SEVEN AUSTRALIAN POETS
Thomas Shapcott interviewed by John Kinsella
[Above] Photo of Thomas Shapcott by Mark Fitz-Gerald, 1999.
JK: Would you give us some background information about where you grew up, how you related to family members, and whether or not poetry was part of your earlier life? When did you write your first poems?
TS: I was born and grew up in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, a mining-industrial town 25 miles inland from Brisbane. Our house was on a hill and on the other side of that hill was a wilderness. It had once been mined but in 1941 (when I was 6) the mine caught fire and it was closed down. We played games in that area and had gangs who roamed among the secondary growth timber and came upon the smoke seeping out from the limestone rocks. The area was actually used by the University of Queensland as a fossil site. So though it was a shabby industrial town it had its magic for a kid. I was the 3rd of 4 sons (no sisters) and a twin. Jack and I were fraternal twins and in fact were opposite: he was olive-skinned with hazel eyes and black hair; I was fair and blond and with blue eyes. Right handed and left (I was the mollydooker). We were companionable (I don't remember us ever fighting, though I had a notorious 'Irish' temper as a kid) but not close. We had quite separate interests though at school we would see-saw in exams - I would beat him one test, he would beat me the next. The same applied to our height, in those primary school years. It was a pretty close family, I can see in retrospect. Though Dad had strong social convictions none of us made friends easily. He was out most nights at committee meetings - chairman of the Finance Committee of the Ipswich City Council, in Rotary, Legacy etc.
Mum was the quietly supportive type though she hated having to prepare meals and entertain his business or political associates. She had her own techniques. Poetry and music were not discouraged and my parents were avid readers, but there were only a few Australian books in the house. I wrote my first poem at 10. It was unspeakable (though I spoke it to anyone who would listen!). At 13 I was writing more serious things, but by then had determined to be a composer. In the years before LP records I sought out the music of Schoenberg and Berg. At 19, when I did National Service, I realized I was not a composer and then turned my attention more consciously to poetry, which I liked because of its compression and intensity. That was when I first seriously started to read Australian poetry. I also discovered contemporary American poetry (in the Penguin anthology of that year). It was a revelation. The first poem I remember discovering with amazement and pure elation was Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover" . I found it when I was helping Bob, my older brother, rip up his primary school books and put them in the incinerator. This poem stuck to my hand, as it were, and I paused, read it, and was transformed! That was really the beginning, though of course there had been poems and stories in the Primary School Readers, things like that.
JK: Your first volume of poetry was published in 1961, and in many ways you were striking out alone in terms of the issues you were exploring in your poetry. Can you give us context in terms of the poets who influenced you? Who did you discuss poetry with?
TS: The ABC Radio Argonauts Club was a huge influence, especially for a smalltown boy living in isolation. I became a passionate member and reached the highest level in their awards system (Golden Fleece And Bar!!). I had poems broadcast on their program (and one of my music compositions!). But I worked in isolation. The postbox was my lifeline. My first poem was published in 1956 by the Bulletin, a national weekly journal based in Sydney. They published me and gave encouragement (Doug Stewart was the literary editor), though actually my first acceptance was from Southerly (then edited by Kenneth Slessor). Southerly printed a set of 6 poems "by a new Australian poet". These 'established' me quickly. Whenever I submitted a poem after that, editors recognized the name. For a young poet that is a great boost. No one at home (least of all Jack, my twin!) knew what to do about my poetry writing. Mum would say, "That's nice dear, but what on earth was it about?". Dad would sit in his armchair and read his detective thriller, smoking his pipe.
JK: What was the relationship between your day job as an accountant and your creative life as a poet?
TS: Pretty uneasy. It was a double life. But I lived because of my poetry. I earned money through accountancy, so that I could buy the books and records I craved. I did not meet another living poet until I was over 21. David Rowbotham, from Brisbane, came up on a Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture tour and I shyly introduced myself to him. He gave encouragement from a distance. Not until I bought my first car did I get to Brisbane to have a wider sort of cultural contact.
