Article
Interview with Laurie Duggan
February 04, 2011
Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?
Laurie Duggan: I started in 1966 when I was sixteen years old. I’d always been a reader, but it was only after I suffered a stroke that I began to write. It was probably just the necessity to be physically inactive for a few months that gave me the space to get going.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Laurie Duggan: I think it was Keats who first got me going, together with D.H. Lawrence. Then I picked up the Penguin Poetry of the Thirties anthology in which I particularly liked Louis MacNeice as well as some of the English surrealists like Roger Roughton and Hugh Sykes Davies. Around the same time I came across the Ern Malley poems in the local library. When I went to university two years later I showed my poems to Patrick McCaughey (later a gallery director but then an English tutor and art critic). He told me I wrote as though the twentieth century hadn’t existed and loaned me the Collected Early Poems of William Carlos Williams, a writer I’ve stuck with since. I’ve covered some ground since then, discovering poets like most people do, either through browsing or through the recommendations of friends. There are too many people to mention really, though I guess the most significant through the years have been Williams, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Paul Blackburn, Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, August Kleinzahler, Roy Fisher etcetera. The writers immediately around me were just as important: people like John Scott, Alan Wearne, Pam Brown, John Forbes, Ken Bolton, Gig Ryan, Angela Gardner . . . the list is endless in reality. Here and now in England I regularly go to hear people like Gavin Selerie, Alan Halsey, Frances Presley, Geraldine Monk, Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson and many others.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Laurie Duggan: If ‘everyday life’ includes the things you are reading then it’s all-important. Then again, is there any other sort of life?
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Laurie Duggan: Subjectivity? It’s a loaded term. I mean the writing sometimes just happens and your claim to be the author is a kind of ambit claim (a necessary one if you’re applying for a grant or trying to get published). Nonetheless I “stand by my word” (you’ll have to unpack each part of this phrase) while at the same time acknowledging that anything like ‘opinion’ that appears in my poems is just that: it’s not a final pronouncement.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Laurie Duggan: I think broadly that I fit into that particular band of poets who could be termed postmodern in the earlier sense of the word; perhaps post-Poundian would be a better monicker. These are the writers who tend to be non-rhetorical, who make use of the speaking voice, whose poems embrace the contingent, but who are also aware of language as artifice. But I like a lot of work that doesn’t fit this particular schema.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Laurie Duggan: The most challenging thing is to get up every day and be able to write. I’m a person who has been through long periods of not-writing, notably a break of six years in the late nineties. I think this is partly because I’m never totally sure of myself and I tend to operate from a basis of doubt (this makes me a not very satisfactory teacher of poetry). It’s nice to have someone every now and then say they like something I’ve done. I’d possibly keep writing if they didn’t but a certain sense of anomie would creep into the work, slow me down, and perhaps ultimately stop me altogether.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Laurie Duggan: All reading is important. Even reading maps.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Laurie Duggan: A few weeks ago I had to phone a guy who’d done some work on our house in Faversham. He answered ‘Laurie!’ and I thought he had a great memory until I realised it was my accent that was the cue. I wouldn’t want to be too problematic about this question so, yes, I’m an ‘Australian poet’. There are things that wouldn’t have happened in my poems (even a certain kind of misplaced confidence) if I hadn’t grown up where I did. ‘Australian poetry’ is just, then, poetry written by Australians or, at least, by people with some depth of local experience. The problems arise when certain people think they have a sinecure on ‘Australian-ness’ (there are some of them over here, the professional expatriates who are often credited with expertise by the British media). I used to deal with this problem by seeing myself as a ‘local’ writer rather than as an ‘Australian’. Of course there was that period in the 70s and 80s when poets like John Forbes were seen by some as ‘too American’, which, in retrospect, is a joke. Sure, John picked up a lot from the Yanks (just as the Americans he loved picked up a lot from the French), but it’s hard to see John as anything other than an Australian poet now. His attitude is hardly ‘American’.
MB: Don Anderson once described Australian poetry as Australia’s only “blood sport”. More recently critics have seen Australian poetry in terms of a “new lyricism” (David McCooey) and “networked language” (Philip Mead). What is the current state of play in Australian poetry? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
Laurie Duggan: I’m not the best person to comment on this because I’ve been away from the local scene since late 2006. So I don’t really know who is ‘hot’ at the moment. The writing schools have certainly started to have an effect on things (sometimes good, sometimes bad). Poets are always going to want to kill off their immediate predecessors and I guess this is what’s happening now. I’m bemused by terms like ‘new lyricism’. I can see why people want to place themselves under particular umbrellas, but it ultimately becomes a burden. Right from its early use I found myself uncomfortable, even annoyed, by the ‘generation of 68’ tag. It made it easy for some people to tar everyone in John Tranter’s anthology (The New Australian Poetry) with one brush and not read on.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
Laurie Duggan: I just don’t know about the international thing. That’s often decided by publishers as much as by readers. Over here you don’t even get reviewed in newspapers if you don’t publish with Faber or Bloodaxe or Carcanet. At least this sort of thing hasn’t happened yet in Australia. From my own perspective it’s probably going to mean that I won’t be reviewed in hard copy as much as I used to be, though the web has made enough inroads for this to not be altogether fatal.
