1.

‘My new persona helped me to make money,’ says the streamer,
but cruel and petty, unhoped for ideal like a hovercraft shimmers
behind a definition of a chair.
You tarnish the boulevards
with your shrapnel castanets and chucked heels
dancing under the exsanguinated sun, but insufficient,
burnt coat of meaning wages a lost covenant.

You hang out till the last minute then take what’s left.
At home’s the torquemada you thought mistakenly.
The Equality Issue opines to the crepe myrtle.
‘I need superficial to relax’
says the airborne Treasure, drinking up a storm,
as she modded the program again until no frond pecks.
On TV chiselled-by-Praxiteles turns his novel arms.
He was an ornament to the game a muse on the field.
He passed away surrounded by his fame.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Traducing a prominent critic on the AustLit online discussion list in 1997 led to some literary-world taking of sides and, after a while, to writing for and then getting involved with Overland magazine. (I was editor from 2002 to 2007 and am pleased to be still involved, on the board.)

What was the first book you published?

A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor education for a changing world, by Mike Brown and Brian Wattchow, which has been an excellent backlist seller for Monash University Publishing in the United States and Europe.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Why do you write?

I write to make sense of the world – or at least to ask better questions – and because words are powerful, transformative tools that can help bring into being a more just and life-giving world.

Judith Bishop’s Interval appears just over a decade since the publication of her first book, also using a one-word title, Event (Salt, 2007). This gap seems far too long. Certainly, there have been two chapbooks in the intervening years – Alice Missing in Wonderland and Other Poems (2008), in the Wagtail series from Picaro Press, and Aftermarks (2012), in the Vagabond Rare Objects Series, – but no full-length collection. The impression is that Bishop works slowly and meticulously. Both Interval and Event are what some may call ‘slim volumes’, that is, in comparison to many.

It is also worth noting in this context that Bishop is, so far, the only poet to have won Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize twice, in 2006 with the haunting ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which was published in Event, and in 2011 with ‘Openings’, a moving poem that now appears, with just one change to a stanza break, in Interval.