Interview with Martin Harrison

16 april 2011 Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?

Martin Harrison: I was very young. I wanted to write poetry when I was five or six years old. I wrote some poems at that time and I still have a vague memory of them. I knew I was going to be a poet at a very early age. I never doubted it, though I had no idea how it would come about, and I had very little idea what it actually meant to be a poet. Paradoxically, however, I wrote very little when I was growing up, because I was so conscious of how young I was. I wrote just a few poems, I loved reading poetry. As I got older I read a lot about poets, biographies and so on. But it didn’t seem worth pretending that what I was doing for myself was any good. I started writing with a bit more certainty and a bit more confidence in the couple of years before I went to university: so, around age sixteen and seventeen. 

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

Martin Harrison: What a complex question to answer briefly.  If you are a poet, you spend all your life in dialogue with poems and poets. You may well be still engaged with the work of another poet years after reading the work and having never looked at it again in the interval – even, that is, if you don’t look back at the work regularly. There are poets whose work you don’t really enjoy who nonetheless exert constantly fresh long-term influences on what you do. I’d put Ezra Pound into that category, for instance. When I was living in Paris in 2008, I finally went back to re-read Ezra Pound, especially The Cantos  I have had a thirty-year argument with Pound, I guess. Perhaps I will never fully resolve the mix of admiration and distrust I have towards that work. Stevens and Frost made a big impact on me as a teenager. I still adore poems which integrate deep psychological processes with a talk which is direct, emotional, intellectual, dramatic, brilliant and so on. Their poems have always mattered more to me than Pound or Williams. I read Auden’s later work; I still don’t enjoy all of Auden. Thanks to my friend David Shapiro, I found John Ashbery’s work as soon as I got to university: and that opened up a lot of the then newer American work. As a technician, as a musician, Marianne Moore has always mattered, too – though Pound’s technical knowledge of poetry (and the source of that knowledge in many languages) is also never less than interesting to contemplate. I reference these poets and poems a lot, on a sort of permanent back of the mind spectrum of thinking. Recently I have been re-reading Charles Olson: his early book The Distances has always been one of my favourite books.  I want my next book of poems to have something of the same feel. 

At this moment, what contemporary poets like Michael Farrell, Robert Adamson, Judith Beveridge, Jill Jones and Robert Gray are doing matters to me too. I’ve been writing about Michael’s work recently, in the context of a thought (developing in many directions, as it were, and not just about Michael’s work) about a very open, “half-formed”,  risk-attractive type of composition. I’ve been reading some Americans like Frank Bidart, Lesley Scalapino, Joan Retallack, and re-reading some of the 80s and 90s long work of Ashbery like Flow Chart and Three Poems.  I’ve been re-reading a lot of the French poetry I read in my 20s – in particular Char, Reverdy (once again, over and over again such a discovery!) and the late love poems of Eluard.

This is another side of the influence of early reading on me – which is hard to explain.  I was lucky to come from a school system which asked you to read poetry from classical languages and, in my case, also in French before you started studying in your own language. I have never read poetry only in English. I’ve never had only the trans-Atlantic connection or the New York School or the West Coast as my main reference points. If I had been asked this question about reading when I was twenty-one then I would probably have said that all the really important references for me at the time were French poets, in particular Apollinaire, Breton, Mallarmé and Valéry. The presence of French poetry and later the Spanish poets has been constant – I’ve never wanted it to be too overt in my poetry but it is there all the same. Three of the most crucial poetic encounters in my life – I mean those moments when you are submerged in another poet’s work for months and months, living daily with the work – have been with Vallejo, Machado and Octavio Paz. I am currently writing towards a new collection, not just with a sense of Olson at the back of the mind, but more centrally with a sense of two other poets as guiding stars in relation to my work, neither of whom are English language poets. One is the modern French poet, Michael Deguy, and the other is to my mind the greatest 20th-century gay poet, the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. 

