August 13, 2024 • 27 mins
What does poetry mean to you? And what if you could put a book on shuffle?
Nam Le’s work encompasses fiction, non-fiction, poetry and screen. His debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was published in March 2024 in Australia, the U.S. and U.K.
Red Room Poetry Creative Producer and Line Break host Izzy Roberts-Orr spoke with Nam about breaking the form of the book apart, poetry’s ability as a form to reach through language toward the incommunicable, and his poem, ‘Quilting the Armour’ commissioned as part of 30in30 for Poetry Month in partnership with the NGA.
‘Quilting the Armour’ is an ekphrastic poem responding to Sidney Nolan’s 1947 painting of the same name, which depicts Maggie Skillion lining the inside of Ned Kelly’s helmet.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:00):
It's a mouth which brings in embeddedness and materiality in
the world. It's a way of happening. It's a process.
It's not something that's fixed, but something that is trying to,
in a way, I guess, mimic how we think. And
then I think I've read from several poets when they're asked,
you know, first principles Foundation, like, why are you writing poetry?
(00:21):
Often the answer is to leave some record of what
was there for me. Otherwise, as with everything else, it'll go.
S2 (00:31):
This is line break. I'm Izzy Robertsau. What does poetry
mean to you? And what if you could put a
book on shuffle? Natalie's work encompasses fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screen.
His debut poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem,
(00:52):
was published in March this year in Australia, the US
and UK. I spoke with Nam about breaking the form
of the book apart, poetry's ability as a form to
reach through language toward the Incommunicable, and his poem Quilting
the Armor, commissioned as part of 30 and 30 for
(01:14):
Poetry Month in partnership with the Nga. Quilting the armor
is an ekphrastic poem responding to Sidney Nolan's 1947 painting
of the same name, which depicts Kate Kelley lining the
inside of Ned Kelly's helmet. Here's Nam reading the poem.
S1 (01:34):
Quilting the armor. Sun everywhere and shadow. Swamp light. Aquarium light.
Turning the far off fields. Almost Kelly green. Boolean. Fringed
stitch of tracer gold. Crystalized moments you see here. Things clear.
(01:58):
Near the end and passed to Shack Hill. Horses. Water tank.
Windmill a garden Paradise floating in a basement. Furniture store.
Larrikin Hills on wood varnish. Your home a museum helmet
and archive box holding 70 years of yarn. Furphy flashness,
(02:23):
spree and lore banging about in black steel. Everything but
the skull ring. That's all you can do. Bed a
boy's hard head. That's not even there. Cushion it in blue. Borage.
Starfish shaped its leaves. Taste of cucumber in sky. Woad
(02:46):
myth in sea and past. Ultramarine sea. How Morgans look
out similar shape now that armor a lapis mineshaft AFT.
No ground safe. Send him in. See? Which he only
ever saw in chains for water. Knows as soon as
(03:07):
you said. It shifts. The rules change a ransomed new.
The body folds down to. Flat product and the picture
plane tilts, heaving horizons up close. There's Flame Robin on
the fence post. Stunning what you've already sensed. He is
gone and he will go. And so will you. Dan's
(03:32):
roasted dead Ned in a new box near mum, fixed
up and fed for hanging. They'll shave his head of
every precious hair, drown it in plaster. For science and giggles.
The loss no less for not having happened yet. So back,
(03:53):
back past them. Sledgehammering metal into myth. Brave boys over
the green Messmate log. Making the black guard strong. It's
not their strength. Prison hulked. Rock breaking holds your eyes
but one ear's cartilage. The sun made somehow holy through it.
(04:16):
Cherry red. And you were bills on bills selection. And
that is Tom's and wrong. Hold to it now. In masonite,
ganged wood fibers fired tight white sheets at day, white
footed in cold night in ripolin to show it clean
(04:39):
as it is Bullock Creek him granite in red loam,
bad whiskey and less gold. Clanging and banging all that
ship's ballast pig iron into a door. And we went
through it. Me and Tom made a go of it. Ned, though.
(04:59):
He wanted to see the thing out. He was. The
thing is, the thing in the bush. And of it
come out of all the traps of time. Son still
always love, hate horror in buck said hand suspended over
inquests of axe blade, needle share. And he did mind
(05:26):
my drowned brother. He saw himself out of old Melbourne Gaol, Glenrowan,
Greater Wombat and wool shed to Heidi to nil and
ended and restarted their now back again to a father.
Start past my old creeks to the swollen Hughes, where
(05:50):
at ten he fished out the Shelton boy Joy and fame.
That day I swear him skinny. Shivering with light. And
seen and loved. Named. He deserved it all. Go back, brother,
if you dare. Meet me at Avenel.
S2 (06:12):
Can you tell me again about why you picked quilting
the armor?
S1 (06:15):
When I went back and had a look at the series,
I realized how beholden to the language and movement of
cinema Nolan was and the narrative of the stories, especially
the bits that really appealed to him as a storyteller.
