Article
Interview with Kate Lilley
June 07, 2011
Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?
Kate Lilley: Five. My younger sister and I were read and recited to by our parents – both poets – from the beginning of our lives.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Kate Lilley: My parents, Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley, and the books in their library. In grade 3 (aged seven) I was asked to bring my favourite book to school; I took the Oxford Matthew Arnold. As a child I read English, Australian, American and Russian poetry. As a teenager I was a fan of John Ashbery, John Tranter and Gig Ryan – I still am. I did my 4th year honours thesis on Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. These days I research and teach 17th-century, 20th-century and contemporary poetry in English. I read more modern and contemporary American poetry than anything else; at the moment I’m reading Susan Howe, Lisa Robertson, Lyn Hejinian, C.A. Conrad and Pattie McCarthy.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Kate Lilley: Poetry is at the centre of my everyday life and vice versa.
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Kate Lilley: Mediated subjectivity is key in both psychoanalytic and poststructuralist senses.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Kate Lilley: I align myself with the multifarious histories of feminist and queer textual experimentation going back at least to the Renaissance.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Kate Lilley: Lack of time to read and write in a freer, less interrupted way.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Kate Lilley: Literary theory, history and criticism; aesthetics and cultural studies; psychoanalysis; ephemera.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Kate Lilley: I see myself as a cosmopolitan Australian poet.
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?
Kate Lilley: I’m all for the development of more high-quality discussion of poetry and poetics that situates it among other aesthetic and intellectual practices and generally widens the terms. I’m much more interested in analysis and description than evaluation and competition. Academics and poets are natural allies, or should be.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society in Australia or at an international level?
Kate Lilley: Poetry, as a mode of thinking, feeling and formal experimentation, promotes complex and open-ended engagement with being in the world.
Kate Lilley: Five. My younger sister and I were read and recited to by our parents – both poets – from the beginning of our lives.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Kate Lilley: My parents, Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley, and the books in their library. In grade 3 (aged seven) I was asked to bring my favourite book to school; I took the Oxford Matthew Arnold. As a child I read English, Australian, American and Russian poetry. As a teenager I was a fan of John Ashbery, John Tranter and Gig Ryan – I still am. I did my 4th year honours thesis on Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. These days I research and teach 17th-century, 20th-century and contemporary poetry in English. I read more modern and contemporary American poetry than anything else; at the moment I’m reading Susan Howe, Lisa Robertson, Lyn Hejinian, C.A. Conrad and Pattie McCarthy.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Kate Lilley: Poetry is at the centre of my everyday life and vice versa.
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Kate Lilley: Mediated subjectivity is key in both psychoanalytic and poststructuralist senses.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Kate Lilley: I align myself with the multifarious histories of feminist and queer textual experimentation going back at least to the Renaissance.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Kate Lilley: Lack of time to read and write in a freer, less interrupted way.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Kate Lilley: Literary theory, history and criticism; aesthetics and cultural studies; psychoanalysis; ephemera.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Kate Lilley: I see myself as a cosmopolitan Australian poet.
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?
Kate Lilley: I’m all for the development of more high-quality discussion of poetry and poetics that situates it among other aesthetic and intellectual practices and generally widens the terms. I’m much more interested in analysis and description than evaluation and competition. Academics and poets are natural allies, or should be.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society in Australia or at an international level?
Kate Lilley: Poetry, as a mode of thinking, feeling and formal experimentation, promotes complex and open-ended engagement with being in the world.
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