ISLAND

A magazine of excellence and variety

 

ISSN 1035-3127

We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.

ISSUE NO. 113

WINTER 2008

CONVERSATION

Poetry Animals- Judith Beveridge and Dorothy Porter

Dear Dot,
As poetry is the great passion of both our lives, it may be a good place to begin, and as we are both very excited by (and even obsessed with) the natural world, perhaps there is a nexus between these two that we could explore first up. It seems to me that as more and more of the natural world is disappearing, the more difficult it will become to imaginatively engage with the world. In other words, creative artists need a rich, complex tapestry of forms and sensory material to respond to, to make connections with and to provide material and sources for imagery.

My work, like yours, tends to be full of birds. I often think with horror what it might be like to wake up one morning and find the birds have disappeared, all those strange, enchanting calls never to be heard again. I’d lose an enormous emotional and imaginative resource for my poems if birds became extinct, in fact I’d lose some of the will, I think, to want to write poems.

Dear Jude,
I’ve often said that I hope I’m dead when there are no longer any tigers in the wild. Probably not a very smart thing to say. A sure hex on myself the way tigers are rapidly moving towards extinction.

I love the way you use birds in your poems. Like Les Murray, you are very adept at writing the poetry of their calls. They are so much more than decorative metaphors after you have written about them.

Birds are never far away in my poems. A journalist in New Zealand, who was interviewing me on The Monkey’s Mask, asked me if I were a bird watcher. I was amazed that she’d intuited this from an erotic thriller that had very little to do with bird watching (of the avian kind).

Sometimes things happen to me in the natural world which are almost impossible to write about. A few nights ago I was staying on a friend’s farm in Euroa in rural Victoria. When I pulled back the blind to let in some air and look at the stars there was a koala standing right outside my window, staring in like a blinking, curious, old man. We held each other’s gaze for a slow minute before he (his size suggested a male) turned his rump to me and scampered away.

How do you write a poem about an event like this? How does it not become corny and lose its surreal, eerie wonder?

Dear Dot,
What a fabulous event! I think we need these sorts of experiences on a regular basis to prevent some of the narcissism that can easily occur when we live in cities, to remind us that we are simply part of a much more engaging and complex whole. But you’re right to ask how we write about these experiences. Something I read recently by Don Paterson has really stuck in my mind.1 He says some experiences simply need to stay where they are because they are too miraculous, and any attempt to write about them will add nothing. Instead it’s the poet’s task to make the commonplace miraculous. Could be much in that. I know I find it very difficult to write about things which have really amazed me. I can’t write about them in a direct way, but I will often put a detail or an event into an entirely different context. At the moment I’m entranced by the channel-bill cuckoos that come here for the breeding season. Do you know their calls? A big, whooping sound which builds up and up. I love it. I think you’ve managed to write wonderfully about certain animals – there’s your poem about the sea hare (now that’s a strange creature!) you have captured some of that bewildering peculiarity very well. I think you approach your direct, personal experience in poetry much better than I can. I tend to fabricate and fictionalise. I’m not especially interested in writing about my personal life whatsoever, in fact the more I know about a situation the less I’m likely to write about it. But I will often try to use an animal or a bird as a touchstone, or as a grounding device for an emotional experience. Have you managed to write anything about your recent trip to Africa?

Dear Jude,
I actually think I write better about miraculous encounters with animals when I do fictionalise the experience! I think the way you do it, if I’m honest, works better. However, I’ve just read a poem of Ted Hughes’ about watching mating spiders through a magnifying glass.2 This is a breathtakingly direct poem, but also eerily an exercise in minutely observant poetic perving as well. Now I no longer see Sylvia Plath as a martyr to Hughes’ selfish sadism, I’m enjoying his poetry a lot more. And relishing his robust sensuality too.

