Tag: Poetry

Banned. With. collaboration with Absent on Arrival

I will never get over what a gift and a joy it is to make work with artists you admire.

After months of over-excited online plotting, my friend and sound artist Gennaro Sallustio (aka Absent on Arrival) and I were thrilled to release our collaboration on Banned. With., one of the poems from my debut poetry collection, Public. Open. Space. (Fremantle Press, 2023).

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Poems, place and digital space: online poetry in Australia, China and Hong Kong

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Over the past three decades, digital platforms have become a significant global player in the development and dissemination of poetry.

Variously referred to as e-poetry, electronic or cyber poetry, digital poetry, social media or Instapoetry and more, Australian digital poet and Professor of Electronic Literature Jason Nelson defines the artform as ‘the combination of technology and poetry, with writers using all multi- media elements as critical texts. Sounds, images, movement, video, interface/interactivity and words are combined to create new poetic forms and experiences’.

Like other online art forms, the creation and consumption of digital poetry has grown further and faster since the COVID-19 pandemic—as more people turned to poetry to make sense of the changing world and shared that poetry through one of the only platforms available to them during that time. ‘Poems are ideally suited to social media,’ New York journalist Michelle Dean writes, ‘because they pack so much meaning into so little language.’

However, this coming together of digital and poetic culture is different for poets in different countries, depending not just on geographic and internet access but language use and platform preferences, as well as the degree to which online activity is monitored, censored or controlled.

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The power of digital poetry

At last month’s Perth Festival Writers Week in Boorloo/Perth, I began my Tiny Little Digital Poetry workshop with the following:

Given Perth Festival Writers Weekend brings writers and readers together in a colonial city built on unceded Noongar Boodja, it’s impossible as a guest writer not to acknowledge that our writing colleagues here and overseas are currently being killed, threatened and censored at unprecedented rates.

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Resilience for writers

Over the last year, I transitioned from literary-helpmate to trade-published poet. Suddenly, many of my own writing dreams have come true. Seeing my book in a bookshop. Launching it at my childhood library. Hearing authors I adore say nice things about my work. Doing so surrounded by friends, colleagues and writerly comrades from all parts and paths of my life.

This has been both an extraordinary privilege and a sobering induction into the realities of writerly life, much of which I had previously experienced only from one step removed – from the industry’s reliance on an author’s personal ability to hustle to the level of work versus the level of (financial) reward.

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Digital poetry in Australia, China and Hong Kong

Over the past three decades, digital platforms have become a significant global player in the development and dissemination of poetry.

Like other online art forms, the creation and consumption of digital poetry has grown further and faster since the COVID-19 pandemic—as more people turned to poetry to make sense of the changing world and shared that poetry through one of the only platforms available to them during that time.

Continue reading “Digital poetry in Australia, China and Hong Kong”