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V: So here we are at the end of the mentorship process! It's the first time I've done something quite like this. It's different from working with an editor or dramaturg even. But you've mentored quite a few people. What does mentorship mean for you?
M: My position is that life and writing intersect all the time, and it's impossible to separate them. I get to know an emerging writer's work but I also [[get to know them->Immense privilege]]. Whilst it is helpful to give written feedback without an interpersonal discussion, people who write creatively, their writing is enmeshed in every part of their being. It’s a way of being in the world. It seems appropriate we meet and get to know each other and each other’s work.
[[>>>->Images]]
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V: I'm not sure I believe this, but I wonder if there's something more interior to poetry compared to other forms - even if you're not sharing something very private or it's fictional...
M: I don't know why but I agree. It's something that comes up in discussion with students. Prose is a different creature, you ask different questions of it. There's something in compression and distillation - a good poem springs open, like a Tardis.
V: And every Tardis is very particular to every new Doctor. <==>
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M: You know, I often think what an immense privilege to be someone's mentor. Everyone I meet in mentoring is just an extraordinary human being, passionate and smart and talented, I find it thrilling. It's a re-energisation for me as you get older as well. It becomes a different kind of relationship the longer you do it. I think it's so important for younger poets as well. The things that people have said to me when I was younger, or [[even at 15->Marcellapoem]], have stayed with me as some shining thing. And I see in younger poets, the part of me that was like that then, full of [[doubts-->Private space]] or concerns or dreams - if I can help them navigate that... <==>
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V: Being at the end of the program, we've just gotten feedback on our poems from the editors. I've written a few and two are going in the current *Westerly*. I'm looking at the comments now and one of them talks about the 'strength of imagery'. It's weird but I never think about imagery as such—
M: I agree with the comments!
V: I just find it interesting, everyone has different ways into their work. Do you start with images?—I think your poems are often about [[unpacking an image->Mpoem2]], you start like whoosh! with a declaratory one, and then it gets finer and finer.
M: Do I? Yes, I think I do [[yes->Image2]]. I think everyone has different processes and that's as it should be, but it's also fine to change. What do you think yours is?
V: Mmm...voice? I think, poetry's like the inside your head, so distinct and intimate. I'm intrigued by different states of mind and subjectivity, what [[internal->Interiority]] structures sound like, whether your own or otherwise.
[[>>>->Summer Thoughts]]<==>
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M: That makes a lot of sense! Because of your theatrical background, there's some similarity there—the performative, and spectacle of it—what happens on stage is similar to what happens in a poem, the audience has to be made to imagine much more than is available to us, every part of us needs to be engaged.
V: That's interesting, I haven't made that connection. Now...a poem I remember you liked 'Summer Thoughts', is maybe an example of what I'm talking about. With this poem, I started out with a feeling of this searching, young person and had an idiosyncratic sense of that "voice", half-ironic, half-truly sad, which you've mentioned maybe I've done in other [[work->Cordite]].
M: Yes, this poem, let me just [[read a bit to myself->excerptsummer]]...yes, I love this, it gives me a visceral reaction. I think what you think of as voice, is equally just technique. It's highly technical. There's an intense rhythm, it's rhythmic, the metre of it is very controlled—it reminds me of [[Annie Dillard's->Dillard]] analogy of stunt pilot. See the stresses of the consonants in the last two lines of the first stanza 'could send the right dog keeling/a fat mutt cracking its teeth' and earlier the sudden slow down with 'cool cool light'. This is an awareness of sound that might go back to your life in performance. What is interesting about this poem, and some of your others, is that it has several parts, and is actually quite fluid overall, but in its smaller parts is very controlled.
V: That probably speaks to the persona's experiences. I'll have to [[think->internet]] about that more.
[[>>>->The I voice]]
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V: Despite having this strain of poems that are about the cadences of various 'I' personas, or fractured selves, one of the great bits of this program has actually been experimenting with more traditional structures and more distant tones in some ways.
M: Not everyone can do fixed forms, actually.
V: I really enjoy it. One of the poems in the current Westerly 'Panic Attack' is a [[pantoum->pantoum]], and using such a rigid form actually unlocked the subject matter more I think. And gave me new ways into it.
M: I think it's a great practice. It's a difficult and unusual thing for an emerging poet to do, but very valuable.
V: Like when you're stuck maybe.
M: Yes, Wordsworth said something about writing within constraints paradoxically enhancing creativity.
