SEVEN AUSTRALIAN POETS
Mark O'Connor interviewed by John Kinsella
[Above] Photo of Mark O'Connor by Ron Evans, 1999.
JK: You are well known as an environmentalist, did poetry heighten your sensitivity to the natural world or did that natural world lead you to poetry?
MO: I tend to write poems that I think are necessary. I'd like Australians to see the variety of the natural world, and not class it all as just bush. I don't believe there is any single "nature feeling", but many different ones.
Standing at the cliff edge at Kanangra Walls or staring up at the canopy at Minnamurra, there can be a sudden rush of euphoria, or of vertigo. But for me, more often, or in more places, there's a quieter more pervasive pleasure in being there - in the interestingness of it, the rightness, and the variety of it all.
It's hard to tell whether this is, as some people would say, 'deeply spiritual', or whether it's simply that we're biological creatures designed to live in and interact in an environment made up of other species. I have the feeling there is something called Life that will pour itself into a vast number of different forms and yet at some level has a unity - even though it tends to insist on diversity and complexity. I sometimes suspect the universe was designed to be interesting. Anyway, I am drawn to try and provide words for the many very different regions of Australia.
I don't sentimentalise nature. Nature is quite brutal in our terms. It's certainly indifferent to death and predation. The tsetse fly and the tiger are as much Nature in action as anything else. Parasites are probably even more important controls than predators and even crueller. Biologists have to be quite strong-stomached when they call the overall effect of the Barrier Reef or of a rainforest beautiful - even though that beautiful balance is created by everything overproducing its own offspring and then being ruthlessly pruned back, parasitized, and used as fodder by others.
I need to be in an environment to write about it. I can't usually write poems sitting in a city thinking about a distant environment. Perhaps some people could write a poem by looking at a wall-poster.
JK: Does the idea of "risk" attract you?
MO: It's a spur to concentration and involvement. When you walk in the Royal National Park in Thailand, for example, the brochure reminds you that all the paths "were first made and continue to be used by elephants". You hear them trumpeting in the distance and you have to give them right of way. It certainly adds that extra edge. The Parks, on their own, are fascinating enough. It's just that sometimes the thrill of danger focuses your mind on the detail of the landscape. It might even be a compensation for Australia's having the world's deadliest assemblage of snakes. I speak in one poem of how the presence of a crocodile in a river "enhances the meaning" of every ripple. It does.
JK: How compatible are science and poetry?
MO: I suggested in a poem called "Wordsworth's House at Rydal" that without some grasp of modern biology it is impossible to think usefully about certain larger or more metaphysical questions. That poem depicts Wordsworth as "an eighty year-old /starving for information". It suggests he spent his old age endlessly revising his earlier poems about nature ("the years of Prelude re-visited"). He was compelled to mark time, because he could make little further progress without the more detailed understandings of nature that Charles Darwin and others would one day bring.
Of course only some of my poems are about the natural world. Manning Clark used to say he valued more my ability to bring characters to life in verse.
I hope the most obviously scientific part of my poetic personality is a certain objectivity --a willingness to feel and care about the world outside myself.
It is of course far more difficult for a poet to write about other species, especially those that have no traditional literary or cultural "meanings", than about people. The reason is that language is a human construction, and works best for talking about human concerns. Yet I try to avoid self-indulgences, including the pathetic fallacy, or making a parade of my own emotions. My advice to beginning poets would be: "Don't set out to reveal yourself. But know that whatever you write about, you will reveal yourself. If you want to interest the reader, talk first about things that you think more important than yourself".
JK: Does language interest you as a thing in itself?
MO: Obviously. Some of my interests in language are evident in the anthology Two Centuries of Australian Poetry, for instance in the introductory essays to the sections on Performance Poetry and The Australian Vernacular, or in the use of bilingual poetry in the section on Migrant Experience. They are also discussed in Rachel Banner's Studyguide to my poems, and in my introductory essays to The People's Forest last year, and to the Australian edition of Aquarius magazine - and on my web site.