I think Deguy (whom I have been attempting to translate or transpose into English) writes with an extraordinary mix of citation and of spontaneity: it is as if his poems operate at the crossover between the entirely free moment of spontaneous thought-formation and a no less constant process of selection from text, literary reference, already given narrative structure, cliché. He is very interesting to read in terms of speed and directness. With Cernuda, I have always loved his prose poems – they strike me as some of the best prose poems of the last century – but I have been reading many of his other poems. The mix of self (a subtly defined personality) and of selflessness in his poetry is what matters to me: the voice comes from the middle of a sometimes lonely, but often erotic, mindfulness.    

That further question of who has inspired you to write is just too hard to answer. As I said, you live with poetry and poets, new poets and ancient poets. Besides, writers who may have inspired me are not all poets: poetry is just what I can do. Inspiration is like a very long term love affair. As with love, you end up realising you can never fully define what it is that you adore in the other person no matter how much you try to name it – you never quite understand what it is that attracts you and fills you with desire. If I was saying something about being inspired, frankly I would probably talk more about music and also about the great European novelists and about films. At the moment for instance I am listening to a lot of classical Arabic music, mainly because of the way the vocal technique extends the voice into ranges of emotion not normal in Western musics. I am not sure yet, but will most likely discover, how this listening experience modulates my poems. 

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

Martin Harrison: I work from very direct senses of the world and I want poems to convey those senses as fully as possible – in an up-front kind of way. Poetry for me is not discourse, indeed it is about how not to ‘do’ discourse: in that sense it always aspires to be as direct a transposition of experience as possible. This is so even if that directness seems sometimes to require a lot of ‘talk’ to get there. I have been described, for instance, as a kind of essayist in poetry: some of my poems are like that, though only some. Most of my poems aren’t of this sort. But there is a technical reason for the talkativeness; occasionally it is there just in order to do talk, but even then there is a reason why, technically, this is necessary at that particular moment. The question of how ‘directness’ is transcribed is, of course, a literary question and a technical formal question. Features like length or brevity or cadence or an allusion to a traditional form or an open structure are technical means of resolving the matter of a poem. Those means are crucial to its composition and performance. But really all and every experience is available to poetry, and so the question of the so-called everyday becomes irrelevant. 

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

Martin Harrison: Do I understand the question? Subjectivity is not a word I’d reach for, or at least not in this context. People bring their own senses of the world and of language to poems when they read poems or hear them. But this doesn’t mean that understanding is only subjective or that experiences in poems are only subjective. (The idea of subjectivity has recently been over-employed in a shoddy, self-obsessed, consumerist way as if it just means personally liking and disliking – and as if that’s the end of the matter. I find this version of subjectivity nauseating.) When I read a poem which I enjoy, it opens up a world or a part of a world for me.  At the same time, it brings to bear a necessary music, I’m tempted to say, a perfectly timed music. Both of these things happen. Something occurs. To say that what occurs is ‘subjective’ – which in a way it probably is – is one of the less interesting things to say about such an event. Great poetry occurs in its own time and space, and most of what we have to say about it or what we feel with it is a kind of approximation. 

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

Martin Harrison: Neither. Modern poetry has a deep, more or less structural connection with freedom because each poem is (in theory at least) a potentially unbounded aesthetic space. This is one of the many reasons why poetry and poets always are, sooner or later, in conflict with political authority and dreary critical canonising and officialising of most sorts. Sure, all these things are all too often unavoidable aspects of the scene: you don’t ask to be born into the age of Stalin (if you are Akhmatova or Pasternak) or the age of ideology or the age of critical nihilism (like now) or the age of inferior criticism – and you have no choice but to respond to these things, to take them on board in some way. Poets have to create the space – a psychological space mostly, but also a practical and literary one – from which their work can proceed. This freedom can easily be confused with a sort of automatic ‘left’-ism or maverick ‘right’-ism but really it is not political in that superficial way. 

