Erica Jolly interviewed by Elaine Schwager
ES: You put a lot of emphasis on the fortuitousness of your father's death in creating opportunities for you as a writer. Do you feel any memories of your father also influenced you? How do you think things would be different if he lived?
EJ: I have always felt most unhappy that my father died when he did and the only way I knew him was through my mother's memories, faint echoes and almost nothing else. I was lucky to re-discover someone who had known me from birth. I wanted another perspective - I felt I could not always trust my mother's recollections. The death of my father almost destroyed her but she did her best for my brother and myself. They had married quite late and she had her first child at thirty-six, so she was ageing, although I didn't realise it, when I was twenty-one.
I wrote that "Afterword" looking at the role of chance in life. It was not fortuitous. If I could have had him alive I would have been much happier and would have had, perhaps, a childhood. But life is affected by chance, so I looked at what I gained, not just as a writer. My father's family did not educate girls. My uncle was the first Rhodes Scholar in South Australia but they only educated the boys. The girls stayed home - 'kept the home fires burning' - to use a phrase from a British popular song. Going to university was probably the most invigorating thing in my life. I expected to teach history. It was chance again, in England, where I expected to teach history, that I was asked, although I had little experience in this field, to teach English. It was useful, in fact, that the English were so ignorant of the fact that, in the 1940s and 1950s and before, our history in schools was primarily British history.
I don't know how life would have been if he had lived. He was obviously not just 'a chip off the old Jolly block' or he would not have married my mother. He might have let me do whatever I wanted. I imagine life would have been socially more inviting. He was determined that David and I should join him on the golf course. We would have had money and would not have been scratching all the time. Now I wonder whether he would have helped me to understand chemistry. He was a pharmacist.
ES: How has Wordsworth influenced you? What other poets have been an influence?
EJ: Before I taught in England, the poetry I enjoyed at school was the work of Pope. I found Wordsworth 'tame'. We had to recite 'Daffodils'. Mainland Australia is so different from the Lake District. This business of one's heart leaping up when one beholds a rainbow in the sky had little place in a secondary school where we were coming to terms with the fact that atomic bombs had rained down their horrors on people. We only came to that realisation slowly. At school I loved the Shakespearean plays we studied and the writing that concerned itself with society. Jane Austen was and is still my favourite writer. Alexander Pope dared to attack mediocrity. I was not interested in poetry as such. Lines such as 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman' mattered to me for what they said about society. I valued history, and what it was telling me about the world, much more than writing of any kind.
It was only when I went to England in 1966 that I said to my mother, 'Perhaps I would like to be a writer. I decided not to use a camera but to record impressions in letters which I sent home.
How did Wordsworth influence me? Once more it was chance. The school foisted the poetry competition on to a 'colonial'. I had to make students prepare and recite a set piece and one of their own choosing. The set piece was the 'skating episode' in 'The Prelude'. Reading blank verse, in England, where there was ice and snow, made such a difference.
I will never forget the day I was walking back to the village of Biggleswade when I saw the first sign of spring life on a bare branch and I said aloud, with the air from my mouth looking like a fog, 'So this is what it was all about.' In South Australia, the distinctions between the seasons is not as marked. This was Shelley speaking to me in a way I had never expected to understand. 'Ode to the West Wind' took on real meaning. I have come to be very fond of Shelley.
It was Wordsworth's 'Prelude' that influenced me as a teacher. I am a teacher first. I had never been satisfied with the mechanistic - I use that word now although I would not have used it then - aspects of teaching and learning, rote learning of dates, knowing the chronological order but not the ideas, not making the connections between the life of the times and what was driving aspects of life. That is why, as a history teacher, I like working from documents and I hated boundaries, being told that was the realm of economists or political scientists or scientists or sociologists. It seemed to me then and I'm sure of it now that those neat, and not so neat, divisions built by 'empire builders' of one kind or another, are the reason we are in a mess now. Wordworth showed the connections with the natural world. Blake gave me the tears of 'London'.
The first poem I ever wrote came out of the 'American Cemetery outside of Cambridge' and it came out of 'half sleep'. It was such a surprise and I saw it an a 'oncer'.
When I came home in 1968, I discovered Judith Wright - for me the greatest Australian poet of the twentieth century. I came home wanting to study English literature and to complete my major in English. Besides Judith Wright, who connected thought and feeling in the most substantial and often lyrical and poignant way, I found A.D. Hope - her opposite - the Australian equivalent in some ways of the Augustan poets. I had come across Leonard Cohen in England and did not like or understand him. I discovered how the American poets were influencing the writing in Australia, most particularly the work of Bruce Dawe who was more urban in his imagery. Of the American poets, it was Robert Frost who interested me.
