Poetry Month Interns And Their Favourite 30in30 of All Time

Andy Jackson's 'Altermath', chosen by Phoebe Lupton

‘Altermath,’ Andy Jackson’s commissioned poem for Poetry Month 2023 hits me right in my memory. It is not a memory I have ever felt able to verbalise, but Jackson does this for me. He writes with a gentle tone and smooth rhythm on male suicide — a relentless topic whose importance still seems yet to fully penetrate the public consciousness.

In the opening stanza, Jackson imagines what beauty might be found in the lives that have been taken, had these lives not been taken at all: ‘the rope ought to have frayed and unspun into a cloud of seed-threads.’ What happens when you leave the rope, a weapon commonly utilised for suicide, alone? Its murderous quality dies, leaving behind the natural stuff from which it was made.

Because, regardless of whether you believe suicide is natural or not, this poem forces you to confront that living is more natural than anything else.

Meet Phoebe: Phoebe Lupton (she/her) is an Australian-Singaporean writer, editor and aspiring academic, currently based in Canberra. Her work is published or forthcoming with Griffith Review, Archer Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, Emerging Writers’ Festival, The Big Issue, Overland, and a UQP anthology of essays by autistic women. Phoebe also co-edits for Lost Souls Magazine alongside Ben O’Mara and Ali Alizadeh. You can find out more about her work here.

Lulu Houdini's 'Mangrove Girls', chosen by Harrison Abbott

I realised through poetry that mundanity is a privilege. Or, at least, I realised that the capacity to speak about the quotidian reflects normality within one’s daily life, unimpeded and visible. I learnt that there is power in letting routine become normative, if not for society then at least for the individual.

Gamilaroi poet, Lulu Houdini, was commissioned in Poetry Month 2023 to write a piece for 30in30, which she entitled ‘Mangrove Girls’. The piece is a reckoning with the passage of time, the growth of family, and the importance of language in defining Indigeneity. When I found the poem, I was in the gut of identity confusion, wondering how the expression of my First Nations culture could ever sit alongside my upbringing in Naarm, off my Country. 

‘Mangrove Girls’, both the poem alone and Houdini’s reading of it on Red Room’s website, slowed these thoughts. She takes the broad questions I had been asking myself, about quantifying First Nations heritage, and enmeshes them with details of daily life that could be considered trivial. That triviality — potato scallops, chips, scooter races, injuries — are permitted by Houdini to exist alongside these grand questions. 

The poem, thus, becomes a permission for these questions to be asked and to sit in the mind unanswered. Yet, in writing the poem, Houdini exemplifies how an expression of Indigeneity does not exist despite our erasure across history, but in light of it. The power of Houdini’s poem emerges from her capacity to display Aboriginal life as trivial and mundane, assuming a normalcy that has historically been denied to First Nations peoples. Thus, from such normalcy emerges these questions of identity, of culture, of family; they, too, are comprised in the mundanity of 21st century Indigenous life, a validation which has stayed with me as I move through the world.

Meet Harrison: Harrison Abbott (he/him) is a Gamilaroi writer on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people in Narrm (Melbourne). Harrison is a Bachelor of Arts student studying at the University of Melbourne, majoring in English and History with a concurrent Diploma of Languages in French. You can read some of Harrison's poems on his Instagram.

Tyson Yunkaporta’s 'Palmistry', chosen by Niki Almira

Among the 30in30 commissions, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Palmistry stands out for the way it unsettles the act of looking. Yunkaporta presents divination that is not the outside looking in, but the inside looking out. It tackles what other works talking about divination never addresses before — that divination reads the inside and flips it out. Why then are they mostly presented as an almighty medium looking at the object from a safe towering distance? Yunkaporta’s medium starts the same way — "Amazing green aura," she said as she rises "out [...] and above". But the next line flips the other way around, to speak from the scried instead of the scryer.

I am drawn to how the poem captures the bodily tension of divination. People’s shudders against the Death card. The fear when faced with an end — even as rarely as it talks about a literal end of life. Or the other way around, the swallowed wince against the pregnant image of the Empress card. Somehow the end of a life and the beginning of it depicted in flimsy thickened paper elicit similar full-body reactions in people. Yunkaporta decodes this visceral reaction of being read when laying out the essence of palm lines transformed into a divination medium. In this space the biological grooves upon our hands become something alive beyond its scientific function: “Artifacts wildly etched with hieroglyphic traumas.”

His palmistry session ends abruptly. It echoes how the world wants us to address our stories; all the trauma going beyond generations packaged as the mystic only to be slapped at the end with the uniform push to let go. And then it takes your fifty bucks before sending you off. The poem ends after taking my dispensable five minutes. But in its brevity, I felt the anger that refuses to leave, and my young soul matured in having itself reflected. This, I think, is why Palmistry is my favourite of the series: it shows how reading — true reading — can make us feel seen, and in that seeing, implicated.

Meet Niki: Niki Almira (they/them) is a writer and avid reader currently in their third-year of a Bachelor of Arts at UNSW Sydney, majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Film Studies. Their writing practice is a mixed bag of skittles: they write both in English and Bahasa Indonesia spanning poetry, prose, screenplays and think pieces. You can find Niki's works sprinkled across literary journals and anthologies; among them the essay "Transmissions from an Odyssey" have twice won the Best Essay prize in the UNSWeetened Literary Journal. You can learn more about Niki by visiting their portfolio.

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