One great problem in Australia is that people came here with feelings and language based on another country, so that when the first Australian poets started to write about kangaroos and wallabies and wattles they were ridiculed back in England, because the British thought they owned the English language. Oscar Wilde had an enormous amount of fun with an Australian poet who offered his love a wattle flower. You know, how comical! Wattle is a colonial flower, not like a daffodil or a tulip that has the right sort of literary association. Now the poets didn't let themselves be bluffed by that, they went on using those words, kangaroo, wattle. No poet would think twice of using them today. And yet in a sense you've still got to be aggressive. You've got to refuse to be too easily put off by the fact that a name is unfamiliar. Rainforest, for instance, was a fairly pedantic scientific term not so long ago. It isn't now.
JK: How about the question of subjectivity in your verse?
MO: Writing is a highly individual business, though writers still need something substantial to say! - novel, yet essentially sane material or sensibility. New - and true. There are no rules for finding it - the process is generally at least half involuntary.
They will be guided in their search by a strong inner discipline (mistaken by others for arrogance or dilettantism) which enables them to pluck out the significant, the vivid and the unusual from everyday conversations and experiences, from studies, and from the media.
There's a common view, one that may have been produced by the study of poets like T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins, that poetry is the expression of far-fetched thoughts in eccentric language. In world terms that's quite abnormal, and I don't think it will be the pattern of the future, even in English. But when we English-speakers go abroad we do sometimes need reminding that, as Anthony Burgess puts it in Language Made Plain, "most foreigners are fond of poetry".
I'd always known this in a general way, but it was brought home to me when I first attended the big International Poetry Festival at Struga in Yugoslavia. Here poets from all over the world are invited each year, at immense expense to the nation. As we performed, in our respective foreign languages, we had an audience not of a few dozen or a few hundred but of several thousand. And between us and the audience was standing a line of twelve cameramen capturing the proceedings for different television channels. It was a very vivid demonstration of how important poetry is in other cultures. Poetry really matters in all the Slavic cultures, including Russia where poets draw audiences like pop-singers. And it matters just as much, though in slightly different ways in French - or Spanish -speaking countries. In the Latin countries of course, poets and writers are quite important in politics. Italian party-leaders tremble when the front pages of newspapers announce that some prominent writer has found it possible to switch allegiance to a new party. Poetry really matters too in Arab countries - in fact in most of the world's countries.
A writer is a builder and destroyer of patterns, a bush encyclopaedist always on the lookout for the awkward fact or experience that fits no existing philosophy.
All good poems contain ambiguities, which the author was wise enough to leave. Bad poems contain implications which the author failed to detect; and their images don't know the value of teamwork.
Poetry is memorable and evocative and emotionally honest speech, but it is not uplift. Besides the Good, the Beautiful and the True, you need "The Fourth Transcendental" - the Interesting.
JK: How do you feel about alternative readings of your poems? Can poems be "misunderstood"?
MO: I'm actually quite relaxed about how my poems are interpreted. Once I publish them they're public property, and I don't think it's my duty to nail down everything so that only one interpretation is possible. A good example is the poem called "The Olive Tree":
Nobody knows how long it takes to kill an olive.
Fire, drought, axe, are admitted failures. Hack one down,
grub out a tonne of main-root for fuel, and next Spring
every side-root sends up shoot. A great frost
can leave the trees leafless for years. They revive.
Invading armies will fell them. They return
through the burnt-out ribs of siege-machines.
Only the patient goat, nibbling his way down the centuries
has malice to master the olive. Sometimes, they say,
a man finds a dead orchard, fired and goat-cropped centuries since.
He settles and fences. The stumps revive.
His grandchildren's families prosper
by the arduous oil-pressing trade. Then wars
and disease wash over. Goats return. The olives
go under, waiting another age.
Their shade still lies where Socrates disputed.
Gethsemane's withered groves are bearing yet.
Readers sometimes ask me the precise point of that ending: "Gethsemane's withered groves are bearing yet". I don't know what it means. It isn't necessarily my business to know - except that it is an evocative line. Clearly it would mean something different to a Muslim or a Jew from what it would mean to a Christian or an athiest. In other words I'm aware as a poet that when I write I leave certain open spaces in my work for the reader to fill in from their own personality and their own life-experience. I think all good poets do that.
