A Conversation with Geoff Page

 Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-four collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include 1953 (UQP 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013), Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press 2014), Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry 2015), Hard Horizons (Pitt Street Poetry 2017) and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography (UWA Publishing 2016). He also edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015 (Black Inc). His Elegy for Emily: a verse biography (Puncher & Wattmann) and In medias res (Pitt Street Poetry) were published in 2019. He also reviews Australian poetry extensively and has run monthly poetry readings and jazz concerts in Canberra for many years. Geoff Page's bilingual (English-Chinese) volume Codicil appeared in the Flying Islands Pocket Poets series last year.

GEOFF
I’m still not sure exactly what you have in mind blog-wise — which is one reason I’ve delayed getting back to you.

You mentioned at one point talking about ‘how the poem gets started’.

I suspect my methods are not unusual but I’ll run through them here just in case they’re of interest.

Of course, Ideas for poems arise from many places including dreams, conversation, reading other poets, research, political (or theological) convictions or lack thereof, memories from many years earlier (Hemingway’s ‘unhappy childhood’, for instance — though mine was happy enough.
I usually jot down the idea or a line or two on a piece of paper and file it in my Ideas file.

Often when I’m about to begin a poem I don’t have to look very far down into the file. Sometimes I don’t have to look at all because the poem’s pressing in on me already. Sometimes the file can be very lean and/or some of the ideas may prove unintelligible at such a distance.

 I work on a first draft when I know I have a couple of hours available without interruption. I try to make the first draft as good as I can even though I know it is only the first and that quite a few more will be needed (in most cases). There’s a nice tension here between being uninhibited and being too careful. One has to choose a middle path.

I type up the second or third draft on the computer and on about the third draft I show it to someone else who may or may not have literary or poetic expertise. I find their suggestions about lines they don’t understand or don’t like very useful. Such comments break the ice of a poem which one mistakenly thought was finished. I do keep the earlier drafts though in case I want to go back to them, as sometimes happens. I quite often show my changes to the other person. I also run poems past subject-matter experts when I’m writing on something I don’t know well e.g. science, theology etc . Usually I let the poem cool down for a month or so when I think it’s finished (or ‘abandoned’, as Auden used to say).
Reading the poem aloud to the ‘other person’ is always important too though some of it, of course, is done by email.

Venues these days in Australia are thinning out, especially if one’s style seems to be ‘going out of fashion’, as it is in some quarters. Obviously, one thinks carefully about where one sends poems and tries to be efficient clerically.
I don’t often try overseas markets, partly because ‘no one I know’ would see the poem — though brusque dismissals of ‘colonials’ may also be  reason.

About every year and a half or two years I look over what I’ve got and see if the poems can be coherently assembled into a collection which might interest a publisher (one of a small handful). I’ve been lucky lately with Pitt Street Poetry but up till then I was lurching from one to the next, possibly helping to drive  some broke in the process!

As readers of mine will notice, I tend these days to write about a third of my output in traditional rhyming and scanning verse. The rest tends to be in blank iambic tetrameters and trimeters randomly alternated for sound and arranged into tercets. It’s  a very flexible and versatile form. I find these days I hardly ever attempt free verse (which I often like a  lot when written by other poets). For myself, I really like the a strong (usually iambic) rhythm. My love of jazz may have something to do with this though I’m far from having the rhythmic flexibility of Charlie Parker.

That’s about if tor the moment.
Let me know what you think.
All the best
Geoff

 

 

KIT

I think our methods and some of our assumptions are very different, Geoff

But I see a lot in common too…

 

Almost everything begins for me pen on paper … I mean that on paper is where the first traces are left… I try to get lines on paper as fast as I can for fear of losing them… which also happens a lot…

 

I imagine that one of the myriad sources of creativity on this planet is the ether being full of these lost lines that float around forever like radio waves never quite gone if you have a subtle enough apparatus to receive them… superstitious nonsense perhaps, but the fun kind…

 

… I think the lines are like mantras before you record them… you roll them around in your head and get a feeling for them from different angles, so that they might well have been worked over to some extent before they even make it into the notes as raw material

 

I used to go from pen and paper to typescript and then back to pen and paper … to get the feeling for the poem in both forms (by hand and in its mechanicial version) … and outloud along the way as well … at least subvocalized… and back and forth as many times as necessary until arriving at a satisfactory form (one that will no doubt nevertheless disappoint a month later when looked at again…

 

But now for a long time it’s been a one-way process for me… I mean from notes in ink to screen and then all subsequent work on screen one way or another (but with hearing it along the way always as part of the process)… which is because I believe that both poetry and the telling of stories are primarily oral/aural phenomena…

 

I should also say I believe in the 99% perspiration paradigm, by which I mean I don’t believe

(perhaps contra the little reverie earlier on) in inspiration per se (I think it’s just an excuse for

lazy poets)…

But – and you may find this contradictory again– I do find that ideas, lines, topics, whole conceptions of poems are constantly coming to me… as you say, for instance with dream material… but equally, with what one sees every day (of late for me this tends to mean what I find in the garden or on the bookshelves)…