And he was a he was a poet, too. Once
that narrative switch was flipped, then that kind of enlivened
(06:38):
different parts of the series for me, it just really
struck a chord with me, especially knowing some of the
context of what was going through Nolan's mind and in
Nolan's life at the time, because he himself was undergoing
a really tumultuous, um, emotional time, you know, with the
reads and with Sunday read in particular. And so all
of that was sort of playing out in my head,
(06:59):
and I sort of drew on bits in my own
sort of past, as we all do. And for some reason,
that image just resonated like it. You know, the tuning
fork was really struck and it just sort of stayed
ringing and the harmonics were really strong for me, so
that's why I chose it.
S2 (07:15):
How does poetry calibrate or tune the attention in ways
that maybe you don't get from looking at visual art
or engaging with other forms?
S1 (07:23):
It brings to the front of your mind the fact
that you're working in language, and that there is no
outside of language, and that language is not just a
medium to be gotten through and with as little fuss
or little noise as possible, that in fact, it is
the whole thing and that the thing itself, whatever referentiality
(07:48):
you want to attribute to, to language is no lesser
for being done in language and through language. And in fact,
when you see the amount and intensity of what you
can do using code, basically because that's what language is. Um,
to me that actually is a thing of wonder and
a thing that needs constant sort of celebration and exaltation.
(08:10):
You know, it's not, um, it's that's such a limited
thing with limited, um, rules. You know, the rules of
syntax or grammar or vocabulary can access a subjectivity that
is as big as anything and as complex as anything
to me is, is extraordinary. And then, secondly, the idea
(08:31):
that the other rules that we think of as the
rules in language, I think poetry can remind us that
these are these are imposed rules, that these are conventions
and that there are other ways of, um, mucking around
with the material. There are other ways of playing with
(08:51):
expectations and assumptions. And so to use the the painting,
as you know, an analogy, one of the things that
Nolan did that was kind of radical at the time
was he he mucked around with the picture plane. So
he his horizons are typically quite high, um, in the composition.
And that changes perspective and it changes the relation of
(09:15):
foreground to background and language and poetry when it attends
to its rules. Its conventions, I think, can have the
same sort of effect. It can sort of radicalize how
we see the world, how we see ourselves, how we
sort of see and agree upon reality. We're trained to
feel as though we've failed. If we don't find the actual,
(09:37):
deeper meaning of something or the meaning of something, and
that notion of there being a correct meaning, being a
certain meaning feels to me like the opposite of what
poetry at its best does. You know, when you when
you come at language, at that sort of level of
intensity and that is throwing up all of these sort
(09:59):
of different references and images and allusions in your, in
your brain. Um, the notion that there is a correct image,
a correct illusion, um, you know, a a total and
comprehensive um, bounding of meaning is the opposite of what
that experience actually feels like. I think what we might
be saying is that there is a reductive kind of, um,
(10:23):
sense that can then crowd or drown out all of
the other more interesting and fluid forms of senses that
we all sense all the time.
S2 (10:35):
Do you think that people have to be comfortable sitting
in uncertainty to, you know, engage with poetry?
S1 (10:43):
Yeah, I do, I do, I think, um, there's a
there's an openness, I think, which is an attitudinal almost
prerequisite for, for, um, just engaging in art, but especially
art that is not, um, as soluble at first instance
as you might be used to. Um, and the, you know,
(11:05):
the longer I've been in the game, the more I've
realized that that that intangible thing, that attitude, that openness,
that generosity is another word or grace with which you
sort of like, turn to something. Um, is is, in
a way, the architecture for the whole thing itself, you know,
because without that, nothing can survive, um, a hostile or
(11:29):
a suspicious or a reductive or an instrumentalized rating. You know,
nothing can there's no piece of art that can't be, um,
criticized with impunity from a place of subjectivity, you know,
because that's that's kind of, um, what you agree to
when you make art is that other people's subjectivity is
(11:50):
legitimate and that they can they can bring whatever they want.
And so I think there is a notion that I
felt that we, we seek, um, we seek certainty, we
seek confidence, we seek purity. And I think that can
sort of lead or slip into piety at times. And
(12:11):
so it's a whole bunch of d um, d educating
and d training that we, we have to do, isn't it,
that will allow us to sort of like come back
to somewhere and something and say, I'm not sure, I
don't know, I think this I wonder that, um, I'm
(12:31):
here for it. I'm open to it. Um, but there's
no right or wrong, and I'm just trying to engage
with it as seriously but also as as openly as
I can.
S2 (12:41):
And playfully.
S1 (12:42):
And playfully. Yeah, it's all about play. I think that's
a really good point.
S2 (12:45):
I feel like that's a really easy thing to lose
track of, though, to finding the way to be like, hey, like,
what do you want to be?
S1 (12:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
S2 (12:51):
Like, hey, idea. Where are you going to take me. Like,
where do you fit? How do you want to speak?
How do you approach that in your practice? I love that.
S1 (12:57):
I mean, I think, I mean, play play is the
way in which we break out of pattern. And if
nothing else, we are creatures of pattern. Like, we we find,
seek and make pattern everywhere. And the problem with pattern
is that, um, once it's been established, it can almost
(13:18):
be ignored. It's just sort of background, you know, noise
or decoration and what you're trying to do with poetry,
I guess, is, you know, what is it you defamiliarize
the familiar and you familiarize the familiar in a sense. Um,
and I think play is, to use another metaphor, it's
(13:40):
it's how we evolve, right? Like, it's the mutation. Like,
if everything is correct and it's in correct incorrect code
and nothing. No mistakes are made. There are no misprints,
no misreadings, no misunderstandings. Then you've got a closed system.
