poetics/ kinetics

I try not to identify with particular schools of poetry. I'm suspicious of gangs of whatever variety. There have always been a number of strands to my work. It is, and always has been, a mixture of more complex difficult works; 'easy speaking' poems where the diction is direct; and, the range of poems which can fall under the general heading of 'performance'. I've a great respect for poetry it's the nub of language. And language is what we, as a species, do best. Bridges and baskets, computers and comet spotting, train spotting and mathematics are all very well, but we are a communicating species and poetry is our natural genre.

Over the years we've become nervous of poetry, although we like it when it is labelled as something else. And we frequently label other things we like as 'poetry'. (Popular newspapers are always referring to this or that as being 'poetry' or 'poetry in motion' and the most minimal word- artists as being 'poets'.) The concept is much in the culture. That, and science.

I have an abiding interest in things scientific and my poems frequently refer to my interests either obliquely or directly. It's not always understood though - for example Redshift/Blueshift was, at least to one reader, thought to be a book about dresses. Thanks.

There are a few things before Redshift/Blueshift - most notably the book Head, Heart & Stone.but Redshift/Blueshift is where I did much of my experimental work - although the poems look conventional i.e like small grey squares), it's here that I most consistently played around with the multiple meanings of words and our ability to hold several meanings in our minds at once... and with grammatical enjambements, the fracturing and elision of sentences to use the full mind of the reader. I give much greater rein to this later with some long poems, especially & - but more of that later.

I once believed that you needed to smash up the topography to explore ambiguity, and was very impressed with this sort of thing when I first came across it - and contemporary poetry - In the 60s and 70s. But in fact I don't think it's necessary now.

Using ambiguity in the way I do in some of the poems in Redshift/Blueshift had several implications - not the least of which is for how poems are read, and what path you must choose to read them out loud.

Poetry appears to be static, but is kinetic. I like to talk about this at length. But this is not a lecture.

Poems have many paths - even the most simple. I was shocked (and secretly appalled) by one Australian poet I know who is abnormally strict about the way other people read his work to the point of extensively coaching another reader when he was unable to read himself. It is much more Interesting to hear a good reader read your work - and to see which paths they choose (or see). It has to be all there already without the coaching.

The poem must be elastic and accommodating - the multiple strands tie in together creating a more complex overall meaning. The poems least rich in this respect are the ones designed for performance ... where the rich veins of ambiguity have to be spread further from each other to take account of the listener's limited ability to juggle too much without access to the visual word,

This theory of people's ability to take in several messages at once and integrate them in unusual ways is based on my readings in the sciences - particularly neurology. Someone once said that music sounds like the mind is [that's why we like it]. Poetry does too. and it is no accident that a map of neural pathways and a schematic diagram of the meanings in a particular poem would not look dissimilar. (Neurologlcally, as I understand it, stimulus is both precisely located and having a diffuse effect.) This is why we like poetry, It reminds us of ourselves. The nature of us. It should be everything - including as Jan Harry once said, slight, if occasion demands it. Sometimes we just think about a simple thing, and it pleases us. Mostly it should mean something. Although not always.

Of course if you're going to write using a full range of ambiguity you need a particular type of reader. I thought I'd gone too far. No-one seemed to understand that the shifting perspective implied by the 'red shift / blue shift' of the title of that book, and the fact that the cover bears holf a dozen pairs of sunglasses and the first poem actually explains how to read the rest of the book meant that it depended on how to read the poems - what perspective you took. So I backed off a bit in the next book - making the poems cooler and more distant. Day Easy Sunlight Fine was a much pared down manuscript. And was short listed for the National Book Council's Poetry Award. What is published is what is left after considerable culling.

In the meantime there was a hybrid book which went to the United States and won a prize, Shining like a Jinx was supposed to be published there, but if it was, I never saw it. Although I've long since spent the prize money.

I went back to this idea of ambiguities ,. though that implies accident ... better to call them 'multivalences'. But not in the same way. I wrote a few pieces with very long lines. long deep breaths necessary to read them as written, fast, more or less unshackled text which washed over the reader/listener. Essentially what I put in were many of those things which go through the poet's mind when making a standard poetic line - the many strands weaving in and out. I thought I'd been editing myself too too much in Day Easy Sunlight Fine, even in Redshift/Blueshift.

The first of these new poems I wrote as an outsider ... ie white ... person in Australia. I was born here and quite a few generations on my great grandfather's side where born here apparently but I had no real understanding of where my country (in the Aboriginal sense) was, listened for a long time to tapes of Aboriginal songs (central desert) and their big and interestng rhythms which were difficult to make stick in your head and then one day I went out with a group to Cowra (it was a university excursion and I was an extra member of staff making up the numbers) and I listened to what went on around me and saw how things stood and how the Aboriginal people there were getting together as much culture as they could from the scraps that remained. And looked also at the group and saw the new imperialism(s) among the different nationalities.

The resulting poem is long, about 25 minutes to say (more with music). In the sections with the long lines I make the language tumble back on itself the way the didgeridoo makes the rhythms fat back into themselves and then shorter pieces within the poem, until the last line, 'and I am looking for my country'. There's a big difference in the way this poem is received in the city and in the country. Although unconventional and unapologetically contemporary in style (and certainly not a bush ballad) it is received best in the country among bush people who have a relationship with the land which is more ... grounded.

It's not a 'cocktail poem' - a short kick in the head - but, through trying to understand the country, the most Australian poem I've written. It won the Queensland Premier's Prize in 1993, and although it plainly identifies the author and the point of view of the poem (in the poem) as 'gubba'(white) more than once it has been mistakenly attributed.

'Yarmul was later rejected for broadcast by the ABC, I was told, indirectly, because they didn't want non-Aboriginal people talking about Aboriginal issues. It's never been officially rejected. I'd submitted it in the greatest humility: understanding, and it being the major premise of the poem, that the search for 'country' was important, and probably for me, an anglo as far as I know, doomed.

Less restrained is another work of the time '&' - an extended piece on my opinion of Australia's decision to participate in the Gulf war. It too uses the long line - to implicate the small actions and the large. It's a long poem which is, sadly, still relevant. These long poems are exhausting to write and to read. They are technically demanding - keeping that amount of passion in a poem and still ending up with a poem rather than a plate of porridge can be a difficult juggling act. & is quite a formal poem - although also indecorous, I'm pleased to say. You'll find '&' on this site. Read it aloud. Let the poem tell you how fast, how slow. What way.

I will, no doubt, write other poems which are formally similar, but, for the moment, have relaxed into an easier style. And direct statement. It's all very well for poetry to hide behind the 'small grey square' model where Rot much is said in a difficult way: for the moment I am taken up with the challenge of speaking directly, although still in poetry, to say things I think need to be said. I still use ambiguity productively. I don't care whether people think the poems are difficult ... or stupid for that matter ... I still have the belief that poetry should be all things: seriousness/ frivolity/ hope/ despair, and so still write the mixture of light performance pieces, heavier works for performance or page and short poems. Which is where I started.