SEVEN AUSTRALIAN POETS
Tracy Ryan interviewed by John Kinsella
[Above] Photo of Tracy Ryan by Wendy J. Kinsella, 1998.
JK: What is your reaction to the comparison of your work to that of Sylvia Plath? It has been said that you are "influenced" by Plath, and that you engage with both her sensibilities and poetics. I see this as a limited take, and a take that is certainly not relevant to the more recent books. Which is not to deny a connection, but to place some perspective on it.
TR: I don't think my sensibilities are much like hers. I can't help but be influenced by her work, but I'm influenced by many other poets too. I think there is plenty that's admirable in her poetry, but there are limitations to it as well. I admire her formal control, her talent for the image, her ability to take risks - also her breadth of reading, even if that came from compulsive ambition (and a Cambridge education!).
If you think of the stuff that's common in Plath (recurrent imagery of moon, tree, blood, babies etc), just on that simple level I can't see any resemblance at all. I'm not as much of a formalist as Plath. As you know, I'm not at all driven. I don't have her technical flair or bent. In my teens and early twenties I was repetitively writing in set form and sometimes in syllabics, but I only published a little of it, when I was eighteen or so. Metrical poetry is still something I love to read, but I am not that interested in writing it. Although a sonnet-related project I have in mind may take me back there - albeit with a twist.
JK: Do you see Plath as a feminist poet? You have said that you're a feminist first and foremost. Does poetry take second place to this, or is it absurd to even try separating them?
TR: I can't see her as a feminist poet, though she has been, for obvious reasons, very interesting to feminists. Her journals would suggest she felt very mistrustful of, and competitive towards, other women. I hate that. I'm not sure what a feminist poet would be, how you would isolate a feminist aesthetic, although you could maybe sketch areas of interest ... I don't know. Adrienne Rich would be one, self-avowedly, I guess. I'm certainly a feminist, but the "first and foremost" doesn't mean "before I'm a poet". It's just part of me in the way that being a parent or being a vegan are. Inevitably those positions will affect the poetry.
JK: Do you see yourself as a political poet? Apart from feminist issues, each book has shown an increasing concern with other ethical issues, especially animal rights and veganism. Your poetry is never didactic, though; rather it turns on some tense or compacted image or expression, sending small daggers out into the reader, raising the sense of self-questioning.
TR: I don't think I could fairly lay claim to being a political poet in any overt sense. I have lived a relatively privileged and private life in many ways and I haven't put my poetry to the service of any cause. Perhaps I should have. But I only do what I am capable of, and maybe try to expand on that as I grow. I think my personal beliefs affect my teaching very strongly, but probably my poetry less so.
However, being a vegan for the last seven years has dramatically altered the way I perceive the world, so the poetry probably reflects that. There was a time when an animal poem or, say, a poem about a zoo, was simply the means to something else for me (serving as "objective correlative" for something human, something distant from the animal's own experience) - now, that would be different. Also veganism has an alienating effect, in a positive way, on certain forms of language, certain expressions I can no longer use without seeing what the metaphor is made of. It's astonishing how loaded our language is with metaphors of cruelty to animals - to which people don't even give a second thought, most of the time, because the metaphors have become clichés.
So in that sense, like feminism, it has altered language for me. It has also changed my sense of relation to the world around me - given me a sense of the wonderful "self-hood" of other beings - and to my own body, because I think about what I put in it. Not in a health-obsessed way, but in a defamiliarised way. It sharpens your sense of apparent minutiae and how they connect with bigger things. I don't mean this to sound superior - many non-vegans are probably more aware of things than I ever was - only that it's a development for me.
I don't know how to be a didactic poet. It might be a very great skill - like being able to write clever humorous verse. But I can't do it.
JK: Do you envisage a "kind" of reader? Have you had much reaction to your work outside literary circles?
TR: Somebody as bewildered as me? I don't know. I began to write out of a sense of isolation and was probably reaching out mentally to an imagined person who was like myself. That sounds very narcissistic but it's true. It was a matter of focus. By contrast, when we moved to Britain, for quite a long time I had lost the sense of whom I was writing to. I think that was more an issue of class than of nationality, because of being in Cambridge, which is a place of very great privilege where perhaps people don't realise their concerns are not always shared by those outside Cambridge, neither are their cultural capital and access to power. It was very distressing but also very enriching, to lose your sense of audience like that. Outside literary circles? I'm not sure. I have had plenty of odd letters from people who've read my work - probably best left unglossed! Sometimes I've had emails from students in other countries who've read something of mine for their course and want to ask questions; they've been very positive.
