Creative accounting: an unexpected career path

I’ve always written poetry – apart from my voracious appetite for novels as a child I read a lot of ee cummings, Alan Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, John Keats, Kenneth Slessor and James Joyce and loved to play around with blank verse, stream of consciousness narrative and forms ranging from sonnets to haikus. At one stage I inveigled my way onto a bill of poetry readings at the Art Gallery of NSW, which to me at the age of 20 seemed the height of mainstream acceptance, and showed me that even nihilism had a bourgeois audience.