(from ‘rob mclennan’s blog’, 17 April 2025) 5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I love doing readings–because they are fun and social and ephemeral experiences, but also it is a hell of a way to edit a poem….
Category: interviews
Rae Armantrout | ‘The absence of certainty’, a conversation with Kate Lilley
(Cordite Poetry Review, 4th February 2025) Kate Lilley: … One of the things you said when we were having a bit of back and forth about how we might do this was when I asked you what often gets left out, because everybody writes about (for good reason) the markedly intelligent, propositional, ‘thinky’ character of…
Alison J Barton – on 3CR’s Spoken Word, interviewed by Indrani Perera
Enjoyed a thoughtful interview with Wurundjeri poet Alison J Barton recently, aired on 3CR’s Spoken Word program (08 August 2024)…. Indrani Perera spoke to Alison about her collection, ‘Not Telling’, Alison’s debut full-length poetry collection published by Puncher and Wattman. Perera began by asking about the book’s ‘intriguing’ title… The title came to me because…
US politics — The client’s the voter…
There’s a thoughtful interview on the New York Times web site … ‘The Interview’ Feb 15, 2025, Lulu Garcia-Navarro in conversation with Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona … Senator Gallego: “The base Democratic voter wants to be rich. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And so our job is to expose when there are abuses…
Martin Flanagan and Cameron Hindrum in conversation
Thursday 21st March 2023 — 18:00 to 20:00 UTAS Inveresk Library celebrates Tasmanian Reads Week with ‘The Place that Made Us: Martin Flanagan in conversation with Cameron Hindrum’. Martin Flanagan explores what it is about Tasmania – its places. its stories, its people and its ghosts – that seep into the bones and the imagination…
Review, David Mason poetry collection ‘Pacific Light’ (Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 Nov 2022)
Thoughtful words, both by and about US poet David Mason, now resident in Tasmania. Siham Karami reviews Mason’s Pacific Light (Forty South Publishing, Sept 2022)…. In this collection, we sense it in the very first poem, “On the Shelf,” whose title rhymes with and is the same metric length as that of the final poem,…
Melanie Barnes, in conversation with Susan Austin
SUSAN AUSTIN In 2007 you helped to found Students Against the Pulp Mill and lead demonstrations in Hobart and Launceston where students walked out of school to protest against the pulp mill. What’s it like to lead 700 or more high school students out of class and through the streets? MELANIE BARNES That was fantastic….
Melissa Ashley—in conversation with Kate Middleton
KATE MIDDLETON You were saying before that you’ve written work that has been quite experimental in the past where you feel you might have pushed that too far – what do you see as too far? What does it become? MELISSA ASHLEY I felt that I went too far in the sense that I stopped…
Jordie Albiston—in conversation with Kate Middleton [Dec 2001]
KATE MIDDLETON Joan Didion once said of her novels that her first sentence has to be perfect, because everything grows from that, and once you’ve got your first paragraph written, there’s no going back. JORDIE ALBISTON I agree with her! And of course it’s more compressed with poetry — you’d be talking about your first…