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.
‘So then the question becomes: is there a moment or stage, before the thing takes form, when all forms – poem, story etc – are open to it? And what role, if any, do I play in seeing this stem cell to its specific expression? If that moment or stage exists, though, to connect it to any eventual outcome seems to me to dishonour it. Things take shape delicately, from and in every way imaginable – through sound or language, idea, memory, feeling, story, incident, epiphany and figure. Who’s to know what’s growing in the dark until it’s committed to light and fault?’
