AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 2
Jeri Kroll
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of Jeri Kroll by Jeff Chilton, 2007.
CH: What is your favourite season?
JK: Spring was my favourite season when I lived in North America. Winters were severe when I was a child. After what seemed months of darkness at four pm, snow, slush, searing winds, a few mildly sunny days with breezes that didn't bite the face gave kids an instant high. At the first splash of weak sun, off went the coats and we'd dash around like puppies. I loved it when I first moved to Australia in 1978 because all of a sudden my birthday was in spring instead of autumn.
I also have to admit I'm a daylight savings' addict. I love being outdoors and you can do so much more for so much longer.
CH: Why is poetry important to you?
JK: I'll answer that by asking another question - "What do I feel like when I'm not writing?" When I'm avoiding writing. When I feel as if I need to but if I plunge in, I will not be able to haul myself out. And there are always other commitments tugging: work, family, friends, etc. I suffer from what I call the Cixoux syndrome [Hélène Cixous, French feminist writer) - the artist must be a foreigner in her own country. The writer must be outcast, self-proclaimed exile, necessary misanthrope, grumpy old woman, churlish egotistical child-crone demanding her time to be ALONE. I vant to be alone, she screams, she mumbles, in order to write.
What to do about these selfish impulses? They are part and parcel of the cliché of being the writer who must set herself apart in order to observe, to mull, to submerge into the creative quagmire to see what she thinks about things. What she doesn't know she knows. What she will find out in the isolation of discovery. Don't misunderstand me. I am not talking about isolated self-communion, the kind of navel-gazing that does not want to communicate with others. But to distill, enrich, organise/disoganise one's thoughts, time is imperative.
What do students say when they write poetry (but don't read it?). Poetry is for saying what you feel. Poetry can do this, but it can also say what you feel about language, about what language can drag out of you, what you can squeeze out of words, what scaffolding you can build across the abyss to help you totter along. Or perhaps it's a tightrope you balance on all your life, negotiating over the drop to death and oblivion. Reading or listening to other poets helps you become more adept. Ignoring other writers implies that poetry is simply distilled emotion, not art.
When my mother, who developed Alzheimer's disease, began to lose words, she lost bits of herself. Her personality began to flake off like dry skin. She would ignore, deny, brush what had been said away. Every month she diminished as language deserted her. She wrote poetry as a young woman, as an old woman, never read other poets much. But she knew that when words began to melt from the core - the 2/3 submerged iceberg core of herself - it was only a matter of time before she would be left bewildered, standing in a puddle, an old woman without personality, unable to say the words that said her, that said the words she was.
Do animals lose words as they age as well? "Sit," I ask of our dogs. "Stay." "Love Me." "Defend." And the silliest command. "Speak." (We've never stooped to that one.)
What do they hear when we speak? I have avoided writing much about their thoughts, preferring to feel their fur, feel them lean into me, know through touching. Is this a failing on my part, avoiding the bond, not writing about the bond? It exists.
And horses. I spend so much time with them, on them, around them, trying to know them as individuals and as a species. They are my escape from language and into a pre-linguistic union. We eye each other off, we circle, I try to be one of them, to be the dominant mare, to love and control. Because in their animal world, it is never about equals. It is about safety, companionship, the group and, of course, the leaders. Then everyone knows their place, everyone is in their place, content. They know what to do, they do not have to say it (except with the occasional snort to warn off, or to call attention to themselves). "Here I am, it's feed time, in case you didn't remember."
After I helped my mare to have her foal, Scorpio, born at sunset in October 2005, I wrote about the experience in prose, not poetry. Why? Did I feel that there was too much detail to record, too much to say? Poetry - "the best words in the best order," paraphrasing Coleridge. Is one of the differences between prose and poetry that you feel obliged to say less in a poem? How hard is it to find the exact word? Poetry wants to grab you by the throat, to throttle you into understanding, if not submission. You can't do that by telling people to listen, by shoving facts in their faces. You have to call up the depths for them, drag them after you to the heights. This can be done with laughter as well as passion. You can shock and cajole and surprise. You can use what you believe and how you want others to believe, but you shouldn't wind up only preaching to the converted and alienating the rest of the herd. You have to use facts as you use language, with respect and suspicion. Words can use you as well as you use them.
When I wrote about Stardust Scorpio's coming, I wanted to record everything that happened (not knowing which parts I would decide did not fit later). I couldn't cram all those words into a poem. But there is poetry in the description, I think. The whole experience was a poem, a few moments in time, at sunset, at star rise, "a living through" that, like many experiences, will always move beyond words, but demands that words try to say it again and again.
