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Last year the Red
Room Company commissioned me to write a poem about my connection to
Western Sydney and the theme of the disappearing. To complete my part of the
project I travelled to Parramatta to record the poem and an interview about the
process I went through in its composition. All the poets involved were sent the
below series of questions. Because I like to prepare I wrote out some answers. What
you will hear in the recording will no doubt be different as they sprung a few
unexpected questions on me and I didn’t use these notes while answering, but I
hope the sentiment remains the same.
What is poetry for you?
·
What made you start writing poetry? / Why is poetry
important for you?
I started writing poetry when I was in primary
school. The first poem I remember writing was about school desks chasing and
eating people. It was published in the school newsletter. Mum still has it up
on a board. I guess I started writing as a means to understand the world and
how my imagination was engaging with it.
Poetry is important to me because it is
something we can all engage with as reader, writer, performer, listener and
critic. I also like the diversity of forms of poetry, from highly structured
pieces, to works I find arcane, to free verse, direct and didactic narratives
to protest pieces. I like that poetry is
studied at schools and universities, in pubs, in bedrooms and food courts. That
authors from ancient civilisations wrote it and that their words live on
alongside newly written work that may soon vanish forever. I like that people
give away and sell poetry on streets, that they perform it in quiet auditoriums
and noisy pubs, that music and visuals and live performance can lift poetry but
that at its best for me it needs nothing but shape on a page and a reader, that
at its best it doesn’t need its author and that it can be so layered that
different readers will find different things in it.
·
What does The Disappearing and this project mean to you?
What message did you want to convey through your poem?
The Disappearing started for me with my poem the Max and the vanishing of childhood,
of memories of people, and that is still there in (En)Joy Rides in Police Cars, though I think it is more advanced or
maybe more discernible in this new poem; that disappearing childhood does not
come through age but through experience, and that experimentation with
imagination, words on a page, with history, can capture something fleeting, or
maybe portray something fleeting so people can examine it through time and
space.
I like to keep away from explaining and
conveying messages directly but what I did want to do was explore some
conversations I’d had about Dad with Mum, to explore some vivid memories, but
also explore how memories can be false, distorted, fractured and fuse with
imagination in an effort to escape or survive.
·
What was it like writing on the theme of ‘disappearing’?
I enjoyed the research component. I spoke with
my mum about dad several times to get a better understanding of my memories of
him and what had occurred while they were married and during their divorce and
custody battles. This poem is part of a group of three about my family and
focussed on my dad and two grandfathers. You can find another with Cordite and
a third was a commission for the Canberra Glassworks. So it was a useful
opportunity to not only research and write the poem, but link it to the other
works, to the location of some of the events it depicts, and to have it
published for people to read. As part of the research I went back to Lakemba
where my grandfather owned his shop, and to Auburn to investigate where I was
born and lived the some of the early years of my life. Throughout this I kept
in mind something I’d read in the Tate Modern while I was travelling in 2013, an
artist’s statement about his portraiture talked about embracing the distortions
and inaccuracies of memory while creating an image of something, hold onto the
memories, don’t refine them in the hope of the true image, instead interrogate
for meaning. For me that allows imagination to come into art, so while this and
the other two poems are autobiographical, imagination is in there.
·
How does the poem begin for you, with an idea, for or
image?
Poems begin for me in different ways. I have
written for a long time with a writing group and we have a range of exercises
that generate the start, middle and sometimes the end of a poem. I also write
to prompts such as books, graphic novels and visual art. I really love travelling
for this reason. In 2013 and 2014, I travelled in the US, Spain, the UK, France
and Italy and visited galleries and museums in every city and town where I
could find them. Travel really kicks my imagination into overdrive and
combining that with art and architecture in a new place will lead me to write.
I also really like to dwell on an idea, research it, and delve into a concept
to develop a poem.
·
How do you improve or edit your poems? With the help of a
workshop, a reading group, a mentor?
I will constantly edit poems. Every day I will
work on something, testing the images, experimenting with the structure,
looking for gaps or weaknesses with what I am writing, taking notes of ideas
and concepts I would like to explore, collecting images. I work to make sure
that where I want the poem to factually and scientifically accurate it is,
where the untruth is, it is there for a reason.
Editorially I put my poems through a taxing time. I will run drafts
through the writing group I mentioned earlier. With this group I feel like I
have received and given a lot of useful critique, hearing other people’s poems
and ideas on your and others’ work makes me question my own style and
approaches. I don’t always take on board critique but I do always consider it
when it comes from a thoughtful place. I also have two close friends in
Canberra who will give me constructive and thoughtful feedback on a poem I am
developing, and I find their feedback incredibly useful in pointing me to areas
of weakness in a poem. In 2015, with the support of an ArtsACT Project Grant, I
had several months of mentoring and editorial development with Queensland poet
David Stavanger in Brisbane and Canberra, his considered input has improved my
overall writing but also given me confidence in the choices I make to break
rules and push boundaries.
·
What is the impact of being commissioned and published in
this project for your writing career?
I always enjoy when a poem exists without me,
as it will through this Red Room Company commission. I usually avoid publicly
unpacking my process or the poetry I write but being interviewed for the
commission has been a useful process in having my articulate my writing process
and the importance of poetry to me.
