AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 2
Tricia Dearborn
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Tricia Dearborn by Tricia Dearborn, 2003.
CH: When did you first fall in love?
TD: I first fell in love when I was 19, and the surprise to me was that it was with a woman. I didn't realise that I'd fallen in love until the moment before our first kiss, although in retrospect I could see that it had happened gradually over the course of a year. That moment before was fairly alarming, but once we were kissing, I forgot my hesitations very quickly.
CH: Where is your favourite place and why?
TD: At the moment, one of my favourite places to be is at the work table in the room at home that we call the studio. It looks like something someone knocked up in their garage in the 1930s. It's sturdy, and has lots of small dents in it, a couple of holes bored through it, paint splashes here and there. A crossbar near the floor at one end has a dip worn into it where someone has habitually placed their foot while doing some kind of repetitive work. What I love about it is that it's so thoroughly and obviously a work table. (To me, a table is always somewhere you can work/write -- but this one has that work vibe in spades.) The studio is the sunniest room in the house, and the table is in front of a window that looks out over neighbourhood roofs and lots of greenery including a big old frangipani and a couple of palm trees. This is where I sit to drink my morning cup of tea and write in my journal.
CH: What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do?
TD: That would be telling my mother I was a lesbian. I'd started with my sister and worked my way up to mum. Before I left my place to go to my grandmother's, where my mother was, I washed my face and I remember stopping bent over with my face in a towel feeling like I could faint from fear. When I was actually telling her, I felt incredibly strong and absolutely in tune with myself -- a wonderful sensation of integrity to the core.
CH: If you could do lunch with anyone who would it be?
TD: Virginia Woolf. I love reading what she has to say about writing, and find her personally intriguing. She's one of the people who recur in my dreams and her diaries are my favourite thing that I've read to date. I'd love to hear her voice, which was said to be extraordinary, and she was also a renowned conversationalist and loved a bit of a gossip.
CH: Why is poetry important to you?
TD: I wrote my first poem when I was seven. The poem itself was pretty grim but it scanned, it rhymed, and writing it felt very natural. I wrote off and on from then till my twenties, which was when I noticed that I wrote when I was feeling. It was part of my realising how numbed and unfeeling I kept myself most of the time. So writing poetry was part of my learning to be much more part of the world, and accepting myself as an emotional and spiritual person (intellect had always been the focus in my family).
As a reader, poetry shows me the world in ways I wouldn't have seen it otherwise; plays with language in ways that give me pure pleasure; tickles my funnybone; delights my mind. It's a very pure, particular, concentrated medium, and I like concentrated.
Also, rhythm is very important to me, and I think writing poetry is one way it manifests. I've always been aware of rhythm in the environment: when I was a student working part-time as a cashier in Grace Bros, I loved the rhythm the register made when you closed off and it printed out the transactions for the day. I remember the electrifying effect African drumming on Sesame Street had on me as a kid, and as an adult I played a djembe in a women's drumming group called Shebang! for several years. Sometimes I'll be remembering a bit of a poem (one of mine or someone else's) and what I'm hearing is the rhythm, and then gradually the words fill themselves in.
CH: Do you believe in life after death?
TD: I certainly don't believe in the heaven and hell I was taught about when I was a kid. I'm not sure about life after death. At my grandmother's funeral I had the distinct impression that my grandfather, who'd died about a year earlier, was hanging around; had been waiting for Grannie; and now they could both get on with some kind of journey. My grandmother had had an experience where it seemed to her that Grandpa (who had died by this time) was in the room with her, and she wasn't someone who was into ghosts or that kind of thing generally. I've had psychic experiences myself, so I know there's more to the world than what you can see or touch or 'prove' with science. (Not that I'm anti-science; I have a science degree and I also have that natural bent.) So I do wonder if it's possible for some essence or energy of a person to exist in the world (or elsewhere?) once their physical form is dead.
CH: If you had three wishes, what would they be?
TD: I have to admit that the first thing that leaps to my mind is that I'd love to have some kind of independent income, so I didn't have to work full-time. I'm glad I have skills that let me earn a living, and a job I'm good at and that has its satisfactions. But writing is what I feel like I was put on this earth to do, and I'd just love to have more time to do it.
Then I'd wish for world peace and an end to poverty so that everyone could have a decent chance at life. And I'd love poetry to be valued in Australian culture as the life-enhancing resource it is. People often seem to turn to poetry when they're in great grief, for example, not realising poetry can be entertaining, profound, funny, moving, informative and useful all the time. The way things are now, not enough people come into contact with poetry in ways that allow them to get the most out of it. I'm an unashamed poetry pusher, and I've found that if people connect with the subject matter (and the poetry is reasonably accessible), they often enjoy it, to their own surprise.
CH: What is your gift to the world?
