Poetry and process

I left poetry behind for a long time. I had begun to see it as largely a young person thing, for when I used to hang around Gleebooks and Newtown and Sydney University Co-op bookshop, looking for poetry, reading it, memorising it. It was a container for all my unformed, yearning thoughts.

But poetry found me again, in Melbourne, during the pandemic. Older. More damaged. And it will never again let me let it go.

It was something to do with writing fiction, which I had started to do in the few years running up to the pandemic, and suddenly words meant more than they had before. In their specificity. In their capability and power. I began craving doses of mood and emotion and imaginings. Poems fed the language beast that was inside me, threatening to burst me if it didn’t get out.

I make playlists for my writing, so that I can get into the weather of my novels. I also have a poet guide. For Diving, Falling it was Felicity Plunkett’s poems in A Kinder Sea. Like the novel’s Woolfian mantra, the sound of the sea all through it.