Poetic reflection

'What does poetry mean to you?"

Poetry to me is a way of expressing things without having to fill in all the gaps or hammer down all the edges. The best bits in poetry are the bits that happen off the page: the metaphors, the points of connection, the things left unsaid or unspeakable. This is true, for me, whether I am the write or the reader of a poem. When introducing poetry, I used to play my uni students a clip from a PM Dawn CD which was 21 seconds of silence recorded at the grave of Martin Luther King Jnr. Invariably they talked right through the clip, waiting for the words to start. After a few repeats, and after I finally told them what they were hearing, the short track suddenly seemed full of a wide range of meaning. To me, this sheer sense of possibility in terms of meaning is what poetry means to me.

'What is a favourite Australian poet or poem of yours'.

My favourite Australian poet… oooh. There are so many to love! But for me at this moment it would have to be a three-way gold medal win between Natalie Harkin (esp her archive-focussed poems), Romaine Moreton (esp ‘I shall surprise you by my will’) and Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan (esp ‘Education Week’).