Aileen Kelly interviewed by Elaine Schwager
ES: Do you write every day in a disciplined way or when you are moved to? Could you describe your process?
AK: This is one of the many ways in which I don't carry out my own advice. I think it is very productive to write every day, even if it is only an exercise (an exercise increases your skills, and while you are writing it may grow into a real poem). In practice, I rarely manage this for more than two consecutive days.
I can't, in fact, decide that I will now write a poem. For me, a poem can start almost anywhere - a phrase or a line-and-a-half, a piece of rhythm, an image, a news story, something that happened to me or to someone else, a nature experience, a dream. The border-area between the conscious and the unconscious mind is very fertile, and at times I actively seek that by techniques somewhat like meditation, or by keeping a dream-and-waking journal for a few days. When I say 'a rhythm', I mean that I may know what a phrase or line-and-a-half will sound like without yet having words to put to it. Paul McCartney apparently began the Beatles hit 'Yesterday' in this way - at first he could only think of 'scrambled egg' as fitting the rhythm in his head.
I often don't know what a poem is really 'about' until I am quite a long way into developing it. I don't write well by deciding what I want to say about something, and then writing a poem which says it as cleverly or as decoratively as possible, though I know many people find that the way to do it. Rather, I'm pulling in images which seem to be related to each other, and turns of phrase and lengths of line that sound useful. I have to be careful not to write things down in a fixed-seeming way too soon, but also not to let a phrase or image with potential slip away - so I jot down rough notes, sometimes only a couple of words, in the small notebooks that I keep around the house, and in my briefcase, handbag, coat pockets…
At some point these notes are ready to be brought together. At that stage I am still writing by hand. Totally new ideas may come from putting separate notes together, while other notes turn out not to belong. For a free-verse poem, the whole process can work reasonably happily around whatever else I have to do, and poems progress on trains and between classes and phone-calls from someone wanting to sell me a new roof. A useful first draft of a more structured poem, however, may need several days without interruption from other serious verbal work or rhythmic disruption of what is going on in my head (and ear and mouth and hands and shoulders - I do quite a lot of physical movement when I'm putting words together). I've been on a writing grant the last few months, which has allowed me more uninterrupted time, and the proportion of formal or otherwise structured poems that I have written is much greater than has been possible for the past many years.
Sometimes, on the other hand, I will go without finding anything to write, for long enough to start wondering if I will ever write a poem again. (This makes me a very sympathetic leader of creative writing workshops.)
ES: Many of your poems seem finely crafted, carefully sculpted. Could you speak of your craft? What your re-writing and editing process is like?
AK: I usually re-draft, in sessions or for a few minutes at a time, over several days, sometimes waking with an idea in the middle of the night - I have a pen with a small light in it, so that I don't have to wake up properly to make a note. I may carry a paper copy of the current draft around with me all day, fiddling in spare moments with words, phrases, line-endings, rhythms (even in my free verse, rhythm is important), the way one image meets into another, and so on.
Then I come back to it days, weeks or months later and perhaps make more changes. I put the poem onto the wordprocessor when I need to see how it looks 'in print'. This is a lot sooner than when I used a typewriter, and making changes meant re-typing the whole thing - I'm inclined to say (it's now an old joke) that if God had not intended us to re-draft obsessively, she wouldn't have invented the wordprocessor.
If I've ever had a theory for my own poetry it is only that a poem should use the possibilities of language more fully than prose does. There are endless ways of doing that, and most of them result in an experience for the reader, not just an idea. Poetry happens in your emotions and your senses, including the sense of your own body - which includes rhythm, and the way a series of words moves around in your mouth. The voice you hear in a poem, or the pictures and sounds and touches it makes you imagine, or the way the images lead into or cry out against each other, or the way the lines relate to, or contradict, the structure of sentences, or the rhymes or other placements of harmonious or discordant sounds - all of these are experiences. Bringing together a number of different ways of making a strong and focused total experience, will usually make for a more effective poem. But the different techniques must work to support each other, not trip each other up.