But as soon as you, you know, incorporate that sort
of grit of something else and you're sort of mucking
around and seeing things differently, that's how language, which is
(14:02):
an evolutionary construct to that's how it evolves. You know,
I think of, um, one of my, one of my, um,
sort of go to poets when I think about play
is Berryman. And there's an anecdote whereby I think he
found he found this book or a pamphlet that, um,
(14:24):
was written for schoolkids of the moment, and it was
correcting all of these mis usages, um, you know, um, incorrect.
S2 (14:36):
Like the rap on a knuckle of a grammar book.
S1 (14:39):
It was a list of bad grammar, basically, and how
not to use this. And for him, that ended up being,
you know, a reservoir of, um, extraordinary and generative, um,
fertile language play like that was, in a sense, his
Bible for us for, for a hot second. And so
I think, um, that always resonated with me like this,
(15:00):
this idea that, you know, what is more, um, what
is more playful and interesting than language being misused? And
when you, when you hear kids, you know, making up
stuff and, you know, mis mishearing mis, um, applying meanings
and words and grammars, um, to me, that's that's way
(15:21):
more interesting as a poet than pretty much any other
public language there is out there.
S2 (15:26):
You know, there's invention there and there's something quite I mean,
there's a tension that's immediately set up when someone says,
you can't, you cannot write or do not. And I'm
interested in that tension in your book because there's tension
between the poems, you know, because they're both distinct poems.
And also one long poem.
S1 (15:43):
I've come to realize that having something that is made
of other parts, wherein those parts are themselves their own things,
but where the parts are constantly in relation to the
other parts and destabilising them, or, you know, exerting tension
upon them and changing them depending on where, which part
(16:04):
you're looking at and which part you're concentrating on. Um,
that feels really true to me at the moment in
terms of how, um, how I think about the whole
project of poetry, you know. And I guess maybe part
of it is that there is a sense of like flux.
There's a sense that this is a thing that is,
that is working rather than a thing that has been made.
(16:27):
It's not just a thing that is fixed and, you know,
stick it on a wall or on a, you know,
between cloth covers. It's something that is in motion and
constantly changing itself, being changed and at odds with itself.
S2 (16:41):
There's something interesting in that for me though, too, because
a book is a fixed thing, right? It's printed, it's bound.
There's a sense of linearity, like whether or not you
read it like that, that tension and that regard and
that idea of being like it's activated by the reader,
and it's here to continue the play and be a
jumping off point, not to just stick on a wall,
as you say.
S1 (17:02):
Totally. And, you know, I try to, um, I try
to sort of just incriminate myself in exactly that tension
by numbering the poems and sort of saying, okay, well,
you're going to read from top to bottom, from left
to right, from start to finish. Then, you know, if
you want taxonomy, I'll give it to you. If you
want classification, here are the numbers. Here's the order go through.
(17:22):
But then hopefully, um, in the process of doing that
the reader then questions, you know, the ordering, the ordinality
of everything. The reader starts thinking, hang on, I'm in
four and it's contradicting two and it's changing what I
thought two was, especially before I'd read three and five
and seven or whatever. And so hopefully that tension is
(17:45):
something that is formally being played out in the poems
as well.
S2 (17:48):
It's a challenging thing to do to try to push
against that kind of linear linearity, or the ways in
which a book is a fixed object, right?
S1 (17:56):
Yeah. Imagine if you could put a book on shuffle.
I'm just thinking about like an algorithmic approach to poetry
that is adaptive and, um, and is personalized in a way. Like,
imagine if you could have a poem that, as a
reader was reading it. Um, it would give detailed sort of,
(18:19):
you know, cerebral feedback as to which, you know, which
cortices are being invoked and put into play. And so
the poem then sort of adapts in order to do
whatever you want, I guess, like you could either sort
of go deeper into that particular, um, activity or you
can sort of, you know, move it somewhere else. And
so everyone would have like a highly individuated and intense,
(18:41):
like a maximally intense experience of a poem. I mean,
it sounds almost evil as well.
S2 (18:46):
But this is this is the dystopia that I is
bringing to poetry in the near future, and.
S1 (18:52):
Eventually, you wouldn't need words to do it. You would
just have, you know, like neural impulses and.
S2 (18:55):
Whoa.
S1 (18:57):
It's part of the remit of art, I guess, is
to control things, to control emotional responses to a certain extent,
but then to leave it open enough so it's not completely,
you know, stultified or or, you know, redundant quickly. I
don't know, it's interesting to sort of think about how
(19:17):
subjective our emotional responses and temperaments and historical sort of
like inner scapes actually are. In a way, the technology
that we have at the moment is very rudimentary, right?
It's um, different people have different poems, poets, lines, transitions, moves,
moments in poems that they can't quite explain why it
(19:39):
just hits them so hard, you know? This wallops me
every time I get to that little bit there to
reverse engineer. That would be extraordinarily interesting.
S2 (19:46):
I think I'm biased, but I also feel like poetry
has this quite unique way as a form. I do
think that it does something about bridging this kind of
experience beyond language that is really challenging to do in
other forms. It's like we all agree that, like, has
a spiky shape. You know, this is like K is
(20:08):
a spiky. That's that's just a fact. I mean, just.
