SEVEN AUSTRALIAN POETS
Anthony Lawrence interviewed by John Kinsella
[Above] Photo of Anthony Lawrence by Jenni Mitchell, 2000.
JK: You've deployed the dramatic monologue to great effect, but you've also written much verse that might be described as "autobiographical". What do you think of this label, and how do you view the movement of voice in your work?
AL: I've always thought of Dramatic monologues as having a curious duality. They give poets a vehicle in/from which to define themselves through the voices of others, and to let pure invention have its head. Autobiography? There have certainly been poems (dramatic monologues and shorter, lyrical poems) where aspects of my life have been worked through. Though mostly it's a case of the imagination staking out new territory to explore. Every voice contains a vein of experience. Some voices work this more than others. I think it's dangerous to anticipate personal experience in all genres. I've never thought of myself as someone who "... does my experience over in verse" as Robert Adamson once wrote, in an early poem. And yet, my life is there, moving in and out of focus, especially in poems that deal with landscape. The movement of voice has always been central to my work. I like to think that I've got a good ear for dialogue, and for rhythm. I find voices in many places, and they define their own terms, they chart the shape and length of each line.
JK: Should art replicate life?
AL: Art should do what it wants. If life gets into the fabric, fine. It does, of course, frequently. There is a certain inevitability about this. Experience again. But also still life. I can be parked in a car on the Hay Plain, unable to move, a poem on the make in my head as I watch Apostle birds and hear them blow the whistle on the approach of a Nankeen Kestrel. The poem, when it's committed to paper, might have the detail of a photograph. Then again, it might be as if I'd never been there. The poem might contain no birds, no plain. It might be a reflection of how I was feeling at the time. A love poem. A landscape poem with no particular (real/physical) points of reference. That's what I love about writing poetry. Art and life are inseparable, though when it comes to defining them, with words, they can be independent of each other.
JK: Your are widely read and work through (and against!) other poetries - would you see yourself as an internationalist?
AL: I'm constantly learning from, and being amazed, by what I read. And while I still go back to poets and poems that fired me up when I began, I'm always on the trail of new things. When I started reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, I tried to like it. I tried to see what all the fuss was about, but it left me cold. I was ultimately dissatisfied, when aligning the poetics of these writers with what was being written. I like Michael Palmer's work very much. He seems to combine complex, often difficult lines with accessibility, and he does it with great generosity of emotion. That's what it's all about for me, as a reader. If I can engage emotionally with a poet, if I find myself returning to a poem or book, time after time, then that work has inflamed me.
JK: Have you translated poetry?
AL: The only translations I do are of my own poetry, struggling with something that is barely recognisable as a work written in English, to something that I'm able to understand, and finally step away from.
JK: You employ a great variety of forms and poetic techniques - is this something "arbitrary", or does the choice of approach come out of the material itself?
AL: Most of these forms come out of the work. There was a stage when I wanted to see if I could write a villanelle, a sestina, a sonnet. This is natural for a young poet. And so I sat there with examples written by other poets, working through the equations, applying imagination + borders until the poems took shape. These attempts never made it into print. I like sestinas. Very weird. It's a big ask for a reader to accept the music of that kind of repetition, of two end-words running off each other, but often it's the shock of that sound/image/ that creates the need to move on. And I love trying to solve the problem of the envoy. Formality can be very liberating. Once we know the boundaries, the rules, we can let fly within those parameters. Often, a poem will set its own terms, from very early on. I was fishing one night on a beach. Every six seconds, the flash and sweep from a lighthouse painted the sand and water. A couple of lines arrived, fully-formed. They quickly entered the beginnings of a sestina. Two hours later, having abandoned one kind of fishing, I had a first draft.
JK: Death and sexuality are intertwined throughout your poetry. Is there an inevitability about this?