So I need not make much effort to find them… But I wouldn’t call this ‘inspiration’ because I think all ideas and topics and lines and rhymes and rhythms come from somewhere… unless you’re a Lewis Carroll and can come up with your own vocabulary out of thin air (brillig, galumph, chortle, slithy and so on) then nothing in the language department is yours to begin with… the trick is to make it yours in the handling… the miracle of every language is infinite possibility from a finite set of signs…

 

I do think in poetry making there’s a balance between what I’d call a practised expertise on the one hand and saying what you need to say on the other…

And to some extent you can decide which is which for you… for instance, I’ve assiduously avoided thinking of my own work in terms of metrical considerations (it’s not that they’re not there it’s that I’m avoiding thinking about them)… my focus is much more on grammar and rhetoric/trope-ology…

 

For me – poetry is an art of knowing and not

… I mean that in the sense that you can’t do it if you don’t know what you’re doing and you can’t do it if you absolutely do know where you’re going… I mean, if there’s no surprise for you then you’re not making a poem, for yourself or anyone else… the principle is clearer with story making (no point in the story when you know what’s going to happen already), but it remains the same principle…

 

I welcome feedback from others but I find myself overwhelmingly going the other way (possibly a pity in view of my profound ignorance) and – for better or worse – it’s a long time since I’ve been able to keep up with myself in terms of draft production … for instance the multi-volume ATARAXIA project I’ve been on for a few years now is becoming a huge sorting enterprise, with thousands of pages of drafts to wade and sift through

…

I think every poet is diligent and is lazy in their own way

I’m very diligent at producing the material and editing it to an acceptable draft stage, much less so when it comes to getting this into ‘collection shape’ – that’s the pulling teeth bit for me

 

… now yll forgive my loose style on the page here … but let me explain it… it’s associated with my favoured styles of creation which are in turn associated with my interest in grammar/rhetoric… I view poetry as essentially a spoken form… and I find written form (especially the sentence starting with a cap and ending with a full stop)… intrusive and frequently unnatural… I want my poetry – not always – but generally – to be more like conversation or thinking aloud

 

I’m happy to acknowledge that it may well be futile to want poetry to be any way in particular at all!

 

poetry

 

comes from a shallow place

so easily missed

like marks passed over

too small to see

it’s never unexpected –

everyone’s hoping for rhythm, for rhyme

until the wall appears

then we first notice

these women and men

girls and boys

animals every one

shaped like sledgehammers

with poetry on their backs

bashing head against brick

until the message is clear                  

 

Perhaps this is a good moment to resume our old conversation about punctuation in poetry? May I suggest considering it alongside attitudes to ambiguity in poetry? I think these are closely related.

 

GEOFF

Thanks for your blog feedback to my comments on how I write poetry (generally). 

 

My focus has usually been on writing for paid publication, either by commission (as with reviews) or 'on spec' (as with poems). I don’t really find the money-free blog congenial. I’d rather just talk with other poets (and readers) over a coffee or a wine (if such things were permitted at the moment).

 

I will make a few comments, as suggested, on punctuation in poetry. ‘Ambiguity’ is a larger topic which I’ll leave to a later time.

 

To my knowledge the loosening-up of punctuation in (European) poetry began with Guillaume Apollinaire’s Alcools in 1913. It was he who first dropped punctuation at the end of the line, probably assuming that end-stopping was a form of punctuation already. He was also an early concrete poet. See 'La Petite Auto’, for instance, where he writes one stanza in the form of the car itself, complete with the road and the wind streaming past below and above it. It’s interesting though that Apollinaire retains CAPS down the left-hand margin, a habit first abandoned in Australian poetry by Judith Wright, I think, as early as her first book, The Moving Image. 

 

In English since the 1960’s there’s been a trend to abandon punctuation almost completely though most poets (indicatively?) are reluctant to abandon the capital ‘I’. Many poets, following the Black Mountain School. also used ‘breath spaces’ as a form of punctuation (almost like line breaks in the iddle of the line). I think these poets. and many later ones, thought punctuation tended to ‘get in the way’ of the words and phrases themselves which should somehow be ‘free-floating’. Initially, this seemed naive (like a primary school kid with a lazy teacher) but the convention was established over ten years or so and is now uncontroversial (as can be seen in your own work).

 

My feeling is that most poems that are not ultra-lyrical need (traditional) punctuation to clarify their denotative meaning. Their (no less important)  connotative meaning, of course, remains free-floating and subjective in the mind of the reader/listener. In discursive poetry in particular (not a popular mode these days) punctuation is essential. The lack of it can be needlessly confusing. 

 

A few small points. 

 

I suspect a comma at the end of a line is often unnecessary — unless it helps to  surround an appositional phrase. On the other hand, it’s hard to abandon commas at that point when you’re using them elsewhere.

 

Punctuation is hard to abandon partially. A poem of several grammatical sentences which has one full stop at the end undoubtedly looks weird. 

 

In general, I think, punctuation should not attract attention to itself. The absence of it has a ‘Look, Mum. No hands!’ quality to it. Of course, one gets used to the device but it’s off-putting initially so why do it without a good reason?

