'Nic Brasch: Welcome to The Garret. The Garret podcast is a series of interviews with the best writers writing today. Alicia Sometimes is a writer, a poet, a broadcaster, a podcaster, a musician, a spoken-word performer and a footy fan. I spent an hour with Alicia at the State Library of Victoria, and we talked about all the things that fascinate her and that influence her work. My chat with Alicia is coming up in a moment.' (Introduction)
Transcript available from website.
Show notes
-Alicia read non-fiction every chance she got as a child, including entries from Encyclopaedia Britannica. She can, however, recall poems by A. A. Milne.
-In her teenage years, she continued to read non-fiction but expanded her repertoire to include Bob Dylan and John Lennon (both of which she describes as ‘out there’). She also discovered Berni Janssen, a Melbourne poet.
- Realising the gap in her fiction, she deliberately went back to read classics such as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Sally Morgan’s My Place.
- Her love of humour and playfulness was influenced by Monty Python, The Goon Show, and E. Cummings.
- Alicia cites PiO, another Melbourne-based poet, as an influence on her poetry today, a poet who also cites facts as she does (for example, she the quote from John Adams).
- And just to confirm, Alicia’s first poetry reading was on 3 October 1992 (the day Jeff Kennett was elected).
- Alicia admires the performance of Dorothy Parker, who read her own poems.
- One of her favourite poems is ‘Julbilate Agno’ by the monk Christopher Smart.
- Peggy Noonan was Ronald Reagan’s speech writer, and she included a well-known poem in the speech mourning the Challenger.
