Interjection from Harry Reid: At this point, I panicked and didn’t send Michael Farrell an email for a month. Breakfast? What the hell? I was being stupid. Farrell went to Paris on a trip and there was a pause between us, but not silence – the difference is important to note.
HR: Hi M, how was Paris? Was it delicious? What are the French doing these days – are they writing poetry? I have been thinking – what’s exciting to you at the moment? Is there anything left in poems that feels like a new frontier or is that where the collage comes in?
MF: Parisians are certainly reading more books in public than here. But they (another, sub-they) are also having a paper and ink crisis, a poet told me. Anyway, the answer is: acrostics, acronyms, patterns. It takes a lot of work to see the possibilities of shifting what the poetry world is, elsewhere – not forgetting that it changes regardless, like everything else. I’m interested in the (pre)determined writing of poetry without poetics. in the possibility of an anglophone tradition that is uncoupled from (or is in a more conscious /critical dialogue with) the (somewhat arbitrary) Greek heritage, as adopted/channelled through Rome.
HR: I have always admired the constraints in your poetry, especially in the last few books. I know that’s nothing new for you, but poems like ‘Enterprise’ and ‘Philip Emu’ are so carefully crafted and so human – it’s a nice opposition to the book’s title. You mentioned ‘poetry without poetics’ – does the encroaching hand of the internet and AI hold any interest or trepidation for you? I had a friend recount that she couldn’t get ChatGPT to write a poem that didn’t rhyme even after expressed instruction.
MF: I don’t think that (my) book/s can counter ‘the digital’ really, being human is already too enmeshed with the digital and the internet. I think all we can do is accept technology and keep doing our thing (a not, of course, static or rigid thing). The internet can’t be an encroaching hand, we high-five it (shake it?) every time we send an email (the method of this interview). But I’m painfully aware that technology (as it develops, with regard to phones/apps, computers, QR codes etc.) is a test of wellness. Its latest examples are useful to the healthy and strong but often exclude those with concentration difficulty, of which I am one. I had already named my manuscript Googlecholia before I had my subsequent breakdown, which removed me from the cosy realm of affects, and, a more casual, inertia, into the full-blown clinical one, of trauma, where I was unable, for around eight months, to face a computer or even a TV screen; to make phone calls, send an SMS – or to read books or write poetry: a mix, then, of survival skills, and meaningful acts of (my) life. It was a time when I became very aware that the rhetoric around ‘inclusivity’ is very much based on a construct of the human as healthy and tech’d up.
That is to veer somewhat from your question. Does the internet (still) hold interest? It’s just one of the relational bodies I think about, especially in periods of formal change – in terms of my writing – one of which I am going through right now – the question, then, is how does what I’m doing now relate to/change my perception of what ‘the digital’ is, or offers. It is also interesting, regarding aging: as we age, we become repositories of greater amounts of memory, but also – at least speaking for myself – become more forgetful.
To skip to AI – I don’t have a particular interest in it for writing poetry at the moment. I might have at some point. I can see it might have some benefit for those (which I have been and will be again) writing applications, for jobs or funding. These processes are great thefts of time. But my hope for AI’s benefit to writers/artists is application reform, e.g. if funding bodies get sick of reading AI applications and scrap the statement aspect altogether. An idea and a CV should have been enough for many things I have wasted chunks of my life on.
HR: I’ve been thinking too that there’s no meaningful divide anymore between ‘real life’ and ‘online’ and Googlecholia is such an apt turn of phrase for that. It’s almost passe to talk about it like but as you say, how we relate to it is not a foregone conclusion. I don’t think we need to counter it, but a bit of wrestling is good. I ran into Ann Vickery at the airport coming home who mentioned she hadn’t been to a poetry reading in ages, mainly for being off Facebook. We need a town crier or something, I think. Or a mailing list, but who has the time?
Interjection from Harry Reid: Ann Vickery drove my partner and me home from the airport after we’d just touched down from a pretty brutal flight home from Tokyo. I would like to take this opportunity in the public forum of to say thank you, Ann Vickery. You are simply the best.
HR: Some of my favourite poems in GC are the ones that create these great little scenes to inhabit – I’m thinking of ‘Fire at the Pointer Sisters Factory’ and ‘On Meeting a Retired Orange’. I am very charmed by the ‘I’ in those poems. I’ve always thought there’s a kind of through-line in your work with that first-person pronoun – you do it in FT with poems like ‘Andre Gide and the Honey Sandwich’, and I even see it in poems like ‘Motherlogue’ from your collection Cocky’s Joy (or am I way off the mark here?). I will admit to trying very hard to write a poem like that, expressly ripping you off, but I never trust the ‘I’ enough. is that trust just built through time or something else?
MF: I like GC as your abbreviation of Googlecholia because it reminds me of tourism ads for the Gold Coast, which included the phrase ‘very GC’. It’s a supremely ironic description of anything bad or good.
Earlier in my writing of poetry I avoided using ‘I’ altogether, so when I started using it, I suppose ‘I’ felt ready. Three of the four poems you mention are prose poems, and it’s easier to use ‘I’/represent a self in a prose poem, for me, anyway. ‘Motherlogue’ isn’t prose but it is strongly narrative. In that poem, the narrator is literally embattled with the devil so that means it (its ‘I’) can’t dominate. There’s a relation perhaps between an ‘I’ narrating a poem, and the reflected attitude in a poem: of how important the poet thinks the writer of a poem is, and how important representing that is. I mean the importance of the writer, relative to language, technology, and history (including the history of representation).
And all this has something to do with how an ‘I’ sounds. Not coming into a room and announcing our arrival as a speaker, still less declaiming from a roof/mountaintop; it wouldn’t be good to be too weaselly, either. There has to, ‘I’ think, have to be a generous amount of irony in relation to the ‘I’ – and not the ‘I’ as the font of irony, or even of voice: the ‘I’ is spoken as much as speaking.
This comes together, ‘I’ think, over years of reading and writing: but it is not just the experience/time factor, but also, where that reading and writing has taken us, in terms of our philosophy (of writing, of representation, of ourselves).
