Radio New Zealand “Sunday Morning” Show Interview With Joanna Preston
Yesterday, Wallace Chapman of Radio New Zealand’s “Sunday Morning” show interviewed fellow poet and friend, Joanna Preston.
Joanna Preston won the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, judged by Fleur Adcock, in 2008. Her winning — and first — collection, The Summer King, was then published by Otago University Press in 2009, and won the Mary Gilmore Award for the best first poetry collection by an Australian author in 2010.
The interview is an indepth look at Joanna and her poetry, as well as her new role as poetry editor for the literary journal, Takahe, which is currently celebrating its 25th year in production.
Here’s the interview—and very well worth your listening time, too:
Sunday Morning Interview With Joanna Preston (Podcast)
As those of you who saw my recent feature of Joanna’s Lucifer In Las Vegas on The Tuesday Poem Blog will know, I am a great admirer of Joanna’s poetry, and so was not at all surprised to hear Wallace Chapman describe The Summer King as “luminous”, “accessible” and “a page turner”—a rare accolade for poetry these days.
There is a great deal more equally worthwhile listening in the interview, not least Joanna’s thoughts on poetry (and all creative writing by inference) as “negotating boundaries” and her eloquently expressed view that “all art is a collaboration…in which the creator must leave as much space as possible for the reader to bring their own [creative] input to the work…” (I have paraphrased as closely as possible to my recollection of what was said in the interview; my apologies to Joanna if I have not gotten it quite right.)
I really recommend this interview—and not least for Joanna’s wonderful reading of Parable of the Drought, recently republished in Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing The Empty Page (ed. S. Harvey, H Ricketts, J Norcliffe, Randon House, 2014.)