Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 13 April
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
When Wallace Stevens said that ‘the poet is the priest of the invisible’, perhaps he meant that the poet’s job is to tend to the unknown, the intangible and even transcendental elements of human existence. Poetry, like prayer, acknowledges mystery. Both can contain expressions of reverence, gratitude, possibility and doubt.
So, in an increasingly secular world, can poetry do the work of prayer?
David Tacey, Kevin Brophy and Cate Kennedy believe it’s an idea worth exploring. All three contributed to Prayers for a Secular World: Australian poems for our time, an anthology that acknowledges the human impulse to pray despite a recession of religion. These are poems that aim to offer comfort and salvation in trying times – and perhaps inspire hope, wonder and epiphany at others.
What power does poetry have to nourish, inspire and soothe us in the 21st century … and what does ‘prayer’ mean exactly, anyway? Join us for a discussion of the spiritual potential of verse. Hosted by Leah Kaminsky.
Featuring
Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky, physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel is The Waiting Room won the Voss Literary Prize for the best novel of 2016. We’re all Going to Die has been described as ‘a joyful book about death’. She edited Writer MD and co-authored Cracking the Code. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
David Tacey
Professor David Tacey is an independent scholar and writer who lives in Melbourne. He is the author of 14 books on literature, spirituality and psychology, including Beyond Literal Belief and The Spirituality Revolution.
Kevin Brophy
Kevin Brophy has had fourteen books of poetry, fiction and critical and personal essays published. His latest book is This is what Gives Us Time (Gloria SMH), a collection of poems written while poet-in-residence at the B R Whiting Library in Rome during 2015. In 2009 he was awarded the Calibre prize for an outstanding essay. He teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne.
Kevin was founding co-editor of the national literary journal Going Down Swinging from 1980 to 1994. He is patron of the Melbourne Poets Union. He is currently a member of the publishing group for Five Islands Press, one of Australia’s pre-eminent independent poetry publishing houses. At present, he shares his time between Melbourne and the remote Aboriginal community of Mulan in WA.
Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely.
Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is currently a text on the VCE Literature syllabus.
She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. Her most recent book is her second collection of stories, Like a House on Fire (Scribe, 2012), which won the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, and is also on the Victorian school syllabus, as a Year 12 English text.
She lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, with her daughter, and is working on a new novel.