Interview with Alan Wearne

Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?

Alan Wearne: Before starting school I was writing at the age of five, motivated by wanting to emulate what other (in this case older) people were doing, and by the resultant audience applause. Parents (my mother as original and so far only amanuensis), teachers, other adults and contemporaries  liked what I did and I was never tormented for my achievements. In fact, as class (later school) writer (later poet) I was appreciated and thus had a role assigned. What a reward! Added to, subtracted from, multiplied, divided, the essence of the above still remains.

If poetry took over as I got older it was only because in a perverse way I found it easier to write than prose, its rules, either those I was adopting/adapting or those I set for myself, were far more imaginatively challenging. When I did return to prose (my novel Kicking In Danger) it was as a poet re-learning what essentially had been long hidden.

MB: Who are the writers that first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?

Alan Wearne: The very first writers who inspired me to write must have been those who were read to me (including radio adaptations of works like The Children of the New Forest, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney and David Copperfield and even East Lynne) and those I must have read. There was till about halfway into high school a good solid overlap between poetry, prose and even drama, but during adolescence I found an outlet for my satiric nature in Alexander Pope. The movie version of Fielding’s Tom Jones was in town, very racy for its time and very popular. Heaps of teenagers would go, see it and pash on in the dark. Was there a better subject matter for a latter day apprentice Augustan? This was further followed in couplets by ‘Death of a Go Go Girl’ (the title says it all) in which heaven turns into some giant 60s discothèque.

I am still drawn to those Victorians unafraid of using a ‘speaking’ voice: Clough, Meredith, Browning and Hardy. Browning at his best is still a poet that makes me want to quit, since given what I still continue to write and given benchmarks such as ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’ and ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ how, I ask, can I become that good? Mind you, a good deal of Browning I find annoying and impenetrable.

No verse form has ever given me greater happiness than ottava rima. If God announced “Alan, you can only write in one mode but being a reasonable god I will allow you to choose the mode,” it would be that. What Byron or Kenneth Koch could accomplish still remains infectious, reading after reading: with its Rossini-like crescendi, its flexibility within such a strict format, its tangential juggling, its continual comic potential and sheer to-hell-with-it daring. The recent Melbourne gangland wars for god’s sake were too iconically over the top to be left to a mere junior art form like television, and I’ve a good mind to render them in ottava rima (better than Underbelly!)

No group of 20th-century poets has given me more pleasure than the (so-called) New York School. They seemed to be able to combine the hip with the democratic, the erudite (when necessary) with the seemingly inconsequential. They were not afraid of using what’s there, really there before you (everyday life if you like) though very much on their terms. I have never thought of them as being some kind of ‘in’ crowd with their ‘in’ gags, though I did encounter them in my early twenties at probably the right age. (I may well have been the first Australian to have read Berrigan’s ‘Tambourine Life’.) So what did Frank, John, Kenneth, Jimmy, Ted, Ron, Bernadette, Anne etc. etc show me? What Pope also showed: if you worry about risking a reference because future generations (let alone non-Australians) might need a footnote, well, that also supposes that your poetry will be a future item, (or an item overseas) and no poet should even consider that. Therefore risk that reference!

I’ll add that although I barrack for the New York School (they’re my team) I don’t let that get in the way of appreciating other players. As examples, I find myself returning to plenty of their contemporaries: Philip Larkin, James K. Baxter, L.E. Sissman, James Wright, X.J. Kennedy and Paul Blackburn, for starters.

So what’s changed? Well, I’ve read more poetry. I certainly know that not every poet I love ‘inspires’ me. The 17th-century Metaphysicals  I worship, though I could never write in their tradition, which certainly extends past Stevens to Ashbery and beyond. Each year I try to discover at least one new (to me) poet, someone whom I probably was only aware of by name. Some years back it was the incredible Thomas Lovell Beddoes, last year Patrick Kavanagh. Will they thus inspire me? I, or rather my poetry will let you know. It would be even greater to know (not that at the moment we possibly could) of someone aged ten who will produce works to inspire me in my nineties. What a way to go!

MB: How important is ‘everyday’ life to your work?

Alan Wearne: Here are two substantial reasons why everyday life with its three pillars, work (including schooling), domesticity (with its support acts such as shopping) and socialising, is very important to my work. Firstly, most people I write about have some kind of everyday life at some stage of their existence, either in or out of the poem. Secondly the very concept of writing about such things is a superb challenge. Can one truly make poetry out of such material without banality? Past examples give me confidence that it can be done. For example Frost’s wonderfully tragic narratives ‘Home Burial’ and ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ are drenched in the everyday. They also transcend this drenching.

I often find that I am making poetry out of my memories of the everyday or my imaginings of an everyday. And quite often the poetry returns to the problem of the language used: did people actually speak this way 40 years, let alone 400 years ago? Were you to line up for an afternoon at the Globe and started to converse in “What ho sirrah”-speak, would the Londoners ignore, stare at, engage with, challenge or imprison you?

