I asked a bunch of poets the above question. I'll feature their answers here each week until I run out or find more poets to answer the question…

Andy Jackson says:

"Why do I write poetry?  There's no comprehensive answer.  Much of it is, I suspect, unconscious and mysterious.

But the bulk of it is, I'd say, a way to reach towards self-transcendence.  In other words, when I write, I'm trying to understand something about my interaction with the world, by writing through it, hoping that I can...

I missed yesterday's post on Aramis Fox due to sick-youngest-child-induced lack of sleep, which could have been disastrous for my aforementioned one-post-a-day-for-100-days commitment as part of the 100days project, but I'm going make the case that by posting twice today I'm still on the way to 100 posts in 100 days, which is well within the intent of the project, so no biggie.

Of greater import (to my mind at least) is the fact that today's twofer has brought the total number of posts to...

Did that zine workshop at Signal last night. Seven keen beans showed up and listened patiently to my ziney opinions, then played along with my zinemaking games.

We wrote rants and stream of consciousness diatribes. We reviewed zines from the pile I'd brought from my personal stash. We copied out recently-played lists from our iPods and funny texts from our phones. We cut up books about sharks and old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, back-issues of Dolly, Cleo, The Monthly and New Scientist

The Penguin Graphic Classics line is a reissue of classics of Western literature with newly designed covers by some of the greats of contemporary comics. Chris Ware on Candide. Tom Gault on The Three Musketeers. Seth on Lady Chatterley's Lover. Marjane Satrapi on The Portable Dorothy Parker. Julie Doucet on Little Women. Dan Clowes on Frankenstein.

Dan Clowes's cover for Frankenstein (detail from the dustjacket).

All together now: Oh. Em. Eff. Gee. (Zed optional.)

…with the help of this kicky little knitted poetry game, of course. Poetry has never been so quilty!

You can knit your very own poems over at The Poetry Society UK. Thanks to dumbfoundry for the link.

There's this thing called One Hundred Days to Make Me a Better Person, part of the London Word Festival. The idea is that people dob themselves in to do one thing once a day for 100 days in order to improve their lives in some way.

I've got some residual guilt in the wake of my abject failure at NaNoWriMo last month. I wrote on four out of 30 days to produce a grand total of 2552 words, falling 47,448 words and 26 days short of the universally accepted NaNoWriMo goal. Which pretty much...

What you like now?
Pie.
We have some pie.
Forty dollars.
Yum yum yum.
What you like now?
Apple.
Oh I think we have some apple.
Here you go.
Forty dollars.
What you like?
Pineapple.
There you go.
Yum yum yum.
Forty dollars.
What you like?
Cupcake.
Forty dollars.
What you like now?
Some tuna.
I think we don't have some tuna today.
I think we eat it all up.
You have some pear?
Yum yum yum.
Spaghetti.
Spaghetti is all gone now.
What you like now?
Toast.
We have some toast for you.
Forty dollars.
Yum yum yum.
Just pretend eat.

Next Wednesday 9 December between 5 and 7pm I'll be hanging out at Signal, the arts space run by the City of Melbourne, with all of my zinemaking gear as part of a workshop I'm teaching, wherein zines will be discussed, dissected and also created.

So if you're between 13 and 20 years of age and you want some insider tips on the zine creation process, or if you're a zinemaker yourself and you just want to hang out and talk about the z-word, this could very well be for you. We'll be reading...

When I was five I thought when a lightsaber hit you, you turned into a blanket.

The ozpo cyberweb has spent the last three weeks on tenterhooks as it anticipated the outcome of the blog war declared between poets Nathan Curnow and Derek Motion. The stakes were high – the loser had to quit their blog – and now a winner has been declared.

It seems Wagga Wagga's own Derek Motion has vanquished Ballarat boy Nathan Curnow in a clear-cut 86-81 victory, and now, as per the terms of engagement...

It's full of poems, comics and an article about saffron milkcap mushrooms. You can also read in its entirety Eric's MA thesis about Oink Oink Oink, his latest novel. Here's how Eric describes Oink Oink Oink:

The narrator of the story, Squirly Fern (SF), is of Japanese/ Australian descent; his grandfathers fought each other in World War Two and he is living with his mother in Japan.  At the beginning of the story, he moves to Australia to meet his father, not realising that his father has...