Jane Frank – Places for Poetry

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2025

Places for Poetry, guest editorial by Jane Frank.

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As I sit down to write this editorial, we’ve just celebrated UNESCO’s World Poetry Day— ‘acknowledgment of an artform practiced throughout history across every culture, as well as an artform that speaks to both our shared humanity and shared values’. As we face all kinds of global and local challenges—geopolitical tensions, parts of the world at war, disinformation, misinformation and mainstream media narratives, rising mental health and anxiety concerns, health crises, climate change and biodiversity loss, just to mention a few—it has been well reported that people are increasingly turning to poetry for daily comfort and inspiration rather than just on those occasions when they grieve or celebrate milestones. People that can’t find honesty and authenticity or that have no easy way of expressing their dismay or disbelief, are finding that poetry is a solution. Poetry—so intimate and beautiful on the page—has never been so necessary out in the world.

At the school my teenage boys attend, they are encouraged to graffiti poetry and song lyrics and to collage images in a stairwell that is a dedicated place of self-expression. On a recent tour, I was told this is about encouraging young people to write and be creative but also about the connection between writing and wellness. Poetry is a part of their everyday and something they are proud to show me and interested to talk with me about. It is accessibility that has opened their eyes to the artform which, in other times and at other schools, may have made access to and acceptance of poetry as a creative vehicle more challenging. Spoken Word and Slam Poetry events are thriving here in Brisbane and across the country, drawing younger people and those from marginalised communities, in particular, to them. Slams are helping young people discover their voices and it is excellent to have these gatherings as spaces for people to step into, perform their work and feel heard. Having spoken to many Brisbane Slam poets over recent years, I know that during these hostile contemporary times, many young people are relieved to hear poetry being spoken that articulates what they are thinking and feeling. Younger poets are responding to the issues of the day—the environment, the cost of living crisis, the failings of governments— in the safety of Slam communities with passion and creativity. So much of getting people hooked on poetry—whatever kind you practice— is making sure there are places for it where young or like-minded writers can support and encourage each other.

On a visit to Glasgow a few years ago, I remember posting a short poem in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens Poetry Postbox that is located in a lovely corner of the enormous 40 acres of gardens. It has the shape of a red pillar postbox but is created from cream fired stoneware and decorated with flora and fauna in clay by a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art called Julia Smith but was the idea of theatre actor and writer Stuart Ennis who wanted to encourage young people to write poetry. An inscription on the ceramic surface reads: Please post your poems here and is also repeated in braille code. I have never forgotten it. For the same reason, I enjoyed watching a short video recently about the Poetry Pharmacy in London offering ‘walk-in prescriptions, literary gifts and poetry books to address emotional ailments.’ It is great to see poetry being shown off.

There are too many examples to name but the brevity of poetry allows so much scope for sharing it on billboards and bridges, in buses and on trains and ferries, so it can captivate the public mind. In 2024, Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne, Maxine Beneba Clarke, led a series of workshops where new and established poets were invited to submit a haiku on the theme of renewal—new beginnings and fresh perspectives— and winning poems were spread across the city on billboards. Melbourne has run many of these public art initiatives including Moving Galleries on Melbourne trains some years ago that curator and organiser Leanne Hills writes was partially inspired by watching the Jane Campion film In the Cut (2003) where a woman’s life is changed by reading lines of poetry on the New York subway. Again, Raining Poetry in Adelaide is a street festival that aims to aims to foster a closer relationship between poetry and the public. Students from the J.M. Coetzee Centre for the Humanities at the University of Adelaide spray paint carefully curated poems onto pavements using a special, water-repellent paint, so they only become visible when it rains. Wonderfully, in 2022, Raining Poetry in Adelaide was able to be extended across regional South Australia.

I’ve been watching, first-hand, and thinking a lot, about the way poetry events can become important third places (not home, not work) where poetry takes on the secular role of galvanising people searching for something— for creativity, for community, for beauty. I go along on the last Thursday of each month to an event called Poetry@Stones— a poetry reading series held in a bookshop at Stones Corner on Brisbane’s inner southside. The event is the brainchild of poet Brett Dionysius and the event mainly features poets reading from new collections. Each month, I see poets and poetry-lovers I know, but also people I have never met before, people wanting to embrace this small renaissance of poetry in the suburbs and who are keen to continue the conversation afterwards at the Stones Corner Hotel. The ingredients are a winner—the slow consumption of poetry, the localness, the bookish sense of place and the learning of something new—an idyllic couple of hours free from the challenges of modern living.

I have published two books with Calanthe Press, a poetry publisher and one arm of a larger collective that hosts poetry events on Tamborine Mountain in the Gold Coast hinterland in south east Queensland. The collective is inspired by the lives and work of poet and activist Judith Wright (1915-2000) and writer Jack McKinney (1891-1966) whose home ‘Calanthe,’ named for the Christmas orchid calanthe triplicata was their refuge on the mountain for many years. The Calanthe Collective has worked tirelessly to place poetry in public spaces on Tamborine Mountain including a series of poetry sculptures in Main Street that feature excerpts from poems by Wright, Mabel Forrest, Jena Woodhouse and other poets with a connection to the region. From Wright’s considerable output, Main Street features ‘Song’, which starts:

O where does the dancer dance–
the invisible centre spin–
whose bright periphery holds
the world we wander in?

