Dan Disney’s latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Jordie Albiston (a treasured friend and magnificent experimental formalist); Mary Oliver (for her extraordinary open-hearted courage of expression, viz. ‘[m]y work is loving the world’); John Kinsella (a hero, latterly a friend, who peerlessly calibrates creative and critical production to an exemplary, engaged ethics); Juliana Spahr (for her legitimate ferocities); Jane Hirshfield (for her quietly astonished veracities).

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, it changes according to the project’s methodologies. With each book, I try to shift the processes that catalyse the poems.