A good poem is not simply a poem that you like when you first hear it, it's also one that goes on growing within you as your own life experience grows. I think that transmitting a poem is a little like giving a pass in football - it should always be aimed just a little in front of the person for whom it's meant. And I'd argue that a poem should cost the reader a little labour, though not an excessive amount. There is such a thing as a power-to-weight ratio in poems as in cars - a balance between the load and the thrust.
JK: What are your poetic influences?
MO: Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Juvenal and Horace, plus the obvious names of English-language poetry from Middle English on. Dante and odd bits of French and Italian verse. I went to Melbourne University to study Engineering, but switched to an Arts course during which I made a very intense study of T.S. Eliot. But today I find Eliot's work less relevant.
By the time I began to write poetry, around the age of 28, I had fallen out of touch with contemporary Australian poetry, beyond what I had met on school syllabuses. So when I found myself on the Barrier Reef and trying to invent a contemporary poetry of that region, with which the English language had no traditional relationship, I had no close models.
I seemed to take it for granted that free verse was the right form, and if I had any models for it they were probably international rather than Australian. Yet I had studied under Vin Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (whose first book I reviewed in some detail), so I may be underestimating my casual knowledge of contemporary Australian poetry.
I also wrote a lot, as my first book Reef Poems shows, in rather quirky humorous styles. That book was divided into stylistic sections. Ted Hughes who read this book at the 1976 Adelaide Festival wrote to me, telling me to have no doubt that poetry was my vocation. He agreed with most readers that the poems in a more serious style were the best, but suggested that the other style held important promise. I have probably over time brought the two styles together, as in "The Amiable Inquisition of the Surgeon".
Since then of course I've edited an Oxford antholology Two Centuries of Australian Poetry that has gone through two editions and at least 8 printings, and in that long process I've become something of an expert on what contem-porary Australian poets are doing.
A.D. Hope was the only Australian poet I knew well when I started writing (I had taught in his department, and he was wonderful company and a very supportive friend). I later got to know Les Murray, Judith Wright, David Campbell, and in time, and in my travels, a large range of Australia's poets.
JK: Should poetry be ethical?
MO: Should people be ethical? I don't know if poetry or anything else can make people behave ethically; but nothing on earth will stop them talking about ethics. Perhaps the more important question for a writer is: how dangerous is it to preach?
I would answer, very. We all want to change things but a poet should realise that to preach a predictable moral is usually counter-productive. It's bad art, and poor activism too. Because either you preach to the converted or you merely antagonise the "anti-converted". What we want is that kind of literature which uses its imaginative power to get under people's prejudices and enable them to imagine what they can't yet see. As a writer about nature I regularly and repeatedly cut out the morals from my poems. I do not end up "And therefore you must not chop it down"; because I think I actually am more likely to have an effect if I don't state a moral, but merely encourage people to see what's there. People like to draw their own morals; and literature works by imagination, not coercion. I certainly hope my nature poems have a conservation effect. But I think all I really need, in order to achieve that, is a kind of naming. The main reason Australians were once content to have the Barrier Reef mined and the rainforests logged was that they had no clear imaginative picture of what was there.
So I would say, Don't preach, but rather, refocus the language. Poets are not so much the unacknowleged legislators as the foreshadowing legislators. Judith Wright's great environmental poems written 30 or 40 years ago, are today stopping more bulldozers than any single group of activists. Poets and environmental writers may not work in the sweaty moment-to-moment wrestling match of politics. Instead we practise a more subtle and slow-acting jujitsu, a changing of minds that has long-term effects on what people want and politicians do.
It's fairly easy to defend Britain's Lake District from destruction, because over the centuries the great British painters, poets and prose writers have turned it into a kind of sacred site. But in Australia, the early settlers sailed in with insensitive, piratical and Anglo-centric attitudes, which made them see the country as "nothing but bush". Places like the Macdonnell Ranges or the coastal Rainforests were ignored or denigrated (as just "desert" or "the big scrub") so that often when it becomes necessary to fight for their preservation now we have to assert that they are a priceless national heritage, even though as yet largely neglected by our Euro-centric art and culture.
