Stylus interviews Peter Minter, poet and former poetry editor of Australia's Meanjin, on his take on writing and his recent collection blue grass.

Interview: Rosanna Licari

You recently published blue grass. What was the impetus for the collection?

I find a book doesn’t necessarily have an impetus before it begins, but rather takes on its shape as the writing happens. Some poems in blue grass are four or five years old, but most were written between 2002 and late 2005, without any explicit direction toward a book, or an idea of a book, until the later stages when I began to look at what was there and think about how it might all fit together, what threads and resonances were manifest in and between the poems I’d been working on. 

In fact I’d comfortably say I don’t like to ‘set-up’ in advance the idea of a book or a poem. Over the years I have found I work best by trusting my instincts and allowing a poem to unfold on its own terms, as the writing happens. Of course there is an initiating idea or response to something, an event, experience, sensation, or memory for example, which might open up a personal, emotionally charged space into which language begins to flow, but I generally don’t know or wish to know where a poem might end up. Once I do end up with a draft, which is basically when the initial writing event is over, I then edit quite a bit, but that is more a retrospective (and forward looking) process.

So, in terms of the construction of an entire book, I generally just end up with a pile of finished poems and wonder what to do with them. Over time I can see a book forming through the shape of the accumulated poems, and it is at this stage that I begin to actively test different ways of organising the poems into a book so they cohere as an organically and ideationally linked group of poems.  I learnt early on from some very good teachers that a book of poems should grow as an organic object, its shape and texture structured such that every poem, every line and word exists in a fine relationship with its neighbours.

Eventually I realised that blue grass is propelled by a kind of Odyssean journey through contemporary cultural and natural spaces, the ‘natureculture’ in which we live.  The title arose from seeing the label on the back of my partner’s jeans one morning as she was putting them on. That is a beginning—the figure of a horse galloping forever toward her hip, the words ‘Blue Grass’ in the frame. So in a sense the idea of ‘journey’ in the book begins with this nexus between popular culture (the compelling street culture brand), with materiality, and with movement, the erotic, lyrical response to being alive.

The poems I have been writing over the past few years build on my explicit interest in lyrical form and voice, and expand my exploration of how lyrical poetry can function within the colonised and politicised, media saturated and natural environments in which we live. I am interested in how present-day lyrical poetry might be true to both its historical roots and the intense conditions of contemporary life, both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’—an ecopoiesis of the everyday, if you like.

You begin with a prologue, how does this work for your writing?

All my books begin with a prologue, a poem which invites the reader into the space of the book.  I feel that a book establishes a kind of ‘guest-host’ relationship between the poems and the reader, and a prologue is at once an invitation, a welcome, and a reflection.

 
You explore the use of quotes in you poems, can you expand on this?

I began the ‘Notes’ section of my last book with the line “Every one of you incorporates layers of quotation in various forms.” This line speaks to the poems, but also to each of us as writer and reader. From the moment we are born we are given a name, a quotation from the sum quotient of human discourse over the centuries.  I suppose in a biological sense we are formed prior to birth as quotations of our parents, of a human genetic pool from which our individual characteristics are given shape.  Natural selection, as such, is a condition of material and biological quotation and reiteration, and so I think the logic of quotation, as a constitutive and liberatory motion, has been a principle of life for eons.

In the modern era we have been reminded of the power of quotation and collage by a broad range of innovative writers and artists who have used its logic to critique and dismantle otherwise hegemonic cultural spaces.  Equally, our generation has experienced the power of late capitalism’s capacity to constantly absorb and recast economic energy and cultural material by using a similar logic — quotation as innovative production and marketing.  For example, songs or images are ‘quoted’ by advertisers in order to produce particular effects, and so on. So I think that ‘quotation’ is very much a part of the landscape. Visual artists, musicians and modern writers have been dealing with this for years.

In my writing practice I find that my poetic responses to places, situations or experiences involve a degree of sensitivity to their histories, the traces of stories and memories or thoughts they evoke. My poems respond to place and landscape, and they simultaneously respond to this web of information that is stimulated in my mind by places and my movement through them. So my poems frequently ‘quote’ stuff that is going on in my head or around me at the time, like lyrics from music that might be playing, lines from movies or TV, or from a conversation overheard. This information is as much a part of the landscape as the visual sensations my eyes create when looking. By addressing it, through quotation or whatever, it becomes part of the poem as well.

For example ‘Australiana’, the central long serial poem in blue grass, moves through various places and the poetic and political histories they evoked to me, interweaving quotations from other poets and writers, from conversations with friends and family, with the lyrics of alternative musics, with artworks and films—with the various bits of information that arrive with some kind of freedom to a situation as it is lived. The real challenge is to choose from this flux of information, to find its lyrical correspondence or agreement with place or voice, and to turn it into a poem. The natural and the quotidian are inseparable.