S1 (20:10):
Rhythm is is a great example because rhythm is, um,
rhythm accesses and shapes our subconscious. And so you can
be so affected and moved by something. And the whole
idea is you don't know why, you know, you don't
(20:30):
know exactly why it is that this is getting to you. Um,
because subconscious influences in some ways the, you know, the foundational, um,
shaping of who and how we are and rhythm can
do this because it moves on that level of blood
and breath. You know, it's it's in our bodies and
of our bodies.
S2 (20:50):
Are we encouraging people to feel and just encouraging them
to go like, get out of your critical head. Put
it to sleep for a minute. Let the poem wash
over you.
S1 (20:59):
The Nolan Kelly helmet. You know, some people say it
has antecedents in Malevich's square. Um, and when you read Malevich,
he talks about how if, um, if you were to
sort of establish the highest utility and meaning and lastingness
of something that that art would always outdo everything else
(21:22):
that had utility because everything else goes. Whereas art can
stay as strong through time as as when it was
sort of, you know, first, first made. I would I
would totally agree with you about bringing people back to
their feelings. And the thing that I would sort of like,
put an asterisk on with that would be that especially
(21:42):
for people like me and you, language is also a
part of that. And so language is in all of
its complexity and its folded ness and its contradictions and
its limitations and coded ness, like we've talked about, um,
it is still okay to feel all that you feel
through with and using language as well as part of
(22:03):
that larger landscape of music and blood and breath and
rhythm and, um, you know, just how we are as
animals as well.
S2 (22:11):
Is there something that you look to poetry to find?
S1 (22:15):
You know, I think we start from the position that
language can never actually convey what it feels like to
be in your brain and body in the world. Right?
But it can approximate certain things and sort of like,
you know, there are flashes of. Yes, this feels right,
I guess. And I think poetry Is where I look
for that and where I most often find it.
S2 (22:40):
I sometimes think about poems as places. Landscapes in particular.
S1 (22:44):
Well, I love that because okay, so if you think
about your strongest memories, it's not because you have a
compendious and comprehensive idea of all of the components of
that memory. You know, it's always some strange something, whether
it's a somatic thing, a smell, or a combination, like
(23:09):
an incongruence of things, whether it's, you know, the salt
and the light. Um, so for me, memory is a
really good example of, um, distillation that one would hope
for in poetry as well. I don't know about you,
but like, that whole idea of the Memory Palace has
always been strange to me because I don't remember my
the houses that I've lived in for years and years
and years, every nook and cranny. Like I, when I
(23:29):
think back, you know, I, I forget the bathroom, I forget,
you know. This door wasn't actually there. The window was
not in that room. It was in this other room.
And so spatial memory, um, as an application of left brain,
sort of like putting things in their place doesn't, doesn't
feel real or true to me either. Like, it's more
it's more, um, spotty and imperfect and changeable than that.
S2 (23:54):
Well, there's something, though, too, about what attention you pay,
isn't there? Like, I think about that with memory. And
I have some places that I can walk around. It's
not every place, though, and it's because I really committed
them to memory.
S1 (24:05):
Oh, interesting. How do you do that?
S2 (24:06):
Uh, just from loving them so much. Yeah. So, like,
there's particular places in the desert where I grew up
or particular places in Footscray. And there's also these specific places,
like the house that my granddad built on Yuin country, um,
where I can't go anymore. But like I walk around
in there in my memory all the time. Yeah. Because
it's kind of got this like charge or something. Yeah, yeah.
That I and that I paid extra close attention to
(24:28):
every detail like I was, I think I was unconsciously
cataloguing or something when I spent time there. But we
rewrite our memories as the other thing that I find
really fascinating. Like every time you go back, it wasn't green,
it was red.
S1 (24:40):
And that's that's I mean, if you were to go
into the program that we were just like coding before,
that would then make the color of the thing potentially
an inessential variable. So what was it? You know what
what what is it that actually gets to the charged
heart of why this means something to you?
S2 (24:56):
I'm also curious, like in this vast archive, the library
of all of the spaces, who is yours peopled with?
S1 (25:03):
I was writing about this when I was writing about
Malouf in prose, and there's a line that he's got
in Harland's Half Acre, which is extraordinary, where he just
talks about lines. You know, there are lines of time
and place and experience and family, and they're all around
us all the time, and they're all intersecting and tangling
(25:23):
in different ways all the time. And to me, that
was always the best Figure that I could figure for identity.
You know, that it was this, you know, murmuration of
lines constantly, sort of like moving, changing, disappearing, coming back
(25:44):
and all of this sort of beauty and complexity. And
to me, I guess, who who we are is as
complex and capacious and ever changing as that. So the,
the library, I guess, as one way of putting it,
(26:04):
of experience or selfhood that you have to draw upon
is literally everything that you've ever seen, talked about, heard, um,
you know, experienced in passing, forgotten about because most of
it's forgotten. It's it's all there. Right. And words play
an enormous part, I think, in that when you're sitting
(26:26):
down to write, but it's all there and it's all
there all the time. And what's nuts is that we
can only access, you know, the tiniest, tiniest portion of it, um,
at any given time.
