Sydney City Poet

Hibernation

As a blogger I have been, apparently, feeling rather ursine and gone into something like a hibernation mode for the winter. Which is not to say that I haven’t been writing, reading, thinking, attending—but that I have been recording more in my own diary and notebooks than I have in the public space of a blog. I can only hope that, in person, I haven’t seemed too bearish to friends.

I suspect my sudden hibernation it goes hand-in-hand with my own awakening (yet again) to my own ignorance. It is a periodic occurrence, like that moment when you step out of your own home library, where you are proud of all the books you have read, into the vast collection of a university or state library and realise how much knowledge you will never have. I find these moments incredibly humbling and also invigorating—but they do prompt me to put my head down and just try to get a little smarter rather than running to the keyboard. For all the odd facts I have accumulated and delighted in (eg. that tapirs bare their teeth and raise their snouts when they smell, a move known as the “Flehman response”; that the takin, a goat-antelope, is the national animal of Bhutan; that you can tell the sex of a Little Penguin by measuring its beak) I know scarcely anything of the world. And for all my reading in and around the particular area of literature (gleaning such tidbits as the fact that Christopher Smart was put in an insane asylum essentially for being “too devout”; that according to Euripides’s Helen, the Helen transported to Troy was a fake—the real Helen was secreted elsewhere, virtue intact; that Charles Olson, before he became the author of the Maximus Poems, was obsessed with Moby Dick­­—just as Dan Beachy-Quick, the contemporary American poet I am spending much of my time studying at the moment, is also obsessed) even there I feel that I have learned very little. Sometimes I even get the basics of prosody mixed up: I know my iambs, my trochees, my spondees and even my choriambs—but will often get my anapaests and my dactyls mixed up. (Lets leave those other feet out of it for now.) It is the same for us all, and I imagine that in such sobering moments of realisation we all want to listen a little more, clamour a little less.

I often return to moments from childhood reading to remind myself of things. In the case of my ignorance I remember, among other things, a moment in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Mrs Which, Mrs Who and Mrs Whatsit give the children gifts to help them complete their quest, and Meg, the central character, is a little miffed when she is gifted her faults. Half the time I will burble on about the odd bits of trivia—mixed in with the moments of insight I have had; but then I go quiet as I remember that above all I am a student. On a daily basis I remember there is much to learn. Among things I would like to learn (or learn about) right now are the names of all the types of trees that grow in the suburb around me, the work of the Transcendentalists, how early explorers experienced the world as they “discovered” it, how to make more things with my own two hands, the basics of sailing, the physics behind the “singing” of icebergs, to navigate by the stars… and… how many other things?

I recently read the new book Quiet: as a study of introversion in a society that largely valorises extroversion, I found myself nodding in recognition at its descriptions on nearly every page. Though I am often loquacious and can “pass” as an extrovert in many situations, I generally fall strongly into the introversion column. One thing introverts need is down time after stimulation: and being the “City Poet” has ensured plenty of stimulation. It’s stimulation I have been incredibly grateful for—anything that provokes further thought is a gift—but that has also left me seeking the quiet conversation that takes place between the pen in my hand and the notebook on my desk. 

So I ask that you forgive a quiet spell—and also encourage you to take some quiet time for yourself. I’ve been enjoying taking a book to Sydney Park on sunny afternoons and reading aloud to the ducks and passing dogs. (I clam up when other people are nearby; I don’t want to appear too strange. The animals don’t begrudge me the pleasures of reading aloud, and seem quiet interested in it actually.) On drizzly days I wander around the park with my umbrella, looking over the wetlands and searching along the ground for a four leaf clover. This is slow time, reverent time. 

I’ve written before of slow time. Blogging takes place in fast time, but we all need periods of renewal. In her journals Susan Sontag wrote “Work = being in the world.” My way of being in the world lately has been circumspect, but I feel that as a result of this I will have dispatches to send back soon. 

Going Home

“Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.”

