloody (of war, occupation, etc.), are they ‘safe’ poems? Is the clean poem the one you write in the shower? The shower when you’re having down time with the thoughts from the chaos that rush in fast, like the water massaging your head.

Poetry that works with the material of parenting and children must be ‘filthy’ poetry I think, because kids are filthy and filth is good for the immune system, it’s a way of being in relation with the world. But I think, if we’re talking about clean as in compliant or non-complicit then none of us are non-complicit; the poems are dirty and they’re dirty dancing!? You’re writing poems while cleaning the nappies; I’m sitting down now to write having washed my hands after picking up half eaten food and collecting dirty tissues. All of it makes its way into the writing, like how our vectors of DNA are constantly smearing the notion of a clean, contained self. To quote Gabriel from his essay again: “the floor gets mopped only to be muddied again.”

Sorry, another long response and I could keep going but I’m curious to ask you your thoughts on insistence, perhaps as a way of signalling some kind of a conclusion here. What feels non-negotiable as far as how you think about raising your kids and writing your experiences alongside them into the world? Or put another way, what does your poetry insist on to no end, even if you sit in the belief that it isn’t possible, and how does this insistence write a life, your life?

EB: I think even when you’re being active in some way, shower/bike/walk/washing nappies, there’s a passivity or receptivity in these acts of motion which makes way for poems/poetry to arrive. John Cage says something about doing something boring allows for ideas to come. So no, I don’t think of shower poems as clean ones, lol. But I think Ghayath is talking about clean poems as safe ones, safe for having been generated within or for a certain milieu and not “touching the wound” as he likes to say. Clean as censorship, usually self-censorship, i.e. fitting in and following ideals of craft and mood/tenor. It doesn’t seem to leave room for something really crazy or transgressive to bob up and into the final text.

And to bring this idea of the filthy or dirty into a reflection on my own practice and this insistence . . . At my core I want to play. Play a bit with fire, with the knife, with words, with the grub and glow of our everyday joys and pains. If I do this and stay true to the energy as you say, it inevitably surprises and jolts me. It feels worth doing. And then after all this gathering up I want to share and make it collective . . . I can’t really follow this with a sensible political or aesthetic explanation of my practice. But my own obsessions and concerns for a radically different world inevitably charge the work.

Yesterday Ezgi and I were with my dad, and we were trying to pull out a tree stump, and it was hot and hard going. We used all these tools…a sledgehammer, a fencing bar and a pickaxe to try jimmy it out cos we couldn’t find a proper axe and finally as my dad said: “don’t hurt your back!” I felt the last big root snap and levered the stump up and as I did it a big chunky frog emerged from below and just sat there and we all went “ooooooh” . . . I like this image, of sweating (together), having your faith questioned a bit and then getting the surprise. That’s poetry my friend!

And right back at you, how would you describe this insistence, this kernel, this charge in your own poetry? Rather than what are you getting at, I want to ask, what are you connecting to and with?

AK: Ah yes, it’s interesting to think about clean in the sense of ascribing to a certain way of doing poetry / within or for a certain milieu . . . fitting in and following ideals of craft and mood/tenor. If this is clean poetry, then I’m filthy. The notion of the organic intellectual, the autodidact as living the thinking, the thinking as doing, not as armchair anthropology, this resonates strongly with me as a perpetual outsider.

You and I caught up on the forecourt of the library yesterday in a little break between our jobs and we were reflecting on recent poetic conversations we’d been sharing . . . Hanif Abdurraqib’s reflection on the public intellectual as the kid on his block who tries to recreate the rainbow that appears in the puddle of water as a route to learning about the world, and sharing that learning, is this. The chunky frog is this – I loved the surprise of that description! I was busy envisioning the tree stump as chunky, and then it’s this new living thing, this reincarnation but actually the coexistence of all things, living and dead. The frog is the rainbow in the puddle at the end of the hard work of prizing the tree stump out of the ground!

Like your gorgeous analogy (but more than this, the reality!) of the collective sweating, the tugging, the surprise encounter, I’m also insistent on the fact that poetry is about attention and attention is the texture of living. You say your response isn’t necessarily political or aesthetic as a generalised explanation of your practice, but you’ve done everything you need to with this story, this metaphor. That’s the art of what we’re committing: plucking at the essence of the particularity of moments.

I could say a lot, but I’ll try and keep it brief. I think the thing that underpins all my writing / what I’m connecting up to and with / as you ask it so beautifully, is also a mode of play: of playing with and breaking apart and reconfiguring language; that in this particular undoing of official language we find that not only is everything connected, it’s even more brilliantly connected than we could have imagined! While etymology is fraught – it’s yet another man-made construct used to control/name/organise the world – it’s also ripe as a rule to be undone and played with. It also ultimately connects across languages and cultures, reminding us that the world is comprised of the same constituent parts, the same matter, we’re all made up of the various bits of this huge cosmic organism; how we attend to these parts in relationship to one another is the particularity of the composition.

A text that you shared with me is the amazing poem talk episode on Joan Rettalack’s The Poethical Wager (2003). Drawing on the work of Gertrude Stein, Rettalack writes about composition as living! I think this is it for me, it’s about how the pleasure of the “serious play” (as she calls) it occurs, regardless of the material you’re working through.

So, while you can be struggling, even in tears working through certain material, the pleasure resides in where and how you’ve travelled inside that struggle. You’re right that it’s about how we arrive at the frog to realise there’s always more life and more living to be done; it’s about composing the living, even (and especially) while everything around us is dying. Often, I’m reaching for a tenor of utter breathlessness, of the thickness of coexistence, rather than a slower building in of breath, of padding – a poetry that reflects this task of clinging onto the living, despite it all. I’m “groping at the present”, as Retallack says, with the past firmly in my grip, trying to understand how we got here, and why we have to keep groping; keep insisting!