S2 (26:39):
I really don't envy the archivist at this library. Right.
Because they would have a really ridiculously difficult job. From
emerging and established poets to beloved Australian public figures with
(27:01):
an unexpected passion for poetry. Red Room Poetry presents Poetry
Month 2024, a celebration of the many ways poetry touches
our lives. Check out the full program online via Poetry
Month ago.
It's a mouth which brings in embeddedness and materiality in
the world. It's a way of happening. It's a process.
It's not something that's fixed, but something that is trying to,
in a way, I guess, mimic how we think. And
then I think I've read from several poets when they're asked,
you know, first principles Foundation, like, why are you writing poetry?
(00:21):
Often the answer is to leave some record of what
was there for me. Otherwise, as with everything else, it'll go.
S2 (00:31):
This is line break. I'm Izzy Robertsau. What does poetry
mean to you? And what if you could put a
book on shuffle? Natalie's work encompasses fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screen.
His debut poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem,
(00:52):
was published in March this year in Australia, the US
and UK. I spoke with Nam about breaking the form
of the book apart, poetry's ability as a form to
reach through language toward the Incommunicable, and his poem Quilting
the Armor, commissioned as part of 30 and 30 for
(01:14):
Poetry Month in partnership with the Nga. Quilting the armor
is an ekphrastic poem responding to Sidney Nolan's 1947 painting
of the same name, which depicts Kate Kelley lining the
inside of Ned Kelly's helmet. Here's Nam reading the poem.
S1 (01:34):
Quilting the armor. Sun everywhere and shadow. Swamp light. Aquarium light.
Turning the far off fields. Almost Kelly green. Boolean. Fringed
stitch of tracer gold. Crystalized moments you see here. Things clear.
(01:58):
Near the end and passed to Shack Hill. Horses. Water tank.
Windmill a garden Paradise floating in a basement. Furniture store.
Larrikin Hills on wood varnish. Your home a museum helmet
and archive box holding 70 years of yarn. Furphy flashness,
(02:23):
spree and lore banging about in black steel. Everything but
the skull ring. That's all you can do. Bed a
boy's hard head. That's not even there. Cushion it in blue. Borage.
Starfish shaped its leaves. Taste of cucumber in sky. Woad
(02:46):
myth in sea and past. Ultramarine sea. How Morgans look
out similar shape now that armor a lapis mineshaft AFT.
No ground safe. Send him in. See? Which he only
ever saw in chains for water. Knows as soon as
(03:07):
you said. It shifts. The rules change a ransomed new.
The body folds down to. Flat product and the picture
plane tilts, heaving horizons up close. There's Flame Robin on
the fence post. Stunning what you've already sensed. He is
gone and he will go. And so will you. Dan's
(03:32):
roasted dead Ned in a new box near mum, fixed
up and fed for hanging. They'll shave his head of
every precious hair, drown it in plaster. For science and giggles.
The loss no less for not having happened yet. So back,
(03:53):
back past them. Sledgehammering metal into myth. Brave boys over
the green Messmate log. Making the black guard strong. It's
not their strength. Prison hulked. Rock breaking holds your eyes
but one ear's cartilage. The sun made somehow holy through it.
(04:16):
Cherry red. And you were bills on bills selection. And
that is Tom's and wrong. Hold to it now. In masonite,
ganged wood fibers fired tight white sheets at day, white
footed in cold night in ripolin to show it clean
(04:39):
as it is Bullock Creek him granite in red loam,
bad whiskey and less gold. Clanging and banging all that
ship's ballast pig iron into a door. And we went
through it. Me and Tom made a go of it. Ned, though.
(04:59):
He wanted to see the thing out. He was. The
thing is, the thing in the bush. And of it
come out of all the traps of time. Son still
always love, hate horror in buck said hand suspended over
inquests of axe blade, needle share. And he did mind
(05:26):
my drowned brother. He saw himself out of old Melbourne Gaol, Glenrowan,
Greater Wombat and wool shed to Heidi to nil and
ended and restarted their now back again to a father.
Start past my old creeks to the swollen Hughes, where
(05:50):
at ten he fished out the Shelton boy Joy and fame.
That day I swear him skinny. Shivering with light. And
seen and loved. Named. He deserved it all. Go back, brother,
if you dare. Meet me at Avenel.
S2 (06:12):
Can you tell me again about why you picked quilting
the armor?
S1 (06:15):
When I went back and had a look at the series,
I realized how beholden to the language and movement of
cinema Nolan was and the narrative of the stories, especially
the bits that really appealed to him as a storyteller.
And he was a he was a poet, too. Once
that narrative switch was flipped, then that kind of enlivened
(06:38):
different parts of the series for me, it just really
struck a chord with me, especially knowing some of the
context of what was going through Nolan's mind and in
Nolan's life at the time, because he himself was undergoing
a really tumultuous, um, emotional time, you know, with the
reads and with Sunday read in particular. And so all
of that was sort of playing out in my head,
(06:59):
and I sort of drew on bits in my own
sort of past, as we all do. And for some reason,
that image just resonated like it. You know, the tuning
fork was really struck and it just sort of stayed
ringing and the harmonics were really strong for me, so
that's why I chose it.
