Writers on Writing is our regular conversation with a writer or industry professional about the writing craft, industry insights, and their own practice. This week, we spoke to Jazz Money about the relationship between place and time in poetry, and how form and language unlock new complexities in her writing.
What are some of your favourite ways to experiment with form in poetry?
I love the places where form and function marry in poetry, where poetry can be such a unique and perfect craft. So experimenting with layout, with breath and with imagery, can reward really particular outcomes, as can thinking about how the words might be presented; in print, in digital forms, in performance or in creating a physical space informed by those poetics. The task becomes: how can the form enhance the poetry to create something more vibrant than the words alone can achieve.
In your collections of poetry, you write both in Wiradjuri and the English language. How does writing with Wiradjuri language unlock new complexities in your poetry?
English and Wiradjuri have a certain tensions with one another that sometimes seem most easily reconciled through the expansiveness that poetry can offer. In particular, Wiradjuri is a language so embedded with philosophy, poetics and place that it sometimes seems the most appropriate way to get to the truth of things is to write in a language so generous and abundant with meaning.
Your poetry often involves listening to, responding to, and sometimes protesting the continued impact of colonisation. How does real life ignite and inspire your practice?
I think of all of my work as being a protest against colonisation. A love poem can be a radical act! All our lives are coded in politics, and our rights to express ourselves are especially hard won in some communities. So I write in a gesture that is indebted to those who have fought before me, and for those who will inherit the world we are making.
Your latest poetry book, mark the dawn, explores stories connected to place. How does the poetic form, as opposed to film or performance, bring these stories to life?
Place informs so much of my writing, not just the literal location of where writing takes place, but the memories and stories that are embedded around us. Every footstep taken on this continent connects each of us to an impossibly vast story, and for me poetry can often be the best way to comprehend that relationship to place and time.
Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist whose practice is centred in poetics to produce works that encompass installation, performance, film and print. Their multi-award winning writing has been widely published nationally and internationally, and performed on stages around the world.
Jazz’s first poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) was the 2020 winner of the David Unaipon Award. Their recently released second collection mark the dawn (UQP, 2024) is the 2024 recipient of the UQP Quentin Bryce Award. Trained as a filmmaker, their first feature film is WINHANGANHA (2023), commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive.
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