Interview with David Brooks

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

David Brooks: I started writing poetry at the age of fourteen, but there are so many starts. In a sense I began fitfully and in various directions in the first seven or eight years, and at each point a set of poets and poetic influences were involved. I’ll take the first part of question 2 into this answer, since it doesn’t seem to want to be separated.

My first poetry was a blending of three different impulses, a discovery of poetry and something about reading it closely that came about when I did a school assignment on Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, a religious phase that I was going through that was throwing up all sorts of questions I was trying to answer, and the receipt of a $10 book prize at the school speech night in the later 1960s. When I went to spend the money I found the first volumes of the Penguin Modern European Poets series, and bought the Holub, the Holan and the Herbert – the first ‘modern’ poetry I had read.

My second start, a thickening and complication of this one, came a year later when I was on an American Field Service scholarship to Cleveland, Ohio. Exposure – remember I was only sixteen – at the beginning of the year to Khalil Gibran, Rod McEwen, and all sorts of new age stuff, and by the end of the year to Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Snyder. The first poetry reading I ever went to was by Ferlinghetti, at a college in Cleveland.

My third start was at university in Canberra a year or two later, a combination of poetry in the undergraduate courses, from Beowulf right through to Stevens and Berryman, with the at that time mandatory immersion in Yeats and Eliot (and exclusion of Pound), some independent discoveries (the T’ang Dynasty poets), support and encouragement from other student poets and staff and poets in the community (A.D. Hope, Bob Brissenden, David Campbell, Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson) and at least one lightning-strike, when one of my lecturers said that he had discovered, while he'd been on sabbatical, a poet I might be interested by, and he lent me a copy of Galway Kinnell’s Body Rags.

I did my honours thesis on Kinnell, wrote to him, and when I went to Canada a year later to do my postgraduate work was invited by him to his restored farmhouse in Vermont. We had a friendship for a while. It was he who introduced me to the poetry of Robert Bly and James Wright, and this set of introductions led to others, some of them, again, actual friendships, as with Mark Strand. At the same time I was writing, in Toronto, my PhD thesis on the poetics of Ezra Pound’s early Cantos, and had developed a friendship with a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Louis Iribarne, who introduced me to the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, and eventually to Milosz himself.

As to what motivated me, I don’t know. It certainly was not any thought of fame or fortune. That inaudible music, its blend of thought and the physical and what I guess we still call the spirit. Once I’d encountered it there didn’t seem to be a choice. A verbal equivalent of the silence and mystery of photographs, for they’re another influence, a profound one in fact. When I was beginning as a poet I was also beginning as a photographer. The impact of Weston, Steichen, Steiglitz, Minor White, Paul Strand, Julia Margaret Cameron, Kertesz. One whole day alone in the inner sanctum of the Eastman House photographic archive in Rochester, New York, in 1972 would have to be one of the most extraordinary, most magical experiences of my creative life.

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

David Brooks: Three poets from the period just described became abiding influences, Kinnell, Pound and Milosz, and the interest in the T’ang poets was still there also. In a sense these have served as cardinal points of my writing, although I think that that has eventually become something else again, no longer so deeply or so obviously imprinted by them. Nowadays a great deal of contemporary poetry leaves me fairly cold, written to follow fashion and fairly ignorant of how much it is repeating history. There are some pleasant and sometimes exciting discoveries, but the poets I have by my bedside, well, right now it’s Osip Mandelstam, Jacques Prévert and David Hinton’s remarkable translations from the T’ang and pre-T’ang periods (Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China). Twelve months ago I would have added Srečko Kosovel.

What’s changed? Three things, I guess (immensely reductive, but than all of this is perforce immensely reductive): I’ve gotten older and more experienced, have a better sense of what I want to say and do; I’ve spent the last thirty years teaching poetry and editing it as well as writing it, and have either educated or jaded my palate to the point where a huge number of things that might once have stimulated it no longer much do so (I was going to say “when only some of the strongest and purest things appeal to it”, but the truth is probably somewhere in between); and I’ve come to a place, ideologically, where I’ve become a little impatient with certain kinds of aestheticism, or searches for novelty, and with the assumption that compassion for and the problems of the self take precedence over compassion for other beings.

