HR: A few poems toward the end of GC mark a real shift stylistically from both the rest of the book and your previous work – reminds me of π.O. (Pi.O.) actually (you and him: the two kings of Fitzroy?). Here, I am thinking of ‘Big Blue Play’ and ‘Brocade’.
How aware are you of contemporary Australian poets when producing your own work now? ‘Aware’ may be the wrong word as I know you’re keenly aware of what’s going on… more so I guess, does it influence you? Or is the recent work more of a drilling down on your ongoing poetic practice regardless of what’s going on at the moment poetically? Personally, I’m trying to put the blinkers on, but I don’t think I’m quite able to yet.
MF: I’m aware of poets – both contemporary and not – Australian and not – that I think are writing in a comparable mode when I feel like I have a ‘fix’ on a mode of my own – rather than at the moment of writing an individual poem – except in the case of a specific allusion that might drift in – or occasional tonal shift.
The fact that I feel close to some poets at some moment reflects a shift, i.e., that I hadn’t felt close to them in a previous moment.
Re: π.O, there are a couple of things we have in common: a non-receivedness about punctuation – to put it awkwardly – and a kind of world-building in writing a poem – I’m not happy with that description, but what I mean is, neither of us writes in a winnowed down way, of discrete images that are meant to resonate soulfully with a reader – ugh ’I’m putting it very badly…to speak for myself, as much as I admire: Paul Celan, George Oppen, Stéphane Mallarmé – I am not that type of poet. I’m closer to Walt Whitman I think, than Emily Dickinson, although we do both revel in a kind of throwaway violence, which perhaps relates to a kind of casual formalism.
Anyway – ‘The Big Blue Play’ is for me the peak poem of Googlecholia. it partly comes from having attempted a few times to unsettle (without valorising that verb) the form of the poem, while trying to keep it mobile, from not falling in a heap. Another driving aspect was my obsession at the time with the mobilisation of voice(s), being more consciously aware than I had been (or even am now) of how voice is working in the poem, how multiple it is, in the case of ‘The Big Blue Play’ by making the subject of the poem a role in a play spoken by four voices.
It’s a kind of sequel to ‘Long White Talksong Part One’ in Family Trees, which has the robot hunters all speaking with the same voice – the same programming.
‘Brocade’, which you also mention, is less determined conceptually but, again, is trying to mobilise collage, in the way that voices interact in conversation, or bodies in spaces (this sounds vague, but could be any situation where people are moving around, and typically that is an aspect of TV and cinema – humans moving and talking) – rather than, collage as a static art form, like paper stuck to a painting.
