Author: Thom Sullivan

Poetry is a very old technology

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Thom Sullivan Poet Poetry NaPoWriMo 19

[From an address to high-school students and their families, September 2018.]

Poetry is a very old technology. In all likelihood, it has been part of the human experience almost as long as fire and stone, and just as long as many activities that scientists look to to set us apart as a species: cave painting, making bone tools, using pigments and jewellery, building hearths, and burying the dead.

Poetry has always touched lightly on the world. As a spoken artform to begin with, it has left us no definite traces of its earliest origins, though in all probability it is older than pottery, and older than the wheel. It has a place with fire, stone, ochre, song, music, story, ritual and mythology as an element of what it means to be human, as an essential part of who we are.

Poetry is an ancient technology, but it is also a relentlessly new one. And so we find it flourishing still in an age of popular songs, poetry slams, podcasts, e-books, YouTube clips, Twitter feeds, and Instagram posts – all of which have exponentially increased its ability to reach into our lives, and the capacity of young writers to find an audience for their work.

Interview: Nathanael O’Reilly

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Over recent months, I’ve enjoyed reading the regular interviews with poets published by Paul Brookes at The Wombwell Rainbow. This week Paul published an interview with poet Nathanael O’Reilly, born and raised in Australia, but currently living and teaching in the United States.

In the interview, Nathanael speaks of the influence of Keats, Yeats and Heaney, his “holy trinity”, as well as his advice for young writers: “Every serious writer knows that it takes years and years of practice to become a decent writer, let alone a great one […] Young writers are often impatient and in a rush to get published, and many of them don’t understand that writing requires a really long apprenticeship […] Having the desire to write is just the first step.”

Nathanael’s interview can be read in full here, and is highly recommended, along with his most recent book of poems, Preparations for Departure (UWA Publishing, 2017).

We can live without poetry

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Thom Sullivan Poet Poetry NaPoWriMo 01

The truth is we can live without poetry.

Many or most people live perfectly fulfilling and contented lives without much exposure to poetry, day to day, month to month, or year to year. Yet I’m convinced that a good life, even the best life, is better with poetry. And, of course, many people still turn to poetry during the profoundest moments of their lives, so we still often hear poems being read at weddings and funerals.

But, by and large, we can live without poetry.

I would say though, to the many people who live without much poetry in their lives, if you find yourself in a world in which talk is cheap, in which words have become a devalued currency, in which politicians, shysters and hucksters have eroded the substance of truth and meaning, and in which a person’s word can be all but worthless – and if this aggrieves you, then maybe look again to poetry for what it can offer.

Poetry – through its careful trust and distrust of words, and its determined pursuit of meaning – is one of the antidotes to that world.

Notes: August 2018

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Diesel and Dust Homestead

I began 2018 with the intention of blogging at least monthly, a plan that went awry when I was seconded to another role at work in mid-March. So, this is a return to my schedule of monthly blog posts. The last few months have been busy with poetry and writing activities, nonetheless. In early July, I submitted the final edit of my forthcoming book of poems, Carte Blanche, to Vagabond Press. I was enormously grateful to friends and fellow poets who helped out in the weeks before the final edit was due.

Since March, I’ve had a couple of poems published: ‘Threshold’ in The Canberra Times, ‘‘Diesel & Dust’ homestead [a landscape]’ in Otoliths; ‘Drysdale: Vaucluse, 1945’ (a terminal, responding to Ern Malley’s ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495’) in Marrickville Pause; and ‘Hit Single’ in Australian Poetry Anthology, alongside the work of a number of other South Australian poets – Aidan Coleman, Jelena Dinic, Alison Flett, Ian Gibbins, Jennifer Liston, Bronwyn Lovell, Rachael Mead, Louise Nicholas, and Dominic Symes. Also, my review of John Kinsella and Paul Kane’s Renga: 100 Poems was recently published in Plumwood Mountain.

On 4 April, I was a guest poet at the opening night of Adelaide’s new No Wave poetry reading series, with Alison Flett, Heather Taylor Johnson and Banjo Weatherald. In June, I had the privilege of judging and announcing three selected manuscripts (by Bruce Greenhalgh, Maria Vouis, and Geoff Aitken) and two highly commended manuscripts (by Emelia Haskey and Inez Marrasso) for Friendly Street’s New Poets 19, a new addition to – and resurrection of – Friendly Street’s important New Poets series. On 22 June, I was a guest writer at the South Australian English Teachers’ Association’s Meet the Writers Festival. And on 28 July, I was a guest poet at DARK FOLK, featuring music by Jen Lush, Go Fish and Daniel J. Towsend, and poetry by Steve Brock, Juan Garrido-Salgado and me. The songs on Jen’s album The Night’s Insomnia draw on the work of 12 contemporary Australian poets, e.g. ‘The Louder Silence’, based on a poem by Jill Jones.

