The Monthly interviews Australian and New Zealand poet Joanna Preston – Part 3 – What matters when producing poetry

What ideas or themes do you investigate through your work?

There’s a strong feminist streak through all of it, and a lot of birds, trees, animals, nature generally. I’m fascinated by myths, and what they tell us about ourselves. I’m a semi-militant atheist, so religion tuns up as one of the more pervasive sets of mythology – power is something that catches my attention. How it is used, how it turns, how to step out from under it. What happens when you don’t. What happens when you do. And what happens to the onlookers.

What about form or structure – Is that important to you?

Always. Most of my free verse poetry only looks like free verse. Most of it has some sort of formal underpinning, even if it’s just deciding that no, this one really con’t be another sonnet, but …

How many collections have you published and what is the process by which you produce a collection?

Two collections – The Summer King (Otago University Press, 2009) and tumble (Otago University Press, 2021). I’m working (ha!) on a third, with the provisional title Marrying the Minotaur.

The process has been different each time. For The Summer King, I had two lovely meaty sequences to assemble the collection around. And a hard deadline (the MPhil and leaving the UK to come back to NZ). I had plenty of work that had been thoroughly smacked around by the MPhil crew, so it was just a matter of getting things in order. Literally. What goes first, what goes last, where I want the two sequences, and then what poems want to be next to what other poems, and how best to lead the reader through it all.

tumble was harder. Life (earthquakes, bereavements, a mortgage, stuff) had gotten in the way after Summer King, and I lost momentum. There were a couple of false starts (including an early draft being sent back from my publisher, asking me to simplify the structure and sort out some thematic confusion), but with some serious prodding from David Howard and James Norcliffe, during the early part of the pandemic I finally managed to pull together the manuscript of tumble, and set it back to my publisher. … The process of putting it together was more difficult because there were no sequences to build around. I always knew I wanted to use two the short poems as prologue and afterword, and I was fairly sure about which poems would begin and end. The overall idea was three versions of the journey from child to woman, innocence to experience, all woven together. So different experiences of the same process, speaking to and past each other. Eventually it felt like it made sense to me, and OUP agreed.

The collection I’m working on is different again. Roughly half are poems that were written separately over the years, but the collection itself is looking at the idea of monsters, and how we deal with them. (Hence the working title, Marrying the Minotaur.) Some of it is dealing with family skeletons, some of it is looking at the toxic version of masculinity that seems to be on the rise. And some of it is prompted by extremist ideology, and sent me down some pretty dark rabbit holes after the massacre at the mosques in Christchurch in 2019. The shooter comes from the same part of Australia as a chunk of my dad’s family. There’s a sequence I’m writing at the moment about my dad’s death which will be a chunk of the book. I’m going to have to sit down over this summer and try to see what else needs to be written to complete the manuscript, so this one is more planned than my previous two. I just hope it’s not going to take me another five years to get it done …