With the accountancy practice, I had one advantage: I would work on the current poem which I hid under an Income Tax Form A or B when the next client came in to have their tax return done. It taught me time management, incidentally.
JK: In his A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry Geoff Page writes: "In the late 1960s and early 1970s Thomas Shapcott became the first of the already established poets to support what soon became known as the 'New Australian Poetry'. Could you comment on this and discuss your role as anthologist?
TS: By 1969 I had published 4 books of poems, three of them being prize winners so yes, I guess I was 'established' by my early 30s. I was still isolated pretty much, though I had widened my horizons in the 1960s: I married in 1960 and we had a family; though I left school at 15 I started a BA degree at Queensland University as a part time student, just after our second daughter was born ("To prevent melon-mindedness" I said at the time). And I had made a couple of literary friendships. Probably your next question slots in here.
JK: What was your connection with Rodney Hall?
TS: I met Rodney in 1962, just after I came back from the Adelaide Festival Writer's Week of that year. Vincent Buckley in Melbourne had spoken about this exciting new Brisbane poet, Rodney Hall, and I had never heard of him. So I sought him out, he was working at the ABC radio, and we met. We instantly responded to each other; we were utterly different in personality and were both prolific writers of poetry, but we were able to offer pretty objective criticism of each other's work. We did not tread on each other's intellectual toes, as it were. So for years we kept lively contact. Pretty soon we decided to compile an anthology of the new Australian poetry - we began around 1963 and by 1964 we had compiled it. We sent it to University of Queensland Press, which had just begun an imaginative publishing program, under their new manager Frank Thompson. They liked it but sent it to the CLF (Commonwealth Literary Fund) for subsidy. This led to a delay of 2 years and we had to cut the anthology by 1/3. Still, it did finally appear, in 1968, by which time dramatic and newer impulses were happening, as a result of the Australian involvement in the Vietnam War etc. Our anthology was called New Impulses In Australian Poetry and though it was very successful, going through 2 editions rapidly, it had really been overtaken by later developments.
Sun Books in 1968 asked me to compile what became known as Australian Poetry Now, which appeared in 1969, and again was enormously successful. This time it did capture the flavour and momentum of recent poetry ("Come in and be pelted by poetry as a happening" wrote Sylvia Lawson in her review of it). In compiling that anthology I made contact with every new and young writer I could, but also wanted to show how some of the slightly older writers had modified their own writing as a result of the new loosening up of pace, rhythms and a more politicised awareness.
JK: You precede the so-called Generation of '68, yet you not only influenced a writer like Michael Dransfield, even acting in many ways as a mentor figure, but in turn were influenced by his work. Was there much creative exchange between you?
TS: I think I actually coined the phrase 'Generation of '68' in a poetry review in Australian Book Review. I had read a poem by Michael Dransfield in The Age a couple of years earlier (which I thought might be another Gwen Harwood pseudonym, it was so elegantly witty) and then Rodney Hall gave me Michael's address, as he had met him at a poetry retreat at the University of New England when Al Alvarez was the main tutor. Michael sent a batch of 13 poems, 12 of which I used. In preparing Australian Poetry Now I would receive huge swags of poems in the mail every moning and the only way I could cope was to read through them before getting onto the accountancy business. Michael's poems came as a flash of genius, they were so much more articulate and assured than most of the stuff, which was of the let-it-all-hang-out variety then fashionable. We began a correspondence and I was one of the people who played a part in having his first collection published by UQP (I gave the reader's report but also had a lot of suggestions about what to include and what to leave out).
I also did much the same with his second UQP collection, but by this stage Michael felt more independent and resented some of my suggestions for cuts. But for the period 1969 to about 1971 we had a long, jolly, and playful correspondence, sometimes camping it up, sometimes being soulful and sympathetic, sometimes exchanging new work. Michael sent me a manuscript notebook of poems which I kept for many years, finally giving it to the National Library. Most of them have never been published, but there were many highly publishable poems, in that lyrical elliptical middle style of his (before the final rather constipated ones). I enjoyed his correspondence because we shared similar imaginative worlds, but he was younger and helped me understand a generation a little younger than myself (I was in my mid 30s by then) and also the spirit of play was paramount. Like Gwen Harwood, indeed, Michael could be in his letters what he never was in public or to his family and friends.
