this was the year i changed my bio from writer to poet

this could be our year we said

id won a prize and youd come into form

so we submitted two poems each to the anthology

best australian poems 2022

there had been an open call

three poems each was the limit but we were being humble

we waited to hear back

we were chill about it

the top 100 poems in the land

a big deal

but no big deal

we are just upstarts

we really want to get in tho

someone said theyd received 5000 submissions

thank u editors for your labour

5000! G-WHIZ

either poetry is back! again

or a malicious state-based actor launched a cyber attack

on australianpoetrys servers

laugh all you want BUT

some regimes, those with long memories, know that

poetry is a weapon

know that the revolution is linguistic

know that poetry fractures regimes

plato knew

and the despots know too

i often think of

turkeys national poet nazim hikmet

a communist in a nato country

he died in soviet exile

turkey used him up for the secular revolution then jailed him and jailed him and drove him away

revoked his citizenship then restored it after hed died

fifty years later

i sat and wrote in a cultural centre named in his honour made of stone and timber

there was a drama school

a tea garden under tall trees

they sold books in turkish, russian and spanish

people were always writing there, studying, pondering, speaking and listening with their whole

bodies, wielding big ideas everyday

they talk now of journalists in jail

but no one mentions the poets anymore

remember Lorca, Neruda and others

somewhere poets still go to jail, get killed

here they send poets to university

poets as tinkerers and bureaucrats

poetry as pathology, as ornate junk, poetry not seen at all

since settler capitalism, in its plunder

could not be bothered to take it, to absorb it

to list it on the exchange

and so WE pick it up, use it, our weaponry

poets as guerillas

waiting for our acceptance emails

i can attest

that the mobilisation is linguistic

riffs poems chants graffiti are the oxygen of revolt

solidarity is sung and punned into minds and lands

it happens at home, in schools, in work, in publics, tea gardens, mountains

i was there in istanbul at the siege of gezi park

in the crowd that resisted then seized bulldozers

dodged water canons and withstood tear gas

we sung of revolution, we practiced it

a newfangled oneness

that disastered the legitimacy of the government

and opened a horizon of possibility

that ten years later becomes the end of not only a tyrant

but the tyrannical mode

all ours liberations are bound up in one another

when we are not killing we might be healing

believe me when i tell you that i found my voice then

a mass movement refusing the authorities that govern everyday life

saying we can do it ourselves

by the people for the people we the people

i think that

best australian poems 2021 was a bumper year

cos it had that energy

we love that edition

you bought it for my birthday but i already had it

we sung its praises to all

at the bookshop i sold dozens

wrote a shelf-talker saying

‘to everyone who reads or wants to read poetry

this is the place to start

100 poems from all walks of the continent

theres radical stuff going on’

i say this now because i felt proud for poetry!

for us

strange to say it but honest

no document i can imagine would speak to the state of this troubled nation better

and so when you were in melb housesitting my place

and i was at the salvos in alice springs

i lit up when i found 2009 and 2013 for two bucks each

leni shilton written in blue ink on the first page

i read them right away, loved them

thought of leni, thank u leni

ill buy your book too

there was something special about encountering 2021

dedicated to my friend and teacher the great Ania Walwicz

the editors did an excellent job

the poets of course did too

and maybe it came at the right time for me, morale was high

or maybe poetry is the technology that generates joys and agonies most freely and directly now

the marginalised poet can storm the top 100

difference in the charts

in a way that the sculptor, the film director, the musician

might not

we feel like were in permanent crisis

its post-truth and plato changed his mind

called us back

the social body exhausted

the earth in arrears

poetry is needed

a jolt straight in the vein

poetry, my friend

poetry