ANDREW BURKE: In going back through
your works, I reread READING AUSTRALIAN
POETRY (University of Queensland Press, 1987) and started revising my
literary theory texts. In the end I stumbled on Aristotle's Poetic
Truth and Historical Truth and so I'll start with a quote::
'It will be clear from what I have said that
it is not the poet's function to describe what has actually happened, but
the kinds of thing that might happen, that is, that could happen
... For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more
worthy of serious attention than history; for while poetry is concerned with
universal truths, history treats of particular facts.' ARISTOTLE
Is this how you see it?
ANDREW TAYLOR: Aristotle would say that, wouldn’t he, not
being a historian. Heroditus might have said the opposite. So I’ll start with
history or, more generally any factual writing, which would also include good
quality journalism, science and economic writing, as well as political and
social analysis. I actually read a lot of this, much more than poetry. If you
want to understand what’s happening in the world, that’s what you have to read.
[For example, if you want an insight into the mess of current American
politics, Greg Grandin’s historical study, The
End of the Myth, is an eye-opener. Siddhartha Mukheerjee’s two books on
cancer and genetics, and Nancy Forbes’ and Basil Mahon’s joint biographies of
Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, and Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder, (to name just a few)
taught me a lot about medicine and science.] Poetry can’t exist in a social or
intellectual vacuum, and the best poetry never has. Think of Goethe, Coleridge,
Shelley etc…
Another
way of thinking about Aristotle’s distinction is to say that not only is what
he calls history fact based, but that it has a certain propensity for closure.
Ok, its conclusions may be – often are, in reality – tentative, but they tend
towards conclusions (literally closures) all the same. Poetry need not do that
and, in my case, usually resists that. I feel that poetry should be an opening
out, a widening of possibilities rather than a tying up of loose ends. Maybe
that’s why I’m so attracted to coastlines.
I
grew up on the Southern Ocean coast at Warrnambool in Victoria, where the next
land mass looking out to sea is Antarctica, and I’ve been a coastal person ever
since. I was a paleosurfie, though you might call me an ancient one now. Every
wave to me was a question – still is - and when the sea was occasionally and
uncharacteristically flat, that was also a mystery. You can’t stay still in the
surf, you’re constantly and often unpredictably shaken and jostled, even
bullied – there’s no comfortable end point, no logical conclusion. All you can
do eventually is drag yourself up on the sand and dry out. Until the next time.
That’s poetry for me.
So
I guess I’m contradicting myself. On the one hand I read lots of fact-based
material that searches, no matter how tentatively, for answers, conclusions.
And I write poetry that refuses to do that. I think that’s a healthy tension.
AB:
How much has theory influenced your poetry?
AT:
Not much. Not much in the writing of it,
anyway. I got a good introduction to theory when I audited, as they call it, an
undergraduate course given by Jonathan Culler at Cornell in the early 1980s.
Jonathan is fluent in French and could explicate writers such as Derrida,
Barthes and Althusser in clear English, without any of that often turgid
translationese that became so common. (Some people accused him of
oversimplifying, which was not the case.)
This helped me in the reading of texts: reading against the grain,
reading to reveal hidden and often ideological elements (gender, racial, political
etc) blind spots, absences etc etc. In other words, to read poetry with the
care and microscopic attention that a good poet brings to its writing. All this
in addition to reading for the poetry’s aural and rhythmic complexities and
patternings.
Perhaps
something of what I learned from theory spilled over to my writing of it,
without my being overly conscious. More a habit of mind than an explicit
attempt to write poetry involving theory, as some people tried. As I tried to
avoid. Perhaps it made me more conscious of what poetry isn’t, the silence
beneath poetry, the blank paper between the words, the unspoken of poetry. But
I think other things were involved too.
AB: What other things?
AT: Eighteen years ago I was diagnosed with
cancer and statistically my survival chance was quite low. Well, thanks to the
brilliant medical attention I received in Perth I’m still here, unscathed. But
that taught me a lot. First, I learned that I wasn’t at all afraid of dying.
Second, all my sympathy was for those I loved, not for myself. Third, life is
precious, but spread very thin over the immensity of everything else. And
easily broken. Montale’s poetry is very aware of this: he talks somewhere of il buio
olte la siepe, ‘the darkness beyond the hedge’. What he calls darkness I
call silence.
Our
fragile grasp on things was also clear in my follow-up visits to the
oncologist, waiting to learn whether I had the all clear – for the moment. I
wrote a poem about that being like waiting at a border, like a refugee, waiting
for someone to pronounce on my future, my life. With the world full of
refugees, it’s hard to think that the billions devoted to sending a lander to
Mars is well spent, no matter how fascinating I find the science.
