Kate Fagan is a writer, musician, and scholar whose third collection, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. She is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and runs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers. She also chairs the Sydney Review of Books advisory board. Her latest volume of poetry, Song in the Grass, was published by Giramondo in June 2024.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Ondaatje, Judith Wright.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Both are essential. The buzz of inspiration endures with the discipline of craft. I’m always drawn to poetic sequences, which can sustain a space of feeling and observation over months, even years. This offers a ‘home’ to which to return continually.

What prompts a new poem?

Often, it’s a desire to think in writing. Poems can speak to images held deep in memory, or improvise around experiences you are reluctant to let slip away. Invitations to collaborate have seeded many of my recent poems. It’s exhilarating to be bumped out of artistic habits, and to create in company.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Time, time, time! As a parent, I’ve become a far more flexible poet. I will write on a train, surrounded by sound, on a mobile phone, in my head while walking – anywhere I can be uninterrupted for a while, in flow. I’ve become less attached to the ‘perfect moment’ in which to begin.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

These days, rarely more than a handful. My practice involves redrafting and over-writing as I go, almost in a sculptural way. A poem remains plastic and radically open until the sonics and space feel balanced. At that point of arrival, I usually stop tinkering.

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why?

Judith Wright. She was calm in her joy for what poetry could do. She had a far-reaching understanding of poetic language as a way of discovering the measure of life: its everyday histories and relationships, ecological vitality, and ethics. Bird-watching with Wright … imagine.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Impossible to choose. So many books stay with me. Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann, The Moving Image by Judith Wright, Empty Texas by Peter Minter, Family Trees by Michael Farrell. My favourite digital collection is the kaleidoscopic archive of Cordite Poetry Review.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

All poems need readers, and all poets learn from listening to others. Solitude is a temporary studio in which to sift collective experience.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

It’s been sad in 2024 to lose three of the most elegant critical minds in North American poetry: Lyn Hejinian, Jerome Rothenberg, and Marjorie Perloff. This feels like a generation of critical firebrands handing over the baton. I admire them all, for hugely different reasons.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W. B. Yeats

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

The wider the road, the more people can walk it. It’s exciting to teach a poem that lights up a class because readers hear their lives singing back – even while that poem is fostering open-mindedness. It could be a lyric, an experiment, a beat poem, a Blake poem. Poetry and song are revered in many cultures, including across First Nations communities. The gift is in listening to what’s right here.