Poet Gus Ferguson sees the world in interesting little packages.

“What I’ve been doing all my poetic life is dealing with stuff in smaller bites. And I really like things that are both metaphorical and clear.”

That perspective is mostly for his own amusement though, it seems – Ferguson’s poems are easy to enjoy at a superficial level, should their delightful subtleties be beyond your grasp for some reason.

“You can say things that very few people understand,” says Ferguson, “but I like communicating; moving from a scenario where people don’t get it to a scenario where they do.”

It’s not as though the poet is trying to be some sort of literary mentor to his readers, though, which is part of the reason he enjoys using his celebrated humour in his work.

“Yes,” he grins.

“As Woody Allen put it: ‘Comedians must sit at the children’s table.’”

So does Ferguson work in punchlines, then, or full scripts?

“The kick comes first,” he says.

“The way it happens changes, though. I used to be able to come up with 20 lines on the way to work. It used to be four or five. It seems I have increasingly diminished capacity as I achieve increased maturity.”

The perspectives that sometimes come with maturity have influenced Ferguson as well.

“I’m inspired by melancholy,” he reveals.

“If I can fit humour in there, it balances out. But I don’t want to be happy all of the time; that would be incredibly boring. I partly represent pieces of my life in my work, but the model is constantly changing. I’m constantly – on and off the page – doing the same thing, but I’m refining it as I go.”

That awareness of small changes is evident from the beginning in the way Ferguson works.

“I always get the first draft of something I write down quickly,” he says.

“You need to rush so you don’t miss it. If you only get a small part of it down, it might be too cryptic to return to later. That said, making something too big doesn’t work either. I work first for friends and then later for the world. If I get approval from my friends, I feel like I’m on stronger ground.”

Refreshingly, for a poet, Ferguson does not pretend that his musings are  world-changing doctrine.

“Poetry can be very tenuous,” he smiles. “Sometimes, the better the poet, the more tenuous the material. There are many half-truths in terms of talking about poetry.

“There’s one that makes sense though, and that’s Robert Graves when he said. ‘There’s no money in poetry, but there’s not much poetry in money, either.’”

There’s plenty of impact in very few words there, something Ferguson clearly appreciates.

“I keep trying to be more succinct. I want to be funny with less. That’s what happening with Twitter and all these other platforms today,” he says.

“And I’ve been asked to teach some haiku workshops, teaching other people to keep it short. So I should learn as I go, too.”