JK: The theme of the exile recurs in your work ...
TS: We are all exiles, from birth. And it is not merely the expulsion from the womb. It is the conflict between the genetically-constructed us, and the socially-sculpted us. What Sir Francis Galton called 'nature and nurture'.
JK: You have written much 'travel poetry', but always deconstruct the travel motif. Movement, crossing borders, interacting with other cultures, are at the foundations of your work. Could you explore this?
TS: I think because my first love was music, travel for me always included the time dimension. Music is intrinsically based on time, it is fonded to it. And yet it can move us out of time, or out of our own time in a plurality of ways. Physical travel forced me to see the relativity of things, my own feelings and my otherness: it is as discomforting as anything unexpected can be, and yet as comforting as most discoveries turn out to be. I write from the point of view of the intrinsic exile, but when recognitions come, sometimes in a flash, they claim you totally.
JK: How have these 'travels' influenced your ways of viewing Australia?
TS: I first went overseas in 1972, on a Churchill Fellowship to the US and UK. Nothing could be the same again and of course the change was as much my perceptions about my own country as about the culture shock of even linguistically similar cultures such as England and America. In later years I avoided these countries and spent all my overseas travel in Europe, or Asia. I now return to, say, Budapest, and feel all sorts of little recognitions and claims. We might be intrinsic exiles but we are also intrinsic claimants.
JK: What role does landscape play in your poetry? In your prose?
TS: Landscape, in its real sense, is hugely important, it is the locus through which we interpret ourselves and our relationships with ourselves and others. I have always tried to evoke specific sensibilities about place, whether that be the West Moreton district of Queensland, or a New York streetscape or the Perth Zoo. In my prose I have tried to capture the sense, or the senses, of both time and place. One of the most thrilling book reviews I ever had was when my novel White Stag of Exile was published in Hungary (in translation). "He has caught the place and the period so completely he might be called an Honorary Hungarian writer".
JK: Shabbytown Calendar is a landmark book in Australian poetry. It is a poem-cycle based on your hometown of Ipswich. Would you discuss the relationship between autobiography, biography, and observation in the work? Would you also discuss the structure of the book?
TS: I wrote Shabbytown Calendar in 1973, just after I came back from America. In form, I was much inspired by Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares but I decided to write a cycle of poems, covering each month, in that year. I began thinking of them as 'preludes and fugues'. The 'prelude' set the scene, or the tone, or the context. The 'fugue' explored different ways of devising a 'fugal' form, ranging from terse repetitions in the style of Paul Celan, to longer more flexible and limber forms where the repetitions were more a motif I guess. But I found I was writing too much, and so thought of the structure as 'preludes, interludes and fugues' where the 'interludes' were more character studies, or social observations, little thumbnail sketches. This enabled me to get a lot of specific images of people in the town, which I think gives the cycle something of its specific colour, though the fugues are still, for me, the crux of the work. The cycle is subjective in that it does flow with the tides of specific relationships in my own life - the stresses of a marriage, fatherhood, some visiting friends and, finally, the death of friends. I often wondered what it would have turned out as, had I written it in the following year, 1974. In that year the town experienced the worst floods since 1893 and I was directly involved in rescue work etc. It was all very dramatic, whereas 1973 was 'just another year' (though it included one quite terrible murder, which I incorporated).
JK: Do you see poems in terms of larger structures or do ideas for books form after a number of individual pieces have been written?
TS: Generally, at a certain point, when I have a swag of poems, I sort through them and usually detect some underlying energy base, some direction they seem to be moving in, or towards. Then I might consciously flesh out these by writing poems that can embody what I feel to have been that underlying energy flow. Probably the only collection I have published which seems to me solidly a grab-bag is Travel Dice which I published in 1987 at a time when I thought it might be my last book.