JK: You're also a novelist, playwright, short-fiction writer, and occasional reviewer. Vamp was your first published novel, but not your first novel - in the same way that Killing Delilah was your first published volume of poetry, but not your first volume of poetry.
TR: I don't like reviewing, though I've done it sporadically. I wrote two or three (unpublished!) novels in my teens and twenties. They were very bad: stereotypical and introspective. One was a historical romance, one a contemporary romance (was I stuck in romance? - I read too much of the Brontės) and one was about a boy's disenchantment with religion. There was a manuscript of poetry that was accepted for publication when I was eighteen, but the publisher went bust before it came out! It was also, to my memory, very bad, highly formalistic and stilted. I hadn't much life experience and the subject matter was very limited. I was still obsessively teaching myself meter and image. At that time it seemed a mini-disaster that the publication collapsed - now I'm glad. I think one poem survived from that manuscript and made it into Killing Delilah - but that's all.
JK: Why do you write prose as opposed to poetry? What leads to the choice of medium? Do you fit the material to the form, or does the form suggest the material?
TR: The idea suggests the form. How big, how extended or elaborate the idea is (I don't usually write long poems). Also the nature of the idea, how graspable it is (the less graspable, the more likely to be in a poem). That's a rough guess. It's more a mood than anything else - you get in the mood to tackle a long piece of fiction. Or you don't! Fiction was all I ever intended to write. I published my first fiction at fourteen and fifteen - it was in an anthology of work by children - and I only envisaged becoming a novelist, that was my understanding of "writer". It wasn't till late in high school, and a particularly good English Lit. teacher I had - Mr. Newman - that poetry came alive for me - and became indispensable. My high school wasn't very literary-minded at all, so that teacher was an anomaly. I think teachers are very important to many developing writers.
JK: Vamp is a pastiche novel, a parody of traditional genre forms but also an intensely political book. Would you call it post-modern? Why did you write it?
TR: I don't know if it's post-modern. I guess it's not a traditional "seamless" narrative, but then most traditional narratives aren't either! I have been told that it's "angry" but I didn't intend it to be. I did have a lot to get out of my system. I wanted to mess around with the (to me) hugely oppressive tradition that is psychoanalysis. And the Church. I also wanted to argue with some of the so-called feminist writing that was happening around then - books like Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend, that was a kind of violent women's revenge fantasy. It seemed to me that this whole villain/victim dichotomy needed deconstructing. My books could probably be dismantled down to what I was reading at the time, run through a weird sieve or blender and with stuff added. In that case, it would be things like Zahavi, Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Henry James - The Turn of the Screw. With the Brontės as constant factor. Things as disparate as that. And the end-product won't resemble them - nor necessarily measure up to them - in any way. I think it would be very interesting to know what writers were reading when they wrote a particular book - very telling.
JK: Vamp is a filmic book - its cinematic subtexts are sign-posted, but also in its flow?
TR: I love films, and I was certainly in a phase of watching a lot of them when I wrote it. I also did some film studies as an undergraduate and loved that. Anyway written fiction has been remediated (to use Bolter and Grusin's term) by film so it's kind of inevitable that it be filmic. It's also inevitable in that the vampire tradition is as much film as writing; it so beautifully crisscrosses so-called high and low cultures.
JK: Do you still read much vampire literature and watch much vampire cinema?
TR: Rarely. It was something I needed at the time for the purposes of the book. I am not a devotee. Though I have to say I would watch Interview with the Vampire any number of times again. It's incredibly lush and moving.
JK: Each of your poetry volumes has been quite different in tone. Bluebeard in Drag is a book largely concerned with the closing off and interiorising of family "secrets" - a traumatic book in many ways. The myth is subverted and played out against the victim, as much by the victim as a kind of protection. Any comments?
TR: Again, it comes down to what I was reading at the time: a lot of Alice Miller, if I remember rightly! It was also a reaction to what some people had muttered regarding my first book ("you can't be so personal") - some perverse part of me thought, "ok then, we'll get more personal"!
But seriously (that was a joke) it's just a look at how "Family" operates - "Family" has always seemed to me very Gothic, and the Bluebeard horror tale both terrified and fascinated me as a child. It's quite possible to be the Bluebeard and not necessarily male, too. The repetition of trauma ... Above all, I was still in the process of exorcising Freud. Alice Miller, who had been a psychoanalyst, you know, turned her back on psychoanalysis as something very damaging.
