Interview with L.K. Holt

5 juni 2012 What languages do you write in? If several, do you have different approaches/mindsets when working with those languages?

I write in English. I am a monoglot, a very sheepish one. I had high hopes of learning German during late pregnancy and early motherhood, but instead I just watched all 70-odd episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

In seriousness, I believe one cannot fully experience one’s mother tongue, or the silence that preceded it, without learning a second language. I enjoy reading about the philosophy of translation, and I remain a translation-agnostic. I can’t wait to talk to the translators I will be meeting at the festival.
 
What is something you would really love to do before you die (i.e., something you don’t want to leave incomplete/unfinished)?

Raise my son.
 
Of all the ways you find inspiration for your work, which is the strangest or most unlikely?

No source of inspiration is strange or unlikely – or rather, every one is strange and unlikely!
 
To what extent is what you have in your head what ends up on the page, and if the two are very different, does this bother you at all?

I often think that every poet has an Ur-poem or an Überpoem in them – a very un-postmodern notion I should apologise for. I often dream that I have written a few lines of it – only to forget every word upon waking, of course. Once I dreamt I completed my Ur-poem. It descended from the sky in a shaft of light and was shaped like an arrowhead diamond – not very readable.
 
What is your favourite mode of transportation, and why?

Memory. It’s always on time.
 
When do consider a poem to be complete? Do you see your own published work as complete? 

A poem is complete when it justifies its own existence. And when it doesn’t fill you with finger-curling shame when you read it. My editor often has a very different idea as to when a poem is complete, but that’s his prerogative and his job!

I do see my published work as completed – or maybe ‘exhausted’ is a better term. The published poems have exhausted all of their particular constellations of possibility, and I can’t see myself having the urge to return to them in later years.
 
Who is the poet you most look up to, and why?

Rimbaud, for giving poetry up. And Donne, for not giving it up.
 
What, to you, is the most important thing all people should know about poetry?

They should know to read copious amounts of it before they try and write it. And they should know that it is wondrous. Wallace Stevens puts it best: “you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all”.
 
Would you consider yourself a completionist?

I am more a perfectionist. I’d say poet-perfectionists are most often incompletionists: they would rather abandon a poem than do it a disservice.
 
Of everything you know (or would like to know) about Rotterdam, what do you find the most interesting, and why?

The idea of polder fascinates me: having the pluck, let alone the means, to reclaim land from the sea. Take that, ocean! I also come from a port town – Melbourne, but with more town and less port than Rotterdam.

For the festival I’ve been working on a poem based on footage of 1920s Rotterdam – I suspect I’ll be surprised to fly into a modern city and not the interwar one that I’ve been poring over for weeks.
 
What is your favourite incomplete thing (be it poetry, music, or something entirely different)?

I love Schubert’s 8th. Incomplete people are the best people to know.
 
What is the easiest thing about being a poet?

Writing poems. It’s the 90% of your time when you’re not writing that’s much harder. When you are doing something as incredibly difficult as writing a poem, the self simplifies. “Absolute attention is prayer”, to paraphrase Simone Weil.  
 
What advice would you offer people wanting to make a career out of writing poetry?

Don’t be an oxymoron.