Laurie Duggan: I started in 1966 when I was sixteen years old. I’d always been a reader, but it was only after I suffered a stroke that I began to write. It was probably just the necessity to be physically inactive for a few months that gave me the space to get going.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Laurie Duggan: I think it was Keats who first got me going, together with D.H. Lawrence. Then I picked up the Penguin Poetry of the Thirties anthology in which I particularly liked Louis MacNeice as well as some of the English surrealists like Roger Roughton and Hugh Sykes Davies. Around the same time I came across the Ern Malley poems in the local library. When I went to university two years later I showed my poems to Patrick McCaughey (later a gallery director but then an English tutor and art critic). He told me I wrote as though the twentieth century hadn’t existed and loaned me the Collected Early Poems of William Carlos Williams, a writer I’ve stuck with since. I’ve covered some ground since then, discovering poets like most people do, either through browsing or through the recommendations of friends. There are too many people to mention really, though I guess the most significant through the years have been Williams, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Paul Blackburn, Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, August Kleinzahler, Roy Fisher etcetera. The writers immediately around me were just as important: people like John Scott, Alan Wearne, Pam Brown, John Forbes, Ken Bolton, Gig Ryan, Angela Gardner . . . the list is endless in reality. Here and now in England I regularly go to hear people like Gavin Selerie, Alan Halsey, Frances Presley, Geraldine Monk, Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson and many others.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Laurie Duggan: If ‘everyday life’ includes the things you are reading then it’s all-important. Then again, is there any other sort of life?
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Laurie Duggan: Subjectivity? It’s a loaded term. I mean the writing sometimes just happens and your claim to be the author is a kind of ambit claim (a necessary one if you’re applying for a grant or trying to get published). Nonetheless I “stand by my word” (you’ll have to unpack each part of this phrase) while at the same time acknowledging that anything like ‘opinion’ that appears in my poems is just that: it’s not a final pronouncement.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Laurie Duggan: I think broadly that I fit into that particular band of poets who could be termed postmodern in the earlier sense of the word; perhaps post-Poundian would be a better monicker. These are the writers who tend to be non-rhetorical, who make use of the speaking voice, whose poems embrace the contingent, but who are also aware of language as artifice. But I like a lot of work that doesn’t fit this particular schema.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Laurie Duggan: The most challenging thing is to get up every day and be able to write. I’m a person who has been through long periods of not-writing, notably a break of six years in the late nineties. I think this is partly because I’m never totally sure of myself and I tend to operate from a basis of doubt (this makes me a not very satisfactory teacher of poetry). It’s nice to have someone every now and then say they like something I’ve done. I’d possibly keep writing if they didn’t but a certain sense of anomie would creep into the work, slow me down, and perhaps ultimately stop me altogether.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Laurie Duggan: All reading is important. Even reading maps.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Laurie Duggan: A few weeks ago I had to phone a guy who’d done some work on our house in Faversham. He answered ‘Laurie!’ and I thought he had a great memory until I realised it was my accent that was the cue. I wouldn’t want to be too problematic about this question so, yes, I’m an ‘Australian poet’. There are things that wouldn’t have happened in my poems (even a certain kind of misplaced confidence) if I hadn’t grown up where I did. ‘Australian poetry’ is just, then, poetry written by Australians or, at least, by people with some depth of local experience. The problems arise when certain people think they have a sinecure on ‘Australian-ness’ (there are some of them over here, the professional expatriates who are often credited with expertise by the British media). I used to deal with this problem by seeing myself as a ‘local’ writer rather than as an ‘Australian’. Of course there was that period in the 70s and 80s when poets like John Forbes were seen by some as ‘too American’, which, in retrospect, is a joke. Sure, John picked up a lot from the Yanks (just as the Americans he loved picked up a lot from the French), but it’s hard to see John as anything other than an Australian poet now. His attitude is hardly ‘American’.
MB: Don Anderson once described Australian poetry as Australia’s only “blood sport”. More recently critics have seen Australian poetry in terms of a “new lyricism” (David McCooey) and “networked language” (Philip Mead). What is the current state of play in Australian poetry? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
Laurie Duggan: I’m not the best person to comment on this because I’ve been away from the local scene since late 2006. So I don’t really know who is ‘hot’ at the moment. The writing schools have certainly started to have an effect on things (sometimes good, sometimes bad). Poets are always going to want to kill off their immediate predecessors and I guess this is what’s happening now. I’m bemused by terms like ‘new lyricism’. I can see why people want to place themselves under particular umbrellas, but it ultimately becomes a burden. Right from its early use I found myself uncomfortable, even annoyed, by the ‘generation of 68’ tag. It made it easy for some people to tar everyone in John Tranter’s anthology (The New Australian Poetry) with one brush and not read on.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
Laurie Duggan: I just don’t know about the international thing. That’s often decided by publishers as much as by readers. Over here you don’t even get reviewed in newspapers if you don’t publish with Faber or Bloodaxe or Carcanet. At least this sort of thing hasn’t happened yet in Australia. From my own perspective it’s probably going to mean that I won’t be reviewed in hard copy as much as I used to be, though the web has made enough inroads for this to not be altogether fatal.
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