Why a new collection, How did it all come about?
When you sign a contract for a new book, it usually takes at some months (twelve at least) before that book appears in bookstores. So for me, the process is to submit the manuscript to the publisher and get on with the new writing. a brief letter to the sea about a couple of things is the result of that writing time.
How did it all come about? Whilst some poets are possibly quite methodical and may have quite clear ideas about how their collection will be thematically, I am the opposite of that. I sometimes liken my writing process to pushing a broken Aldi trolley up the high street of my life, throwing in experiences and observations as I go. Those experiences and observations go on to become poems. Then after many months of writing, rewriting, editing, fiddling around with recalcitrant commas, I’ll lift my head from my writing trench and realise I have a good amount of new poems that I’m happy with, and that’s when I start to think about how I might arrange them into a collection.
When I’m selecting the poems for the collection, I’m never thinking about themes, my first port of call is always to pick out the poems that I feel are the strongest, regardless of their subject matter. Then I print them out and arrange the pages across my dining table in an initial loose order. We even eat dinner on them. It’s ok if they have the occasional pasta sauce splash on them. Poems are part of life, as is pasta.
Then I pace around the poems for days or weeks, looking at them, trying to see how the poems, gathered all together in one spot, feel. As I pace I am constantly rearranging the order, moving one poem here, another there. There’s really not much logic to it, it’s purely about how the poems feel to me, how they sit together, should this one follow that one? Would it be better on page 3 or perhaps page 47? The brilliant Scottish writer Kevin MacNeil said to me once, when you’re putting poems together as a collection, you’re trying to make the collection a poem itself. I don’t know if I’ve achieved that entirely, but I always use this as a loose guiding principle when I’m putting my poems together.
You are not working to a deadline, or a thematic orientation where there is a point where you have covered the theme?
No. I don’t have any deadlines set for me by my publisher (and as Liz Gilbert soberingly says, ‘no one is waiting for you to write’) and I don’t work with any thematic orientation. The only deadline I have is with myself every morning at my desk. Routine is everything for me. Woody Allen says, ‘showing up is 80% of success’. I believe this in every cell of my body.
If there is a theme to my work overall, it is the nitty gritty, almost banal mundanity of life (see Aldi trolley analogy above). What I’m always aiming for is to try to write the ordinary in a way that is fresh and original, in a way that is not ordinary.
Like all poets, my poems come about in so many ways. I might overhear someone saying something hilarious on the bus, or a politician will say something that enrages me, or it might just be a feeling, an injustice, something beautiful, something tender, something sad, something tragic. American poet, James Tate (if you don’t know James’ work, do check it out, he’s some kind of genius – try this one for starters: poets.org/poem/fathers-day ) says of his own work, ‘I like to make my readers laugh but I also like it when they cry. If I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best’. I guess I’m hoping (dreaming) my poems will do something along those lines too.
When I’m out in the world I’m not necessarily consciously observing, hoping to find stuff to write about, but the quirky and left of centre things will jump out at me and I’ll know there’s a poem there. So I’ll take quick notes on the back of an envelope or the paper napkin that’s languishing in the bottom of my bag (because somehow I always forget to take a notebook out with me), then when I get home, the poem(s) will be fleshed out until they start to feel ‘right’. This could takes hours, weeks or even months. With every poem I write, my goal is that I’m always trying to make it the best thing I’ve ever written. I don’t always succeed, but that’s the bar I set for myself. It’s the carrot that’s constantly dangling in front of my nose, just ever so slightly out of reach.
I was listening to a David Bowie interview recently where he said, ‘If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.’ I can’t think of any better writing advice than this.
So writing a collection or putting it together isn’t a conscious or deliberate approach?
The only deliberate aspect of my work is that I write every day and I don’t stand in the way of what wants to be written. I don’t judge my ideas or observations by saying, ‘that doesn’t sound like it would make much of a poem’. I just let my pen be free and trust that whatever it wants to say, it will say. If I have a kernel of an idea for a poem, though I’m not sure what the poem will be about at that point, I just write the kernel down and keep on writing until eventually, a little magic will appear on the page and then somehow I’ll hit a seam and the poem will be off and running. But, if I’d judged that original kernel and decided not to write it at all because I didn’t immediately understand what it was trying to say, then I would have stood in the way of the poem. This is what I mean when I say, ‘staying out of my own way’. Also, I don’t wait for the big stuff to occur to me. I always seem to be writing the small. My idea of gold is always found in the small.
Would you say that you are aiming to write without the constraints, themes or structures or even expectations which one might expect a poet to be guided by?
I have never felt constrained by anything writing-wise (unless you count the time on Australian poet Mark Tredinnick’s workshop, where he set the task of writing a sonnet and I nearly lost my mind – hello Mark, if you’re reading this). While I loosely understand some of the rules of various kinds of poetry (haiku, villanelle, etc) I’ve never had any desire to write within these required restraints. Maybe that will change in the years to come, who knows. I tried to write a haiku for this latest collection, but as you’ll see, it failed miserably, but I still put it in the collection because I loved how damaged it felt. That it had failed so miserably made the poem feel quite precious to me. Maybe I could pretend it’s an example of Japanese Wabisabi (!)
At the same time I’m never trying to push the poem in a particular direction. I may well start off writing a poem about a banana, only to discover in line three that it’s actually about the fox I saw dead at the side of the road, its partner standing over it gently prodding its bloodied fur. Poems are adventures. Let them take you on a journey. Be delighted, surprised, perhaps even devastated at where they end up.
Roland Fisher who runs The Writers Studio here in Sydney, once said that writing is a dance between the conscious and the unconscious. This idea sits on my shoulder as I write. When the writing is feeling flat, I remind myself of this, and this reminds me to dive deeper into the emotion I’m trying to convey. I think of the poetic mind as a big reservoir of juicy lines that will appear through my pen if I just keep out of my own way. I’m always trying to get out of my own way when I’m writing; which is to say I’m trying not to judge what comes out of my pen. I let the words come out as they wish. I let whatever ideas and thoughts occur to me fall out onto the page. The most embarrassing ones that appear are very often my favourites. The playwright Arthur Miller says, ‘The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.’ I love that.
Your poetry does have some structure though?
How the poem looks on the page is a huge part of its ‘success’. Mark Tredinnick once said that almost as soon as he starts writing he’s getting a feel for what structure/form the poem wants. Whereas I tend to have practically finished the poem before I start to think about how the poem wants to look on the page. You’ll notice I’m saying ‘what the poem wants’, not what I want. I feel this surrender to the poem is important. We surrender our inhibitions and thoughts and feelings when we are writing. And surrendering how it looks on the page is also part of this. So when you’re writing, look at the poem on the page and start to fiddle around with how it looks. Try different things. Eventually the perfect form and structure will appear, and it will feel just right.
If you want to learn more about Ali Whitelock’s work see the following link – www.aliwhitelock.com
