how to launch a poem

About the author

Grace Yee

Grace Yee’s collection Chinese Fish won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs...

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In ConversationIn the ’80s, and maybe the early ’90s, fashion was a political statement just like art was…and real art wasn’t about selling out or succeeding in a mainstream context; it was the opposite. The whole idea was that you didn’t want to conform. Anyone who was trying to make money off your art or helping you make money was corrupt or compromised. The last thing you did as an artist or a writer in the ’80s was self-publicise – it was so naff, it wasn’t done. Street cred was what mattered. And I’ve been watching, with social media and the internet, this 180-degree shift over the last few decades.

Dying of exposure

Non-fictionPublishing is a weird industry, a retail supply service where every day hundreds – thousands – of brand-new, untested products are launched, each one a little bit different to the last. The long-haul career trajectory of most writers is increasingly difficult to maintain with incomes nosediving, as evidenced by multiple surveys. The road is cluttered with novelists brought down by ‘bad track’, their new books rejected because of the poor sales of previous titles. But as readers we still need help to discover good books, to figure out what to read next. As book pages, magazines and newspapers shrink or disappear altogether, it’s no longer clear what impact book reviewers can have on a career. The endorsement of someone whose work – critical or otherwise – you admire remains important to many writers.

Drowning in a puddle

Non-fictionThe thought of being accepted is terrifying when you’re so used to not being accepted. You expect the worst because the worst is what you’ve become accustomed to. The people in that meet-up group will become your closest friends for the next year. You’ll come to understand that they worry about the same silly little things you do. But those silly little things aren’t so silly and they’re not so little. We just designate them as such because that’s how we’ve been taught by some of the people around us – who expect us to behave in the exact same way they do. But life just doesn’t work like that. Different experiences create different strengths and weaknesses in all of us.