Although many of my poems may not be completely transparent at first reading, they are all intended to be heard, at least in the imagination, and experienced not just thought about. I hope a reader gets enough pleasure or interest in a poem at first reading, however, to want to read it again and find it coming clearer. I admire other people's poetry that continues to give me new pleasures at subsequent readings, 'poetry you want to live with', more than poetry that gives me all it has at the first reading; and as long as I'm getting new pleasures, I will persevere with reading a poem that I don't yet feel I fully understand. I can only hope that readers feel the same way about any of my poems that they don't find immediately transparent. I don't set out to be obscure - I just want there to be several different satisfactions in a poem.
I think and talk a lot about poetry in terms of the reader. Yes, each of us 'writes for ourself', and is the person who must be satisfied. But using words seems to me to make sense only if there is some idea of a reader, even if it is only oneself on another day. The craft of words is basically, for me, about making it possible for a reader to experience what the writer wants to be experienced, even though no two readers will read it exactly the same way. In fact, not all readers can be the readers this poem is written for - trying to satisfy all possible readers is a quick way to a nervous breakdown.
So my re-writing process tries to get the whole thing stronger as an experience for its 'ideal readers', by whatever techniques seem to be possible in this particular poem. The language often needs to be worked harder. Words and phrases and images, and the order they are in, often need to be right in more than one way. Rhythms may need to be smoothed over, or broken up. I also like to do unexpected things with words, or to give a new twist to a well-known phrase, which adds an extra element of illumination, or makes a reader think twice. My students say that I'm always going on about the effect of where you end the line. (They are right - I think controlling the move from line to line is one of the crucial skills in poetry.)
Sometimes I end up discarding the element that started the poem in the first place - it no longer works with what has developed. Now that does take discipline!
ES: You seem to have a strong commitment to the creative process. Could you speak about how this force has guided your life?
AK: The creative process means two things to me. One is whatever process any creative person may use to produce their art - it doesn't seem to me to be 'a force', and my commitment to following and refining mine may have complicated my life but it doesn't guide it. I do have a deep respect for other people's creative processes, which makes it important for me to be positive and affirming, as well as usefully critical, when I'm teaching creative writing.
I get angry and hurt when I meet people whose creative process has been paralysed by some critical bully or unimaginative person, who made them feel their creativity was worthless and silly. It takes a lot of courage for someone who has suffered that to come to a workshop again; they are very tentative and vulnerable and need a lot of genuine appreciation (not false sweetness) and healing attention to what they want to do. Everyone's creativity is valuable and calls for nurturing, even if not everyone's may produce 'excellent work' by a particular measure at a given time. Creativity isn't only for geniuses, it's a basic human drive.
The other meaning of 'creative process' for me belongs to your next question.
ES: There is a strong spirituality as well as groundedness in your poetry. Could you talk about your spiritual evolution and how it has influenced the different phases of your poetry?
AK: From the liberal and humane Catholic tradition of my upbringing (this was England, not Ireland or Australia) I drew a spirituality that went naturally with my insatiable curiosity and wonder about the natural world. A religion that believes centrally in a divine incarnation ('embodiment'), and whose central rituals are sacramental (where the material world enables an encounter with the divine) very easily nurtures a spirituality in which the sacred is constantly found present in the material world - essentially a 'grounded spirituality'.
This unfolded for me, over many years, as ever-growing respect for the environment, a love and wonder for all living things (even if I don't want a spider in my bed), concern for social justice (which is a major area of Catholic teaching, though many conservatives don't seem aware of it), and an egalitarian feminism which sees it as oppressive to prescribe a role for anyone which does not accord with their desires and talents for work and natural growth.
Basing one's spirituality in embodiment works very well alongside poetry - I see a poem as an attempt to embody something (from the poet's reality or imagination or contemplation) in word and image and sound/rhythm, in such a way that it will be experienced by and in the reader. I don't have to separate my spirituality from my writing, either its themes or its methods. A poem that is really working well for me is an outcrop of my spirituality, even if its themes seem mundane, because 'the spiritual' inhabits and grows from 'the mundane'.
