Emerging Writers Series: Robbie Coburn
“I would hear from people who told me the work had helped and comforted them, people who were grateful I had written openly about these topics and given voice to these often unspeakable things. It made me see that it’s so much bigger than me and it is important to write about these awful experiences. It isn’t easy but I have to write what’s true to me, and I think this is where the connection and hope enters.”
I recently had the opportunity to read Robbie Coburn’s remarkable collection Ghost Poetry (Upswell, 2024), and it afforded me the opportunity to reflect on the things we do and don’t speak about - with our friends, our peers, and across our wider communities.
The collection can on first read be an abrasive one. Coburn doesn’t shy away from the ‘taboo’ and as someone who grew up in an era that essentially denied the existence of mental health, reading this was another welcome opportunity to reappraise the ways these topics have been shunned (a read of Kirsten Reneau’s essay, ‘After I am Raped I write a Book and Do Not Use the Word Rape’ has also been an eye-opening experience highlighting the ways we often fail to name the wolf in the room).
Coburn’s collection is a brave step towards the power that lays in naming our experiences, especially when they’re challenging.
It was a pleasure to chat to him more about his work, his journey into poetry, the lifeline that it holds, and the ways that writing about that which is most difficult inevitably extends out a hand of connection and hope to others.
Tell us a bit more about yourself and your background. How did you become a poet, and when did you decide you wanted to pursue this seriously?
I grew up on a farm and knew early on I wanted to be a writer. My mum used to read me and my brothers the verse of Banjo Paterson and I was so enamoured with it, especially given where I came from. When I was fourteen, everything changed. My mum worked in a library at a primary school, and was sometimes allowed to bring home books that were deemed “inappropriate” for the library. One day she brought home a slim volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry. I remember the moment I picked it up so clearly. The blurb began simply with the words, “Love. Death.” I opened the book and read “The Raven,” and the words shot through me and transformed everything. It was like I was holding in my hands the life I had always wanted for myself. I knew then who I was, and from that day on all I have ever wanted to be is a poet.
Your poetry collection, Ghost Poetry, tackles some pretty complex and often taboo themes, and it’s clear a lot of care and time has been poured into it. I’d love to learn more about how the collection came together and why these themes felt urgent for you to build the collection around?
To me, poetry has always been about giving voice to things that are unspeakable, it is a voice in the dark. It’s strange; I write openly about things I would probably never talk to another human being about, and I did this from the very start of my career. Poetry has always been a place I felt safe. Writing poetry is like a conversation with God.
My first published poem when I was seventeen touched on a lot of the topics that are explored in Ghost Poetry. I think all true poetry comes from a place of urgency and necessity. I wrote the title poem and a few others such as “The Saddle Maker” and “Straw Horses” in one day, back in 2021. The poems were published in journals, and then I didn’t really write anything for the better part of two years. It was torture and I was beyond lost. I had completely given up on everything and thought I’d never write again. Then I was featured at Canberra Writers Festival, met some incredible people, and something reawakened in me.
I wrote most of the book over the course of a few months during extremely difficult nights after I came home. I was in a dark place and felt like a ghost - existing but not truly being here. That was when I realized Ghost Poetry was the perfect title for this surreal, nightmarish, dreamlike collection.
It happened very naturally, but I think I’d been preparing myself for a long time to be capable of writing it.
Ghost Poetry offers readers these bright moments of connection and hope. How cathartic a process was this for you, and what are some of your hopes for the collection overall for readers?
In the process of writing, I don’t think about how the poems will be perceived. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily cathartic to write like this, it’s art, not therapy or a diary. The poem is all that matters and the poem comes first.
That said, poetry has always been my reason for carrying on, and a lifeline. It’s a strange duality. I sometimes wonder if it does me more harm than good to put this work out there. But I couldn’t live without it and I wouldn’t be here without it. It is who I am. The state I was in during its writing compared to its release was truly darkness and light.
I would hear from people who told me the work had helped and comforted them, people who were grateful I had written openly about these topics and given voice to these often unspeakable things. It made me see that it’s so much bigger than me and it is important to write about these awful experiences. It isn’t easy but I have to write what’s true to me, and I think this is where the connection and hope enters.
My hope now is that perhaps this work can help someone somewhere in the same that way loving and reading poetry has helped and saved me so many times.
