The Daily Kit: A Conversation in and out of Poetry with Laurie Duggan

A Conversation in and out of Poetry with Laurie Duggan

Laurie Duggan was born in in Melbourne and was involved in the poetry worlds of that city and Sydney through the 1970s and 80s. In 2006 he moved to England, living in Faversham, Kent until 2018 when he returned to Sydney. He has published some twenty books of poems together with Ghost Nation, a work about imagined space. His most recent books are Homer Street (Giramondo 2020), Selected Poems 1971-2017 (Shearsman 2018), No Particular Place To Go (Shearsman 2017).

KIT

I thought maybe kick off by just asking -- what are you working on now?

I've ordered a copy of Homer Street but I haven't read it yet (obviously)

but riffing on that would be interesting too

... possibly responding to each other

( a conversation in the poems/draft)?

or just whatever seems fit to discuss

I want to talk with about translation too

but one thing at a time I guess

so what's the latest for the Duggan oeuvre - in prospect or in draft?

LAURIE

Homer Street is a pre-coronovirus, pre-bushfire work. Scenes of life in another age even. Since then I've written about a third of a new book featuring work that might not directly address these things but which has certainly been conditioned by them. I've always found it hard to address a particular given topic which is why I tend not to submit things to anthologies that focus on issues. I completely understand why George Oppen stopped writing poems for some thirty years. As an American communist he felt he could work for the cause in better ways while at the same time not wanting to produce poems in its service. I haven't written anything in the last couple of months but this isn't unusual for me. I did stop writing once for six years but that really had more to do with the feeling I had exhausted a particular mode. I don't think a break that long will happen again . . . but who knows?

KIT

(as you might realize from the daily kit) I guess I’m more of an habitual poet, Laurie… no breakfast till there’s some kind of draft …

But why not begin with some corona capers or other related zeitgeisties ?

Let’s see – here’s a draft I’ve playing with:

staying together may drive us apart

our hearts go out to Melbourne

but it’s safer to stay at home

‘staying apart keeps us together’ –

reading this newspeak I knew

we must have cursed ourselves to here

according to the sudden mood oscillation index (SMOI)

there are only so many rooms in your head

staying at home

makes everyone aphoristic

who tops it off…

cover your cough

elbow a sneeze

staying apart will lighten the heart

outside they’re dropping like flies

don’t look

make observations of each other

casual carnal asides

don’t you know filo makes you fart?

that’s cant and superstition!

so on and so forth

shut the fuck up

can’t hear with the kettle on

keeping at bay

run out of puff

where’s the all-I-should-have-achieved?

blame is no longer a game here

but who walked the dog to death?

sentenced to same marriages

parenthood, siblingry

in all relationships

need a breather

not a respirator

you could become obesely morbid

just following the advice

or well worn way to the pantry

studying leaf cast shadows

vanishing into the book or the bark

myself becoming the music

is where I’ll have gone

or back to a little thing like sleep

they do it south of the border

and when we come out of it

same again as never before

the pillows are talking now

it’s like winter forever

around the first lit traps of morning

find a little fire and sing

little birds won’t care

And yes why have topics when, as Sterne tells us, ‘digression is the sunshine of the text’?

LAURIE

Actually, and this may seem a little contentious, I feel at times that instead of writing being my 'profession' I am someone who has been 'stuck' with writing. I just have to do it, regardless of what occupational disasters it might involve. This means that although I have a high regard for various teachers of writing (Alan Wearne, Joanne Burns, yourself) I'm rather glad that I didn't enter writing in any kind of 'professional' manner. Partly my ceasing to write reflected an anxiety in that regard ('am I just doing this because it's my career'?). I will tackle 'issues' occasionally, though usually in the form of an epigram. That said, I have in recent pieces alluded to the bushfires and the virus, but it's just because this is what's going on rather than that it's something I need to make a statement about. God, I'm sounding pretty cranky here. This is in a way funny because I'm often seen as a comic poet.

KIT

Well I think I feel a bit like that too, Laurie… and as far as teaching is concerned I think, now I’m retired from it, I feel a little like Sophocles is supposed to have felt once he no longer had much in the way of sexual urges – ‘released from a cruel master’. In a general way, I’m not sure if it works at all, in the sense of producing worthwhile writing… though I can show plenty of convincing examples. I think the point of teaching creativity more generally is that it does you good, one could say in a cathartic sense… but more importantly I think in the sense that we need stories to understand the world and if you know how to make/tell them then you have a very useful kind of power, and also the means of learning a capacity for empathy. More empathy looks like a helpful commodity in the Trump-era world. You could say something similar about being involved in translation processes, and if the translation involves creative work then the benefit is boosted. Our current government’s attack on arts degrees is really a brilliant move (from the point of view of wanting a more boring and compliant society – call that the John Howard Project)… you knock out creativity and critical thinking with the one stone.

On a personal note, I do feel that poetry is an essential part of my daily existence – reading it, writing it, talking about it, mentoring, translating, etc… and I feel lucky to have been able to make a career and decent income through poetry-related means over decades…

As for the ‘professional’ aspect, I never studied Creative Writing myself, and I don’t have any qualification in it (though I did do a doctorate about the pedagogy of it late in the piece)… actually that’s not quite true – mid-eighties, I did a semester at UTS on playwriting with George Hutchinson, but I never quite made it to the stage (though George was very encouraging) … so that’s the only Creative Writing course I ever did. And I don’t think it did me any harm.

Comics are surely the crankiest of the lot? Like the Japanese fisherman in the rubber merman suit, standing in the river all day long – the most impatient person in the village.

LAURIE

Comics are a strange breed. I normally avoid live comed like the plague but I did go to one evening when I was in the UK. The comedian was really good but I found myself worrying for her. The whole business of presenting aspects of your life as a kind of tragicomedy seemed fraught. Not even the sort of bad poet who writes about him/herself continuously risks this kind of exposure.

I did once teach writing myself. It was for a semester in Melbourne's outer west. I found I had to make the students read things in class to be sure they would actually read them (and I tried to present as wide a range of poems as possible). I did have to say at one point 'if you don't want to read anybody else's work who do you think will want to read yours?' That made a couple of people start. Really they weren't a bad bunch at all - they just weren't inner-city types from well-to-do families.

So when I did my doctorate it wasn't in Creative Writing. It was Art History - although my then partner told me she thought my thesis was a closet poem.

KIT

Ah, the students who don’t want to be influenced! Can’t sell them a book! … re teaching of the stuff and that ambivalence we share… not sure that teaching about poetry is more forgivable than the teaching of doing it (both activities being of course so much better paid than actually doing it)… BUT if I could turn back the hands of time it would be to eliminate rap/hiphop… I’d keep the ballad and the talking blues but all acoustic … and leave to Hendrix the smashing of amps and the climbing inside of them and the business with the teeth…

Just to be clear, Laurie – my PhD was in Poetics (it was titled METABUSINESS: Poetics of Haunting and Laughter) and my EdD was in Pedagogy of Creative Writing… yes, this is extreme masochism I know … no need to rub it in

… anyway … now that we’ve more or less established that the production of poetry is – one way or another – in the category of things – for better or worse – that cannot be helped – I’d like to insist that topics persist (as much as do forms or genres), regardless of and in the absence of intention … just that they won’t be gainsaid

… in the absence of intention – not a bad title (textbook for criminal law)

But this train of thought is leading me to ask you about connections (inadvertent I hope) between yr fine arts delvings and poetry machinations – and so ask how do you feel about ekphrastics ? … or poems that take in the process of art

LAURIE

As it turns out there is a stretch of poems in Homer Street called Afterimages, that deal with visual art in one way or another. I wrote them over the space of three or so years and at one point Cordite was putting out an issue of ekphrastic work. I didn't submit partly because I wasn't sure I'd use the term itself (god I can be pedantic!). I guess ekphrasic means that the poems are in a way imitations of art or verbal embodiments of the visual. Now I've always loved visual art in its many forms but I feel uncomfortable with poems that simply try to convey what the painting or whatever is doing. The Afterimages are certainly responses to visual art but the way they respond takes various forms. Yes some of them are 'descriptions'. Others are ideas about the art (or generated by it), and others are like imaginary artworks a particular artist might have done. But even with the 'descriptive' poems I was writing them with the sense that first of all they would have to work as poems and that possibly they would have to work to such a degree that it might not matter whether or not the readers knew anything about the artwork in question. In any case there has always been a lot of art in my poems, right from the beginning. I wrote a pretty bad poem about Gauguin around 1970 or so. But the way art appears in a lot of the poems is really as part of the scene that the voice of the poem is moving through. Something appears in Blue Hills because I just happened to be in the Art Gallery of New South Wales that day, and that experience will be jammed up against something else, possibly quite inconsequential. Far from being a reliable guide, the voice of the poem can often be stupidly wrong. It's kind of saying 'enjoy the poem, but don't take it as a road map'. The poems dealing with art do much the same thing.

KIT

Ah, my copy of Homer St has just arrived today, so I shall begin browsing.

I utterly reject the idea of a poem that imitates a painting. Apart from the fact of this being impossible, it’s ridiculously limiting … why would you want to do that?

But a poem some way in conversation with a painting … that’s something else … I think a lot like the idea of a poem that comes from a dream in some manner… in either case it’s engagement with another in/complete world of which we only have a glimmer … so why not run with its possibilities ?

I spend a lot of time in galleries when I can (!) and I respond to paintings (and other artworks) frequently… being beside a picture is a great thing for poetry making I think

… and with my own stuff, when I put the two together, I think it’s really important to get something equal happening – so the words aren’t a caption, so the picture isn’t an illustration…

When I say another in/complete world – I don’t mean to idealize the art or the dreamworld as contextless, of no provenance … I mean to give equal rights to the other worlds we got to/come from every day, the other arts life imitates … etc…

Actually I think it’s good to be discussing the idea of ekphrastics first in the abstract before considering our own examples!

LAURIE

Of course music has always been important for me (as it has for you: I remember a crazed gig in the University of Sydney Union - god knows what we were on). So music of various kinds keeps appearing in the poems. I once had a review by a very snobby academic who figured my mentions of jazz were really because it sounded hip and that I didn't have the intellectual rigour to lace my work with classical references. Jeez, I thought, tell it to Ellington or Mingus. It seemed like pure racism. I like the way a handful of musicians make regular appearances in Ken Bolton's poems. This is the product of a great love of music. When I read other people's poems I'm never annoyed by this kind of reference. I'm not one of those people who feel as though they ought to be able to understand everything. I'm getting a little stream-of-consciousness here but when, for example, Frank O'Hara mentions Joe, I know who he's probably talking about. I also feel that it wouldn't bother me if I didn't. Joe would be just a friend of Frank's. The academic poets (where are they now?) who used to go on about this seemed oblivious to the fact that a lot of English poetry from the sixteenth century on was full of personal address. People were mentioned; poems were addressed to certain individuals.

But music? How does it work with your written materials? I'm pretty aware of how things sound and how they might be paced. The page used to be a lot more important pre current technology (where justification to the left is becoming the norm again). I'm as influenced by this as anyone, though I loved the way poems could spread across a page. Still we have to consider how it all sounds. What about things like time signatures? Can you write a 5/4 poem? It all becomes similar to the way visual art might affect the way you write.

Over to you Comrade.

KIT

Ah yes – the Happening in Hades 77 or 78 … which the bro has named his most recent volume of poems for … ah yes, Spastic Mumble with Kafka the Magic Dog (actually billed on the poster, I believe… I must check out that’s right – it’s on the wall …and in that neighbourhood, I particularly remember the Music Rooms down in the depths of the Old Union / aka Holme Building … if iniquity ever had a den, that was the place! Garbage bags full of deal bags, gladbags full of trips… a creepy beat across the corridor…

And the record that got stuck on ‘these scenes’ in the Rodriguez song ‘Sugar Man’ (I think?) – I’m tired of these scenes … prophecy in real time !

But to music … I write a lot more material in the lyric department than I make actual songs… which is funny in a way because I do play/inflict the guitar (and now the piano) every day … I don’t know how to play but I do it every day … so I work out a simple tune… often just before I go to bed of an evening and meanwhile far away in another part of the day I am actually producing lyrics and sadly I rarely bring these two activities together … it’s all for practice… and one day grow up?...

I array my incompetences throughout the day … painting and music making particularly … I know nothing about either, except what I hear and what I see … I guess it makes me old dog up to tricks predicted …

Stuck on the thing that’s too easy

Stuck with the thing that’s too hard

… all the story of my life, never the time to tell

As for 5/4 time in poetry, I have to say I’ve assiduously avoided thinking about sound aspects of poetry, both as a practitioner and as a teacher … I want all of that to be fully unconscious… my only technical interest is in meaning making – so grammar and rhetoric (tropology)

And as for alluding to the work of others in your own … everyone loves an epigraph (like getting yr first ball to bounce for free) … and of course there’s a name dropping risk – conspicuous effort at pretentious cool … though I know the cool had a birth somewhere … then again there’s archetype dropping risk, which is perhaps just as bad … perhaps different generations are more subject to different particular risks ?

Sky and earth and tree and cloud and bud and breeze and sun …

One worries there’s too much eternal return … but what’s world to do?

Struck with a certain topos

Like Alice and the Fawn in the Wood where things have no names … poetry’s in that place where you won’t find it …

As for listening… I do listen to a lot more classical music than anything else… I acknowledge its genius and I acknowledge the genius of jazz … I marvel at their incomprehensible splendour and complexity… what’s that Walter Pater line about all art aspires to the condition of music? (bet I got that wrong but something like that)

‘Songs of myself the Americans sing’ …

Too true too true

But I don’t blame Walt

I think he meant well -- you see

I’ve got to yr page one

But anyway let’s come back to the ekkies – a fertile field

Not finished with them yet

LAURIE

I don't know how much more I can say about the ekphrastics. They just happened over a period of three or so years (and I picked up an earlier poem on Dorothy Napangardi that I rescued from an earlier collection). What were you figuring?

LAURIE

No that's not right. I can say more. The title, Afterimages, reflects a little my ambivalence about the practice. It could mean after images, as in 'after Van Gogh', but it also means afterimages, which are paler than the originals. But let's take an example of one of the poems that seems to deal directly with a painting: Ken Searle:

a pick, an ancient projector,

a potato masher, an aeroplane in flight

over an ashtray, an empty beer bottle

green stalk protruding, a lily, prone

on a table with peeling paint

memento mori in

South Australian sunlight

through the louvres, a possible clothesline,

the roof of a carport

Now the painting that the poem is 'about' is hardly one you would be expected to know (it hangs on the wall of a friend's place). So all you get here are the words. It looks like a kind of catalogue of unusual objects that you imagine make up some kind of still-life. But it's a list that can never be complete and that leaves out things - not just the objects but the manner of the painted work. It's also consecutive, which of course the painting is not. It might be possible with some paintings that deal with narrative to 'tell the story' (and I appear to do this in some other poems) but here there is no story, or if there is it is entirely in the viewer/reporter's imagination. You could make up a story but it might not be very interesting. What you're left with is the poem which either works or doesn't on its own terms. The poem Jacopo Bassano does deal with a painting that tells a story (Noah's Ark). But it is also selective and it ends with a series of conjectures and questions which are not the sorts of things a painting can do:

To the left a monkey holds what looks like

a sceptre - has all sense deserted these people

alive in the cramped space of a jigsaw? All questions

seem to have an answer in this world

but where is the cat's companion?

It goes on (what can happen to one art when it is alluded to in another). I'll just give one more example: Alberto Giacometti:

i'm

a mere

mortal

tool

a bottle

i'm

a limb

game

a mir-

age

i'm

gloom

Now this poem physically mimics the skinny nature of a lot of Giacometti's sculpted figures. But I also took a cue from Dave Drayton who wrote that great book of poems and drawings of the Australian Prime Ministers. Each poem uses only the letters of the PM's name. My poem does the same for Alberto Giacometti. This is a practice peculiar to language and there's no visual equivalent at all as far as I know.

KIT

Ah so I started drafting a response, Laurie, before your reprise with the Giacometti, etc

… so let’s start with that …

Well I think I’d better read some of your afterimages and get back to you on it

(I warn you I’m a deliberate slow reader … and especially on the page with a lot of blank space which encourages me into annotation mode

where with pencil

I apply the simple principle ‘in the presence so a poem comes’ … i.e. a bounce of good stuff makes you want to keep it company with more

… I do this everyday and have a mountain of untyped annotations as of now … many of which come to naught or will and most of which have bugerall to do with the poem printed on the page from which I first bounced to scribble … it’s just habit at this stage and I know I’ll never catch up … doesn’t worry me

…back to ekphrasticising though – which for me is a very similar thing

(although I’ve never yet been apprehended for scribbling on walls in galleries or museums)…

I guess I’m interested in the range of relationships that can exist between word and image and especially where they’re – for whatever reason – in proximity

Titling is one instance … personally, I like to give completely abstract works very concrete ‘out-there’ sorts of names

There’s the Piercean play with the kinds of names/titles/ that Lewis Carroll indulges in Through the Looking-Glass… in where is it… looking… yes… chapter 8 ‘It’s my own invention’… where the song is called ‘Haddock’s Eyes’, but it’s called ‘Ways and Means’ but the name of the song is ‘The Aged, aged Man’ … but the song is really ‘A Sittin’ on a Gate’… ‘and the tune’s my own invention’

I had a show in Lisbon a few years ago where I deliberately made very distracting difficult to read title captions (some like a mirrored running writing, other non sequiturs, each different)… to draw attention to the fact that I think your average punter spends as much time in the gallery reading the title caption as being with the painting

It is interesting to play with the relationship … bumped into Ken Searle a couple of months pre-pandemic… hadn’t seen him for ages… I wouldn’t mind doing an ekkie for his kangarigar – one that’s always stayed with me

I guess we should be working out a typology for ekkies … yr Giacometti is a kind of concrete ekkie, a George Herbert of the genre…

I begin to see there are a few kinds I do … one is a kind of redescription – re-inscription of the images given

Klee’s swamp legend

1919

each mark a season

such as we hide

someone has a basket

someone is a tree

churches point too

and a monster’s head’s hatching

scaffolding thrown

where snow sits

a house is a hand

and holds up windows

a home is a flower

folded from mud

see in further

and far, as if into time

how the sea

has been called to its cliffs

you wade in

under-determined, so you wonder

what kind of a creature

to be?

… which is a kind of bringing to words the thing unspoken … more locally (and a century later) here’s something similar with

Michael Bell’s ‘The After Party’ 2019

bottle over carrot down

black with the waves of somebody’s sea

thick cake smear – mock acrylic cream

and the flags

for backing up

for coming into land

butts, squeezed tube

matches dropped after use

with the Bell teeth

and the Bell eye smudge

cast in freckled pink

approximate of digit

I know that there are fish under this

smoke could be a ceiling

here’s frenzy of the work to be

the sea is higher than the sand

this is how things are going

the whole thing rocks as if afloat

resigned

aloof

attuned

and something not sure

to a fault

faithful

take these for the facts of a practice

a knife is well under

you might not see

the sawn down log made tackily

those red ears must have been boxed

it’s all still being worked on

walk away at the end of the day

won’t be finished here

the cup heaven so routinely pours

misses every time

I’ll see if I can dig out the picture for you… There are context play ekkies, which are about being in the room with the thing and presence of time to it passing

But I also like the big deliberate being there beside or in… the jump-in ekkie … like the famous Auden everyone goes to with Icarus and giving the little bloke a role to not notice so we see what kind of a game we were in with the Breughel brew

There are stray ekphrastications… tangents gone off on from a picture… but, as with work drafted in the annotation mode, if the resulting poem is irrelevant to the resulting picture, then why mention the picture at all?

On the other hand I do think they all need to be able stand on their own, without the canvas dangling before yr eyes… I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with the fact of reference, knowing the words point somewhere; I just mean the poem should work on its own…

I didn’t know about the Dave Drayton, I’ll have to check that out … having written a few of the PMs over the years myself…

But what other kinds of ekkies dyareckon there are?

LAURIE

Laurence Duggan

18:39 (12 minutes ago)

to me

Well I think the poems you've posted might also be described as responses. That's one way out of seeing the poem as a second-hand version of the art work (and these ones of yours are clearly not that). Poems are often enough responses to other poems even when the poet may be unaware of this. It's all one big conversation . . . and why not invite the artists. The matter of what makes up poems is always contested. There are people out there who think it's ok to write poems about the first world war but not ok to write about the Ramones. I always liked the bit in WC Williams where it is suggested to him that part of his poem is 'a fashionable shopping list'. He replies, yes, that's exactly what it is.

Sometimes what starts out as description ends up as philosophy - in other words as a kind of idea of visual art rather than a copy. The one on Seurat goes:

motion is predicated

on the interaction of colour

our relation with others

apart at intervals

an equation,

a chemical reaction

the way gaslight makes

shape uncertain

and objects stutter

in its aura

Now you can detect (maybe) La Grande Jatte and also one of the night-time paintings in nineteenth-century clubland, but the poem moves on from being a description. It's a kind of philosophy of colour, light and substance - more an idea about what's going on with a painter who constructs work with these minute particles.

What I've got to say at this point is that all this is tentative. The main thing is that a poem should result from whatever crazy ideas lie behind, or alongside, it. The poems are certainly not meant to be definitive statements about the art.

KIT

I like the fashionable shopping list or better still the scrappy one … the envelope back dreaming…

It’s time for philosophies of everything… if you can have the bedroom, then why not the garden? I have for many years been planning A philosophy of Table Tennis (which is a kind of homage to dad, and to childhood – to the halcyon sound of the celluloid ball on timber…)

…interesting how particular arts might suggest diverse sciences / modes of understanding … the range of response and how responses are conditioned by social orders and their aesthetic manifestations … so the chemistry of paint, the science of light (with all the discoveries of photography)…

But along with wanting to know more about how a thing (anything) works for the sake of making art from / with / about / because of it … there’s also wanting not to know … somehow every artform has a kind of not looking / not wanting to understand on which it depends … and the danger there is that, in not looking where you’re going, you’ve simply fallen under a tired old spell… I don’t think Seurat had that problem though… his beard was just too pointy… though wispy in a way as well…

There’s canonicity and there’s snobbery and the way these revolve around objects to revere … questions of power/authority in who decides what get to be revered?

I remember a story circulating around the Woolley Building, late seventies, about the student who wanted to write a thesis about Dylan, and the crusty old don of the day finding it so strange this upstart would think him(sic) self on first name terms with Dylan Thomas… and then, when the penny dropped, what a preposterous idea! … which I have to say the Nobel prize indeed was…

To bounce back from this sunny digression … looking away from the machine alone will never cut it … ultimately though what works in every art form is the capacity to look again, to see what’s not been seen before, or not that way at least … what else could be the point of, for instance, representational painting?… but in every artform surprise is prized … paintings are contraptions in which contradictions are caught … a revolution in light, a net cast over still order … things only seem to survive here

And yes, everything’s part of a conversation and it’s all a draft until we’re gone.

The best pictures (abstract or otherwise) are openings onto other worlds, complete and unique in themselves

One of the types of ekphrastic must be bringing the still picture to motion

(which is to reverse the dynamic of the nature mort commenced with

I’ll take La Grande Jatte as a challenge then, Laurie … quick draft

wrong yellow

still edge of hell broke loose

one of a multitude of studies

what if that dog should lift a leg,

project its pointy atom stream

elsewhere on the canvas

par example

on M. Le Pipe or M. Le Moustache?

a Sunday of sun

some would say amusement

play remembers young hearts

grants distance

pointillist beard – delicate order

of course this could be a musical

imagine the chase with the stick

(suddenly much more three dimensional

having found a use)

very vaudeville

and the other one – the lapdog – to trip over

angry gentilshommes

some would be entertained –

brolly and bustle, tophat, cigar

let them loosen into laughter

ahead of the needful retribution

first dog escapes the canvas altogether

not before aiming a fresh stream on the museum floor

paparazzi chase one still in the painting

an afternoon’s gay chaos!

and they would bring a pretty little guillotine

then the monkey would have its business cut out

…

just, as I say, a study for a sketch

LAURIE

here are a few things to take up here (nice one on Seurat by the way). Something you said made me think also about translation and about how the nature of translation has changed. When you think of it the translations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - and right up until the early twentieth - were usually directed at a small group of people who could already read Greek and Latin. So the translation didn't exist as a way into the original, it was a way out from it i.e how amusing, clever, whatever, can I make this (my readers will know the 'original'). Since then translation has often been directed at people who can't read the original and so there have been disputes about how 'faithful' versions are (e.g. those critics of Ezra Pound who assumed he didn't know what he was doing with the Chinese poems). Like a lot (though not by any means all) recent translators I have been dependent upon other people's work. I did my book of Martial using the old Loeb Classical Library's prose translations. Now some of these (the Loeb editions) were more reliable than others. Michael Heyward, who was a Latinist, told me the Edwardian translator of Martial was pretty reliable, even if he'd conceal the overtly sexual passages by translating them into modern Italian rather than English (that way you wouldn't arouse the lower classes who mightn't have been able to deal with it like decent chaps &c).

You could maybe say that ekphrasis is a form of 'translation', though I feel uncomfortable with this. I mean we can all see an art work (language is not a difficulty).

KIT

I’ve worked with poetry translation with a number of languages and in both directions… but more to and from Chinese than anything else (although my Chinese is crap)…

I only ever consider myself a –co-translator into English and a facilitator away from English … simply because my language skills are so far from adequate to the task of writing poems in any language other than English (although I have had a crack at it now and then – and songs too – but really just for fun)… I read for instance Pessoa’s poems in English and think better not dear, we can’t all be a Conrad or a Nabakov…

My basic idea is that you need a native speaker who is a poet at either end of the poetry translation process…. Of course this ideal world outcome may not always been attainable … in which case one of the second bests is the effort to make poets in the process… I think translation is fantastic training for poets

Because of my general theory about what poetry does to language vis a vis what the non-native speaker can’t help doing to the language s/he is entering … which is more or less the same thing… that Russian Formalist de-automatization thing more or less (there that was the theory, in case you missed it) … this is why it’s so great for poets to spend time with non-native speakers of their language (and of course I had the privilege of growing up with a father who was a playful wordsmith of that order, and inveterate punster … the kind who’d give Greg McLaren a run for his money…

Ekphrasis as translation? yes but only tropically so

… didn’t George Steiner say something like every act of speech/language is really an act of translation (this is the rejoinder to Borges’ famous ‘to speak is to commit tautology’ (or something like that … no it’s translated as ‘to fall into’ … let’s see that is in fact

Hablar es incurrir en tautologías in the original

… fair enough, but where does this reduction ad absurdum get us

I like this idea of speech/or writing to the nth degree… like the Barthesian degree zero or that dream Aristotle has of trope free plainspeech, which he can unwittingly only describe by means of landscape metaphor… Michele Le Deouff does the job on all this in The Philosophic Imaginary … despatches Kant particularly nicely as I recall

And yes all art is work and play, but I’d rather my ekkies weren’t translations or imitations … guess I just prefer my translations as conversations, which probably lands us back in the Renaissance

I have b t w thought of having a crack at Virgil’s Georgics … but there’s rather a lot of it and I know whatever I attempted would end up reversioning somehow …

But ‘what makes the cornfield smile?

You tell me!

LAURIE

What makes the cornfield s(i)mile.

I think I had a lot of literary theories in my bag earlier in the piece. I don't so much now. Not that I'm anti-theory - my Fine Arts doctorate (Ghost Nation) will testify to that. But with writing my own approach is so tentative that I find theory an encumbrance rather than a way in. You know the earliest document on writing that rang true for me was Keats' notion of negative capability. It's why I've never really wanted to teach. My whole approach to writing is predicated on doubt - doubt that I will ever be able to write another poem (or one that's any good). This may sound a bit grim but it's not really. I think it's amazing that we write at all and so any production (if it remains satisfactory) is a kind of blessing. I don't mean to sound religious here either, since religion is itself a testament of certainty. I think this business of doubt is what throws so many poets off - to madness &c. But I don't want to sound too 'romantic' about this either. You deal with it. Art is weird and wonderful and where would we be without it. I realise I'm riffing here, but that's what it's all about innit (as they'd say in the part of England I called home for twelve years)?

KIT

I’d say I’m an empiricist at heart …

And a theory bowerbird…

tuck whatever bits suit in the nest and tend to my own hunches…

Blue, by the way, is a lovely colour…

I think we can throw negative capability into that category … helpful hunch, you can call it hypothesis

As to religion (and I include the atheists here) … all those who KNOW, know the others are wrong … whatever that is, it’s not the way of poetry… though we might well doubt that it could be …

Where religion is on the cusp of okay it’s because it’s close to either philosophy or poetry

I have this simple formula –

Religion is for people who are not bright enough for philosophy …

Philosophy is for people who are too boring for poetry

Poetry is an art of knowing and not … all about being in two minds at once … travelling up and down in the ambivalator, never getting off at the floor for lost socks

I love that Merleau-Ponty idea of the writer as a weaver always working on the wrong side of the material … in the place/position where you can’t see what yr doing

Doubt – or one might say that happy hammock – the question – this is the basis of all speculation in the form of art

… and that speculation is – if you like – fundamentally empirical because it is trying out experience … if at times only the experience of words, one’s doubts as to what they can do

I place all of my faith in doubt – what else is a bear of little brain to do?

LAURIE

Those lines about religion and philosophy are great!

I feel we've talked out some of the things we've been conversing about so I might go off at a tangent here. I mentioned in the course of all this that I stopped writing for six years or so in the 1990s. I think it wasn't so much the poems that I was worried about, just the ways in which I had been justifying them. I'd also begun to feel both a back number and lost between all the kinds of poetry that institutions love. There were all those poets who felt they had to write about their sex lives or their nervous breakdowns; there were others who thought we should be writing poems about the first world war; and on the other side of a divide, the language poets. All of these poetries were marketable. Looking back on it now I keep thinking of a poem Tom Clark wrote which I can't find anywhere. I think it was called The Code of the West and it steals a line from Hemingway 'if guts is grace under pressure' and proceeds with it as though it was an equation, then the poem ends 'but pleasure is never mentioned'. When I got back to writing again I did it with modified expectations but also with the sense that pleasure was very important: the pleasure of writing itself (pleasures of the text), and the pleasure a piece of writing might give. I had always liked certain poets who might well have been called Epicureans. Jonathan Williams was certainly one, but also people like Philip Whalen or very different poets like James Merrill or Peter Porter. Some people might feel that this is a kind of 'elitism' but that's such a misused term (in response once to someone who argued for poetry that anyone could write I said sure, but I wouldn't back a barfly to win the 100 metre hurdles).

KIT

I consider myself to be an Epicurean, Laurie… or at least an aspiring Epicurean… I write on the census form …. it’s true we don’t have too many fragments to go but I can’t see what Epicurus was wrong about. The Garden is the place to be, friendship is the most important thing and death shouldn’t worry anyone – because you won’t feel a thing once you get there which you won’t because … well, let’s just say it’s beyond us… it’s so bloody obvious really… and likewise that all the gibberish otherwise peddled since antiquity was pulling wool overt the eyes for fun, for profit, but mainly for power… (this is the core correctness of Marxism, which turns out to have been not too flash as a fortune telling system… The Indian mob Epicurus might have got his materialism from are interesting too – the Carvaka-Lokayata mob/s … all much maligned in the ancient world for denying the gods and so forth … or in the case of Epicurus slating them as far and not giving a fuck about us … this seems to me as likely as ever …

… anyway, this is I should say, all for me a particular poetic interest too – the three year project I have currently funded by OZco (just passed the midway point) is titled ATARAXIA … it has three parts (books, really) – originally A Field Guide to Australian Clouds, a book of ekphrastics and poems about painting, and then a garden collection – Ataraxia … but I have this other mountain of material under the title godsbother which I think should fit in somewhere … essentially a collection of ideas, images, observations, parables, facts and so on that should bother any god worth her/his salt…

I used to call myself a socialist hedonist (I think everyone should have a good time) … then I thought anarchist hedonist was more appropriate … but – and it only took a few decades – then I realized Epicurus pretty well covered the bases quite a while back…

In any case I do think pleasure deserves a mention … too much asceticism renders hearts geological … misery might like company but…

Here’s a recent ataraxia draft just frinstance

around the rain

a garden wrapped

as if a purposed prayer

but no

dust’s nothing

thirst, itch – we’re mud

under and over

so wallaby with

rain got into certain ache places

took tea to pass so hoofed

tending all this while

as if a lens were laid

in each round

atom planet fall

in mist fence went

like music

and all the green of risings then

the flowers, frange and citrus leaf

to catch

a forest of the stuff

palm poised and ferning waxy

umbrella is a tree too

we were doing a little dance for

and later swim, take bath in it

someone thought bud up now

and someone thought soon flower

this pub was open all hours

every body drinking

you’d almost think a fire inside

but it was lovely out

rugged and brolly up for

of course one was lost

in timber instance brinking with

and upward eyes in spread

here is the rain

in person perhaps

wink from all the crew

‘we’re wet’

an insect landed asking

and wondered who I am

someone so birdily singing

simple as forever was

and is, will be

snails paced it out

ducks spoke the loudly joy of splash

shy clefted clouding

in mulberry’s first glimmer

all waiting to be lit

and all this

no one did it

I cannot help but praise

LAURIE

Nice one.

I used to think I was an anarchist but I came to distrust anarchism. I'm a Melbourne guy who came to Sydney in the early 1970s. The Push was a big thing then and so many of them were anarchists of a sort, or at least libertarians. I subsequently joked that (being from Melbourne) I was a Stalinist. This was a gross parody of course. Stalin would have gotten rid of people like me pretty early. But the point was that I was still very much a socialist (as I am now) and that libertarianism (and anarchism) seemed to me to be ultimately right-wing directions. That focus on the individual ends up translating as 'there is no such thing as society' i.e Thatcherism. Paddy McGuinness proved as much. Where does this lead my poetic? Certainly towards a poetry where the 'individual' is never more than a quirky instance. This is why I don't write about my nervous breakdowns &c. The I that appears in my poems is just a fallible character who may or may not be right or wrong. The writing isn't any kind of 'confession' or testament even. This is why I always loved Philip Whalen's Scenes of Life in the Capital. He reserves the right to be stupid.

KIT

Yes, anarchism is a broad not-a-church from chuck a bomb and see what happens to proponents of true participatory democracy and local/global thinking, to libertarian smartarse loons who’ve found their hip way of being arseholes to everyone… I’ll take the middle path…

Stalinism and Maoism do in practice make a number of problems clear … it’s just not enough to bump off the royal family and think the job is done… if you want to change this world then you’d better have a better one in mind (I have been known to sing with a ukulele… and should find you the link) …

I would like to see some more and faster withering away of state and nation however …

We are so in their thrall. Why, for instance, should poetry be conducted on anything like a national basis?… of course it’s tied to languages and spaces between languages (and in many cases, though not ours, that’s an essential link)… of course I know it’s because of funding and exam systems and publishing infrastructure and so on … but what has any of that to do with poetry?

And thinking about language, the idea of idiolect comes into focus here … in one way it’s a useful abstraction (voices are indeed unique) but in another way it’s an absurdity – we are all so obviously in this together … and that message has such extraordinary urgency now with planet fuckers in charge almost everywhere and the need so desperate everywhere to turf them and save the furniture from the fire.

I love those lines Auden disowned in ‘Spain’:

Yesterday all the past. But today the struggle!

What else but a quirky instance can any of us be? Surely there’s no other way in or out of a poem? And no better place to be! I started reading ‘Scenes of Life in the Capital’, but I have some way to go!

Perhaps our topic now is the relationship between poetry and politics? What is to be done?

Or – is there anything we can do?

LAURIE

Actually I fear that there isn't anything we can do. Generally speaking poetry suffers whenever it is appropriated for a cause, no matter how worthy. This is not to say that we shouldn't express our political views. I'd figure these would be apparent anyway, even if we don't venture into propaganda. As I've mentioned, this is the dilemma George Oppen and Carl Rakosi faced, and they chose not to write (while working for their social objectives by other means). There is always the danger that signing on for poetries for a particular political objective might be a betrayal of poetry itself. Art doesn't have to further anyone's agenda even if as a human being you want to protest or make moves towards some political resolution. If you do write for a cause you need to know that poetry might not be the best way of doing it while taking part in a physical demonstration (or writing a letter to the press) might be. Let's face it, the general public probably think people like you and me are nut cases, not cultural heroes.

But this is not to say that poetry can't in its own way be political. It is just not an appropriate medium for short term effects. There is a profound politic in Walter Raleigh's poems (for example), and we can weigh this now even if it didn't help him. The poetry of Blake and Whitman similarly expresses a political view, but it didn't in either case have an immediate impact. It's all a bit like the almost apocryphal statement of Frank O'Hara: if you want to communicate use the telephone. For these reasons I've long been reluctant to send poems to 'poems for' sites. In my worst moments i feel that such sites are as often as not career moves. Jesus, I'm a grumpy bastard. But I'll just continue to write what I write, hoping at least that I'll be (in Basil Bunting's terms) a 'minor poet, not conspicuously dishonest'.

KIT

Poetry and politics seems like opposites in at least a few ways

The most subtle of possible ways with words as against the most moral of imperatives …

Then there’s that slippery kind of politics (what right wing politicians mean by ‘politics’ when they’re wanting to say that they don’t do it) which has nothing to do with moral position and everything to do with pragmatic advantage … the Machiavellian ways

But slippery politics is matched with slippery poetry, that likewise stands for nothing, pretends it has no origin and so doesn’t even need to claim universal application … like ‘common sense’ which denies any ideological basis… has no history

They rub up against each other interestingly – such politics and such poetry …

Of course by virtue of tropic investment – esp metaphor – poets trade in beautiful lies

But this can be done honestly … it’s only what language can’t help but do ….

Language is how the world changes or not … at least it’s the most fundamental means… and the base of all political action

…there has been an aversion for politics among various kinds of poet

… there’s a fair enough fear of the sledgehammer … the singing to the choir… the words that won’t convince anyone …

But there’s also the distaste of mustn’t talk about it … it’ll only end badly

Like mum telling me and the bro the list of things we couldn’t talk to Uncle Michael about (abortion, drugs, music) because it would give him a heart attack (he did eventually die of a heart but then most people do) …

But avoiding controversy is about avoiding conversation … and I think there can be no taboo topics … poetry has to be about everything

I do think there’s a kind of hopelessness that declares politics something only for the corrupt … and pointless to participate in … this is how you get a Trump when the people with the most to gain from anything but Trump feel so powerless that they exercise their right not to bother (flipside of the right to bear arms)… non-compulsory voting is the culprit … it’s not democracy if you can just bury yr head and say not responsible…

There’s a very similar I think hopelessness with regard to poetry – no one reads it / no one understands me even if they do … even if they did it wouldn’t change anything

I suppose the clergy in this day and age generally feel more or like this

And I think we do do it for a similar reason – call it vocation … in any case, it’s the thing we do

… bottom line – do no harm

… to speak our bit of the truth for whoever’s listening and even if they’re not

As per

‘in my craft or sullen art’

Of course you can be hopeful about politics and feel hopeless about poetry or vice versa

… so, for individuals there’s no necessity of any link

For me personally the link is that the work of undoing injustice and of bettering the world has important parallels with the art of pushing language as far as it will go … of tearing down the brick walls in it no one would otherwise see … of turning things on their head so people will feel if not understanding how upside down the world is

All this of course premised on the idea that the personal and everything else is political … that we humans are not merely social but particularly political animals

In any case

I think that nexus is the opposite of the sledgehammer tactics that are frequently claimed to pass for political in the case of poetry

But for myself there’s so much Blake and Whitman and Neruda and Celan and Brecht and on that I love and that for me is political poetry

Highly personal and for me

A hortatory aspect and a

Manifesto edge

… bearing witness is a hard thing for the poet to avoid … and for me that’s something much closer to negative capability than it is to expressing any kind of certainty (ideological or otherwise) …

… contrariwise as the Brothers Tweedle might say, ambivalence is a kind of key… it’s better for the sake of poetry to be in two minds at once

And if we could get to an honest politics it might be better there as well

…

every poem is a kind of a report from when and where we are … surviving to make sense in other wheres and whens is a consummation devoutly to be wished … but one never knows how one will be understood or if indeed at all

I think the poet is godlike in the manner of the inventor in the garage/shed … maybe playing with her/himself … guessing the next trick, showing the world … though the world may never know

LAURIE

Kit, all this is pretty well stated. And we do live in strange times, practising an art that takes time when there may not be a lot of time left. I think it's worth looking at poems that have seemed (and continue to be seen as) political. 'Howl' for example. But 'Howl' is a complex poem, it's not asking for a political answer even as what it states is evidently political. It is indeed a howl but you couldn't get a political program out of it. Later Ginsberg works like The Fall of America, which I've always thought his best book, is full of politics but at the same time not beholden to any particular philosophy. You could say the same for Pi O. The poems are more than what they often seem to be on about and will outlive their circumstances. And so has Raleigh's 'The Lie'.

I'll continue to plug away, but I don't necessarily want people to believe that what I say is the truth. It's just a voice, among many voices. Better than some, not as good as some others.

OK what topic shall we bulldoze next? Maybe the business of writing from a particular place, which is surely as important a consideration. Both of us have written from very different places: in my case semi-rural England and urban Australia. In your case the extremes are greater: rural Australia and hyper-urban Macau. I remember you saying once that when you visited Sydney it seemed half-deserted c.f. Macau - and this was well before the lockdowns. We have inhabited very different cultural scenes.

KIT

hi Laurie

greetings from Dubbo!

just a brief pause and I'll get back to you

off to Warrumbungles/Pilliga frabit

…

good new direction for the conversation

place and other place

yes

I'll be home in a few days and get back to you

...

currently in the Pilliga at Pilliga Pottery

with bugerall internet

but nice walking ...

and meanwhile

I think I mentioned to you before about my 'annotation mode'

... so I thought I'd share with you what I've drafted from the margins of the first pages of

... kind of a Kit's own 1066 etc... mebbe

draft response to Laurie’s Homer Street

(‘closing album’)

(reverse charges to old Blighty)

a list of motives for empire and elsewhere

pictures of once called home

chalk cliffs

and erstwhile isles blessed silly

summer coming (that’s spring)

and long for pilgrimage

let’s pretend

some blitz and Armada gone round

John Bull’s Irish jokes

and ‘pluck you’ at Agincourt, is it?

anyway

arrow in eye to begin

parliaments long, short

Runnymede mix ups

all this nervous energy

signed for calm

(a roll call of motives

things could do if chill

but never…)

sleight of hand with the sunsets instance

and all to whit

a tumult of toys and none put away

never ever ever shall be

though some may be denied

how now round vowel?

tremble, obey

o merry wives

then comes the one with honest intentions

and throws himself off the scaffold

fantasia on

in the end forget why

length and breadth

dotted lines for the all over ocean

step over my cloak miss majesty

pink continents

barely an anthem after

but sing

here is the weary age

fact upon

the prefect’s fag

and polish my won’t you

you will? I’m in love

now air abuzz with insect us

and strike like a drone

to be free

burn the cakes

give the lady her lake

blue me for a Druid too

coracle off

henge like a little Uluru

there are two worlds

you see I had this childhood --

the one carved from the slab

another built up -- burnt offering

country edge

a set out of the briney

empires of darkness and empires of light

Harry Potter again

one a penny two

groat for a guinea

all royal

George IV’s last bilious moments

all love that seasick charm

see it through a looking glass

we all have a mean time

it’s boys’ own adventure

could have set out on foot for Thurso instead

LAURIE

Thanks for the response. I think the first thing I have to note about writing in the UK is the way it parallelled my Australian writing. I had the model of Memorials in mind when I first went over. Memorials was a long poem written largely over 1992. Apart from the intro and the long concluding piece (Ornithology) the four central parts were written seasonally. It happened that for the first two seasons of that year I was in Melbourne, the third in the UK (Manchester) and the fourth in the USA (based in Washington DC). The moves were due to my partner being on study leave and based at Law schools in those two cities. The idea was that each piece would be written over one month so that whatever happened fed into the poem. When we moved to England in late 2006 I decided that I would write a poem over the space of a year but that this time the units would represent each month of the calendar year. It was a way of forcing myself to write. The poem was published by Shearsman as Crab & Winkle (named after an early railway line connecting Canterbury with Whitstable on the north Kent coast) but the sections occurred whatever (and wherever) I was, so that one stretch was written from Morocco. My English friends on the whole liked it though one mentioned that my mistakes about local culture were occasionally amusing. After that I wrote a short stretch of small poems called Angles (referring to Anglo-Saxons as well as to approaches). This mutated into the series called Allotments that referred both to the peculiarly English feature of gardening spaces you could apply for in fields within towns and also to the idea that you were allotted a brief moment on the stage. These poems took the same overall form as my Australian Blue Hills poems but they tended to be more clipped, less expansive, reflecting an environment that had possibly been poetried to death. The last poems in this series appear in Homer Street.

My twelve years in the UK were productive and generally interesting but at a certain point it became imperative for me to come back . . . the smell of gum leaves &c &c. But, not to be romantic about it, I thought of the words of Carlo Ginzberg, a long-time expatriate who, when he was asked 'where could you feel at home' replied that it would have to be in a place he could feel ashamed of.

KIT

Sorry to be slow again … I find coming and going very disruptive… mainly because I have so much correspondence etc to deal with when I get home …

But on the other hand the Pilliga was a very inspiring landscape to be in … so worthwhile…

It’s interesting the idea of a poem over a year … this is now my fifth year of a draft every day … so that’s something similar … or maybe it’s the thing in reverse?

… I’ve had this project idea for a book of poems of the twentieth century in a poem every year … of course it would music and ekphrasis .. but still assessing viability and where it would fit in the queue

But coming back to the topic of place … and, more particularly, other place…

I like that home as place you could feel ashamed of … all those years in China (HK and mainly Macao) I had a lot of ambivalence along precisely those lines and the question of to what extent I was a participant / to what extent I was entitled to an opinion

… how that played at in terms of teaching roles / position in an education bureaucracy was interesting

…

In Japan I felt honoured but largely irrelevant … except in the little conversation school Carol and I ran where we were the curriculum and pretty well in charge of everything except money

In Hong Kong at my school I felt dishonoured / resented but important

… less dishonoured at uni there though I wonder how that is now?

And in Macao things felt more or less equal … neither being Portuguese nor Chinese… the nice thing about teaching anything to do with English in Macao is that it is not resented as the colonial language (the way it is in HK) … it’s simply a practical thing everyone needs…

I think on the Mainland in China, the feeling was more like in Japan … the honoured foreign expert who really has very little say

Of course one wades through all sorts of contradictions, not to say hypocrisies, as a matter of course… for instance as a firm believer in compulsory voting who has never, over there, exercised his right to vote

…

But to place and poetry …

In Macao I ratcheted up the peripatetic method I’d developed in Rome chez Bertie Whiting’s in a residency in the mid nineties…

I used to regularly (weekly mostly) just ride a bus to some remote part in order to be lost and find my way … the streets around the inner harbour are particularly maze like and atmospheric… that ubiquitous sound of the shovelling of mah-jong tiles… anyway that lasted a few years but then I couldn’t really get lost anymore … certainly couldn’t keep it up for the full seventeen years (Macao is only about 30 square kms in total, and more than half of that is reclaimed)… but I think I got a few poems out of it

…

peripateia: a note on the method

I walk

an hour each week

with the rusting town

the barnacle

and its spate of sea

the skin is dark with dreaming

and the sky is always blank

can I smell this pencil

making a spectacle?

I have the mechanism apart in my hands

in order to deprive it of sense

in order to dampen infernal ticking

each tattoo

is a fleet of voyages

its brave limbs

labour deck for tide

all in the big book noted

ashore I am

as stray shipping come

stumped in conclusion of all the sea’s said

become part of the wall, part of the paper

the seasons have their streets in this

a doorway painted red

or birds raucous

streets don’t spring up

they are worn down to this

each ends in harbour, mast, grimy moon

the world is a wedding

of waters, of salt

my work the unfitting of pieces

I walk

The funny thing about ‘poetried to death’ is that I only found out that this was also the case with Macao when, with a co-editor, I put together an anthology of Macao poetry from Chinese, Portuguese, English and some other languages … and found to our amazement we had about 120 poets in the book and most of the key landmarks well covered… really had not expected that… but it truly is a city of poets… population of Newcastle (NSW) and while Newcastle is well endowed poetry wise, I think we’d scratch to find 120 (in fact I recall Jean Kent and I included a little less than half that number when we did an anthology eight or nine years ago)…

Anyway I still love the feeling of foreignness… and I always found it disappointing to come home or be in any English speaking country and know what almost everything in the supermarket was and be able to read every street sign

And I still love the walking / gathering mode … I think it’s a permanent practice for me

…

But I wonder if I’ve answered the place question along the lines you’d envisaged?

LAURIE

I do like the idea of deliberately getting lost. I've done this in so many cities (and occasionally I've done it in the country - the English countryside: it would be inadvisable to try this out in Australia! Urban wanderings might also be inadvisable in certain places though often the time of day is crucial. When we were in Washington I caught a bus from the Law School up to Howard University to look at the work in their gallery. It was great and well worth the trip. I figured that in daylight it would be fine to walk back from there to Georgetown where we were living. In America so often you become aware of 'boundaries'. I crossed from an Afro-American area through a Latino area and then into White Sliced and of course it was fine. But around the same time parts of Washington were definitely no-go; not because you would be attacked but because you might walk into crossfire between gangs. End parenthesis). It can also be a stranger experience to enter an area you know well from a different direction. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. I love all that surrealist stuff about derives and the uncanny. And Walter Benjamin is my hero.

I'm interested in what you say about language. I wondered at one point whether (as an Australian poet) I would be better off living in continental Europe rather than in the UK where I supposedly speak the language. Other anglophone countries have always been curious. I remember that when I went on the reading tour in the USA that Lyn Tranter organised I would often discuss with the other participants (Helen Garner and Michael Heyward) this problem: that while on the surface of things we were speaking the same language as our audience we often had no idea of the weight our words and phrases carried with them. There was the usual problem of irony (the New Yorkers might get it but did anyone else?). But i felt for a while that if I lived in, say Spain, then I could be more of an Australian poet than I could be in the UK, even if, as it seemed, we were closer in our culture to the Brits than to the Americans (sense of humour &c). Divided by a shared language indeed. At the same time I was interested in the approaches taken by other anglophone poets in England. I think of Kenneth Rexroth's long poem written there and of Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson's poems written there . . . and of course Ed Dorn's work. From Australia there were the poems of Peter Porter and Randolph Stow . . . and for that matter Francis Webb. These were all useful takes. Ronald Johnson's Book of the Green Man was crucial. All of these things fed into Crab & Winkle. Partly I felt I was writing as an anthropologist investigating a strange culture (who more or less spoke my language). Hong Kong must have been like this since English has for so long been a second language there - but it would be a different English wouldn't it (I don't mean in terms of literacy or anything like that but instead what the language there contains in its assumptions. I saw a facebook post recently with a photo of an American church of undoubtably fundamentalist persuasion with the image of a tree and the words 'rooted for life', hilarious for an Australian to take in).

KIT

unpopular mechanics in the age of poetry … but it’s a long way back to the garden now…

… yr making me look at my copy of the Arcades Project… directly in front of me on the desk … that needs opening and dipping back into… actually first it needs prising out from between the other tomes it’s holding up

And there’s Illuminations sitting up and looking pretty yellow

With what’s in it …there’s A Guide to the Grand Mosque of Xian and a boarding pass for Hong Kong … those were the days!

But I think of Port Bou and the beautiful sparkling sea and poor old Walter … but probably saved himself a lot of misery ending it there … it’s good we have as much of him as we do have … three essays in particular… I think the idea of translation as a mode is particularly valuable

…

I think, in America, the irony deficiency is all in the big middle … it lies, rhetorically, where Trump lies

Trump is the most remarkable rhetorical phenomenon since … since… I dunno… Caligula or Jesus Christ or Nietzsche

… it’s the Cretan Liar actually running the world now (his untruth rate has actually been measured at around 50% when yr average American politician apparently averages 15% lies)

I have a great fondness for Cantonese English and for the (heavily ironic) humour of that part of the world …

Have you ever seen the cartoon series MacDull ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDull

and Stephen Chow is a genius too – Kung Fu Hustle etc

see Golden Chicken as well if you ever get the chance…

It’s colonial/postcolonial in a way that chimes with Australian humour

Plus Cantonese is full of the most remarkable sexualized and toilet oriented invective and abuse… so lots to relate to there!

(and it makes the seven or more tones of the language super dangerous because it’s so easy to be saying something super rude.)

