Ruby Street

What is an environment in poetry – maybe creating space for things to happen, even if that be small, let alone associative/expansive, or even rhapsodic, or taking in other 'data', big and small. In doing this, I consider the spaces in the poem, the associative if you like, as wave forms, intersections created by words, phrases, iterations and reiterations as words double-back on themselves, as a mapping of territory, the sense of both looking close (the micro) and looking out to and beyond a horizon (the macro). The effects multiply and affect each other, there is a sharing of being.

I think nearly all my most recent writing has something to do with how ‘the local’, gender and intimacy intersect in a kind of ecopoetics. That ‘something’, of course, can take many different forms, however, at least in my mind, remains connected to those ideas, even if tenuously. I’m not exactly sure what a suburban queer ecopoetics might look like, in general, but to my mind, it’s what I’m doing in my own way. In other words, how apparently mundane locations of ecological shifting and climate change/breakdown can figure in a poetry that recollects or reimagines embodied (human and non-human) locatedness and intimacy. If that doesn’t sound too stodgy. It was certainly what I had in mind with my most recent book, last year’s Viva the Real (UQP 2018), as well as in my previous book, Brink (Five Islands Press 2017). And it is what I’ve tried to work through, making the personal even more personal as well as historical (more on this later), in a new manuscript that’s in deve...