Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I’ll choose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you’ll get to enjoy a taste of them too. I may not manage it every month. But if I do, that will equal 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). There’s still four months more of this excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

1. ‘Great As You Are’ by Susan Griffin

Be like a bear in the forest of yourself. / Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath. / Every hair has life / and standing, as you do, swaying / from one foot to the other / all the forest stands with you.

Susan Griffin is a poet, essayist, and playwright from Los Angeles. She has written twenty books, one a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The recipient of many honors and awards, Griffin was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad. ‘Great As You Are’ is from her book Bending Home: Selected Poems 1967-1998.

2. ‘Waking up with you this morning’ by Kate Tempest

You burrow down then climb up laughing, squash me, / your hungry kiss-mouth wanting to be fed. / Slow and soft you spread yourself across me / your lips lead mine like needles leading thread.

Kate Tempest is a UK poet whose epic narrative poem Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. It completed a sell out run in the UK and New York. Everybody Down, her debut solo album, came out in 2014 to critical acclaim. ‘Waking up with you this morning’ is from her most recent collection of poetry, Hold Your Own. Her debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses, was published in 2016.

3. ‘Getting Through a Strained Fence’ by Philip Hodgins

From that moment you’re on the other side. / A whole new paddock opens up its realms / of greener grass, the prospect overwhelms / you with its possibilities, and while / you fold your arms and try to reconcile / the future with the past, the present fence / still stands behind you making perfect sense.

Philip Hodgins was widely published in Australia and internationally, including in The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review and The New Yorker. His awards included the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, the New South Wales Premier’s Award, the Grace Leven Prize and the National Book Council Poetry Prize. ‘Getting Through a Strained Fence’ appears in Selected Poems: Philip Hodgins.

4. ‘Meeting Beyond Meeting’ by Tess Gallagher

Now the light’s extinguished / and we who knew every curve and dip and scar / must claim each other like hands picking orchids / in the dark. We can tell only by the fragrance / how much needs crushing.

Tess Gallagher is a US poet, essayist and short story writer who has won many awards for her work and published numerous collections of poetry, including Moon Crossing Bridge. ‘Meeting Beyond Meeting’ is from this collection, which centres on the theme of loss and grieving prompted by the death of her husband, the acclaimed short story writer Raymond Carver, in 1988.

5. ‘To My Daimonion’ by Czeslaw Milosz

And I could only repeat it, instead of thinking / About my bad character, the decline of the world, / Or about a lost laundry ticket. / And it seems that while others loved, / Strove, hated, despaired, / I have only been busy with listening intently / To your unclear notes, to change them into words. / I had to accept my fate, called today karma, / For it was as it was, though I did not choose it—And get up every day to honour the work, / Even if there is no guilt of mine in it and no merit.

Czeslaw Milosz ranks among the most respected figures in twentieth-century Polish literature, as well as one of the most respected contemporary poets in the world: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. ‘To My Daimonion’ is from his collection Facing the River: New Poems. Milosz died in 2004.

6. ‘Falling Through Snow’ by Elise Paschen

Then, feeling only the weight of his body, // and also the lightness, as if treading water / or as if shot out of the human / dimension into some other, possessing pure / being, becoming a child again trying / to stand up, he recalls this image: an elk, belly-deep in snow, ploughing the blizzard, panic-stricken, resolute.

Elise Paschen is a poet and editor who served as the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America (1988-2001). She co-founded the Poetry In Motion program, which posts poems in subways and buses. She has received a number of awards, including the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for poetry from Harvard University and the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic and been widely anthologised. ‘Falling Through Snow’ is from her collection Infidelities.

7. ‘America’ by Kate Monaghan

I was given / parents once, their / houses // green from / timbers, cold / plateaus— // how light slit / bedroom / floorboards / over decades, long / surface thinly // altering // as one recalls /there is no / history // not even / yours /

Kate Monaghan is from New York City. A doctoral candidate in Chinese literature at Harvard, she has published poems in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. ‘America’ was published in American Poetry Review (May/June 2016).

8. ‘Birthday Poem’ by Jean Sprackland

the silk shifted, or the spool relinquished it— // unsleeving / slowly at first, then / gathering confidence / spending itself faster / and faster, a torrent / flashing over and pooling beneath—

Jean Sprackland is a poet and writer based in London. She won the Costa Poetry Award in 2008. Her books have also been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the TS Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award. Sprackland is Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also a trustee of the Poetry Archive, the world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. ‘Birthday Poem’ is from her third poetry collection Tilt.

