Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, SWF 2022
This was a thrilling session between three poets: Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa in conversation with Evelyn Araluen, who asked searching questions about their beautiful new poetry collections, Beneba Clarke’s How Decent Folk Behave and Musa’s Killernova. It was a stellar panel! Araluen’s first book of poems, Dropbear, had just won the 2022 Stella Award.
Araluen opened by asking when these books were written? Where were they at when they wrote them?
Beneba Clarke said she wrote her book in 2019 and 2020. Because most of the poems were for her weekly poetry gig at The Saturday Paper, it’s the most time-specific work she’s ever written.
Araluen said it reads like an annotation of this period – and in a sense we’re still in that moment, but also not.
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