Editorial: 1 October 2011

29 september 2011 The sky is feeling old-fashioned
in its birthday blue
and is dressing in grey, clouding
the trees who are yet to tell
what weird dance
the wind is trying to choreograph,
while the sun, playing hide and seek
with the world’s shadows,
is unsure if it should hide

in the little space of mind
between the familiar
and the unknown

(from ‘Outside’ by Tari Mtetwa)

In this issue, we introduce a new voice in Zimbabwean poetry, Tari Mtetwa. In an introduction to Mtetwa’s poetry, Musaemura Zimunya notes that Mtetwa “does not seek the loud and bombastic phrase to prop up vacuous inspiration”, as – Zimunya argues – is often the case with emerging writers in his country, who rely on grand themes such as love and death, rather than attention to poetic craft, to give their work power. Not that Mtetwa eschews “the painful things of life”, as Irene Staunton puts it in an interview with the poet; Mtetwa writes about birth, love, time, memory and death. The latter, he points out, occurs frequently and is “an easily recognisable symbol” – “I believe that poetry should reflect life in the closest way possible,” he says. Yet Mtetwa addresses these grand themes subtly, and is as likely to write a poem about a beautiful woman walking down a street, or about a sculptor at work, as about grave-side mourners. Zimunya is right: there is nothing “loud and bombastic” about Mtetwa’s work. Rather, he looks at the world with an alert and sensitive eye, mindful of the quiet yet strong impact of pared-down language, subtle repetition, a well-chosen image.

In July, PIW Australia editor Michael Brennan published thirty interviews with poets from Australia, gathered over the course of several years. To this collection of interviews, we now add one with Samuel Wagan Watson, an award-winning poet from Brisbane with Indigenous and European heritage. In it, he discusses his inspirations and motivations as a writer, his day-job as a writer for radio and the political and cultural backdrops to contemporary Australian poetry.

With a Beat sensibility and taking inspiration from the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski, Watson’s work offers crafted poetics and sharp digs at Australian politics, as in ‘Apocalyptic Quatrains: The Australian Wheat Board/Iraq Bribery Scandal’ or ‘Monster’, in which he declaims “I am a mutation of the white Australia policy! / I am Frankenstein of the Dreamtime! / I am the Australian Dream’s living nightmare; I am an educated Aborigine!” As Michael Brennan argues in his introduction, Watson reflects “the reality of community created on the margins, raising with humour the ‘voodoo of semantics’ against the ‘cappuccino song’ of middle Australia’s retrograde conformism”. Personal experience and childhood inform many of the poems in the selection published here, from lyrical memories of boyhood fishing expeditions – “the catch a moving paragraph” – to ‘The Night We Lost Charles Bukowski’s Voice’, an exuberant prose-poem about a drunken night on the town. Watson reflects too on landscapes urban and rural, and the way they intersect with identity: Brisbane is “punctuated by the footpaths, the parks and corner stores where I have purchased my ingredients of the Dream”; the desert at dusk has a “fire-pink, burner-blue horizon line”; on Wiradjuri land, the poet “can't sleep on this beautiful soil that was sung . . . and sewn with too many secrets”. Whether contemplative, celebratory or critical, Watson’s writing always has both soul and fire.