This is Gertrude Stein speaking to Alice B. Toklas—though I admit I have found it in Jeanette Winterson’s book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Unlike Winterson, I somehow haven’t yet made it to this particular part of the section of “S” in the modern library, though I own a copy of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and am once more reminded that I must read it. It moves up the pile. That in turn brings Stein’s Tender Buttons out for a rereading too. She also has me yearning to pull out Virginia Woolf again. So it shall be, once I finish reading Jeanette herself.

I recently realised that I’ve been reading Jeanette Winterson for more than half my life, and when I saw her at the writers’ festival in Sydney recently I told her that she is one of the reasons I am a writer. It is true that I had always written, and had always wanted to write, but I was also raised with true pragmatism, such that whenever I stated that I wanted to be a writer, I would be asked, “What else will you be?” I took it that the “what else” (answers were usually the obvious ones for a child bent on learning: a doctor; a lawyer; a vet) would be the career that took precedence, and that writing would be my hobby. Reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as a teenager, and later the essays of Art Objects, I saw that it was possible to live mostly on books and grit.

I often tell people that “I take art daily,” as is proclaimed on a badge I bought in the Guggenheim museum in Berlin in 2003. I have gasped in front of artworks. I have gone to galleries to spend an hour or two with just one painting: sitting in front of it and looking, then turning to a book or letter or piece of homework for a while—then looking back to see what else I notice. Music—which I studied seriously for a long time, and wrote almost as seriously for a number of years at the Conservatorium—has long been a part of my life. Alongside all the wonderful concerts and recordings I have attended and heard there have been, in particular, three truly profound musical experiences in my life. These have made me understand why so many people say that all art “aspires to the condition of music”. Between the supposed celestial “music of the spheres” and the fact that many plants thrive not just when talked to, but when played to, music strikes me as absolute essential. I don’t play often anymore, but there is true joy for me in singing freely.

When I first heard a friend perform the fifth movement (Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus) of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps from memory—eyes closed, she swayed with her cello, as if the two were a single animal, as the pianist accompanying her gently and insistently provided the constant pulse that tethers the movement to the earth—just—at the pace indicated: infiniment lent.The circumstances in which the quartet was written (composed for the only four instruments available in the Prisoner of War camp in which Messiaen was held during World War II: though sketches of some of the music had existed before Messiaen entered the camp) infuse the eight movements. It is the fifth movement in particular, which the violin and clarinet sit out, that makes me escape my own skin a little.

Nonetheless it is books that I feel have saved my life, their earthliness and earthiness a particularly important part of the way they fill a basic need in me.

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Co-Signed, K

During my first year living in Ann Arbor, I was inspired by a group of poets in the year above me who, as the WCWPCCS (the Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective and Casserole Society), published a chapbook of collaborative poems. Though others made appearances in it (including male poets) the primary collaborators were Amy Berkowitz, Beth Divis, Emma Gorenberg, Kellen Grady, Elisa McCool and Jessica Young. Their first chapbook was called The Feeling is Mutual. Having not written collaboratively for a few years at that stage (and then only on theatrical and operatic works) I was inspired by the ways in which the group mind opened out so many possibilities.

This was further highlighted in my first workshop in Ann Arbor, in which we discussed one of Elisa McCool’s poems. She used the phrase “the third mind” (which she in turn told us she had found from Anne Waldman—though it has been used by many people) and reading that made something click for me. Bringing together two things, a third thing emerges that is the thread linking the two. To collaborate with another is to create a third mind: because anyone who has really let themselves enter this alchemical process knows that what emerges is a creative neither collaborator could have made alone.

While still in Michigan I participated in a few collaboration sessions, and always found them incredibly rejuvenating; since getting back I’ve pulled out a notebook with relative frequency when sitting with other people to see what happens. Not knowing what will happen is among the most exciting parts of the game: something appears, sometimes quite lumpishly, word by word or line by line or in any other increments that seem to work—and suddenly there it is.