JK: How and where do you write? What are your working methodologies?
TS: When I was younger, everywhere and anywhere. Between income tax returns or while listening to music. As I have grown older and my life has changed into such widely different spheres (and places) these patterns have modified. I am still notoriously prolific but I think more self-critical. What I advise others to do, I do not always follow myself.
JK: Your most recent book, Chekhov's Mongoose, is also a conceptual work. Would you talk about the structure of the book itself, and about the mechanics of the individual poems?
TS: In a real sense, it is held together by the pillars of the two sestina sequences. One of these is retrospective looking, in a personal sense, evoking those lost images of childhood experience and discovery. The other is more social and political, spanning history and the politics of both the self (not the autobiographical self, necessarily) and the social tides that have their own pressures. In one sense, both Chekhov and Pauline Hanson are similar tokens that we see ourselves through, not always comfortably. The book also incorporates ideas of 'the dream', which is one way our innate sense of exile can find at least temporary resolution - or, for that matter, discomfort. I do not believe in the black and white of things. As early as 1960 I remember trying to describe my poetry as being concerned with 'the ambivalence of all things'.
JK: Music, art, and literature are strong reference points in your poetry. Can you separate poetry from these artforms, or are they all interconnected?
TS: I would like to say they are all interconnected, but I am not so sure. Each form - music, visual art, literature, especially poetry - offers quite different triggers to the imagination, or to the insight we can squeeze out of them, or to whatever else it is that holds us, perhaps in surprise, or in that sense of recognition which is also a way of 'placing' surprise for us. At different times we seem to respond differently. I can still feel something of the same delight if I read 'The Windhover' today as I felt in 1947. Perhaps more surprisingly, I think - I think - I can be as moved by Mahler's 'Das Lied Von Der Erde' in 2002 as when I first heard it in 1949. But now I know every note (I bought the full score in 1949 also) and the medium of the interpreter intercedes more. A book is something different. I am terrified too attempt to re-read some old revelations. Others have saved themselves up until I was grown up enough to recognize what they were all about anyway. Take Chekhov; when I read him in the early 1960s I was altogether too crass. Now I laugh, and ache and am entirely envious of the skill, the craft, and the deep insight.
JK: What are the correlations between libretto and writing book-length poem cycles?
TS: I have written over 20 libretti but none of them have been published, except in program notes etc. No, that is not quite true. I have in my 1989 Selected Poems, included 2 pieces written as libretti: The Songs for a Tarot, and 'Five Days Lost'. They seemed to stand on their own in some sort of way. With libretti I am particularly concerned with writing words that can be sung. I look at vowel sounds and their placement. I look at consonants and how they might or might not add to the dramatic or musical tension, or development. Things like that. Which means that sometimes the words themselves are not the sharpest way you might develop the material, say, as a 'proper poem'.
JK: You have translated poetry into various languages: what are your views on the process of translation?
TS: I have been involved in translations from French (a set of 9 poems in Helix in around 1990) and Macedonian (the anthology An Island On Land: Contemporary Macedonian Poetry (1999) which I did with Dr Ilija Casule of Macquarie University). We also produced a volume of the poems of Katica Kulavkova Time Difference (1998). Essentially Ilija prepared an initial transliteration and then I worked on attempting to make it readable in English. Sometimes it involved small alterations, rhythmic and textural. Sometimes it involved finding an English-language equivalent to something which, in Macedonian, had its own resonances and associations. It involved a lot of to and fro discussion, but it was great fun, very exciting in fact. Quite a number of the Macedonian poems we published in Australian literary journals and papers, so I took that as indicating they worked as poems in Australian. For me, that is the big thing. I do not want to read poems in translation that shout out at me: I am an exotic, I am wrenched into your language and I don't like it. The reader deserves to feel secure, so that the real discomforts and the surprises, might come through with (what seems) their own conviction. I remember once with one of the French (French Canadian) poems the last line referred to smoke circling round the poet 'comme un chien'. To translate that as 'like a dog' was flat, wrong, drab. So I put 'like a puppy', and people in that translation group (in Paris) seemed to feel that had the spark in it. I think this was what set me off.