I still regard myself as a Catholic, and am aware of a persistent, though not dominant, strand in Catholic tradition of this sort of spirituality, and an ever-developing theology which underpins it intellectually. The first poet I really went crazy about was Gerard Manley Hopkins, because I saw him struggling to understand his natural spirituality, and to reconcile it with a mainstream theology which did not account for it. His techniques also capture the excitement the material world offers someone who is seeking, or in contact with, the embodied sacred.
Like most people, my confidence in my spirituality rises and falls, and of course it is constantly affected by the tough realities of the world it inhabits and grows from. There are poems which ask the deep dark questions fairly directly, as well as celebratory ones.
ES: Having children seems to have in some way slowed you down as a poet, but also inspired you; could you talk about the inter-relationship of children and your art?
AK: Some women poets and artists seem to thrive on pre-schoolers, but that wasn't me. Judith Wright talks about 'the dumb and fruitful years' ('Naked Girl and Mirror'), and I recognise that. The long quiets that I need to gestate the early stages of a poem, and the bursts of energy that go into re-writing, were just not available to me, even though my husband was, and is, very domesticated and supportive. I had a bad bout of depression, and looking for something quite different to do for a few hours a week, fell accidentally into teaching adults which turned out to be the other part of my life's work. This included teaching literature and creative writing, and eventually led me back into my own writing. I was very quickly writing better than before the dry years, and I have seen this happen to a number of other women. There are also women who have started poetry for the first time after the children have moved on a bit, and have very quickly developed the maturity in writing that their age would suggest if they had written all their lives.
Some people are wise enough to grow in any life-situation. For me, however, it took motherhood to open up all sorts of insights and concerns and attitudes that have certainly enriched my poetry. My children and grandchildren have also kept me in touch with the energetic speech-patterns of their generations. And I have a profoundly deaf grandson, now at university, whose use of sign-language offers another take on 'the embodiment of meaning'.
I am surprised and delighted that although none of my children is primarily a writer, they are, like my husband, very positive about the way my writing absorbs time that might otherwise be spent baby-sitting, cooking elaborate meals or earning serious money. All four of my children, including the two who work in Hong Kong and in Sydney, and my two busy teenage grandsons, made it to the Melbourne launch of my second book. It would have been quite a different book (and many years sooner, no doubt) if I had never had them.
ES: Family and household experiences are important subjects for you - how do poems emerge from your daily experiences? Could you discuss the process of giving this form?
AK: Maybe it's an aspect of my 'incarnational' slant. Theme and imagery tend to come from what is real and important to me, which doesn't exclude the strongly imaginary, of course. But yes, the poem often coalesces around family and household, and images often come from there even when the theme is something more universal or more remote. In the same way, body-imagery keeps coming in. I live very locally in my body, my family, our house and the creeklands alongside it which bring an incredible range of wild birds to our garden.
ES: Aging and time are also areas you explore. Has it gotten more difficult to sustain writing as you get older or has writing poetry influenced how you experience aging and time?
AK: It has always been difficult for me to sustain writing. I may be getting better at insisting on the necessary time, but time goes faster as you get older. Writing has certainly influenced how I experience aging and time, and most other human conditions as well - you get a different perspective on anything you write about in the sort of process I use, because significant words and images can emerge unpredictably, and then it's a question of exploring whether, and how, they fit together or collide. It's a common effect of reading a really good poem that it illuminates the way you see something for ever after, and that can also apply to trying to write a poem, even for a minor poet like me. A poem can be, as Dickinson says of the approaching death of a loved one, 'a great light upon the mind' which 'italicises' familiar things.
ES: Your last lines in many of your poems are very strong, do you work towards this, or does the poem seem to come together for you at the end in an unexpected way?