9. ‘A Creed’ by Kei Miller

‘when you are done with the news / because it no longer breaks your heart, / and you now know sand / where there once was river in your inner parts; / when you are ready / to say—I have done terrible things, / and there is a room somewhere that holds / this evidence, a thumbprint / made in blood; // then this creed is for you. We belong to a single country, / and this is our sad anthem.

Kei Miller writes across a range of genres. His poetry has been shortlisted for numerous awards and his recent book of essays won the 2014 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (non-fiction). In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature. ‘A Creed’ is published in his collection A Light Song of Light, which distinguished Jamaican writer, Olive Senior, said ‘sings in the rhythms of ritual and folktale, praise songs and anecdotes … finding the languages in which poetry can sing in dark times’.

10. ‘The Beautiful Anxiety’ by Jill Jones

and distinguish the cold of it, dropt on / sun shadows within the petrochemical hum / its erotic scent, a ghost of ash / passing stars, and a kind of subliminal speech / among legends of flowers and birds, roses / of the place where the phoenix plays / that useless search within the art of speech / to fly amongst lost things again / the long road from the north

Jill Jones is an award-winning poet whose many collections have received critical acclaim and whose work has been widely published in leading literary periodicals in Australia and overseas. Her poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Spanish, French, Czech and Dutch. She has also been an editor of anthologies and magazines over a number of years. Her collection The Beautiful Anxiety—in which the title poem appears—was published in 2013.

11. ‘Hangover in Paris’ by Jennifer Grotz

 I’m getting moody about permanence, not about / the weird abundance of the temporary, little mushrooms // that come up out of nowhere and disappear in a powdery puff / when stepped on accidentally. I think of Nausea, / when Sartre’s character grows so disgusted // he writes in his journal: “Did nothing. Existed.”

Jennifer Grotz is an American author of three poetry collections, The Needle, Cusp and Window Left Open, in which ‘Hangover in Paris’ appears. Grotz teaches at the University of Rochester and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and she serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

12. ‘Goodbye is too small a word’ by Kristen Lang

And because / we cannot climb again, / we pull away—that small / emptiness … at the tips / of our fingers, in our forearms, / its web in our chests, // the hill, / a fracture in our lungs.

Kristen Lang lives in Tasmania and has a PhD in poetry from Deakin University. Her collection of poems and photographs, Let me show you a ripple, was published in 2007. She won the 2015 Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry with her poem ‘Glass’ and ‘Goodbye is too small a word’ won the Rosemary Dobson Award for poetry in 2011.

13. ‘Elk’ by Robert Wrigley

Since snow is at last forecast this afternoon, / I have come to skate, half a mile from shore / when I see him, or see what’s left, / and reconstruct the narrative of his demise. / The coyotes ignored his spraddled forelegs, / hoof prints still born down against the pull /of his back half. A six-point bull elk, / some abrasions on the surface of the ice / where the horns thrashed but held him.

Robert Wrigley has published ten books of poems, most recently Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems, and The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry and a host of other magazines and journals. ‘Elk’ was published in the Spring 2015 issue of Conduit.

14. ‘The Walk’ by Ali Jane Smith

The mind is a silk-satin pillowcase / folded very small. Shiny fibres rubbing / sparking, unfolding into the Goldberg Variations / Disney Princesses, fission, fusion / basketball and flight.

Ali Jane Smith’s poems have appeared in Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Mascara and Famous Reporter. She is the author of a chapbook, Gala (Five Islands Press 2006). ‘The Walk’ appears in Southerly: The Long Paddock—War and Peace issue, 2016.

15. ‘On This’ by Petra White

Suitors surge in on tall ships. / Penelope weaves and unweaves for the one / above all others. / How he flowers in the mind like a wild transparent violet / held to sunlit glass.

Petra White is a Melbourne-based poet. Her first volume of poetry, The Incoming Tide, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the ACT Poetry Prize. Her next collection, The Simplified World, shared the annual Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for 2010. A Hunger was published in 2014 and contains her full-length collection of new poems bound in with her two previous books.

16. ‘The Dining Car Scene in North By Northwest’ by Homer Rieth

Thornhill strikes a customised match / suavely from a matchbook; / she leans forward, into the flame, / takes his hand, with the match in it, / doesn’t let go / but draws the smoke in slowly, / pulls him towards her, by the fingertips / with no apparent pressure

Homer Rieth has a doctorate in literature and lectured in Classical Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. He has lived in Minyip in western Victoria since 1999, where he has been running free philosophy classes for five years. In 2016, there are 24 class members, including farmers, working professionals and retirees. Rieth is well known for his ‘epic’ poem extending over 359 pages and titled ‘Wimmera’. His book 150 Motets was published in 2013 and ‘The Dining Car Scene in North By Northwest’ is published in his book The Dining Car Scene.