streets have a saliva sheen, the stones bathing in it. fog is school-pants grey, thick on the tongue. the older trams shudder until they stop and the conductor retires. drunks smirk with red-balloon cheeks, dallying through each step. it is a grave turn. they milk their charm and spend it on ghosts in make-up, loosen their teeth. a clean wind moves the leaves from side to side, the clucking of winter within.
our snapshots –
the photo booth
becomes a grave-marker
This is a tough question and I hope I can add something relevant here. My first reaction was to ask myself if the e-form was entertaining – which has been and can be something of a ‘charge’ to be levelled at the novel, rather than a simple descriptor. Many art forms survive based on the answer to this question (and sometimes in spite of it) and I’d argue that the novel does live and die on its entertainment value.
And so I wondered if the e-form, if it isn’t always entertaining, is it at least fulfilling some need in society? The blog is useful in a sense of providing information quickly. There, it is surely King, and must be a key artefact. And while the blog is a great communicative tool, it’s not always the best tool to present writing. Consider reading the text of a poem with a mess of distractions, images, colours, layouts, links, pop-ups and so on. All of these factors alter the way a poem is received. Compare that to a clean, white page and there’s something different going on.
But – if the poem being read on that blog was hypertextual or more hybrid in nature (combining text, sound, image etc) then the blog is perfect. Powerful in its flexibility.
Of course, the blog also has the great boon (and great curse some would say) of the internet’s participatory nature. A text presented on a blog alters the Public and Private modes of reading. Reading on a blog can be public (via comments) and you can ‘be seen’ to read certain pieces/poets. At home, with a book, it is only public when you travel with it (bus, train) or write about it. With a blog, you write and read about it at home, in the private sphere (though that division has certainly blurred.)
Switching to the idea of the e-book, I suppose that any e-form needs a cheap, simple device to really take off. For Literature and the novel, I don’t feel like the Kindle or other e-readers can do it yet. Not fully. In fact, there a few steps to be taken. One thing that holds me back from grabbing an e-reader (aside from price), is the question of durability. They just seem more fragile. Drop one enough, step on it, expose it to extreme temperatures, have it stolen, and you won’t be happy. Drop a paper book for instance, and it will be fine, if scuffed. A stolen book might be under ten dollars to replace. A stolen kindle with hundreds of purchased books inside? Now, durability could use a deeper discussion (obviously a digital file has a longer lifespan than paper), but if the e-form becomes part of a new literary standard, it might have to wait until the delivery technology seems as indispensible to the content, the way paper, glue ink and card do for physical books.
At this stage, the e-readers replicate the shell of a physical and traditional book, limited in part by what is digitised by publishers. Because many writers (myself certainly included) don’t always take advantage of affordable digital technology to create fully multimedia texts, the e-reader becomes less than a computer, but more than single book (because it can store so many of them.) In that sense, it’s a hard drive with a screen. Although, perhaps when readers want multi-form pieces of literature, then a piece of portable technology will appear that combines the best features of the computer and the old school book.
All that said, in the grand scheme of the history of the way language is presented, e-forms are so new, that I don’t have the insight to predict much. But I am looking forward to the missteps and triumphs, as both will be pretty damn interesting.
Ashley Capes: Your newest collection Ocean Hearted includes a confident blend of haiku and verse. I’m interested in how you see haiku interacting with your verse poetry.
Graham Nunn: I got in to writing through haiku, so the form is very influential on my writing process. In my last collection, I used haiku throughout the book to help the reader make the leap from poem to poem. For me, they kept the collection moving, much like in a renga, utilising that idea of newness, of not looking back. This (ie. Mixing haiku and free verse) is something that I will continue to do, as for me the haiku also act as a cleanser for the longer verse. They keep everything sharp.
Ashley Capes: I like that description of haiku as cleanser and sharpener, and I think it really shows in the collection. It’s interesting that haiku was the form that turned you to writing. How did you find haiku? Through school? A penguin classic?
Graham Nunn: I actually came to haiku through Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. At the time I was living at the top of a mountain range in a very small town (population less than fifty people), so I was really feeling his isolation, his solitude. The haiku dotted throughout the first half of the book really hit me. The poem on Starvation Ridge/ little sticks/ are trying to grow is a poem I go back to often. It still has the same spark, the spark that has ignited what I am sure will be a lifetime interest in haiku.
