AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 1
Judith Rodriguez
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Judith Rodriguez by Jenni Mitchell, 1998.
CH: Why is poetry important to you?
JR: It's important to me because I have to write the truth, the deep truth. I can't keep on with a poem which is not doing that, even just in a light way. When I've perpetrated a poem that doesn't feel truthful, even one with some good ideas, I can't send it anywhere or, in the end, keep it. (I'm thinking here of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's use of the word "perpetrator" in Chronicle Of A Death Foretold: the rejected bride has to name someone as the taker of her virginity. And she names someone - we can't be sure he's had sex with her and it's even likely he hasn't, but she is forced to have a "perpetrator" - the criminal of a crime that not everybody would see that way.) Of course the criterion of truth, placing a high value on life and utterance, applies to poetry you read or hear. I don't want to be precious about it, this almost oracular standing. Their need for truth is why people treasure some writers and don't bother even assessing others (though of course they end up with different treasured names). You can feel that a good writer is striving to know and express something difficult and valuable. It's wonderful, too, when you'd think truth is simple, that it can be discovered anew because of the poet's brief to use language to the nth.
CH: What makes you sad?
JR: Misunderstanding, poor understanding. In which I think I include lack of respect, and an incapacity for welcome to other beings. (I'm not even going so far as trust and affection.) Les Murray in his poem "Seven Police Voices" expresses the wish that people flashed lapel lights (red amber green) that would let people know when they were dangerous. I wish the asylum seekers fleeing impossible living conditions had some sign that would get beyond stereotyped beards and head-scarves, to show that in themselves they're safe. Ninety-something cases out of a hundred, a need for food and a wish for a way to have a reasonable life is quite enough, I'd say. But put that to our politicians! Misunderstanding among people who have been persuaded at a deep level (by the media, by parental attitudes) that they have different worth from others, different interests and predetermined fates. And of course, of the earth's resources, and between whole nations. That's what makes me mentally tear my hair. (I suppose I'd better recognise anger there, feelings of futility, not just sadness.) Is this why I'm a teacher? At any rate, I do believe that understanding is work that everyone has to keep doing
CH: What advice do you have for young poets?
JR: Words are your tools and materials: you do need to love and know them. Write your dearest, closest, most believed, most important, best. Remember that England had only about four million people, I think, when Shakespeare and Marlowe and Webster and Donne and Herbert and Jonson were all alive together. So don't be cowed by greats - though they had the immense advantage of not confronting the amount of ignominious print we plough through today; and they spent a larger proportion of their lives responding to voices.
CH: Where is your favourite place and why?
JR: This is difficult. Most of the places I've liked are warm - Brisbane, Jamaica, Colombia, Florida, Madras. Greece in summer. Beirut in 1962. New York if I can be on Manhattan. But I like it where I am in Melbourne, too - and usually I've needed some outside imperative to pitchfork me out of wherever I was before. I like my room but sometimes paper (piles of it, as in Slessor's lines about "books / All shapes and colours, dealt across the floor / And over sills and on the laps of chairs") overcomes me and then I hope for my other love, anonymous hotel rooms. I don't mind them luxurious, but with certain features barely-functional ones will do. Yes, I'm an escapist. I liked Stockholm, Mexico, Damascus, Cheju Do in Korea (visiting my teacher daughter there). This is all too difficult. I like people and then I like being alone. I like where I am. I like the next place. Could I say I like the Earth, minus the poles and snowfields? I have a cousin who sounded interested in living on a space-station. That I can't understand.
CH: What is your favourite season and why?
JR: Summer is still my favourite time. I was brought up mainly in Brisbane and spring was not much of an event - but the hot weather! I have been trying to get back to it ever since, by turning up in Jamaica, Colombia, Broome and Chennai. I like to see colour, people in the open, greenery sunning itself.
CH: What is your most memorable childhood incident?
JR: When I was three or four, my cousin George - two years older - and I stood by his mother's melon-plant. We both wanted to pull the first melon. "Go on Judy," he said. "I won't tell." I did the awful deed. "Mummy, Mummy, Judy picked the melon," he yelled as he ran towards the house. As Aunt Myrtle carried me indoors, spanking me all the way, my mother ran alongside panting, "Oh Myrtle, I'm so sorry." Of course my beloved cousin George doesn't remember this at all.
CH: Do you believe in a power greater than yourself?
JR: Of course. Do you mean my employer, the government or God? You needn't answer this one.
CH: When did you first fall in love?
JR: I think when I was twelve or thirteen and a gawky boy called John Hitchen, from somewhere in England, turned up at our house briefly as a house-guest. He might have been hoping to migrate. I spent some time trying to tell myself that this was a mighty moment in my life. I would have been just a pest of a child to him. Really truly, not till I was in university. At that stage I went for clever people who could teach me something - the sad story of a lot of girls who want to be learned.
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About this woman:
green-eyed and could not give them to her children,
caresses her friends in thought, doubts they do likewise,
malingers and charms in fits and starts, dies daily.
About this woman:
wears no ring. Hangs on her husband, hang him,
to be the husband he could be, if he was;
if it takes fifty years. Faithfully mangles him
in words and thoughts, precarious vindications.
About this woman:
has heard of nymphs like wine; savagely inside
copes with turbid storm-water, and walls of sludge
it piled and can't shift now. The calm nymphs braid
light-runnels, a summer stilled. She dredges
in mixed minds at a quarry-mount of muddle:
where to dump, where gouge, whether
to abandon the site to flood,
worked faces flayed
with rubble in the flurry;
this woman.
Tuned to a tangible mode,
score half-composed, corrupt,
exultant, inharmonious, full of trouble ...
The white room
Speaking softly speaking
softly in the white room in your ear
through the window where sunlit curtains blow
out to the full fields that will lie dank and darken under snow
I am speaking softly to you here
curling into the process of your mind
feeling to where it links it moves over will never be undone
never will your hearing being be again as it was here
now I have come in
The Late Lemon Tree
All summer the lemon delayed.
Its four bold branches,
parted at knee-height, flourished
large yellowy leaves
just as when bought. Watering
hardly helped, or digging;
a few leaves blundered down.
then flowers, waxen and splayed
showed the flag, meaning nothing -
neither fruit nor forking
of twigs nor tiny bunches
of new leaf. And suddenly now
it's mad autumn, unpinning
everything. That world of green.
Early to the lake
I go down to the lake.
Mist has claimed its shore.
The dark mud, bearings -
behind, where I came from,
the thin trees of the slope
would each near suddenly
then move back. Now they are gone.
I came early, alone.
And it is truly the world's egg.
I call, and the pulse
heading out, stops -
The mist gives back nothing.
The lake spreads in me.
I am in time for the beginning.
Acknowledgments: Judith Rodriguez: New and Selected Poems (UQP, 1988). |
About the Poet Judith Rodriguez
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Judith Rodriguez was born in Perth and brought up in Brisbane. Nine collections of her poetry have been published. Judith has had a number of exhibitions of her linocuts in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Paris. In the early 1990s she was commissioned by the Australian Opera to write a libretto for Sydney composer Moya Henderson, on the subject of the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain and the trial of Lindy Chamberlain. This opera, Lindy, will be produced in 2002. A past Poetry Editor of Meanjin Quarterly, Judith was for eight years in the 1990s the Series Editor of modern Australian poetry at Penguin Books Australia. She has been awarded three Australia Council fellowships. She works on the Committees of the Australian Society of Authors and the Melbourne PEN Centre, and also as a literary judge and critic. She was awarded the F.A.W. Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry and the AM. |
[Above] Photo of Judith Rodriguez by Jenni Mitchell, 1998.
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