GM: You write that Rimbaud’s dislike of convention, or ‘impatience … with the world as it is’ (Badiou) is a ‘goad’ for poetry. Does poetry always need that tension or oppositionality for you? Are there poems you like, or have written, that are goaded by, to put it glibly, mindful acceptance of things as they are? What would such a poem look like, do you think?
Poets are never happy with what they write (one of many reasons that I’ve had a book in suspended animation for so long), there is always that impatience, hardly specific to Rimbaud, though he spectacularly writes it. In particular I was looking at his ‘Après le Déluge’ (‘after the Flood’) and how the ideal state is permanent revolt, continuous disruption, that is, poetry. Complacence is really a form of cynicism, in poetry – as in politics, and impatience with things as they are is impetus for change in any field. Poems that are satisfied with the status quo? sounds like a contradiction in terms, though all art is celebratory at the same time it’s critical.
GM: In your PhD thesis, you discuss poets as ‘commemorating’ the time they live in. How do you see your work as commemorative of time?
GR: The thesis was partly looking at how poets attempt to, wish to, hammer the past to smithereens, in making something new, but that new work is necessarily carrying traces of what’s gone. That is hardly a new vision, but I was also tracing how so much that we think of as ‘modern’ can be found in Homer, the sort of split-screen his similes provide, the multi-temporalities created, even a gender fluidity, and how Homer leaks into Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and all three into Ashbery. Mainly I was exploring depictions of, and responses to, temporality.
Poems inevitably employ the language of their era, yet also exist as if outside of time, timeless. There’s always that paradox with art. When I first visited the galleries in Europe, paintings were leaping from the walls almost blinding me with their exuberance, as if they had just been painted, even or perhaps especially so many I knew well.
That’s what it’s like reading great poems, you can see the impatience to unsettle, to change, to surprise. In Homer’s Iliad there are times he piles simile on simile, competing with himself for his own amusement or to describe more exactly or more flamboyantly. And even when poems seem ludicrously outdated and derivative, that too is a reflection of an era that tolerates or rewards or encourages the hackneyed, and that is every era. What’s already approved and known will always appeal to a majority, because it conforms with and confirms preconceived ideas of poetry.
GM: How have the ideas of poetry changed from when you started writing and thinking about poetry – talking about it with other poets like John Forbes, publishing it in the Age, reviewing, etc.?
GR: With John Forbes, when we weren’t arguing which was often, we had similarly critical approaches and tastes, and shared and exchanged enthusiasms for Ashbery, Baudelaire, and many others. We once jokingly re-wrote Auden’s ‘Consider this and in our time’ as a wedding poem for Martin Johnston: our poem was pretty bad, the Auden is so declamatory and dazzling and crazy, so inarguably great, that we found it hilarious. Also, with Martin Johnston and John Tranter, there was enough overlap in aesthetic tastes – yet all produced very different poems, often the case with close colleagues/friends. I borrowed hundreds of books from Martin’s library, and he would remember every detail of the books’ contents, so it was always illuminating to discuss books with him. John Tranter used to drop off photocopies of Prynne, Clark Coolidge, and others, when their books were not available in pre-internet, pre-Jacket magazine era. I suppose there’s comradeship, what the ancient Greeks called philia, between poets with a certain affinity, though you don’t think of it like that until they’re not there driving you mad. John Forbes would bring his latest poem over and I was often unimpressed, or just critical, thinking ‘another John Forbes poem, big deal’, ‘same old plateau’: the standard was taken for granted.
As poetry editor at the Age, the allotted space kept shrinking over my 18 years there, from 30-35 lines to around 20 by the end, insufferable limits – but it was nice to have that public billboard for so many great poems. I tried to review as much as possible but that often meant three books in 600 words including quotes. Reviewing and publishing poetry has moved almost entirely to little magazines, online journals. There isn’t one space, or one magazine, that most poets read, there are hundreds of different ones of extremely varying quality, each with their own audience.
In any time, you can see changes and developments, reactions to, and borrowings from, previous eras, and often can tell roughly when poems were written. But the biggest changes are technological. Print-on-demand means more books published, and there seems more appetite for occasional and ephemeral and performance poems perhaps as a result. Sometimes I think the emphasis on identity now is partly that people are just desperately trying to be seen and heard over the cluttered online labyrinth. So much is readily accessible that it must seem daunting to younger poets trying to track through centuries as well as keep up with both local and international currents. It takes longer to find the good poems, to separate the wheat from the chaff. But there’s always something to discover, to use, to learn, from reading anything. Even bad poems can have a great line or two.