A sense of the poem as an aesthetically free act places a lot of emphasis on composition, on the features of the poem, on its performance and so on. This emphasis is not at odds with “tradition” in any of that word’s many connotations. (For one thing I don’t think you can make use of aesthetic freedom unless you understand the technical base of poetry.) Each new poem, if it’s any good, is a contribution to tradition. To me, the newness of my work is to do with wanting to do in new ways and new words what my predecessors have done so magnificently.  My work will look very different from theirs in so many regards.  But I hope it remains rich and productive over time, like the works of the past. 

Perhaps the word tradition is treated as just another word for lineage.  This unfortunately is what many of the local academics mean by it: they just mean history and of a fairly pedestrian sort, too. I chose not to work in a single line of descent when I was in my 20s. I felt a real conflict between a national line and the fact that, by the 1970s, the English language had no boundaries – it had variations, yes, even significant ones but no real frontiers. For better or for worse, one must add: yet this was the case. In reality, the key modernists of the earlier part of the last century already knew this about the position of their work in the various languages they wrote in. Nearly all of them set up a permanently open negotiation between local ancestors who had influenced them and the knowledge that their work was, in a philosophical way, meant for the world. (Australian critics and academics who want to see tradition as exclusively a matter lineage will, and do, have problems with my work.)

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

Martin Harrison:  The only challenge is the next poem, and how to develop a vibrant relationship each time between the technical shape of the work and its meanings.  My poems form over very long periods of time. They take a lot of time and work to get right. When a new poem starts I’m often anxious, or even a bit depressed, at how much time and energy and attention it will take. But then, of course, writing a poem is an extraordinary experience. 

It’s odd to me that in the question’s list of possible difficulties facing a poet today there is no mention of the risk that the lively, pleasure-seeking acknowledgement of new poetry starts to disappear. And also there is no mention of the sheer difficulty of getting the work lodged, getting it on to a larger agenda. Both seem to me to be key problems. I think both issues have become more and more frustrating since the late 70s – and I think it is having a distorting effect on how Australian poets approach their work. We now have a situation where a number of multi-awarded, anthologised poets have, in reality, very few or no readers. In other words I am not talking here about banned or lost poets, or poets too experimental for their time, or poets working in little known languages or poets like Dickinson and Cavafy who preferred not to publish. I’m talking about a paradoxical kind of acceptance, in which readership consists in few or no readers, that is, apart from a small self-promoting handful of academics and a few well-meaning fellow poets and perhaps a few journalists. (In some cases, not even that.) I am not just saying, either, that this situation always pertains to slight or meretricious work. That would be too understandable, we could put the phenomenon in the “ever thus” category.  But the problem is more complex: for the work may be marvellous or mediocre, and it seems to make not much difference. This situation – how to get through it – is indeed a challenge.

By the way, I don’t want to sound unduly negative – you just have to create your own context for the reception of your work. It takes a long time and there are no shortcuts, I guess.  

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

Martin Harrison: I’ve probably said enough about this. There is no recipe for being a poet, but reading in languages and cultures other than your own (if you can do it) offers a wonderful expansion of your sense of the poem. Beyond that, I would offer two comments. Firstly, there have been other periods, in the past, that is, which like this period develop a closeness between poetry and philosophy – but you have to tread carefully here because poetry is not philosophy. The purity of how a poem utters the world is not philosophical. Secondly, it’s not just a breadth of diverse reading that’s required, important though that is. (In fact, one danger with omnivorous reading is that it can produce a sort of hysterical behaviour in the poet that he or she has to be all-knowing, all-talking – an endlessly entertaining parrot of talkative witticisms and encyclopaedic tips. This nervous tic afflicted a whole generation of older Australian poets in the 60s and 70s, who seemed to know absolutely everything about everything and who always had to have the last word, especially in radio interviews or at dinner parties.) Much more important to my mind is to have a love of an art other than literature, for example music or dance or painting. These other aesthetic experiences will teach you so much that words cannot.  Besides dance movement, sculptural gesture, design and drawing are right at the heart of poetry. Poetry is an art, it is an art-practice. Reading is very important, obviously; but the practice is bigger, and more many-sided than that.    

