Jan Turner-Jones - Author Interview: Poet

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

Apparently my mother read and sang nursery rhymes and poems from day one. I always liked to read poetry, shutting the door and saying it aloud. My grandmother used to recite all the old poems from her youth as well and I learnt them by heart. I liked “A Child’s Garden of Verse” and even the poems in the school readers. I moved on to favourites like Judith Wright and AD Hope.

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

Yes, I’m sure I get my facility with rhyming doggerel for kids’ poems and song lyrics from the early influences. The first time I realised poems needn’t rhyme was on reading David Rowbotham’s “The Cliff” – and I suddenly ‘got it’. Whether a poem rhymes or not, it must have perfect intrinsic rhythm.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

How to choose just one… I love the words of Australians Les Murray, Gwen Harwood, Bruce Dawe, Rhyll McMaster, Judith Rodriguez and Robert Adamson, among others, and the romantic poets are a given, including songwriters who are often superb lyricists.

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

“River”: my most anthologised poem (seven outings). It’s about one’s sense of place, the colours and events that form historical links to the present.

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

Local people seem to identify with the images. Somehow it often turns up in school assignments – and I receive many emails asking for clarification and explanation of my reason for writing it.

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

Sometimes at night/you can feel the river./In another town/I realise finally/this is my place… The night the migrant mother died/they searched the water first/found her floating, full of river/ arms outstretched to define her country.

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

The first few lines define the theme: a sense of place. The drowned woman shows the heartbreak of hovering between the new and known. Only the neutral river provides comfort.

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

Varied, but mainly thematic.They range from the big dark themes to happy songs for children.

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

Yes, I’ve read poetry everywhere – writers’ gatherings, festivals, small lounges and pubs. Luckily I have a loud voice and I’ve found the audiences responsive. These days I often work with children. I love their honest responses.

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

I write poems as they come but often they fall into thematic groups. When I wrote poetry about the early Moreton Bay settlement, I did write specifically, and once for a children’s volume, I wrote class topics – gold rush, bushrangers, migrants, etc. In the most recent acceptance (10 for a US anthology called “Poems from the Dark Side”) the poems were linked by their general misery! Most poets probably have sufficient poems to fit into thematic groups. There are only a few themes after all.

Author website: www.janturnerjones.wordpress.com



Fleda Brown - Author Interview: Poet

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

My father had memorized many poems and spouted them off at will. I remember “Invictus,” “The Highwayman,” “Gunga Din,” “Jabberwocky,” and on and on. He could quote them all flawlessly and with great enthusiasm.

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

Maybe. I am more a narrative poet than not, although what I write may not look narrative enough to suit my father, there’s a strong thread of story underlying whatever disjunctive dream-material may enter the poem. When I was a teenager, I studied the usual, Wordsworth, Browning, Dickinson, Shakespeare, etc., and I am sure the formal quality of most of that work influenced me. I found that the free verse anthologized poems were often boring ones. The real “meat” was in the formal ones. I hardly ever write very formal poems, or at least traditional form poems, but my poems are very sensitive to chiming sounds, stresses, and other formal qualities.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

Pick one other? That’s hard. Maybe Emily Dickinson, because she manages to surprise me in every single poem. She is almost preternaturally sensitive to sound, which enables her to slip around the edges of expected sound, so the surprise is there, too. Her subjects appear to be hermetic, but they are about as deep as a person can go into the psyche and remain readable. And when a poem can do that, I dare anyone to call it hermetic! The poets who seem most narcissistic to me are often ones who appear to be very “social” and “public.”

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

If I did that, the poem would be missing. Only its poor skeleton would be strewn, detached, across the sand. I will pick one: “The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower.” It is “about” a memory of what happened when my father received a postcard from a woman he must have had an affair with while he was stationed in the Phillipines.

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

It moves between the mind of the adult, remembering, and the feeling of being a child, helpless and confused. I think the disparate images of kayak and Eiffel Tower are interesting.

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

This is the way the poem begins:

The white sheet I remember, flashing across
the bed and I was watching my mother and the crying
and the bed disappeared and all was white
but it was not snow, it was my mind, and then, oddly,
she took us in a taxi to the movies, I think
it was Ben Hur. It was his postcard, now I know,
from that woman in the Philippines, back when
he was a soldier. All this, a movement
of shapes, nothing to hold onto. The kayak
is like that. It slides through the water and the paddle
goes on one side then the other, and there is the sway
of the boat and then the correction. It was
like that, and it was like the Eiffel Tower, all filigree
and lace, because I couldn’t see anything solid . . . .