AB: Do you
remember the circumstances under which you began to write?
AT: A good question and very hard to answer. I
grew up in a country town before television, and the house was full of books,
including some English poetry, which I read. My sister is seven years older
than I, and was an excellent pianist. I used to sit in the lounge room
listening to her practising Beethoven sonatas and letting the music work on me.
At high school there was a girl my age also an excellent pianist, and the
school encouraged her very much. This encouraged me too to do things beyond
school work and sport, to listen to the music in words and the rhythms of
language.
When I was about
fourteen I discovered Judith Wright and TS Eliot, and that really got me going.
As a country town kid I’d wandered lonely as a cloud often enough, but now I
found poetry that wasn’t about daffodils or distant stars, but about things and
places I could experience at first hand. After that there was no stopping me. Still,
my first book didn’t come out until I was thirty.
AB: You mentioned music. Is music important to
you in writing poetry?
AT: Yes, in several ways. I love music, though
I’d be a hopeless musician. I’ve even tried writing melodies, but have no idea
how people do it. I tried writing poems in sonata form, after reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and found it can’t be
done, though you can do it with songs, where the music can justify the form.
And I’ve written the libretti for two operas, with the composer Ralph
Middenway, which taught me a lot about writing for the stage.
There’s music in
language too. I know that’s a cliché, so perhaps I could say that language has
complex aural qualities that are important for poetry if one is really attentive
to them. These vary from language to language: those in German are very
different from those in Italian or French, let alone English. As an undergrad I
also wrote Latin poetry, which was wonderful in sharpening that sense. Is there
any line anywhere to equal Virgil’s ‘per ingens silentium lunae’ as the Greeks
creep up at night on their final attack on Troy?
Everyone knows
about rhyme, half-rhyme, allit… etc. And something about rhythm (and I don’t
mean metre). But a lot of poetry that I read today seems to have forgotten
about them. Maybe I can come back to that later. I write to hear the sound of
the language, the rhythms and cadences, the inflexions and recurrences of
sounds… I could go on and on, it’s so complex. For me it’s like writing music,
and just as in music the pauses and silences are crucial, so they are with me
in poetry too. Poetry without silence is like light in a room with no knowledge
of the darkness outside.
AB: My favourite poetry
definition is by John Wain: Poetry is to
prose as dancing is to walking. A lot of my poems come from walking, a
flaneur poet! You’ve been a marathon runner and then a kayak paddler. Does your
physical activity influence your poetry? How and when do you write your first
draft?
AT: I’ve never been a marathon runner, and I’m a
lousy dancer, but I’ve covered a lot of water in my kayaks. And I do lots of
walking, especially in the Covid-19 era, since I can’t travel abroad and even
interstate travel is dicey. I used to be a sprinter, and I think my poetry is a
bit like sprinting. Fairly short poems, the finish line already vaguely in
sight from the start. I say vaguely, because I never write a poem towards a
predetermined end, and certainly not with a predetermined length (except for
sonnets). But I know I’ll run out of puff if I try to go on too long, the poem
will get wordy and worthy rather than light on its feet. Isn’t it interesting
how the same terms apply to both running and poetry!
Although I write short
poems, longer forms have their attractions too, like walking. But I’ve built
those longer poems, like The Crystal
Absences, and Rome, from small
parts that I can write, usually, in a single sitting. I can’t do narrative or,
more accurately, narrative doesn’t attract me so I don’t know how to do it in
poetry. But I’ve liked building up longer forms from small bits, like brick
laying, each bit not just continuing on from its precursor but also reflecting
back on it.
Many of my poems have
started with a line in my head that comes to me as I’m walking. I don’t carry a
notebook so I have to let it churn around to the rhythm of my walking (or
kayaking) until I can write it down. Rhythm (not metre) is very important to
me, and walking and kayaking are both very rhythmic activities. Rhythm keeps
forward movement balanced and coherent, which is something that I find lacking
in some contemporary poetry. I don’t mean regular, repetitive rhythm, dum-dee-dum stuff, but flexible, sinuous
and coherent rhythm that leads you on in a confident way. Like a good guide
into unfamiliar territory . Of course good metrical poetry also has this. Just
read Wordsworth, who was a great walker too.
AB: How many drafts do
you do before you abandon the poem? (Do you ever go back to a poem when it’s
published?
AT: As few as possible. But of course almost all
poems need revising, they’re not dreams.
But I don’t keep tinkering with them if they move right, though I’ll
change words or phrases if I can find a way of improving them, or if the
sound’s wrong or the rhyme too obvious. I read them over to myself aloud to
make sure they don’t limp or stumble. And if that proves too hard, I just ditch
the poem and write another one. That’s the advantage of writing short poems.
