Alan Wearne interviewed by Bonny Cassidy

February 14, 2009 BONNY CASSIDY: Would you like to start by listing your publications?

ALAN WEARNE: My books start in a small chapbook, 1972, Public Relations, that I’d been writing from about 1967 through to some time in 1972. And then another book came out in 1976 called New Devil New Parish, which has got some stuff in it that I like, and some stuff in it which I don’t like. The main work in there is a verse novella called Out Here, which I am proud of, albeit I know that if I go back and look at it, I will find that a little bit embarrassing. The Nightmarkets came out in 1986; I’d worked on it for seven years. Certainly, it was something that I had to write, and I wrote it. Then I started work on a thing that eventually became The Lovemakers Volumes One and Two, and, in the middle of writing that, I wrote my Melbourne footy novel, Kicking in Danger, a prose novel, which I’m proud of because I did conquer certain things doing it, like how to write prose. I am getting a book out next year that will be called The Australian Popular  Songbook, published by Giramondo. That will be a series of poems based on popular Australian songs from late nineteenth century through to 1980, and another group of poems centred on areas of Melbourne and Sydney to be called something like The Metropolitan Poems.

BC: The earlier poems you mentioned that you aren’t happy with in retrospect – would you mind unpacking how your style/process has changed in terms of achieving poems you do like?

AW: [John] Forbes said something once: “You write about what you know, you write about what you don’t know; but you don’t write about what you half know.” I think a number of the poems that I find difficult to comes to terms with are ones that I half know what they are about or half know how to do; there is one poem which I write in 1973, which at the time I thought was wonderful, and subsequently think, “Oh, God, did I write that?” And a year and a half after that I write something that I am very proud of; often, somewhere along the line, I do it right the second time.

BC: Would it be true that those big jumps in development are characteristic only in that early period?

AW: No; without the experience of one, you can’t get the latter, and that still applies. There are some things that I do believe I wrote on fire, like Sue Dobson’s second monologue [from The Nightmarkets], which I still could go back to read, if I had the courage. Those big leaps in standard – quality, or my reaction to it – are probably there still, but I won’t know until I can step back and look at it, whether it makes you cringe or not. That’s objective enough – cringing. So I was an erratic poet, but erratic with a purpose, though I didn’t know the purpose. I didn’t even know I was erratic, but there is a method . . .

BC: – in the madness.

AW: In the madness, yeah, there is.

BC: Was it very difficult for you to move from verse form to verse form, from narrator to narrator, in the verse novels? Would you do it again?

AW: I’d love to do it again if I knew exactly what I would write. Let me answer that with reference to my prose novel. I had an idea about a novel set in Melbourne footy, with a private eye investigating a crime that involves the entire league; I had it first come to me when I was probably stoned, I think, in 1981 or something. A decade on, it was still there, and a psychiatrist said to me, “Well, no one else is going to write it,“ and I thought, “Oh, that’s brilliant, what a brilliant thought!” and I went home and started writing it. I just wrote [Kicking In Danger] for three months, which put a strain on my domestic life, up to a point. In writing the big-production verse novels, there was this kind of – I won’t say bipolar or manic depressive – but it’s a very violent thing, writing poetry, very violent. After writing the first four of The Australian Popular  Songbook, I thought I’d been attacked, assaulted! I know little that is as violent on my psyche as poetry. Certainly not writing prose.

BC: Was it because it’s not your form, because there were fewer inhibitions in the prose process, maybe?

AW: It was well enough structured, given that it was a picaresque ramble. It was supposed to be about a private-eye – no more private-eye than I am – but it’s also an ex-footballer – no more ex-footballer than I am – but it sort of clicked. A gag every line; good parts for women; every league team in the old VFL competition is represented with archetypes and god knows what. There’s a rap song in it, there’s all things. I don’t know whether that’s a one-off in my life as a writer, because I never know when I’m going to write big time again. I’m in on of those states at the moment; I will, I don’t know when. Does this worry me? A little bit, but not hugely.

