Poets and event organisers Colin Berry, Evie Wood and Ralph Wessman talk to us about the upcoming Tasmanian Poetry Festival. Video and pics Rod Thompson
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00:00 Well, we have ten guest poets, eleven now, because we've got a lot of us on as well,
00:15 and several musicians, which is nice to break it up a bit.
00:19 The other thing we try and do every year, and I think we've done it again, is to have
00:24 a range of genres, a range of types of poetry, because the problem is, as you know, that
00:30 some people, if they think poetry, think the man from Snowy River, other people think slam
00:35 poetry, you know, I'm a hip-hop lyrical robot and a real cool cat.
00:40 So in between there, there's lots of different types of poetry, and a lot of different tastes,
00:45 and so we really want anybody and everybody to feel that there's going to be something
00:49 for them in the weekend.
00:50 I mean, I've been interested to see that poets who, poets of renown, and people who've made
00:56 it big internationally, from Australia, and people from overseas, still want to come specifically
01:04 to the Tasmanian Poetry Festival.
01:06 All the poets talk about it and want to come back all the time, they love it, because we're
01:11 friendly, and it's all totally, mostly devoted to poetry, like other writers' festivals,
01:17 where everything else is jumbled up, and the poets don't really get their own little thing,
01:22 but they do at our festival.
01:24 I suppose I'd accentuate the fact that it's known as a friendly festival, and poets around
01:31 the country actually say that, you know, it's part of the conversation.
01:36 I think the other thing that Evie's been very involved in is youth trying to get more younger
01:44 people together.
01:47 We're publishing them, we're allowing them a stage.
01:53 Last year Evie managed to get a book together in a very short deal of time for the Andrew
02:01 Hardy Award, which had schoolchildren, basically.
02:05 Yeah, we ran a competition.
02:08 But it's not just schoolchildren, it goes through this year up to the age of 30.
02:14 And that's to draw out our younger poets and get them involved, because the future of poetry
02:20 has to be younger people coming up, and that's all different types of poetry that they write
02:25 as well.
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