 

I know E.E. Cummings achieved entertaining (and important) effects with typological and punctuational high jinks that could not be achieved otherwise but he also ran the risk of becoming a ‘one-trick-pony’. As Cummings himself insisted: ‘Gillette Razor Blades / having been used and reused / to the mystical moment of dullness emphatically are / Not To Be Resharpened.‘

 

It’s over a century now since Apollinaire died of Spanish flu and the war) so his innovations are probably not so new any more. Likewise, Cummings — his main freedoms were introduced back in the 1920s. 

 

Of course, punctuation-free free verse has long been the orthodoxy in the Anglophone world so it may even be innovative for a (fairly) conservative poet to question it. 

 

As you see, I’m not beyond using a few brackets in my prose though.We agnostics do like to qualify things. 

 

 

 

 

KIT

sorry to be slow responding, Geoff…

life in lockdown was ridiculously busy… I think it’s that no more excuses mode of life (yr not going anywhere so yd better just get on with it)… and of course coming out of lockdown is worse… I look at last year’s diary and marvel at the pace with which I was getting about…  anyway, here I am now

and

I agree with you about line end commas … they generally seem superfluous…

and I agree about the general point that punctuation should not draw attention to itself (unless keen to be set in concrete)

 

I suppose I could sum up my general attitude to punctuation by saying that it needs to be justified, rather than the other way around… I don’t mean ‘as opposed to ragged right’ … I mean, you need to have a reason to punctuate anything… as opposed to simply following a set of given rules, or accepted patterns of language behaviour (in this case, the written kind)

 

punctuation-free is precisely what classical Chinese and Japanese and some other poetries were (in the case of Chinese I think up until the May 4^th Movement)… there is a kind of purity there in the image that is the character, always equal in dimension to the character preceding and the character to follow… I can see why some were upset when this populist decadent western convention was brought in in the twentieth century

 

…perhaps it is the mission of poetry to escape the straitjacket of prose and of paper … and the direction of the escape is the spoken word … a kind of return to origins … an Edenic return that must always be frustrated by what we know and where we’ve been … anything we literates can hope to say is going to be tainted by where we’ve been reading and writing, and there’s no avoiding this… there isn’t an innocence we can recapture

 

perhaps this is why I’m so fond of ellipsis? … it’s a way of showing that there are dots to join… that it’s not a case of everything already hooked up the way it has to be…

 

and it’s nice to turn prose out of its pre-determined courses to some extent, simply by allowing perhaps unexpected flows (though possibly these are the rantings of one who imagines transcendence from the double blind peer review in the ranked journal?)

 

…

the same with grammar as with punctuation – it needs to be justified and not the result of having swallowed so many Fowler’s pills as a child … in fact it should not be shaped by anything prescribed… but gathered from the air around us… which is where the language is alive

 

then where is spelling in all of this (?), it might well be asked…    you have to draw the line somewhere, I suppose I could say …but actually I don’t think that’s it … it’s that the word is the most basic unit we work with to make meaning … the word then the phrase or the clause (going up the ladder)

… and yes, this is a concession to a fundamental written-ness we at least unconsciously ascribe to poetry… because the word is an abstraction of writing (I mean without the meta-awareness of writing, we could have no such abstraction as ‘word’… or for that matter ‘sound’ or pretty well anything else we’re talking about here)…

 

Plato has Socrates railing against writing as the new fangled technology that’s going to make everybody forget everything because they won’t need to remember anymore… and you have to admit one of the great advantages of writing is the way it allows us to drop half a dozen different balls we were juggling on the strength of knowing we will be able to pick them up later because we’ll know where they are…

 

…it’s interesting how the interesting questions lead to each other…

I think we have quite different impressions assumptions about orthodoxies, in these things, Geoff…  

 

Of course there is a solid following –  Joanne Burns, Pi O, lots – for minimal or no punctuation and related experiments/tendencies … still

I would say that while there are the thousand flowers blooming and schools contending, there is nevertheless a normative kind of magazine or competition-winning poem in Australia, an average kind of poem in a book of somebody’s poems … and that normative number has conventional punctuation, spelling and grammatical progression and it flows forward on either a narrative or a hortatory basis of some kind (it’s either telling a story, meant to be recognized as such OR it’s making some kind of argument or series of linked observations in lieu thereof)… it’s the same in the States for sure, as I find now reading last year’s Best American… which, I must say, I’m pleasantly surprised by … I used to always find it very inferior to the Australian one … the Yanks have lifted their game (nice to think there are still fields in which they can do that, in the light of their recent global performance)…

 

of course, I have succumbed frequently to the norms I mention above (and, I feel, would otherwise have been much less published/shortlisted over the years)… but I try not to let those norms be my norms…

 

Cummings a one trick pony?  I don’t think so… but that’s another discussion perhaps?...

what I love particularly though about Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel is that there really was a reason  for the way the type was on the page… that cockroach had to do a lot of jumping… and one night the caps lock was left on … there’s something about demonstrating the materiality of writing that makes

 

and there’s another issue … as previously alluded to … with minimising punctuation – which is the opportunity for polysemy

 

I’m drafting a lot of dream-originated poetry at the moment … and the unpunctuated and/or ellipsis (find yr own connection) mode seems appropriate for delivery

 

dreamt

 

two dead birds

each set to a stream, branch

come to life and flew

 

themetune: Beatles – something in the way…

 

second one, kookaburra

who else was there?

