Interview with Peter Minter

June 07, 2011 Where do we begin? What is this place that recedes always billowing against the present, beginning to be forgotten?

Beginning is there amongst us, always shared amidst the gentle swell of what is given, every habitus. It is also catastrophically solitary, turning suddenly on a point of impercipient irruption.

Following Arendt, the motivation is not mortality, but the cataclysm of natality: “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of making something anew”.(2)

And so we recede toward a moment of exemplary ruination.

Maybe I am three or four years old: it must still be in the 1960s. My mother went to work and left me with our neighbour (a neighbour, of course, is both you and me) and I remember now the feeling of wanting to bring my mother back. She had given me a note to hand to the neighbour, and later in the day I found it and fell into a reverie of copying the note, over and over.

I can see my writing, my first ever writing, the long loops I wrote in measured lines across the paper.

I looked at the shape of my mother’s script, then copied it in careful rhythmic patterns in which I made an echo of my mother appear close to me.

Inside there is a beginning. Naturally. Nat(ur)ally. Natally.

Of course, the paradox of the beginning is the banal inevitability of its innumerable inceptions. I think I was using a blue biro.

I wrote endless stories when young. My favourite themes were the obscure, the occult and extraterrestrials.

The mid 1970s were beset with television programs that plumbed the gravity of the gothic hyper-real. Big Foot, UFOs, the Pyramids, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, the Mary Celeste . . . stock-standard content of the documentaries In Search of Ancient Astronauts and In Search of Ancient Mysteries, and the spin-off six-season series In Search of . . ., narrated by an intense and dapper Leonard Nimoy.

There was something of a breakthrough in 1977 when I made a pact with the devil that I would serve him forever if he turned me into a vampire.

I wrote a story about vampires, and soon after another about meeting extraterrestrials in the bush near our home in Swansea. I once found a $20 note in a gravel lane-way, and told my fourth grade class that a large metallic sphere had descended before me and rested on the ground, leaving the $20 note as a celestial offering before it returned to the heavens.

This was around the time of Star Wars, when I was desperately in love with both Princess Leia and Linda Ronstadt.

I then turned to the catastrophe of poetry.

As a quietly rebellious teenager I fell in with a company of New-Romantic head-animals in Newcastle. I think it’s true to say that between early 1983 and late 1985 the city’s dark satanic steel mills were well and truly illuminated by the inferno of poetry, painting, music, sex and drugs, with which we smelt and cast our young imaginations.

It was at this precise moment that I discovered, in the library of my small rural high school, a book that would also change my life forever – The New Writing in the USA – edited by Donald Allen and Robert Creeley (3). Here I discovered John Ashbery, Robin Blaser, William Burroughs, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Jack Kerouac, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky et al.

This book was pure revelation, a bolt of beautiful fragrant lightning fucking my young cortex and opening my mind to the cultural revolution of post-war America. I kept this book out on permanent loan through my final two years of high-school and stole it when I graduated.

So, beyond the English and Australian canon first revealed to me by my school teachers, when I was about sixteen years old The New Writing opened up for me some very primary ideas about poetry, poetics and life, a space of poetic kinship that remains true to me today.

My first poetry love was Denise Levertov. My budding lyrical consciousness was spurred by the verdant, erotic mythos suggested by her two New Writing poems, ‘To The Muse’ and ‘Eros at Temple Stream’. Reading these and other poems, I began to aspire to the sovereignty of the poetic psyche, its undulating grasslands, cascades, and turquoise hills, its ardent deliquescence of being and form.

As Levertov’s friend Robert Duncan writes in his masterpiece The H.D. Book, I saw in her poems a glimpse of “. . . an aristocracy of spirit, inspired by the homo Eros . . . the intense yearning, the desire for something else . . . our areté, our ideal of vital being [rising] not in our identification in a hierarchy of higher forms but in our identification with the universe. To compose such a symposium of the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure – all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are.”(4)

The symposium of the whole is utterly central.

By the time I left high school in 1985 I had read most of Levertov’s New Directions catalogue, an odyssey suspended at times for interludes with John Donne, Sylvia Plat, and Judith Wright.