As a writer, I live in my own head a lot of the time. I’m not the only person I know who fits that description. When in social situations I am usually jolly, but I often creep away from events early to recharge quietly at home. I chase the subjects I want to write about obsessively, and that often involves being alone with the page. I don’t mind these things: I like that time spent in thought. But I’ve discovered that writing with someone else can also be a form of rejuvenation: because the discoveries in those conversational poems are often so surprising.

Tomorrow (Sunday 27 May) I’m giving a reading at the Brett Whiteley Studio (2 Raper Street, Surry Hills; the reading is at 2pm—there is no charge) with friends and fellow poets Michelle Cahill and Toby Fitch. For this reading I wanted to think about the fact that this monthly reading series takes place in a gallery—and a gallery that was once the working space of one of Australia’s most iconic artists. At the moment Whiteley’s massive work “Alchemy” is on display: what better subject for collaboration? It’s all alchemy.

As poets we have all responded to Whiteley’s art in different ways—in our ways collaborating with the artist himself—but one element of the reading that I’m looking forward to is reading a couple of collaborative poems written with Toby Fitch as we pored over Whiteley’s work. As a reading this is something of an experiment—both nerve-wracking and exciting. As ever, I’m glad to have found myself in such a state: doing something new to me that I hope proves as refreshing to an audience as it has been for myself as a writer.

Alchemy Reading
Brett Whiteley Studio
2 Raper Street, Surry Hills 

2pm, no charge

On Being Taught

Many years ago I wrote a poem dedicated to one of my teachers that ended with the lines “Still I seem to need so much teaching/ still I am so unteachable.” Besides giving the poem as a small gift, I haven’t done anything else with it except, I hope, build on whatever skill I had at the time I wrote it.

Since that time, I suspect the sentiment of these lines has stayed true, though I have come under the eye of many more teachers in the intervening years. I’ve been thinking a great deal about my choice to study poetry: I was initially resistant to undertaking an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in writing because I too questioned the degree to which creative disciplines could be taught. Having acted as both student and teacher, I have come over the course of many years to believe that, in fact, a great deal can be taught—and that at the same time what is “so unteachable” is a certain wildness that is perhaps what I most seek out when I look for new poets to read.

And despite this notion that, at the core of it all, there is something that can’t be taught, can’t be learned, the truth is that I have learned an incredible amount from both formal and informal relationships with more experienced poets—as well as from younger poets, friends and peers, from students, and of course from books.

I first realised how much I needed teaching when I gave my first attempt at blank verse to my first teacher, poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. He had been very encouraging with the poems I had shown him previously. When he gave me back this one the only words written on it were “Flat as a pancake.” No comment on the fact that I was writing in a formal metre, or any other elements—because, in reality, there was no reason to comment on these things. What I had given him was a failed poem, and though I was proud for having tortured language into an iambic flow, all that hard work had killed off whatever was special in the poem. Perhaps if I had never been taught anything else that single line of feedback would have been enough: I think it is still the most significant I have ever received.

It was this feedback, which stung my eighteen-year-old self greatly, that made me realise how much work is involved in poetry. That maybe after I’d written another one or two hundred iambic lines I would find a good one; that after I’d experiment with another one or two hundred caesuras I would be able to see the ways in which a pause best enhances the line.

I was told a story by another friend and mentor about her own early days writing poetry, relating one of the first times she read her poetry to an audience. Afterward, amid the congratulations, someone said to her, “You are good, but you need to write another hundred poems.” Though this was a lesson received second-hand, it’s another I have come back to. Several years ago I took trapeze lessons, and one of my teachers told me that he was only ever allowed to perform a trick without the harness after he had performed it perfectly over a hundred times. All those studies on the passage from novice status to something like expertise are right. There are things that can be taught (such as how to recognise when your work is flat as a pancake) and other things that can’t be—such as the grit to recognise that a poem is a failure, and the next ten, or one hundred, may well be failures too, but to keep working anyway. That when you’ve worked so hard on a poem that the seams are showing, that you need to work as hard again to make the thing seamless.

