Billboard Poetry

Write your Humanity

We invited budding and established poets from across our community to submit a haiku for our third annual Billboard Poetry competition.

Throughout August, the 12 selected poems spread joy on billboards across Melbourne.

Now, we want to know your favourite of the twelve poems!

Vote here for the People's Poem!

Interested in writing your own haiku and want inspiration? Watch Maxine Beneba Clarke exploring the history and form of haiku, and discover examples of previous Billboard Poetry winners below!

Billboard Poetry is supported by the Melbourne Public Humanities Initiative.

Meet our Billboard Poetry champion

Andy Jackson is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. His poetry collection Human Looking won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Andy's poems are included in the anthologies Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe, UK, 2025) and Every Place on the Map is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, USA, 2026). He is a co-editor of Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability (Puncher & Wattman 2024), and he writes and rests on Dja Dja Wurrung country.

Haiku: small but mighty
Maxine Beneba Clarke

Watch Maxine, inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence, and instigator of Billboard Poetry, as she gives a short history of the haiku and tips for writing.

The beauty of a haiku lies in its unpredictability. It’s not exactly what you think it is.

Maxine is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent, and is the multi-award-winning author of over fifteen published books for children and adults, including the poetry collection Carrying The World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her latest poetry collection How Decent Folk Behave was also shortlisted for the award in 2022. In 2024 her play The Hate Race (based on her bestselling book) premiered at The Malthouse theatre to sold out audiences.

Theme: IN REAL LIFE

Our 2026 Billboard Poetry theme is IN REAL LIFE. This symbolises our increasing need to live authentically in a world that has become mediated by screens and algorithms. We invited poets to think about shared spaces, fleeting moments of interaction, the blurring of the virtual and the real world and the separation between what is public and what is private.

We hope the haikus might inspire connection and meaning making. You might even consider the very small gesture of noticing, leaving time for meditation through words. Our haikus are published both digitally and IRL on billboards across Melbourne.