In recent weeks (since my secondment ended), I’ve had the chance to resume monthly poetry workshops, and editing work. And I have new poems forthcoming in Overland and Westerly.

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In terms of my reading, I’ve enjoyed and can recommend Ken Bolton’s Starting at Basheer’s, Jill Jones’ Viva the Real, Anthony Lawrence’s Headwaters, Bella Li’s Argosy and Lost Lake, Philip Mead’s Zanzibar Light, Nathaniel O’Reilly’s Preparations for Departure, and two of Vagabond Press’s books of poetry in translation – one from its Americas Poetry Series, featuring Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez and Alí Calderón (contemporary Mexican poetry), and another from its Asia Pacific Poetry Series, featuring Kim Yideum, Kim Haengsook and Kim Min Jeong (poetry from Korea’s ‘Future Wave’).

Notes: February 2018

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Adelaide Writers’ Week 2018 – Notes on Tracy Ryan’s The Water Bearer

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I’m writing this on March 4, which means Adelaide’s ‘Mad March’ is well and truly under way. I can take and/or leave many of its attractions, which include the ‘Adelaide 500’ car racing event, with its air-force flyovers and traffic diversions; the various delights of the Adelaide Festival; the ubiquitous Fringe Festival; WOMADelaide; the Adelaide Cup, a public holiday, at least; and – this year – a particularly inscrutable state election campaign. To borrow a note or two from Keats, early autumn in Adelaide is drows’d with exhaust fumes, and the wailful choiring of supercar engines.

While I can take and/or leave much of that, I take time off work (when I can) to spend a few days at Adelaide Writers’ Week, which started on March 3 (‘yesterday’, at the time of writing). There’s lots to look forward to in the days ahead – including some gifts of serendipity, no doubt – though I’m particularly looking forward to sessions featuring Australian poets Pam Brown and Sarah Holland-Batt, and Adelaide Hills writers Rebekah Clarkson and Eva Hornung, and the traditional Writers’ Week poetry reading. I attended yesterday’s session for the announcement of the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. It was great to see the successes of well-known Adelaide poet Jude Aquilina (the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship), and Pam Brown – who was awarded the John Bray Poetry Award for Missing Up (Vagabond Press, 2015). It was also great to see Eva Hornung win the Fiction Award for The Last Garden (Text Publishing, 2017), as well as the ‘overall’ Premier’s Award – evidently, she’s the first South Australian to win the Premier’s Award in its 32 year history (The Advertiser article). Though I’ve never met Eva, she’s my next-door-neighbour when I’m ‘home’ in Bugle Ranges, which is less often than I’d like at the moment.

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Of the hundreds of poems I read in February (Lowell, Boyle, Kinsella, Salamun…), the one that’s stayed with me most strongly is an apparently unassuming poem entitled ‘School Walk in German Winter’, from Tracy Ryan’s new book of poems, The Water Bearer (Fremantle Press, 2018). I won’t say so much (I hope) that I spoil the poem or its workings (or the workings it seems to offer the reader) for anyone who’s keen to read it for themselves. What’s noteworthy about the poem is the chance Ryan’s taken in publishing a finely worked poem when a superficial reader – and maybe many other readers besides – will miss its apparent secondary reading – one that notionally contains both the walk to and from school – after all they’re the same journey, but in reverse.

As a reader, there’s a particular pleasure in discovering some element or effect that’s been subtly worked into a poem. By not disclosing the effect in an explanatory note, the poet preserves the poem’s potential energy. Ryan’s poem had me thinking – more broadly – about the gamble writers take on their readers’ attentiveness. Does the writer disclose some element or effect they want a reader to discover in their work – for the reader’s edification, or as evidence of their own cleverness? – at the risk of being heavy-handed and untrusting? Or do they leave it undisclosed, keeping the poem’s full range of delight open to the reader? Some of the pleasure of discovering an undisclosed element or effect, then, is knowing you’ve rewarded the poet for their trust.

In addition to this one poem, it’s an excellent book – though I’ll leave it to others to say more in the reviews that will, no doubt, follow. It’s Ryan’s first book of poems since 2013’s Unearthed (Fremantle Press) and 2014’s Hoard (Whitmore Press). Unearthed is also an excellent book, and one which resonated with me at the time I read it – particularly the ‘Karlsruhe’ poems. Unearthed can be read profitably alongside Sharon Old’s Stag’s Leap (Jonathan Cape, 2012), winner of the 2012 TS Eliot Prize and 2013 Pulitzer Prize, which shares something of its circumstance and themes.