AL: Yes, I think it's inevitable. Death and sexuality have always been a strong focus in my work, though I've never sat down to examine them clinically, or to shoe-horn them into a poem simply for effect. Often, they're there as a kind of soundtrack to other issues. I've been criticised for writing about these things. I make no apology. The act of writing poetry brings them into focus. Just as working for a long time on poems can open cracks in emotional armour and expose some poets to anxiety and depression, this work can also expose us to thoughts of mortality and sexuality. This is often the way it is, when I'm deep into an extended writing time. Writing poetry can be a very sensual act. It can also be quite bleak, and death has been known to want to try my coat on.
JK: Questions of masculinity surface over and over - usually out of a sexual tension. Questions of guilt and insecurity, love and lust (sounds almost like Berryman!), desire and "the occasion", struggle against each other. Could you comment on this observation?
AL: I interract with the world on a very physical level, and this includes writing poetry. I don't set out to create a masculine voice or persona. Sexual tension arises from this interraction. This tension can stem from long periods of isolation, travel, and yes, insecurity. I've never been interested in exploring these issues in a confessional way. They don't enter poems as single, major themes either. I never think about it unless my attention is drawn to it by the comments of others. My first book has poems that deal openly with sexuality. This is not gratuitous. I like to think of my poems that have a masculine/sexual drive as love poems, as celebrations of the physical and emotional. The list you've offered creates an ongoing, natural struggle. Nothing survives in isolation.
JK: James Dickey has been a huge influence?
AL: For a time, Dickey was a big influence. People criticised him for being so open about his love for fishing and hunting and his attitudes to women. I think these criticisms were often justified, where women were concerned. What amazed me was his landscape poems - the intricate, luminous detail. And while he was almost always there - these poems were never one-dimensional observations - his presence added a crucial link to the scene. Poems like 'In the Treehouse at Night', 'On the Cootaswattee', 'For the Last Wolverine' ... these poems are haunting portraits of landcape and fauna. I learned from Dickey how to enter a place and use all my senses, that to find poetry there, I had to eat the soil.
JK: What do animals mean to you? Do they seem both incidental and potent, often within the same poem. They operate as totems?
AL: Animals and birds have been central to my work, yes. My father showed me, at an early age, how to see into the landscape, the air. We'd go for long walks, and he's point out many things: bird calls, the underbelly of a hawk, nests, fox holes. He showed me how to see beyond the surface tension of what the eye often passes over, to investigate the complexity of things. My poetry acknowledges this gift he offered me. I don't think of animals as being incidental in my poems at all. They are there for good reason, and in this sense, if you want to call them totems, fine. Though, they are totemic of their own place in the landscape, not as some mystical construct for my head or imagination.
JK: Do you see yourself as a landscape poet?
AL: Essentially, yes, although I like to think that I write about anything that surfaces. I think this is why I've not (yet) written a verse novel, or at least a book of poems that has firm borders. Life's a miscellany. The poems follow. And they also follow planted with birds and animals and trees and blood. A poet like Philip Hodgins ... he was a wonderful poet. A true poet of the physical and emotional landscape. His best poems work on many levels. I'd like to think that a couple of my poems achieve this tricky balance: landscape veined with humanity, flora, fauna, what's imagined and what's experienced.
JK: Dealing with fears and phobias, the intensity of private space, the negotiation between experience and the act of writing, all surface and dip in the crucible ... There is a tenuous relationship with the external world and yet you are such a visual and "physical" poet. Comment?
AL: I can't say much about this other than to acknowledge your astute observation that interiors and exteriors are at odds in my work. The external world? I celebrate visually and physically what I feel to be important at the time. All things melt down into poetry. Often, days can be spent in the glow or flicker of being completely in tune with what my body and head needs. Words. Images. Music. I can be a right despot, on the domestic front, when I'm immersed. And that's quite a lot of the time.
JK: You've worked in theatre and have co-written a play, your classic "Blood Oath" is a dramatic poem. Could you talk about the relationship between poetry and drama.