We writers have to redefine terms. It's not so long ago that the West Australian Government actually had a policy of clearing three million acres of scrub a year. They were able to do that, and not think themselves criminals, because they were able to call it scrub. And even rainforest was once called scrub or brushland. It sounds so much better, doesn't it, to say that you've cleared 50 acres of scrub than to say that you've cleared 50 acres of rainforest. And it's not so long ago that even Henry Lawson, that great Australian patriot, could begin his most famous short story with a typical country setting, "Bush all around, nothing but bush. Nothing for the eye to focus on ...".
Well today's environmental photographers and writers do focus on Australia's landscapes. And when you do that, it turns out that rarely is it just "bush" or "scrub."
JK: Les Murray has mentioned the Great Barrier Reef as being your muse. Any reponse to this?
MO: It was my first sustained source of inspiration. When I went there I thought of myself as a playwright, and in fact I had had some early successes in that area. The new Australian drama was a hot area then. But drama is the most urban and human-chauvinist of all literary art-forms, and if I had really been cut out to be a dramatist I would hardly have wanted to live on the Barrier Reef.
Once there I was faced with a world in which humans were only one of thousands of showy species, and probably not the showiest either. Neither drama nor novel could cope with a world made up predominatly of other species, but poetry could. When I came back from the Reef A.D. Hope and Les Murray (whom I knew as yet only as the name behind the signature at Poetry Australia magazine) encouraged me to specialise in poetry, as did Ted Hughes later.
'The Beginning' was one of the first poems I wrote when I hitchhiked up to the Great Barrier Reef in 1972, playing truant from my earlier career as a playwright. I was staying at the Scientific Research Station on Heron Island, where I used to meet the different scientific experts as they came through. Most of them would take me out on the Reef and we'd see this extraordinarily complex web of life, but as yet there was no pattern or story with which I could make a poem out of the scientific information. Yet to those scientists the Reef was the most poetic and engrossing thing in the world.
Then one day I met the person who had been given a grant to work on the Crown of Thorns starfish. He was a parasitologist called Lester Cannon, and I said, "I presume you are trying to identify its predators?" "Predators?" he said. "Who cares about predators? It wasn't Sabre Tooth tigers and lions that kept us humans in order in the past. It was cholera and malaria, etc. It's parasites that hold the whole beautiful system in balance." Somehow or other, through that, and through other conversations I had with scientists about the limitations of the original creation story, I evolved the notion of writing a new ver-sion of the Bible's creation story (as told in Genesis).
In the Bible, the Garden of Eden, the most beautiful place on earth, is seen very much as a Persian walled garden, such as you can still see in the Middle East and right across to India. It has a wall around it, and outside is the "wilderness" (probably a stony desert with goats) and inside are such exotic fruit trees as - apples. That didn't strike me as very exciting. Instead, this time God would do the thing with a real swing and gusto. He would do it underwater with only a tiny piece of land in the shape of a coral atoll. He would do it in the tropics, not in the temperate zone, and he would do it in the Southern Hemisphere, in fact on the Barrier Reef.
So I described the creation of a coral atoll (rather like Heron Island) and of its surrounding reef. The creation still takes seven days, but this time God wastes one day on the original walled-garden idea, then puts in five and a half days on the far more complex coral atoll idea. So it is not until late on the seventh day that he is able to relax and admire his week's work.
The creator is happy to use not only predation, but even parasitism - things being eaten out from the inside by other species - as a way to keep his beautiful system in balance. The poem can be taken very light-heartedly, as a humorous or satirical piece on the notion of creating a world, but there are more serious elements within it. Ultimately, it refers to the theological puzzle which is known as the Problem of Evil: the question of how a benign creator could use predation, cancer, parasitism, and painful diseases as part of his plan for the universe.
This poem's creation story differs from most traditional creation myths in that it emphasises the enormous ecological complexity of nature. Most creation stories depict the creator as creating just a few key species.