In my review, I talk a little about how I’ve been learning as a writer about the different approaches we can take to connect with readers, with some focusing on emotional/cognitive experiences and others writing from the body and concentrating on physical experiences. Your collection felt like the latter for me, with lots of strong physical imagery. I was wondering whether this is something you’ve come to intentionally or if it just happened to emerge in the writing process? (And obviously, feel free to disagree with me here if you don’t feel this way about your writing!)
I think my work uses both of those approaches. It’s not a conscious thing. I think I use the body to give the emotional experience a physical form, as I think depression and emotional pain is what underlies everything I’ve written. Though of course when it comes to things like self-harm, these have been very real physical experiences for me.
It’s a fascinating question and I’m grateful you’ve made me think about it, because I don’t ever set out to write from a particular place. I don’t know where the poems come from or what they mean until they are completed. Sometimes even then the meaning is more a feeling than an identifiable concept.
Can you share more about your journey to publication with the collection? Was it challenging to get publishers engaged in what you have to share here because of the themes?
I have been very fortunate to have been supported by some truly incredible people over the years who believe in what I do. I know it isn’t for everyone and some people look down on work that they see as being purely “confessional” poetry. I know it can also be too intense and painful for others when certain topics are discussed. I get it. There were times when I had given up on certain books but Terri-ann White, who published my last collection The Other Flesh at UWA Publishing, has always been a huge supporter of my work. When she started Upswell, my beautiful agent Jeanne Ryckmans (who has helped more than I have words to say) gave her the manuscript and she took it on immediately.
This book came together really smoothly in every sense, publishing-wise. Terri-ann is a huge champion of poetry and is extremely supportive. I am very lucky and she is incredible. I’ll always be so grateful to her for everything she has done for me and my work.
And as a follow-on from that, what role do you think poetry has in offering a gateway to hope and healing for others going through similar experiences?
I live for poetry completely. It’s like breath, and is everything to me. It’s always been my absolute lifeline and the only thing in my life that has ever made sense. So I do think it offers a gateway to people who seek it out and want to read deeply. I hope work like mine can provide hope and healing for someone who is suffering in the ways I suffer, the way poems by poets I admire have done for me.
Who have been some of the biggest influences on your writing? Tell us a bit about who’s on your bookshelves we should be reading?
They are too numerous to name. Poetry has always felt like a kind of conversation to me. I’m so grateful to play some small part in that conversation continuing. My single biggest influence would be Robert Adamson, the great Australian poet who was my hero and mentor. Everyone should be reading him, forever, as well as Judith Beveridge.
A lot of what I read to this day is what I was first influenced by when I started. I am a huge Shakespeare devotee, so I’m always revisiting his work and return to it when I need to remember why I started. Poe is the same for me.
Other major influences are poets like Sylvia Plath, Franz Wright, Sharon Olds, Arthur Rimbaud, Frank Stanford, Antonin Artaud, Philip Larkin, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Moore. And I am always reading haiku.
As far as contemporary Australian poets, everyone should be reading Olivia Ark, Michele Seminara, Amanda Anastasi, Claire Miranda Roberts, Dimitra Harvey, Anne Walsh, Luke Best, Jo Langdon, Luke Davies, and Lou Verga.
I am also extremely influenced by songwriters, particularly Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, David McComb, Nick Cave, and Emma Ruth Rundle.
Lastly, what’s next for you? Are you working on anything at the moment that you could share with us? Are there any events or readings coming up that readers can attend and support you?
My first verse novel, The Foal in the Wire, is forthcoming from Hachette Australia next year, and I am slowly working on a new collection of poems.
I haven’t done many events or readings in recent years, for various reasons, but I am hoping that soon I will have the strength to overcome those fears and read in public more often. There is nothing like reading poetry out loud to people who care about poetry.
That said, I’ve appeared at some wonderful festivals recently, and a memorial reading for Robert Adamson on the Hawkesbury River, that I was a part of last year, it was one of the most beautiful and special moments of my life.
Robbie Coburn is a poet based in Melbourne, described by ArtsHub as ‘one of Australia’s most essential poets’. His verse novel, The Foal in the Wire, will be published by Hachette Australia in 2025. His poetry collections include Ghost Poetry (2024), And I Could Not Have Hurt You (2023), and The Other Flesh (2019). His poems have been published in Poetry, Meanjin, Island, Westerly, and elsewhere, and anthologised in books including Writing to the Wire (2016) and To End All Wars (2018). He has also run poetry workshops for youth mental health organisation headspace.
Website: robbiecoburn.com
Instagram: @robbiecoburn
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
