Sydney City Poet

“I could have called it Violence!”: A conversation with Maria Takolander

Though I have admired Maria Takolander’s poetry for a number of years now, I only got in touch with her a couple of months ago when I decided I’d like to write about her poem “Geography Lessons” in my Poems Revisited series. When this email exchange took place I was soon to travel to Melbourne, so I asked Maria if I might be able to interview her as well. Over a brisk weekend visiting my parents and friends, I took a day out to drive to Geelong’s Deakin University campus and meet with Takolander. 

Before we sat down to conduct this interview we talked for a couple of hours, sharing lunch and a coffee. At a similar stage of her poetic career to myself, it was wonderful to find that we instantly connected over our experiences as poets beginning to establish ourselves, but also as writers of other forms.

  

Reviewing Ghostly Subjects, Martin Duwell suggested that while Australia lacks a minimalist tradition, a large portion of your writing could be labelled “minimalist”: is this how you think of your own work? At the same time you’ve written a critical book about Magical Realism, a genre not often associated with minimalism. To begin—what was your experience of writing on this subject of Magical Realism? 

I feel that Magical Realism had degenerated into something of a cliché by the time I finished writing my book about it; people were churning out magical realist novels because it was popular, and because it sold well. My resistance to that mode in my own work comes from the clichéd nature of what Magical Realism has become, both actually and in the popular imagination.

I see the roots of Magical Realism in the work of Borges, and how what he does both as a poet, and as a short fiction writer whose fictions almost read like non-fiction: that this is a minimalist version or precursor of magical realism. I can see Borges as a figure that floats behind your work in some ways. 

Yes! These days Magical Realism is seen as a maximalist genre, whereas Borges writes with such discipline. If discipline is akin to minimalism, then I might be amenable to that “charge.” I don’t know that I write in a minimalist style—I think, if anything, I write in a hysterical voice! Sometimes I think I’m being funny, but I’m not sure if I achieve that. The sense of minimalism, though, probably comes through discipline… I do like to discipline my verse! Perhaps too much…

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Meeting in the Hungry Middle: A Conversation with Kent MacCarter

I first met Kent MacCarter in 2005 when we shared a dinner of rabbit together at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. It was my first rabbit, and also my first exposure to the names of a number of American poets Kent threw out during the conversation that evening. We were intermittently in contact after that, but my recent return from studies in the USA—Kent hails from Montana (by way of Minnesota and New Mexico)—has given us much to talk about. 

When I met up with Kent to conduct this interview, he had recently begun moving with his wife and child within the suburb of Preston. Not quite settled into his new home—an email followed a week or two later celebrating the arrival of furniture—we met at the High Street café Umberto’s on a Sunday afternoon, where we shared piccolo coffees and the following conversation.

 

As your publisher notes in the blurb of your collection, the poems of In the Hungry Middle of Here are international in flavour. What struck me, however, was how much of the Australian idiom is present in the poems. How conscious have you been to make use of Australian phrases? 

For the poems in that book, I was very conscious of doing it, as I was enamoured of Melbourne and Australia immediately. I didn’t really start writing seriously until about a year after I came to Australia—until about 2005—and I’ve always thought of Melbourne as a bit of a muse. I can’t exactly say why, though if I could it would probably be inaccurate. 

I’m geographically minded, so I’ve been exploring place in my poems. The one thing that is hugely different about Australia and America is the language—the idiom, the bend and the pitch of voice, Living here, I’ve found the sound of Australian English fascinating. So making use of that voice was very intentional through In the Hungry Middle of Here, though I’ve pulled back on it a lot now. It adds flavour to that book, but I suppose it has a limited life span for me.  

Can you tell me about what limitations you might find in deliberately seeking out that Australian tone?

Like any gesture, if I keep doing it, it seems like I could write myself into a cul-de-sac.

I’m always a little paranoid about beginning provincial in some way. Whenever I read anywhere, and they come to introduce me, I always hear, “And the American…” So that gets you couched a certain way. And when I read at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I’d say that three out of four comments that I received were along the lines of, “You write very Americanly…”

When I hear that, I say, “Okay. That’s a fair assessment—but can you tell me what you mean?” And people say, “Well, I can’t really tell you what I mean, but it just sounds so American. I just don’t want to get forever mired in the linguistic of slang: it can be a cheapening effect, whether it’s Australian or American slang. It can certainly be used to good effect at times—but if it’s too big of a footprint in your work, it really can look shoddy. So the Australian slang probably made a slightly bigger footprint in the third of the book that is set in Australia specfically—but I’m still proud of most of the book.

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“All these poems around the word fell:” An Interview with Luke Beesley

“All these poems around the word fell:” An Interview with Luke Beesley

Though I’ve known the poet, artist and musician Luke Beesley for ten years, I only recently visited the home he shares with his partner Zoe and son Ari in Northcote for the first time since he moved to Melbourne from Brisbane four years ago. Walking in the door of the apartment I was greeted by bookshelves stuffed with much-thumbed-through literature, and a guitar in the corner of the room. Luke fixed coffee for us, and we sat on the couch acknowledging how strange it was to conduct this conversation so formally about things we had been discussing for years; nonetheless I realised that there were many questions I had never asked him.

You’ve recently had a solo exhibition of drawings, and you also have been working on music over the past few years. What drives you to create in different art forms?

It arises out of the necessity of the creative workspace for me. When I’m writing new work, I often do it in blocks—I go away on a retreat, for example—and I’ve also nearly always had a studio space to work in outside of my home. So while I’ve been writing, to keep the energy of creativity moving along, I’ve always done other things. If I’m fatigued after writing, I draw or scribble with some pastels. By shifting over to a different art form I find I can get my energy going again, but I always thought, until recently, that the drawing was just a silly thing I was doing on the side.

Then, too, about three or four years ago I figured out a way to write a song, which I always thought was an impossible thing. I discovered that a lot of drafts of my poems, if I just picked out a few lines, could be songs. So now that has become part of my creative process of writing new work too. It’s a way to sustain energy.

Can you tell me about the drawing series of your recent exhibition: what was the genesis, and how did the exhibition come about?

When I moved to Melbourne in 2007 I got a studio space near where I was living. So I was working in this little room during that year when I was finding my feet, having moved to a new city. I had all my books in the space, and then the writer Nick Powell, who had the space right next to me, moved to Finland—so suddenly I was looking after all his books as well. For some reason, then, I decided to start doing some charcoal drawings.

I thought, as a form of practicing the craft of drawing with charcoal, I would draw these authors from the backs of these books, with their slightly eccentric poses. I liked the idea of trying to draw faces. I was drawing hundreds of authors, and I kept these drawings. I did that for about a year, and then over time I realised it was an interesting thing to be doing: being an author drawing these authors, the word author, and the idea of authorship… there’s a lot of layers there. I was also writing text on the drawings. Amongst this, I had moved to a different studio, then come back to the original, which has a gallery attached. Suddenly it didn’t seem too crazy to have an exhibition.

About a year and a half ago I got a grant from Arts Victoria to write a manuscript of poems and drawings together, and for this show I was able to show a lot of those pieces too.

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