S2 (07:15):
How does poetry calibrate or tune the attention in ways
that maybe you don't get from looking at visual art
or engaging with other forms?
S1 (07:23):
It brings to the front of your mind the fact
that you're working in language, and that there is no
outside of language, and that language is not just a
medium to be gotten through and with as little fuss
or little noise as possible, that in fact, it is
the whole thing and that the thing itself, whatever referentiality
(07:48):
you want to attribute to, to language is no lesser
for being done in language and through language. And in fact,
when you see the amount and intensity of what you
can do using code, basically because that's what language is. Um,
to me that actually is a thing of wonder and
a thing that needs constant sort of celebration and exaltation.
(08:10):
You know, it's not, um, it's that's such a limited
thing with limited, um, rules. You know, the rules of
syntax or grammar or vocabulary can access a subjectivity that
is as big as anything and as complex as anything
to me is, is extraordinary. And then, secondly, the idea
(08:31):
that the other rules that we think of as the
rules in language, I think poetry can remind us that
these are these are imposed rules, that these are conventions
and that there are other ways of, um, mucking around
with the material. There are other ways of playing with
(08:51):
expectations and assumptions. And so to use the the painting,
as you know, an analogy, one of the things that
Nolan did that was kind of radical at the time
was he he mucked around with the picture plane. So
he his horizons are typically quite high, um, in the composition.
And that changes perspective and it changes the relation of
(09:15):
foreground to background and language and poetry when it attends
to its rules. Its conventions, I think, can have the
same sort of effect. It can sort of radicalize how
we see the world, how we see ourselves, how we
sort of see and agree upon reality. We're trained to
feel as though we've failed. If we don't find the actual,
(09:37):
deeper meaning of something or the meaning of something, and
that notion of there being a correct meaning, being a
certain meaning feels to me like the opposite of what
poetry at its best does. You know, when you when
you come at language, at that sort of level of
intensity and that is throwing up all of these sort
(09:59):
of different references and images and allusions in your, in
your brain. Um, the notion that there is a correct image,
a correct illusion, um, you know, a a total and
comprehensive um, bounding of meaning is the opposite of what
that experience actually feels like. I think what we might
be saying is that there is a reductive kind of, um,
(10:23):
sense that can then crowd or drown out all of
the other more interesting and fluid forms of senses that
we all sense all the time.
S2 (10:35):
Do you think that people have to be comfortable sitting
in uncertainty to, you know, engage with poetry?
S1 (10:43):
Yeah, I do, I do, I think, um, there's a
there's an openness, I think, which is an attitudinal almost
prerequisite for, for, um, just engaging in art, but especially
art that is not, um, as soluble at first instance
as you might be used to. Um, and the, you know,
(11:05):
the longer I've been in the game, the more I've
realized that that that intangible thing, that attitude, that openness,
that generosity is another word or grace with which you
sort of like, turn to something. Um, is is, in
a way, the architecture for the whole thing itself, you know,
because without that, nothing can survive, um, a hostile or
(11:29):
a suspicious or a reductive or an instrumentalized rating. You know,
nothing can there's no piece of art that can't be, um,
criticized with impunity from a place of subjectivity, you know,
because that's that's kind of, um, what you agree to
when you make art is that other people's subjectivity is
(11:50):
legitimate and that they can they can bring whatever they want.
And so I think there is a notion that I
felt that we, we seek, um, we seek certainty, we
seek confidence, we seek purity. And I think that can
sort of lead or slip into piety at times. And
(12:11):
so it's a whole bunch of d um, d educating
and d training that we, we have to do, isn't it,
that will allow us to sort of like come back
to somewhere and something and say, I'm not sure, I
don't know, I think this I wonder that, um, I'm
(12:31):
here for it. I'm open to it. Um, but there's
no right or wrong, and I'm just trying to engage
with it as seriously but also as as openly as
I can.
S2 (12:41):
And playfully.
S1 (12:42):
And playfully. Yeah, it's all about play. I think that's
a really good point.
S2 (12:45):
I feel like that's a really easy thing to lose
track of, though, to finding the way to be like, hey, like,
what do you want to be?
S1 (12:51):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
S2 (12:51):
Like, hey, idea. Where are you going to take me. Like,
where do you fit? How do you want to speak?
How do you approach that in your practice? I love that.
S1 (12:57):
I mean, I think, I mean, play play is the
way in which we break out of pattern. And if
nothing else, we are creatures of pattern. Like, we we find,
seek and make pattern everywhere. And the problem with pattern
is that, um, once it's been established, it can almost
(13:18):
be ignored. It's just sort of background, you know, noise
or decoration and what you're trying to do with poetry,
I guess, is, you know, what is it you defamiliarize
the familiar and you familiarize the familiar in a sense. Um,
and I think play is, to use another metaphor, it's
(13:40):
it's how we evolve, right? Like, it's the mutation. Like,
if everything is correct and it's in correct incorrect code
and nothing. No mistakes are made. There are no misprints,
no misreadings, no misunderstandings. Then you've got a closed system.