AK: I rarely write a poem by starting at the beginning and going on till I reach the end, so I often know roughly what the last line is going to be while I am still writing the rest. However, once it all starts coming together, sometimes that last line doesn't work. This means finding an unexpected twist for it, or a completely new line or group of lines. Or I have a lot of the poem but not a last line, and it can take a long time to find one. Either way, the rest of the poem does need to work towards the last line, but equally the last line needs to complete the reader's journey through the rest. Ideally, the poem is an organic whole, in which all the elements are encouraged and re-visited until they grow together.
The Japanese say that the important thing about music is what it does to the silence that follows - a good last line carries the poem on into the white space after it.
If the last line is strong, it's tempting to use it as the title, but I rarely do that. Pre-empting the end will often weaken the poem.
ES: Does your childhood in England still influence the imagery in your poetry?
AK: Yes. But so does the Australian context, and that of Ireland, where I had two substantial writing visits in 1998 and 1999. As my name would suggest, I have Irish roots, but they were not really explored in my childhood.
Similarly, I have no doubt that all those three countries' language-use influences me, and that many different ways of speaking and writing in all three get into my poetry at times. Many of the poems in City and Stranger were worked on in Ireland, and I think both language and imagery were influenced, even in some poems that would not strike a reader as having Irish content or context.
I like the vigour of popular speech, the competence of technical vocabulary and the precision and formality of academic language, and the character of all sorts of language codes, according to the effect the poem is seeking. Mostly, nowadays, I feel more Australian than anything else - but I came to the love of nature first in southern England, where the birds and animals and landscape and weather and country churches were the same ones that kept turning up in the good poetry I read. Some of my poems deal directly with this dislocation of familiar places, such as 'Water quality' (Coming up for Light) and 'Not at home' (City and Stranger). But I think that sort of dislocation, of having more than one 'home place' so that one is never fully at home anywhere, and more than one thinking-language so that thought never feels fully articulated in any one speech, is very common among Australian poets, and it is part of the strength of current Australian poetry - we are a migrant culture, or a tapestry of many cultures.
Most of the overt nature, garden and city imagery in my poems is Australian, I think, when I'm not using something else for a particular reason. My 'inner landscape' covers a lot of territories, however. And the imagery of my childhood in England includes the war into which I first became conscious - a place where planes fought overhead, and someone dropped a bomb on my grandparents. The world of my poetry suffers a lot of conflict, injustice and violence, against which I have nothing but words.
ES: Could you say a little more about what events from your childhood and earlier life most affected your poetry and development - what is behind the statement 'the world of my poetry suffers a lot of conflict, injustice and violence, against which I have nothing but words?'
AK: I was always a verbal child, and inherited my father's punning sense of humour. Both my parents gave us example and encouragement to use language correctly and effectively. My mother was in fact a teacher, but didn't intend to teach me to read before I went to school; I just picked it up because she read to us so much. (I have one sibling, an older sister). We also sang a lot of rhymes. I was writing rhymes by age 7. It seemed the obvious, fun, thing to do with all the words and phrases that were running round inside my head. Fortunately the schools I went to were very encouraging of writing, and of enjoying any book that looked interesting to the student. I also had public library tickets from a very young age. I read very broadly, with opportunities to discuss what I read, both at home and at school. Some long bouts of sickness meant that I often read a book more than once (waiting till someone else could go to the library for me) and began to understand how some books give more on second reading, while others become boring.
I was (and am) insatiably curious. Since I was especially interested in 'nature-study' I nearly got de-railed into The Sciences, following my father and sister, since my general interest was mistaken for talent. But, as my senior English teacher used to say, for the student of literature (or the writer, I think) there is no such thing as useless knowledge - anything may prove helpful for something you read or write next week, or next decade.
At university in Cambridge, it seemed that all of us were writing, instead of that being something weird that only a few did. For the first time, I could talk to most other students without having to censor my ideas or my vocabulary. Nobody was teaching 'creative writing' as such at that time, but the combination of detailed technical study taught by good critics and good writers among the faculty, and our commentary on each other's work, laid important foundations for me that I still build on, and work from, both in writing and in teaching.
