Middle of the Air: When Poems Became Songs
As we enter a new year, we look back at Middle of the Air, one of Red Room Poetry’s most innovative projects of 2025.
Launched as our inaugural music and poetry initiative in collaboration with ABC Radio National, Middle of the Air invited poets from across Australia to imagine their work beyond the page. The response was overwhelming. More than one thousand poems were submitted, each one exploring the possibilities of rhythm, voice and sound.
This project came to life from the question: Can you turn a poem into a song?
Fittingly, at the end of Australian Music Month 2025, winning poets were announced live on The Music Show on 30 November. Congratulations again to Giles Watson and Cate Kennedy, whose poems ‘The Arbour’ and ‘Reed and oak’ were selected for adaptation.
“Poetry has been my deepest passion ever since my parents used to read me ‘The Ballad of the Fox’ when I was a small child. That was when I learnt the power of poetry to transport me to another world through rhythm and sound... lyrics, set to music and exquisitely performed, become something greater than the sum of their parts. Music, like poetry, is a powerful vehicle for emotional truth.”
“I love all expressive language, and I love that our oldest human artistic expressions are rhythms, dances, and making harmonic sound together. I have this kind of pattern hunger, looking for the catchy repetition and variation which hooks itself memorably into your mind. Poetry, to me, is much closer to music and song than narrative prose because it is made up of this pattern of repetition and variation, with language.”
These works were transformed into original songs by acclaimed musicians Leah Senior and DOBBY, who each brought their own musical language, sensibility and storytelling to the poems.
Watch Lea Senior discussing the relevance of poetry in today’s world:
Each winning poet received a $1,000 commissioning fee, and their poems were professionally recorded and broadcast nationally reaching listeners beyond traditional poetry audiences.
Looking back now, Middle of the Air feels like the perfect way to close out 2025: a project that affirmed poetry’s adaptability, relevance and power to connect across forms. By placing poems on the airwaves, it reminded us that poetry has legs that run way beyond the page.
We look forward to exploring more poetic avenues in 2026.
Listen to the poems-turned-songs from Middle of the Air.