As far as writing poems post my extraordinary recent safari holiday in Africa, it’s a paralysing embarrassment of riches. I’m only just starting to scratch the surface. I will send you a poem, ‘Waiting for the Crocodiles’, that I wrote in Botswana after viewing on the Chobe River a group of vultures patiently standing around the stinking bloated carcass of a buffalo. The hide of the buffalo was too thick for their beaks and claws to penetrate, so the vultures were waiting for a Nile crocodile to drop in and kindly rip open the carcass for them. I saw so many beautiful living animals, and the only poem I’ve written so far with any lift-off is about a reeking corpse.

In your first book The Domesticity of Giraffes I had a strong feeling that many of the poems were direct personal experiences – like the title poem for instance and its scene of a female giraffe drenching her tongue under her mate’s stream of urine. I don’t think even Ted Hughes has written about ‘water sports’ in the animal world, Jude. Did you actually see this happen? Is it ‘fiction’? And – come to think of it – what did the schools where the poem was being officially taught make of it?

PS: I just remembered another post-safari poem that I thought you might like to look at, ‘Kusini Camp’. Here it is. What do you think?

Kusini Camp
A badger on my moment of life
Ted Hughes

I too saw a badger
on my moment of life
but not dead on an English road
like Hughes’ fly-blown beautiful animal
(why are Hughes’ poem creatures
always dead, dying or dazzling dangerous?)

My badger was African.
Nothing Wind in the Willows
about him as he emerged
suddenly
from an inhospitable termite mound –
as small mammals do
in the late afternoon
on the parched Serengeti.

Very much alive
and on a wild animal’s hungry mission
my badger lumbered
fluidly
through a shimmering dusk world
of presences I could only glimpse
and now so hungrily
remember.

Dear Dot,
Thank you for sending me your poems. Yes, seeing a badger in dry dusty Africa would be such a different experience to seeing one on a damp English moor. You capture the tooth and claw of the natural world so well. I get very upset at the brutality of the natural world at times. One of the saddest things I ever saw, and it still fills me with pain when I think of it, was a TV show about flamingos breeding around one of the African lakes. It was a brutal season and the lake was drying up rapidly leaving thousands and thousands of young flamingos with their feet concreted into the dried mud; they were unable to fly away. It was appalling to see these gorgeous birds dying in the heat and mud. I know it’s easy to sentimentalise and romanticise about the natural world, and to feel that at the core there’s a severe, tyrannical imperative which can put Pol Pot to shame, but Nature can be machine-like in its cruelty, and its blind indifference very hard to come to terms with. I think Hughes can be very good at getting that aspect of nature into his work, but I remember once reading an article by Robert Bly who accused Hughes of being too caught up in the mammalian parts of his brain. I did witness the event I describe in the giraffes poem and was certainly more likely in my earlier writing to use more direct experiences. I read some very funny essays by students on the poem – one student saw the poem as a complete indictment of marriage. Some schools refused to study the poem because of that image of the bull giraffe urinating. Have you come across much censorship in relationship to your work, Dot? You’ve certainly been a risky and transgressive poet. I’ve always admired this in you and your work and felt you have been courageous in some of the poems, leaving yourself exposed and vulnerable. I’m incorrigibly private and self-protective.

Dear Jude,
I’m never as brave in any aspect of my life as I’d like to be. If I’d published The Monkey’s Mask fifty years ago that would have been brave. Kamikaze brave. The book would have been immediately banned for obscenity. When I was at school our ancient librarian kept Jane Eyre under lock and key – for the sophisticates of sixth form only. Times have certainly changed.
Recently I heard that The Monkey’s Mask had been set on the HSC.

Sometimes I feel when I have written directly about an intimate personal experience that in fact I have automatically fictionalised it, even neutered it in a way, by aestheticising it. The poems of mine where I feel most the close breath of my own private life are usually secreted in my verse novels. Perhaps I am as ‘self-protective’ as you are.

