Martin Langford Martin has published six books of poetry, including The Human Project: New and Selected Poems and Microtexts, and edited Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788-2008. He is a previous director of the Australian Poetry Festival. He is on the judging panel for the 2012 Blake Poetry Prize.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I liked language from early on – from, say, my late teens – and it wasn’t long, perhaps early twenties, before that turned into a preference for poetry. I’m not sure why poetry and not prose: narrative and poetry speak to different impulses – at least narrative and lyric poetry do, and I’m not sure why I chose the one and not the other. I have a liking for embodied language, and for the way poetry leads the reader out into the moment rather than on towards a point of arrival. For me, it has always seemed like the natural and logical response – though one might also mention music, dance, science: anything curious and attentive, or embodied, or both.
