Ahead of his upcoming Online Feedback Clinic: Poetry, poet Tim Loveday hopped on the phone between workshops in Iowa City to speak with Writers Victoria’s Amelie Hughes about his new collection, influences and fascinations with form. In this special Q&A, he shares his extensive knowledge of poetic movements and conversations with other poets, the idea of community and how it can develop your craft and help to look at your writing anew.
Tim is a poet, writer, educator and baby academic. The winner of both the Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards (2022 and 2024) and the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award (2023), his work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation, rurality and climate collapse. Tim has also been a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, 2024 Best Australian Yarn Prize and 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
I wrote the collection over the space of seven to eight years, so it was a long period of development for the collection itself. The work iterated in a lot of ways – I would start with particular poems, rewrite those poems, find new sort of adjacent poems – and that naturally coalesced into a particular series of forms or sections within the collection. I certainly had to balance it around work, teaching duties, and being a writer. I was also fortunate enough to win a few fellowships, residencies and grants in the process which allowed me concentrated periods of development time.
Who do you often come back to reading, and if you had to introduce yourself through your favourite poems, which would you recommend?
At the moment, I’m obsessed with an American poet called Phillip Levine, he has a collection called What Work Is. I think I’ve read the title poem maybe 20 or 30 times in the last two weeks. It’s a masterclass in an economy of language, in the concentrated and continuous image, and the simple vernacular that carries the weight of ideas around labour and the idea of love in terms of labour. Another collection I really love – that has some similarities to my collection – is Maria Takolander’s Trigger Warning that came out with UQP in Australia. It uses the anthropomorphosis of furniture throughout the house to talk about violence within the domestic space. It’s an exceptional collection in terms of subject and positionality in play. I tend to return to works that interest me in terms of play.
I find it beautiful how poetry, in aesthetic terms, always moves towards community.
You have written in many different forms, but why do you think you return to poetry as a main mode of expression?
I was trying to write a novel years ago. Then I started writing poetry. People appreciated the poetry – and, to some extent, you do things that people tell you you’re good at. In the process, I fell in love with it – the craft and (particularly) the community. And that’s probably what brings me back to poetry time and time again: the ongoing conversation going backwards and forwards between poets, between poetic works and between poetic movements. I find it beautiful how poetry, in aesthetic terms, always moves towards community. On a form level, I’m interested in the concentration of images – poetry is always a reminder that you can say a lot with very little.
What have you learnt about the craft from your work as Poetry Editor for Island Magazine?
One thing I’ve learnt is there’s an overwhelming amount of talent in Australia. It’s exceptional to think I’d ever get anything published in the country considering how many good poets there are – which is the heartbreaking work of being a poetry editor.You knock back a lot of work that you otherwise admire. This is simply based on scarcity; you don’t have space to publish it. You also tend to notice patterns in terms of representation, in terms of syntax, that make you weary in your own craft. I’m thinking about things like anaphora, the repetition of a particular phrase at the start of a sentence. You will see these little poetic tricks that poets use to amplify philosophical meaning. I’m starting to look at those things and feel they are a little bit lazy. It’s counter to the work that a poet should be engaging with. Good poetry rejects laziness; it requires labour and craft and doing the work over often long periods of time.
Poetry is always a reminder that you can say a lot with very little.
Can you share a standout memory of workshopping or collaboration that has helped inform your own poetry?
I’m travelling around different US conferences and workshop series as part of developing my second collection. Recently, I went to a conference in Oregon and one of the workshop was led by a poet called Sasha Roque Pimentel. We were talking about the value of a line – why break a line at a particular point and why emphasise the unit of a line. Despite being in poetry for a long time, I’d never heard anyone describe a line as having unique poetic value, that can be read almost as a poem itself. I felt it was really illuminating in terms of my own craft. It got me curious how the things poets realise or learn can feel simple to other people. We spend a lot of time in our own craft and our own practices, and it’s an extremely idiosyncratic relationship with craft, so we just begin to believe certain things. It’s nice to have a workshop in which expertise in different spaces can illuminate a simple idea for you that has a lot of broader poetic application.
What can participants look forward to and take away from your online feedback poetry clinic?
I’m hoping that I will be able to illuminate a particular aspect of their work they’re doing really well. George Saunders, an incredible US writer, talks about the idea of praising precisely. I really like this idea, observing one image, one line – whatever it might be – and saying ‘hey, this is functionally powerful and a beautiful image’, and then using that as a gold standard to lead the development of the poem. Attendees will also be able to think critically about consistency across a poem, what sort of world they are building in the poem, and what’s the architecture of the poem. But also, what meaning they want to be derived from the decisions they make, because for me poetry is always about precision.
Feeling inspired by Tim? Dedicate time to your collection or a competition submission and gain valuable feedback in his upcoming clinic, Online Feedback Clinic: Poetry.