V: Like sitcoms—great sitcoms work like math, but still manage to find their unique take on the world and innovate within it. Sorry I love sitcoms.
M: No that makes sense!
[[>>>->Monster form]]<==>
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M: Those forms are a good place to return to. You can't wait for the muse to fall on your head. Pushing through the terror of the page is important. It never stops!
V: Definitely, but I think programs like this are so helpful for that. Knowing I had to send you stuff every few weeks, bad or good. And sometimes, that let me experiment more or send stuff that I thought was 'nothing' but then turns out to be something. Like 'Childhood' - a prose poem, I remember thinking, do I even bother sending this?
M: Yes, I love prose poems! And I love [[this->Childhood]] poem! What it does is that it continuously surprises, like with the [[pilot analogy->Dillard]] we talked of earlier, yet each detail and image makes sense in the world. Prose poems work differently, at a different density, and this poem builds.
V: I remember you said at the time to read Maggie Nelson's [[Bluets->MN]] as as something that worked similarly. I've been reading her, she's great.
M: Yes, and I'm also going to recommend [[Ania Walwicz->Ania]]. She does a lot of work with assumed voices and writes about the immigrant experience. She's an 80s poet. Reading this now, I'm struck by the horror you bring to this naive voice, in lines like: "We were like giant crows in the mist/...I clung to a snail I found drowning in a puddle."
V: Oh horror is an interesting word!
M: It's very dark, but darkly funny. See this line: "Well, my mother was no well-behaved import", it's biting, bitingly funny, and yet tells of something darker and wondrous.
V: Maybe we should talk about the "funny" for a bit.
[[>>>->Humour]]
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V: Speaking of difficult things, you mentioned [[horror->Monster form]] earlier?
M: Yes, there is an element of the monstrous to your work, an element of threat. Sometimes it's diffuse like in [["Pre-emptive Mourning->mourn]]" where "forks glint" and sometimes it's in a character like [["your mama"->mum]] or explicit in [["Demon"->dem]]
V: I hadn't thought of that, but looking through now I see, as you say, difficult things—war, [[loss->Private space]], migration, bodies under threat. And also often, this monstrous thing, though you could maybe call it fabulism sometimes. Is that a technique or trope that comes up for [[you->displacement]], or that is often a way into these things?
M: I think more in my prose, in my novels. But it absolutely can be, if used in an excavating way. In these poems, it doesn't stay on the surface. They are full of observations and interrogations. To use the uncanny well, when it is done with force—it actually comes from a very close observation of the everday. That's a good place to return to.
V: I find it interesting regarding the slight element of fabulism that creeps into our work, how you say it comes from an observation of the everyday, but also I was raised with magical thinking—
M: Me too, completely.
V: Which I don't believe in, but it just, it makes the world a charged place. So it's not unusual to find these elements in the everyday. I never want to represent anything glibly though.
M: No, I think it's powerfully rendered because there's close detail and authenticity in the work. Even in poems like [['Exodus'->Ex]] which don't use those tropes of transformation much, there's still a sense of this difficult bodily experience.
V: I wrote that on prompt from you actually! We were talking about the past, and whether I'd write about any of it, and I remember hesitating. And then thinking, well—that's a good reason. That it unsettles me. Let's see what comes of it.
[[>>>->End]]
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V: Sometimes I have this sense or obstruction that humour in poetry is regarded as a lower form somehow, low art—
M: Yes there can be that view. It's an old idea with old roots, it's Aristotle.
V: I'm trying to think of many poets who do it.
M: It's interesting—Australia is viewed as a humorous country, but I don't know that it's a defining [[feature->Forbes]] of our poetry.
V: I'm suspicious of it too sometimes. There's a lot of conversation currently about the way comedy can deflect from the genuine, or the political. And poetry feels like one of our few cultural spaces where we can be earnest about ourselves and reach for the sublime, it's part of what I [[value->Private space]] about it.
M: Definitely, but I don't think your use of of it is deflecting at all. It's completely [[embodied->Forbes]]. It never feels preachy. The trick is to come with empathy and specificity. I'll recommend [[Ania->Ania]] again because she is playful in her work too. But if it is authentic, it can speak about very difficult or traumatic things.