You are right about the brutality of the natural world. Is that something you are confronting in your fishermen sequence? Are you trying to explore minds that are part of this brutality?

On one of my safaris in Botswana last year I witnessed something dreadful. And I was helpless to do anything but look in horror, then look away in despair. It was a morning when we had already seen so many amazing animals going about their business in the cool of the morning drizzle. We had seen a cheetah, leopard, a white rhino, African wild dogs and strange birds, birds which looked more like dinosaurs. Yet we hadn’t seen elephants. Suddenly, as you do on safari, we found one. A baby elephant lying on its side. We all thought it was dead. Then – horror – saw it wasn’t. And the vultures were on stand-by. It was a very young baby. Its skin fine and translucent as its chest fluttered up and down. It was clearly dying. I squirmed in my seat wondering whether I should jump out of the vehicle and kill it. In truth I doubt whether I could beat a baby elephant’s head in – even with vultures probably about to peck out its eyes. The decision was taken out of my hands when our driver took off as fast as the rough terrain would allow him. He said the mother elephant could be around and would charge our vehicle if she saw us near her baby. He also said that the baby had most likely been abandoned because it was going to die anyway, and that elephants will only abandon their young very reluctantly.

Jude,
I have tried to write about this. An emotionally clogged-up terrible poem. Maybe I will never be able to write about it. One of the strongest things I remember about the experience is my own squirming impotence.

I’m sure Ted Hughes would have come up with something. Didn’t Bly mean Hughes had a reptilian brain?

My brain can be cripplingly mammalian. Is that a female thing? Oh dear. That opens such a can of worms. What do you think?

Dear Dot,
Yes, I too find it impossible to act in those situations. I’m simply unable to deliver the blow that would put an animal out of its misery. I remember once seeing a blue tongue lizard lying on the road – its back half had been run over by a car and was stuck fast to the bitumen, and its front half was rearing up, trying to pull itself away. I couldn’t kill it even though I knew it would be the best thing to do. I felt so cowardly and cruel. I’ve always believed we are morally responsible for taking care of our fellow creatures. I’ve never forgotten that lizard, as I’m sure you’ll never forget that elephant. I’ve never forgiven myself for being so paralysed with fear.

But what a feast of creatures you saw in Africa. I was feeling rather chuffed last night because Stephen and I spotted a powerful owl in a nearby tree. It flew in so silently, sat on a branch for a while before flying away again. They are so big, but so utterly quiet. But how wonderful to have seen such birds and animals in Africa. I’m sure that eventually you’ll write about at least some of them, Dot. Didn’t Wallace Stevens say that things have to sit in the nervous system for a while before they can be written about? I certainly find that the case. Yes, with the fishermen sequence of poems, I am trying to come to terms with brutal aspects of human behaviour, and also to acknowledge that this brutality is there in my own psyche too, the lizard being a case in point, where my sense of fear outweighed my sense of compassion. The poem I’m sending you, ‘Gale’, tries to evoke some of the brutal elements of nature. Bad weather can make life pretty tough, as we know from recent times. I’m rather entranced by storms – but rather cowardly – only from afar.

If I’m remembering correctly, Bly was praising poets who he felt had very developed neo-cortexes – he called them new brain poets – such as Rilke (I forget who else now, it’s years since I read the article), and that Hughes was very caught up in a kind of mammalian response. A new brain poet would be more – tender? A poet such as Mary Oliver possibly. But then again I could have totally misremembered the whole thing, and Bly’s always been a grand theoriser. Just tried to hunt down the Bly piece so I could check on my memory but it has disappeared. I think my brain can be amazingly amoebic. I’m lucky if two thoughts for a poem happen in the same day! You write rather quickly though, don’t you? At least you get that initial impulse down, and your poems have a dynamic energy that is very ‘you’. Anyone who saw either you or me at our desks writing might laugh – we’d both have headphones on, but yours would have rock music playing, and mine would be to block out any sound at all!! I think your use of adjectives is superb, much like Emily Dickinson’s – the way they give so much flavour and texture to your poems.

