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| Mark Tredinnick at work in his Cowshed. (Photo provided by the poet.) |
Mark Tredinnick, winner of
the Montreal Poetry Prize, has published three collections of poetry and eight
other acclaimed works, including The Blue
Plateau and Australia’s Wild Weather. His books have won the
Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the WA Premier’s Book Award, and a
shortlisting in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Other awards include the
Blake Poetry Prize, Newcastle Poetry Prize (2007 and 2011), Gwen Harwood Poetry
Prize, Calibre Essay Prize, Wildcare Nature Writing Prize and the Josephine
Ulrick Poetry Prize (runner up). He lives in the highlands southwest of Sydney,
Australia. A prose book, Reading Slowly at the End of Time (New South Books)
comes out late this year, and a second collection of poems, Body Copy, in early 2013.
1. Is the weather wild
enough for you at the moment?
It’s
always wild, isn’t it? Which is to say we’ll never domesticate the weather,
though we seem to have made it wilder. Though many of us seem to consume it and
complain about it as if it were a consumer good, as if someone were putting it
on and could, really, do a better job of it, the weather belongs to itself, and
we belong to it. We’re here on its terms, as long as it’ll have us, as long as
we don’t muck it up too much. Its recursive habits (high following low, la nina
following el nino, rain following drought), its relatively temperate but
irregular ways, the way it shields us from outer space, blankets us, and filters
the sun—the weatherness of weather created the conditions for life and for its
growth and continuity on earth. We are creatures of the weather. We live in its
house. A fair bit more than we know—of who we are, and how we think and talk
and carry on—is how we adapt to the weather of where we are.
Personally,
the more vivid the weather, the more alive I feel. The larger I seem to be. The
wilder, indeed. The wilder the weather the easier it is to remember it, and
when I remember the weather, it’s like I remember the rest of me. I like to
think of myself as a citizen of the real world, a participant in the landscape
and its weather: it just makes me feel more real than thinking of myself as a
taxpayer or a householder or a, God help me, consumer. So the more weather
there is and the more I take note it the better it is. Up to a point, of
course. Citizenship of the real world stops being fun when the river is lapping
your eves because the rain has forgotten how to stop. And there’s been a bit of
that this summer, and the last. Where I live, along the mild old,
carp-infested, turbid Wingecarribee, the rain’s been big and it’s been often,
and the river’s been jumping out of its skin but not into my bed. Which is
good. That’s the kind of wild I like. In weather, anyway.
Weather’s
always wild, and the band of normal wildness might just about be stretched to
include the kind of thing that’s going on across the continent, and the planet,
for that matter, at the moment—an unprecedented (in European memory, anyway)
third, or is it fourth inundation, in successive years of the inland lakes;
record heat and dry in the southwest; heavy duty cyclones in the Pilbara and,
last year, the largest cyclone ever in the northeast; record March rainfall in
parts of the southeast; a winter that wasn’t and an early onset tornado season
in North America… But this—wetter wets, drier dries, increased turbulence, more
frequent and more violent
2. Is it blowing poems in
or blowing poems away?
It’s blowing poems—into me
and out of me—which is good. The poetry went quiet through the end of last year—inevitable,
I guess, in the wake of the Newcastle Prize at the end of September, all the
teaching one has to get through, in October and November, and then all the
media for the weather book. Oh, I wrote a few nice pieces, but nothing much
through November, and then the Montreal Prize came along and knocked the
quietness and loneliness out of me, on which the poetry depends: poems only
blow in and teach me how to turn them into themselves when the coast, which is
never clear, is at least uncluttered and a little stolen solitude is possible.
For most of January, after
I had the news in mid December that I’d won the world’s biggest poetry prize, I
couldn’t buy a poem. There was a fair bit of fuss and a fair few interviews,
and then there was Christmas, and travel with the family. But there was also my
voice in my own head worrying me half to death that maybe I might never write a
good poem again. And sure enough, for most of a month I couldn’t. I made a lot
of notes and a lot of starts, but nothing stayed. Until the holidays ended and
I sat with some ideas, stolen from the Matisse show, which I saw at GOMA in
early January, and made a couple of poems. February and March have been awash
with them. As if I had caught the weather again. The wildness, the fluency—the
storm, if not the Drang.