[[>>>->Loss/fabulism]]
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the peach-skinned girl in french class
voluptuous articulate & rich says
she thinks I am un galion
two dozen girls look back & forth between
her steady eyes on me
& me all flushed with love
—Excerpt: 'these things I remember from fifteen', Marcella Polain, //Therapy Like Fish//, 2008<==>
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V: I hadn't written poetry for a while before this program. I'd done it a lot as a kid and in high school, then sort of stopped as other forms of work took over. I don't necessarily want to draw this bow, but I felt the urge to again after a few big life changes.
M: Yes.
V: Maybe because compared to many forms, it feels more like a way of carving [[private space->Interiority]]. A lot of the other work I do is very public, or involves lots of people. <==>
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He has eyes like a sky he wants me to fall into.
On his wall is an illusion, an invitation
a shutter that opens over miles of sea.
—Excerpt:'Therapy like fish', Marcella Polain, //Therapy Like Fish//, 2008<==>
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there’s a bee sting that draws dave’s palm
back he waves it out there in the open air and then
sucks on the puff of jelly skin though you know that’s
not gonna help dave
—Excerpt: 'the anarchists of hyde park (and my dad)', Vidya Rajan, //Cordite 84: Suburbia//, 2018
M: That poem made me cry.
V: Oh that's good to hear! I struggle with whether humour or irony can be [[distancing->Humour]] sometimes. <==>
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...
it’s the only one I can remember.
Cause of Mad Men or 90s ads.
Maybe they’re effective after all
Do you mean menthol?
I don’t know Ganesh.
I’m sorry I came into your servo.
You have acne to deal with and racism probably
and this cool, cool light.
The kind that’s trapped between almost white and a
dying blue that should always be flickering.
Or is always flickering, but
at a frequency imperceptible
to the functional human brain.
Though it could send the right dog keeling,
a fat mutt cracking its teeth
against the night.
Or me any minute now.
...
A Victorian woman would lie
on a better couch than this.
...
—Excerpt: 'Summer Thoughts', Vidya Rajan, 2017. <==>
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The plane looped the loop, seeming to arch its back like a gymnast...the human pilot, Dave Rahm, worked in the cockpit right at the plane’s nose; his very body tore into the future for us and reeled it down upon us like a curling peel...like any fine artist, he controlled the tension of the audience’s longing. You desired, unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return to a certain portion of the air, and he fulfilled your hope slantingly, like a poet, or evaded it until you thought you would burst, and then fulfilled it surprisingly, so you gasped and cried out.
—Excerpt:'The Stunt Pilot', Annie Dillard, //The Writing Life//,Harper Collins, 1989<==>
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These lungs are Siamese twins.
They cannot help but fold to each other.
—Excerpt: 'Panic Attack', Vidya Rajan, //Westerly// 63.1, 2018
V: I'm just reading what a pantoum is quickly to make sure I've got it right. It's "a poem of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first." And I thought it was European, but it originates in Malaysia. The fun thing I found was finding ways to tinker within it, because each change says something significant.
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V: I immediately think of John Forbes, whom I love and is very funny.
M: He is.
V: There's a [[poem->Forbes2]] on a painting actually he has that you'd like if you haven't read it already. Also...Bruce Dawe, I remember from high school was sometimes silly or would be humorously critical of something, like in that famous [[Good Friday->GF]] poem—
M: Yes he can be satirical too. I know the poem you're talking of. I think there is often a satirical thrust to a lot of comic poetry in general, and when it occurs in this country. There's a distance there.
V: I'd not thought of that—is it gendered? I mean, not that anything's intrinsic, but I'm thinking of contemporary poets with that playful voice and I'm thinking of women like [[Hera Lindsay Bird->Bird]], have you read her?
M: No but I will!
V: She's got this very millennial voice you could say but it's very emotive and bodily and arresting.
M: I think that's a rarer approach. To have the ridiculous or the comedic gaze arise from an embodied place. From closeness.
V: Embodied is a great way to think of it,from your interior and your sensations. [[Sharon Olds->Olds]] who you've recommended and whom I now love, has it too, she's so personal and yet, wicked.
M: Yes, a funny thing actually—a male poet who I once mentioned Olds to said "ah but she's a woman's poet".
V: What does that even mean?? <==>
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We were so big there and could do everything. When you have lots you know it. Lucky and lucky and money. My father was the tallest man in the world. Here we were nothing. There vet in the district and respect.
—Excerpt: 'So Small', Ania Walwicz, //Autographs: Contemporary Australian Autobiography//, 1996
You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me.