ES: How has your political involvement affected your poetry and how has your writing and poetry affected your politics?
EJ: I have never been a member of any political party but I believe that no one can ignore politics. I studied Ancient and Modern and Economic history at school as well as so many aspects of European and American history at university. We are all members of the 'polis' in one way or another. The word 'polite' comes from it. Unless we are slaves, serfs or stateless persons, we are citizens.We cannot escape it. If we try to, we allow ignorance to win. As a teacher of girls in what were considered 'second rate' schools - the technical schools - I did not consider them as such - I found these girls had no understanding of their own society, outside their suburb. They would leave school at fourteen, get a job, get married and have a reasonable or distressing life according to their circumstances. These girls were from working class suburbs. I am so glad now to see women from such schools in politics. What a government does affects us. If we don 't think about what we are doing we allow 'horrors' to happen. So I concentrated on contemporary history. In Australia, and while I hate the result at the moment, we have compulsory voting. No one has the right just to whinge. We are responsible for what government we put in power. Voluntary voting is the ultimate cop-out. Conservatives, of course, like it. For me, as a teacher of history and social studies, it was important that students should examine statements and take nothing on face value. They had, as historians must, to check sources.
But the fragmentation of curricula in history in South Australia was bugging me. I wanted to be able to cross boundaries. I wanted students to recognise the artificiality and convenience of so many boundaries, so I began to study literature and came to more poetry as I went forward, becoming more and more interested in the concern with morality - Matthew Arnold - and aesthetics - George Santayana. This was in the 1970s and I was only beginning to write poems of my own which grew out of experiences in school life which dominated my existence. 'Are you one or many?' is in 'Pomegranates' I think. Thinking as I do, with concern for connections, politics has been an integral part of my life. With the experience of a private school before federal politicians used funds to private schools to get the Catholic vote in the mid 1950s, I was in a school where debating, where examination of issues without fear or favour, was part of the norm. It is inevitable as the daughter of a civilian widow, disadvantaged in terms of pension when she was too ill to go on trying to get work as a typist, striving to give her children as much as she could and with aunts mouthing platitudes about 'pensions' as 'charity', that I would feel the social injustice of it all.
What I love about poetry is the precision. I'm less loquacious. I can focus. The bloke who checks my work often tells me I have too many ideas for one poem. I find it hard to discover effective metaphors.
An anecdote - recently I tried to join a group of good poets to improve my work, to try new things and accept new challenges. I had to be accepted by the group. A courageous woman and a clever poet rang me up to tell me I wasn't going to be accepted. They thought I was too narrow, too focused on what is happening to the 'polis'. She said, 'You have the tools. But we think you're too political and you probably won't change. Why even I might end up saying to you, "Give it a rest Erica." So I wasn't wanted. Part of me was not surprised.
But that phone call has freed me to be and stay who I am. The accompanying poem has just been published in 'Blue Giraffe 2' in Tasmania.
Response to a telephone call telling me my poems are too political
Give it a rest Erica
Touch this gift of dragon wings
rich glossy green leaves
triplets of translucent tepals
(petals and sepals joined)
on this flourishing begonia.
Give it a rest Erica
Share with rainbow lorikeets
bouncing on low branches
beaks deep in sweet red pulp
inside soft swollen skins of
Dante's gift - my green fig tree.
Give it a rest Erica
Enjoy the sight of friends
wary but willing to try
eyes widening with delight
as tongue and taste buds
discover the secret of mulberries.
Give it a rest Erica
Appreciate your old back fence
corrugated iron only shoulder high
letting a neighbour hand over
her gift of frozen pumpkin soup
to help in the process of healing.
In a society with wealthy people putting up high walls with electronically controlled gates the notion of a neighbourhood is disappearing. This is a political poem because it describes one of the things happening to the 'polis'.
ES: It took you many decades to publish your book. How did that effect your identity as a writer?
EJ: I have started so late that I am surprised when people see me as a writer and a poet. When the committee for the South Australian International Women's Day celebration gave me the Barbara Polkinghorne award for my writing - mainly writing about teaching, education, lobbying governments for the Australian Federation of University Women and my poems - I was amazed.