What traumatic events there were in my childhood were not personal - I was born a few months ahead of a world war which was fought very close to home, even over my roof, but everyone I knew survived, more or less intact. Although my grandparents had to be dug out of their bomb-shelter after a raid, they lived on into their eighties. My father was a naval officer, and we had moved house to a village at the beginning of the war so that we didn't have the disruption of being evacuated away from family, as many town-children did. We just lived at home with our mother while my father was away, we had gas-masks and our own little corrugated iron bomb-shelter where we slept during bombing raids (before the shelter arrived we used the cupboard under the stairs), and all of us kids played in the mornings with fallen casings from the bullets fired by the planes overhead the previous night. (I've reflected on some of this in the poem 'Palpitations', in City and Stranger.) It all seemed quite natural at the time.
I have many reasons to celebrate life. Yet the reality around me also includes poverty and homelessness and other social injustices; and people who hate other religions or races or ways of life; there is violence which makes the world ugly for too many people; and anger between drivers on my city's roads; and the lack of imagination of many politicians and business leaders; and the contempt many people demonstrate for others; and our carelessness with the environment. Such matters are factual and present aspects of the world I write in.
Poetry responds to this: by trying to tell the truth; by seeking insight into the human consequences of these situations; by asserting different values (including the simple fact of valuing the creative and aesthetic); and by drawing on the dark side of the world for themes and imagery, and converting them into something more positive. But as Auden says, 'poetry makes nothing happen … it is [only] a way of saying'. Paper won't hold back a storm.
ES: What poets have had a strong influence on you?
AK: Too many to list, but including these. Auden. Bishop. Border ballads. cummings. Dickinson. Eliot. Harwood. Hopkins. Plath. Dylan Thomas. RS Thomas (in some of his styles). Judith Wright. And dozens of contemporaries in several countries but especially Australia. I don't consciously model my work on any of them, but I'm aware of having learnt from them. No-one writes in a vacuum, even those who say they don't read their contemporaries for fear of being influenced - I think this is a big mistake, because it leaves you influenced by your 'school poetry', and trying to invent the contemporary wheel all by yourself. If you have a genuinely individual voice, it will assert itself whatever you read. If you haven't, refusing to read other poets won't give you one.
ES: Who are you presently reading?
AK: I'm teaching, and therefore reading, WB Yeats and Robert Lowell. I taught recently and am still reading Richard Wilbur. I'm dipping into John Donne (the short poems, for pure pleasure), Simon Armitage (English), Morgan Yasbincek (Australian, and that's a female name), Alex Skovron (Australian), Peter Sirr (Irish), Rita Dove (USA) and Dorothy Molloy (an Irishwoman who died recently after publishing her first lovely witty book, Hare Soup). This is a matter of taking the books off the shelf and reading a few poems for a pleasurable moment, or when I'm frustrated with my own writing (which is a lot of the time). A lot of my poetry reading is done like this, and from journals and anthologies (at the moment, The Best American Poetry 2003). Then I'll pick up one poet and spend serious time with her or him, on and off for weeks or months. This can lead to teaching a selection of that poet's work, which is the best way I know of studying them in detail.
I'm also engaged, on the day I write this, with work by three very strong poets who have not yet had their first book published - Elizabeth Campbell and Mal McKimmie (that's a male Mal) in Australia, and Edna Coyle-Greene in Ireland. Watch for these names!
ES: Have there been mentors that have been important influences on your development as a poet?
AK: Very much so, from school-age onwards. However, since some of the most significant of them would not want to be named, it seems invidious to name others: a teacher at school, another young poet at university, a number of other poets and editors in Australia and Ireland (email is a boon), and the members of various long-term workshops - people who, whether as fellow-poets or teachers or readers or editors, are prepared to get into your poetry line-by-line, image-by-image, phrase-by-phrase, and talk about what is happening in it for them, so that you can see if the poem is doing what you want it to. This is far more valuable than someone, however knowledgable, who explains to you what you ought to have done instead. A good mentor recognises that it is your poem. One of my best long-term mentors has never made a suggestion about what change I might make, but I come away from a discussion with a much better idea of what needs attention and why. I find it hard to be that restrained when I am mentoring others.
