In 2009, when I started to write poetry seriously, i.e., confidently, ambitiously, I noticed a change in my reading patterns—more poetry, more than one book at a time. (When I was a kid I established a rule of two halves—finish a book before you start another; finish every book.) Around six months ago I was reading only poetry and felt unbalanced so I started to read prose again and found my attention span for longer forms had shortened. Re-enter Vikram Seth’s infamously long A Suitable Boy, which honed my concentration (though when I first read it, at Apollo Bay in the late 1990s, it was more soporific than stimulating).

Another change in my reading patterns occurred in 2013, not long after I moved from Melbourne to Rockhampton, when I read Sylvia Plath’s Ariel: The Restored Edition. ‘These new poems of mine,’ Plath states, ‘are written for the ear, not the eye’. Ever since, I’ve read poems—others’, and my own—out loud.