And once they’re done, they’re done. I don’t go back to them after they’ve been
published.
AB: After many years
living in many different countries – how many? – have you developed a taste for
international poetry, not the Sydney ‘poetry community’?
AT: I’ve lived in six countries, on and off. When
I graduated from Melbourne University I was expected to go to Cambridge, but
instead I went to Florence, and lived in Italy for two years, one in Florence
and one in Rome. I’ve been back may times since. I’ve spent a lot of time in
the USA, and even more in Germany, where my wife comes from and where she has a
house. I once made a list of how many town or cities I’ve lived in for more
than a month – excluding hotels – and it came to twenty two. But I’ve always
felt myself inerasably Australian, that kid from Warrnambool who’s been let loose
on the world.
I’ve read a lot of American and European poets. Penguin had a
wonderful series, many years ago, of Modern European Poets, where I could read
poets like Holub, Cavafy and Herbert and many others, which I’d pick up at
Cheshire’s Bookshop in Melbourne. And where I could buy a lot of contemporary
American poetry as well, including Donald Hall’s wonderful Contemporary American Poets. Which is why I spent a year in Buffalo
NY in 1970-71 for the coldest winter of my life, where I met Ginsberg, Corso,
Merwin, Bly, Levertov, Kinnell. Unfortunately I missed Berryman, who gave a
reading the night I arrived, and Diane Wakoski, who arrived at the train
station but couldn’t get any further because the blizzard was too intense. Of
course I’ve met many other poets in the fifty years since then: Heaney,
Transtromer, Hughes, Amichai, Enzensberger, Ammons… that’s what happens when
you move around a lot. But I also tried to read as much Australian poetry as I
could, as soon as it came out. But I haven’t been able to keep up with it all
today – there’s just too much. If you put all that together, maybe that’s the
‘poetry scene’ I’ve belonged to, scattered all over the place.
I don’t really know what
the consequence of all this has been, because I’ve always seen myself as an
Australian poet. But not part of any group here, probably because I lived
mostly in Adelaide and Perth. I’ve only been living in Sydney for six years. And
the Sydney ‘poetry community’ has been hit by the pandemic, with most of the
readings and launches cancelled just as I was starting to get to know people,
or get reacquainted with people I’d known many years before. Things should get
better soon.
Q7: I know you’ve
translated Montale. Have you translated any other poets? What’s the richness of
that experience?
A: In 1985 Beate and I published a book of
translations of four woman poets who wrote in German. Beate’s English wasn’t as
perfect as it is now, so she did the immediate translation from German and I
worked with her to make the translations read like real poems in English while
being as accurate as possible. It was a great experience, working with
microscopic attention across languages to achieve a result that we were both
happy with.
When I had a fellowship
in the Whiting Library in Rome in 2004 I made a number of translations of
Eugenio Montale’s poems, which I’d admired ever since my first time in Italy. Some
of those are published in The Unhaunting.
Translation is great because it takes you away from your own poetry, your own
too familiar way of thinking and doing. And translating well forces you to look microscopically at the original, not
translating simply word for word or phrase for phrase – anyone with a
dictionary can do that – but trying to grasp a whole poem and rewrite it so that
it’s the same poem, but in another language. Something like Liszt did, with his
piano transcriptions of other composers’ orchestral works.
I also wrote the book
length poem, Rome, while there.
Frost said that poetry
is what’s lost in the translation. I think he was quite wrong: poetry is what
survives the act of translation, if it’s done well. But strangely, translations
date, get to look old, unlike the originals, which never do. There’s always a
need for new ones. And new poems too.
AB: With your permission,
I’ll end with your Writing, an
opening poem to Impossible Preludes
(Margaret River Press, 2016):
Writing
is tracing a spider’s footprints
across a web
across a scorching rock
across the underside of a leaf
across one’s foot
across the back of one’s hand
is leaving oneself behind
as a spider does
as it spins its web
Andrew Taylor is the author of more
than seventeen books of poetry, the most recent being Collected Poems (Salt, UK 2004), The unhaunting (Salt, UK 2009), which was short listed for the 2009
Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, and Impossible Preludes (Margaret River Press, 2016). He has published
much literary criticism, and written the libretti for two operas, as well as
translating poetry from German and Italian, including the work of the Italian
Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale. He has taught in universities in Australia,
Germany and China, is Professor Emeritus at Edith Cowan University, Perth, and
now divides his time between Sydney and Wiesbaden in Germany.
Andrew Burke (MA,
PhD) is an Australian poet, with numerous books to his credit, the latest of
which is New & Selected Poems
(Hobart: Walleah Press, 2020)
