What can poetry do to change the world?

Earlier this year, we met up with poet and artist Jazz Money in a half-renovated room at Carriageworks during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Scooched into the corner sitting cross-legged on the floor, Red Room Poetry Creative Producer Izzy Roberts-Orr spoke with Jazz about the radical potential of poetry, Sara M Saleh’s brilliant poem, ‘Border control: mediations’, and specificity as a gateway to the universal.

Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist whose practice is centred around poetics to produce works that encompass installation, performance, film and print. Their most recent poetry collection is mark the dawn, published by UQP and now available at all good bookstores.

Sara M. Saleh is a human rights lawyer, organiser, writer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. She has been published and anthologised widely, and made history as the first poet to win both the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat is published by UQP, and her debut novel Songs for the Dead and the Living  is published by Affirm Press.

'Border control: mediations' by Sara M Saleh was published in Overland Issue 242, Autumn 2021, and was the winner of the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

Explore Poetry Month

August is Poetry Month - a continent-wide celebration of contemporary Australian poetry established by Red Room Poetry to increase access, awareness and visibility of poetry in all its forms and for all audiences.

Explore the full program at https://poetrymonth.org.au/

This year, as part of Poetry Month, we're bringing the UK's Biggest Poetry and Performance Festival Down Under. The UK’s biggest poetry and performance festival BBC's Contains Strong Language comes to Sydney 28-31 August.

Check out the full program here - including events featuring both Jazz and Sara https://redroompoetry.org/projects/poetry-month/contains-strong-language/