I turned fifty in early
January. That kept me quiet for a while, too. But now I’ve grown used to the
idea, crossing that threshold—into the age that the Hindus call the entry into
the forest—has led me deeper into poetry, and maybe into deeper poetry. And I’m
praying it lasts. Actually, I know it’ll last, though the intensity and output
will ebb and flow. A poet is what I seem to be. I am most myself when I am
making it: I am thinking best; I am most free; I am most happy (if not always
in the moment).
3. If you couldn’t be found for love,
what would you want to be found for? [p. 14 Rules
for Walking]
Not to be meagre, but my
line was about being found “by” love, not for it. But you make me wonder about
the implicit passivity in my poem, in the poet’s approach to love. I am, I think, more inclined to fall
(and farther and faster) in love than the national average, though maybe not
much above the benchmark for artists. In love with beauty as I find it in
nature, in the sky, on the ground, in birds, in poems and other literature, in
the faces of my children, in animals, and in the eyes and bodies and minds of
people I meet. I fall for music. I fall for wisdom, too, if wisdom is not,
itself beauty. And when I fall, it is often, I hope love’s work I perform in
response (this is how I am found “for” love): the poems I make, the care I try
to show, the passion I articulate, and the attention I pay.
But I am found by anger (at
injustice and venality and cruelty and ecological ignorance) and by melancholy
and grief and other hungers as often as I am found by love. I am happy to be
found by whatever comes, though I’m not courting illness or death especially!
What a poet wants, this one anyway, is authentic experience, rawness of
emotion, bigness of life (one’s own as well as encounters with big ideas, with
undomesticated nature), freedom to be untrammelled in the world, to witness and
speak uncensored back.
I would always want to be
found for poetry as well as for love. That is work I want always to do, and to
keep learning to do better. One is as often found wanting, of course, but one wants to keep going, to keep
growing, in one’s work and the self-knowledge it depends upon; to keep failing
but failing better (as Beckett would have it.)
I want to keep being found
for literacy. I’d like my writing and my teaching to continue to make the case
for kinder, clearer, smarter, more elegant, more human, more useful and limpid
prose—starting with literary criticism and theory and poetry, but extending,
like an outbreak of wisdom, across scholarly, business, professional, political
and scientific discourses. If how we write is who we are, then I’m worried. I’d
like what David Malouf calls “the intelligent vernacular” to break out and to
break up the power of the inarticulate elites, the perpetrators of Newspeak. I’d
like more beautiful sense to be made, and I’d like my work to help.
I’d love my work to lead
more lives into deepening, into slowness and consideration and compassion; into
remembering how much the earth is worth to them and to all of us. From time to
time I hear from readers who say my poems or my prose (The Blue Plateau,
especially, and essay or two, even the writing books or the weather book) have
helped them in this way. I have heard from activists—for social justice and for
wise responses to climate change, for better grammar and more graceful prose—who
say my work has inspired them to or in their work. This pleases me a lot and I’m
up for as many of those responses as want to find me. This is the kind of
change I want to provoke; this is the kind of politics that plays in my writing
and teaching. A more mindful, beautiful way of being ourselves, of being with
others, of being with and on the earth.
Most people are never going
to read my work, but I hope many of them find their way to great music and
poetry and good books and good people, because that’s how the politics of fear
and greed will be undone; that’s how the kind of spiritual revolution I have in
mind will begin.
I’m writing a book called Reading Slowly at the End of Time, and
that’s why I’m writing it: in case a few more people read it than read my
poems, and because I believe it’s a gift that one can be found by love, and I
love literature; and that when one is found, one should return the gift the
best way one knows how, and the best way I know how is by writing. And that’s
what my writing is: a return of the gift of being alive in a world, compromised
by greed and growth and poverty and fear and fundamentalism (of all creeds),
but beautiful in its people, in its natural forms, in its weather, nonetheless,
and in a world that is sung and made thereby lovelier, in poetry and books.