TD: I'm interested in the truth of my own experience and also other people's. I love knowing the real story -- What happened then? How did you feel? -- with all the gore, all the disgusting/ scary/ hilarious/ embarrassing/ incredible bits. I hate seeing stuff covered up, covered over. I believe that knowing how other people experience the world can free people to really have their own experience (not thinking they're the only freak who has ever done X, felt Y; just seeing the range of possibilities) and connect in a deeper way with the world and other people. So maybe my gift is that in my writing I aim to convey some truth about the world as I've experienced it.
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The changes
Kissing Louise was a bell. Unlike
the chimes of the genteel drawing-room clock
it gave no warning before it struck.
It was more like the shock of the extra-early
morning alarm
on the day of the journey.
Or the sudden shrilling of a schoolroom bell,
calling me in
to a strange new lesson.
It rang sweet as a tardy dinner gong
summoning me to a meal
of scent and heat.
Resonated like a great church bell
calling the villagers over fields
to christenings, to benedictions.
My throat sang my body
swung my skin shone
and my old life shivered and fell from me
and lay like the sweat of the ringers in the tower.
This book will change your life
it's the first book you owned, a careful pile
of fraying pieces
you place your name in it proudly, in shaky biro ball-and-stick
script, in modified cursive, in the stamp your friend
had made for you, in purple ink, in earnest
it absorbs the oil from the pores of your fingertips; rests beside you
on the sheets, inhaling your breath while you sleep
this book brings back the queasy joy, the circled eyes,
of days spent reading in the cool dim inside, summer's sun
through the venetians laying dazzling bars on the wall
you read it on the beach; years later it will gently
shower you with sand
this book will distract you as you wait for the bad news;
ground your rootless heart in something solid; it will teach you
new words for the world
maybe it will see you when no-one else has
this book contains secrets and keys; it reconnects
the severed pieces; perhaps it will draw tears up
through the dry well of your throat
your tears blur the words then spot the pages;
you put it down laughing helplessly; your indignation
hurls it to the wall
you burn it
it's the book inscribed in a hand as familiar as your own;
the new book by a favourite author, saved for this
moment of peace and a good cup of tea
it swallows you whole, it stops the clocks, it spits you up
exactly where you were, not as you were
it's the necessary unwelcome weight in your backpack;
the book you take sips of, prolonging the pleasure; the one
you wished for years you'd written
it's the book you bought for a luscious cover; the only
book you ever stole
you finish it, close it, thump it gently back onto the table;
you'll allow its echoes to recede until you can come back to it
and not hear the words before it speaks
you touch it with affection, lightly, on the spine, as
you're passing
it's a dictionary, plump with surprises, I-told-you-so's;
you hold it open at all the places you have fingers for,
following a snaking trail of accident and meaning
you stand in the bookshop turning its weight in your hands,
knowing it means a lean and well-read week ahead
this book will be lent out, lost, regretted always
you read it over and over, your mind taking in
its familiar shapes as a palm caresses a lover's thigh,
knowing it more thoroughly each time
you sleep with it held to your heart, astounded, grateful
Second skin
the black that billowed through here
from next-door
settles still on the kitchen cupboards
splashed by the washing up
the paintwork drips in sooted runnels
the fuel he tossed onto your body
ran in rivulets that spread to sheets of fire
shearing off all sensation, stripping you
of the surface that meets the world
when I saw you curled at the bottom of the stairs
you were not charred but shiny and mottled
by now you'll be sheathed in
a pressure-bandage chrysalis
which some day will be peeled back
to reveal you
patterned with the scars of multiple grafts
in my house, the aftermath still settles
washing up, rubber-gloved against the heat,
I think of you, pressing against the world
your fire-new surface,
feeling nothing
Everything we're made of
comes from earth; we cry, returning
borrowed salt; we give our bone and muscle
back to the earth to suck, as ash,
as rotting flesh: that calcium atom in your skull --
star-fired, congealed to rock, dissolved
by rain, passed on to you, breathing blood
in your mother's womb --
will settle in another's bone some day
when your atoms range over mountains, rock
in the currents of distant oceans
no matter how steadfast, stock-still this life,
one day you will travel the world
Acknowledgments to: Frankenstein’s bathtub (Interactive Press, 2001). |
About the Poet Tricia Dearborn
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Tricia Dearborn is a poet, writer and editor. She was born in Glen Innes, New South Wales and grew up in Bathurst. She moved to Sydney to go to Uni (graduating with an Honours degree in Biochemistry and a Master of Arts) and now lives in Sydney's inner west. Her poems, short stories and reviews have appeared in literary journals in Australia and the US, including Southerly, Westerly, Island and Antipodes. Her first collection of poetry, Frankenstein's bathtub, was published in 2001 by Interactive Press. In that year, she also received a New Work grant for poetry from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and won first prize in the University of Canberra National Short Story Competition. |
[Above] Photo of Tricia Dearborn by Tricia Dearborn, 2003.
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Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007) |