BC: What are you reading at the moment?

AW: I’m reading Daniel Deronda, and prior to that I read Under Western Eyes, and prior to that I read The Secret Agent. I seem to return to a lot of the Dr Leavis tradition; I also go back to Henry James . . . I don’t know why, I try other books and they don’t work, I just give them up!

BC: Perhaps Leavis was right!

AW: I don’t think he’s not not wrong. I read Middlemarch earlier in the year, and I would like to try to read some more Dickens one day. One of the great things in my life, although I never went back to it, was to read Bleak House at the age of eighteen. I try, each year, to find a new poets, or poets, to read, who aren’t necessarily your contemporaries. Some years ago, I deliberately read Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a poet who I had heard of, sure, but only that. He died about 1848. He was quite self-destructive; he was a doctor, and he wrote these sort of big, battered, over-reaching works (kind of like the Cantos – Pound thought highly of him); Death’s Jestbook, for example: half-finished, weird, quasi-Elizabethan dramas, with all these other strange things, lots of songs. I found a collection of Beddoes, with [Thomas] Hood and [Winthrop Mackworth] Praed, two of my favourite minor nineteenth century poets, and I thought, “Maybe this is the guy for me, let’s have a look at it.” I was very pleased to have discovered him in that way. I’d love to re-read The Canterbury Tales. I think Chaucer is my ancestor, and I’ve got to re-aquaint myself with my ancestors.

BC: You know that the BBC is bringing out the Sunday night adaptations of The Canterbury Tales? Maybe you don’t have to worry about it, Alan.

AW: No, I do have to worry about it. In the late ’60s / early ’70s, did you know there was The Canterbury Tales the musical?

BC: No! Was it American?

AW: No, British, I think. It was done in modern English, but I never saw it. People used to play these songs at parties, and sing along. Perhaps the BBC Chaucer will go the same way as the musical – the Poms brought it out, they probably thought it was the swinging ’60s – [Cockney accent] “Ooh, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, it’s a bit like now, innit?” I’d like to re-read that, and listen to it. He’s there to be listened to, and to follow.

BC: Leavis felt Dickens was too much of an entertainer to be considered canonical. Do you have any opinions on writing as entertainment?

AW: It’s not a problem; I call myself an elitist and an entertainer. I’ve got no qualms about entertainment. I am entertained by Nostromo, I am entertained by Middlemarch, although perhaps it’s a more sombre entertainment. I don’t quite know why the division, but like most divisions, the fence is down and you wander in. Dickens was just popular – well, tough! I didn’t go to those books for a canonical reason. I’d like to read and re-read more of Balzac. There is an architect in Melbourne, Peter Corrigan; we used to sing drunken praises of Balzac to each other. ‘Balzac! Balzac! Yes, that’s him!’ I don’t do that, now; my liver wouldn’t stand it.

BC: What about the Aussie canon? Are you delving into that?

AW: I read a lot of Patrick White’s short stories a couple of years ago, and I was very pleased that I did. There are certain Australian writers that I’d like to get to know better. I keep going back to Hal Porter; he’s a bit of a handful, but so what? I was very interested in Australian literature when I was in my teens. I remember discovering things like Herbert’s Capricornia and Watcher On A Cast Iron Balcony, and My Brother Jack, and Christina Stead came a bit later. I read The Man Who Loved Children on a number of occasions, once on a train trip from Melbourne to Sydney, practically all in one sitting. It was very interesting in high school in Year Twelve, in Melbourne: we had an anthology of six Australian poets: Slessor, FitzGerald, Wright, Hope, McAuley and Douglas Stewart. You could go through subsequent poets and add people to that but, from that generation, there’s not much more – David Campbell, Francis Webb . . . Dorothy Hewett, Harwood, yes – but, really, when we look at all of those people who were published in old anthologies, you’ll realise that there were a lot of people who didn’t get published again. So, is it a canon? I think it’s more of a pecking order. I think at the moment it’s still just a matter of waiting to see whether poets can survive after their demise; that’s enough, and I don’t think we should write for posterity, though: you’re a fool if you do.