Ashley Capes: Compositional context fascinates me and I’ve wondered if the way modern methods and tools have changed the way we compose poetry, if it has altered the content more than we realise. That it may have removed some of that solitude you mention. Do you work with both the pen and the keyboard? If so, when is one tool more appropriate than the other? And if not, why do you prefer one more than the other?
Graham Nunn: The keyboard does not play a part in the composing process… I am very much a pencil and notebook person. I really enjoy composing while outdoors. My big old dog Floyd was a great writing companion. He heard the poems in Ruined Man long before anyone else did. We would sit out under the Pepperina Tree for hours… I have recently been running a ginko series for QLD Writers Centre, and that has been great for my writing as each week there is a new destination, a new set of stimulus and most importantly, time to open up to your surrounds. There is definitely too much time spent with the doors closed (literally and metaphorically speaking). I am also a believer in carrying a notebook with you at all times. Sketching ideas and experiences play a very important role in the process of composition. I have been going back through some very old notebooks of late and working on different ideas. They seem so foreign to me now, which makes them all the more exciting.
The keyboard… well I use that exclusively for editing. It creates too many distractions for composition.
Ashley Capes: By which, do you mean, what the keyboard creates access to? The internet, answering e-mails, bureaucratic tasks etc?
Graham Nunn: Absolutely, I really struggle to ignore all of those things when I sit down at a computer, so I tend to stay away until it is actually time to type and edit the poems I have been working on.
Ashley Capes: I know for you music isn’t one of those distractions. Many writers have their favourite albums to write to and just as many require silence. From your blog alone, the casual observer would suspect that music is a big part of you – take your performances with Sheish Money or the album you collaborated with him on The Stillest Hour. What music do you find best to write to, and conversely, what music do you find impossible to write to?
Graham Nunn: As I am writing this, Margot Smith’s Taste is simmering in the background… sadly, she passed away recently, such a beautiful voice; a gifted songwriter. Wherever possible I have music playing… bands like The Necks, Because of Ghosts, Set Fire To Flames, Tren Brothers, GodSpeed You! Black Emperor and Clogs all create a space where the sound of reality is drowned. Through music, I find it easier to inhabit a world free of distraction. I very rarely listen to anything with lyrics while writing, although Sigur Ros is a band that gets plenty of writing air time. Jonsi’s voice is so otherworldly that it becomes part of a song’s arrangement, rather than a focal point. That for me is the defining point… I could never listen to Bob Dylan and write, nor The Church or The National or Okkervil River or so many of the bands and artists that I love. Their lyrics are so potent, so important to the overall song that I am unable to free myself from the world they create.
Ashley Capes: The ocean has a profound effect on your writing, especially the autobiographical elements (I’m not only thinking of your latest but also your haibun collection, Measuring the Depth) Can you explain how it came to be so important? And why it continues to do so?
Graham Nunn: I was fortunate to grow up in a family with grandparents that lived near the beach. My Gran lived at Paradise Point (Gold Coast) and my Gran and Da lived at Toorbul (Sunshine Coast), so for me, two out of every three weekends was spent in or around the ocean. I see the ocean as the thing that draws our family together. Whenever I am feeling out of sorts, I pack a fishing rod and head to Toorbul. Standing waist deep in the ocean never fails to get me back on the level. Sadly Paradise Point is unrecognisable, so I rarely go back there. But there are many other places that are important in our family’s mythology – every Easter I go to Brunswick Heads, my Great Grandmother lived in the caravan park at Tweed Heads, so I regularly go back there to swim and fish.
The cleansing power of the ocean is what constantly draws me in… no matter how you are feeling, it is always there, ready to accept and wash over you.
Ashley Capes: The idea of a family’s mythology is interesting, can you expand on it a little? I take ‘mythology’ to mean something vital to the group’s identity, rather than something ‘made up’ and I like that you are a part of creating it in the way you so deftly incorporate such history into your writing, both at a literal and a symbolic level.
Graham Nunn: I think of our family mythology as a created world and definitely something that each of us has a role in creating. Place is very important in this whole concept and plays a major role in the construction of our mythology. An example of such a place for me is Toorbul, a very sleepy little beach side town, north of Brisbane. For me, this place has great spiritual significance. It holds so many of my childhood memories and to this day fills me with the same innocence I had thirty years ago when my Grandparents first moved there. When I am there, I feel the deepest of connections; my mind is always clear and my youth is always just below the surface.
With Ocean Hearted, I wanted to bring a little of that connection to the poems; to bring that mythology into the poems.