 

on the way to the fire

 

dream I dreamt

and dream I dream

and wake

 

slept off a cliff

into this day

 

scenes of a crime returned

 

not a word now

 

just as dream worn

wallaby thud slow beyond dawn

 

then pumpkin hunting

wilds of winter

where the last vine got away

 

 

… this is pretty well just what was in the dream (a few nights ago) and then into the garden first few minutes waking… so I suppose, a kind of aubade…

 

but the point is that what I hope to do in ‘recording’ this sort of thing is to re-enact the dis/connectedness of the dream as it came/is remembered waking

 

and

I do like making the reader do the work of deciding how to read lines that can be read in different ways, of sometimes having to decide what part of speech a word is (whether unconsciously or not), of forcing a preposition or phrasal verb into new and unexpected service… 

 

here’s another new dream poem draft …

 

it’s every waking moment in the dream again

 

climb those selfsame footworn stairs

 

so came to the eye of the needle

door too small to post myself

 

I will

put up my shoes

took hat down

fear squeeze still

 

empires to rise

and stars fell there

 

I was someone somewhere else

am

 

ask no questions tell no lies

 

try again

but the address is lost

 

day won’t fit in the dream

encompasses all light

 

glow still in the up first thing

pile paper kindling air and ember

 

so it must be winter we’ve come to

every window a different world

puts you in the picture

 

make mirror of anything that shines

 

cloud at a time I come

scribble the first thing down

 

 

… having to decide, as a reader, with each new stanza whether yr in the clause or sentence you were in in the last stanza, or whether yr in a new one – I think simulates nicely the way dreams go… or what passes for ‘logic’ in a dream, but isn’t

…

 

¿is that sort of method serviceable beyond the poem that aims to imitate dreamwork?  yes, I think it is and the reason I think that is because everyday speech (and thought) is much more like that than we generally give it credit for being… so by cultivating that need for a reader to work out how things connect we connect with a less pre-determined way of being in the words

 

(you see there are actually some extra punctuation marks I wish we had in English too – for instance ¿ -- so useful to be able to say ‘question coming now!’)

 

… are thought and speech for most people most of the time more like a dream or more like a law report?   thankfully, we have a lot of playground in between!

 

I do fully understand how annoying the kinds of play I’m promoting must be for a lot of people and how disturbing it must be for their expectations of what a poem needs to do …

 

and let me also say, I’m certainly not immune to being annoyed by the transgressions of those who need their licences revoked with extreme prejudice … rapsters, hip hopsters, poetasting ‘lyricists’ and very many of the slam brigade whom we shall not offend because they won’t have read this far

 

 I do think poets tend on the issue of ambiguity into two camps – essentially

those who wish to see their meaning controlled … those who’d like to let it loose

 

without wanting to get into a discussion of either plagiarism or death of the author (the first rather clear-cut in my view, the second greatly over-reported),

I do think there’s a gulf of sorts between those who see meaning as something they’ve made themselves and those who think of it as collaboration …

personally, having invented so few of the words I use myself (unlike, say Lewis Carroll), I see them as something on loan from everyone who’s spoken with me and from everyone who’s spoken before… and so as a kind of forced collaboration – a collaboration I press on mainly the unwitting and the unaware, mainly people without a pulse…

I guess you could think of this ‘mine’ versus ‘team effort’ thing as a product versus process orientation divide… I certainly disagree with that Archibald Macleish ‘Ars Poetica’ dictum, that a poem should not mean but be… quite the other way round in my opinion … permanence is all appearance, smoke and mirrors… all works a draft until we’re gone…

 

the irony is though that the art of poetry is typically best practised by those who are of the written ilk and those who more or less assume what Macleish assumes…

 

the problem with the slamsters

is that they’re frequently pretending there’s no written tradition at all or that it doesn’t matter or that it has no power over them

(like the creative writing student who tells you ‘no, I don’t read anyone else’s poetry because I don’t want to be influenced’… what a terrible thing it would be to be influenced! … and where do they think poetry comes from?)

… and still, among the slamsters, are some fine poets, and many more potentially good poets, who kind of bob between worlds as it were…

 

… there is so much pretending in poetry worlds … and I guess that makes a lot of sense really … it’s what the art/craft is largely about after all

… there’s a lot of pretending about readerships, about influence, about importance, about originality … there’s so much self-pity on the part of the undiscovered (and have you ever met a poet who would deem themselves sufficiently discovered?  Saint Emily Dickinson praps… but it’s more or less a categorical impossibility)…    

 

instinct and talent are two different things and the successful passage between them lies through the land of Hard Yakka… which has led me to the conclusion that poets are people who read and work on and with and make poetry every day (or as nearly as possible)

 

… my last word (for now) on the written and the spoken is that the page is where poetry ends up but nothing of writing is essential to its substance

… flip that over and we get

if you can’t incline to hear what’s on the page then either you’re not in the mood or it’s not poetry (or possibly both)

 

…

questions of orthodoxy and canon and what’s expected/accepted bring us un/naturally to

the issue of poetry and money … I’ve always loved that wonderful Robert Graves quip – ‘no poetry in money but even less money in poetry’          

 

I think there’s a lot of pretending goes on around money and poetry in this country

 

I don’t know how you feel about it, Geoff, but I think Australia is a country with (per capita) a remarkable number of good poets…

and because a high proportion of those are mid-career or further along, I think there’s a remarkable amount of good poetry being produced in this country… and there’s much more good stuff being written than the mags could ever soak up

 

… of course there’s a huge amount of the bad stuff too … more of everything!