MB: What is the role of subjectivity in your poetry?

Alan Wearne: I have never been able to quite explain the differences between subjectivity and objectivity. I certainly don’t know whether they are natural opposites or places at the ends of some metaphysical continuum (I suspect the latter). If by subjectivity you mean I place myself and my experiences at the centre of my poetry I reply with a qualified no. So much of what I write is based upon what I have observed and what has impacted on me, yet I try (and try is the operative word) keeping myself distanced from proceedings (with a few exceptions in some of my more recent pieces). Being the author I am very much present whether I wish to be or not. I admire Anthony Powell in being able to sustain Nick Jenkins as narrator for the twenty-four years of A Dance to the Music of Time and leave us wondering “How much of Powell is Jenkins and how much of Jenkins is Powell?” I like to think of my verse novel The Lovemakers as “an autobiography in which I don’t appear”, which sounds like a good try, but there’s that operative word again.

I doubt if I’m an “I do this I do that” poet. I’m sure not a confessional one. Of these two 50s and 60s American modes, I prefer the former with its ‘personal’ poems, though the latter did produce ‘Heart’s Needle’ and ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’. And now having arrived at this point in my essay I have to ask: “This question . . . what was it again . . . something about subjectivity?”

MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions or broader cultural or political movements?

Alan Wearne: I court a satiric muse, I court a narrative muse and at times the tragic muse comes a-calling. I have (as indicated earlier) Browning as a strong exemplar, other fine Victorians in strong support, whilst the man who brought us Don Juan refuses to leave. Then I recently read Pope’s ‘Epistle to Bathurst’ and knew I had to lift my game.

I love making disdainful, Augustan aims at things. In 2005 the then Prime Minister attended Anzac Day at Anzac Cove to prove his patriotic mettle . . . you bet he did! That’s when The Beegee’s ‘Stayin’ Alive’ was the warm-up act. Talk about the Foxtel Dawn Service! Composing the following I e-sent it to numerous politicians of an anti-Howard persuasion. None replied. Here’s my chance.

GALLIPOLI 2005

Here the way élitists snigger
over our latest Little Digger;

well funny how there’s nothing said
when I address our living dead,

nor softest heckling intrudes
upon their mates’ beatitudes.

(Yet how can I . . . let’s clear some phlegm . . .
show I feel like one of them?

And how to find which way to choose
for “Fellas, I'm near one of youse”?)

Oh that my final battler breath
was breathed beside the A.I.F.

When little tops a patriot
line up lads, let’s see you shot!

Darwin to Cooktown via Geelong
my heart tells me where I belong:

hear it pounding beaut beaut beaut,
soundbites and a photoshoot.

Go slam shut each trendy gob,
I’ll take my orders from the mob.

Ahh democratic treasure trove,
let’s jet home to Anzac Cove!

Yet as much of my work shows, I’m a sucker for pluralism. One of the major regrets about current Australian poetry is that there are far too many folk like me bleating forth some left of centre line. Oh for a few more right-wing poets, please, if only to make the place a bit less predictable . . .

I believe my lines are never static (never could compose haiku!) So with an ear most often tuned to some kind of long-lined iambic pentameter-plus-a-bit-more, I feel safe. It’s something I don’t have to worry about, although Jim Davidson once mentioned that at times too much of it might sound like a washing machine quietly chugging rrrmm rrrmm rrrmm up the other end of the house. Point taken.

I love the way form, structure, metre etc. frees you, just as his cell allowed the Birdman to study the flocks of Alcatraz. When it comes to composition though there’s little better for me than a good balladic beat, or to quote Nat ‘King’ Cole: “I’m an errand boy for rhythm . . . send me.”

MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?

Alan Wearne: Given the nature of what I’ve written and still at times write my major frustration is getting the stuff finished. Seven years on one verse novel, thirteen years on another, what kind of fool was I? Added to which of course I would keep two/three/four/five sections of the work going at the same time. If I have a gift in verse, perhaps it’s that one, though I won’t recommend it to anybody. At present I have about a dozen poems in progress, some stretching back to at least eight years, the enterprise being both comic and exhausting. During the latter stages of The Lovemakers, drinking friends on a Friday evening session would chide me about my progress. They had a point, but believe me it was worse in the driver’s seat. Meanwhile, countless colleagues, some of whom I had discovered, would bring out book upon book. Then the utterly irrational occurs and I’m find I’m writing a new poem, maybe even a long new poem and boom boom boom! in days (in hours sometimes!) it’s finished. Weird.

