Poetry in Process

Hello poets and readers,

“The logics of law and poetry boil meaning and power down to their barest components.”

We’re delighted to be able to bring you an interview with Alison Whittaker, a Gomeroi poet and author of the collections Lemons in the Chicken Wire and Blakwork, shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry 2019.

An earlier blog post introduced Alison’s ideas about law and poetry and highlighted an experimental technique which makes use of trigrams – a device used in Google optimisation – to show us what the law considers important in a legal case. This technique is used in poems like ‘the skeleton of the common law’. She discusses these and other issues more fully here, and we’re proud to be able to share her insights with the world.

References

Alison Whittaker, Lemons in the Chicken Wire (Magabala Books, 2016)

Alison Whittaker, Blakwork. (Magabala Books, 2018)

Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi multitasker from the floodplains of Gunnedah in NSW. Her debut poetry collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, was awarded the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship in 2015, and was published by Magabala Books in 2016. Alison was co-winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2017 for her poem, ‘Many Girls White Linen’. Her latest book, Blakwork, was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2019.

Poetry – “Most of the time, it’s an accident of composition.”

Hello poets and readers,

We’re delighted to be able to bring you an interview with Filipino-Australian poet Merlinda Bobis. Bobis’ assertion that the writing of poetry is accidental is reflected in the title of her most recent collection Accidents of Composition (2017). Her poetry is characterised by a sense of universal connection with the natural world, reflected in the use of other voices and points of view, including the fishes and birds of the air. Writing is part of that whole, with art as natural an act as the world spinning (2017a, 65).

Bobis’ writing is extremely embodied; lines like “always flesh / never relic” (2017a, 50) reflect this orientation, even where acts of remembrance concern the dead – in another poem, the dead breathe as the living do (2017a, 100). Remembering is an important function of literature, and contemplation of the victims of war and colonialism and refugees are found both in Accidents of Composition, as well as in earlier works, such as the epic poem ‘Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon’ (from Summer was a Fast Train without Terminals, 1998), and ‘Detainee’ (originally published in Rituals, 1990).

Her writing also contains multilingual elements, used in original ways, for example in her poem ‘Siesta’ (from Summer was a Fast Train’), the footnotes give a translation of Filipino phrases but also add new lines which offer challenging cultural insights – Bobis calls this a ‘footnote poem’ (2017b, 24).

She is also a novelist and playwright and the different genres have obviously informed each other. For example, the structure of Accidents of Composition can make it seem like a verse novel, with its recurrent themes and references to cycles and arcs, and a sense of poems speaking to each other, almost like cinematic scenes. Back we come, then, to connections.

References

Merlinda Bobis, Accidents of Composition: . . . There could be Accidents of Kindness Here (Spinifex, 2017a)

Merlinda Bobis, ‘Subversive Translation and Lexical Empathy: Pedagogies of Cortesia and Transnational Multilingual Poetics’, in Narratives of Difference in Globalised Cultures, eds. B Martin-Lucas & A. Ruthven (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017b, 13-35)

Hello

In our recent podcast with experimental poet Christian Bök, we mentioned his 10 rules for writing lyric poetry, and hinted that we might be able to return to this topic at a later date. In this additional podcast, Christian talks us through his ten rules. This guide, highly useful for new and aspiring poets, also reminds more mature poets of the fundamental elements of good writing, including ways to monitor poems and make sure they remain sharp and suggestive. I hope you find the podcast as useful as I have.

I conduct experiments through language.

Christian Bök

Hello poets and readers,

We’re

Bök extends poetry’s range. His first book, Crystallography, ‘misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology’ (156). The geological processes described in the sequence ‘Geodes’, for example, includes self-reflexive injunctions and statements which create a form of process poetry – where the act of creating becomes part of the content. Scientific vocabulary is gathered for our aesthetic pleasure. If, in Wilfred Owen’s experience, the poetry is in the pity, in Bök’s it lies in the fluorescent algae mimicking constellations in a cave, where the author attempts to ‘saturate with new meaning / the dead layers of rock’ (48).

His

His most recent collection The Xenotext, Book 1 explores the encoding of genetic sequences into cells which ‘read’ a poem and become a machine for generating their own poem. This work further develops Bök’s relationship with the natural world in the context of taking ‘instructions’ from molecules and genetic sequences for the composition of poetry. Each of Bök’s projects have been years in the making and demonstrate the work of a poet committed to both craft and the future development of poetry.

Reference

Christian Bök, Crystallography (Coach House Books, 2003)

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (2001), a bestselling work of

Melinda

We have a society . . . in which artists are free to do and say mostly what they like without being . . . thrown into jail for it, and we should celebrate that fact and use it to aspire to be a society in which there is a lot of art for everyone.

Melinda Smith

Melinda’s forays into form include traditional lyrics, but also poems that prise phrases apart to find new ways to speak. She is particularly open to the use of fragment and found materials. Her work is also notable for its experiments with point of view, taking on the personas of diverse historical and contemporary characters. Smith seems to work at times almost in the manner of a method actor. In our interview, she likens herself to a novelist who hasn’t yet written a novel, but uses character, setting and plot in diverse ways in her writing process. Found material also aids her in creating new voices. Despite the seriousness of many of her subjects, Smith’s work remains playful and surprising. She talks about bearing witness in this interview and holding up a fractured mirror which might produce work that’s rich and strange enough to have another life beyond the moment portrayed.

I hope you find the podcast inspiring and enriching. Please post any comments below. Thoughts, ideas or discussions about the process of writing poetry are much appreciated.

Melinda Smith is the author of six books

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