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

It locates the poem in time and space. And it begins the two images that move through the rest of the poem.

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

My poetry used to be more narrative than it is now, although as I said, the thread is always there. I am strongly convinced that poetry should be accessible on the rational level as well as pointing our way into the irrational, non-linear place we often call the dream-world.

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

I give public readings fairly often, to audiences of varying size. I have read for hundreds and I have read for six people. I have read in public arenas and for book clubs.

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

Good question. In my most recent published collection (I have a new one coming out from BOA Editions in 2013), called Reunion, the poems were loosely connected by the thought of things coming together, having a reunion, of sorts. There were a few poems I wrote after my high school reunion, but that part didn’t form the basis of the book. There were poems about the three places I’ve lived: Delaware, Michigan, and Arkansas, and in a way, bringing those together made a reunion.

Author website: www.fledabrown.com



Annie Finch - Author Interview: Poet

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

As a child, I savored popular poems such as "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "The Night Before Christmas," read aloud to me by my family. As a teenager, I fell in love with more moody, passionate poems including "Luke Havergal," "Tithonus," "The Listeners," and "I died for Beauty," along with the songs of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.

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

Yes, absolutely. The rhythms and passions that first flowed through language for me in those years created channels that my rhythms and passions still tend to follow.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

William Butler Yeats. His work, in many genres of poetry, creates a world that feels complete in itself yet is profoundly engaged with the outside world in complex and challenging ways.

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

"Landing Under Water, I See Roots," the first poem in my book Calendars, addresses how suffering passed down through generations can threaten to stifle us yet how we can rise above it. In two four-line stanzas, the poem describes forests that grow from under water and threaten, yet fail, to overtake what we consciously create through love.

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

The poem challenges readers to read it in two different ways--one reading where the forests appear to overtake our consciousness, and the other where our consciousness rises above the forests. Readers at different stages of life have found it a hypnotic and often inspiring exercise to contemplate these simultaneous possibilities. The poem has been set to music by composer Stefania deKenessey and sung by a soprano whose soaring version of the final word "love" left no doubt as to the composer's triumphant interpretation of the poem.

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

And they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above

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

This is the hinge of the poem. Based on how we choose to read the word "might," we decide whether we want to believe that the "love" invoked at the end of the poem's last line does or does not transcend the burden of the past.

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

I make a clear distinction between narrative, lyric, and dramatic poetry, and I write in all three genres. I've written narrative poems that tell stories, such as "The Last Mermother" and the epic poem that is the backbone of my book Among the Goddesses. My dramatic poems are conversations between different voices, whether a short poem such as the two-stanza "Conversation," the book-length poem The Encyclopedia of Scotland, or something in between, such as the title poem of Calendars--a five-page poetic play with four characters from the myth of Persephone. But most of my poems, like "Landing Under Water, I See Roots," are lyrics. Lyrics are at once the easiest and the hardest for me to write. I am sometimes afraid to open myself to the lyric voice within, but I love to capture the feeling of a moment, in language that feels as if it came through me, not from me.

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

I often read my poetry aloud to people. So far, I have read to audiences ranging in size from one person to over a thousand. The response has always felt satisfying and authentic.

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

Yes; my first two books of poetry are structured around such collections. Eve is structured by a collection of poems written about goddesses, and Calendars is structured by a collection of poems written for the solstices, equinoxes, and the days between them. The most recently published such collection was a group of five poems about Tarot cards.

Author website: www.anniefinch.com



Nicholas Reid - Author Interview: Poet

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

As a child, I read voraciously and loved the poems of Walter de la Mare, especially those in his collection Peacock Pie which was given to me when I was eight. My mother was very good at reading to us (my sister, brothers and I) and one treat was hearing (often) all of Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamlin. As a teenager, the first book of really grown-up poetry I picked up and read with enjoyment, of my own volition, was (New Zealand poet) James K. Baxter’s The Fallen House (1954). I also went through the standard moody, self-pitying adolescent A.E.Housman phase and a rather intense Emily Dickinson phase.

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

I’m not sure how to answer this as my taste now is not my teenage or childhood taste and on the whole I do not relish the sort of poetry I enjoyed then. But sometimes I do catch myself in a mood of nostalgia for it, so I suppose it does interest me. And also, my stressing over FORM probably shows that part of me is a traditionalist.

Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?

Of poets known to the world I have a very high regard for Seamus Heaney and his humane concerns and sense of history [my main academic life is as an historian]. Of my fellow New Zealand poets, I like the maturity of Vincent O’Sullivan and C.K.Stead; the sardonic wit of Anne French; the versatility and thorough knowledge of form of Richard Reeve (who is my junior by quite a few years).

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

If I could summarise one in a paragraph it wouldn’t be a very good poem, but for what it’s worth my poem A Racehorse Down a Coal Mine [from my collection The Little Enemy] began as a protest against the attempt to harness the arts for propaganda purposes (especially in coercive states). The reference is to the early Soviet poet Mayakovsky, who committed suicide as he realized the doleful direction in which his country was heading.

[POEM FOLLOWS]

A RACE-HORSE DOWN A COAL MINE
(Mayakovsky)
(for Judith)

Strangle him with leather thongs.
The brace and harness that he wore
will draw the iron cart in creaking
cortege – his own muscular funeral.
The froth grows cold on his jaws
and flanks beneath the coal dust.
Backward-turning hocks and fetlocks tired with strain,
and again the prescribed misery
of parallel tracks before his blinkered eyes.
Impulse of grass, instinct of ribbon
breasted, memory of fierce combat
and his five foot spear erect and
penetrating.

Collar him with wood and work.
The way is dark, the tracks inevitable
as duty, as human will in triumph,
this utilitarian imposition.

Itch to gambol, itch to snort,
itch to joy in the speed of the animal
moment, unreflective and sure, shitting
in clean hard globular essence of grass.
Wind and sun would lick him, flies
madden to a horse-hair whip.
He would breed and bite apples
and laugh ha-ha among the trumpets.

Parody Judaeo-Christian dominion over beasts.
This is your way, racehorse down a coal mine.
To the greater glory of the Five Year Plan
you will strain as man must strain.
Horse no more, carbon compound,
beast dragging, peasant bleeding,
poet in harness, cloud in trousers.
A man on four self-chosen hooves.

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

[Always assuming that it does have appeal to readers!!] By its dominant metaphor as announced in the title – the absurdity of incongruity, as in an artist [or poet] harnessed to the wrong work. Also in the sounds and in the dialogue of two distinct voices – the voice of the state and the voice of the horse, combined into the voice of the poet.

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

Collar him with wood and work.
The way is dark, the tracks inevitable
as duty, as human will in triumph,
this utilitarian imposition.

In these four lines, the last three words “this utilitarian imposition” are deliberately heavy, awkward, clumsy and non-musical – like the totalitarian concept they are intended to convey. The words “human will in triumph” are allusive, referring in part to the Biblical dominion of human beings over animals, but also in part to the title of the notorious Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will, my point being that one totalitarianism is very much like another.

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

It is the voice of the state, beginning with an imperative verb (“collar him”), but modified by the viewpoint of the poet and therefore probably showing more self-awareness of motive than the brute state would show.

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

Again a hard one. Not narrative. Lyric I suppose. All poetry is thematic and at times I have consciously created character portraits. I find I do like composing monologues in the voice of somebody else – sometimes for satirical purposes. In a way, this is a distant descendant of Browning “dramatic monologues”, so maybe my mother’s childhood readings of The Pied Piper led somewhere.

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

I read my own poems out loud to myself at various stages of their composition.I have six times participated in public reading of some of my poems. On three of those occasions it was an “open mike” affair to restive and/or indifferent pub crowds, and in such cases you are a nutter if you don’t read something rowdy, accessible and rhythmic, which I proceeded to do. On the other three occasions I was actually paid (a very little) to read my stuff to a respectful and polite audience of poets and afficionados. In truth, I’m not sure which audience I prefer.

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

Theoretically yes, but I have only one collection to my name so far: The Little Enemy. This is a bit of a bind, because publishers seem to prefer poems to be thematically connected so that they can sell them as collections, but the reality is that I tend to compose individual poems rather than thinking of their relationship with others. Having said that, however, I gathered the contents of into four distinct sections – poems of childhood recall; poems of adult experience; poems with religious overtones; and poems written in response to literature and the other arts. As for the second collection upon which I am currently working, it is being strictly organized around a central theme. This is a hard discipline for me.

Author website: http://reidsreader.blogspot.com/