What does it mean to be a poet in a world where poetry is seen both as a concern and a calling, a prayer and a practice? Three accomplished Australian poets around Australia show how poetry fits in alongside, but also gives rise to, other tasks. There are the tasks of ‘filing to work, this poem a fishbone in my briefcase’, as the Irish poet Nick Laird would have it, but also the task of reconciling society’s wounds, whether racial or cultural, or devoting oneself to the art of love.
‘It’s strange, the more I write (and I mean “write” and not “publish”) the more it becomes clear to me that all the work is all one work. Looking back, I don’t think I could have written any of my stories as poems (or essays), or vice versa, but probably that’s a dumb thing to say because a thing isn’t separate from its form; some would argue that it’s nothing but,’ he says.