Still amazed, I can now answer when people ask what I do by saying I'm a writer - and occasionally I am paid for what I do. But first I'm a citizen, a tax payer, a teacher and a poet. I'm not just one thing - once I was a daughter. Now I'm not. I'm not a grandmother or a mother. I'm a friend, a neighbour, a person, an opponent of this appalling Australian government, a slowly ageing woman and . . .whatever might come along to add to the mix.
ES: Who is your audience when you are writing?
EJ: Who is my audience? Anyone who will listen and who will read and be prepared to find in what might be seen as 'local' something that could be universal. More and more are listening at Friendly Street, the oldest society for poets to read their work in Australia. In 1993 when I began there was serious suspicion. Poets did not write about politics. There is still fear that my poems are 'polemics'. No one would have called Wordsworth or Blake's 'London' or Shelley a 'polemicist'. No one would have called Judith Wright a 'polemicist' and her poetry has given me a history of my nation that has imbued the way I see it and the way I want it to be.
ES: The natural world and nature imagery is very prominent in your poetry. Could you speak of this influence?
EJ: The natural world in my poetry is not Nature as Wordsworth sees it. I am a product of the suburbs. In my educational background is a minute bit of botany. My mother and I lived from 1955 - 1969 in a flat, upstairs. Luckily the series of flats was well planned by the Housing Trust which constructed two storeyed flats for pensioners and people with lower levels of income. There were trees. When my brother went to Canberra, we took over his house and with it his garden, very neat, with shrubs and no tall trees. We changed that. The backyard and garden became a buffer zone. When I was writing poems in the 1970s and much later, I would see in the garden aspects of my life.
My mother hated plumbago. When she died I grew it and, as it grew, I discovered why this exotic was trouble. I also found out it was Cecil Rhodes' favourite flower. It was a 'colonizer'.
I planted natives and the backyard became a mixture of exotic and indigenous flora, rather like us, a mixture of immigrants and rulers and indigenous people very easily smothered by the invaders like daisies, spearmint geranium. So the natural imagery in my poems grows out of this close suburban surrounding. My only successful extended metaphor is in 'Equal opportunity'. As a teacher, I know how difficult it is to provide equal opportunities for students. As I worked to cut back the aggressive plants, I saw the only place where I had power to free the less aggressive plants from the invasion and conquest of the more insistent growth was where I had total control.
Specific plants have given me avenues for interpretation of ideas. That is how 'Pomegranates' came about. Three cheers for my neighbour who found the historical connections. 'A view of the end' took six months. I had to re-read 'The Waste Land' but the opening line came when I was picking ripe mulberries from my tree.
So my 'nature' is basically domestic, not the wild tumultuous Nature which became the teacher for Wordsworth's child. It is not a symbol of immortality. But I would not be without its presence in my life. It frees me from despair.
ES: Do you think Poetry is effective as a platform for political ideas or should it serve other purposes and goals?
EJ: I hope you will accept what I'm about to say in the spirit I mean it. I find either/or questions most disturbing. They are part of the reason we are in the mess we are. This either/or culture is destructive.
I hear your President saying 'If you are not with me, you're against me.' [I often watch the PBS news hour with Jim Lehrer.] I don't see poetry as a 'platform' for anything, in the same way as a don't see Goya's paintings as a 'platform'. The arts present ideas, attitudes, feelings and people respond, interpret and feel about them as their backgrounds and outlooks affect their responses.
Poetry is, as music is, as visual art is. If the work is good, it lasts and crosses all kinds of boundaries. Others may use it for this or that purpose.
In my "Afterword" I made mention of my experience of teaching science-oriented boys in England. That made me quite determined to try to bring the sciences and the arts together as best I could as a teacher. It is very hard to go against a trend that dominated the twentieth century. The only poem in 'Pomegranates' that makes an attempt to deal with it is 'A Scientist's Spinoza'. I was invited to read it at a party where there was a preponderance of physicists. One came, a little shamefaced, by the use of this marvellous man's name for this experiment. Then he felt better - the experiment had happened in Vancouver! There are connections between Wordsworth and Spinoza in one way - God and Nature one!
In Australia, at the moment, there is a fashion quite antagonistic to the writing of overtly political poetry. It is derided as polemic. I don't know why this attitude has taken root. Perhaps it is because we are trying to be clever, seeking images that yoke peculiar animals together.
The protagonists of this outlook say poetry should deal with what they call 'universals'. Anger is as much a universal emotion as love. What makes us angry, or what makes us feel love or fear or concern for the lack of justice may have a different focus.
