This week, on The ABR Podcast, Eleanor Spencer-Regan reflects on Melbourne poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic career. Wallace-Crabbe made the poem ‘a space for thinking in public’, she writes. In his work, poetry is treated ‘less as statement than as real-time event: a site in which ideas are tried out rather than asserted’. His most enduring legacy, Spencer-Regan suggests, lies in the intellectual capaciousness of this approach: one that is ‘curious, plural, generous, and ever alert to contingency’. 

Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet-Clarke Hall, Australia’s first residential college for women. Here is Eleanor Spencer-Regan with ‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’, published in the March issue of ABR.