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. This will equal 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). There’s just three months more of this excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

1. ‘A While’ by Claire Potter

unbroken / between us / the language of fireflies— // a slipknot of daffodils caught in a tide / of felty darkness / but what I mean to say is / love / doesn’t need / bait / (or the preface of sticks & bone) // it needs a line.

Claire Potter is an Australian writer and translator living in London. ‘A While’ appears in her full-length collection Swallow. She also published two chapbooks of poetry In Front of a Comma  and N’ombre. She holds a Masters from Université Paris VII, and was doctoral candidate at Paris VII and the University of Western Australia. In 2006, she received an Australian Young Poet’s Fellowship and was mentored by Kevin Hart.

2. ‘Sleeping with a Southern Carpet Python’ by John Kinsella

I sleep deeply and in a dreamless stupor, though it has / since fed my nights with images and dark rumours. Living dead, I still make body-warmth and the cold / blood of the snake exchanges its knowledge, / its stock of stories and experiences. When I wake / with the morning streaming coldlight into the room, / I shudder with poikilothermic thirst clutching the walls of my cocoon close, synapses tuning to the expectation of snake at my feet /

John Kinsella is the author of over thirty books. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. In 2007 he received the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. ‘Sleeping with a Southern Carpet Python’ is from his collection Sack.

3. ‘The Forge’ by George Bilgere

and how he solved the problem / by picking up the tricycle by the handlebars / and smashing it through the windshield / of our brand new family station wagon, / his face red with scotch, his black tie / and jacket flapping with effort, the tricycle / making its way a little farther with each blow

George Bilgere has won the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Midland Authors Award, a Witter Bynner Fellowship, and the May Swenson Poetry Award.  His most recent book of poems is Imperial (2014). He His poems are often featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and he has appeared as a guest on A Prairie Home Companion. ‘The Forge’ is published in River Styx Number 95, 2015.

4. ‘Mourning Picture’ by Adrienne Rich

Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill, / my doll lies in her wicker pram / gazing at western Massachusetts. / This was our world. / I could remake each shaft of grass / feeling its rasp on my fingers, / draw out the map of every lilac leaf / or the net of veins on my father’s / grief-tranced hand.

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W.W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s. Rich’s poem ‘Mourning Picture’ is based on an arresting painting by American artist, Edwin Ramanzo Elmer, produced after the death from appendicitis of his 9-year-old daughter Effie. The narrative voice in Rich’s poem belongs to the dead Effie, the couple’s only child.

5. Wolfwatching by Ted Hughes

Woolly-bear white, the old wolf /
Is listening to London. His eyes, withered in /
Under the white wool, black peepers, /
While he makes nudging, sniffing offers / At the horizon of noise, the blue-cold April /
Invitation of airs. The lump of meat /
Is his confinement. He has probably had all his life /
Behind wires, fraying his eye-efforts /
On the criss-cross embargo. He yawns /
Peevishly like an old man and the yawn goes /
Right back into Kensington and there stops /
Floored with glaze. Eyes / have worn him away.

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was UK Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. ‘Wolfwatching’ is from his collection of the same name.

6. ‘Lessons for Young Poets’ by John Forbes

7. Envoi // the rest is technical & you’ll / steal it yourself / but just remember / if you take care of the art / your sister, Life / takes care of the human part.

John Forbes (1950–1998) was part of the ‘Generation of 1968’, and began publishing his poems in the early 1970s in journals such as Poetry Magazine and New Poetry. His first collection of poetry, Tropical Skiing, was published in 1976. ‘Lessons for Young Poets’ appears in Damaged Glamour one of his ten colllections. Forbes published Surfers Paradise magazine and worked on magazines such as Leatherjacket. Moving to Melbourne in 1989, he was closely involved in literary activities including writers’ festivals and poetry readings, and was involved with small presses and the publication of literary journals such as Scripsi.

7. ‘Doubles’ by Tracy Ryan

My late good friend was a twinless twin … // At sixty-one / he wrote to me, ‘It shocks me still. / Perhaps he lived and I have died. / Maybe somewhere he writes the book / I talk about, is happily married, / a steadfast father.’ // Stuck with the work / of moving house after years in place, // he added, with characteristic smirk // ‘This rather Borges-like fantasy / is not unconsoling. The bugger can do // the packing for me.’

Tracy Ryan was born and grew up in Western Australia. She has a BA in English from Curtin University and a BA (Hons) in French from the University of New England in NSW. She is especially interested in foreign languages and the translation of poetry. She has won, commended and been shortlisted in many of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards and has published numerous collections. ‘Doubles’ was published in Jacket 2 in 2012. Ryan blogs with the poet John Kinsella.

8. ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ by Linda France

If a flower is always a velvet curtain / onto some peepshow he never opens, // It’s a shock to find himself, sheltering / from the storm in a greenhouse, //seduced by a leaf blushing blue / at the tips, begging to be stroked. // He’s caught in the unfamiliar ruffle / of knickerbockers or petticoat, a scent // of terror, vanilla musk. If he were / not himself, he’d let his trembling lips / articulate the malleability of wax;

Linda France is currently Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Leeds. She also tutors both privately and through the Poetry School. She has published several collections and other books and edited the acclaimed anthology Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe 1993). She has worked on a number of collaborations with visual artists and musicians and around 40 Public Art projects. ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ won UK’s National Poetry Award in 2014.