 

it is to some extent a worldwide phenomenon (and partly a phenomenon of raw population): there’s more good poetry being produced in the world than ever before and as a concomitant if not consequence, there’s more bad poetry being produced than ever before

 

I suspect the current corona capers may be upping particularly the bad poetry figures right now… because people are emboldened to have a crack at things in life they perhaps might be better off coming to more gradually … and essentially I say good on them … give it a burl!

but who knows… there’s also the moment focus … I mean the zeitgeisty presence one feels to the moment, like when a wall comes down or a war’s declared … so valuable documents may come from all of this…

 

but back to the volume of poetry being produced

in the case of Australia, it’s hard to see how all the good stuff could ever be read

…

I know this idea has been pooh-poohed a little of late, but my impression is that the serious readership of poetry in this country (from which number I exclude, on principle, school students and their teachers, as persons forced into doing it)

… the serious readers – the conscientious readers – are poets

(and to a lesser extent practitioners of other artforms [musicians, artists, dramatists, novelists])

 

I would number the serious producers of poetry in Australia at around 500 …that is to say I think there are about 500 people in the country who work at making the stuff with some diligence, consistency and success (whether or not they see themselves as ‘poets’)

 

…you’d be in a better position to know than I am whether I’m in a statistical cloud cuckoo zone here, Geoff

…but take the Newcastle Poetry Prize for example… having spoken to many judges down through the years my impression is that of late they average 700 to 1000 entries

of which about 20 or 25 get shortlisted

but of which according to my sources probably more like a hundred deserve to be

 

… how many of these noble 500 have been able to make anything like a living out of poetry through their lives?  bugerall, I would suggest and this despite various forms of coercion and assistance (textbook prescription, grants, prizes)… and yet, probably, for most of the 500, poetry is the most important thing in their lives (or the core/key thing anyway), it’s probably seen by most of them as their most important potential contribution to the world …

the lack of recognition and appreciation afforded to our unacknowledged legislators when compared with that given the sporting morons we usually have to listen to towards the end of the news… it’s simply astounding, and a damning indictment of a culture that so steadfastly refuses to think or feel about things of real importance …

 

I count myself as one of the fortunate troupe who have actually managed to patch together a somewhat poetry-oriented career (mainly by getting paid to do a PhD about it and then by teaching creative writing far away from home for a long time, by virtue of piggy-backing on a previous career in teaching English to non-native speakers of it). I count myself lucky to have done okay over time with mags, with shortlists in blind comps, with book publishers, with residencies, even with grants … and one has to remember there’s a remarkable degree of luck involved in all this … you could have ten poems that would have won ten different comps every year for ten years, and enter them each in the wrong comp each time and not be noticed at all… I’m sure that this is happening all the time…

I count myself lucky too to have been, not exactly mentored ever, but at least appreciated a little from time to time

 

… mind you grant money, while psychologically very helpful, really is a pittance… this three year Ozco grant I’m currently on for instance, had been fully spent on tiny houses within three months of receipt and before the grant period commenced and now I have yet to pay tax on it, but the bill is coming …

 

I suppose the point I’m coming to about the money is that if Australia’s poetry output and archive were limited to what can be paid for in the current circs, it would be a very poor show indeed

 

…if I look at my income over time the fact is that, though I have in various ways made a living from poetry, only a tiny part of it has come from actually publishing poems or broadcasting them or winning or placing in competitions … once again, it all felt good but I know poets in many parts of the world who’ve, shall we say, been more nicely treated …

 

… despite and because of being kept keen if not lean, I think I’ve become, over time, both a much better and a much more prolific poet… I’m sure it’s very annoying to some … and I’m sure I’m not behaving the way poets are meant to behave… but frankly I’m past carin’

 

a few years ago Les dubbed me the poet of the Myall, by which he intended that every river has to have a poet and the Myall (dumb luck) was stuck with me …

yet I revel in that crown for which I contend – of Australia’s most persistent minor poet… the stone (but I won’t have one) would say ‘he just kept bloody doing it; you couldn’t stop him’

 

all of this theme of luck and lack of recognition leads me back to

an idea I had long since but now seems relevant –

which would be an annual anthology along the lines of the

salon de refusés idea

… in fact it could simply be called just that … and the rule would be that you could only enter a poem that had failed to shortlist for a recognized competition or failed to be accepted by a mainstream mag (or set the bar higher, say both) …

… a little like Phil Roberts’ Poets Choice of yore, with the twist that

each submission would come with a declaration (to be published) as to where it didn’t get up … waddayareckon?   could change the scenery a little praps?

