Let’s get this out of the way. Prince was a song-writer, not a poet. While pop music does make use of poetic techniques, the modes of expression are fundamentally different. The craft and conventions of pop music are wholly different to those of poetry. Nevertheless, (as a teacher) I often use ‘Raspberry Beret’ to demonstrate the power of image over abstraction.

In a scintillating talk organised by Express Media, the Dharug/Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen speaks of the production of literature as historically being a dangerous place for Aboriginal people. I heard her say this around the time I was reading Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Penny van Toorn’s Writing Always Arrives Naked and Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker’s beautiful Lemons in the Chicken Wire.

Overland is seeking poetry submissions for a special online edition – ‘Tribulations of the digital frontier’ – to be guest edited by long-time Overland volunteer, Mitchell Welch.

Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse.

When Pound structured poetry into three forms in the 1930s (melapoeia, phanopoiea and logopoeia), it’s unlikely he could have anticipated the confessional, tag-and-shareable, anti-intellectual iteration of online poetry in the 21st century. #instapoetry, Pinterest poetry and Tumblr poetry, often created by the same individuals and shared across platforms, push a direct, targeted meaning which is arguably without poetic or intellectual interference.

In the ‘We are the world’ footage, Dylan is either drunk or high or just beginning to be dully suspicious of the whole charity super-group music-single enterprise. He barely mouths the lyrics to the song, if he knows them at all.

It would be limited/limiting to state that Shah Idil’s poetry explores impacts of colonisation, migration, Islamaphobia and transgenerational trauma – this collection is filled with hope, tenderness and ‘reminders’. As Shah Idil writes in the poem ‘Reminder’: ‘Hold out your memories / in your palms without shame. / They are all we have / and they matter.’ Jill Jones, Aisyah Shah Idil, Fiona Hile and Jeanine Leane reviewed.

These are words, phrases and stanzas that work the teeth and tongue, and the dense packages of syllables and consonants are often delivered in bite-sized chunks. Longer poems, such as ‘Dunes’, ‘Nether’ and ‘Mostly water’, are broken into shorter sections, so that there is a perpetual sense of ongoing creation and destruction, of worlds and substances forming only to dissolve again at a touch.

Translation is more than just carrying a text from language to language; it’s also a passage from audience to audience. To its Greek listeners, the Iliad didn’t need footnotes or endnotes. It wasn’t ‘literature’ or a status marker for taste and education. It was popular entertainment, put on at boozy gatherings by MCs whose talent could get them free drinks. That mood is hard to recapture now, even if a translator’s philology is faultless.

My favourite living poet, a poet who seemed like he’d never stop writing, died in his sleep in his home in Hudson, New York, on Sunday 3rd of September, a strangely appropriate way to go, perhaps, for John Ashbery – unconscious, half in this world, half in another, kind of like his poems.

One way to read poetry in Australia is to see it as being in a constant state of conflict. For the most part, this is a cold war where poets argue with poets in very poetic ways – the outcry about Geoff Page’s Southerly blog probably counts as the outer limit of this activity, which manifests more often in email exchanges, reviews that are compliment sandwiches or gossipy asides. Sometimes this breaks out into the open, as we saw when John Kinsella took out a restraining order against Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence and which the Sydney Morning Herald covered in 2006.

If Dylan has one indefatigable character trait it’s that he’s not preoccupied with the small details. He cherry-picks the essence of the thing in question and tosses out the carcass. Poetry deals in the language of feeling, capturing and amplifying the fleeting sensations too unimportant for the day-to-day functions of consciousness. The practice of poetry is less a matter of form than a state of mind. Few saw that proposition last year when the Swedish academy announced the 2016 laureate.

What I like and admire about Adrienne Rich, poet and writer, is that her activism didn’t directly occupy public space, but inhabited the sublime spaces between behaviour and language. The 16th of May commemorates the eighty-eighth birthday of Rich, a woman who, more than many, has influenced my views on art, feminism and the archetypes of femininity. She was political and actively so, famously declining the National Medal of Arts, and protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1997.

7.30pm, Monday 19 June 1000 £ Bend, Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne Free event Overland's Deputy Editor and poet Sian Vate will join fellow contemporary poets Saaro Umar and Elena Gomez for a night of readings hosted by Australian Poetry.

As a book with its institutional filters, Gularabulu can be a disquieting read. It is clad in notes: about Aboriginal English, explaining stories before they’re told, guiding pronunciation. Its transcription occasionally describes, rather than carries, Roe’s wordwork. His breaths, even background noises, are painstakingly noted. I describe this as poetry, perhaps incorrectly. Others call Gularabulu a story collection.

French poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud once proposed the following formula for maintaining an ideal book collection; by his working, 1 of 361 works: K + X > 361 > K – Z, where K = 361, X = a newly acquired book, and Z = a previously owned and since-relinquished book. While this formula amounts to a collection of books currently owned, rather than exhaustive cumulative tally of books read, it does at least set in our sights a number more manageable.