But Levertov’s muse of “indwelling” was only part of my early story. I also found the force of the New Writing in its explicit bearing of a poetics of the real, the idea that a poem could be a literal expression of experience, that, to paraphrase Olson, the form of a poem, its being in the world, could be continuous with both psyche (psyche) and cosmos (cosmos).

As Creeley writes emphatically in his introduction, the New Writing rejected how “the colleges and universities were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance.  . . . [an] assumption of a mold, of a means that could be gained beyond the literal fact of the writing here and now . . .”(5)

The new poetry had abandoned the formal satisfactions of classical critical and compositional templates, their projection of aesthetic and prosodic exteriorities over experience and writing. Instead – and as Ginsberg, Creeley, Olson, O’Hara and Snyder, for instance, made very clear in their poetry – a poetics of the here and now sought an “undertaking most useful to writing as an art . . . the attempt to sound in the nature of the language those particulars of time and place of which one is a given instance, equally present.”(6)

I reckon this to be central too.

In my final years of high school I also began to reach for a community of people who were seriously engaged with poetry and poetics. I twice attended the Morpeth poetry camps, a late spring gathering hosted by poets and writers associated with the English Department of the University of Newcastle, such as Norman and Jean Talbot, Christopher Pollnitz and Paul Kavanagh. Outside the band of fantastic vagabonds with whom I spent my weekends, this was my first experience of a community of people who considered poetry and poetics to be the foundation for a way of living.

Looming over this sometimes odd meeting of scholars, poets, introverts and amateurs was the figure of Irish-Australian poet Roland Robinson, whose frame and demeanour cast over the retreat a Yeatsian squall of reputation and possibility. I remember writing haiku under a jacaranda tree with Jean, something about delicate purple-blue trumpets resting on grass.

At university I intensified my reading of the post-war Americans, especially Olson, on whom I wrote my English honours thesis, as well as Creeley, Duncan, Snyder and Michael Palmer. I studied their Modernist and Romantic inspirations, such as Williams, Pound, Whitman and Thoreau.

With some astonishment, I also discovered their Australian contemporaries, especially Robert Adamson and John Tranter, having simply not found out until the first few months of 1986 that local variations of the American new poetry had been vigorously flowering all around me. As might be expected for a young man living on the provincial horizons of a late-twentieth century empire, I discovered contemporary Australian poetry after first getting to know the Americans.

Perhaps inspiration is always received in exile, an earthed exile. I think that throughout my writing life I have been both inside and outside, at home and homeless, my creative trajectory unfurling like the absolute limit of a growing branch, the limb an émigré of the soil.

Now, exactly now, having spent a quarter of a century reading every poetry in the world I could find, having wandered across the vast sheets of mirror reflecting every kind of philosophical and aesthetic theory and critique, I remain inspired by the myriad inflections of a poetics of the here and now, as both interface and artifice. I am deeply inspired, for instance, by (the now recently late) Caribbean poet, novelist and philosopher, Édouard Glissant, the work of Lionel Fogarty and the indigenous poets of the world, Australian and world-wide traditions in innovative and experimental poetry and poetics, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, J.H. Prynne, the poets of nature and ecology . . . the here and now goes on and on.

Really, nothing and everything has changed. Just as I was as a sixteen-year-old reading New Writing, I am still compelled today by a poetics of relation, continuity and transformation, against closure.

As far as everyday life goes, I don’t think there is anything but every day life. Everyday life. Every daylife.

The quotidian difference between the everyday life of everyday life, and the every daylife of the poem, is found partly in their different temporalities, their singular relations to language.

Unlike the every-day-ness of everyday life, its intrinsic duration, interiority and extension, the every daylife of the poem, of the work, is always-already historical.

As the linguistic condensation of everyday life, the poem turns private duration into an everyday public trace threaded from mouth to mouth, a contour of relation lineamenting sense between self and other, mineral, vegetable and animal.

Of course, the everyday is also always actualised in the tragedy of its absorption into the temporal ubiquity of the every-day as nothingness.

A poet friend once wrote to ask me whether my poems are about animals or whether they just have animals in them.

