It’s been a week since I attended Thin Red Lines, a quarterly poetry event curated by Georgia “George” Kartas and Thabani Tshuma, and I haven’t stopped thinking about the poem Thabani read as an introduction to the evening—one that he’d written solely for the event. “I offer this poem as an aperitif,” he said. And the feeling of it sure has lingered, lightly and delightfully, in my mind since the evening.

So, I head to Brunswick Bound Bookstore to pick up his debut poetry collection, The Gospel of Unmade Creation. And who do I find working behind the counter? Georgia Kartas herself. 

It’s the kind of serendipity that seems on-brand for Thin Red Lines. Georgia and Thabani introduce each poet by regaling anecdotes of chance meetings, happy coincidences, and turns of luck that have brought each writer into the world of Thin Red Lines. These anecdotal bios impart a certain warmth to the event from the outset; it feels like a personalised, curated anthology is being created before the audience’s eyes. There’s an intentionality and generosity about it, as if Thabani and Georgia are earnestly introducing us to their friends at a dinner party.

The pair seem to view the event with a grateful, slightly disbelieving sense of wonder—surprised and delighted at both its very existence, and the presence of these poets in the same room. A sense of awe seems to settle over all the guests, too. We’re invited to share in it, to recognise that we’re lucky to spend a moment within the one-of-a-kind-ness of a Thin Red Lines event.

This is the overall sentiment I come away with from the evening: no one except tonight’s audience will ever get to experience these poems in the same way. It’s partly because some of the poems aren’t written down anywhere, preserved only within the audience’s memory. Thabani’s opening poem is one such example; written solely for this event, not to be published anywhere for the foreseeable future (I asked). Hasib Hourani cuts and merges together different parts of his book-length poem rock flight to create a new piece just for the evening. Afra Atiq scraps her planned line-up and goes with whatever poems speak to her in the moment. “The poem always chooses the poet,” she confesses. 

There’s also the new and transient meaning that each poem takes on, simply by merit of being read aloud. I email Nam Le, one of the event’s speakers, and the recent winner of the NSW Literary Awards’ Book of the Year, about this idea. He suggests that “all poetry has two 'voices': one that can be scanned and analysed on the page for its rhythms, its syntax, its accents and cadences, but also one that comes from the body, through breath—both of which, tellingly, expire.”

But what really contributes to the singularity of Thin Red Lines, I think, is the simple act of placing six poets alongside one another. Sequence creates context: the poems that are read before and after one writer’s work provide points of contrast and commonality, filtering and shaping our interpretation of that poem. There’s a unique effect that can’t be replicated in a single-poet reading. When read alongside Micaela Sahhar and Hasib Hourani’s poems on Palestinian displacement and dispossession, Nam’s poem, written partially in Vietnamese and dedicated to his mother as she faces eviction from public housing, seems to partake in the same global conversation about diaspora and national belonging.

When I discuss this with Nam, and later Georgia, they both observe that the shared message or meaning generated by a multi-poet line-up is often unintentional—or at least uncontrollable. Nam admits that you “can't predict what the gestalt of a multi-poet reading will be,” while Georgia describes the curation process as “allowing [the event] to kind of randomise itself, because each time a different form of magic kind of emerges… Every time, quite similar themes emerge from different artists, and you sort of have to allow the parameters to be a bit random for that to happen.” 

Despite its seeming randomness, however, the event takes on a kind of symmetry, a thoughtful and considered rhythm. Not only have Georgia and Thabani selected “three poets from Thin Red Lines’ past, and three from our future,” with the poets splitting more-or-less evenly into speaking about the past and the present accordingly, but the evening is also underpinned by a lovely balance of poetic styles.

Micaela Sahhar and Manisha Anjali’s poetry tends towards the abstracted and esoteric, each conjuring up a series of fragmented but mesmerising images. I find myself dipping in and out, not quite able to grasp all the metaphors but still pondering over the odd gem of language. Daniel Browning and Afra Atiq bring the event back down to earth, in a way; they deliver raw narrative poems of deep, lucid vulnerability. Hasib Hourani and Nam Le seem to sit somewhere between the two poetic planes, merging abstraction and metaphor with diaspora narratives and imperial/colonial critiques. As a result, the evening seems to ebb and flow, bringing the audience into a political foreground before receding back into the transcendental.

There’s something for everyone, which rings true to the creators’ original intentions: Georgia tells me that her and Thabani wanted to create “a poetry event you could invite friends who aren't into poetry to.” Through its diverse yet perfectly balanced range of poetic styles, Thin Red Lines achieves this. It breathes life into poetry, understanding it to be the embodiment of spontaneity and ephemerality.

So, my parting impression is that Thin Red Lines really is an aperitif. It disarms you a little, makes you ever-so-slightly woozy, and hungry for more (I’ve since read Hourani’s book, and started Tshuma’s). It’s offered to you with warmth and humour, by two friends, earnestly inviting you to share in a moment of wonder.

Thin Red Lines is a quarterly poetry event hosted by Georgia/George Kartas and Thabani Tshuma. The event I attended, on the 9^th of May, was part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.