Sydney, 15 June 2023: A packed audience gathered at the Centre last week to hear once again from some of Australia’s most respected writers, this time two acclaimed women poets, as part of the Ramsay Writers Series.
The Ramsay Writers Series is a new Centre initiative designed to showcase established Australian writers. At each event, noteworthy writers read from their own work, as well as offering perspectives on influential past works. For 2023 the series is focussed on celebrating Australian poets.
For our third Ramsay Writers Event, the headline acts were poets Bronwyn Lea and Kimberly K.Williams with a special guest appearance from Luke Whitington.
Professor Bronwyn Lea is a published poet and fiction writer, and University of Queensland’s Head of the School of Communications and Arts. She has authored eleven books including the multi-award winning Flight Animals, The Other Way Out and The Deep North. Her poems have been widely anthologised, most recently in Australian Poetry Since 1788, Thirty Australian Poets, Sixty Classic Australian Poems, and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry.
The founding editor of The Best Australian Poetry series, Professor Lea is also the inaugural editor of Australian Poetry Journal, and poetry editor at Meanjin. She has founded two ongoing and highly successful poetry awards: the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.
Speaking at the event, Professor Lea named American 20th century poet Wallace Stevens as her greatest influence. She said while his poetry was initially difficult to comprehend, once cracked open, “…the poem is as large as the world. That is when I signed on, when poetry became for me, not only art but philosophy and the way of being in the world,” she said.
Professor Lea read from Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West. She also named 20th century Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva as an important influence on her work, and treated the audience to a reading of I Know The Truth. From her own poetry collections, Professor Lea read The Dream, How to Become a Fossil and what she playfully described as her most ‘narcissistic’ poem, Bronwyn Lea.
The second poet to read, Kimberly K. Willams, is the the author of three books: Still Lives (Gazebo Books), which received a 2022 Canberra Critics Circle Award in Writing; Sometimes a Woman (Recent Work Press), which won the 2022 WILLA Literary Award for Poetry; and Finally, the Moon (Stephen F. Austin University Press). Kimberly was short-listed for the University of Canberra’s Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize in 2019, and her poems appear in journals and anthologies worldwide. She is the curator of the Manning Clark House Poetry Reading Series in Canberra and she directed Canberra University’s Poetry on the Move Festival from 2021-2022.
Kimberly told the audience that the legendary Romantic poet William Wordsworth had had the greatest influence on her poetry, describing how as an undergraduate, the ideals of the Romantics held great appeal for her. She read Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us to showcase his timelessness, saying it never ceased to amaze her how visionary he was: how he could foreshadow in the 1800s that we would now live in a world “just so caught up in itself.’’ She also read I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
The second influence that Kimberly referenced was Langston Hughes, a major figure in the 20th century creative moment known as the Harlem Renaissance. She read two of his poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers and Theme for English B, a poem about the complexities of identity in a racist society. Kimberly, who grew up in Detroit, said his poetry reminded her of the gospel music and jazz of her childhood.From her own poetry collections, Kimberly read At The Rise, Deep Like The River, Afternoon Thoughts and Sydney.
Kimberly encouraged the audience to see the play and enjoyment in poetry, and not get lost in its technicalities, describing poetry as “…a universal stomp, a way of unifying humans that is greater than the sum of its parts.” She said you can earn a PhD in poetry but there is an essence that defies academia and analysis and just requires enjoyment: “…sometimes a sense of stillness to be with what you are hearing.”
Ramsay Centre CEO Professor Simon Haines said it was a delight to host two such talented poets and to hear how great works from the past influenced their thinking and creative processes.
If you wish to be invited to future Ramsay Writers Events email ramsayevents@ramsaycentre.org
Media contact: Sarah Switzer 0407 816 098/ sarah.switzer@ramsaycentre.org