 

 

GEOFF

There is much to discuss in your recent email but I’ll confine myself this time to your assertion that the serious producers of poetry in Australia number at around 500 and that probably, for most of the 500, poetry is the most important thing in their lives … it’s probably seen by most of them as their most important potential contribution to the world …

 

 

I’ve often said the number of competent and serious poets at work in Australia at any one time is probably about 300 but the numbers may well have crept up a little in recent years. Whatever the number is, it’s probably more than concert pianists and fewer than rock guitarists. Fewer too than the couple of thousand who seem see themselves as poets but have still a way to go in their craft, Fewer, too, by multiples, than the number of talented footballers who (normally) charge telegenically about our ovals and stadiums.

 

Almost none of the 500 (let’s say) has made a living from poetry and all of them, to my knowledge, have had an extremely supportive spouse (or series of them). As you say, much of the money they do make comes from associated activities such as teaching, reviewing and so on. These are all important and, I hope, inevitable offshoots but, except for teaching, they don’t generate viable incomes.

 

Does this mean that our 'noble 500' are hobbyists and that their work is universally disregarded. I think not. They know they’re doing something important within the culture and that a small, but not ridiculously small,  number of readers (or listeners) who are not poets share this opinion. 

 

This doesn’t mean that poets take themselves too seriously. It’s just a recognition that they have a vocation and are doing their best to honour to its (mostly pleasurable) demands. 

 

Since our society uses money as a sign of seriousness they do want to be paid, even if the amounts are pitifully small. They are not in the habit of saying to their plumber ‘thank you for coming over and sharing your spanner skills with me’. They want to be paid — just as he (or she) is. Their work is not less valuable.

 

Of course, almost all of them have a ‘day job’ which they also take quite seriously but their art is at the core of their lives — along with their personal relationships and family (they’re not hermits, for the most part). 

 

What is to be done about all this? I suspect the most that can be done is that each poet, in his or her own way, should do what he or she reasonably can to extend (with integrity) the number of people who read poetry and/or go to where it’s head. This is less important, of course, than the original writing of it, but it is important. Some poets have different talents in this regard e.g. as venue organisers, publishers or presenting their poetry to students  but ideally, each will make his or her contribution to this slow expansion (or defence of the perimeters!)

,

Poetry has been highly and widely admired in some cultures at some periods but even in the hardest of times and the bleakest of contexts poetry never quite goes away. Name me a language without its poets. There may be some in which a Nobel prizewinner has yet to appear but there are none, I think, where poets are not at work. If they number 500 in 25 million, so be it. That might even be the right ratio.

 

 

KIT

An interesting list of poetry’s others here: concert pianists, rock guitarists, the plumber expecting to be paid, the footy player expecting to be seen and heard (and paid)…  Personally, I find the plumber much more helpful and necessary. But I suppose plumber, poet and footy player each wades through the shit in her/his own special way. Likewise the musos.

 

I agree about the need to have a role in facilitation, alongside being a poet. (Something yv conspicuously done over a long period of time, with a range of fine hats). It is a need because without this activity poetry will not be available to anyone. A need because – whatever dribs and drabs may flow – there is no commercial viability in poetry in this country. There has not been and there is no prospect there ever will be. The plumber analogy falls down because there simply wouldn’t be any poetry if we were still waiting for the first account to be settled before we came back to the job. But the washers would have been long since fixed. These activities are not part of the same economy. But it is interesting now, in the jobkeeper economy of the covid-world, to see the greater economy thrown into something a little like the territory poetry generally finds itself in. The lesson being that this is all invention anyway, and that there was much more imagination involved in the dismal science than anyone had ever guessed.

 

I do have to say it shits me when poets do nothing to assist community at all and then whinge about how unrecognised they are and how unfair the world is. Naturally though they’re broadly correct, in that they are unrecognised and the world is unfair. How these things are related is another matter. I do think there’s a lot of unsustainable myth floating around the ideas of poetry and poetry making. The way canons have worked, especially, but not only, in the West, has encouraged people coming into the craft to see it in somewhat individualist terms. But without community I cannot see how poetry can be at all. Community, in the simplest sense, meaning that of the reader and writers, listeners and declaimers, the living and the dead, the remembered and the (more or less) forgotten.  So I think there’s another kind of pretending that goes on here – pretending the artist-hero can wow the world alone, simply by being discovered to be the next great thing.

 

The ideal number of poets for a country? That’s an interesting construction. I always used to think that there were two reasons for making the stuff. To change the world and to better yourself. And of course that one could chew gum and walk these ways at the same time. In other words, one makes poems (or art in any form) in order to/in hopes of contributing to a canon of worthy (memorable) works and also for cathartic reasons. The first of these – the tangle with posterity – is fraught, of course. Who knows what time might do to your stuff? But the second need be no more troublesome – in terms of self-improvement – than yoga or knitting or playing the guitar. So the idea that there could be a ‘right’ number of poets for the province is mildly anathema to me. Why shouldn’t the plumbers and the footy players have some of the poetry action? I’m guessing you’ll say ‘that’s fine but let’s just not call them poets.’ Fair enough. I’ve had a bit of a lifelong struggle with the idea of being called a poet myself, even though it probably has been my main activity and the centre of my activities for a long time now. What is it makes it so shameful?

 

This idea of poetry never quite going away, though, intrigues.  What is it exactly that doesn’t quite go away?  

 

 

GEOFF

I’ll briefly pick just three  elements out of for comment.

