About Us
Poetica is dedicated to the performance of poetry and ranges freely among contemporary Australian and overseas work as well as drawing on ancient sources and from bi-lingual programs, live readings, studio-based poetry features and on-location recordings.
Poetica aims not simply to reflect on radio the rich world of poetry, but to re-create that world in radio terms, with generous use of music and sound to "place" the poems. The emphasis is on entertainment and letting the poetry speak for itself.
What Is Poetry Anyway?
Poetica presenter Mike Ladd has written two essays on poetry for a general audience wanting to find out more about the artform and for those interested in accessing some current Australian poetry titles. The articles are: What Is Poetry Anyway?, and Contemporary Australian Poetry: An Introductory Sampler.
Mike Ladd
Mike Ladd is currently producer and presenter of ABC Radio National's Saturday afternoon poetry program Poetica.
Born in 1959, he grew up at Blackwood in the Adelaide Hills. After completing a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy at Adelaide University, he began to publish his poetry widely in Australia. In 1980 he formed The Drum Poets, a group of musicians who perform his poetry using conventional instruments, found objects and pre-recorded sounds.
In the early 1980s Mike travelled in Europe and Africa. While in Senegal, he made recordings of the traditional poet-praise singers known as the 'griot'. In London he worked for the BBC and the British Institute of Recorded Sound.
Returning to Adelaide, Mike began work with ABC Radio. After working as a sound engineer for 10 years, he became a producer within the Audio Arts department and subsequently began his present role on Poetica . Mike also writes radio dramas and features which have been broadcast both by the ABC and a number of overseas organisations including the BBC, CBC, NPR, Radio France, RTE Ireland, YLE Finland and many others. He is the author of three film poems which have been shown on ABC TV, SBS, and in film festivals across Europe.
Mike has published six books of poetry: The Crack in the Crib (1984), Picture's Edge (1994), Close to Home (2000), Rooms and Sequences 2003, Shacklife (2006) and Transit (2007). In 2000 he had a Churchill Fellowship in the UK, Ireland and France, where he studied poetry and radio production. His other awards include a Literature Board Venice Studio Grant (1987), and a Special Commendation at the Prix Futura, Berlin, for his radio feature Tracks and Traces (1995). His book Picture's Edge was short-listed for the John Bray National Poetry Award in 1998.
In 2006 he was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and was a guest of Venezuela's World Poetry Festival.