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

Martin Harrison:  The first part of this question becomes possible to answer once you take away the speech marks. Australian poetry is Australian poetry. In response to the second part: yes. I am only halfway through my work, but I have made (I hope) a contribution to Australian poetry in a body of poems which hold up in relation to some of the more significant of past and contemporary Australian poets. To my real surprise, nothing quite like what I have done exists in the poetry before me. Also, no one like me has ever ‘arrived’ into Australian poetry, not even Douglas Stewart. I am often no less surprised, but also very pleased, by the interest of younger and emerging writers in what I am doing.

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?

Martin Harrison: I’d say it’s very important that critics who choose to write about Australian poetry  read the work first and hesitate before bringing their already digested, hand-me-down concepts to it. (Such writing has occurred but is fairly rare.) Terms which just set up agendas or seek to write imaginary literary histories or which impose this or that evanescent political correctness on the work don’t grab me. At least Don’s comment was amusing when it was first made, and will still probably outlast a few dinner parties in Sydney. But can you imagine opening a bottle of decent Merlot somewhere in a smart house in Balmain or Balmoral and gushing on about the “new lyricism”? (Unless it was meant as some camp flim-flam about the wine, of course.) 

To be serious: I came across the phrase a while back, in part in a context which was picking up some things I had written about getting beyond a fixation on generation and lineage and about the importance of acknowledging how good poetry operates laterally “in the world”, experientially, richly, always in the true contemporaneity of fresh perception. Do we need the phrase? It struck me as a bit quaint and, oddly, rather 1950s. Anyway, why do critics need so often to offer comments about genre when they come to define newness? Formal excitement, experimentation, persistence of thematic material, recurrence of tonalities both of voice and (if I can put it like this) of thought – these things seem to me to have much more complex origins and connections than a container-term to do with genre will allow. The aesthetics of poetry are not a simple business. Because we are dealing with sensation and sensoriness and an embodied structure in thought and feeling, the impulse and direction towards certain preoccupations and forms have complex origins. They are not just generic. 

Nor was I totally wrong in feeling something 1950s about the term. I should add (just to dispel any impression that I’m against the 50s) that I find the 1950s exciting and thought-provoking in a way that I don’t find the phrase “new lyricism”. It’s the time when O’Hara and Schuyler and Ashbery were writing their first poems, when Cage was developing chance operations in talk poems and when David Antin and Jackson MacLow were starting to get going with spontaneous and musical performance poems and when Celan was dropping in to talk – with some real dissatisfaction – with Heidegger. But it is also a time when a reactive, segregating terminology around lyricism got going in the States and more obviously the UK: perhaps more accurately in the 1940s than the 50s. There was indeed even talk of a “new lyricism”. We remember (if anyone actually reads it) Dylan Thomas, and probably forget George Barker and Elizabeth Smart and Cecil Day Lewis’s poetry and early George Macbeth – and many others.  A lot of them were “big” names in their decade. We forget much of the poetry, largely because this “new” lyricism could never quite deal with the temper of the times (hip, pop, experimental, full of travel, painterly, cinematic, Buddhist, metropolitan, existentialist), and reads now as poetry under-resourced technically (pace Thomas, perhaps) and rather hollow. If we are going to have critical terms launched on us, then they have to have their own genetic dimension consciously accounted for (mainly historical) and presumably they have to be means, never wholly accurate, of accounting for what we poets have made. 

At the back of all this are some very basic perceptions about poetry and the history of poetry. Perhaps part of the issue is that many Australians are still wedded to British and American ideas of how a literature works, or is supposed to. Paul Kane has written very interestingly about this with his idea of the negative or ‘absent’ ancestor, a negative ancestry that sets up a problem about legitimacy and about a true foundation for poetry. What I would add, however, is that there have been historically many different histories for the emergence of a poetry: these are the models which don’t follow the pattern of the great ancestor (Shakespeare or Milton or Whitman) or the sort of periodisation (Renaissance, Romantic, Modern) you find in American and British poetry. I’ve read enough, for instance, in Latin American poetry to be struck by the similarities between here and there: there are very similar issues and movements, to do with indigeneity, to do with various forms of realism (which are charged with narrow ideas of “the authentic”) and complex patterns of affiliation with experimental poetries in Paris and New York.  Sometimes I think we need to develop ‘our own’ critical terms more even than to develop ‘our own’ literature.  

