Interview with Bella Li

27 februari 2013 Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?


 
Bella Li: When I was ten years old I wrote a poem about a horse. As a child I was a library cormorant, a bookshelf raider. But creative writing was for a long time an opaque and inaccessible thing. In class, I would pretend to write, but actually be doodling. One day, a poem arrived in my head like a mystery train out of nowhere. It had a regular rhyme and meter. It was sentimental and awful. My school principal sent it to the head of the teaching faculty at Melbourne University. I still have the fax (this was in the early 90s) sent in reply.
 
After that I became really enthusiastic and started writing short stories. My father, who had always wanted to be a writer but became an engineer instead, encouraged this. We once drove for an hour and a half just to hand-deliver an entry for a short story competition (I had written the story at the last minute and it was too late to post). Much of my writing, both now and in the past, occurs under duress, in the shadow of an impending deadline. I try not to think about it too much. Sometimes a cup of tea helps.
 
MB: Who are the writers that first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
 
Bella Li: In high school I was introduced to Poe and Tennyson, Longfellow and Dylan Thomas. I disliked Wordsworth intensely and thought Shakespeare was overrated. TS Eliot was on the syllabus in year twelve; we wrote essays about ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. We dissected that poor poem to within an inch of its life and I still loved it. Eliot was, I think, the first poet whose poetry made me go completely cold. I read beyond the syllabus. I memorised ‘Preludes’ and recited it to nobody. I looked for copies of his books in secondhand bookstores.
 
All this time, I had absolutely no interest in Eliot as a person – he was nothing to me but a hand guiding a pen. His meanings were oblique and inscrutable and I appreciated that (even after everything we learnt about modernism). I didn’t feel like I was being hit over the head with a blunt instrument. I can still read ‘The worlds revolve like ancient women/Gathering fuel in vacant lots’ and feel something move in the space behind my ears, and at the base of my skull.
 
It’s this sense of the inexplicable, of having a space that is hollow and habitable, that I look for most in poetry and in writing, no matter who the author is or what genre the writing is in. The short stories of Poe and of Borges do this for me. The novels of Calvino. The prose poems of Rimbaud and Mallarme, the free verse of Emma Lew and Susan Howe all share this quality. I do appreciate other qualities in writing, but this is my personal centre of gravity.
 
For a while now, I have also been particularly interested in poetry that writes onto history, that has at its base something concrete and tangible that has existed in the world. Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is an amazing work: violent and spare and beautiful. As a collection, I think it is some of the best writing I have read, partly because it manages to maintain, through the excess of blood and death, a human sadness. In this way it stitches time together; it is an iteration of a conversation with the past and those who have lived it.
 
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?


 
Bella Li: A few months ago I was on my way home from somewhere, driving and listening to the radio. A piece of classical music was playing, which I wasn’t paying much attention to, but after it ended the presenter read out the following lines from a poem that had inspired the composer:
 
‘I’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling
among yellow trees in driving rain
on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves,
no fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark.’
 
This was how I discovered George Seferis (the poem is ‘Epiphany, 1937’). He led a very interesting life outside of his creative work – born in Greece, he studied law in Paris and then spent most of his career travelling the world as a diplomat. He was smack bang in the middle of some pretty important world events at various points in time. But his poetry is atemporal in many ways – it floats outside of any sense of particularity. By contrast I think of Wallace Stevens – an insurance salesman (and later executive). I can’t think of a job that would, on its face, epitomise ‘boring’ more than this, and yet there is absolutely no sense of the mundane in his poetry – instead, once again, it gives a sense of being atemporal; a collection of loosed, bright objects arranged with precision. And then I think of Rimbaud, who led a rather crazy life and at one point went to Libya to become an arms dealer. But all of this was after he wrote Illuminations and A Season in Hell (I suppose being shot at by Verlaine has to do something interesting to your psyche).
 
What is the point? Some people’s lives are exciting and some people’s lives are not so exciting. But does it matter? My life is certainly not exciting. I have to invent a fair bit. I think that is the point.
 
MB: What is the function or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
 
Bella Li: It’s impossible not to be present in some way in the work you create. But I’ve never been interested in consciously writing myself or my experiences into my poetry. Some people do it well – I have just finished reading Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and he writes himself in all the time. After 600 pages it could get tiring and boring and annoying but it doesn’t. It’s different for everyone, but I can’t do that sort of thing without becoming self-conscious and paranoid. I am always imagining myself as someone or something else when I write. I like to disappear.
 
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions or broader cultural or political movements? 
 
Bella Li: At the moment I am writing a lot of prose poetry, so I guess that is a literary tradition I am a part of? Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons are both works that have influenced my writing in recent years. I’m not sure about broader cultural or political movements, though – I tend to write apolitical and non-culturally specific poetry. But there is always room for interpretation! I occasionally worry that my gender and my ethnicity will influence the way in which people read my work. But I am realising that you can’t escape categorisation, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
 
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
 
Bella Li: Time. There is never quite enough. I don’t know of many poets who survive solely on their poetry, so there is always the need to juggle writing with earning a living. Wallace Stevens did it very well. William Carlos Williams. But I have yet to find a balance. I am returning to university soon to start a PhD. I have been warned about the pitfalls, and know it will be hard and painful and I will probably end up hating everyone and everything. But having worked full-time for a while, the prospect of being given the space to read and write is something that seems so utterly luxurious. 
 
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
 
Bella Li: Anything and everything. The less like poetry it looks the better! History and science, biographies – non-fiction in general. Reference books. Graphic novels. Detective fiction. For a while I chain smoked Raymond Chandler novels. Short stories. And other forms of media that take you away from the written word – visual art, music, drama, film – are very important too. They open up other avenues of thought. Dreaming. But I can’t dream on command, so that one is a little less dependable. The more I read, see and hear, the more I write.
 
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
 
Bella Li: The only definition of ‘Australian poetry’ that I think is broad enough to avoid excluding one poet or another is: ‘poetry written by Australian poets’. This is perhaps the easy answer to give, and I would probably have said the same if you asked me about Canadian poets, only substituting ‘Canada’ for ‘Australia’. I’ve lived here for most of my life, and for that reason alone I would consider myself an Australian poet. It is a matter of pure geography. I’m sure others would disagree.
 
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?
 
Bella Li: I don’t think I’m attuned enough to what’s going on in the poetry community to say anything informed and intelligent about the current state of play. But I do think there is an abundance of energy around poetry, and a lot of support and good will among poets for each other (i.e. no evidence of this being a ‘blood sport’). There are also a number of local presses – Vagabond, Five Islands, John Leonard, Giramondo and UQP, to name a few – that are doing good work to keep poetry and print together. I think this is vital to the health of poetry in Australia and poetry in general: the internet and digital publishing are wonderful things, but there is still nothing quite like holding a volume of poetry in your hands.
 
I am very interested in the Red Room Company, which has been operating out of Sydney for a while now and always has innovative projects up and running. I think they are a vital presence for a number of reasons, one of which is their aim to make poetry more visible and accessible to those who are not already involved in writing or reading poetry. On a very superficial level, I also very much appreciate their design aesthetic! Deakin University’s Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention also seems to be working to pushing poetry into the broader community (they have a project involving poetry and the mapping of urban spaces).
 
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
 
Bella Li: Poetry is always relevant and always valuable. Often in ways that cannot be quantified but that impact upon our experience of the world and the shapes of which it is composed.
Notebook image via Shutterstock