Gale

I vomit across the tiller, gunwale and deck,
dumping more than a monsoon
would into the Bay of Bengal; one more load
I think, and I might change
the entire hydrological cycle of our small inlet.

With every lurch of our boat I stagger, trying
to wear this gale like a fisherman’s
sweater. Then, a scuttling wave comes and I hold
my footing in a half a metre
of deck swill before it gushes out of the scuppers.

Already Grennan has peeled the steel swivels
off the leader cart, stuck squid
onto the hooks, fixed the swivels onto the mainline
and thrown the lot over the side.
Davey has locked a ball-drop on a line, checked

where the mainline has snagged spooling off
the big drum. My stomach
feels as though it were being keel-hauled,
my head as though it were
jammed into a set of pressure lines going

into a cyclonic spin. When I vomit again,
Davey says I look as ugly
and expendable as a bucket of badly iced brill;
then my feet slip from under me
and I’m carried along by the moshing swill.

Rain is falling so fast it looks as if fishmongers
are scaling the day’s catch.
I hear my breath repeating a calamity like the sea’s.
Over my shoulder I can see
the lightning trip wildly, a venom-transmitting

nerve; then it jolts rapidly across the sky again
streamlining out like a frog’s
electrode-prodded legs… another wave crashes in;
a rod slopes, bends – Grennan
grabs it – cross-cutting boldly the italicising wind.

Dear Jude,
I’m very chuffed by your praise of my use of adjectives. But aren’t we always trying in those ubiquitous creative writing classes we all teach to discourage student writers from using adjectives? I don’t mean ‘overuse’. I mean we teach the eradication of the adjective as if it were a kind of feral exotic that will strangle the native verb if left to get out of control. And look how I have just let this metaphor get out of control. But I got such a kick out of writing it. Maybe my use, or indulgence, of adjectives is a personal giving in to the pleasure principle. I relish a good adjective. Though I will never be as lushly profligate with them as Keats. Maybe I don’t have the courage of my own sensuality.

But what about your use of highly unusual even bizarre words in your poetry? Your poetry has a compelling, if challenging, range of vocabulary.

Jude,
I know you write with a thesaurus. After reading one of your poems I frequently feel that my own vocabulary is predictable and meagre. My paranoid vanity has just wondered if I should let those words ‘predictable’ and ‘meagre’ out of the bag. What ammunition for my critics! Speaking of critics, how do you take criticism? Are you like me in being able to remember and recite a bad review off by heart, while being relieved and thrilled by good ones, but barely able to remember them?

Your description of the blue-tongued lizard stuck to the road has joined my experience of the dying baby elephant. I wish it hadn’t. Am I living in a solipsistic fool’s paradise when I can’t face suffering or override my own squeamish cowardice? For the record, I don’t think Rilke dealt any better with these matters than you or I, Jude. Just ask Clara.

Dear Dot,
There’s a terrific article by Ellen Bryant Voigt in her book The Flexible Lyric called ‘Rethinking Adjectives’.3 She takes poems by Yeats, Stevens, Plath and others, strips them of their adjectives and shows what paler cousins the poems become – losing argument, nuance, music and structure. It’s a most persuasive plea for the adjective, but of course these are great poets and they know exactly what they are doing. Bad poets use adjectives badly, obviously. But I think it takes a lot of perceptive qualities to be able to choose the right adjective. I’m not really sure that my vocabulary is all that rich. At least I feel it isn’t, though one of my favourite pastimes is to browse through the dictionary. I love the Chambers dictionary for all those tantalising Scottish words. I love Seamus Heaney’s poetry for the richness of his diction – those fabulous Anglo-Saxon words. He knows so much – he can give you the exact word for a particular part of a plough, or hand tool. I feel it’s the poet’s job to know things. But of course there are so many wonderful poems made up of very simple words, there’s virtue in clarity and lucidity. I remember the talk you gave at the National Poetry Festival a few years ago when you were talking about that very thing. Getting back to your comments about Rilke, I’ve always been a little irked at the fact that he abandoned his wife and daughter so he could be free to pursue his art – though he did continue to give them financial aid when he could. I’m sure Clara would have liked more time for her sculpture. Yes, the bad reviews do rankle, but I’d rather people be honest in their reactions. I’d much rather that someone told me they didn’t like a book or poem than to pretend they did. I’ve written reviews that have said some fairly harsh things, but there’s no point reviewing if you are not going to be honest. But no one likes getting negative comments about their work, no matter how constructive or well-meaning. Poetry is a hard and demanding art form and easy to fail at; the wonder is that we do, at times, have successes. What are you working on now after El Dorado, which I really think is your best verse novel? It’s so rich and covers such a lot of interesting ground.