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Quotation, Context, Connotation

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No Words

If you have ever read a poem or novel or literary essay and loved it, then you, too, value literature: you don’t need to spend every waking hour dedicated to the temple of words in bookish idolatry to say that a work made of words has enriched your life.

Weirdly, I am quoting myself. On Tuesday night, after hearing about the cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards I wanted to write a response. I questioned myself, wondering: “Who am I to respond?” There are many more established voices than mine, and many who have previously won the Queensland award, which I have not. However, I suppose I remembered the words a teacher and friend once said to me:  when I expressed doubt over my position in the academic world musicologist Linda Kouvaris told me, “No-one’s going to tell you you’re sitting at the big kids’ table.” I had something I wanted to express, and I wrote it. I am gratified that the Sydney Morning Herald saw fit to run the piece today.

I’ve been following comments written in response to various articles since the news broke on Tuesday, and am not surprised to see how polarized opinion has been. Amidst this, there has been a call for a new defense of literature.

My defense of literature essentially boils down to the words above. I am one of those who has spent my life in “bookish idolatry,” but I have plenty of friends who have chosen other paths, other passions. Nonetheless most of them read, and allow themselves to be transported and transfigured by the words of others. Some express regret that they don’t seem to have the time to read for pleasure anymore—and yet will recall a book they have loved, whether its Dr Seuss or Frank Herbert’s Dune. If it’s as far back as Dr Seuss, I might teasingly urge them forward with something like Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark or Lear’s Collected Nonsense on them, but I appreciate that most readers let book lead to book in their own time. Similarly, someone who may not be a reader of novels could still be thrilled by Norman Mailer’s evocative writing about boxing; locally, it’s a delight to read Robert Adamson on fishing—probably more delightful for those who actually go fishing; hell, in the days that Nabokov was a regular contributor it was really possible to read Playboy “for the articles.”

Among my own recent reading, I’ve been plunging hungrily into the essays Eliot Weinberger. His essay on James Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions, was a true delight - it can be found in his collection Oranges and Peanuts for Sale. It reminded me of something worth pointing out when people object that the market should really pay for literature: classics grow over time. New Directions has a policy of never letting their works go out of print, and Weinberger points out that this policy derives from the fact that literary works are often sleepers. A decade or two after first appearing, many New Directions books  that had seemingly slipped by unnoticed made it onto syllabi and suddenly found their readership. There are plenty of famous-after-the-fact stories in the arts: this doesn’t negate the fact that there are also plenty of here-and-now success stories, but there’s more than one timeline when it comes to art finding its audience. Similarly, just because a writer eschews populism doesn’t mean that writer is an elitist or denigrates a popular readership.

Today the NSW government has announced that the NSW Premier’s Literary Prize, which had been placed under review, will be going ahead on a delayed basis. I can’t help but think the timing of this announcement is a response to the outcry at the outright cancellation of awards by the Queensland government, and I’m glad to read the news. Public opinion does count for something, so make your thoughts known.

Second Draft

They say all writing is rewriting; what they don’t say is that rewriting—yes, vital—often feels like stasis.

When I talk with writer friends about what constitutes a “good day’s work” we will nearly all say that the best feeling is to have written something new. To go back to something old—whether it’s looking over something that appeared on paper only the day before, or pulling a piece out of the drawer where it’s been sitting for six months or six years—can be a wonderful experience. But it can also be frustrating.

When it comes to poetry, I write my first drafts by hand—and usually the second draft too; maybe even the third, fourth, fifth and sixth as well. Though the lines may change when a poem is transferring to the computer (because the length of the line in handwriting can be different from the length of the line in typescript, among other things) it is nearly always true that the words themselves are nailed down. At times I write the initial drafts in prose, and treat lineation as an entirely separate process. While form and content really are inextricably linked, both form and content take time to nuzzle into being and don’t necessarily arrive at the same time; even so, changing the line, the stanza, the shape can also bring about small changes in the words themselves. Minor changes I enact at the keyboard; major operations take me back to pen and paper.