The poem is just between us every day. Its subjectivity recalls the essence of Aristotle’s to hupokeimenon, “the ultimate subject of predication”, the irreducible substance that lies under all other things.

The function of this substance is to enable poetry, to experience it, write it and speak it. Its place is under the poem, a singular substratum that exists of itself rather than in relation, but without which relation could not occur.

Just as poetry is always every day, it also has a necessary relation to subjectivity.

Indeed, a poem is a machine for making subjectivity.

A poem makes a mode of articulated consciousness, a surface of interiority unfolding like a Möbius strip into the relational exteriorities of everyday life. The surface of the Möbius strip is perforated by an infinite number of letters and words, riddled by the linguistic and the psycho-existential: the subject in the sentence of the poem, and the subject of the poem. In and of. And so, as it is made in the poem, subjectivity can be thought of as a function of movement. It forms in the movement around the Möbius strip and through its linguistic perforations, the poem emerging in elegant eloquent gestures made between the interior and the exterior, the self and the non-self.

Movement is the key. Veronica Forrest-Thomson reminds us that emotion is “the psychological counterpart of ‘motion’”.(7) In other words, subjectivity can be, indeed always is, moving.

In my poems, I have sought to get all kinds of subjectivities moving.

I have never thought that one could dispense with subjectivity, because to do so would be a nonjusticiable non-sense, not logically or aesthetically possible. Even so, the status and contours of ‘subjectivity’ have undoubtedly been preeminent ‘subjects’ of formal critical inquiry throughout my writing life.

In the spirit of the here and now I have undertaken to create numerous subjectivities in my work, to create spaces for their appearance as they are poetically manufactured, moment-to-moment and place-to-place. My imagination seeks to conjure up the world, to make worlds, the “ultimate subject of predication”, within which we can gather and speak in the world of the poem.

Perhaps ironically, therefore, the poet’s true home is always in exile, always beginning but always beginning to be forgotten, without borders or allegiances, always hovering at the edge of the anti-abyss into which language and subjectivity forever fail to collapse, over and over.

Politically speaking, I am of the eco-anarchist left. I am an anti-exceptionalist humanist, meaning that while I am a humanist I don’t see how human interests can possibly be placed above or beyond those of the non-human, for they are one and the same thing.

I am deeply resistant to the neo-fascistic tendencies of political and aesthetic singularities. I stand against any kind of ‘monoculture’, like monocultural agriculture, which destroys healthy complex natural ecosystems, or monocultural aesthetics, which destroy healthy complex poetics and poetical communities.

A hint of this position can be found in my last book of poetry, blue grass, where I opened a series of poems entitled ‘Australiana’ with a quotation of Édouard Glissant: “every way of speaking is a land”.(8) Glissant proposes a radical planetary vision, a tout-monde or “all world” which emerges from a planetary poetics of relation. For Glissant, every way of speaking, every subjectivity and culture, can enjoy its difference and specificity without the need for exceptionalism. Essence and difference can co-exist.

That is why I stand against any kind of reification of ‘nation’. And in standing against ‘nation’ I stand against the reification of a ‘national poetry’. I am not really all that interested in the idea of an ‘Australian poetry’ as a banal kind of given or primary principle, or as a kind of aesthetic precipitate of nationalist psycho-geographic ideology.

Indeed, if there is one thing that the present planetary ecological crisis makes clear, it is the absolute redundancy of the nation state, the fact that ‘nations’ are not at all equipped to deal with the borderless planetary scale of the challenges faced by our species in a finite ecosphere. There is an urgent need for a commitment to a humanist, non-nationalist and non-exceptionalist aesthetic as part of a far broader social, political and economic transformation.

Deep down, I don’t personally find conversations about ‘Australian poetry’ to be all that interesting or useful. So I don’t really think of myself as an Australian poet. Of course, there is the mundane fact that I live in Australia and my activity is part of a local scene, a local conversation. But really I am nothing more than one human writing, and the local inflections I produce are best thought of as site-specific manifestations of more general planetary principles.(10) What is therefore of most interest to me is a human poetry as it is expressed on the earth by every way of speaking human.