THE BEGINNING
God himself
having that day planted a garden
walked through it at evening and knew
that Eden was not nearly complex enough.
And he said:
'Let species swarm like solutes in a colloid.
Let there be ten thousand species of plankton
and to eat them a thousand zooplankton.
Let there be ten phyla of siphoning animals,
one phylum of finned vertebrates, from
white-tipped reef shark to long-beaked coralfish,
and to each his proper niche,
and - no Raphael, I'm not quite finished yet -
you can add seals and sea-turtles & cone-shells & penguins
(if they care) and all the good seabirds your team can devise -
oh yes, and I nearly forgot, I want a special place
for the crabs! And now for parasites to keep
the whole system in balance, let . . .'
'In conclusion, I want,' he said
'ten thousand mixed chains of predation -
none of your simple rabbit and coyote stuff!
This ocean shall have many mouths, many palates. I want,
say, a hundred ways of death, and three thousand of regeneration -
all in technicolor naturally. And oh yes, I nearly forgot,
we can use Eden again for the small coral cay in the center.
'So now Raphael, if you please,
just draw out and marshall these species,
and we'll plant them all out in a twelve-hectare patch.'
For five and a half days God labored
and on the seventh he donned mask and snorkel
and a pair of bright yellow flippers.
And, later, the host all peered wistfully down
through the high safety fence around Heaven
and saw God with his favorites finning slowly over the coral
in the eternal shape of a grey nurse shark,
and they saw that it was very good indeed.
JK: Do you see yourself as being part of any school or movement of poetry, or are you sceptical of such "gatherings".
MO: I've always assumed that good poets don't follow fashions or movements (though they sometimes start them). Imagine the loss if Shakespeare had decided he needed to catch the new wave, and had become a convert to Ben Jonson's school of classicism! (Yet it would have been a good career move. Classicism was the incoming wave, and it took nearly 200 years to ebb.)
Obviously there are strong tides of belief and sensibility that may influence most writers in a given age. But fashion is the inferior artist's ersatz substitute for the unpredictable creativity of the genuine artist.
It's noticeable that almost all the major Australian poets of the last 35 years, including Bruce Dawe, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Les Murray, and Gwen Harwood, have all been their own persons. By contrast, the fashion-followers and the bullies who assured everyone that their "new poetry" was the only stuff that mattered have largely faded away; and they mostly looked quite sad when the ABC did a documentary on them last year.
What I do believe in is friendship and mutual support among poets. I have received (and have tried to return) wonderful and generous friendships from many fellow poets. In the seventies there was a great tendency for poets to collect in centres in Australia, mainly Sydney and Canberra. The so-called Canberra poets didn't so much emerge in Canberra as migrate to Canberra. The list of residents there would include: A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, Timoshenko Aslanides, Dorothy Green/Auch-terlonie, Geoff Page, Alan Gould, Kevin Hart, Philip Meade, David Brooks, Michael Thwaites, Frank McMahon, T. Inglis Moore, Rhyll McMaster, Roger McDonald, R.F. Brissenden, Les A. Murray, John Rowlands, Malcolm Pettigrove, John Scott, Linda Hobbs, Michael Murphy, and Michael Dransfield. It was - and still is - a very friendly and supportive environment.
The younger Canberra poets tended to collect around the National University, but we came to know and were on increasingly good terms with the older generation of Canberra poets. We had nothing but kindness from them. But we were a regional rather than a factional grouping. Unlike the Balmain and Fitzroy poets we hardly ever wrote reviews of each other. We never claimed that previous Australian poets were of interest "only for their outstanding mediocrity", or produced anthologies of ourselves with covers proclaiming "this book contains the best poetry written in Australia".
I didn't meet Les Murray till much later. He'd been in Canberra for a period up till only about a year before we began writing in 1972-73, but at that stage I hadn't heard of him. I first met him in 1973 when I won the Poetry Australia International prize and went to Sydney to receive it. He congratulated me, mentioning that he had been one of the runners-up, and I was struck by the warmth of his greeting and the lack of any trace of jealousy (since it was at the time Australia's biggest literary prize, and both of us were skint). It wasn't until a year later that I had a proper conversation with him.
