GK: This question is not a question, but an opportunity to set the record straight. Your first collection, In the Printed Version of Heaven, was bratty before the terminology ‘brat’ was canonised in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2024. Please discuss.

SB: George, thank you for giving me this opportunity to say that yes, I was brat before Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’. She ought to recognise this! I’m looking forward to the day that she admits this publicly.

I’m joking. I’m not joking. Perhaps something I could say – seriously – here about lyric poetry and pop music is that I’m really committed to this form. I do think my sensibility in poetry aligns closely with certain kinds of baroque pop. This approach of mixing tonal registers, using like medieval language with internet slang, and rhyme as a bridge between antiquated and contemporary forms for compressing the erotic, humour, heartache – everything into a slim lyric. Often for me this reads as audacious and a little deranged. In this way, sure, I was (I was!) ‘brat’ before Charli. But I owe a debt of gratitude to the poets I learned from, particularly poets like Elaine Kahn, Julian Talamantez-Brolaski, Langston Hughes, Ariana Reines, and I guess poets like Alfred Tennyson and John Donne, and on and on …

GK: Thank you for setting the record straight.

SB: You’re welcome.

GK: And this second collection, while also bratty, and beautiful, and diaphanous, and sexy, is also quite mystical, a symbiosis of the mundane and sacred. Bulls, swans, thistles and archery bulge throughout the poems, and there are many biblical references of paradise, heaven, hell and so on (for example, ‘From love I went looking’). And, of course, the collection opens with reference to a saint. Can you talk about your relationship with mysticism, or whatever you want to call it?

SB: I think writing poetry, particularly lyric poetry which places so much on the sounds of words, has this way of bringing different forces into alignment. The bull you mentioned is in the poem ‘Monologue’, which has this line ‘a cruel bull plunged a horn in me’ – I wrote that basically for the assonance between ‘cruel’ and ‘bull’. I think they sound good together and their placement does something for me that feels transformative. I don’t know if there’s a way to talk about this without sounding stupid because it’s both incredibly simple and yet mystical. But like, the placement of words together in surprising or aesthetically attuned ways in the packaged form of a poem can make something out of language that language can’t ordinarily do.

Alice Notley died yesterday [20 May 2025]. She has been a big influence on my life as a poet. She was always saying how poetry draws on the raw material of the universe and spoke confidently and defiantly about the importance of poetry as a mystic form, and I’ll always be grateful to her for it. She was completely uncompromising in how she referred to poetry as this magic form of address, this thing that comes from outside the poet, and I agree with her, I think it is magic.

I guess I come to the idea of magic through my interest in aesthetics. I really care about beauty! It’s what magic is. I feel some resistance to this inclination from so-called Australian culture, if I could speak of such a thing. I’ve always felt at odds with the figure of the like, ratbag, or larrikin. I imagine this larrikin poet who just wants to like, have a laugh. And it’s hideous! Humour is obviously important, but I want to be beautifully, mystically funny, I want to do it with arrow-shot saints.

GK: Mystics are funny.

SB: They are funny. Alice Notley was really funny.

GK: She was. Vale Alice!

In response to the entirety of Light Film – that ‘Monologue’, which you mentioned, is all about light, I ask you this Sholto, scientists have now crystallised light; they’ve made light into ‘supersolid’, where the phase state it’s in is both solid and liquid at the same time. What do you think about that?

SB: Oh god, it’s happening again … first Charli stole brat and now science is stealing Light Film! I don’t understand anything about science at all, but I think that’s great they’ve somehow done that. Light and lightness, how the word invokes both weight and light as in … the opposite of darkness, is an enduring obsession for me artistically. I once heard Ariana Reines say in an Instagram Live that the alchemical term for turning a liquid into a vapour is levity. She spoke beautifully of how in order to create transformation or change, there must be levity, some process of lightening. At different points in my life, I’ve had high degrees of suicidal ideation. When I was writing this book, I was so unhappy I thought I might die. I don’t think of this book as like … a comedy, but there are funny poems, and I wrote the funniest one at a very low point. It strikes me that that’s levity, like, life-preserving lightening. We need light, lightness in all its forms, to survive.

Light Film as a title is my attempt to bring together some of the book’s themes. Yes, the book uses film, as in cinema, and that functions as a process of transmuting light on celluloid film. But also, it’s film as in, a trace, an oily film, a light residue. I like the thought of it being both. A slippery, oily light.

GK: You also teach poetry. How do you think this has – if it has – influenced your own writing and understanding of poetry?

SB: Teaching fulfils me spiritually and renews my love of the world. I’m not sure exactly how it’s changed poetry as a writing practice for me, but it’s showed me that poetry means something to the world, and it belongs here. Seeing what poetry means to people other than myself, and having any part in expanding that meaning, is incredibly humbling. It’s helped me come to terms with my own fears and insecurities about being misunderstood and strange, not least of all for having devoted myself to such a niche artistic medium. It’s community, I suppose.

GK: There’s a playful question and answer between two poems, one in your debut collection called ‘Is it so impossible to be taken seriously’ and then in this book with the echoing title, ‘It is, after all, impossible to be taken seriously’. How do you feel or how would you describe the relationship between the two bodies of poetry?

SB: In the Printed Version of Heaven is like a trampoline that Light Film jumps off from. When In the Printed Version of Heaven came out, I couldn’t look at it, and I felt really disappointed and disillusioned by it. That’s probably normal for a first book. In a way, I wrote Light Film to escape that feeling. I think they’re similar, but Light Film feels like a more refined statement that needed In the Printed Version of Heaven to be written first, to undertake some figuring out and exploring to exist. Both books are bratty and merge cinematic images with everyday life. They both use wit and irony in the lineage of Kevin Killian. But I think Light Film turns it up a little more. It’s more direct in its references to cinema, and it’s rawer about its depiction of gay life, or my gay life. They’ve been published basically back-to-back, so they deal with similar concerns, but I feel more confident in my voice in Light Film.

GK: Final question. Fragrance emerges – plumes – strongly in the last section of your recent collection. If Light Film were a perfume, what would you say its notes are?

SB: This is the most important question. I’ll set the scene for you, to introduce the perfume. It’s a humid, summer night and you’re walking to an orgy. But you’re crying. And you’re smelling every flower on your way. We’ll start the perfume with a really tart lemon note, for some bite. Then, night blooming jasmine and tuberose. White florals are key because they are lush and atmospheric, they invoke sex and genitalia as well as grief. We honour the dead with them. Perfect. Then, a milk notes, and musk to make it disgusting. Civet –

GK: What’s civet?

SB: A civet is an animal. Historically, their perineal glands were extracted to use as a perfume ingredient. It’s now synthetically reproduced in modern perfumery. When you smell civet as a perfume ingredient, it kind of smells like a groin – so we’ll use that.

Then an almond note, a marzipan-level sweetness, to make it psycho and sincere in equal measure.

GK: You’re right, that was the most important question. Psycho and sincere! Stunning!