—Excerpt: 'Australia', Ania Walwicz, //An Anthology of Recent Australian Prose 1981//, 1981
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Our people are an unpleasant people, my mother told me. She chopped onions with a knife between her teeth. Don't cry over war, she barked...
Our sweaters turned black and clung to our bodies. We were like giant crows in the mist. I clung to a snail I'd found drowning in a puddle...
...my father took to tailored suits. At first, we indulged him...
—Excerpt: 'Childhood', Vidya Rajan, 2017<==>
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V: I think about the internet a lot. I'm wondering if these looping, fragmented voices are part of that—is it an aesthetic response to, this is going to sound wanky, unstables selves?
M: I think it can be but also the unstable self—it's not wanky at all—is an important experience and it's important for writers and artists and performers to mine that to reflect their world.
V: So it's not something you're seeing an upsurgence of in your students?
M: Not particularly or any more than usual, I see more attention to particular tones. But I think instability comes from a different space, pre-internet, outside of pop culture, and can reflect all kinds of experience—such as migration or [[displacement->displacement]].
V: Yeah, you're right, it's an old technique, just refracted through new experiences.<==>
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V: Do you paint?
M: I don't no! And I'm not sure I ever intend to. But I work a lot with visual art. I love to do that. I actually work on projects that are responses to painting. I work with artists to make books that are text and image.
V: That sounds great. I did a thesis on ekphrasis—which is writing about images. Maybe that's subconsiously made its way into the work. Do you think it can be nice to have an artform you're very interested in and aren't necessarily practicing?
M: Yes it keeps some of the awe, though having said that the more I learn technically about poetry, the richer and more wonderful it is—so maybe it's just that I'm not a painter!
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V: We have some similar family histories and experiences, with these topics.But also it's not history, the experiences—they're in your bones.
M: Yes, completely. Where else would these things go? It's intergenerational. In general as a society, I think we have become very invested in silencing the cost—
V: The cost of difficult lives, or difficult things, or people on the margins. It is weird in a multicultural society, to have to struggle to shed light on people's experiences.
M: And it's foolish. It's very foolish. It seems really important, and you can see poetry as part of this, to trouble back. Even just by writing under the surface of things, with empathy. Hopefully, it gives people a rehearsal of experience.
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Any frayed waiting room copy of //Who//
could catch this scene: flash Euro-
trash surveys a sulky round faced
...
—Excerpt: 'On Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra', John Forbes, //Collected poems 1970-1998//, 2001<==>
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You men there, keep those women back
and God Almighty he laid down
on the crossed timber and old Silenus
my offsider looked at me as if to say
nice work for soldiers...
—Excerpt: 'And a Good Friday was had by all', Bruce Dawe, //Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1957-1997//, 1978<==>
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maybe i should open up a savings pyramid
with a whole bunch of trapdoors and malarias
to keep the financial anthropologists
i mean bankers out
my emeralds cooling under the ground like beautiful women’s eyes
—Excerpt: 'Pyramid Scheme', Hera Lindsay Bird, //Poetry//, 2018 <==>
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“Well, if there is great sex
in heaven," we used to say, “or even just
sex, or //one kiss//, what’s wrong
with that?!” Then I’m dreaming a map of the globe, with
bright pinpoints all over it —
in the States, the Caribbean, Latin America,
in Europe, and in Africa —
everywhere a poem of hers is being
read. Small comfort.
—Excerpt: 'Voices', Sharon Olds, 2010<==>
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That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.
—Excerpt: Maggie Nelson, //Bluets//, 2009<==>
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M: I really hope you keep writing.
V: Well, me too.
M: And send me things, anytime! I'd love to keep reading.
V: Thank you! That's very generous of you. This whole experience has been really unexpected and enlightening. And I think...that's a good place as any to wind up for today!
M: Yes, good talking to you. Take care.
V: You too.
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They left it up to us. As if we were
the board-makers, or the painter
inking the black squares...
—Excerpt: 'Exodus', Vidya Rajan, 2017<==>
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He was a sentry
for a fractured country
and this is one duty too many.
—Excerpt: 'Pre-emptive mourning', Vidya Rajan, //Westerly// 63.1, 2018<==>
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...took her breath with her
as we gathered round the bed.
The fence of us useless
to keep it all in -
...
—Excerpt: 'Your mama', Vidya Rajan, 2017<==>
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Something grows
in this hot room.
Something is in the fortress.
Now that I have given...
—Excerpt: 'Demon', Vidya Rajan, 2017