JK: You are a prominent novelist. What brought you to prose? Do you write poetry when you are working on a novel?
TS: I actually wrote my first (attempt at a) novel in 1959, the year before I married. Marriage, the beginnings of a family, work responsibilies, all meant I just did not have the physical time that a large architecture like a novel demands. Poetry, which was my first love (after music) was ideal as it could be drafted, and then developed, in short, intense bursts. Time snatched. I attempted a second novel in 1974 (more later) and wrote it over 2 weeks late at night, in Melbourne. It proved to me I had a lot to learn about prose style. It was based on the 1974 Ipswich floods and eventually was re-written as a children's book Flood Children (1981). but I learned from that and it helped push me towards the biggest decision of my life: to apply for a Literature Board grant, which meant I had to sell my accountancy practice. In the 3 years that followed I developed a prose style I began to feel comfortable in and worked on 2 novels, no 3 novels, that were all published. One of these, White Stag of Exile, is probably still my most important novel. I found working on 2 novels concurrently was stimulating and helped me take a break from one subject and leap into the other, refreshed as it were. Not that dissimilar to juggling a poem and a tax return. So that when the question arises about poems and fiction, the same answer: some things demand to be developed in one form or genre, some in another. I think over time one learns almost instinctively which is the appropriate structure. In poetry itself, some things tell me they are a sonnet length, or a sestina, or demand to be expressed in a freer technique, perhaps even jerky or jocund.
JK: Does writing criticism enhance your insights into your working processes?
TS: I think I would have to say yes, though I think of myself as an enthusiasist rather than a critic. Are enthusiasts still possible in nature, or in post-modernism?
JK: You are Professor of Writing at Adelaide University: does teaching writing infringe on your creative space? Have you continued your mentor role in this environment?
TS: To be a teacher of creative writing is essentially a mentorship. I work as much as possible with students (making use of the group dynamic) in having them write on the spot, in the class (we have 2 hour seminars) and then take what they have writtin home to develop it. But mine is a post-graduate course so I have people undertaking the large job of a book-length manuscript, be it a novel, a book of poems or stories or even a performance piece. It is exciting to see how the authors develop their own skills, techniques and take charge of the project. Already several books written in my course have been published, and others have won national prizes. So I feel something is working. The stimulus works both ways. I have written several of the poems in Chekhov's Mongoose, for instance, as a result of the 'five finger exercises' I get my class to do in their Seminar.
JK: You have been heavily involved in the formation and application of arts policy in Australia. Is this a constructive or inhibiting thing for writers in general? For you as a writer?
TS: I was one of the foundation Members of the Literature Board of the Australia Council (1973-6) and that was a genuinely exciting time. We were given a big budget and we evolved a whole new series of programs for writers, some of which lasted for decades. The success of those programs changed writing and publishing in Australia. Alas, today the Literature Fund (the name was changed a few years back) is a pale shadow of its original self and its budget is a token. We gave chief focus on writers to produce new work. The tendency now seems to be to give money to in-between persons and entrepreneurial blotting paper merchants. Again perhaps I am a Pollyanna, but I found the stimulus far outweighed the dreariness of agendas and Formal Minutes. Perhaps my accountancy training was a help there; I did not lose sight of the real priorities. I remember once in 1974 when the Board was first formed, I sat on a plane next to Jean Battersby, General Manager of the Australia Council, and she asked me the same question: "Does this inhibit your own writing and creativity? Should writers be involved in this aspect of things?" I pointed out to her that I had just completed a new book Shabbytown Calendar and quite a lot of the poems in it had been drafted, or polished, in motel rooms when stimulated by the discussions and animation of Literature Board Meetings.