Another factor, of course, is that I’m writing about it and thinking about poetry all the time. Essays, books on poetry and poetics, translations. And when you’re working and thinking that way a lot of your reading is done for that research, and a lot of the pleasure is also research-driven: discoveries, understandings – a searching for evidence and information as much as for pleasure and inspiration.

MB: How important is 'everyday life' to your work?

David Brooks: Quintessential. The imagist is still there very strongly in my poetry, and the vein of non-formalist, ‘naked’ poetry seems as inexhaustible as the T’ang. The everyday is as eternal as it gets. One of the base-lessons of photography. Miracles in the grain of the wood, the patterns in peeling paint, bent grass.

MB: What is the function or place of subjectivity in your poetry?

David Brooks: I’d have to say that that, too, has been quintessential, for much of my writing. But now I’m in two minds. The subjective ‘I’ is our principal connection to others, and I don’t just mean readers, though anyone who writes poetry has to admit that readers, even if only ideal and/or imaginary, are a big part of the process. At the same time the lyrical subject is also a technique as much as a main-line, confessional conduit from the poet’s psyche, and I think this, that it can be a rhetorical as well as a subjective position, is often misunderstood. I think that poetry of a certain tradition post Mallarmé has tended to distance the reader and to hive off its ancient, core functions of compassion and consolation. There is a contemporary fashion – not universal, I might say – to discount and even disparage the presence or persistence of the subjective ‘I’ in poetry.  I think that this is unfortunate, on various counts, and also a touch naïf where it’s not hypocritical. I might take it a bit more seriously when the poets stop putting their own name on their work, but even then I’d have deep reservations. The subjective ‘I’ cannot be removed in any way other than rhetorically. It merely becomes hidden, submerged, a more deceptive and perhaps dangerous position than keeping it out in the open where we can see it and assess its impact. There is, too, the way this is likely to handicap a poet’s own self-awareness. If you don’t know, intimately, the machine that does the thinking and the writing in the first place, then you don't operate that machine very well. Which is all eventually to say that the apparent subject is still pretty present in my poetry, though I’d caution those who think that it is a direct representation of the person who writes it. There’s always a fictive component. The ‘I’ who might instigate the poem must always negotiate with the poem – Je est un autre. And there is always, too, the chance that the poet is using the intimacy of that apparent subject to attempt to manipulate the reader out of or to change their own subject position.

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

David Brooks: Increasingly it is addressing – it is turning to address – the latter. This is in 2009. I’ve no idea what I’ll be saying in 2019, if I am still saying anything at all. And it’s less a matter of cultural or political movement as it is of addressing cultural and political intransigence. I wish there were a Movement to address the species barrier and to challenge our lethal anthropocentrism and the appalling way humans characteristically – almost definitively – treat animals, but at the moment we are still at the point where a concern for such things is derided as fond eccentricity where it is not actually classified as some kind of terrorism. As to literary traditions, the first part of the question, I am increasingly aware that they are as much part of the problem as they are any part of the solution, and so I am inclined to sit a little more side-saddle to them. They are the vocabulary, so there is no doing without them, but one must develop a forked ear as well as a forked tongue. The particular traditions my writing might be seen to be a part of (T’ang/wilderness poetry; the new ‘naked’ poetry of the 1960s and 70s, etc.)  should be fairly evident from my earlier answers.

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

David Brooks: Getting the ego out of it (almost impossible) and letting it be. A tricky statement, I suppose, and, at the risk of overlapping somewhat the answer to question 4, I should try to explain, at least a few parts of it, though it’s fraught with paradoxes. Robert Adamson recently called me a “new confessionalist” or something like that. I can see why he’d do so, but it’s an unfortunate reversion to an old and confusing category, insisting as it does not only on the personal and private nature of the material deployed – and forgetting that intimate revelation might only be the appearance of intimate revelation (i.e. that it might be fictional) – but also suggesting that there’s something transgressive and faintly shameful about that material. Some of my new writing seems personal indeed. I admit that (i.e. that it seems that way). And I’m sorry if some people find it embarrassing or think that I should somehow be embarrassed about it. But they quite miss the point, to say nothing of the fact that I think they are reading only a small part of the poem. We live our lives once, have only one life. How absurd that when we try to write honestly about it, to say clearly and unambiguously what we have learned (instead of placing it in code, for fear of embarrassing ourselves), we find ourselves given labels that attempt to shame and silence us. The whole point of our experience, surely, is to learn from it, and one of the points of writing – note that I do not say the only one – is, just as surely, to record what we have learned, for the possible benefit and solace of others.

