Join a panel of poetry experts at the Melbourne (Bundoora) campus, Borchardt Library, for a discussion on poetry writing. From the song cycles of Arnhem Land to Sappho to Slam Poetry at your local pub, poetry expresses culture, emotion, ideas, memory, politics – everything – using form, rhythm, sound, image, space and above all, language. Many poets make it look easy, but is it? What makes a poem work? What tools does a poet need in their writer’s toolbox? And for readers, how can we learn to read a poem?
Hosted by the Head of the Department of Languages and Cultures, Claire Knowles, this panel of poets and poetry experts will help us unravel these and many other questions.
Thomas H. Ford is a Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. He has written extensively on poetry and poetics, including How to Read a Poem and, most recently, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius (Melbourne UP, 2023), co-authored with Justin Clemens.
Simon West is the author of five collections of poetry, including Prickly Moses, published in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He is also the author of Dear Muses? Essays in Poetry and the editor and translator of The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. He is an adjunct senior research fellow in Italian Studies at La Trobe.
Judith Bishop is the 2024 Tracey Banivanua Mar Fellow. She is a poet, linguist and AI researcher in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her second collection, Interval (UQP, 2018), won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her latest collection, Circadia (UQP), is out this month.
When: Wednesday 22 May, 1 pm – 2 pm
Where: Seminar Room 1.34, Level 1, Borchardt Library, Melbourne (Bundoora) Campus
Register now.