Image: 2016’s Australian Poetry Slam Champion, Arielle Cottingham. Supplied.
‘Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge,’ wrote Percy Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, 1821. Nearly 200 years on and Shelley’s words still reverberate.
Arielle Cottingham, a poet and performance artist out of coastal Texas, now based in Melbourne and 2016’s Australian Poetry Slam Champion reminded ArtsHub of another line in Shelley’s essay: ‘”Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”’
