AA: But, I mean, what better thing to memorialize – for lack of a better word – in a poem, like the line in it that I love so much: ‘it’s like there hasn’t been a Sunday for years’.
AP: That was a quote from my girlfriend at the time, her noticing how a day can open up and feel timeless. You think: ‘how long has it been since we’ve just hung out together with no agenda?’ I think when you and I exchanged the email about this interview, it was also at the start of pandemic lockdown. Along with the many hardships (and even serious tragedies) that have come along with it – for some people, this forcing of a slowing down also meant that they could take a rest, [especially when there was some income support happening]. Maybe sleep a few more hours a night sometimes, without the commute, to get off the adrenaline train. You know, we’re junkies on something that fries us from the inside and the economic conditions often demand that we fry ourselves from the inside. No one’s quite sure how to get out of it, but it’s violent.
AA: I’m interested to hear what’s happening for you. I haven’t written a thing really. I’ve been re-writing joke poems. But have you felt in the space that … (I am assuming you have space, maybe you don’t, maybe it’s wall-to-wall Zoom meetings …) what’s your writing and reading looked like since we spoke last?
AP: I’ve been cautious about thinking: ‘now we’re in lockdown, we should write that Shakespearean play that we’ve had up our sleeve’. I’ve been cautious of that, because I think people have felt it … My intellectual capacity’s been a bit less; I’ve just clocked it. I’m not quite as conceptually fast as I normally am. For me, that means some part of my brain is preoccupied with what’s happening, even at a level that I can’t see. There’s a busyness going on behind the curtain, if you like. I’ve emphasised for myself steadiness, laziness, pleasure, kindness – doing even fewer things than one could imagine. Doing my work, which hasn’t been less. My job at Deakin has been more than it usually would be, or a different composition because there’s been a lot of student support to do, and that matters to me. In that role, there was a place to step in and do a particular kind of pastoral care. In a way to show the students: art will hold you; not productivity-as-art, but art – as in a practice where we’re going to keep writing, folks, and we’ll write a bit less than normal, but we’ll keep doing that thing, as long as you don’t need it to be ‘good’. Keep writing and it will hold you. And we’ll just do some reading, and it will be better than five hours of Netflix and the 60th Uber eats order. It will be better than that. There’s the quietness of reading and something about the difficult pleasures, which hold us better than the shit we’re sold, you know?
AA: It’s good to be reminded of that.
AP: Yes. So, writing and reading. I’ve written a few smaller things. I’ve been working with that book on the table. It’s a book of photographs. No words in it. I’ve been working on ekphrastic responses, as kind of meditative thing. Mostly they’re crappy, but it doesn’t bother me. Just – you know – look at a photo once a day and try quickly to write something crappy. That’s even dropped off in various moments when students needed help from, you know, earlier in the morning. Then, you kind of start the administrative day, and (usually, if you start the administrative day) in my experience it can have you in its grasp until close of business. It’s good to delay the administrative day, if you can.
AA: I would like to give you space to talk a little bit about your embodied practice, for which I will use the shorthand ‘yoga’. You also wrote a fantastic piece in The Lifted Brow. It was published as ‘The anatomy of a trigger’. And there’s really, really fantastic paragraph that I’ve cut and pasted here. You say: ‘yoga is one approach among many good-enough ones. The point, however, is that the most profound reasons for doing yoga arguably fall into two clusters. Either you have a niggling urge or proclivity towards researching some hardcore ontological matters through your body. And/or, second reason, your life is a secret train wreck. And you seem to be the reliable source of most of the wrecking. And you wonder whether this odd set of practices called yoga might be able to make a teeny impact on your being such a fuck stick’.
AP: It’s good, we’re laughing. Because we could be crying as well.
AA: I was earlier, but … yeah. So, there are obvious ways we could probably talk about how yoga connects to writing and poetry. Like, it keeps you out of your head all the time, keeps your body able to function, to sustain the actual physicality of the practice.
AP: Well, that’s right, because writing needs a body that functions. Janet Frame describes this very well in her little story ‘Solutions’, where the person progressively cuts off bits of their body because they’re so burdensome. And then they’re just a bloody head on the ground [that dries up to be mistaken for a prune]. It’s a great metaphor.
Yoga stands in, I think, at the present moment, for a whole bunch of quite sporty, you know, self-maintaining ‘musts’. Another kind of piety, right? I must maintain my neoliberal unit, so I can produce, and whatever. All that stuff. So, there’s that, and if people find that a satisfying way to use it, it’s also fine. And often people move from one to the other. You know, we start in [fitness]-yoga, and then people’s curiosity gets deeper or more nuanced. Then they start looking for another kind of way or just for new layers to add to the other layer of being vigorous and shaking up the system – which is excellent, given our lifestyle. But, I guess what yoga [wants to] train is pure sensitivity, sensibility, sensuality. ‘Body awareness’ feels a bit ick to say; it’s a bit of an overused word. (We’re poets, we get annoyed with words, right? I get annoyed with so many words. It’s endless; I’m so intolerant.)
AA: I cannot hack the term ‘social distancing’ right now.
AP: There you go!
In terms of practising, in the style I work in, ‘yoga’ means sitting practices [meditation], plus breathing practices, plus poses, plus study. It’s a four-limb system, which is why, as a thinking person, I took to it so well because I’d had too many earlier yoga teachers go: ‘oh Antonia, you think too much’. And I was like: ‘I don’t think you think enough, mate.’ (The ‘mate’ being pointed here, you know. I didn’t believe my thinking was a problem. Or maybe this guy was tortured by his own thinking …) Maybe, too, I thought, [this person] just doesn’t want to answer my questions about yoga.
Yoga and thoughts go perfectly well together.
It’s just that often our thinking is a bit unruly. Like our posture’s a bit unruly and it needs us to be kinder to it. To be interested in [the thinking] rather than wanting to shut it up. As if you want your thoughts to shut up like a toddler; they will not shut up, right? You can only listen better and be more patient. And the gems will come up through the thickets of supposed nonsense. I said recently to a bunch of yoga students on Zoom, of course, that really when we meditate or when we do poses, we’re just listening to ourselves more closely – with less of an immediate shutdown or an immediate disapproval. And I think poetry, isn’t so different; it’s that we have to tolerate ourselves on the page in a big, jumbled mess of banality and mediocrity.
‘Gawd, did I just write that sentence? That’s just so … is that really me?’ But once you stop caring that the sentence is on the page, you just keep writing. And through that process some sentences come that we like well enough. That’s where there’d be an obvious crossover between yoga and writing. Where you just stop being so tyrannical with yourself. It’s the opposite of a body tyranny. It’s the opposite of a mind tyranny. People say: ‘oh, you do yoga; you must be so disciplined’, or ‘we do meditation to control the mind’. I am for none of that. Actually, you can totally let the mind go wild. You let the body’s ability to feel go wild. Like: ‘how does the floor feel? And: why is there a circular patch on the bottom of my left foot that connects to the inside back of a patch in my sacrum where I get tight?’ What you’re doing is really being not so knowing-in-advance-what-your-body-feels. Not knowing in advance what bits connect to other bits. Being so radically willing to see anything, including – as I’ve said to a student who is a brilliant Melbourne poet … trying to see, trying to feel, the places that are numb.
You don’t even see it; you’re blind to that particular patch – say – in your back. Blind to the way that that it connects to places we’ve shut down because there was trauma; there were bad times; someone did something to us in that place. And we don’t want to think about that place anymore. So, we just blanket it, you know. Yoga is often about feeling what can’t be felt and I think writing is no different. We’re saying the unsayable, if possible – bringing that to expression as best we can with all the clumsiness of it.