Whatever the case, criticism and critical acknowledgement can only be based in the ideas and achievements of the writers first and foremost. One thing is clear: we don’t need the sort of literary history which does painting-by-numbers. If, for example, you wrote a literary history of the first twenty-five years of the 19th century in British poetry (1800–1825) and filled in all the necessary slots, basing it on who was successful, who best represented which liberal or reactionary cause, who most represented this or that popular or emerging genre, who wrote for this magazine and not for that, who scored the best patrons or prizes, who was working-class or male or female, you’d have an account which would have lots and lots of names and which would largely obscure the achievement of Coleridge, early Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Blake. If anyone other than Wordsworth actually got a mention, it would most likely be in a minor and probably equivocal role, i.e. as someone who got a nasty review or someone who is associated with some cause or idea. I am not suggesting such a book would be completely uninteresting as, say, a history of a political literary moment, but as a guide to a young reader as to whom to read for pleasure and excitement – and why to read poetry – it would be counter-productive.  
Finally, as for the future, even to say “Let it happen” is futile. The best we can do is to acknowledge and support the best work of our contemporaries lucidly and pleasurably, and make sure that we have said so. 

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

Martin Harrison: I am a poet and am obsessed by poetry. But in fact many of things which are correctly said about poetry can in various ways be also said about other art forms.  I think making art and responding to art is the highest and most refined practice humans have in terms of achieving insight and pleasure. I put the two terms insight and pleasure together, because I can think of one or two other equally, and arguably more, profound forms of structured insight than poetry (philosophy and prayer, for instance); and there are many, many other beautiful pleasures. But the object and practice of art, such as poetry, are to do with the mix of both insight and delight, simultaneously.  It is to do with the interplay between them. This is so if you re-write those terms as thrill and shock, or sensation and truth, or vividness and reality – whatever term you assign on the side of insight and whatever on the side of pleasure, it is how they play out together which is at the heart of poetry. 

Perhaps, then, what sets poetry apart and perhaps what makes it exceed even music among the arts, is the way that being an art of language it can operate at a personally very intuitive and intimate level and, at the same time, be known as such: we feel that poems are ours, that they are part of our minds and inhabit our dreams, and they connect deeply with pre-linguistic senses of the world. Doesn’t music do much of that too? Doesn’t it also work as a form which offers a definition of time both within and beyond the temporal dimension of ordinary experience? Yes, but poems also consciously explore within a space caught between a conscious idea and all the other associations and impulses and intuitions and histories around it. This also means that we have to think in a very lively way about the technical means that each poem brings to bear, that a poem can work in. Those technical means have to be able to capture what is in fact a very complex phenomenon. Indeed, while mere technique can become as wearying and artificial in poetry as in sex, there is a sense in which a good poem is nothing more than a perfect, technically accomplished moment of realisation. Poems are, in fact, the most important way that we invent and sustain a language. 

I don’t apologise for offering a rather abstract way of putting the matter. The experience of a poem is, after all, a specific event in your or my experience: so if we want to describe something as extraordinary as that we need to have sufficient means to do so. I can think of all sorts of ways in which you can usefully and intelligently link up the experience of a poem with (for example) ecological awareness, with sustainability, with truth-telling (especially in relation to the narcosis of mass media and politics), with the experience of locale and the pleasures of place, with the ancestral and modern presence of Aboriginal Australia, with the psyche, with imagination, with humour and wit, with literature and with identity; and I have written about such things. But ultimately people value a body of poetry because they value a particular poetry and that is why it survives on the larger registers, connecting with larger themes of nature, science or history. 

Wollombi, 14 July 2010