All of this, of course, is work—but at the end of the day it doesn’t feel like work, especially if the thing isn’t finished. To rewrite a poem for hours, or go over and over an essay of a few thousand words and to come back with no definitive “solution” (no solution is really definitive…) is disheartening. What makes it even more disheartening is that I end up feeling I have done nothing at all.

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Double Duty Report

As well as continuing on with this site, I have also been asked to be a guest-blogger for the journal Southerly for the month of March. I’ll be posting there once a week all month—the first piece, musing on my attraction to reading the biographies of other writers—is now online. Nonetheless, I’ll still be posting here—there are more interviews, Poems Revisited essays and “diary” entries to come. So join me here—and there!

Writerly Ancestry, or Influence and Anxiety

I love to argue with the literary critic Harold Bloom: my copy of his The Western Canon, for instance, is incredibly dog-eared, edge-worn and marked up. Especially the lists at the back, his extensive proposal for a canon of Western literature. I bring up Harold Bloom because he’s the one that introduced that phrase, with his book of that title, The Anxiety of Influence. As poets, we are almost honour-bound to reject the generation immediately above us, seeking out other models. I argue with this too: like all poets, I have groups and poets who attract me, and those to whom I feel an inexplicable aversion—but mostly I welcome the sheer variety of poetic forebears, and when feeling lost about what it is I’m doing, where I’m going, I’ll return to someone I haven’t read in years, or else I’ll push onward to someone I’ve never read, or never read intensively, before. I’d like to think that the “when” of these poets’ careers doesn’t come into the equation.

This is on my mind because this week I’m going to be in conversation with poet and podcaster Fiona Wright at the NSW Writers’ Centre as part of their “Talking Writing” series, considering the career of Judith Wright. A colossal figure in Australian poetry, I remember discovering her work in the Norton Anthology of Poetry as a teenager and thinking that, after all, it was possible to be Australian and to be a poet. As time has gone on, I’ve been interested, too, in the way Wright uses and addresses the landscape in her work, and have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about her use of form. Of particular interest to me in this area are the poems she called “ghazals.” In fact, these poems only glancingly resemble the ghazal, but what fascinates me was that she was looking to this different poetic tradition years before others. The ghazal had a moment in vogue in the Romantic era—amongst the German poets, including Goethe—and was then overlooked by poets outside the traditions of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetries until very recently. Though I rarely publish “formal” poems, I have actually written quite a lot of poems that either adhere to or play on traditional forms, and Wright’s approach to the ghazal is one of the most interesting adaptions I have found. There are poets who have become gatekeepers for the form in recent years—no doubt worried about the way in which a longstanding tradition in Middle Eastern verse has been so quickly taken up and broken down by the Western poet—would most likely be horrified by Wright’s incredibly free interpretation of the form. Nonetheless, the poems are gorgeous and suggest ways to play upon poetic traditions closer to home.

Reading so much poetry, I often find it difficult to assess the impact any one poet has had on the way I myself think about poetry—but it’s a real pleasure to have a reason to revisit Wright’s work and to ask myself questions about the ways in which her example has suggested avenues for my own work, directly or indirectly. I’m looking forward to hearing Fiona’s thoughts on the subject, too: as two young female poets, separated by a small number of years, I’m interested to know how she came to Wright’s work (in the classroom? in anthologies?) and where she slots Wright in when it comes to her own personal canon or anxiety of influence. When I sit down to write, what I think nearly always becomes clearer as I keep at it; likewise, in conversation more facets of my own understanding come out as they are pressed against the knowledge and intuitions of another.

This conversation is a free event for members of the NSW Writers’ Centre. For non-members admission is $20—or you could just think about joining the centre, and enjoying more events in the future.