I was born in 1933 in a racist country with a 'White Australia Policy' in which Australia's indigenous people were not counted in the census. When I was in Los Angeles in 1967, the students knew about our attitude to the immigration of non-whites. They knew about the language test we used to keep people out. We only counted the Indigenous people in the census in 1967. So much in 'Pomegranates' - 'Seeds of place in time' is my exploration of the very slow process I went through to understand my background.
When Walt Whitman began 'Leaves of Grass' he wrote about the America he wanted to see. In Australia A.D. Hope in 'Australia' targeted our shore-line of urban and suburban dwellers in a savage satirical way. Everything I see around me here makes me think he was right. Judith Wright, more lyrical, more aware of her own family's contribution of our destruction of the Australian Aboriginal people, wrote with a feeling of guilt in some work, and of longing and anger in others. 'Australia 1970' is packed with her fury at what we were doing.
Yesterday, I heard our Minister for Indigenous Affairs describe the homes of Indigenous people in remote communities as 'cultural museums'. She refuses to recognise them as communities. I am torn between rage and sorrow - rage that so many of us voted them in. Howard said the Aboriginal issue would not 'play at the ballot box'. He made sure of that. The "war on terror" gave him a 'platform' to build his fear-driven campaign. The sorrow is that I don't know how to help. I may not be able to put it in a poem!
I find, in so much that is happening here, the white-supremacist outlook that has antagonised so many. Yet this is my land! I cannot divorce 'politics' from the attitudes that seem to thrive in our materialist society. But it is not a case of 'materialism' or 'spirituality'. It is not a case of 'moral philosophy' or 'natural philosophy' or science - supposedly objective - or poetry - dismissed by so many as 'soft'.
We need 'matter'. The world is made up of it. We need spirit. I don't believe in a God, by the way. Human beings have in them the capacity for friendship and kindliness, not for some reward in heaven or some future return - it's there often surprisingly. Scientists are not 'ethically free zones' as Fritz Haber and Edward Teller would have had it. You have in America a man I have just discovered. His name is Roald Hoffman, Nobel-prize winning chemist and a poet. He does what I want to see happen. He makes the connections in his poems and his essays between poetry and science. He gives me hope that people are recognising the significance of connections. I was talking yesterday to a friend about Goethe - poet and scientist - whose ideas are found in the structure of the Goetheanum in Basle, where the Steiner approach to education has its centre.
I did say some of my answers would be long. Sorry about that but as a poet I must write about what stirs me. If the poem works to awake someone. good. At the last Friendly Street meeting a poet picked up my concern that we do not respect the traditional owners and custodians of the land. I was pleased about that. I do not see my poetry as a 'soap box'. I have been told I'm saying what many are feeling. I only know I can only write what 'arises' as an idea that ferments in me - sometimes for a long time. The either/or approach fosters divisions, not connections. Sorry for my long-winded answer.
ES: What has the relationship of teaching and poetry been like for you?
EJ:
In "Pomegranates' there is a poem 'Provoked by a Poet at Friendly Street'. - I think that's its title. I haven't checked. Stephen Lawrence, a very good poet, was raging about teachers and didacticism in poetry. He insisted that it had no place. I am a teacher first: I know that. I've taught for forty years. I've only begun thinking about what poetry has to offer since I had the experience in England in 1966/1967. That experience took me back to university.
It was only when I stopped being a Deputy Principal and went back into a classroom that I faced a problem. This was the 1970s. I was teaching practically-oriented boys in a technical-high school. Teachers of technical studies and science and maths teachers dismissed English literature as irrelevent.
I had to decide - was I going to cower before ignorant adolescents and only give them 'practical English'? Was I going to let them deny me pleasure of sharing what I was finding wonderful? The change came with Shakespeare's sonnet,' Shall I compare thee to a summer's day'. The boys enjoyed the poet's pleasure in his power to make a woman immortal by his craft. As craftsmen, proud of their skills - and they were very good - they found someone they could admire. They could enjoy the structure of the poem, the question and answer and that triumphant final couplet - his own design! He'd refused to follow Petrarch! They approved.
We moved on. Coleridge's imagery was exciting. They found Donne's imagery 'surreal'. At the same time they taught me about their 'pop' world as in 'Tommy' who 'sure played a mean pinball'.
When I could build this relationship with students we could go anywhere. There were, and still are - with a U3A group I work with - no boundaries.