But as soon as you, you know, incorporate that sort
of grit of something else and you're sort of mucking
around and seeing things differently, that's how language, which is
(14:02):
an evolutionary construct to that's how it evolves. You know,
I think of, um, one of my, one of my, um,
sort of go to poets when I think about play
is Berryman. And there's an anecdote whereby I think he
found he found this book or a pamphlet that, um,
(14:24):
was written for schoolkids of the moment, and it was
correcting all of these mis usages, um, you know, um, incorrect.
S2 (14:36):
Like the rap on a knuckle of a grammar book.
S1 (14:39):
It was a list of bad grammar, basically, and how
not to use this. And for him, that ended up being,
you know, a reservoir of, um, extraordinary and generative, um,
fertile language play like that was, in a sense, his
Bible for us for, for a hot second. And so
I think, um, that always resonated with me like this,
(15:00):
this idea that, you know, what is more, um, what
is more playful and interesting than language being misused? And
when you, when you hear kids, you know, making up
stuff and, you know, mis mishearing mis, um, applying meanings
and words and grammars, um, to me, that's that's way
(15:21):
more interesting as a poet than pretty much any other
public language there is out there.
S2 (15:26):
You know, there's invention there and there's something quite I mean,
there's a tension that's immediately set up when someone says,
you can't, you cannot write or do not. And I'm
interested in that tension in your book because there's tension
between the poems, you know, because they're both distinct poems.
And also one long poem.
S1 (15:43):
I've come to realize that having something that is made
of other parts, wherein those parts are themselves their own things,
but where the parts are constantly in relation to the
other parts and destabilising them, or, you know, exerting tension
upon them and changing them depending on where, which part
(16:04):
you're looking at and which part you're concentrating on. Um,
that feels really true to me at the moment in
terms of how, um, how I think about the whole
project of poetry, you know. And I guess maybe part
of it is that there is a sense of like flux.
There's a sense that this is a thing that is,
that is working rather than a thing that has been made.
(16:27):
It's not just a thing that is fixed and, you know,
stick it on a wall or on a, you know,
between cloth covers. It's something that is in motion and
constantly changing itself, being changed and at odds with itself.
S2 (16:41):
There's something interesting in that for me though, too, because
a book is a fixed thing, right? It's printed, it's bound.
There's a sense of linearity, like whether or not you
read it like that, that tension and that regard and
that idea of being like it's activated by the reader,
and it's here to continue the play and be a
jumping off point, not to just stick on a wall,
as you say.
S1 (17:02):
Totally. And, you know, I try to, um, I try
to sort of just incriminate myself in exactly that tension
by numbering the poems and sort of saying, okay, well,
you're going to read from top to bottom, from left
to right, from start to finish. Then, you know, if
you want taxonomy, I'll give it to you. If you
want classification, here are the numbers. Here's the order go through.
(17:22):
But then hopefully, um, in the process of doing that
the reader then questions, you know, the ordering, the ordinality
of everything. The reader starts thinking, hang on, I'm in
four and it's contradicting two and it's changing what I
thought two was, especially before I'd read three and five
and seven or whatever. And so hopefully that tension is
(17:45):
something that is formally being played out in the poems
as well.
S2 (17:48):
It's a challenging thing to do to try to push
against that kind of linear linearity, or the ways in
which a book is a fixed object, right?
S1 (17:56):
Yeah. Imagine if you could put a book on shuffle.
I'm just thinking about like an algorithmic approach to poetry
that is adaptive and, um, and is personalized in a way. Like,
imagine if you could have a poem that, as a
reader was reading it. Um, it would give detailed sort of,
(18:19):
you know, cerebral feedback as to which, you know, which
cortices are being invoked and put into play. And so
the poem then sort of adapts in order to do
whatever you want, I guess, like you could either sort
of go deeper into that particular, um, activity or you
can sort of, you know, move it somewhere else. And
so everyone would have like a highly individuated and intense,
(18:41):
like a maximally intense experience of a poem. I mean,
it sounds almost evil as well.
S2 (18:46):
But this is this is the dystopia that I is
bringing to poetry in the near future, and.
S1 (18:52):
Eventually, you wouldn't need words to do it. You would
just have, you know, like neural impulses and.
S2 (18:55):
Whoa.
S1 (18:57):
It's part of the remit of art, I guess, is
to control things, to control emotional responses to a certain extent,
but then to leave it open enough so it's not completely,
you know, stultified or or, you know, redundant quickly. I
don't know, it's interesting to sort of think about how
(19:17):
subjective our emotional responses and temperaments and historical sort of
like inner scapes actually are. In a way, the technology
that we have at the moment is very rudimentary, right?
It's um, different people have different poems, poets, lines, transitions, moves,
moments in poems that they can't quite explain why it
(19:39):
just hits them so hard, you know? This wallops me
every time I get to that little bit there to
reverse engineer. That would be extraordinarily interesting.
S2 (19:46):
I think I'm biased, but I also feel like poetry
has this quite unique way as a form. I do
think that it does something about bridging this kind of
experience beyond language that is really challenging to do in
other forms. It's like we all agree that, like, has
a spiky shape. You know, this is like K is
(20:08):
a spiky. That's that's just a fact. I mean, just.
S1 (20:10):
Rhythm is is a great example because rhythm is, um,
rhythm accesses and shapes our subconscious. And so you can
be so affected and moved by something. And the whole
idea is you don't know why, you know, you don't
(20:30):
know exactly why it is that this is getting to you. Um,
because subconscious influences in some ways the, you know, the foundational, um,
shaping of who and how we are and rhythm can
do this because it moves on that level of blood
and breath. You know, it's it's in our bodies and
of our bodies.