AL: This is something I feel strongly about. I think all poetry has, at its core, a sense of drama. The shortest, lyrical poem can be a tiny one-act, one-person play. Likewise long narrative poems. While writing, I hear voices, see people and things moving around in a certain space. I record this, unaware of what's going to happen next. The spaces between things. Silence. Noise. What happened before the poem began? After it's finished? Before the players move on stage and after they've gone ...
JK: You've been working on a novel. Could you tell us about it?
AL: My novel "In The Half Light" began as two lines written down while driving on the Pacific Highway out of Sydney. One moment I'm looking out over the Hawkesbury River, next I'm opening the glovebox and scribbling something onto an envelope. Two lines and then two pages, over wine that night. I didn't think "Oh, so this might be a novel". I had no idea if I was writing a poem or a story. Then it took hold. Characters came and went. Towns came into view. I stayed with it. In Japan, during a residency, I found myself writing about the West Coast of Ireland. I'd walk up into a bamboo forest in the afternoons and work into a notebook, letting it happen. Nothing was planned. The novel, like almost all of my poems, wrote itself. I did no research. I watched and heard people and I wrote down what they said and did. I made a list and commentary of lives and places. The only difference between writing poetry and writing fiction was that I had to keep going. I edit heavily while I'm writing poems, even though I don't know where I'm going, craft is always there. With the novel I just had to get a first draft down. I loved revising it, as I discovered exciting things in the re-reading and polishing. It went through five drafts. That's the real writing. I'll probably have a go at another one. In third person, this time. I'm waiting.
JK: Nature and psychology are another of the binaries you pose and undo in poem after poem. Is this a reasonable observation?
AL: Yes, it is. Although I don't have a fix on psychology as i'm writing or editing. It's a way of coming to terms with the often-fractured nature of my head. I write about nature to define my life.
JK: What do you think of the critical climate in Australia?
AL: The critical climate in Australia can be vicious. Having said that, many reviews seem to be tame and say nothing in case the reviewer offends. As a reviwer, I engage with what I believe to be the fundamental aspects of a work: subject-matter, syntax, craft, possible influences. I've written some tough reviews, but I think they were balanced and considered. Unfortunately, there are people in this country, often other poets, whose reviews are character assassinations wearing the mask of a critical work. This is common. I've experienced it. Many poets have. The Tall Poppy must be taken down. It's often jealous carping and it's always transparent. There's a great need here for good, fearless reviewers. A negative review can not only be a great leveller, it can be positive, if it's the work and the work only that's being attended to. There are things I've learned about my work in a "bad" review that have caused me to reassess how I approach certain things. This is a fine thing. Personally, when another poet publishes a book to critical aclaim, or wins a prize ... these things are to be celebrated. That's not always the case of course. It's said that poets are the most caustic of writers and readers in this country. That's true, but not only in Australia. I can't see things changing. There are thousands of serious poets competing for a very small section of publishing territory. This makes for some serious aggression. Oh well. In the end, all we can do is keep writing.
About the Poet Anthony Lawrence
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Anthony Lawrence was born in Tamworth, New South Wales in 1957. He has published poems in many magazines and journals both in Australia around the world, and his work has won many major awards, including the New South Wales Premier's Award, The Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Some of Anthony's publications include, Dreaming In Stone, (Angus & Robertson, 1989), Three Days Out Of Tidal Town, (Hale & Iremonger, 1992), The Darkwood Aquarium, (Penguin, 1993), Cold Wires Of Rain, (Penguin, 1994), The Viewfinder, (University of Queensland Press, 1996), Skinned By Light: New & Selected Poems, (University of Queensland Press, 1998), In The Half Light, (Picador, 2000). He currently lives in Hobart, Tasmania. |
[Above] Photo of Anthony Lawrence by Jenni Mitchell, 2000.
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Thylazine No.4 (September, 2001) |
