Between Odisha and the ACT: poetry, community, connectedness

During 2019, prompted by the editors of this Special Issue, Bibhu Padhi and I began talking to each other via email, exchanging poems, and also exchanging snippets of our lives, our interests, and our thinking. A question posed by the project organisers was: What did involvement in the project help you understand about similarities and differences between India and Australia?, which led me to reflect on the twentieth-century notions of world poetry, and cross-cultural communication. Despite my anxieties about the widely recognised risks of such communication, the exchanges between us suggest that the shared experience of wrestling with image, concept, and language that is a feature of the writing of poetry provides a fulcrum for poets: a possibly contingent and consistently productive common ground.