For some of the rest of the ‘being challenged’ catalogue: I have always been able to work at paid employment and write poetry, and anyone who announces that there is a Poetry Industry (just as there is a Rock Music Industry) will have me to answer to. There’s a lot of really bad Australian poetry out there that I wish would evaporate but that is doubtless the case in (for starters) Denmark, South Korea (North Korea!) Chile and Ireland. The United States? Don’t even ask. And the worst part of this Australian load? So many of these bad poets are okay people whom I often quite like. Thus my antipathy towards their work must remain hidden. Oh dear.

MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?

Alan Wearne: I enjoy reading large mainstream and not so mainstream works of fiction that don’t insult my intelligence. I also aim for histories, generally of a full bore nature such as  Richard J. Evans’ three-volume account of Nazi Germany, Orlando Figes on the demolished hopes of the Russian Revolution and the very black madness of Stalinism, and almost anything by Simon Schama. The most recent novel I ‘finished’ was Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. During this unfinishable and unfinished epic I also read a life of Paul ‘Skinny’ D’amato, the uncrowned king of Atlantic City during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, a book on the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, and a third on Khrushchev’s  visits to the US in 1959 and 1960. All these works are important to me and hence to me-as-a-poet. Whether they will somehow make special guest appearances in my future work is hard for to say.

Occasionally I have pursued ‘research’. My obsession with the Mr Asia Drug Syndicate (a good portion of which propels great slabs of The Lovemakers as well as later shorter poems) was helped along by the late Richard Hall's book on that subject Greed and by much of  the ‘Stewart Royal Commission Report’.

The chances of my reading (of my understanding!) poetics and/or literary theory are negligible. 

MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?

Alan Wearne: Australian poetry is anything written by Australian poets, and, yes, I am an Australian poet. What a pity though there is so much out’n’out drivel I wish wasn’t written by Australian poets. One of our number goes to a Writer’s Festival in let's say Ireland and reads this risible slop about the Irish Famine, which truly gets up the backs of much of the audience (and believe me when I say I’ve been told how the Famine is so much off limits now with most Irish poets it’s no joke). Should this Australian contribution be acknowledged as ‘one of ours’? Well yes, alas; the Irish certainly don’t want it. Our bad poetry is surely as much a part of us as ‘South of My Days’, ‘Five Bells’, ‘Because’, ‘The Tomb of Lieut. John Learmonth A.I.F.’, 'Stroke', ‘Speed, a Pastoral’ and those other great Australian poems I love.

The Anzacs, for all their heroics, were violently destroying the red light district of Cairo (and doubtless worse) earlier in 1915; Alfred Deakin, the great progressive of Federation, was a fervent White Australian; tranquil-looking  Georgian Tasmania was a charnal house of vindictive vengeance and ethnic cleansing. And so it is with poetry: mine, ours, theirs, all of it. (The only thing I can sat with positive certainty about The Nightmarkets is that it isn’t as bad as The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, The Monkey’s Mask, What a Piece of Work etc. etc. and that’s not saying much.) I just live in hope that Kenneth Koch’s immortal words will still prove true: “All bad poetry is psycho-degradable”, a luxury we have over many other areas of history.

For my own part, I am so poetically grounded in the country called Australia, I’ve never left its literary shores; and even after 11 years of ‘exile’ I’ve hardly left Melbourne! In 1976 I discovered that ultimate eminence grise China’s Chou Enlai, and announced that here was a subject fit for a future dramatic monologue. I still haven’t hopped on the Muse Express to that part of creativity, though when I do, I’ll still be an 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?

Alan Wearne: I’m not interested in ‘the new’, for anything that calls itself ‘the new’ is going to become ‘the old’ very quickly. Thoughts on the current state of play I leave to others. I’m certain though that those emerging poets I enjoy will keep emerging more fully and give me further enjoyment, with Liam Ferney, Bonny Cassidy, Jimmy Andrews, Ben Michell (if he starts writing again) and others heading in numerous right directions. The big problem, of course, is that they will have to confront the heirs of those inglorious poetasters we confronted. Oh well, ho hum. So it’s not today I’m interested in, but the future; but then today is the future, for I see these four great ten-year-olds whose work will take Australian poetry where probably only Slessor, Webb and Forbes have taken it, and maybe even beyond.

One is a state school kid from Booragoon in Perth’s south-of-the-river suburbs. He loves making sounds, he loves making jokes, he loves the way words fall, he loves the way the sounds of the words can also mirror the sense of the writing. The other day he read (though don’t ask me how, on the internet probably, computers have to be good for something) Auden’s ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ and was stunned. Like all good poets he immediately started learning through imitation, and wrote a brief poem using the same quatrain structure as Auden’s, the subject being Garden City, the local shopping centre. This boy does not compromise on quality, however, and whilst his art receives great support from his normal-enough parents, his teachers and, above all, his friends, he somehow already knows that this poetry game isn’t just about applause. Of course he writes for the hell of it and knows that all this sure ain’t for the hell of it. Never confusing fame with art he will become Australia’s most popular poet, ever.

