Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

I don’t like either word. I used to write poems quite quickly, but for a few years now my process has become a slow accretion and assembly of lines or fragmentary stanzas. It’s hard to get poetry right – to have it look, sound, and read as you intend. I can spend ages adjusting punctuation and spacing and lineation, though I usually avoid deliberate formal or structural difficulty (pantoums, sonnets, sestinas, and the like). Of course, material or content also figure.

What prompts a new poem?

A mis-hearing, a line from someone else’s poem or song, a ridiculous statement, an ad, a photo, an injustice, a joke, a movie, a place, a feeling (anxiety, anger, shame, irritation, pleasure, and so on). As you can see, I sample bricolage.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Poems can be made anywhere at any time in waking life. They just need to be noted down.

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

Oh, the fiddling just goes on and on. My recent poems are thirty-five A4 pages long; they took months of revisiting to ditch or repair the terrible parts. The tiny changes are beyond counting.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

A bit of both, depending on your mood.

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

My dream a drink is with Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Her books are clever, meticulous, clear, compositionally strategic, complicated, political, and sometimes epic. Nervousness would probably silence me, so best that this remains a dream.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Many – but lately I often return to the poems in Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Bonny Cassidy and Jessica L. Wilkinson, published by Hunter in 2016.

What have you learned from reviews of your work?

That everyone reads everything at slight variance to everyone else.

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

The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler.

What is your favourite line of poetry?

‘Is it true that poets see a piece of filthy paper at the time of their death?’ Kim Hyesoon, ‘Marine Blue Feathers’ (translated by Don Mee Choi).

Is poetry generally appreciated by the reading public?

Apparently it is, by 9.2 per cent of readers, according to a Macquarie University economics department survey published in March 2017. But sometimes I think they’re appreciating the wrong poetry.

Pam Brown has published many chapbooks and nineteen full collections of poetry, most recently Missing up (2015) and Click here for what we do (2018) – both from Vagabond Press. Pam has earned a living in a range of occupations and has been writing, collaborating, editing, and publishing in diverse modes both locally and internationally for over four decades. She lives on unceded Gadigal land in Alexandria, a busy suburb in the perpetually reconstructing city of Sydney.