Maybe poetry more than prose is our testimony to whatever experiences we have in our pre-linguistic, non-linguistic worlds. What we feel with lovers, children, animals, as part of the human herd watching others stampede over the cliffs, the essence of ourselves above and below the ordinary rutted road along which we rumble to death. That tells us we did feel or believe, that reminds us of that because we always have to come back from the precipice. We usually come empty-handed, elated or depressed, shocked or rapt, if we're lucky with a word or phrase ringing in our ears that we jot down on a scrap of paper. For when we find the time to expand on it, remember it. Soon. Now we've lived. Or died. Or suffered. But we always want to write about it later. To prove what? To remember what? To warn others? To share the act, the existing we did when we were simply doing it?
This absorption also applies to the act of writing, to the experience of forgetting that we're writing, when we're so immersed time isn't an issue. We sit at our desks, our computers, pens or fingers poised, to move into that space where the thinking is done for us, the words act as triggers to allow us to simply exist. They might be faulty words, sublime words, inane words. Maybe they combine well or not. We will have to play with them again later. Lose some, find others (the best ones). But this first fresh play is an experience we all know and relish. And revision can act as a key to the door to that other room, to the alternate universe of the writer, where the act of creation, so often an effort, so exhausting, becomes easy. We're part of the flow. We're part of the poem. We say it. It says us. We want to live there. To be there out of time.
That's why we keep plugging away. We're addicted to words. We pop them like pills. We purge ourselves of the ones that don't help. We nibble the pretty coloured ones, sip the syllables, savour the bitter aftertaste. Wonder what each dose will do. We seek that endless high.
CH: What is your most memorable childhood incident?
JK: Some good memories, some bad. The "most" makes it hard to decide.
CH: Do you believe in life after death?
JK: Wish I did. Not sure. Maybe on good days. No on bad days. Would love some proof. Please email with details.
CH: What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do?
JK: One of the hardest things was a gig I had in 1992 teaching poetry writing to reception to grade 2s in a junior primary school. I had five weeks as an Artist-in-the-Schools. It was also one of the most fantastic and happiest (yes, I've dared to use that word) experiences. Kids are natural poets and inveterate image-makers. They "see" in ways adults have forgotten.
In week three I was walking across the yard at recess, and one of the kids yelled out to me, "Hello, Poetry!"
CH: What kind of working environment best suits you?
JK: A place where I can't be interrupted - by others and myself. I've loved being at writers' centres (Varuna, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland), because I can immerse myself easily. I'm fairly disciplined, and once I'm away, I can get down to business. At home there are always interruptions, even when no one's in the house (I can distract myself - A-1 procrastinator). The dog might want to go out, I can see my horse in the paddock and his rug needs taking off because it's hot, the phone rings, my back seizes up because I'm sitting in a bad position, oh, I forgot to put in a load of wash, and I left my email on and can't resist looking (and answering). Then my job calls.
I am thinking about my ideal study (it's almost made it to the drawing table), away from the phone, the refrigerator, the laundry, everyone else. Minimal noise. Massive windows on two walls and the right kind of natural light. Flowering gum trees and coastal acacias we've planted in front of the few sand hills left in the distance, the ridge like a dinosaur's spine running along a hill, our horses grazing (rugged or unrugged), my mind uncluttered.
CH: Talk about when you first fell in love.
JK: This presumes I fell in love. Once, twice, thrice? Was the first time real, or imagined? Was the second time lust, not love? Was the third time "mature" or as intense as the first imagined passion, but this time realer because sex was involved? Hmmm.
My sister married me to Billy Geddes who lived across the street in Queens when I was eight. She made us rings out of spears of grass. I have just realised that we never bothered to get divorced.
CH: If you could do lunch with anyone, who would it be?
JK: I used to plan imaginary dinner parties. I wanted Samuel Beckett, Descartes, maybe James Joyce, Anaïs Nin would have been the life of the party. You can see this comes from my early modern period. Later after enlightenment Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft made it to my table.
Now I'd like to do lunch with a major publisher who would actually be interested in listening to what's happening to poetry in Australia. And of course they'd need to pay. On second thought, someone interested in becoming a philanthropist, a patron of the arts, would be nice. I have lots of ideas about how to spend their money.
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III Water to Water
"In the late stages demented people can no longer recognize friends and relatives. Their speech is reduced to a few repeated phrases." -- The Harvard Mental Health Letter [on Alzheimer's]
My mother is floating out to sea
without buoy or boat. She smiles as she drifts.
Light dapples in her eyes like sun on water
when rolling clouds pass over.
Almost eight years since her last visit.
We came here once to show off beach and land,
the sea she dipped a toe in.
She never saw dolphins or pelicans
that appear like a gift of effortless sleep.
Now the sea is dolphin smooth.
Nothing worth comment breaks the skin.
I imagine her drift beyond the reef,
suddenly riding breakers.
What was the word for that fish
with the triangle fin
that looks as if it is grinning?
She scans the horizon for a hint.
Only the glint of light on her cloud-grey hair
betrays where she is. And her unnamed fear.
Perhaps she'll meet dolphins after all
and ask for their secret:
where did that hand come from
tucked up in their sides?