9. ‘Against the Grain’ by Sarah Rice

Friendships too have a grain / People in general / Ourselves in particular / Time itself is a grain we cannot go against / even if we wanted to / The morning light slicing cleanly through the dark / the shadow as it climbs the hill / There is only one way to move / through a night thick with thought / and thin on sleep

Sarah Rice is a Canberra based art-theory lecturer, visual artist and writer. Her limited-edition letterpress book of poetry, Those Who Travel, is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Australia. She was shortlisted in the 2013 Montreal Poetry Prize and co-won the 2011 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for her poem ‘Against the Grain’, published on the Island website and subsequently published in Long Glances: A Snapshot of new Australian Poetry from the Inaugural Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Poetry Prize.

10. ‘Long Distant Relationship with a Mountain’ by David Hawkins

a trig point decentred in the mist, / spectral sheep splayed tarsally among / the drop-skied moors, while someone else / is summiting surely in their own home-made uplands. // A snipe whittles up from a cloak of rushes / and I try to keep its ember alight with my eye / until with perfect clearance it falls / off the edge, or edges beyond seeing.

David Hawkins is a writer and ecologist from Bristol with a particular interest in the intersections of landscape and time and human activity. He was a founding editor of the Likestarlings collaborative poetry project. ‘Long Distant Relationship with a Mountain’ was the second prize winner of the UK National Poetry Society international competition in 2015. The entry was praised by judge David Wheatley as ‘poetry as field composition, assembling, mapping, “thinking with these hills” to summon the wonders of place into being before the reader’s eyes.’

11. ‘Biracial’ by Carolyn Oxley

The love that made you / was simple as the sounds / at breakfast: clink of pan / on stove, scraping-back of chair. / No slave ever rocked / inside the boat of your hips, / no explorer pried open / an African river. // They say the ancestors / reside in a sacred grove. / Your homeland is wherever / you stand.

Carolyn Oxley studied literature at Georgetown University and counts herself lucky to have attended poetry workshops at Aspen Summer Words and Lighthouse Writers in Denver. ‘Biracial’ was the third prize winner of the UK National Poetry Society international competition in 2015. Judge Esther Morgan said the ‘balance between personal and public histories is what most impressed and moved us [the judges], articulated in a form and language that mirrors the daughter’s straightness of spine.’

12. ‘Antipodes’ by Bronwyn Lea

There is a man I know with sand-heavy / eyes that are sometimes sullen blue  / like the haze of the eucalypt grove / that makes you remember all the f-words / you never use like forgiven and forever. / He has grown on me like an embryo / until without him I feel thrown / into being incomplete like the wintering / rose bush de-leafed and out of bloom, / like the falling apart mountain, / a mountain that all my tying together / won’t mend.

Bronwyn Lea is the author of four books of poems including Flight Animals in which ‘Antipodes’ appears. Her poetry has been widely anthologised appearing most recently in Thirty Australian Poets, Australian Poetry Since 1788, Sixty Classic Australian Poems, and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. She has won numerous awards including the Somerset Poetry Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award. She teaches literature and writing at the University of Queensland and is Poetry Editor at the University of Queensland Press.

13. Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse) by Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; / And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile; / And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her, / And she balanced in the delight of her thought, // A wren, happy, tail into the wind, / Her song trembling the twigs and small branches. / The shade sang with her; / The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing, / And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)  graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1929. His first book, Open House (1941), took ten years to write and was critically acclaimed upon its publication. He went on to publish sparingly but his reputation grew with each new collection, including The Waking which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.

14. ‘Another Report’ by Tracey Knapp

winter when the crows crowded the trees and cried. / I closed for business. I gave up /whatever I had that felt like it was dying on me— / an old cactus in a teacup, my dumb guitar, / the facial expressions for thanks and I don’t think so. / I left a friend that year.

Tracey Knapp is the author of Mouth, winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award in 2014, and in which ‘Another Report’ appears. She has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, Five Points, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, The Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere.

15. ‘The Making of a Japanese Print’ by Phyllis Webb

Door behind the mother / closing as father in blue / blows out. // White filled in, hatch- / crossings for negative space. / Decadent life. // Flesh tint on / with extreme caution. All moves are dangerous. // open the door and wind pours in / with dust. Lift the head / of mother an inch / her attention goes / out the unseen window.

Phyllis Webb is a Canadian poet who also worked as a radio broadcaster. Author of numerous books of poetry and one of broadcast scripts, essays and reviews, Webb is a writer of stature in Canadian letters. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her work as ‘brilliantly crafted, formal in its energies and humane in its concern’. ‘The Making of a Japanese Print’ is in her collection Hanging Fire.

16. ‘The Junior High School Band Concert’ by David Wagoner

By the last lost chord, our director / Looked older and soberer. /  No doubt, in his mind’s ear / Some band somewhere / In some music of some Sphere / Was striking a note as pure / As the wishes of Franz Schubert, /  But meanwhile here we were: / A lesson in everything minor, / Decomposing our first composer.

David Wagoner is the author of numerous collections of poetry and he served as a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. Wagoner is also the author of ten novels, including The Escape Artist (1965), which was adapted into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He is also the editor of Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63 (1972).