A good workshop group can often add up to one mentor, and half the same people in a different group a year later can add up to a noticeably different mentor, or be no help at all. Human dynamics are very subtle and strange - love it!
Teaching the study and enjoyment of poetry with adult classes has also been constantly formative and challenging of my own work, because we are always engaged with really good poetry at the level of line, image, phrase, and the effects that these have on us, and working out how that happens. Reading poetry by myself teaches me only half as much, and is much less enjoyable. But quieter - we tend to be a rather excited group.
I've noticed in travelling to give workshops around country Victoria that one of the problems of distance is that poets living on farms or in small towns often have the choice between one local writing group, or no writerly feedback at all. The feedback in the one local group can be heavily influenced by the need to be neighbourly, and in some cases by lack of anyone else who really understands the sort of poetry this particular poet is working on. So it may amount to 'Yes dear, very nice', or 'The grammar is not right in the second verse, and that rhyme isn't correct either'.
ES: Do you feel you have gone through different artistic phases? Could you say what propels you from one phase to the next?
AK: Probably someone else could identify phases in my work, just as I identify phases in other people's work. Mainly, from my own point of view, I just keep on keeping on, trying to make each poem effective and to learn better ways of doing that. In retrospect I may see that I have been pursuing a theme or developing a technique, among other poems, for some time. A few times I've felt that I was using one sort of imagery or technique too much, and have deliberately put them aside, to force myself to find others.
ES: What projects are you planning?
AK: I haven't had much in the way of projects at any stage of my poetry writing. The way I write does not easily accommodate a prior decision. However, I want to explore further the return to more use of metrical elements, syllabics and other structures that I've enjoyed while I've been on the writing grant in the past 6 months. This does mean planning and organising to have more time, more flexibility in my other work and demands on my life, so that I can concentrate for those 'days at a time' that, as I said, may be needed to pin down the first draft of that sort of poem. I've been advising other people for years to learn to say 'no' to good things that will eat away their writing time. Now I'll have to take my own advice.
But basically, my poetry keeps surprising me. I'd like that to keep happening.
ES: You talk about advising others to say no to good things that interfere with writing, has this been a difficult struggle for you?
AK: At times. How do any of us set aside the time and energy for writing, when we have families, neighbours, jobs, causes and so on which are not just a matter of reluctant duty, but things we really want to give time to? I know I'm not a 'Great Writer', so it is easy to imagine that writing is self-indulgent rather than important.
ES: Do you think of returning to writing novels and prose?
AK: It's not the way my mind works at present. When something might be a story, it comes out as a character-in-situation poem. This can cause difficulties when some readers imagine that every poem is autobiographical. Like fiction, even a first-person poem may not be the writer's own life. In fact, the choice of 'person', like the choice of tense, can be a major element in the impact of the poem, and can be chosen for that reason. For example: I wrote an exercise-poem about a recipe for stuffing peppers, and then played with putting it into the first person, and it turned into a totally different and unexpected poem ('The right stuff', in City and Stranger). However, every poem I write is deeply personal to me - just not necessarily about my own factual experience.
ES: Do you have a reader or audience in mind when you are writing?
AK: I am aware as I work on a poem that I want it to affect a reader in particular ways. But I don't have a particular person or group in mind. There is a sense in which I always write for readers who enjoy words and imagery doing the same sorts of things that I enjoy - I would not set out to write a poem that I didn't like, in the hope that it might appeal to other readers. But individual poems are likely to appeal to different people, just as various friends may like different things about you, and often those likings are unpredictable. Often someone likes or dislikes a poem mainly because its theme or an image touches on something significant in their own experience. I think it would be a big mistake to imagine that I can pitch a poem to one sort of reader, and know who that will be. A finished poem, like one's teenage child, walks out into the world and sets up its own relationships
About the Poet Aileen Kelly
