Poetry on the Move is a five-day poetry festival curated by the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra (UC). The festival has been running each year since 2015 and offers a busy program of workshops, panel discussions, poet interviews, symposium papers and, of course, poetry readings. The events are held at several venues across Canberra.

Poetry on the Move aims to promote poetry through engagement with international, national and local poetry communities. This year’s festival ran from 17 October to 21 October, with festival fringe activities extending beyond those dates.

Owen Bullock from UC runs a website about Poetry in Process and chaired a panel discussion during the festival about how poets work and write.

 

The discussion during Owen’s session ranged across the location and duration that poets spend writing, the way the form of a poem and the writing process interact and the process of writing a poem when it is based on research material.

While the circumstance and structure of a poem affect the writing process, and different poets will inevitably write in different ways, many poets believe it’s best to let a poem develop organically. That’s to say, the poem is likely to be better if the poet allows the poem to evolve on its own path.

Amongst the extensive program at each Poetry on the Move, you will find a small fee is payable to attend the festival workshops (they sell out quickly). But, amazingly, all other festival events are free! So keep the Poetry on the Move festival in mind if you enjoy a week when ‘too much poetry is never enough’.

The Poetry on the Move website can be found here.

Owen Bullock’s Poetry in Process website can be found here.