Over the years I went on to meet most of the better-known poets at one gathering or another. Many are people I would enjoy spending more time with; yet I've never been one to spend much time at literary gatherings. I don't think a creative writer should read too much literature, or spend too much time in literary circles. A critic may need a continuous diet of finished literary works to reflect upon; but a creative writer needs a diet of facts and experiences that have not yet been transmuted into literature.
JK: You've travelled widely, how have your travels influenced your views of your "home" place?
MO: They've made me realise how lucky I am to have so many fascinating bio-regions awaiting a literary tradition. European biologists who take a posting in Australia are often amazed to be given a whole genus to work on, instead of a local sub-species. There's something of the same spaciousness in the "matter of Australia". Its harshness can daunt - "the thin film of life that encrusts the hot planet of iron". If Europe is the planet disguised as a human possession, Australia is the thing itself.
When I was going to Europe on a two-year Marten Bequest scholarship - simply because I couldn't get money to support myself as a poet any other way - I complained to David Campbell about the absurdity of a poet of the Reef and rainforest (as I then largely was) having to move to the Mediterranean. Campbell drawled "Yes, Europe is a bit ... shot out. But don't worry about that. Take Homer and Sappho. Go to all the obvious places. Do all the obvious things. As an Australian you'll always see things with fresh eyes."
JK: In writing the land do you feel like you're intruding?
MO: All humans are intruders. We're an intrusive species. More subtly, we are always protruding our emotions, thrusting them upon the external world. And all the receivers of our poetry will be fellow intruders. Of course good writers of nature (like Barry Lopez) don't rush in and try to project meaning upon the landscape, as Henry Miller did in The Colossus of Maroussi. They are humbler, and let the landscape intrude upon them, rather than vice versa. They may see it as having thousands of alternative owners, far older than our own human species. There's always a risk of the pathetic fallacy in writing about other species. Think of Shakespeare praising:
daffodils that come before the wallow dares
And take the winds of March with beauty.
The first line is pure biological observation; the second pure romanticism.
JK: What about intruding on indigenous space?
MO: My policy is not to do that. I don't enter areas owned by Aboriginal groups without appropriate permits and consultation. And if I come to know or suspect Aboriginal secrets, I don't publish them. My poems about NT art-sites all deal with places which the Gagadju people have themselves selected and decided to throw open to visitors; while the information about their traditional meaning is to be found in the pamphlets and interpretive signs that they and the rangers provide.
At the same time, I think it's important in a multi-racial society that we all feel free to discuss traditional Aboriginal culture, because we have some important things to learn from it. In that culture, land is sacred, inalienable, communal, and beyond value. In ours land is a resource, to be used up by the community or seized and turned to private profit by individuals.
The old obsession with 'development' and with clearing the bush - for instance by felling and then simply burning the world's tallest hardwood forests in Gippsland - may have reflected a need to eradicate the Aboriginal world. In the settlers' eyes their conquest was legitimized by the belief that they were using a country which the uncivilized Aborigines had let go to waste. But this led to a nervousness that if they themselves did not fully 'fill' and 'use' the country, some other race might take it away from them.
Hatred and rejection of our Aboriginal heritage may be the mark of Cain upon our society in an unusually literal sense, and at the root of some of our destructiveness.
JK: Can you outline the movement of your poetry since you first started writing?
MO: No. I'll leave that to others. Rachel Banner's Study guide does seem to me to get the emphases right; as does that other shorter Guide in the Excel series (though it is limited to the poems that were on the Year 12 syllabus).
JK: Where are you heading now?
MO: All around the paddock! As you know I have recently taken up a two year fellowship to write poetry about (a) the 2000 Olympic Games and (b) the "remote" regions of Australia. This means that from June onward I'll be driving around Australia - for the next 3 and a half months - following the Olympic Flame from its arrival in Alice Springs until it reaches Sydney in September - and also taking in a view of many regions. After that comes the Olympic Games and the pressure to write a poem a day! I trust that in that "high-speed hermitage" of a car's cabin the inspiration will flow.