Poets are drawn to the refreshing poetry events on the mountain as much for the place as the poetry. The Winter Garden Party, held in an auditorium-like sunny glade in a garden of huge established trees, planted with flowering shrubs, vegetables and an orange and lemon orchard, is a signature event each year when the winners of the Calanthe Collective Prize for Unpublished Poetry are announced and winners read their work to guests in the garden. For the past few years the major drawcard has been a half-hour reading by well-known Australian poet and novelist David Malouf. It is a privilege and a treat to hear David read poems like ‘Earth Hour’ that begins:

It is on our hands, it is in our mouths at every breath, how not
remember? Called back
to nights when we were wildlife, before kindling
or kine, we sit behind moonlit
glass in our McMansions, cool
millions at rehearsal
here for our rendezvous each with their own
earth hour
(Earth Hour, UQP, 2014: 54)

Poets gather with deck chairs, picnic blankets, thermoses, wine and cheese, wrapped in pashminas and rugs, rosy-cheeked and receptive. Anyone taking part feels part of the living fabric of the town for that day. Perhaps it is because people want the ‘experience factor’ that is such a marketable commodity that poetry is benefitting. These are life-affirming afternoons, afternoons of heart, where what is on offer is a core piece of goodness. These are well attended events.

I’m sure the pop-up aesthetic is helpful to this rekindling of interest. I recently read a clutch of love poems at the BLUSSH Romance Festival in an inner-city shopping precinct early on a Saturday morning, and it was wonderful to see the intrigued faces of shoppers and slightly sleepy not-necessarily-morning-people looking for their first cup of coffee, confronted with poems that seemed to wake them up as much as the bright morning sunshine. Many people stayed for the whole set of six poets. It struck me that perhaps people need the contemplative and the creative more than ever — a counterpart to everyday routines, a juncture at a particular point in time, or sometimes, a kind of pilgrimage. They are searching for essences and maybe these are to be found in unexpected places. I don’t believe this sharing and disseminating is a watering down of poetry as an artform. These are just other ways and places that help people to find it.

A few years ago in Wellington, New Zealand, on a research trip, I found the Wellington Writers Walk quite unexpectedly as I wandered along the iconic waterfront— a series of text sculptures featuring quotes about the city by well-known New Zealand poets and writers. The public path that follows the picturesque harbour features 23 inscriptions that can be variously seen underwater, on wooden decking boards, hidden on the underside of a pier and on concrete slabs. I particularly admired Denis Glover’s (1912-1980) poem extract from the poem ‘Wellington Harbour is a Laundry’ published in Come High Water (Dunmore Press, 1977):

The harbour is an ironing board;
Flat iron tugs dash smoothing toward
Any shirt of a ship, any pillowslip
Of a freighter they decree
Must be ironed flat as washing from the sea.

There is nothing more moving to me than poetry in the cityscape or landscape that it is written about. I was just as moved a few days later when visiting Featherston book town in the South Wairarapa district that sits at the foot hills of the Rimutaka Range and close to the northern shore of Lake Wairarapa. Before its relatively new status as a book town, Featherston was better known for its significant military past as the Featherston Military Training Camp was New Zealand’s largest training camp during World War I, and later as a camp for Japanese prisoners-of-war (1942-45) and site of a mass shooting. A memorial to the camp was created in the mid 1970s that stands now as a symbol of reconciliation. The site features a cherry orchard and many memorial plaques, including one carrying a seventeenth century haiku by Basho in Japanese that translates:

Behold the summer grass
All that remains of the dreams of warriors

Poetry fits with slow ideas, life-affirming as it is, a turning away from the vacuous commercialism of so many leisure pursuits, so being at a poetry event is an act of resistance in a world of increasing distraction and a kind of intense engagement in a society that seems to encourage disengagement more and more. Walking helps as does poetry. In these times when the world feels increasingly fast-paced and digital, the simple act of walking continues as inspiration for poetry. Wandering and poetry go hand in hand, and especially in urban settings, walking has long been tied to the production of poetic thought. Both Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin wrote about the meditative practice of walking as a flâneuristic way of observing the complexities of modern life. Contemporary writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, in her groundbreaking book Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin 2015), intertwines history, philosophy and personal reflections, inviting the reader to consider the connections between walking and words. At one point, she writes

…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the
more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the
invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you
when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new
possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring
the mind and walking travels both terrains (22)

Again, though not a poet, Haruki Murakami’s reflections on running in What I Talk about When I Talk about Running (Vintage, 2008) also offer intriguing insights about the relationship between movement and creativity, inspiration and introspection. I know the fusion of walking and poetry, for me, is about linking the rhythms of life and nature. Recently trapped inside for a few days during the Tropical Cyclone Alfred event here in Brisbane and wanting to use the time to write, I was disappointed. It was a strange time, but I couldn’t string two words together. These days, I seem to need my feet moving over a footpath, a street, a park trail or winding up at my favourite coffeeshop destination to coax a poem to start, handwritten in a notebook. The act of moving through a space or place, for me, opens the door to deeper insights. Any place could do, but there needs to be one.

A Story of Walking

after Michel de Certeau

I suppose small things count: