interview in Kosmos Insight re A Postcard from the fires, a picture of the rains

 https://www.kosmosinsight.com/post/kit-kelen-a-postcard-from-the-fires-a-picture-of-the-rains?fbclid=IwAR1RHSjjLXQ0CMDzZx0VEuikaUUQhzU8kNbC65V1c1xtZhtSVrf8DP5V-JE

Kit Kelen: A Postcard from the Fires, A Picture of the Rains

Updated: 4 days ago

Interview: Anna Couani, Yannis Dramitinos

Photo: UBI SANT

Kit Kelen is a well-known award-winning Australian poet and painter and was Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Macau for 17 years. His poetry is widely published in Australia and internationally, and he has produced 17 full length books of poetry, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, French, Filipino, Indonesian, Swedish and Greek. He has worked extensively with translators translating poetry from other languages into English and also translating poetry in English to other languages.

He recently worked with Greek translator Theodora Arampatzi to produce a bilingual book of his own poetry in Greek and English called A Postcard from the Fires, A Picture of the Rains.

Another recent collection is Book of Mother, written about his relationship with his mother and is an exploration of dementia. Kit Kelen has also published several book-length scholarly works about poetry and children’s literature.

After working as Professor of Creative Writing in Macau and teaching in Asia, Kit Kelen returned to Australia and now lives in country New South Wales in the Myall lakes district.

He continues to write poetry, available in draft form on his blog thedailykitkelen.blogspot.com and with other works on his website https://kitkelen.com. He also continues to mentor other poets from Australia and around the world. He has facilitated the publication of many poets in a press called Flying Islands Pocket Poets and these publications can be accessed and downloaded online at https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au

Can you please tell us the story behind this book?

The idea of a book of poems about fires and floods came out of long conversations between me and my translator – Theodora Arampatzi. Our common thread is children’s lit and we met at the International Youth Library in Munich (at Blutenberg Castle) – a wonderful wonderful place – where Dora is in charge of the Greek collection. All kinds of collaborations start there and go on there. Dora and I have many interests in common, including poetry and the weather, and the extreme effects of the weather in our two countries. Over the period we were working on this book – let’s say the last three years – there have been a number of extreme and dangerous weather events in Australia and in Greece. The impacts have been really devastating and of course they’re just the beginning of how the world is going to be with climate change. It does seem that people have an incredible capacity to forget disasters, especially when they personally were not the victims. Perhaps that has been a useful survival instinct in the past. One thinks of black death parties, and escapism as a genre. But the world is too small for that approach now. World imperialism and totalitarianism and the fascisms and genocides of the last century are some of the things that prove to us the importance of remembering. Remembering, so as to not repeat. I think poetry and the arts in general are important as a means of memorializing terrible things that we need to remember in order to avoid them in the future and in order to improve as a species. And to protect this one and only planet we have. To protect it from we humans. Already there are only half the trees left in the world as there were when we took over, ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. Whether poetry – whether art – can make any difference, can make people think, feel, act about these things is of course a moot point. What else can poets and artists do? I suppose though that to make people think and feel about the current world eco-crisis is more or less the motivation behind the book.

I had poems and drafts on Greek topics already to share, and also responses to Greek language poets (whom I had read in translation of course… more on that below), and I had written Dora some poems arising from our conversation. So, all this material started taking the shape of a book. And I should thank Dora for her dialogue and friendship and her careful collaboration to make this book a reality. And I should thank Alexa Apostolaki, at Kaleidoscope, for all her skilled effort as an editor/publisher to make this book the beautiful production it is.

In general I can say that what’s in the book is work arising from a discussion that is always at least partly political … but more philosophical than political… work about how the world is, and should and shouldn’t be. For me, going to philosophy means starting with Greece (my own personal bias is towards Epicurus first). And thinking about democracy (or forms of government more generally) means starting with Greece, whatever adventures along the way.

Also, for me, this book is necessarily about Greekness and Australianness and where and how they meet. Greekeness is one of the many great strengths of Australian society and its intellectual life. It’s impossible to imagine Australia without its Greekness. One of the great public virtues of my great grandfather JJ Moloney, was that he read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. It was by this means he was connected with the ancient intellectual life that formed the basis of civilization as far as he was concerned.

In a way, then, I suppose I can say that this is a book about how our different languages make the world, how the world is something we make in conversation, how precious it is when, through the act of translation, your voice can be mine, and vice versa!

Is this your first book published in Greece or in Greek?

Yes and yes, and no, in a way – well, to be clear, it’s my first full scale poetry collection ‘book’, in Greek, published in Greece. But I’ve had a lot of poems translated into Greek over the years, especially from my time at a residency in Cyprus (Boubouki, in Mesana, up in the mountains behind Paphos)… by Dora and also by Patros Panaou … who happens to be another children’s lit. scholar … a bunch of these poems were published a couple of years in the journal Mandragoras: https://mandragoras-magazine.gr

From memory I think there were about thirty poems there plus a number of my paintings plus a little introductory essay by Dora. So I guess I could say that I had a chapbook before this book.

What is your approach to works in translation?

That’s a tricky question, put so… simply! I’ve been involved with poetry translation a lot and I’ve written a lot on this subject. I think with this book in Greek, I now have books of poems in at least ten languages other than English … and in some cases (for instance Chinese and Portuguese) there are several books in the other language. But I’ve done a lot more work in this space on other people’s poetry than on my own … My 2012 anthology/collection Notes for the Translatorsexplains quite a bit about it.

And I have done a lot more in the last ten years! There have been articles in Westerly and Southerly and Jacket and elsewhere about poetry translation and workshopping processes and so on. I’ve worked a lot with poets and translators, with poetry translators, with poets becoming translators and with translators becoming poets. And although I’ve co-translated lots of poets into English – from Chinese (including a lot of classical Chinese poetry, Portuguese, French, Indonesian, Norwegian … I’ve probably done a lot more work facilitating the translation of Australian poets into those and some other languages. For me, this is very much a pedagogical activity. Translation is one of the best apprenticeships for a poet and, as I’ve been a language teacher all my adult life, one way or another, teaching poetry writing through translation was a natural thing for me to develop in my practice. Working with a great model from your own or from the other language and trying to get it across the gulf between cultures … trying to make a successful poem in the other language … I think that’s one of the best things a poet – at any stage of development – can be doing. And if it doesn’t always succeed then perhaps we need to keep at it! And get more people involved. A bad translation can sometimes result in an excellent new poem! It’s good to be flexible with goals and attainments.

Is there a “common thread” between A Postcard from the Fires and Picture of the Rains?

Well, it’s one book! So I hope so!… I suppose it’s all about extreme weather, so it’s all about climate change … as I think explained to begin with. And I suppose there’s a humanist/ posthumanist Epicurean philosophy behind it all. I hope that all of my poetry helps people to look again and see with new eyes the world that they thought they knew. But that’s something I think all poetry should do.

Have you had any experience of modern Greek literature either as a poet or as an academic?

Well of course – Kavafy, Seferis, Elytis, Ritsos and many more, but in Australia – Antigone Kefala and Dimitri Tsaloumas and P.O. and more All in translation of course where they’re not writing in English. I have written poems in response to many of these. Some are in the book! So I have tried to engage practically with the thought and the style of these poets, and of course the ancients as well. But I feel I have only scratched the surface. I’m hoping this book will help me to make more connections and that there may be fruitful exchange as a result.

I’m impressed with a new generation of Greek Australian poets. For instance I’ve just finished reading Angela Costi’s An Embroidery of Old Maps and New. And I’ve invited Angela into my Common or Garden Poets group. And then there’s Anna Couani, whom we’ve published twice in the Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series. I guess this is all modern Greek diasporic literature, regardless of the language in which it’s written or where it’s published.

What gave you the idea that you could be a writer and how do you see your place in modern Australian literature? Or in world literature?

Because I started writing poetry as a teenager, in a family of writers, writing poetry just seems like a very natural thing to me … a normal thing, an everyday thing … a thing it would be hard for me to stop doing every day. Maybe it’s a kind of affliction / addiction … but if so then one with which I am at peace. A ‘place’? I think I have quite a clear idea of my place in Australian letters… it’s definitely lower case, not CAPS. I think many poets have odd fantasies about poetry their place in the world and about money and fame and importance. That bastard, Plato, expelled us from the Republic, because we were deluded and dangerous. And well, who can blame him?

So let me say I’m an unimportant poet and unlikely to be much remembered. That’s not because the system is corrupt or because people are blind to my genius; it’s because there are a lot of people in this country writing really good poems and doing it a lot. The fact is that there are more good poems being written in the world today than ever before. As a natural consequence of this, there are more bad poems being written every day.

Ironically, although I’m writing more and more, I’m less and less in magazines and journals because I find it hard to send my stuff out, because the rate of rejection is so high. Because, as I’ve said, there are a lot of good poets producing the good stuff and there aren’t enough readers. And then I wonder, should poetry be a competitive business, like this? Do I, personally (as a sexygenerian), need to experience more rejection? Is it good for poetry and is it good for poets, for the business of poetry to be competitive? I think that’s a very ancient and very Greek question! And poetry is probably an ancient form of masochism.

To the extent that there is any system to it in this country, it’s what I think of as an unhealthy ‘star system’ (mirror of the movie or the music industry), where some people get promoted and some get left behind, on what are some times nepotistic whims. I think poets can suffer as much from being given attention as they can from being ignored. Generally though poets do crave attention, however much they like to paint themselves as hermits. All this jostling to be heard, recognized, lauded and awarded. But the joke is that the prizes are not so glittering – not even in the way of readership. The readers of poetry in this country are – despite some recent protestations to the contrary – the people who spend their time writing poems (as always, for better and worse). So what’s all the jockeying effort in aid of? It’s part of a general pattern of delusion about the arts and creativity in this country, and about the place of poetry in particular.

Power, in the form of decision making about publication – in magazines, book series – about competitions, about school and university syllabuses – is exercised through overlapping circles of influence and control. The people in charge – like our horrible government, though nowhere near so horrible, are typically lazy readers.

An outsider reading reviews of Australian poetry would simply have no concept of its range and quality. That’s to say the standard of Australian poetry is several orders of magnitude higher and more varied and more interesting than any form of writing about it. And that is basically a good thing! Read for yourself and see! I suppose it is simply a fact of life that a meta-industry is to some extent parasitic. Critics, academics, bureaucrats all feed from (generally unpaid) work of the impoverished poets. Ah, but of course it’s never quite so simple, because so many of the critics and academics are also poets and often quite good ones, and decent people too! So that was ‘state of the disunion’ address.

I am happy that there are a lot of people around the world who follow my work every day on the daily kit – https://thedailykitkelen.blogspot.com/

What I publish on the daily kit is all about showing my process, and I know that many of my past students and past collaborators and translators visit there, where now I’m writing in Esperanto as well as English every day … and also posting artwork (painting and drawing) most days. Writing in Esperanto has opened me up to an entirely new readership, I am sure, mainly of poets (some good, some bad, as you would expect).

I think you could say I’m a very process oriented practitioner of poetry – oriented also towards pedagogy (that sounds like another Greek invention!).

I think if you’re a poet (and it took me a long time to admit to being a poet) then poetry making is something you do … in my case, for better and/or for worse, it’s something I do every day. I am quite aware that this productivity annoys some people but I do not feel that I have a choice in the matter. I do not think that I could stop without causing myself serious mental distress, if not illness. I feel that what I am doing interests enough people around the world every day for it to be worthwhile to show.

It’s work. It’s my day job and my night job. And it really is 24/7 for me. Dreams contribute a lot to my poetry practice. I guess dream material is the ‘stuff for free’. But you have to work for that too.

I think that the ‘poets’ who wait for inspiration or to be visited by muses are basically just lazy … I subscribe to the 99% perspiration – 1% inspiration mantra. I also think you have to produce a fair amount of crap to produce the gold.

And for whom do we produce the stuff – in a country where there is so little general interest or support for the arts in general and for poetry in particular? Mainly we – the artists and the poets – are producing for each other and for ourselves. Is this a problem? Reality is always a problem. Art and poetry – these are solutions to the problem of reality. And of course the arts are fields populated with fantasists, people with big and delicate egos, many of whom can (as I’ve already suggested) never get enough attention. In a sense, also, that most might find offensive, most poets in a country like Australia are necessarily hobbyists. Poetry’s not their day job until they retire.

But making poetry has a cathartic/therapeutic value that should not be underestimated. It would be a very good thing if more people did it. In the same way as it would be a good thing if more people spent time doing art of any kind. Putin should do this instead of invading other people’s countries. Scott Morrison should learn to hold a hose and become a gardener.

For myself … I have basically made a career out of poetry, through teaching – by first teaching migrants in Australia and English to Speakers of Other Languages overseas (Japan, Hong Kong) and then by creating a creative writing specialization of my own, tending towards poetry, and making this happen in an academic context, mainly at the University of Macau. So my academic career and publishing have been very poetry oriented. Over the years I have published a number of scholarly books about poetry – Poetry, Consciousness, Community, City of Poets, Anthem Quality, Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism – Children, Animals and Poetry.

I guess, rather than starve in the romantic garret feeling sorry for myself, I sniffed out a living around the thing I loved, which was poetry. No gold medal for the best poem ever, just working away at my craft, and spreading the word, and listening to what others have to say. If this hasn’t made everyone happy, then remember Oscar Wilde – ‘each man kills the thing he loves’.

At this stage in my ‘career’ – and I do love the word ‘career’ because of the way its other meaning in English suggests being out of control – I see myself as possibly Australia’s most persistent minor poet, as a believer in poetry as a community, rather than a competition, as someone who has made collaboration a long-term work focus… because, although it is now a very cheesy thing to say – I see all art production as a conversation – the kind of conversation that – like Socrates’ ‘examined life’ – makes the lives of poets and artists worth living.

I suppose some people find it strange that I write so much about poetry and yet I never write reviews. I took a vow at an early age never to wear that hat and to sit in judgement of my immediate peers. But of course I love it when my books get good reviews. I suppose everyone’s a hypocrite one way or another. And it’s nice if you can choose. I think the peer review system has been a disaster for the arts in Australia. Here’s another ancient Greek idea we should adopt – the lottery. If we can’t pay all the serious artists a living pension for life, then let’s have a lottery, and stop spending money on judging work, start spending it on helping the people who make art to survive! (I’d also like to bring in ostracism… I have a few ostrakons ready to cast with some well known names on them already!)

The thing about fame and importance is that there is no gainsaying posterity. Who knows what will be important or even remembered in fifty, a hundred, a thousand years time? Will poetry survive the extinction of our solar system in four billion years or however long it is? Just do your job, like Candide said. ‘Work in silence. It’s the only way to make life bearable’.

As the publisher of Flying Islands individually and in group enterprises, what are your thoughts on bilingual texts in that press?

I think bilingual texts are very important for poetry, and for poets as readers particularly. I think we need to break down national and language barriers as far as we can … and this is part of the idea of flying islands. Clouds don’t recognize any borders, birds don’t recognize any borders – so why should we?

Of course poems are generally written in ‘natural’ languages but the organisation of the world into national states, typically with a single dominating language – has that been a good thing for the world? For humans? For animals? For the trees? For the planet?

Remember Shelley, in his Defence (trying to get the poets an access-all-areas ticket back into the republic)! We are the world’s ‘unacknowledged legislators’ – so you have to expect us to have some big opinions!

The national model is simply not the right way or the best way to organize or think about poetry or art, or the world, or most things, for that matter. Poetry needs to be a cosmopolitan activity. We can thank Menander for that idea, but take it back a little further – I think Homer’s Zeus – god of borders and strangers – he’s really the one responsible. A god for everywhere, who cares about a refugee, like Odysseus, for instance.

So, let’s make as much effort as possible to get between languages and to get over borders. Borders? I’m over them!

The parallel text poetry collection is a very interesting creature … actually not two but potentially three books in one – one for each language and then another book for the reader of both languages!… And with that in mind, I’ve been interested in pioneering books that are what I call ‘not- translation’ ... e.g. Iris Fan’s South of Days (in the Pocket Poets Series).

A press needs to be distinctive. And in the case of Flying Islands, we have a number of distinctive features. The pocket format of course, the large proportion of translated and parallel text bilingual editions. And being a community organisation instead of a profit making one (or more commonly, a profit-pretending one). These are all things that make Flying Islands distinct and worthy of support to help the press continue.

Why did you decide to learn Esperanto?

Ah well, this is something I was very idealistically interested in as a kid, but never got very far with. I had a few other dabbles and encounters with Esperanto over the years. And then during the pandemic I thought I should have a serious crack at it, because, for the first time in a long time, there wasn’t a motive to learn some of a language for a practical purpose, because – like the rest of the world – I wasn’t going anywhere. (I don’t know why I’m talking about the pandemic in the past tense b t w.)

I love the idea of Esperanto as everyone’s language and no one’s language ! It’s an idealistic better world idea – a language that is easy to learn for everyone, that would encourage everyone to learn languages and that would create a level playing field for global communications, simply by being everyone’s second or other language. A language to believe in, and an unnatural language, as linguists would have it.

But from my point of view, Esperanto presents a special and interesting kind of challenge. I’m not only a persistently minor poet, I think I might just be one of Australia’s most translated poets at the moment. That’s not a matter of luck or of being canonized or lionized. It’s a matter of doing the work every day and building the relationships over years. I’m perhaps also one of very few poets anywhere who writes with translation speicifically in mind. Despite this, I’ve never seriously translated much of my own poetry into another language. Not until I started working with Esperanto.

Now I’ve always thought of poetry translation like this: poems are written by poets, so a translation of a poem also needs to be written by a poet, ideally by a native-speaking poet. Therefore the poetry translation process is best carried out by two parties – a native speaker in the source language and a native speaker in the target language. Bilinguals of course can fill both positions, as can people who achieve native (or native-like) levels of fluency in foreign languages. These are rare individuals.