The Bluebeard book is not all literal - to some degree it's caricature. It's "personal" only in the sense that it looks inside the home rather than outside it - but that home is a confluence of lots of stories of other people, including earlier generations of my own family.
JK: Does the poet have the right to tell the stories of others? Should private experiences shared or undergone with others be made public? Is there some kind of mediation that makes the "material" available for publication?
TR: It depends what the story is, how people might be affected (are they still alive? identifiable? likely to read it? what will it do to them?) - I don't know what the "right" is here. I think you have to show respect in any kind of poetry, not just "personal" poetry. To a degree, if it's poetry, it is mediated. Yes, I think there has to be some important aesthetic gain to justify it, but that's also true of any kind of poetry: why waste paper? All that said, none of us poets, who seem to give ourselves such licence, would like to be the target or subject of someone else's hurtful poem. I don't want to write hurtful poems. My sense now of what is hurtful might be more informed than it was at, say, eighteen. That's life.
I also don't know at what point, say with family, the story stops being one person's and is another person's. It's just a matter of what you do with it, how responsible you are.
JK: Should poetry work as therapy? In your work there's such a grinding intensity at times that I doubt it can bring closure or be cathartic.
TR: It is not therapy for me. I associate therapy with psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and I couldn't think of anything more different from poetry. (I know there are other kinds of therapy.) Therapy would try to heal the person or, as in institutional practice, try to bring them into line with some kind of norm. I don't think poetry is about that - rather the opposite - it's being open, being alive to risk. Not being healed.
JK: Does the book die for you after it's been written? Is the moment all important?
TR: Yep. It's hard to re-enter the atmosphere of something you've really finished with. I remember telling the poet and novelist Kathleen Stewart that I had greatly admired a particular book of hers, and her saying how far behind her it was, it was over - and both of us wondering at what a strange phenomenon that is - like a dead star (for the writer) that still appears to be there (for the reader).
JK: Do you draft? How and where do you write?
TR: Yes, I draft. I don't know how anyone couldn't. I write poems longhand first and then pretty well straight onto a computer. Prose I tend to make notes of by hand, and then work a first draft onto the computer. I have lost the ability to sustain prose in longhand. My arm gets tired.
I have usually written in kitchens and bedrooms - something about the warmth of those places, and their feeling of security. I cannot write a word with other people around. Writing for me is very secretive and surprising in the early stages - I loathe any kind of intrusion. I came from a very big family - seven kids - and writing was its own kind of private space. I am always amazed that my students can write in class - I used not to ask it of them, and then realised many of them wanted to. Everyone is different in this way.
Just now, as you know, I've done up the attic room and am going to use that to write. It's poky (where the other rooms are big) and up-top and protective, so it feels right. That study I had last time we were here in the USA - looking out into the woods, a window-screen traversed by birds, deer, raccoon and groundhogs, constant surprises! - was perfect. Quiet but continually different.
JK: The Willing Eye is about ways of seeing ... It is heavily influenced by living in England for a number of years. How has living outside Australia changed the way you see? And you have a new volume of poetry - Hothouse ...
TR: Well, I already mentioned the effect of Cambridge in divesting me of my sense of audience. Also being in England sharpened my sense of Australia as a colonial place - it still has so many hang-ups and problems from that; white Australia still needs to grow up and take some responsibility - and of my personal "location", ethnically and spiritually. In Australia, the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling had died well before my time. It still existed in my mother's childhood (she was Anglican and eventually married an Irish-Australian Catholic). But in my time there was only the tiniest sense of being made to feel tainted, when you got taken out of the state school class for R.I., for instance, and most kids stayed with the Anglican teacher.
For the rest of my life in Australia, because Irish Catholics are well-assimilated within that dominant Anglo-Celtic thing, I never felt that outsider-hood. Even though my mother's side was English, because I was raised Catholic I came to identify more strongly with the Irish factor. This identity was very strong in my father, who had never even been to Ireland! In England, for obvious reasons, there is still a sense of Irishness as something "other", and that came as a shock to me - sitting in a postgraduate seminar and realising that some of the English students feared and were suspicious of Irishness. And numerous other examples of such fear - which led me to reading a lot about the history of the Irish in Australia, to understand how that assimilation had happened, how it runs through our literature, our complicity with and sometimes resistance to the colonising culture in Australia. Having our cake and eating it too - seeing ourselves as underdog to the Brits, but still actively participating in our "share" of ill-gotten gains, in terms of dispossessing the indigenous peoples. It's complicated. There is nothing romantic about it - though like many so-called Irish-Australians I was trained as a child, primarily by the Church, to believe there was.