Ashley Capes: Could you share something of the process you undertake when revising work for a collection? When putting it all together, what are the differences, as you see them, between ‘selection’ and ‘editing’?
Graham Nunn: Selection is far more painful than editing. It is the one job I happily give over to other people. It is incredibly difficult to make that ruthless decision about what stays in and what is left out. I am lucky to have four or five people that I can send work to; people whose instinct I trust. Once they are finished with the ms, it is generally pretty clear which poems have risen to the surface. It is then a matter of sequencing. In that sense, I generally look at things like a musician making an album. I want each poem to make the collection build in intensity and emotion. More often than not I have a start and finish point, so then I look over the poems to build the narrative in between. I am working on a new chapbook-length collection and this time, the selection of poems has really looked after itself as the central poem, ‘On the Island’, will make up the bulk of the book. I am now deciding what I am going to do to flesh the collection out… I am caught between a series of love poems that I have been working on and another longer series of poems titled Black Stump Blues, written during my time in Blackall (Western QLD) during the last few years. I am leaning toward the latter idea as the mix of ocean and outback would create a real contrast. But, we’ll see…
Ashley Capes: I remember the Black Stump Blues poems, and I agree, they’d make a really effective contrast with the ocean. That’s actually the kind of big-picture thinking I find most difficult when putting something together. How important do you think a theme is to a collection’s unity? I noticed that your latest collection Ocean Hearted is broken into three parts/themes, and here you talk about wanting a collection to ‘build in intensity and emotion’ is this difficult to match to thematic concerns?
Graham Nunn: Theme is something I have really focussed in on, in the compilation of my last two collections. With Ruined Man, I wanted to put together a series of really urban poems; poems that lifted the skin of Brisbane and slipped into the vein of the city; poems that brought the inner and outer darkness together. With Ocean Hearted, I wanted to move away from the urban, and capture the coast, while also focussing on aspects of family, love and death. I had to laugh the other day as a friend of mine said to me, whenever I think of your writing, I think of death and the ocean… definitely made me chuckle!
Ashley Capes: Brisbane is another of your great loves, how important is a city to a poet?
Graham Nunn: For me, feeling at home is incredibly important and in Brisbane, I feel very grounded. Brisbane has a unique energy… a mix of being totally comfortable with itself and searching for something new. It is that mix that makes it creatively vibrant.
The community of poets here is also very special. While the number of readings fluctuates from year to year, there is always something on each month and audiences have definitely grown. Having a major festival like QLD Poetry Festival and a truly magnificent Writers Centre, really helps to create a focal point. SpeedPoets has also done great things for the poetry community and I am thrilled that it is still going strong after ten years.
Ashley Capes: SpeedPoets has recently moved venues. How has that changed the gigs for you as an organiser and performer? Have you been able to introduce any new facets to the performances?
Graham Nunn: With every venue, there is change, in fact, because of the open nature of the event, every gig is surprisingly different. The move to Brew in the heart of the city feels really good though. The space is vibrant, comfortable and has great sound. And importantly, it feels really focussed. All of these things influence you as a performer; they give you that extra kick to make sure your performance is spot on; that when it your turn to make your mark on the mic, you deliver.
Ashley Capes: Would you consider the internet explosion of blogging to be something of a poetry movement in itself?
Graham Nunn: I hadn’t really thought of it like that. The internet is definitely a fertile ground for poets and with the recent shake up in the book industry, new technologies are going to be taking more of the market share. Publishing in a traditional sense definitely has its back against the wall, so online avenues such as blogs and social media sites like Facebook have become an essential tool for audience development. And like most movements throughout history, blogging has opened up new networks, and is proving to be a vital creative space, where people from all over the globe can gather, engage and create. It will be very interesting to see where things are at in another ten to twenty years.
–> Photos by Julie Beveridge
in my office between classes
I rage at flat things: the sea,
the land, the hard, flat dollar coin
and all its friends,
the road too short by far
and my feet, fingernails and thumbs
sleeping, none of them wings,
I rage at the flat things
until my voice is stamped flat
stamped like the stamp of a soldier’s liberating
boot; I rage until all my dreams are flat
I rage so quietly that animals come close
I rage so well that people congratulate me
I rage so far that distant mummies wake in
their class cabinets, I rage at the rainbow slinky
for no other reason, than that it is on my desk,
I rage so that you notice and go away
I rage at flat things like the paper kipple
growing over me, I rage at words I cannot fix
I rage so deep that Hades lets Persephone go back
for more flowers and I rage so much that
it flattens my soul, now like a leaf
as it turns in the breeze,
and no-one left to chase it.