But the labels that attempt to shame and silence us are only part of it: the real barrier is the ego itself, and those false senses of dignity, integrity and face that are so much a part of it – things that seem noble, honourable, because that is the way we have been taught to regard them, but that are in fact double-faced, have as much to do with not rocking the boat, with remaining complicitous in things that may not be so honourable but that the society at large doesn’t want to give up, as they have to do with any good in some less-invested sense. That is in part – large part – what I mean in talking about getting over oneself. The largest rock in front of us, preventing us from seeing, from being, ethically, in this world, is our self itself. But now I am opening another huge can of worms and should probably back away for fear that I will never, in such a forum, be able to explain adequately what I mean. (Another point I would make under the same head – another reason for getting over oneself – is that a great many, it seems to me, are drawn to writing in the hope of the applause and fame it might bring them, and forget what it was about writing that drew them to it, that made them fall in love with it, in the first place (in my case its extraordinary power, something the duende Lorca writes about). Ultimately a great many find themselves not only wallowing in a mire of disappointed ego, but actually silenced and all too frequently destroyed by it. Given that so many of these people are immensely talented, and might be able to do so much if their writing were put to some purpose other than their own Narcissism – and ‘art’, writing itself, is only one of those possible purposes – this seems to me a huge waste.)

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

David Brooks: Vegan recipes, because I have to eat and I want to enjoy it, and, at the moment (early 2011), the writing of W.G. Sebald.

That must sound facetious. It is and isn’t. Again there are a couple of things behind it that I should explain. Firstly I teach, and take that teaching seriously. And secondly I edit – co-edit – a literary journal and take that seriously too. Others may have more energy than I or more time in the day but I find that the reading – and re-reading – that I have to do for these purposes, when combined with the desire to do a little writing of my own, quite deprives me of time to read much else. At an earlier stage in my life I might have been more troubled by this than I am now, but at this point, quite frankly, I have read thousands of books, read thousands of newspapers, seen thousands of movies, etc., and don’t find myself all that compelled to read all that many more. There are times when I’d like to, because they can be entertaining and occasionally instructive, but, setting aside a comment about the infinite repetition of plots and news items and pieces of wisdom, (a) it seems to me that there is a time to take in, and there is a time to process, to do something with, what one has taken in, and I find myself in the latter time (and one eventually has to be careful over how one uses one’s time), and (b) I find myself (also) at a point where my own habits and convictions are increasingly at odds with those of the world and the people I find represented in the books I might be reading, and that that kind of exposure and pursuit is more likely to dismay than to enlighten me. [A caveat: I note/admit that none of this stops me from listing books that others might read, when they come to me with requests that I do so.]  

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

David Brooks: This once was a very important issue to me, and indeed I am half-way through writing a book I care a lot about, called Re-Reading Australian Poetry, but it – the question, or the concept behind the question – is also a source of increasing exasperation. There is the dream or Australia, of a society to match the sometimes-perceived wonder and majesty and mystery of the place, macro and micro (more of this two answers below), and all of the talk of antipodean thought that goes with it, but there is also the selfish, xenophobic and ethically dysfunctional reality of a bunch of meat-eaters – most ‘Australian’ poets included, though in this they don’t differ from poets in any other place – happy to chew through half of the creatures of the earth, even while they (the poets) are writing about the mystery and beauty of those selfsame creatures. Which Australia are we talking about?

MB: In reference to the heated debates around poetics and poets, 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 in your view? How do you think Australia poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the future?