Sharing ideas, considering forms, playing with alliteration, not afraid to rhyme - which is still a crime for many stuck in a free verse mould - painting interpretations of images, playing bongo drums, listening to rhythms. I was very lucky. I was sent a young man who was going to gain full marks in physics, chemistry and double maths. He was expected to fail English. I found out that his English teacher had dismissed him. No one had explored imagery in poetry with him. He had never considered how metaphors work. This was all he needed. My mother and I took him to plays. Shakespeare opened a new world. All he needed were these lateral connections.
So, to answer your question, - you'll find my answer in that poem. The teaching may be in the poem. Wordsworth was didactic in his own way. Pope in a different way. The inspiration may come through the discussion. When teaching and poetry have come together with a shared explosion of something or other, it has been sheer joy and I have found that I am learning as the interaction goes on. I spoke to Stephen about his vehemence a few weeks ago - he is much less antagonistic in his attitude now.
ES: You say in your afterword "I would learn not to be afraid to break the weighty silences of academics." Could you elaborate on this?
EJ: I don't know about the situation in America, but the hierarchical approach to education has meant here that kindergarten teachers are special - they are allowed and encouraged to play with children but in the system, junior primary, primary, secondary tertiary - higher education, there has been a strong tendency for the teachers at the next level to undermine what was taught at the previous level. There has been intellectual snobbery of the worst kind. Even in the secondary school, the teachers at the senior level affect to despise those teaching those at the lower level. As a teacher in a technical high school I found my work denigrated by those in academic high schools. The universities sat at the top of the tree. A few made connections with professional associations. Even lecturers in the Schools of Education avoided contact with the teachers lower down the 'tree'. Even in 1992 when I last dealt with students undertaking their practicum in schools, I found Schools of Education paid contract people to supervise the teaching students, seeing themselves as too busy to go to the schools.
The university, and there were important exceptions who loved working with younger students, was seen as 'Olympus'. That's where the latest 'knowledge' was, that's where the experts were.
When I was elected to the Flinders University Council, I watched. Most academics did not acknowledge the presence of this outsider. If we had not had an excellent Chancellor and a Vice-Chancellor interested in changing the structure, I would not have met people. One is shy. One is aware of the depth of one's ignorance on all kinds of matters. One is afraid of seeming an ignoramus.
I was asked to attend the meeting of the Board of the Faculty of Medicine. They were discussing the proposal to connect Medicine and Nursing in a new Faculty of Health Sciences. Many members of the Faculty of Medicine - called 'the jewel on the crown' of the university - were aghast. Have to deal with mere nurses! And nurses, a new faculty because nursing had only recently emerged from the hospitals to be included as a part of tertiary education, did not want to join because they had searing memories of doctors' rudeness and intolerance and assumptions of superiority in hospitals. The intelligent people saw the need for the connections to be made.
I sat listening as the debate, some of it acrimonious, went on. One of the most influential of the professors in the Faculty of Medicine was frustrated and finally said, 'We have nothing in common'.
As an outsider, meant to be an observer, I could stay silent no longer and said, 'Surely you have human beings in common. They are your patients.'
That experience taught me not to be afraid in council. Academics enjoy their capacity to floor their opponents with the savage cut and thrust of language and there are entrenched positions.
What seems to happen in council, and it happened when I was on the Academic Senate, is that they wait for someone to begin, lie in wait actually and then behave like piranhas and tear the flesh. The silences in that waiting time are full of a combination of knowledge and prejudice and I found that the needs of the wider community might have no place in their deliberations.
What could they do to me? If I was prepared to admit ignorance of specifics, I could express my opinion of what their decisions might mean for us, working at these 'lower' levels, and for the students and their families. It took a while but the experience at that meeting was pivotal. Incidentally, I was never invited to attend the meeting of another Faculty group in the university!
ES: How would you describe your process of writing. What inspires you? Do you write every day? What is your re-writing process like?
EJ: I do try to write every day but it's only a journal. I need something to prod me into writing a poem. I use Friendly Street to make me write two poems a month. I have a mentor/editor. I am not sure about the quality of my work. As you can see from my replies, I write a lot. Once I'm on to something I go on. Graham Rowlands is a very well known poet who helps many beginners. I send my work to him and he'll send it back, usually telling me it's too long, occasionally telling me a poem is excellent. In 'Pomegranates' he thinks 'A Scientist's Spinoza' is the best but he likes 'Lord Chesterfield to John Howard' in which I chose to use pseudo-heroic couplets because Howard says he is a 'Burkean' man, for the conservative Edmund Burke. I had to read all Lord Chesterfield's letters to his illegitimate son, to get the flavour of Chesterfield's approach to politics. We know Chesterfields as leather chairs. One of the things Howard did when he became Prime Minister was get rid of some beautifully designed contemporary furniture made from one of our most exquisite woods - the ancient Huon pine of Tasmania - and bring in these green Chesterfields. Symptomatic of all he stands for! It took a very long time for me to find the way to put together that letter to John Howard. Many drafts.