So, for me personally (not being one of those rare individuals), it’s always been about co-translation. I work with a native speaker of the language other than English to produce a poem of another language in an English version, or to produce an English language poem in another language. In that second case I would not put my name to the translation because I am not sufficiently in control of the target language to claim ownership of the meaning being made in that language.

Esperanto offers a special opportunity for a poet interested in translation but who never got to a strong enough point in any other than her or his native language. Esperanto is a language in which, if one attains a reasonable fluency, one will not be less able with the idiom than the native speakers are, because (for practical purposes) there are none. (In fact there are quite a few native speakers of Esperanto, but they represent a tiny proportion of the language’s regular users.) For me, Esperanto presents the opportunity to, for the first time, produce poems in a language other than my own, that is, in a language other than English, but where I can hopefully be as in control of the meaning I make as any other typical user of the language. So that is half the answer to your question ‘why?’

That’s the upside.

The challenge is that I think Esperanto is, essentially, and for very noble reasons, an anti-poetic language. Why do I think this? Esperanto is a language of straightforward precision. Unlike other languages, Esperanto is efficient because it is systematic and consistent in a way that a naturally evolved language could not be. Technically, I suppose, it is something like an artificial pidgin that not really yet become a creole. If you think about Ferdinand de Saussure’s dichotomies in language, then the one to focus on is the opposition between the motivated and the arbitrary: things in natural languages happen for a reason or they don’t (there are rules and there are exceptions, things in a language that can be learned as system and things that have to be learned rote). In Esperanto the arbitrary is reduced as far as it can be reduced. Everything is system; the rules have no exceptions. This is of course what makes Esperanto comparatively easy to learn. And this is the whole point of the language in a nutshell – an easy-to-learn language designed for the purpose of precise and unambiguous communication between parties who otherwise need to rely on, either translation, or a third (much more difficult) common idiom, for instance English (the current world language).

Where does all this leave poets and poetry?

Well, I think that one of the many ways you can divide the poets of the world into two opposing camps is to say that there are those who see their work as being about avoiding ambiguity (those, in other words who prize precision and exact meaning), and the other mob (among which I number myself) who value polysemy and indeterminacy, who want to play with the multiplicity that is in language; to play, for instance with the fact that language is constantly evolving and never quite arrives. This is what makes culture both necessary and possible: there is still a story to tell, there is still something new to be said.

Esperanto provides a special challenge for this latter group of poets (let’s call them the polysemists, though that’s probably not the best word), and so for me. An anti-poetic language! For someone not very interested in rhyme, but very focussed on meaning, the play with words is harder to achieve. (One might think of that ‘play’ as the essential work of a poem – its way to mean – and as what distinguishes the poem from a gloss of the poem or any other writing about it). To some extent, one has to impose idiom and metaphor (and other tropes) on a language like Esperanto – to borrow in and to invent (especially through the use of affixes). These may feel to be embellishments in a way one would not with to think of in one’s own language. Fortunately though, Esperanto has a long and distinguished history of literary and poetic effort and play, and some of these issues I mention are ones that the inventor, Zamenhof, foresaw from the beginning. He saw the need for a poetry in the language he was inventing and chose to share with the world.

The resources of Esperanto are all about reaching and making sense to someone who doesn’t speak your language. In a way, these put poetry in a very pure place, with much less interference from what I think of as the ‘what would be otherwise meant’ of your own language used day to day. A poet, in Esperanto needs to get to her/his reader – to her/his head and heart by the simplest, most direct way. I think this is an idea well xpressed by Berthold Brecht in one of his last poems:

And I always thought:

the very simplest words

Must be enough.

When I say what things are like

Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.

That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself

Surely you see that.

And that, I believe is a challenge for all poetry making, in every language. But I hope I’ve given you an idea of the poetry challenge, in Esperanto, with which I am wrestling, and daily right now, and enjoying the wrestle very much!

My personal aim has become to learn Esperanto to make poems and to make poems as a way of learning Esperanto. At this point I’ve written and translated quite a few of my own and am working towards a book of them. I’m also working towards collecting an anthology of Australian poets in Esperanto. And while it’s a little sad to do something like this on a national basis, in this case it’s with a cosmopolitan motive of introducing Australian poets to a language which, ideally, anyone in the world could read.

Will that be a good point on which to conclude this discussion?

Before we go though, I suppose that this is a good moment to mention my new book, published in in Australia – book of mother –

https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/book-of-mother/