Poetry front and centre at festival

THE Bendigo Writers Festival is just around the corner, with 51 events taking place from Thursday, 6 May to Sunday, 9 May.

Chewton poet Tegan Gigante will join Ben MacEllen and four other top wordsmiths from regional Victoria for the conversation as part of the Off the Page event.

Gigante said she is also grateful for the chance to do a live reading in person from her latest release All Things Flow.

“There obviously hasn’t been a lot of that in the past year so there’s a sense of not taking that for granted,” she said.

“Poetry is well represented, a dear friend of mine and I are reading at the same event, the Off the Page event, and that’s great.”

As the operator of an indie publishing company called Birdfish Books, Gigante said she enjoys being on both the performing and publishing side of poetry.

“I’m often promoting other people’s work and other poets and it’s kind of great to be just representing myself,” she said.

The poet has released two books and said she can really see how she has grown in her writing.

“I think I’ve spent a lot of time refining the craft between those books.

“While I was on the right track in terms of idea and feeling, I spent a lot of time working on the technical side of the craft and I think they’re more accomplished poems,” she said.

Often found performing her poetry with a band, Gigante said the musical side of poetry is important to her.

“I’m really passionate about the melodic qualities of poetry.

“We set poems to music so I’m really aware of what the music qualities of sound in a poem are how they can serve the poems,” she said.

With the tagline for this year’s Bendigo Writers Festival simply ‘Strewth’, Gigante said idea resonates with her, especially after last year.

“One of the connotations of that is we’ve come out of this year with that buzzword of things being essential, so of course it’s not just food and shelter, it’s art and writing,” she said.

For ticketing and more information on the Bendigo Writers Festival, visit bendigowritersfestival.com.au.