I had thought that following the Flame would be a leisurely business. After all, whenever you see it, it seems to be jogging at about 7 km an hour. Unfortunately, when you don't see it, it's flying business-class with a gas mantle on its head. For instance it goes through the Kimberley in 3 days odd, and I'm not even going to try and keep up with that section by car - it would be just too dangerous. Luckily, it moves a lot slower through more densely populated areas.
The following year, 2001, I'll concentrate on the "remote area" poetry project. Les Murray, in an article in Kunapipi magazine* on "Athenian and Boeotian Art", suggested that writers could be divided into two types. "Athenian authors" were those who wrote about the city, its fashions and its more human-centred concerns. Murray contrasted this with an older, wider and wiser tradition (as he saw it) which he called "Boeotian", after Boeotia, a rural region of ancient Greece. Boeotian writers like the poet Hesiod integrated their human figures more into a landscape. I think that in Australia one might need a third category, which perhaps in terms of ancient Greek geography might be called Thracian. In other words, a poetry that deals with wild or at least relatively untouched nature as opposed to the rural, humanised, farming landscape in which Murray is especially interested. At least for the calendar year 2001 I'll be prepared to wear that label.
*See "The Boeotian Strain", Les Murray, Kunapipi II, no. 1, 1980 pp. 45 ff., with rejoinder by O'Connor in the same issue.
JK: What are you working on at present?
MO: Well, on the Olympic poetry project. This year I want to strike a balance between quick, quirky, "journalistic" poems on immediate events, and more serious reflections. When the ABC's A.M. program asked for a poem at 15 minutes notice one morning I produced Ticket Stakes which runs in part:
. . . Hush! Can you hear?
- All over the suburbs, the roar
of envelopes tearing? And Yes!, at Number 10
It's Gold! Gold! Gold! for the Protheros!
They've lit a fire. They're dancing on the lawn.
- Not so good at Number 15.
The Grampolis are a bit bronzed off.
They thrill to the shrill of the soccer ref's whistle.
Hard luck! It's the Lady's Nude Luge for them!
And Rhea Yemenis at no. 1, well she really loves
those elegant gymnasts. She's got the Clean and Jerk ...
There'll be more serious poems too, but the Games provide a wonderful chance to experiment with every kind of metre and form, from limericks to Pindaric odes.
The first third of this year has gone largely on finishing and seeing two books into the press. The first, called The Forever Lands is a book of poems about Australia's Desert Centre and monsoonal Top End, with superb A4-size color photos by John Kirk. The other is my Collected Poems - no, not Complete Poems, since I trust there will be more - but after two Selecteds I'm informed the next book must be called something different. This one will add an 80-page selection of additional poems covering the past decade. Many of the poems in both books are either new or have only just reached final shape.
Both books are being rushed out, and should be launched at the national English Teachers' conference this year (5-7 July in Brisbane) at which I'm speaking on a range of subjects: the future of English studies and literacy; adapting the English language to Australian environments; recent criticism of Shakespeare. They'll fly me back from Perth, where I'll abandon the vehicle briefly and take a week off from following the Olympic torch. Those are only some of this year's projects.
There are fuller details on my website. It's going to be a very busy and I hope also a creative year.
About the Poet Mark O'Connor
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Mark O'Connor has published over a dozen collections of poetry and gave a Series of 6 talks on the ABC Science Show in 1985. Some of Mark's publications include: Poetry in Pictures: The Great Barrier Reef (with photos by Neville Coleman), (Hale & Iremonger, 1986), Two Centuries of Australian Poetry (editor/poetry anthology), (Oxford University Press, 1988, reprinted 6 times). An A.B.C. TV documentary on O'Connor's poems was broadcast on A Big Country, 1985. Tilting at Snowgums, was the subject of two ABC documentaries. In 2000 he was given a 2-year grant from the Australia Council to write poetry about the 2000 Olympic Games and (in 2001) the 'remote' regions of Australia. |
[Above] Photo of Mark O'Connor by Ron Evans, 1999.
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Thylazine No.4 (September, 2001) |