Dear Jude,
I’m glad you raised the subject of your work as a poetry reviewer. It may surprise people to learn just how tough and exacting you can be when you pick up your pen to write a review. You are always fair. But you do not make allowances for bad, mediocre or lazy books, no matter whether friend or foe wrote them. You gave me a both generous AND rigor­ous review for Driving Too Fast, which stung more than a bit at the time, but also made me value your consequent praise.4 I’m delighted – and mightily relieved – you regard El Dorado so highly.

Nothing has made me appreciate more the magical effect of the right word than attempting to read Spanish poetry for the first time in Spanish. My pace is glacial. But perhaps that makes the difference, as I painstakingly uncover and examine every single word. Each poem I read is under a linguistic and forensic microscope. I’m thrilled by how all these new and marvellous sounds and images suddenly rush together. I remember someone telling me that she had learned Russian just so she could read Tsvetayeva in the original.

As I work on my next collection of poems – tentatively titled The Bee Hut – I hope some of Neruda’s luscious exuberance and Borges’ stoic intensity bleed into it. Not to mention your exacting standards! I am also reading Vera Newsom’s posthumous collection, Gratia, which you gave me for Christmas last year.5 Jude, these intimate, deft and searing poems of Vera’s make me sad and angry. Too many wonderful poets like Vera fade away unread. It’s everyone’s loss.

Dear Dot,
One thing I deeply regret is not having another language. Perhaps that’s what I’ll do in my dotage. I’d love to have the ability, like some people have, of picking up languages easily. I’ve always struggled badly with pronunciation. I have a poor ear. I really love the title The Bee Hut – it’s exotic and intriguing and no doubt the book will contain and reflect your love of the natural world. Thank you for this dialogue, I’ve enjoyed it very much.

January – February 2008

NOTES

1    Paterson, Don, ‘The Dilemma of the Poet’ in How Poets Work, Tony Curtis (ed), Poetry Wales Press, Seren Imprint, 1996.

2    Hughes, Ted, ‘Eclipse’, New and Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 1995.

3    Voigt, Ellen Bryant, ‘Rethinking Adjectives’ in The Flexible Lyric, University of Georgia Press, 1999.

4    Beveridge, Judith, Review of Driving Too Fast by Dorothy Porter in Phoenix Review, David Brooks (ed), 1990.

 5   Newsom, Vera, Gratia: New and Selected Poems, Five Islands Press, 2007

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JUDITH BEVERIDGE has published three books of poetry, all of which have won major prizes: The Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lightning Press, 1987); Accidental Grace (UQP, 1996) and Wolf Notes (Giramondo Publishing, 2003). In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. She lives in Sydney.

DOROTHY PORTER Her most recent book is the verse thriller El Dorado, which was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year for Poetry 2007 and the SA Festival Awards 2008 for Fiction. Later in 2008 ABC TV will be broadcasting the film opera, The Eternity Man, for which Dorothy wrote the libretto.

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Last modified: 16 July, 2008
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