Alex in conversation with Di Cousens, recalling an early poetry submission….
“One of my very first submissions was from Sydney. It was to ‘Poetry Australia’, and at that time Les Murray was editing. I sent a bundle of poems representing those early ten years of my poetry writing but towards the later phase of that, poems I thought were good enough to try to submit. And Les Murray eventually sent back the bundle of poems with a wonderful comment, he said ‘I can’t quite like these enough, though there are felicities here’. That was in one way a rejection but in another it was encouragement. And I didn’t take it as a rejection, because I knew I had a fair way to go and I needed to refine not only what I was writing but my whole approach to poetry if I wanted to be serious about it.”
[3CR, the Spoken Word Show, 19th May 2022]