4. What do you abjure besides hyphens?
In writing and in life more
generally, I abjure (such a good, strong old word, Lizz—thank you*): bullying;
manipulation; meanness (generosity, along with compassion, if they are not the
same thing, are the great virtues, and they depend on the capacity to be found
by love; so that meanness, chiefly, along with most of the rest of my lest
here, is the opposite of generosity, and therefore very worthy of abjuring);
meagreness; skulduggery; reductive thinking; dumbing down; pomposity; venality;
hypocrisy; duplicity; mendacity; selfishness; secrecy and its concomitant, the
invasion of others’; sanctimony; piety; self-righteousness; slavery to fashion
(especially when the fashion is bad, such as bad business writing); the
conspiracies, exercised especially through language, that professions practise
on the public; brutality and tyranny; fearfulness and defensiveness (of writing
and behaviour); shrillness; rudeness and bluntness; violence; fundamentalism
(all faith worth having must include doubt to be worth having); passive
aggression; shallowness; intolerance; pedantry; climate change denial;
jingoism, Nationalism, insularity and fear/hatred of strangers/ others; the
sense of entitlement of the lucky and wealthy; the economic and political
addiction to growth; the blind belief in progress; the sway of the profit
motive; conversations dominated by real estate values, interest rates and where
one’s children should go to school… There’s more, but you get the flavour of
it.
Just quickly, many people
imagine because I’ve written a style guide to grammar and punctuation that I
might be fiercely judgmental about others’ grammar and punctuation. It’s true I
have my likes and dislikes: love the em-rule, for example, and a semi-colon in
the right place. But I’d rather say I love writing in which the grammar and
punctuation don’t get in the way, and in which they underwrite (and are part
of) spunky, elegant style. To write well, though, you need to have mastered
your grammar and punctuation, or to be at ease with it, at least.
I have this theory about
driving, and, as long as you don’t push it, it works for life. It’s my flow
theory. And it isn’t of course mine. Whatever you do on the road that helps
things flow—for you and for everyone; for the ecosystem of the traffic—is a
good thing to do, and whatever you do (like cutting someone off or driving
slowly in the fast lane) that works against flow is a bad thing. Now, I don’t
mean that I value going with the flow—in life. Of course, I don’t: I value
freedom, independence of mind and all that. But I mean, on the page, do what
you can to let your message or your poem stand clear; resist cliché; favour the
grammatical way, because on balance, that way makes more meaning happen hast
for more readers. In life, what I mean is: love your neighbour; seek your own
freedom, but pull your head in when the pursuit of your freedom curtails others’;
and bullying and tyranny and fundamentalism are out because they depend on
wilful self-absorption and ignore and damage the “flow” of others. I guess I
value a democracy that’s guided by altruism and the elements of good style.
5. You’ve said your writing is ‘a very small part of a very long
and urgent conversation.’ Have you been caught out talking to yourself?
Yes. (Just now, in fact, on a train
travelling Canada: the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies cut right
across a great conversation I was having about the nature of poetry and why we
so need it in the world…) It embarrasses me when I sense I’ve lost my audience
(or audient), especially when that happens because I was too self-absorbed. But
I kind of expect to be the only person in many rooms who wants to talk long and
hard about some of the loves and disdains I’ve listed above. I’m not much good
at small talk. And big talk sometimes doesn’t play: Christmas with the
relatives, for instance; most barbeques; many parties.
But I tend to get my self into enough
situations where someone is listening and some others are talking, too: at
literary festivals, in the classroom, on the radio, in my critical
writing. So that I can stay quiet
more peaceably when all the talk is small. And so that the big conversation
goes on.
6. What is it that is urgent?
All of us are in the middle of an
ecological crisis that most of us don’t want to think about or believe in or do
anything serious about. The scientists tell us a mass extinction event (the
fifth, I think, we know about through time) is going on around us, in large
part, this time, caused by human land use (over clearing, pollution, climate
change etc), and there’s a major risk, we, ourselves, may be part of that
event, if we don’t get climate change under control and wean ourselves off
fossil fuels.
The western project, the western idea, is
approaching its use-by date, at least in its pure form. Capitalism, so good at
growing things and making wealth, is the most to blame for climate change, for
growing inequality across the globe (even in the rich economies) and the
injustice that embodies and the trouble it inevitably leads to. It needs to
learn some moderation and some manners; and it will learn them from the peoples
it’s dispossessed, from the languages it’s colonised, from the land it’s
spoiling, from art, including especially poetry and books. And if it doesn’t
learn them soon, if a post-capitalism does not emerge—a slow capitalism, a
small capitalism—and if ecology does not supplant economy in our thinking, we’re
all in big trouble.
