Joanna Preston: Tasmanaut Poet
I’ve just spent a week trying to work out, to my own satisfaction, the difference between ‘unknowable’ and ‘unnamable’. I know. It’s simple – the first means ‘you can’t know it’ and the second ‘you can’t name it’. But there’s so much more to it than that. It’s to do with a poem I’ve been working …
Continue reading "Tragedy (when you lose control and you got no soul)"
There’s been an outbreak of anti-Creative Writing Course rhetoric causing a few ripples in the UK. This most recent bit has been kicked off by comments allegedly made by Hanif Kureishi at the Bath Literature Festival a couple of weeks ago. Go read his comments (in the Independent, or the Guardian, whichever you prefer), and …
Continue reading "Some Reasons why Creative Writing Classes Might Actually Be Good Things"
Well that’s another year, just about gone. It started with a lurch, flailed around a bit in the middle, and then collapsed into an unsightly puddle and really never managed to recover. Or maybe I should put it honestly – that this has been a brutal year. That I want it gone. Some of it …
I imagine most people reading the title of this post will be puzzled by the name, and wonder what corner of the poetry world he hails from. And the answer is: he doesn’t. He wasn’t a poet. But, after my grandmother, he is the person most responsible for me being a poet. And he died …
Big congratulations to Siobhan Harvey, who has won the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award for the manuscript of her second collection, Nephology for Beginners! The judge this year was Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, who apparently had a field of ninety manuscripts to work his way through. The official announcement was once again made on The Arts on …
A Dark Feathered Art 