Breaking the locks: Increased accessibility for isolated poets during lockdown and post-COVID

For poets in rural and remote areas, the experience of COVID lockdown was one in which online opportunities for readings, spoken word performance, poetry workshops and courses, allowed easy access to the creative community that had previously been largely inaccessible. This was also the case for those with intersectional challenges of limited mobility through economic issues, disability, age, and cultural restrictions. By using a hybrid approach that combines prose analysis with extracts from personal poetry, autoethnographic reflection, as well as extracts from the poetry and reported experience of other poets, this paper demonstrates that COVID lockdowns opened up new possibilities for creativity and poetry and networking. This paper also recognizes the importance of poetry as an art form that not only gives a voice to the marginalised but can communicate the challenging experiences to create empathy and understanding, foster creativity and community connection, and produce texts with their own inherent artistic value. A version of this paper was presented at the Australasian Association for Writing Programmes Conference 2023, ‘We Need to Talk’.