Poetry

“Editors of small magazines and anthologies are the unsung heroes of Australian literature. Working on shoestring budgets, or for nothing, they create the foundation for poets to develop. Service as an editor myself (Nine Lives, Black Possum Diaries and as book review editor for the academic journal Social Alternatives) means I know something of such labours of love. On the topic of generosity, a shout-out to the convenors of poetry events. (Favourite performance haunts: Sydney Poetry Lounge, Poets Up Late, and Can You Keep a Secret in Brisbane.) I also appreciate the collaborators who’ve adapted a number of my prose poems for performance. It was a pleasure to hear my prose poem ‘When the Americans Came to Town’ broadcast on ABC Radio National and to be the featured poet on its PoeticA program, twice. It was a thrill to hear the lyrics of a poem from Mountains Belong to the People Who Love Them transformed into a choral work performed at the Queensland Performing Arts Complex and to play a role in developing friendly relations between the Australian and the Korean people. It was moving to contribute to a benefit for coal miners with deadly lung diseases and to see another choral performance of another work, ‘The Nature of my Illness Being …’. This experimental prose poem was inspired by the find, in the dirt of an abandoned mine office in Blair Athol, of a bundle of sick notes penned by coal workers. It was first accepted by the editors of the Melbourne journal Verandah before being anthologised (All Walks of Life). Ann Bermingham and the Mt Nebo Men’s Choir adapted it for the benefit at Magda’s Community Artz, Brisbane and performed it on one night only, an unparalleled experience. (Perhaps this particular prose poem is not done yet!) I’m currently assembling individual poems on the theme of work for a fourth collection. Again I treasure the careful attention paid by journal editors who are publishing my poems, one by one. Dear editors, dear convenors, dear adapters, you illuminate the darkness of solitary creation. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The author is collected in anthologies: Kookaburra Shells, Small Packages, Taboo Haiku, The Sky Falls Down. Journals include: Blue Dog, Blue Pepper, English Teachers Journal, Hecate, Indian News, Mozzie, Plumwood Mountain, Right Hand Pointing, Social Alternatives, StylusLit, and Tasmania 40° South.