S2 (20:50):
Are we encouraging people to feel and just encouraging them
to go like, get out of your critical head. Put
it to sleep for a minute. Let the poem wash
over you.
S1 (20:59):
The Nolan Kelly helmet. You know, some people say it
has antecedents in Malevich's square. Um, and when you read Malevich,
he talks about how if, um, if you were to
sort of establish the highest utility and meaning and lastingness
of something that that art would always outdo everything else
(21:22):
that had utility because everything else goes. Whereas art can
stay as strong through time as as when it was
sort of, you know, first, first made. I would I
would totally agree with you about bringing people back to
their feelings. And the thing that I would sort of like,
put an asterisk on with that would be that especially
(21:42):
for people like me and you, language is also a
part of that. And so language is in all of
its complexity and its folded ness and its contradictions and
its limitations and coded ness, like we've talked about, um,
it is still okay to feel all that you feel
through with and using language as well as part of
(22:03):
that larger landscape of music and blood and breath and
rhythm and, um, you know, just how we are as
animals as well.
S2 (22:11):
Is there something that you look to poetry to find?
S1 (22:15):
You know, I think we start from the position that
language can never actually convey what it feels like to
be in your brain and body in the world. Right?
But it can approximate certain things and sort of like,
you know, there are flashes of. Yes, this feels right,
I guess. And I think poetry Is where I look
for that and where I most often find it.
S2 (22:40):
I sometimes think about poems as places. Landscapes in particular.
S1 (22:44):
Well, I love that because okay, so if you think
about your strongest memories, it's not because you have a
compendious and comprehensive idea of all of the components of
that memory. You know, it's always some strange something, whether
it's a somatic thing, a smell, or a combination, like
(23:09):
an incongruence of things, whether it's, you know, the salt
and the light. Um, so for me, memory is a
really good example of, um, distillation that one would hope
for in poetry as well. I don't know about you,
but like, that whole idea of the Memory Palace has
always been strange to me because I don't remember my
the houses that I've lived in for years and years
and years, every nook and cranny. Like I, when I
(23:29):
think back, you know, I, I forget the bathroom, I forget,
you know. This door wasn't actually there. The window was
not in that room. It was in this other room.
And so spatial memory, um, as an application of left brain,
sort of like putting things in their place doesn't, doesn't
feel real or true to me either. Like, it's more
it's more, um, spotty and imperfect and changeable than that.
S2 (23:54):
Well, there's something, though, too, about what attention you pay,
isn't there? Like, I think about that with memory. And
I have some places that I can walk around. It's
not every place, though, and it's because I really committed
them to memory.
S1 (24:05):
Oh, interesting. How do you do that?
S2 (24:06):
Uh, just from loving them so much. Yeah. So, like,
there's particular places in the desert where I grew up
or particular places in Footscray. And there's also these specific places,
like the house that my granddad built on Yuin country, um,
where I can't go anymore. But like I walk around
in there in my memory all the time. Yeah. Because
it's kind of got this like charge or something. Yeah, yeah.
That I and that I paid extra close attention to
(24:28):
every detail like I was, I think I was unconsciously
cataloguing or something when I spent time there. But we
rewrite our memories as the other thing that I find
really fascinating. Like every time you go back, it wasn't green,
it was red.
S1 (24:40):
And that's that's I mean, if you were to go
into the program that we were just like coding before,
that would then make the color of the thing potentially
an inessential variable. So what was it? You know what
what what is it that actually gets to the charged
heart of why this means something to you?
S2 (24:56):
I'm also curious, like in this vast archive, the library
of all of the spaces, who is yours peopled with?
S1 (25:03):
I was writing about this when I was writing about
Malouf in prose, and there's a line that he's got
in Harland's Half Acre, which is extraordinary, where he just
talks about lines. You know, there are lines of time
and place and experience and family, and they're all around
us all the time, and they're all intersecting and tangling
(25:23):
in different ways all the time. And to me, that
was always the best Figure that I could figure for identity.
You know, that it was this, you know, murmuration of
lines constantly, sort of like moving, changing, disappearing, coming back
(25:44):
and all of this sort of beauty and complexity. And
to me, I guess, who who we are is as
complex and capacious and ever changing as that. So the,
the library, I guess, as one way of putting it,
(26:04):
of experience or selfhood that you have to draw upon
is literally everything that you've ever seen, talked about, heard, um,
you know, experienced in passing, forgotten about because most of
it's forgotten. It's it's all there. Right. And words play
an enormous part, I think, in that when you're sitting
(26:26):
down to write, but it's all there and it's all
there all the time. And what's nuts is that we
can only access, you know, the tiniest, tiniest portion of it, um,
at any given time.
S2 (26:39):
I really don't envy the archivist at this library. Right.
Because they would have a really ridiculously difficult job. From
emerging and established poets to beloved Australian public figures with
(27:01):
an unexpected passion for poetry. Red Room Poetry presents Poetry
Month 2024, a celebration of the many ways poetry touches
our lives. Check out the full program online via Poetry
Month ago.
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