HR: Ok, final question: something is happening in your work over the last five (?) (more?) years, a pull towards sincerity. Both Googlecholia and Family Trees certainly feel that way, and I think too of your essay ‘Living In a Fridge’ in Growing Up Queer in Australia where you note that a decade ago, you would have written that essay as a ‘fairly standard growing-up-gay-in-the-country story’. You write in that essay of collecting/creating families – I wonder then, is returning to this in Family Trees a return to that childhood practice? And is that sincerity?

I wonder if sincerity is even the right word here. Your work has never lacked irony, even the most recent of your poems – this is something I have always loved about them. Irony and sincerity would seem at odds with each other though, is that true? Do you have to choose between them? Or do we even care about such descriptors within the kind of poetics you/we create?

MF: One aspect of sincerity in my poetry is that of being a fan, of a poem/poet, song/singer, artwork/artist. That devotion brings in the pure and the clear if you like – the unalloyed. Its expression may not be unmixed, but there’s no doubt, in fandom – which is an arguable origin for ‘Grammatical Theme And ‘Dancing Queen’’, and ‘Fire At The Pointer Sisters Factory’, in GC, or say, ‘Recital At The Court Of King Carrot III’ in Family Trees.

I think – predictably enough – that it comes down to an extent to experience and practice – the development of a broader and more varied affective register – as well as the experience of living/aging which provides resources – but there are also the changes in the times – the proliferation of queernesses – covid/lockdown and its discontents. ‘Families’ as a trope feels partly accidental – it was certainly not a determined project of FT, though I am attracted to the irony or perversity of using tropes that don’t belong to me – not that I don’t have a family – but not having partner or children produces, at least for me, an aspect of remoteness – and exclusion when it comes to government rhetoric and discourse – which impinged directly during Melbourne lockdowns.

Jane Austen makes it clear that sincerity exists in relation to irony as much as insincerity.

Anyone who tries to find new ways of saying things is liable to be called insincere – sincerity belongs to the conventional – and yet – of course, this relation immediately falls apart. How can anyone be sincere if they say the same thing as everyone else, and in the same way? This has long been a problem for spoken word I think, which appears to claim a greater sincerity than written poetry.

A broader cultural problem is that of the sincere apology – the required or forced apology made under public pressure, that must yet appear to be sincere (these statements make for ugly reading and are therefore un-or-anti-poetic in the traditional sense). Then there are the self-justifying apologies, which can make sincerity seem very ugly (for a representative example, see Nic Cage in Dream Scenario). Connotatively, sincerity is associated with ‘true feeling’, or being ‘from the heart’, and honest. Etymologically, we get something slightly different: it derives from the terms clean, and pure. To me, this suggests something about the motive for speaking (or writing), that, therefore, a politician is unlikely to be sincere, because it is difficult for a politician to have a clear or pure motive. The sincere statement that could be given is only, ‘elect me’, or ‘I want to be elected’, unless it was something more messy and unending about wanting to ‘help people’, but it’s not so simple etc. ad nauseam as we’ve seen in countless dramatic representations. In poetry, we have the difficulty of writing feeling: especially, or, consequently, in relation to lyric poetry. Immediately we have the problem that feelings muddy, rather than clarify (hence Eliot’s ‘tranquility’). But ‘recollection’ is another word for ‘memory’, and memory is no synonym for clarity or purity either. What appears, literally, to be clear and pure, are the words on the page. The cleanly printed black on white. Which has nothing, really, to do with what might be being said. But if something looks like lyric poetry it either is or is likely to be read in this way (in a book of poetry or other poetic context).

Printing expresses the literal faith that language or writing can purify/clarify thought. Which is more sincere, the thought, or the (printed) wording – or the spoken-aloud version? The thought is imbricated in feeling, but is not, clear, nor pure. We can think of the printed word (or its simulation on the internet), as being a meta-correlative for thinking in general (I apologise, to myself, as well as everyone, to keep referring to Eliot as if he was still an authority, but that which has been hammered into us is easiest to think of). I seem to have come nowhere, in that any word, or series of letters, might be printed in verse form, and have no relation to anyone’s thought. We might undermine its further ‘clari-purify’ by thinking of the atoms in paper and ink vibrating, or of the movement of photons in light that makes the page readable. Reading a screen is even more complicated. Let alone thinking about how clear or pure the motives or components or histories or associated profits of the materials of any of these things. Not thinking about them directly relates to fascism: fascists love clarity and purity and unmixed motives (which they inevitably have, as does every subject, including the lyric subject of a poem).