Talking Writing: Judith Wright and Poetry in Australia

Thursday 8 March, 6:30-8:30

NSW Writers’ Centre

Garry Owen House, Callan Park, Balmain Rd, Rozelle

On Translation, Poet Translators and the Creation of New Work

Poet, Editor and Translator Michael Hulse

A number of years ago I ran into an acquaintance in the library (he worked there; I merely frequented the place) and he asked what I’d been reading lately. I mentioned that I had recently begun reading a lot of Polish poetry. His response was that he didn’t really respond to the work of Cseslaw Milosz. This event has stood out for me for a long time because it wasn’t Milosz I was reading at the time, nor was it Szymborska, the other Nobelist—I had stumbled across the work of Adam Zagajewski and Zbigniew Herbert. 

This was before the larger selections of their work were commonly found in Australian bookshops, so the university library was my connection to their work. Nonetheless, his reply wasn’t surprising: because when it comes to writers in other languages, we really do tend to know only one or two names. Nonetheless, translators are working away on the books of many, many more authors—and many of these authors are just as deserving of attention. I wonder if sometimes we have a bit of a “one and done” attitude with non-Anglophone literatures. There is, after all, so much to read—if we know the work of Milosz, we know something of Polish literature in the second half of the twentieth century. (With the recent death of Szymborska—a sad event that at least had the happy consequence of bringing attention to her poetry again—Zagajewski will now be the prime living representative of Polish poetry for the outside world; Piotr Sommer will no doubt be next up.) Similarly, if readers know the work of Syrian poet Adonis or Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish they know something of recent Arabic-language poetry. I too am guilty of this, no matter how much I constantly try to address my own ignorance.

And it’s a lot to ask of any reader that they delve further: the world of so-called “world literature” is enormous, and often only translations of the biggest names are readily available. Only a couple of hundred books in translation are published in the United States every year, and no doubt only a fraction of these are published in Australia.

In a poem in his recent book Southern Barbarians, the poet John Mateer declares that “translators are angels.” I too subscribe to this opinion: translation is perhaps the ultimate labour of love. One translator I know translated a contemporary novel and for his efforts received only $500. Merely retyping a novel would surely cost more at any decent hourly rate; rendering the work in a different language would take much, much longer… Another friend translated Estonian poetry: among readers there doesn’t seem to be a high demand for this, and I doubt he’ll ever profit much from his efforts. But literary translators—especially of poetry—are rarely in it for the money. And though a few translators names are known—William Weaver, for instance, the translator of Italian authors Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among others is well known—being a translator is often akin to being invisible. Yes, your name goes on the book as well, but the average reader pays little attention to it. The flipside is that many successful translators are also creators of their own work, yet it is their translations that reach a wider audience. Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan birth, and my former teacher, is now Adonis’s translator: he recently toured the United States with Adonis, and the pair gave bilingual readings. I was privileged to attend one of these readings in Michigan a year and a half ago. But Mattawa is also a poet of considerable power: I believe his recent book Tocqueville deserves serious attention. The book has received some of that attention in the United States, but coming from a small independent publisher, it remains unknown in Australia.

All this is on my mind because Michael Hulse is in town, and will be reading and talking at UTS tomorrow night. Hulse has a formidable record as a translator: best known for his translations of three of W. G. Sebald’s works (The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo) Hulse has done much, much more through his career—and has a lot of work ahead of him. He has translated authors from a range of periods, and is one of the foremost translators of German literature. Whether it’s a rendering of Goethe, Rilke or Elfriede Jelinek, you are in good hands when it comes to Hulse. And like many translators he is also a writer: he has published a number of books of poetry, the most recent being The Secret History in 2009, which followed on from Empires and Holy Lands: Poems 1976-2000. We know poetry won’t sell in the same numbers as, for instance, a Penguin Classics edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, but his poetry is well worth reading.

Beyond that, Hulse is an accomplished editor and anthologist. He edits The Warwick Review at present, and acted as the co-editor of Bloodaxe’s The New Poetry and, most recently, The 20th Century in Poetry. I’m looking forward to hearing him read and discuss his work tomorrow night; the event is free and open to the public, so please join us.

Michael Hulse Reading and In Conversation

UTS Building 3 (Bon Marche), Level Two, Room 221/2

Entrance on Harris Street, Ultimo

Tuesday 28 February 6:30-8pm