Read a Q&A with Jazz Money | how to make a basket

Jazz Money is a poet and artist of Wiradjuri heritage, currently based on sovereign Gadigal land. Her poetry has been published widely and reimagined as murals, installations, digital interventions and film. Jazz’s poetry has been recognised with the David Unaipon Award, the Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, a Copyright Agency First Nations Fellowship and a First Nations Emerging Career Award from the Australia Council for the Arts. how to make a basket is her first book.

Today, Jazz Money is on the blog to answer a few questions about her book. Read on …

Jazz Money (Photo by Hannah Leser).

Please tell us about your poetry collection, how to make a basket.

JM: how to make a basket is a collection that examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. It is grounded in love, memory, family, history and protest. As a queer First Nations person it is both a protest against the violence of the colonial state, and a celebration of Blak and queer love. The collection is about how places and bodies hold memories, and the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.

How long have you been writing poetry for? What do you love about it?

JM: I started writing poetry while sitting on the bus from Queens to Brooklyn when I lived in New York in 2015. I was feeling really confused about my place in the world and found that poetry helped me express and sort through some of the complex things I was negotiating. In 2018 I started, very tentatively, to put some poems out to journals and prizes and was delighted to find that poetry is community and infinite connection. I love poetry for the way that it allows for shared experiences that can be huge and intimate, messy and simple, kind and full of fire.

What does it mean to you to use poetry as an act of protest but also of celebration?

JM: Poetry is a tool I use to express how I feel about the world. Activism and protest are logical responses to the injustices of our society. Poetry helps me sort out these responses. But I think joy and love are also an intrinsic part of our lives that are deserving of attention and celebration. I am angry, but I am not defined by that anger. As First Nations people I often think of our abundance and beauty as being a further protest against a colony that doesn’t want us here. In that way I think Blak joy is protest but is also the place where I feel most free of the colony.

Is there a particular poem in your collection that means a lot to you?

JM: These poems were written over the space of five years, and each ones takes me back to who I was at the time I wrote it. They all feel like friends, past and present. The third poem in the book ‘as we attack’ was the first piece I ever wrote that I wanted other people to see, which I suppose was the start of this journey for me.

You won the David Unaipon Award in 2020, as well as the First Nations Emerging Career Award from the Australian Council for the Arts. What impact has winning these awards had on your career?

JM: These awards are huge out-of-this-world gifts. The Unaipon represents an incredible collection of once-emerging Indigenous writers, many of whom have gone on to be some of this country’s most significant writers and thinkers. It was an honour to win it in 2020, and a shock that I still haven’t quite gotten over. The award from the Australia Council for the Arts was similarly humbling. Recognition and endorsement have been so invaluable to me as an early career writer in feeling seen and heard, but also in realising that my writing has the ability to resonate with other people and evoke something in them.

Who are the poets working today that inspire you the most?

JM: There are so many! Uncle Lionel Fogarty does things with the coloniser’s tongue that make my head spin. Aunty Charmaine Papertalk Green’s work across languages makes my heart full. I love Natalie Harkin, Tony Birch, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Alison Whittaker, Ellen van Neerven, Evelyn Araluen. And that’s just some of the incredible Blak poets writing today. I also love Natalie Diaz, Eduardo C Corral, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Lorna Goodison, Ocean Vuong, Omar Sakr, Sara Saleh … I’ll stop, otherwise I could fill pages.

What is the last book you read and loved?

JM: I recently finished the Collisions anthology from Liminal and was totally swept away by these phenomenal visions of the future. I’ve also been very slowly making my way through When the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through, an anthology of Native American poetry edited by Joy Harjo. It’s the sort of tome where you can flick to any one page and be moved to tears, laughter, or another world, and often all at once.

What do you hope readers will discover in how to make a basket?

JM: A resonant moment that they can take for themselves. And a moment that motivates them to fight for the betterment of our society.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

JM: Plenty of writing! And imaging new ways for poetry to exist in spaces around us. The page is just one of many ways to experience language, and I’m enjoying thinking about poems hung off bridges, poems in the dirt, films with spoken word, digital interventions, teaching and working with community!

Thanks Jazz!

—how to make a basket by Jazz Money (University of Queensland Press) is out now.

how to make a basket

by Jazz Money

Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money's David Unaipon Award-winning collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history.

Writing in both Wiradjuri and English language, Money explores how places and bodies hold memories...

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