Another is a Glen Iris girl in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. She is quiet and bright, a perfectionist with all the problems that that condition can entail. Her parents are set on sending her to Mandeville Hall (Gig Ryan’s alma mater) where her studious nature has her aiming very high. She reads poetry of course, often in a state of near ecstasy, but can't quite bring herself to write the stuff, fearing she will never be “that good”. Obtaining Law/Arts Double Honours she joins a Catholic relief organisation around the time that some kind of never quite identified crisis starts her writing poetry. At 50, with her only book, a 90-page volume of 21st-century spiritual exercises capturing an international audience, she disappears, in such a way that no one even knows from where she has disappeared. Australia and the world mourns.

Somewhere in The Gap, Brisbane, a ten-year-old boy already has ‘leadership’ stamped on him. If he’s pushy and opinionated he’s more often right than not. He knows a lot, probably too much, and this causes a certain trouble at the Christian School to which his well-meaning parents have sent him. Never mind, it’s off for a more mainstream education where he reads widely and plays all manner of sport. If in his early twenties we see him take a few too many of the newer drugs he soon rights himself and dives into academia. Australia Poetry needing an overhaul, by the time he’s thirty, boy does he overhaul! Murray, Tranter, Adamson, Gray, he’s read them all and they receive his judgement. He’s read Wearne too. “Mad bastard, Wearney” is his two-edged compliment. With his eyes forever on the main chance, in honour of Pi O’s eightieth birthday he edits the coffee table book and multi-media extravaganza Pi O, Now You’re Talking!. His greatest praise though is for Forbes. “John Forbes is still the current state of play in Australian Poetry . . .” opens his Life of Forbes. And guess what, he’s correct. He writes poetry too, gnomic, intense pieces about which reviewers are united in just one thing: he’s nothing like Forbes.

The fourth kid, a girl in Darwin, is the most interesting. Her father runs his own trucking company, her mother is a primary-school teacher and although an only child this girl is in no way spoilt. A solid middle-class grounding in “Whatever you do, do it well” is nevertheless combined with a vigorous social conscience. She loves words, of course, though has a somewhat private attitude to the various poems she assembles. In her twenties, still living in Darwin, she sends a variety of poems to a number of Australian publications, and the folks down south are stunned. You think L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry has taken the product places, wait until you see this person’s work: it’s metaphysical, spiritual, satiric, political, playful, over-the-top yet never excessive. What’s it about? Well, language I suppose. And so she’s invited to a Sydney Writer’s Festival where, getting off the plane two things are evident. One, because of her androgynous name (Robin? Andre? Leslie?) the welcoming party don't know it's a woman; and secondly: they are confronted with a full blood Aboriginal! “Huh?” is all the Sydney Writer’s Festival heavyweights can blurt out, though later one has the courage to ask “Err, but umm, why don’t write about the Dreaming, the Rainbow Serpent, the Stolen Generation?” To which comes that reply all poets worthy of the name should give: “Well, do I have to?”

Well, do I have to? And thus the first, truly great Red Letter Day in Australian Poetry has arrived!

MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?

Alan Wearne: We won’t really know until poetry had been abolished, though if it has been abolished who will really know? For some there might be some kind of unspecified ache . . . but then what?

Okay, what poets could be in the past they aren’t quite now, and who knows the future? Kipling defined the Empire and Whitman defined Civil War and post Civil War USA; Yevtushenko defined Mr K’s brief thaw and Yeats defined Ireland (some might say too much he did). Contemporary Australia does not have a poet with that kind of clout. Certain more conservative thinkers might wish Les Murray to have this role, but plenty would oppose this view.  For those mentioned above were at least for a certain time unassailable in that role. Compare Murray’s ‘position’ (perhaps not a ‘position’ he has actively sought) with Baxter in the 1950s, 60s and 70s New Zealand and my argument I think holds even more fully.

But I tell you what, poets often have their antennae up and quivering, well before many other sections of society. Not that anyone ever notices, of course. Forbes used to say that he came from a line of speculative professions: his grandfather was a punter, his father was a meteorologist, he was a poet (and I suppose if John had had a son he would have been a merchant banker!) I posit it’s this speculative nature, combined with the pithy, sharp way the best of us have in distilling observation, thought and language which is where we are relevant and valuable. All we need, of course, are folk to read and listen.

And some are certainly doing that with Forbes. From reports, a recent Monash University seminar on his work sounded spot on. Moreover, a few months ago at an undergraduate house warming somewhere in the Sutherland Shire, it was decided around midnight to adjourn to the Woronora Cemetery where, at the grave of Forbes (‘By Vocation a Poet’) with an obligatory amount of drink, the party recited selections from his work (yes, some folk are reading, some folk are listening) plus a few of Wearne’s (the mad fools).