When did you begin writing poetry?

I began seriously writing poetry circa 1982, when I was about 15 years old.  I’d always written stories and short bits and pieces, and my keenness as a youngster was stimulated when my family moved from the coast to the bush and I suddenly had to find things to do amidst acres of trees and countryside, a fair distance from my peers. I suppose I have always had what some folks call an active imagination, and I actually felt totally liberated by the space and freedom of the bush. Within a few months I’d taken up horse riding and bushwalking and had became a wanderer, exploring the local environment and basically making up stories and images and poems through it.  When I wasn’t at school I’d read or listen to music, or get around in the bush taking photos, that kind of thing. I was lucky to eventually fall in with a bunch of crazy switched-on art-freak teenagers in Newcastle, and I suppose that’s where the real work began.

Who were your influences and how did they influence you?

My reading and writing of poetry crystallised around some discoveries I made during my final three years of high school.  For some highly fortuitous reason the school library had copies of two extraordinary contemporary American poetry anthologies edited by Donald Allen, The New American Poetry and The New Writing in the USA. I still think that for me this was an amazing stroke of luck in an otherwise fairly unremarkable country high school library. In these anthologies I discovered work by Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Alan Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder — the whole set of really important American poets of the post-World War Two decades. At the same time I was a serious student of English at the school, and read with a great deal of pleasure the usual HSC poets, like Donne and Eliot and Auden and Plath and Wright, etc. I was also seeking out new music and art, listening to lots of rock’n’roll, classical and twentieth century compositional music, and hanging out a crew of young visual artists in town (when I could borrow the car!).  So I’ve always been interested in all kinds of poetry and art practice across the spectrum. I think perhaps my ongoing openness to different forms and voices and approaches in poetry is a result of the real variety of things to which I exposed myself early on. These days I still read widely and almost compulsively seek out new poetry and music and art to experience. I feel a responsibility (if that’s the right word) as a practising artist to constantly seek out challenging and new material by other artists, in light of which I can see other ways to understand my own experience of life.  I am constantly amazed by the beautiful force of the imagination as it finds its way in the cosmos.

 
How does the creative process begin for you?

I try to wake up.

What do you do if you're stuck, when nothing is working?

Go out, watch TV, READ POETRY, read junk mail, think about stuff, go for a swim, cook dinners, READ POETRY, listen to music, see movies, have sex, talk, go shopping, wander around looking, READ POETRY, sleep, go for a run, read philosophy, do some gardening, read a novel, have a bbq, go to the beach, go to a gallery, READ POETRY, count the number of cats between here and the next place, etc…

How important is editing, and discussing your work with others?

It’s really important to me to engage as much as I can with a community of other writers. I’m lucky that this starts at home for me, as my partner is also a writer with whom I can discuss all sorts of stuff about poetry and poetics. We regularly show one another our work and offer each other suggestions for editing or shaping poems or series of poems in different ways.  And I am also a constant editor of my own work. I often go through numerous drafts of a single poem before I feel it is ‘finished’.  I have stacks of poems I haven’t put into my books because they may not have contributed to the book as an organic whole, and a bunch of other stuff in the bottom drawer that may never see the light of day! So I personally find editing is a really important part of the craft of poetry, of being a poet. I’ve never really trusted the ‘write it down once and leave it’ school, as I feel a poem is necessarily a crafted object — it takes its nourishment from immediate experience and thought, but takes on its own life as a poem by its capacity to transform such experience into something else, something more meaningful. This transformation is the result of writing, of applying the imagination to experience in language, and writing is made out of editing.

Where can blue grass can be purchased?

The best way to get hold of blue grass is to go to your local bookstore and ask them to order it in for you (from Inbooks—see below).  This is much better than ordering it online, as it stimulates a local demand for poetry in bookstores, and this helps out local poets and Australian poetry communities in countless ways. If you want to order it online, you can get it from the websites of most major Australian bookstores, like Gleebooks in Sydney or Readings in Melbourne. Collected Works in Melbourne is also an excellent bookstores from which you can order poetry over the phone. The Australian distributor of Salt Publishing and blue grass, Inbooks, will also take orders for any Salt poetry books, and they can be found here:

http://www.inbooks.com.au/index.shtml

Or you can buy a copy directly from the publisher, Salt Publishing, and check out the fantastic range of world poetry they produce, here:

http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/184471246X.htm

You can also buy copies of blue grass and my other books directly from me as well — feel free to get in touch at pete (at) peterminter.com