MA: On the profound aspects of place and memory, I am reminded of the poet and scholar Meena Alexander, who writes, ‘the composition of poetry cannot be cleft from the complex density of place, and the sights and sounds and smells the sensorium of the body makes us heir to. For place bears the mark of history. It is the wound that memory returns us to so that in poetry we can commemorate, we can remember.’ Your poems are rooted firmly on Country, and your memory is a cinematic archive of colour, sound, journey and play. How do memory and place anchor your practice?
SA: It’s really important for me as a Koori poet to tell the stories of our place. It’s a joy to be making work at a time when poetry and writing by Aboriginal creatives are widely published and sought after, and for me, the voice I want to contribute to this wave is the voice of Western Victoria. This involves reflecting on my childhood in that place, the stories I knew at the time and things I have uncovered since. Recently, I was talking with two other poets about how memories of childhood surface vividly through the writers’ life, but that perhaps what turns memories into poetry is the distance we try to claw back to the moment of experience. Like they said in The Great Gatsby, you can never go back! But we can sure as hell use language to try.
MA: It is a really exciting time for Aboriginal poetry. You render the images, sounds and tongues of Western Victoria so vividly. When we were in conversation at the Williamstown Literary Festival, there was an Italian poet there who was enchanted by your poems. It led him to reminisce about his green, pastoral childhood in the Mediterranean. It was a magical moment. Although you write about Country, your poems lodge themselves deeply into a literary and cultural space where we all keep our precious memories and longings. Have you considered the universality of your poems before?
SA: Not in such specific terms, actually. But as you remind me of his comment, it strikes me that he was connecting with a sense of nostalgia, which is exactly like you say, a ‘space,’ almost like an internal landscape that we all try to return to. The two poets I just mentioned above were Lloyd Jones and Tony Birch, and the conversation we had at the Port Fairy Literary Weekend. In our event, we spent a good chunk of the time reflecting on how prominent childhood is in both of their recent collections of poems. There’s something melancholic and endlessly poetic about the way we grasp for those days of innocence, moments half-remembered from childhood. Using language is a folly we use to convince ourselves we could ever close the gap between the present moment, and the moment of something past. I think that desire is totally universal.
MA: As well as beautiful Wergaia language weaved through the collection, you offer many meditations on language, sound, and breath, like in ‘perfect alphabet’ and ‘silent way.’ These are refreshing reflections on integral devices of poetry. Sometimes, language feels like a temporal entity. Sometimes, it has a life of its own, beyond the poet. Are language and sound containers in the way that the body has been configured?
SA: Language is a tool to get closer to the meaning of the thing. Circling around it, heading towards the centre. Often with poetry it’s an approximation or an attempt to recreate a feeling or sensation. Some speakers of First Nations languages say that there simply aren’t appropriate words in English for particular terms, places, kinship or relationality between people or places. In this way, the English language is also a container, or maybe a reluctant conduit between the meaning/moment and the reader’s experience of a poem.
Returning to ‘chorus’ for a second, perhaps this is my own invention or interpretation of the depth of meaning that Wergaia words could carry. My use of these language words in this context gives it my personal meaning within their various stanzas. They become containers, they have weight, volume, depth.
‘silent way’ and ‘perfect alphabet’ play in a similar yet slightly space of understanding. They are, in hindsight, both devastating conversations. Both speakers grasp at ways to communicate with a beloved and despair at the notion of how – no matter how many times you frame or rephrase or try to control what you say – you can’t control how they listen or what they’ll hear. You still run the risk of being mis/understood. It’s this very real conundrum for poets and writers for whom language is sculptural material.
MA: Translations, misunderstandings and meaning-making are certainly part of sculpting poems. I want to go back to the body-as-a-container concept for a moment, specifically the throat, tongue, and voice; and the mysterious force called breath. In performance, somatic sound is the container for disembodied poems, bringing them to life. I remember seeing you read for the first time at The Victorian Poetry Gala, hosted by Red Room Poetry, at The Wheeler Centre in Naarm. I was captivated by your recitation. Each word lingered in the air for moments long after you had spoken. With poetry originating in ancient oral traditions, there is alchemical power in the spoken word. How do you feel reciting your poems out loud?
SA: What a humbling thing to hear! Because honestly it was your performance on that night that stayed with me. I think we must share the same approach to enlivening words off the page. The way you read, it was almost like incantations; your enunciations were that evocative. I do love reading poetry out loud. I have one of those extroverted/introverted personalities, and I think, at my heart, I am a bit of a performer. The type of reading I do … I always wanted to set myself apart from slam poets, but I didn’t want to be a page poet who doesn’t know how to read, yet I also didn’t want to fall into the trap of using obvious cadences from the page to guide the readings.
I’m not sure how successful I am at the latter part. Over the past few years an interest of mine has been acting classes, and a few of my teachers have brought in poems to read, or we’ve done exercises with text. This has made me look at the craft of a poem entirely differently. The purpose of a word, all its sounds, mechanics, functions all unravel when you have to say it over and over, in different tones, while walking around a room with strangers (a genuine exercise I have done in class, don’t knock it). I don’t necessarily do this with my poems before I do a reading, but it’s given me a different type of appreciation for poem recitation and also writing itself. Reflect on the emphasis you naturally choose during a reading and question it. As an aside, I think everyone should do acting classes. Even if you intend to do nothing with it, it’s just given me a better sense of how to take up space, have authority with a text, and be calm overall when I am being observed onstage.
Reading aloud also makes me want to write more funny poems because I love making people laugh. But I think it’s hard to deliberately write a funny poem. Funny poem moments seem to just happen.