David Brooks: …and I might talk about the sycophants around Nero, encouraging him to keep fiddling while Rome burned. But that comes from the dismayed side of me and there are other sides that get annoyed by its didacticism and its tendency to forget just how huge poetry is and the absurdity of trying to prescribe anything at all about it. As to blood sport: Australia, for the poet, is a very small pie; who can blame anyone for being dissatisfied with their portion? Just so long as they realize that this is quite irrelevant to anyone other than themselves. Fashion-wise, it’s not a good look. And as to the new lyricism, where did the old one go? John Forbes, bless him, once thought it a good idea to write what must have seemed to him witty and cutting things about poets such as myself, who wrote about ‘nature’ and ‘emotion’, but we can see now that his own poetry is drenched in them – the old haunted house of postmodernism. I wish I could still be arguing it out with him. But I think I’m supposed to be a part of the new lyricism, so I’d better shut up. And as for networked language, what poetry isn’t? and how is it, anyway, that these terms – “the new lyricism” and “networked language” – are presented as somehow separate and implicitly oppositional? Do they rule one another out? Every poem is part network, even when the poet is oblivious to it. And the current state of Australian poetry? A bit like our politics, rudderless (no pun intended, please!) and embarrassing, when it’s not actually shameful. There are a few bright spots – there is even genius (in the poetry, not in the politics) – but I will name no names, since I (and they) have to continue to live and function here.

MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level? Is it after all a defensible form of cultural practice?

David Brooks: These matters used to exercise me a lot. Australia as at the edge of the empire of Western thought. A place of reconsiderations. Crumblings and re-formations of ideas. A frontier. And poetry as the edge of the edge, since we are after all language creatures, and poetry, while it makes up a face to face us with, has its back on darkness, the unknown, the Other. And quintessentially defensible as a form of cultural practice because of that, though the very idea that poetry should need to be defended is absurd to me, seems to ride on a kind of category error, is a kind of logical non sequitur. I still hold these things, though a little less righteously, but I’m rather sick of hearing myself talking about them, let alone finding myself thinking through them again like a four a.m. obsession. The idea of what Australia could or should be, as a space of mind, runs up again and again against Australians, who don’t seem much interested, don’t seem in this sense Australian enough. 

There’s a major problem with this question, anyway, or questions of this type, in that – and I don’t mean to imply that this is their only major problem – they seem to assume that poetry is some sort of fixed entity in the first place, whereas I find it huge, uncontained and uncontainable. It’s hard to envision an answer to such questions that actually covers this vastness, and that is not instead limited to one particular genus or style. I'll have to take the latter course, and hope that the genus or style I speak from and about is clear enough from answers I've given above, and from my own poetry, should the reader have consulted that.

Auden famously, in his ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, wrote “Poetry makes nothing happen”. His meaning there was clear enough although even its immediate context ironised it – turned instead to the deep, stubborn strength of poetry – and his own career showed that he didn’t believe it anyway; that he resisted it. It’s an interesting statement. Perhaps it doesn’t need his irony in the first place, since it seems to contain its own opposite. Look at it closely and it can turn from a negative to a positive. Poetry does make something happen, and the something that it makes happen is nothing. It makes something out of nothing. It makes something that was not there before. It uses many things, yes, that were there before – buses, orchids, feet, memories of feelings of exhilaration, spiders, possums, etc., or the concepts of them, the words for them – but it also brings to them something that did not exist before. I suppose I am a little Rilkean, or (Judith) Wrightean, in this. A poem about a morning walk – whether or not it is based upon an actual walk – makes a walk that did not exist before. It makes the details, and the attention to those details. It sets those details in a context which shows them in a particular light, and in so doing, of course, becomes a kind of lesson in seeing in that light. What was, in a sense, nothing before, becomes something that has happened, a nothing that has been brought out of its nothingness, into the light, proving that nothingness to have been only apparent, only a gap in seeing. (There are some fabulous lines in a Lionel Fogarty poem, “Some call it poetry / I see it as putting something / from nothing”. Putting, not pulling: putting.) And at the same time, through this same process, it coerces us, by all the many many techniques that it has available – music, repetition, allusion, echo, the beauty and eroticism of the well-constructed sentence, the well-constructed line, the well-constructed image (etc., etc.) – into seeing in certain ways, reflecting in certain ways, aiding us, in the long run, to place ourselves, in our place, to inspire reverence for that place. And if it’s an excruciatingly slow process – if it’s like water dripping on rock – heck, what’s wrong with that? Why are we in such a hurry? (And there’s always the chance that it can work like lightning.)