Oct 10, 2011

Siobhan Harvey - Author Interview: Poet

What kinds of poetry, including songs, did you experience as a child and teenager, and did you have some favourites?

I was born in the Midlands to lower working-class parents. There wasn’t much poetry or books generally about. I heard the occasional nursery rhyme and song, but nothing which I feel now influenced my later writing of and interest in poetry. For me, poetry hasn’t arisen from a childhood experience of it, but rather, from an early age, seems innately to have been my place of belonging.

Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?

No.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

For me, this is the hardest of your questions to answer. It’s like asking, what’s my favourite poetry collection, novel or short story? There are so many, and the complete answer shifts in time. Presently, I’m honoured to be a guest-writer at the 2011 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Indonesia, and I’m having my eyes opened up to some wonderful young and established Australian poets, as well as some American poets like Stephen Haven whose work is new but vital to me. But, if I had to pick just one poet whose work I admire, it would be the American poet, Billy Collins. Beyond his accessibility, there are deep layers to his poetry which keep me reading and rereading his work. I see in Collins’ poems – and in Haven’s – how startling imagery is married to a beautifully wrought structure. I love Collins’ thoughts on structure which, to paraphrase, run thus – that a poem is complete when it appears aesthetically cohesive on the page. There’s a science behind that, which I think Collins brings to his structure, a mathematical equation and solution. Roughly, each line holds the same length, metre and cadence, and roughly, stanzas are formed according to a patterned number of lines. There result is both a poetic and scientific order which always guides me when I’m crafting my work.

How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?

I’ve chosen my poem, ‘Tooth’ which is included in my collection, Lost Relatives. It arose when my son was very young. We returned home from a morning spent at our local beach. He was tired and slipped on our wooden floor, knocking his left, front tooth out of his mouth. Even as a first-time mother, I knew this wasn’t right. I dashed him to the hospital, and fortunately he was fine. Only when we got home did I find the small tooth-shaped indent in our wooden floor; I sobbed. Over the next few weeks, I wrote a poem, an elegy really to our experience. The breakthrough for the poem came when I realised that, as a poem about the molar, I could use teeth as a gauge of my son’s age.

How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?

Of all my poems, ‘Tooth’ has proven the most popular, included in anthologies such as Emma Neale (Ed.), Swings + Roundabouts: Poems about Parenting, Random House NZ, 2008, appearing on writer’s blogs and being nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize (US). From what readers, editors and judges have told me, the appeal of ‘Tooth’ is its thematic examination of parenthood and of the traumas of being a mother and child in an open, caring, sensitive way without ever straying into that literary territory which poems about children can so often drift into, the saccharine. For me, I’m proudest of the opening line; my son is simple proud that he has a poem written about him.

Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?

Tooth

Today, you’re twelve teeth old,
and we fossick for shells,
star-fish, pipi and paua

until the tide goes out
when we wave goodbye
to yachts moored in the marina.

At home, you float
across polished floors
until you keel over.

Your jaw leaves an alveolus
in the matai deep enough
for a tear-drop’s caress…..

How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?

This four stanza section introduces the poem – linguistically, thematically and descriptively – to the reader, and as such is a strong foundation for the remainder of the work. Additionally, all the key constituent parts of this section of the poem, such as the metaphor of the tooth as an indicator of age and the nautical imagery, will resurface in the rest of the poem.

Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?

Accessible, concerned with language and linguistic interplay, buoyed by sharp imagery and engaged with dissecting theoretical and thematic tenets of displacement.

Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?

Yes, I read my poetry aloud to audiences. For me, a poet’s ability to read their work to audiences is an integral way of keeping poetry alive, and enabling audiences to experience the work as more than an entity which only exists on the page. The size of audience depends on the venue – we’re fortunate in Auckland to have a very vibrant poetry reading community, and so audiences here can reach the hundreds. I put a lot into my readings and have worked hard over the years to refine my vocal and emotional delivery of my work. Audience responses have fortunately been exceedingly positive thus far.

Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?

My first full collection of poems, Lost Relatives appeared this year and was launched at the start of New Zealand Book Month (March). The book took me 10 years to complete which is as long as I have lived in my new homeland, Aotearoa New Zealand. For me, the two things are no coincidence. I didn’t actively choose to reside in New Zealand; rather I came to live here because I fell in love with a New Zealander. Since my arrival, my engagement with my adopted land as a migrant has been mirrored by the inspirations for and issues tackled by my poems. In essence, Lost Relatives is a collection about migrant and displacement experience – the hardships, the deficiencies, but also, importantly, the joys. That is not to say that the poems in the collection are factual. They are not; they are fictional. Rather it’s to say that the things which map my creativity – an interest in exploring the politics and poetry of displacement – are also the things which map my existence in Aotearoa New Zealand. As such, Lost Relatives deals with the loss of (what we call in New Zealand) whanau which is a Maori word with a broader understanding of family than is held by Western tradition. Whanau embraces concepts of friendship and close relationships. In Aotearoa New Zealand, one of the dominant things I missed was friendship. I realised, before I came to my adopted homeland, I had taken the nature of friendship and my friends too lightly. I sought to explore this loss alongside the difficulties of assimilation in a new land in the poems which constitute the first two sections of the book, The Exile Lands and Whanau Farewelled. Sections three and four of the book, My Son and I and My Theory of Relativity deal with the second meaning inherent in the book’s title – ergo, the loss of relativity. By relativity, I don’t mean the scientific imperative associated with the term, but rather the philosophical, particularly non-Western, theory of relativity, which posits that we construct our existence and our place in time from our connection to the land, our whanau and so forth. So in these sections, the poems explore the building of a new whanau and new connections in an adopted homeland.

http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/Harvey,-Siobhan.htm

Tooth

Today, you’re twelve teeth old,
and we fossick for shells,
star-fish, pipi and paua

until the tide goes out
when we wave goodbye
to yachts moored in the marina.

At home, you float
across polished floors
until you keel over.

Your jaw leaves an alveolus
in the matai deep enough
for a tear-drop’s caress.

As I stroke you,
your eyes collect water;
your gums are an ocean of blood.

But only when you’re sleeping,
do I discover a tooth
anchored to blue woollen blanket.

Suddenly, you’re eleven teeth old
and have grown, like Lazarus,
younger beneath moonlight.

White and hull-shaped,
the tooth’s a boat,
isolated by low tide.

In the morning,
I’ll show you how it can rest
safely upon its starboard.

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