Poets’ Corner is WestWords’s monthly encounter with celebrated Australian poets, curated by David Ades. Each month a poet is invited to read and talk about their poetry on a theme of the poet’s choice. This month David talks to Stuart Barnes about ‘Form and function’ in poetry.
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Stuart Barnes is a Tasmanian-born, Queensland-based Australian poet. He is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023) and Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), which won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, was commended for the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. His poems have appeared on goa (Brisbane’s broadcast roadside digital billboard network), been commissioned for Alcatraz, Australian Poetry Journal, Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Manoeuvres, Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours and Peril Magazine as well as Red Room Company (Poetry Object 2019, Poetry Month 2023), and been widely published in anthologies and journals, including in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020, The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Prose Poetry, The Moth, POETRY (Chicago) and Poetry Wales. Other poems have been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the ACU Prize for Poetry, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize.
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Stuart has performed his poetry at Brisbane Writers Festival, Perth Festival Writers Week and Queensland Poetry Festival. From 2013–2017 he was poetry editor of Tincture Journal. Since then he has guest co-edited issues of Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review and Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry and co-judged the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award. In 2023, Stuart’s poem ‘Off-world Ghazal’ was set to music by award-winning Australian writer Nigel Featherstone and released by Hell Herons, an Australian spoken-word/music collective.
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Twitter: @StuartABarnes
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Like to the Lark can be purchased from Upswell Publishing: https://upswellpublishing.com/
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Glasshouses can be purchased from UQP: https://www.uqp.com.au/books/