For those who wrangle with poetry as intellectual expression, and who think words, if used, can be a simple projection from the mind, we can think of Mussolini’s definition of fascism as being ‘action’ (supplementarily, Peter Neville, a Mussolini biographer, refers to fascism as ‘intellectually trivial’.) Whereas any rules of how poetry should be also approach fascism, as far as they approach authoritarianism; not that close here, really, compared to say, Russia under Stalin: and yet, feeling, is relative. It takes a certain amount of cultural capital to identify convention as convention, and not reality, or compulsory. And conventionality is not static, or unproblematic as a category either: convention is always emerging, I’d say.

None of this is meant as an evasion of honesty, or of the problem of lies. Insincerity and lies are poetic problems in the Romantic sense, rather than the moral, in that they often seem to suggest a lack of imagination, rather than purity or clarity. (Or, more generously, lies, at least, are themselves products of anxiety, and the inability to concentrate: mental health enemies of imagination).

I feel like I’ve ultimately made sincerity out to be a bad thing. Maybe one way to save it is to think of it as a strand of discourse, that in itself might be pure/clear, or that wants to signify something about these (historical) concepts, that is mixed in with other, logically less pure/clear strands. Sincerity is ultimately (? can anything really be ultimate?) a form of irony that is aware of its speaking limitations: of some sense of itself as made up (an example of dictionary irony: if sincerity derives from pure and clear as synonyms, it is already mixed) from historically figurative components (where clear, for example, can, I think, only be understood as a metaphor borrowed from something like water, which is only ideally, or fantastically, not really, clear, let alone pure; pure has connotations related to virginity and innocence also – it is not pure in itself). Now, I feel like I’m heading towards an argument in favour of ‘the real’.

This is perhaps a worthy aim: not of attempting to represent ‘the real’ in language, when the form is conventional; rather to approach – however conceptually or hypothetically – in any case, poetically – a form of ‘the real’. I think if we don’t make the mistake of rejecting irony, through misunderstanding it as trivial, or reductive (though hardly fascist or authoritarian even in these mistaken terms) then we can see truth, or something close to that – or the real – there. Words and semantics aren’t content but relational forms. And, I think I want to say, that relationality is a form (the form?) of irony. For me, the development of irony, of sensitivity, in relation to irony, is the great, aesthetic, goal, as well as a spiritual and, it could be said, political, goal (a better understanding of relationality seems vital at every political impasse).

Also, I want to answer the aspect of your question in relation to families and collecting, and I think one thing that poets do or that I do is collect, or accrue, families of forms. These reproduce further forms, of family resemblance, and then die.

A poem to end (btw, the boss that initiates the poem does not refer to myself, but to my first boss, of employment, at the Commercial Bank (now NAB), in Bombala):

Bombala Boss
 
Bearded or mad, braided, as legends are, banking ones,

‘Someone Somewhere …’   Once, making bread, appeared, like,

a beer ogre, spending, seed, beyond.   Majestic barges, all,

Levantine, and British, owned, somewhat suspiciously, but,

operative.   Bloody angels, look at, bad omens, ‘Say Something’,

being, originally, mavericks.   Aloha, lovers, another belated,

overture / sequel, ‘Shy Boy’, bananas, onze / millions, Biafran.

     Leaders accomplish, breathlessness, of sequential, submarine,

burdens, occupying, messy, Brazilian, anthropologists.   Again,

birds / oracles, surmise, saturation, becoming, Ottoline Morrell,

by August, latest.   Between ovens, Sanitarium sandwiches,

beloved, orange, marmalades, buttered, aubergines, lettuces,

aces.   Overt / simulated, sacrifices, brontosauruses’, ongoing,
 
martyrdoms, banging, afternoon, legs, apparently, burnt.   Saint

Sebastian, brought, old medallions, brutal atheists, laughed, after,

breaking, one.   Show babies, obedience, money, buy, Australian,
  
let, anxiety, back, other systems.