When an idea is in my head, I let it lie. Sometimes I'll find it working its way out in my sleep. Sometimes I get up to write a first draft - long hand - sometimes on the back of an envelope. 'A View of the End' took six months. I know if an idea does not go away that there's something there.
I have always been irritated by the conclusion of 'The Waste Land'. Eliot seemed to have been predicting for the twentieth century that this would be all we would have -'fragments to shore against [our] ruin'. I had planted my mulberry tree and found the mulberries ripening. They are an exquisite fruit. I am aware of ageing - don't want to reach ninety. The opening line 'came' in an early morning. 'I am so mean with my mulberries'. Slowly the rest came together, the memories of my friend's warning when I planted it and my reaction to 'here we go round the prickly pear'.
Sometimes Graham will tell me there's no need to rewrite. Sometimes I send him the first draft, sometimes more. Occasionally I present a poem at Friendly Street before he's seen it.
'A Villanelle for Today' started a week ago. Other poets were trying villanelles. I thought I'd have a go. I talked to a friend about the connection I was seeing with this French form and 'laissez faire'. Our government has just undermined our legislation of protection for workers. They will have even less protection than workers in America who, I believe, cannot be denied the right to join a union.
At a beach-house, I sat watching the sea. I wrote the first draft and read it to a friend. He liked it. I worked on it again. Some lines and some rhymes were not working. I read it to another friend.
At home on Tuesday I looked at it and read it aloud again. It clearly needed a couple of refinements - even if it meant breaking the iambic pentameter rhythm. This is it.
A VILLANELLE FOR TODAY
How suitable this form for laissez-faire
Employers freed to do now as they please.
No pastoral pleasures for the workers there.
This French term all workers should beware
Those with power can bring them to their knees.
How suitable this form for laissez-faire.
No out of bounds, no thought outside the square
No extra payment and no more penalties
No pastoral pleasure for the worker there.
Managers can rule, reject the need to care
Who dare question when a wage might freeze?
How suitable this form for laissez-faire.
Safe behind new laws, away from the glare
Of frightened mortgagers, anxious families.
No pastoral pleasures for the workers there.
With less than a hundred, free to be unfair,
Dismiss at will, ignore convention's niceties.
How suitable this form for laissez-faire
No pastoral pleasure for the workers there.
Graham thought it worked well. So did I. One person told me how pleased she was to see I was not angry! I thought the tone quite savage but there it is.
ES: Where do you see yourself going from here. What projects or books are you working on or do you have in mind?
EJ: I have had a few successes this year. A number of my poems have been published. Two in Tasmania, one in Melbourne. Dr Coral Hull chose one of my poems for her 'writers and artists for peace' collection. I'm not good at sending poems off to publishers. I was asked to co-launch the poems of a Chilean refugee who escaped from Pinochet's prison. One poem was the best poem of the month of September on the Friendly Street website. While there is something to stir me, I'll go on writing poems. Much of my work comes from artworks I see. There is one in North Terrace - no hard-edged angularity, the mark of twenty-first century urban design here. It could take ages before anything emerges. I don't yet know what kind of stone it is and have to find out what a friend means by 'fluid dynamics'.
I will be co-editor of 'The Best of Friendly Street' for 2007. That will be an important learning experience.
My project is two-fold. I will go on working on a series 'Poetry and Science' with U3A in 2006. This year it will be 'From seeds to the stars and back again' connecting poems that tie in with botany and astronomy. I find it amazing that we pour so much money into space exploration while we destroy the foundation on which our telescopes and space bases stand.
I hope to put together a book connecting 'Poetry and Science'. A friend asked me about the market for it. If I was doing it for the market, I wouldn't do it at all. I have a publisher who believes in me and who will tell me if it is rubbish. 'The Poets' Union' of New South Wales published my article 'Poetry and Science' earlier this year. So far no one has panned it. So far, it's been ignored!Your questions have helped me to think. Thank you.
About the Poet Erica Jolly