BC: More generally, what are your views on contemporary work, here, in the last forty or fifty years?

AW: It is a myth when people said, “Oh, the Ern Malley affair destroyed Australian poetry, because no one was willing to experiment.” Who were these poets who were unwilling to experiment? You go and have a look at British poets, the United States, even closer to home, in New Zealand; you will see that, basically, there is a sort of worldwide conservatism. John Hawke has shown me lines, or stanzas, by Harold Stewart – not quite James McAuley, but he wrote in the 1950s – that are just as incomprehensible as any would be surrealist. I’ve been looking at a lot of Bruce Beaver, and Vincent Buckley’s poems from the 1960s such as Stroke. I don’t think there are poets in Australia, writing at those times, who are as good as Baxter or Curnow in New Zealand though. Baxter was just that much greater a poet. He was everything that Murray thinks he is, and isn’t, which doesn’t mean, of course, that Murray can’t write poetry; he is probably the best Australian poet born in the 1930s.

Do I think there was a great changing of the guard around 1968 or ’70 by all these new poets coming through? That’s a legend that I think was brought up due to a number of anthologies. The bulk of the poets that have survived there have had their feet firmly planted somewhere in Australia’s past: the way that Adamson saw himself in a tradition of Webb, the way that certain younger people saw Beaver and said, “He is one of us.” But it’s a little bit of a myth, all that nonsense about the Generation of ’68. We were all united by what we opposed; we were all arrested at the same demonstration, but were all at that demonstration for different reasons. Verse became a bit more democratic then: many people who saw it as a vehicle for expressing themselves in an arty way. You did get a number of big anthologies that wanted to sweep a whole lot of people in. Mother I’m Rooted, for instance, said “Women of Australia, send us your poems!” The call went out. I liked – still like – the idea of those things shaking up the system. Someone should do it now. It may require something like that.

BC: If you step away from that ’68-er generation –

AW: – Please, let’s.

BC: If you wanted to construct a Wearne canon, where would you come in?

AW: 1. There are certain poems I like which I am nothing like. I love seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, I love them; I am the least metaphysical poet, ever. 2. My muse is a satirical muse, though this isn’t always the case. The Roman poet Juvenal (whom I have ‘discovered’ in the way I ‘discovered’ Beddoes) is an out ’n’ out soul mate. 3. Am I a frustrated playwright? Maybe. Obviously, given what I’ve written, is in that ‘tradition’ with Browning writing those sorts of poems that make me want to give up writing poetry. 4. There’s been no Australian poet who’s had that effect on me; otherwise I would have given up, announcing “You’re better than me, I give in.” 5. There are all sorts of poetries that I would like to write, but can’t; one is erotic poetry. The main trouble is, whenever I’ve introduced something ‘erotic’, I generally send it up. I may as well write, “The Good Ship Venus”. 6. Re. the New York Poets of the ’50s onwards: what people like O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Berrigan, etc., did for me was show the amount of energy and vibrancy that they could use, a great example to us all. 7. A couple of poems by Robert Frost are almost in that Browning category of wanting to give it away: ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Home Burial’. 8. You don’t know where the influence is going to come from, anyhow. I like the crabbed way that nineteenth-century poets tackle the language, like Meredith, like Browning. 9. It would have been great to go anywhere, do anything, write any poem, in any style, like Auden, Tennyson and Dryden. Well, alas that isn’t quite me. 10. I like raiding this country for its potential to write about. I do like the idea of being moderately uncompromising, if such a thing exists, in the Australian potential of my poetry. Not dogmatically so, but if someone requires footnotes to understand my piece, because they’re not from this country, well, tough. It’s got to stand on its own feet. I haven’t made the leap to making my writing as ‘universal’ as perhaps I’d like it to be, but then again I don’t know how.