God knows what will happen now as the re-colonization project ramps up to max…

But in the mind numbingly dull high school classroom there (the last two years of high school English consisted, in the classroom, of no activity other than practising past exam papers)… one felt this amazing energy of creative resistance … which is what blossomed with the Yellow Umbrellas a few years ago, and which is currently being crushed like a flower now surplus to lapel

LAURIE

I'm not sure where to go from here. It's a bit like writing certain kinds of poem. Occasionally you paint yourself into a corner. But I guess this brings in the problem of 'style'. Do you remember that poem, I think of Ron Padgett's where he ends with the line 'I wish to be a phoney for the rest of my life' (I quote from memory). I thought YES when I saw this. The poem went on about people having to find their 'voice'. Some people had said similar things to me when I was starting off as a poet: that I hadn't 'found my voice' yet, but that maybe I would. I think I swept my voice under the sofa and never thought about it again. Yet it's true that as you get older you see certain approaches and preoccupations reoccurring. I think the thing is not to be reductive (I hate Jung). You need to step to the side of things like Gary Snyder once said, and let the juggernaut blunder on past you. Actually it's remarkable that poetry exists and that within that overwhelming bibliography of poetry that there are things you want to go back to, even to read in the first place.

Right now I'm doing that thing where you write in a notebook every day but don't look back at any of the material for a while. Something will come of it but there will also be a lot of shit in there. And I've just furthered work on my grumpy old man persona by refusing to take part in a poetry chain letter (as much as I like the people involved). I've never been a 'joiner' I guess.

KIT

The notes and the looking back and best of all, the not knowing where to go from here… the letting things mellow/mature …

… this is what I do with my peripatetic mode and my annotation mode and in fact in general… let things collect and brew and come back later when one has more perspective…

let the echoes find us … sometime topple into pool of reflections…

I guess the micro-form of these processes is that getting down a few lines when yr drunk or stoned (or some simulated equivalent) and then feel embarrassed about them in the morning… but maybe there’s a spark in there somewhere? Or at least a fire to light in winter…

With the peripatetic mode, what I’ve always liked is to keep coming back to the same place and make notes each time … but not compare or try to combine until you know that the place has been experienced differently… then you know yll have something to play with … of course it could all still be crap, or the result could be crap… I think it’s like looking at a star indirectly in order to see it more clearly…

Go and come and come again seems like a good approach generally for poetry – to allow an interaction of perspectives – in the hope that this leads to a new way of seeing, or to seeing something new (that was generally there all along… just like for Dorothy trying to wish her way home from Oz)

… now to the chain letter …with public display of the cabalry and clique …

it’s kind of a classic ‘might not be what was intended’ scenario… like the anonymous workshop, where the one whose work is being critiqued may be identified by the little foetal position echidna ball in the corner… What teaching has left me with is a strong commitment to the idea of inclusiveness … but including and excluding are such a seesaw in practice… so efforts at inclusion are fraught with danger and complication in a field where everyone (where so many) seek/s canonization … or not so much seek it as take as an infallible sign of the world’s wickedness and folly that said canonisation has not already taken place…

I have a strong affinity here with Anna Couani and with what she’s doing with her Shop Gallery… I guess it’s that we’ve both been teachers of creative practices over a long period of time… so we both value inclusiveness and collectivity … and have a critique of ephemeral star system bullshit … which tends, among other things, to distort what would otherwise be best practice for anyone…

Anna and I disagree over competitions though… I mean I think the blind comp is in principle a good idea and a way of breaking down cliques… but I think Anna feels that all competition in the arts is essentially a bad thing… fair enough … and I certainly see how blind competitions might in some ways in practice not be so blind… the zeitgeisties are always getting us by the short and curlies but what can be done about that?

… It’s, I guess, as with Facebok like culture… obnoxious but hard to avoid ,…

Have you seen that Black Mirror story - nosedive ? it’s a nice nth degree of this

… of course this leads on to the whole question of judgement by the peers… which I’ve long felt corrupts the spirit of art, dashes that Jungian hermetic vessel to the ground and so on …

Long have I favoured the idea of a lottery with qualifications and limitations for ozco grants … so everyone gets a guernsey and no one sits on the judgement seat

… but I’ve come to realise that Universal Basic Income is a better and fairer solution… a better way to let the flowers bloom and the schools contend… and suddenly in 2020 with so many people being paid to do bugerall, this formerly fanciful idea seems almost to be within reach

… but to the more personal question of judgement and roles … one has to decide all this business case by case I think… so I am continually writing reference but I won’t review and I won’t write back cover blurbs (vows made early in life)… I just don’t want to wear those hats and I don’t want the kinds of influence that those hats might have on the way others see my efforts…. Whereas editing, mentoring, collaborating, translating, publishing – I feel quite comfortable with all of these

… you choose the hats you wear … I think we’re not often sufficiently aware of which choices are available to us

… but what’s yr thinking about comps and hats and grants and such, Laurie?

LAURIE

What do I think of prizes, competitions, grants &c? I don't enter competitions partly because I don't like the idea very much, though I can see if it were entered into lightheartedly and if not much was at stake the competition could be made enjoyable. The problem is that poetry is so low-rent that many of the practitioners are desperate for cash or at least some acclaim (that might lead to cash). It's a bit like They Shoot Horses Don't They: a kind of all-night dancing competition where people collapse on the floor. As for prizes and grants, I've had my share. The grants were pretty useful for buying time with and for the opportunity of travel, and the awards were often pleasing largely because you got to meet people as a result. Still I agree with you that a universal basic income would be much better. It would leave the sorting out of good and bad and more or less interesting to time (which usually makes the ultimate judgement). I now have a variant of that basic income (it's called the Pension) and for that reason I wouldn't apply for a grant of any kind (not that there seem to be any around). It's better that this kind of money (if it any longer exists) should go to younger writers.

One award I was particularly pleased with was a special mention from the British Poetry Society for my most recent Selected. The Society had for years been pretty conservative but they'd had an injection of new blood. Awards weren't given to Selecteds, just to individual volumes, so the mention was nice (otherwise the book went right under the radar). An ASAL award a few years back was also good to receive. Neither of these were money things. Of course I'm going to write whatever. I've got to that stage now where I can't really do anything else!

What does worry me is the audience for poetry. I thought that the internet expanded the audience considerably but I fear that the neocon dumbing down of education might have the opposite effect. These people have never given a rat's arse for poetry so what's taking place is a kind of revenge of the nerds.

KIT

Maybe that was the last word?

But then again – nerd revenge? How do we explain Trump? A kind of neo-con reductio ad absurdum but ballisticaly aimed at nerd-dom, at truth, the facts, the way things actually are and wrok. On the other hand, considering his anger, vacuousness and the clear peril he presents to us and them, himself and the world, one has to admit that Trump is the most rhetorically successful world leader in a long time… I refer to the Cretan Liar thing. Heard Bob Woodward on the telly last night saying that Trump was the wrong man for the job, which seems like litotes, but then again (clear away patriotic investment and) maybe Obama was the wrong man for the job, as proved by his failure to gain traction. Maybe Trump is the Nero they needed to really get the decline properly underway?

LAURIE

Yes I think for the moment anyway we've come to the end of something. Once Trump enters the conversation it's the equivalent of the fat lady singing.

and tune into ZOOM for Laurie at

Laurie Duggan
in conversation with
Ella O’Keefe

To mark the publication of his new collection Homer Street, we are pleased to invite you to a discussion between Laurie Duggan and poet Ella O’Keefe, organised by Gleebooks.

6.30pm start
Thursday 1 October 2020
Online via Zoom

Please register through the Gleebooks event page to receive your link to the event, or email events@gleebooks.com.au. This event is free, but registration is essential.

Buy Homer Street from Gleebooks

And, as a special treat for those who have scrolled so far from home, some pics, from my sturdy SLR, of Writers' Doodah at the Adelaide Festival (or Rootathon as some knew it) back somewhere late seventies (featuring some usual suspects):