harrison & ryan dig deep by Henry Leslie-O’Neill

About this project: "Being stuck inside all the time gives a lot of time for my culture's time-honoured tradition of laying on the couch and watching the tele for hours on end. This poem is a melange (that's french) of words and utterances I pick out while performing this tradition. Poetry, I think, is more about the thoughtful combination and editing of words (and non-words), rather than the picking of those words out of my own lexicon. Getting the words from tv allows me to skip that step, and I like how the essence of the show I'm watching, as well as the ads in between, rings through the poem."

Scroll down to download this piece and find out more about the contributing artist.

About the artist: "Hi! My name's Henry, I grew up on Ngunnawal land in Canberra and now live down here in Melbourne/Naarm on Wurundjeri land. I study Linguistics at Unimelb and enjoy writing poetry and other stuff, although sometimes uni uses up all your words for the day. Which is maybe why I like borrowing words from tv. And then it means I get to watch tv at the same time, so win-win, win."

We asked, our artists answered: why does creativity matter now?  "I don't know. Creative stuff is cool, it keeps you going. Art does this thing where it takes what's going on around it and reframes or reflects it and then it means something. Which is like what we try to do in academic research, but art mostly does it better. Maybe paint a journal article or something. Another win-win, so that's like 5 or 8 wins now hey, well done."