 

One: poetry as community. I agree with this but it’s best not to be too explicit about it. Poets, generally, are not good unionists (or not in their poetry activities anyway) As we’ve seen with identity politics recently communities are often unhealthily concerned about their own borders (in this case, who is and who isn’t a poet — or a ‘worthwhile' poet?). It’s probably best to devote one’s personal efforts to the form itself, to the poems, to the tradition perhaps, and not the poets. From this focus, other benefits will almost automatically flow. I organise my poetry readings for the distinct pleasure of hearing the poet reading his or her most memorable or moving poems aloud, in their auditory fullness. Naturally there will be some (relative) dross on the way. A secondary interest is observing what poets reveal about themselves in a reading without intending to. Some are unbearably humble; a few are unbearably vain. Both types (and others) are capable of a good poem, at least from time to time. One has to be on the alert. 

 

Two: poetry will always be ‘around’. I’ve thought for a very long time that the human need for patterned language is the same as the, more widely recognised, need for narrative. We just can’t help ourselves.  Half of advertising is based on it. Songs are obviously a part of this wide definition (despite my personal and idiosyncratic reservations about ‘setting’ poems to music and perhaps about ‘singing’ more generally). Metre is a part of the patterning — and I include the more elusive metres of free verse, of course. And political or religious rhetoric etc etc. I suspect the need is built into the language itself. As long a language exists (and I know many are threatened) patterning within it will also exist — and be enjoyed and valued.

 

Three: money. I mention it only because it’s a sign (for better or worse) of seriousness in our society. Like housework, published poetry that goes unpaid is not taken seriously. It seems that the ‘economy’ can’t afford handsome payments but nothing at all is a probably unintended insult. Paradoxically, of course, we poets don’t write poetry for money as such but for our own satisfaction (or improvement, as you somewhat intriguingly say — many great poets were not very ‘improved’ as people, I’m afraid. I do think the reading of, or listening to,  poets, however, is likely to ‘improve’ people in some sense — though one always has to remember those Bach-loving Nazis or Japanese P.O.W. camp commandants who had a taste for haiku. 

 

 

KIT

It’s interesting how the money/paid work question keeps hanging around in this conversation, Geoff. I had kind of thought we’d dealt with it.  I think we’ll just have to agree to having a slightly different orientation on this issue. But to shift focus a little maybe we should dive deeper into the purposes of poetry question … as related to the idea of a ‘function’ for poetry or why do people do it…

 

I like Herbert Read’s idea that art (that the making of art) is the opposite of alienation. Where does this idea leave the making of poetry vis à vis relations between labour and capital?  The housework question is interesting on this score… and interesting with a certain amount of chicken-and-eggery. Is it worthless because it’s not valued?  Is it drudgery because unseen. Is it yoga nidra? What does not kill me makes me strong.

 

‘To speak is to fall into tautology’, Borges says.

 

It’s a lot like the question of tipping and its moral dimensions … to whit: by tipping, are you encouraging exploitation or helping to pay someone’s wages? Then reverse that. By not tipping are you encouraging proper wages and conditions or depriving someone of their livelihood? The never simple answer is it depends on where you are.  So while the idea of tipping may be essentially obnoxious to us, it is nevertheless sometimes what needs to be done. Living, as we do, in a real world also.

 

Then how do we begin to value housework? Child rearing? Not pouring more carbon into the atmosphere? A particular system seems to be the problem here. And as it is a system based on trickery (but with a large moron following), we need to be a little tricky to get around it…  The Icelandic Women’s Strike of some years ago was an interesting action experiment in this regard.

 

In the case of the arts more generally, and poetry in particular, I can’ be convinced that conforming to financial success criteria of any kind can ever be more than make-believe. And I can’t be convinced that it’s healthy. The canon of what’s worth returning to is troublesome, but it’s what we’re stuff with (no matter how many Emily Dickinsons were lost). And let’s face it, even in these uncertain times, the weather remains much more dependable than markets (unless your sole criterion is that eventually they go up).

 

From a personal point of view … I draft poems every day and have made them available every day to a small public who seem to appreciate the encounter with my process…

I make no great claims for these works-on-the-way … many are discarded, many find their way, often in fragments, into works that may take years to amount to something. A little like piling up bricks because the idea for the castle of the temple must emerge one day, however the jungles grow over.

 

It may be my Creative Writing teaching background (a déformation professionelle?) drives me to see a value in this show of process other poets might not see… and I suppose for some of my readers it does amount to a kind of mentoring.  I think, if on-line reader stats are anything to go by, my work is meeting a lot more people this way than through books or mags or shortlistings…

 

In any case a phenomenon like the daily kit is a kind of community… and a different kind of community from that in which most poets (or at least most Australian poets) participate… I don’t recommend it to anyone… it’s my thing… it was stressful to begin with, but five or more years in, it would be a lot harder for me not to do it than to continue … Perhaps best of all, I think over time my hopeful to dross ratio is improving.

 

And I think the self-imposed spontaneity has been good for my poetic production (obviously in terms of quantity, but really I mean in terms of quality… that’s to say I think I’m becoming a better poet because I do it every day). The idea of tying that particular activity to money in any way is anathema… maybe something like paying a priest per sermon draft (appalling b t w the church jobkeeper thing has been in my view, when the government can’t bring itself to help the arts or the universities).