Some writers draw you into each story or poem, and in these instances it’s cinematic, even if it’s not a particularly good film. There’s this one experience, and this is all that we’re looking at. There are directors that defy that singular experience and we watch each film in isolation but also as part of that director’s oeuvre. At the other end of the spectrum there’s the great HBO-style show, where it’s not really about individual episodes or directors, but the flow from one week to another, and further, into months and years. It’s not about scenes or plot twists anymore, but a way of looking at the world and a way of feeling it, that we want to tune into. The aesthetic becomes compelling. The moods and insights become epiphanies that we eagerly wait for. Ashley Capes is this kind of writer.
* * *
Alec Patric: I’m not someone that believes in ‘natural’ poets. I’m too aware of how much reading goes into developing poetic awareness, and how many hours at the page go into developing a feeling for the craft, and then how many years of living with poetry go into creating a poetic weltanschauung, but despite all that, occasionally a poet will strike me as being a ‘natural’ poet. Every time I read your poetry I’m struck by the grace and ease with which you present each poem. So tell me about the work, the sweat, and reassure me that there have indeed been lost months (if not years) where it wasn’t all quite so natural.
Ashley Capes: Absolutely. Writing is supposed to be one of those careers with long apprenticeships, and certainly I’m not finished, but it’s been close to fifteen years now. Although, probably only ten of them have been ‘serious years’ where I’ve been writing, reading, editing, submitting, being rejected, being published and repeating the process over and over.
Probably the most important part of the last ten years, has been the submitting. There’s nothing like scores of rejection slips to get you thinking critically about your own work, to get you thinking how to communicate better.
The reading is a big part too. I read as much contemporary small press poetry as possible, as well as my older favourites from the world stage. And I read a lot of haiku too. Reading and writing haiku, more than any other genre, was where I really began to strive for the ‘economy of words.’
So it’s great to hear you describe my pieces as having ‘grace’ and ‘ease’ because I want them to read that way, even if writing them is a much more difficult process. I remember spending around six years on one poem, which started out as a twenty-two page kind of Beat-rant. As I worked on it, I’d cut it down, take some time away, come back, often with months or years in between. Eventually I wrangled it into something closer two pages and it had evolved into a more direct piece, though it did retain a feel for what it once was. Another piece, written for the Street/Life issue of Stylus Poetry Journal, I managed a draft in an hour or so, then spent the next few weeks before the deadline reworking the opening and the last two lines. The first two paragraphs went through around fifteen versions before I arrived at something I felt worked.
Alec Patric: You seem to have an admirable resilience and adaptability. Some writers feel even the smallest suggestion of correction as a personal affront to their integrity as artists and to take rejection as a personal offense to their honour. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but I have in fact known a few writers that very much embody that medieval mindset. I’d also suggest that we can be surprised, even when we think we’re completely beyond it, and feel devastated at suggested corrections or a particular rejection. What are your thoughts on literary adaptability and artistic integrity? I’m also wondering how you negotiate rejection.
Ashley Capes: I learnt pretty early how much rejection is involved with writing and it seemed utterly pointless to give up just because things were tough. Actually, it’s probably because things were tough that I managed to improve.
Yes, I’ve come across that same mindset at times. It seems counter-productive. And I agree, we can be surprised, it’s one of the best things about writing. I love getting feedback that allows me to step back from a piece and see something new in it, or where something different could lie. So perhaps artistic integrity is adaptability? The ability to adapt, alter and improve your art, to change – a poet’s dedication to this ethos is perhaps the core of artistic integrity. (Just add in something along the lines of ‘never let a major corporation use your work for advertising’ too.)
I like the term ‘negotiate rejection’ as it can certainly be a negotiation with yourself or your ego. Sometimes you’re just so confident that a piece is right for a particular publication, and then bam! back it comes with a polite ‘no’, or even worse, no reply at all. And sometimes, when you’re lucky, with a useful reply as to why it was a ‘no.’
With most rejections, I think to myself ‘damn it – but no, this is a good thing too, I can look at this poem again and send it somewhere else.’ And sometimes that second look involves a further edit, and sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, the work is sent out again. I treat rejection as an opportunity. It’s probably one of the best motivators for me. I’d been submitting to GDS, for instance, for around six years I think, before I had work accepted for their latest issue. Every rejection made me think to myself, ‘one day I’ll write something good enough’ and when I finally did, it was fantastic. Glad I never quit, actually!