This is what is so urgent. Bad language
and bad grammar are part of the problem; and good writing is part of the
solution. As I say in another poem, “Language got us into this, and language
will have to get us out.”
7. Do you think good-humoured patience
is an essential characteristic for a poet? [p. 41 Buddha’s Little Instruction Book] Do you have it?
A sense of humour—of
proportion and of one’s own capacity for idiocy and failure and pomposity—is a
mark of intelligence, I think, as well as good manners and good ethics. And it
marks the literature I admire and try to write, including the poetry. But in
life and on the page it will be matched, if the life and the writing are worth
bothering about, by a willingness to take things, including one’s self,
seriously. Not taking things too seriously is where the sense of humour and the
tolerance come in. Good-humoured patience, though I admire it, isn’t enough. It’s
necessary but not sufficient. And as the poem you quote suggests, though I
aspire to equanimity, in real life I fail at it, or achieve it too late, more
often than I’d like to admit.
Though poetry can have all
manner of different attitudes, it’s hard to think of any that’s much good that
doesn’t look on the world and all of us in it, even the bastards, with
something like compassion. Poetry writes the music of the intelligence of
things; it writes how it feels in the real world (which is to say, the life of
the soul and of the anima mundi) and you cannot write it unless you can, at
least in the act of writing, that meditation upon the real, look on the earth
and its creatures, especially us human creatures in our grandeur and frailty,
with something like kindness. The poet will not get close to being the Buddha,
even on the page; but the poet’s work is quite like that of the Bodhisattva,
and tender-hearted, hard-eyed seeing is the work of the Bodhisattva.
I’d add this, and I hope it
doesn’t sound like a special pleading, given what I’ve just admitted: to work
seriously as a creative person, while living fully in the everyday world
(raising a family and earning an income, that sort of thing) is to have your
patience tried and to risk developing chronic bad-humour and impatience.
Creativity is slow and hard. It needs silence and solitude. A thing women have
been telling men for ages, of course. Writing is, if not essentially selfish,
then essentially self-full. So the writer in the midst of their other life has
their creativity crowded, if not crowded out—has their creativity hurried and
their concentration broken and their commitment tested. And tested all the
time. If you don’t watch out you turn into a terrible grump. Writers are, I
think, especially hard to live with—because they are in their work so deeply
and so long, and because they grow testy negotiating daily the road from the
home one has in poetry to the very different home one has in family. Poets
should probably not have families, though we’d be poorer without them, and I
would not be without mine. This is the tension “Buddha’s Little Instruction
Book” explores: one poet’s failure to reconcile his calling and his family; his
failure to act often enough with grace and good humour. But it may well be a
poem that speaks well beyond my own narrow circumstances.
8. If you had to have another poet in
your Cowshed who would it be?
Many would be very welcome,
but none when I’m working. They’d put me off my stroke.
I’d love a chat with G M
Hopkins. Charles Wright is a major influence and an inspiration, so he’d be
welcome a while. Rumi, Basho, Jack Gilbert, Jane Kenyon, Anne Sexton, Mary
Oliver, Wislawa Szimborska (now there’s a poet with seriousness, humour and
patience), Jan Zwicky, Robert Gray, Judy Beveridge, Bob Adamson, Les Murray,
Bronwyn Lea. But not all at once. And in many cases not for long. Poets are
often easier people to be with on the page than off it. Some because they’re
shy; others because they are not sufficiently shy; and many because they’re
sensitive and prone to mood swings, and one never knows how they’ll be and for
how long.
9. What is the right question to ask?
[p. 70 Things I’m Trying to Believe]
Oh, there’s not one. Unless
perhaps it is how shall I return the gift that’s been given to me (so that the
world is not poorer, so that the world is richer, for my having lived)? Here
are some. What is wanted of me? What is the life I’m meant to be leading? How
can I live wisely and beautifully? Justly and truthfully? Whom can I serve and
how? What is the world and how am I to live in it right?
10. What’s the answer?
I’ll get back to you.
*You’re welcome Mark - but
actually I’m quoting your good self (email correspondence) J
Rhythm & Muse is an occasional conversation with poets that
Lizz Murphy has met. Thanks to Mark Tredinnick for sending his response from a
Montreal train with Wi-Fi (April 2012).
© Lizz Murphy and the guest poet
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