 

So how are the need to make art (in this case poetry) and the need to receive it to be best arranged?

It would be wonderful for there to be a living in it (for those who prove themselves to be good at it), because I believe it is a legitimate thing to be doing with one’s life. And also because it is an important contribution to culture. Because if nobody makes culture then there won’t be any. (Why we need to pretend this has to be conducted on a national basis is a little beyond my comprehension.)

 

One simple question is – what part of the economy (and which job descriptions) are as essential or of as much value as the production of art? Those who produce food and deliver it to us, clearly. Those who put roofs over our heads. Those who teach. Those who heal. That might get us near to a quarter of the workforce, but it wouldn’t be much more. The corona capers have been interesting for bringing into focus this question of what’s essential and the value of what’s essential. Surely the arts are essential, close to most essential?  But there are other ways to look at all of this. To whit – should we be considering the positive and the negative of contributions (as in the National Happiness thing in Bhutan, and which Aotearoa/NZ is now having a dabble with)? And is art something that everyone should be doing? There’s something to consider there but I don’t want my Meanjin  full of bush ballads, and I don’t want a symphony orchestra arranged along we-can-all-do-it lines.

 

I fear that journalism is going the same way as the arts and we may simply have to suck it up… that people with stories that need telling must by and large produce for a public because they have the leisure and means to do so…  because they are driven to do so by duty!

This is not ideal but at least for the short term it might be better than letting the world go on without any truth being told at all (just because Rupert Murdoch can’t be persuaded to pay for it.)

 

As for funding the art makers more generally, ahead of the generalised introduction of Guaranteed Minimum Income, I think it could first be delivered to bona fide artmakers (as we established in the case of poetry, probably not more than five hundred of them… but even if we stretch to a thousand, the impact on the budget would be insignificant).  I had thought for a long time of a lottery and an automatic pension with no means test for providing income to producers of the arts. The lottery would have several entry levels, depending on fixed achievement criteria. This would be in the interests of eliminating bureaucratic costs and the associated toxic culture of peer assessment. But, I think a Guaranteed Minimum Income system is a much simpler straightforward mechanism. I notice that the Seniors’ Association are arguing for exactly this for everyone of pension age.

 

In any case, the road to getting the economics of all this right cannot be down the path of giving up making art because we can’t get paid for it. Or we can’t all get paid for it. Or we can’t get paid for it often enough in order to feed and clothe ourselves without recourse to other sources.

 

But to return to the more immediate question of the art and poetry needs of the world… I think the need to be with a sound pattern (then later, historically, as well a graphic pattern) with words , is I agree something essential to the species (as far as I know)… and the impulse is as far as I can see older than words. I think it’s quite plausible language came from song rather than the other way around. 

And older than the species as well … I mean didn’t we get the idea in the first place from birds and frogs and the wind through the treetops?

 

 

As for ‘identity politics’, I think essentially it’s a right wing beat-up, along the lines of ‘political correctness’.  While I agree that chips on the shoulder can damage the psyche, possibly for life, the global problems to be addressed when people speak of ‘identity politics’ are to do with power and its unequal/uneven/unfair distribution.

 

Yes, there’s such a thing as victim consciousness and it can fuck you up for generations. But unfortunately there are victims. It’s not all imagination.

 

Tribalism damages everyone and everything in its path. But sometimes, nevertheless, a tribe needs to put its hand up and tell the world ‘this is what’s happened to us’… which usually means ‘this is what that other tribe did to us’. This is what Black Lives Matter is about. You don’t get to the better world simply by fantasising it. Nor does the past go away simply because you’re ignorant of it.

 

I think of your work, Geoff, as mainly a wrestle with this stuff, a wrestle with the stories towards the truth of who we are. A ledger with seasons and hatless pride.

 

We think of nations and nationalism as a better or benign version of the tribe thing, but the nth degree of that mania is fascism… … or in the current circs – Trumpery, Putin-ery, Xi Xing Ping-ery. Nationalism is the one –ism, as Benedict Anderson tells us, conspicuous for its lack of what we would generally consider to be ‘thinkers’

 

The question then is – in whose image the cosmopolis?  How to make that fair? How to give everyone a go? How to get to a politics where who you are or were or seem to be (through no choice of your own) doesn’t determine who you can be, or at least not in a crippling, limiting way.

 

This all seems a long way from poetry until we realize that everything’s political and that acts of poetry are therefore as political as other acts. Of course I don’t mean this in any party political sense. And I don’t propose poetry as the sledgehammer for getting through the wall. I simply mean that everything we do and say comes from somewhere, connects and has effects. And poetry has special duties in the re-imagining field (or space as they always seem to say these days).

 

poem between

an entre nous

 

chorus of just myself

the half prayer

 

not for publication

at least

not for anyone else intended

 

the outflow though

because we are in conversation

 

of course a kind of wandering off

is how we came to words

 

zeitgeisties!

taunt equally

and secret cypher in plain sight

call it provocation

 

won’t do what it’s told

 

dab hand of the poem

and sleight of

tug o war entitled

 

where we find ourselves to wonder

what is to be done