There's a little bit of this in a couple of "Irish" poems in the new book, Hothouse. The poem about Dublin that begins "Home that is not my home", about the impossibility of colonial fantasies of home. And the ambivalence of a relationship with the Catholic Church.
JK: There's a strong element of sexuality in your books
And you have a novel out in the middle of 2002 that deals with bisexuality and other sexual and gender issues in very specific ways ...
TR: I'm very wary of the term "bisexuality" because it's so open to misinterpretation and stereotype. From Freud through to people who think it only means swinging! Also it seems to confirm the two categories "hetero" and "homo", which I think are not as clear as they are made out to be. But yes, the novel deals with the fact that a person can love/fall in love with someone of either gender (if there are even two genders in the first place!). And in a sexual way, not just love.
I was raised with very strict traditional Church beliefs about sexuality (not that it was ever mentioned - figure that out!) that bear no resemblance to my experience or my basic sense of compassion. Because of this, and because I see many people suffering under the same strictures, it interests me. As a feminist too, inevitably it interests me. (To be fair, my mother was certainly more compassionate and liberal-minded than the nuns in her attitudes, though not radical in any way.)
JK: We co-wrote a play together, and are about to start work on another. We've also collaborated on small poetry projects. How do you view such a process? Does being "close" to someone interfere with integrity, limit you? Are you suspicious of "projects"?
TR: I am not suspicious of projects - they are my own natural working method. I am not, however, naturally collaborative, because of those elements of secrecy and surprise that I mentioned before. However, I believe it's very good for a writer to do things occasionally that don't feel natural, that feel almost uncomfortable, and see if it affords anything new. I think by being "close" to someone you gain as much as you lose; possibly much more.
JK: Are theory and writing separate entities?
TR: Not when I think about writing. When I sit down to write, I don't do it according to some blocked-out theory. But I do re-theorise as I draft and re-plan. It's not entirely possible to separate them. You are always writing from some theory, even if you don't call it that.
JK: You teach writing - does this limit or intensify your focus as a writer?
TR: It drains me of energy, and of time for writing - but it pays back tenfold - it is stimulating when you have very good students, and I have had some excellent ones - and it clarifies and reconfirms things for you if you have struggling students. It also forces you to keep up to date with what's being written, and with what younger generations think. When I started teaching I was not too far removed from my students - now I am much older, and I need an interpreter. One student last year taught me some things about dance music and rave culture I would never otherwise have seen or taken the time to learn. And it's something fairly crucial to that age-group, or many of them. I don't want to be artificially young, but neither do I want to ossify. I have learned a lot from my students; I hope I've been some good for them!
JK: You are writing half the year in America and half in Australia now ... what's happening?
TR: Of course for the period in Australia now, I am usually teaching, not writing. America is my writing space (does that sound greedy? - what a lot of space!). I am learning so much here, and grateful for the time-out. Last time we were here I finished a novel; this time I have another novel started and want also to finish some "American" stories - one of those "projects"!!! All prose for now. If I can have half-years like this, it doesn't matter what work I do for the rest of the year. It's a breather. And in the way that Australia has had a literal colonial relationship with Britain, and that was both clarified and complicated for me by living in Britain, so too it's had a strange and fraught one with this place. It's wonderful and it's troubling at the same time. I don't know what to make of it. I will keep you posted.
About the Poet Tracy Ryan
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Tracy Ryan was born and grew up in Western Australia but now lives in England. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Literature, and has also studied European languages at the University of Western Australia. She has worked in libraries and at bookselling, taught at Curtin University of Technology, and edited poetry and fiction for magazines. Killing Delilah was shortlisted for the 1994 Western Australian Premier's Prize for Poetry and the John Bray Award, Adelaide Festival, 1996; Bluebeard in Drag was shortlisted for the 1997 Western Australian Premier's Prize for Poetry. She was joint winner of the 1996 Times Literary Supplement/Poems on the Underground short poem competition. |
[Above] Photo of Tracy Ryan by Wendy J. Kinsella, 1998.
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Thylazine No.4 (September, 2001) |