I never asked if she were afraid
when she couldn't remember her grandsons' names.
I took it as given. "You must be frightened," I said,
speaking my terror into her skin.
I stand on the winter beach at dusk.
Swells threaten the track tonight,
the dunes next year, our unbuilt house in thirty.
I'm happy to see the ocean broken,
happy she's now far enough out
to take pleasure in pure motion.
My mother has taught me a lesson without a sound.
Words wash over her now.
It doesn't matter what she's floating in.
Even the word sea means nothing
because she becomes it.
Return to Eden
Crocodiles are decent creatures,
up front as their jaws
clack-clacking at your limbs.
They dribble in honest delight at cries for help.
Their eyes cruise above the slime twinkling like sunspots.
They promise other worlds with each chomp --
only a moment of pain
and you enter a primeval realm:
intestinal juices break you down without tears,
making new muscle and hide.
Finally you're motorised power, snug in the mud.
You, too, can maraud without mercy.
Everyone shuns those teeth like protected ivory.
Heartily feared but not hated,
your glorious gorge, your tail
that can pound a man into meal.
A truly catholic creature,
you'd let anyone cruise down your street
regardless of sex, creed, or colour.
Your great jaws only open to repeat:
I am what I eat.
Mammogram
She no longer turns sideways to the mirror,
avoids profiles in shop windows,
anything that reflects:
car doors, washing machines,
a man's eyes as she undresses.
She puts on a bra gingerly,
as if her breasts need to be cradled
like a baby's head.
The day is a minefield of symbols.
Anything could explode.
Her children forget to kiss her goodbye,
the car stalls on the way to work,
a freak wind almost absconds
with the client's letter she reads by a window.
Finally, the present begins again.
She looks, not at reflections,
but at pale, unknowing skin.
She passes the breast over
to the radiographer,
a gift she'd rather keep for herself.
The other woman arranges it on a plate
with the tact of those who know
exactly what to write on sympathy cards.
At least she is honest --
it can hurt, she says --
as she flattens the breast
like a butterfly under glass.
The radiographer leaves to protect herself,
but the specimen's trapped.
The bruise in her mind starts to spread
even before the vessels react.
A machine hums. She imagines the picture --
a negative of lunar landscapes.
It's over quickly as promised.
She waits in a cubicle
slightly bigger than a confessional,
wondering what to repent of first -- if needed.
Telling herself, it's only a scare.
Guessing at the possible cures.
The breasts, back in their cups,
tamed and sensible in cotton,
giving nothing away of the past
or the future.
II Still Life with Dog and Fire
"... [for humans live] in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant." -- Jorge Luis Borges
Does age smell? The older the dog grows
the more he smells like a labrador,
though he's border collie and blue heeler.
His skin shows his age, mottled like a wino's.
He's allergic to fleas. If he could talk,
he'd sound just like my mother.
"Not bad. But I've seen the doctor again."
Age is one damn thing after another.
The dog copes as best he can,
but does he recall when he could run
without dragging his rear end?
Does he think in his doggy way of limber days?
"Ah, I remember when I raced across the paddocks
after the horses -- once the filly tried to kick me."
He sleeps before the fire on a rug,
his breathing deep and even,
trusting in eternal love and gas.
I envy that oblivion.
His rhythm's like the waxing summer tide
that edges up the beach in perfect time
with firelight melting in the waves.
He doesn't seem to brood on age,
and so we don't brood with him.
His sleep forgives us all.
He lifts an eyelid as I rise
and pass to call my mother,
lowers it when I dial.
As I recite the caring catechism --
how, why, when --
feeling patience stiffen
and fail in the gloom beyond the warmth,
I lose myself in this present vision:
a young dog curled up on a rug,
sleeping by a never ending fire.
Acknowledgments to: The Mother Workshops (Five Islands Press, 2004), House Arrest (Wakefield Press, 1993). |
About the Poet Jeri Kroll
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Jeri Kroll is Professor of English and Program Coordinator of Creative Writing at Flinders University. Her critical publications cover children's literature, Samuel Beckett, contemporary poetry and the pedagogy and theory of creative writing. Her newest book, due late 2007, is Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research, Pedagogy (Multilingual Matters, UK), co-edited with Graeme Harper. Some of Jeri's twenty-two books have appeared in Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the UK and the US. They include collections of poems and stories, picture books and fiction for the young adult market. A Coat of Cats (another CBC Notable), with pictures by Ann James, helps children to understand the bond between pets and older people. The young adult novels Better Than Blue and the sequels Beyond Blue and Riding the Blues deal with migration, dyslexia and depression. Jeri's fifth collection of poems, The Mother Workshops, deals with the mother-daughter relationship in its final stages and the effects of Alzheimer's disease. Her poetry has been anthologised in Australia and overseas. |
[Above] Photo of Jeri Kroll by Jeff Chilton, 2007.
I Next I
Back I
Exit I
Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007) |