JK: Any observations on the small press/small magazine culture in Australia at the moment?
TS: I think it is going through one of those cyclical changes of gear. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a very lively small press culture and it lasted almost into the 1980s. Recently most major publishers in Australia have been taken over by their accountants and Sales Department Heads, with the result that there is a sense of caution and conservatism. Poetry has almost died, if we think of the main presses. But small presses will always emerge and that has been happening. I think the new emergence of magazines is through the internet. What is important is that new writers are emerging. It is tough going for them, but actually not as tough as it was for new writers in the 1950s and early 1960s.
JK: As a prominent supporter of PEN, and a vocal opponent of racism and bigotry in Australia, do you think arts and politics can be separated? Do you use your poetry as a tool, to promote those values you support and believe in?
TS: Poetry and art are part of human expression, and human expression cannot be other than political, in the broadest sense, as we all know. Australian writers have not been particularly strong in covering direct political issues. Even in the broadest sense. How many Australian novels, for instance, deal with the dirty business of high finance and manipulation? Whereas American writing seems full of it. The recent appalling manipulation of bigotry and racism by our current Prime Minister is the sort of thing, as Phillip Adams said recently, that makes so many people feel ashamed to be Australians. I find in my own writing, my deep and personal responses to such matters have to be weighed and filtered through the medium of what I am using. Several short stories recently, for instance, have not been able to avoid the subject of the Woomera Detention Camp and the treatment of refugees (a shame upon us all) but I have had to do it in a way that will not become 'dated' in a matter of months. On the other hand, I have written a poem called "The Ballad of Barbed Wire" which I have circulated through the net. It was taken by The Australian in November and has not yet appeared and it may well be months before it does. Another example of how the old outlets simply do not seem capable of keeping up with the momentum of what needs to be expressed.
JK: What are you working on at present? I am just starting work on a selection of your poems. How do you feel about an 'outsider' making decisions over how you are represented? Will selection and presentation potentially change your intent/ions?
TS: The idea of an independent 'selector' at present excites and intrigues me. I do not know how I will feel when dearly loved ancients of my early youth, or equally cherished recent arrivals in my poem-nest are discarded. But I am most interested to see what survives, in another's eyes. And what remain relevant. That is one of the problems for a poet who has now been publishing for 45 years. I am too close to judge. I am working on finishing a new novel, set in the Fassifern Valley of Queensland (where one of the Sestina sequences was generated, partly from the same source of inspiration though the novel's cast of characters have nothing to do with the persona of the sestinas). There are a few other eggs in the basket, and I have a fair swag of new poems. I have been writing quite a few poems over the last year. So I still feel a sense of great ongoingness.
JK: Have you collaborated on any writing projects?
TS: The only collaborations have been with composers. Who, as you know, have pretty definite ideas of what they want out of the project. I think I am not well adapted to collaborative projects, which is why I have never been really successful in writing plays (I have tried a few, and had several broadcast, and 2 operas performed. But this is not to deny my sense of awkwardness, and perhaps shyness, in working with others). In their own small way, a writer feels in control. That is perhaps why I never did make it as a composer.
About the Poet Thomas Shapcott
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Tom Shapcott was born in Ipswich, Queensland, one of Australia's mining-industrial areas. Left school at 15 but did an Arts Degree at Queensland University part-time in the 1960s, when he was working as a Public Accountant and had a young family. His first book of poems, Time On Fire (1961) received the Grace Leven Prize, then the only major poetry award in Australia. He has subsequently published 14 collections of verse, most recent being Chekov's Mongoose (2000, Salt Publishing), named by Elizabeth Jolley as one of her '3 books of the year' in The Age, Melbourne. Awarded an OA in 1989 and an Hon.D.Litt. from Macquarie University. In March 1997 he was appointed the initial Professor of Creative Writing at Adelaide University in South Australia. |
[Above] Photo of Thomas Shapcott by Mark Fitz-Gerald, 1999.
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Thylazine No.4 (September, 2001) |