The fact of the matter is that the moment we try to say what an Australian poetry is, its poesis is happening elsewhere. Terms such as ‘Australian poetry’ or ‘new lyricism’ etc. simply function as territorialisations of the projective domain of other forms of intentionality. They make themselves redundant at the very moment of their articulation.

Location-wise, my work is necessarily underpinned by both historical and geographic experience, both its here and now and its conditioning during the political, economic, technological and aesthetic revolutions of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the west.

At a cosmic level, I have a perhaps hermetic belief in a poetics of material complexity: in this cosmos, matter has evolved into more and more complex forms over a great deal of time, the result (so far) being consciousness as an emergent autopoetic function of corporeal substance – the emergence of consciousness from bio-chemical neuronal matter such that every located consciousness is an instance of the material cosmos being conscious of itself. The minerals and chemicals from which our brains and bodies are formed were themselves once formed in supernova. The exact same atoms.

How or where might I locate a poetics that embraces my life’s zeitgeist? In anarchist, indigenous, queer, pacifist, buddhist or feminist writing, art, music or philosophy? In the cacophony of their poetic equivalents, the open field, the hybridised or creolised, the feral, the surreal, the hyper-real, or the romantic, for instance? In the productive wreckage of their impacts with capitalism and technology, the engrossing saturations of TV, rock-n-roll, cinema and the internet? In neo-lyricism, neo-formalism or the post-post-avant-garde? Hey?

I open up my wallet, and it is full of blood.

Wherever and whatever, my writing is against closure. My work remains open to the natality of idea, feeling, language and relation. It stands against the ossification of poetic subjectivity in the mere negative replication of given forms and sensibilities – classical, romantic, modern, postmodern, for instance – and the demarcation of aesthetic and critical territories around them.

To be honest, I am most inspired by civil disobedience and romantic love, and their endlessly parallactic dialectic.

I said kiss me you are beautiful these are truly the last days.


PETER MINTER The response above are to the same 10 questions posed to other poets as part of the 2009–2011 survey of PIW Australian poets. Peter Minter noted: “Regarding the piece itself, you'll immediately noticed that it has avoided a kind of ‘call and response’ approach to the questions. For reasons that will (hopefully!) emerge in the reading, I’ve adopted a more conversational and relational technique. I hope this is ok . . . all the questions have been answered.”

The questions were:
1) When did you start writing and what motivated you?
2) Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
3) How important is 'everyday life' to your work?
4) What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
5) Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
6) What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
7) What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
8) What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
9) 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 Australia poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
10) How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?

– Michael Brennan

Endnotes

1. In an anecdote at a recent Holloway Series in Poetry celebration of the publication of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book (20 January 2011), the poet Robert Haas conveyed that Robert Duncan had once proclaimed to him that the two important inventions of western culture were “civil disobedience and romantic love”. See ‘Holloway Poetry Series—Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book’, on YouTube, from 2 minutes 40 seconds.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 9
3. Donald Allen and Robert Creeley, The New Writing in the USA, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1967
4. Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book, The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, eds. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011, p. 154
5. Ibid., p. 17
6. Ibid., p. 24
7. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1978, p. 8
8. Édouard Glissant, “Un champ d'îles”: Poèmes complets, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 65. Translation by Peter Hallward.
9. Édouard Glissant, Tout-monde, Gallimard, Paris, 1993); Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, The University of Michigan Press, Anne Arbor, 1997

Works cited

Allen, Donald and Robert Creeley, The New Writing in the USA, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1967
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998
Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, eds. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica, Poetic Artifice : A Theory of Twentieth-century Poetry, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1978
Glissant, Édouard, Tout-monde, Gallimard, Paris, 1993
Glissant, Édouard, “Un champ d'îles”: Poèmes complets, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 65
Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, The University of Michigan Press, Anne Arbor, 1997
Hass, Robert, ‘Holloway Series in Poetry’, University of California, Berkeley, 20 January 2011
Prieto, Eric, ‘Edouard Glissant, Littérature-monde, and Tout-monde’, Small Axe 14.3 (November 2010), pp. 111–20. See also p. 8.