Live-stream: Words for Now: Poetry as Processing
not in Aus, mate
bad things don’t happen here
our beaches are open
they are not places where bloodied mattresses burn
Ellen van Neerven writes fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. An award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer and editor, their highly celebrated books include the experimental fiction collection, Heat and Light, and a book of poems, Comfort Food. This month, they released their second poetry collection, Throat, which explores love, language and land, and interrogates the colonial impulse.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is also a critically acclaimed writer and poet, whose work – including her award-winning 2016 poetry collection, Carrying the World – is known for its intensity and inventiveness, and for speaking truth to power.
Both writers bring humour and heart to critical questions of who we are, where we come from and the burden of Australia’s unreconciled history.
Broadcasting on this page in May, these two poetic powerhouses will discuss their shared passion for the form, and consider ways in which poetry can help us process what’s happening in the world today.
Stream the event live from this page.
Presented in partnership with Australian Poetry with the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Featuring
Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Lit... Read more
Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books for adults and children. Her forthcoming poetry collection is It’s The S... Read more
N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs AM is a Boon Wurrung senior elder and is the chairperson and founder of the Boon Wurrung Foundation. A descendant of the First Peoples of Melbourne, the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung, she is the great-granddaughter of Louisa Briggs, a Boon Wurrung woman ... Read more
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