Article
Interview with Luke Davies
April 09, 2011
Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?
Luke Davies: I was seven or eight. I was obsessed with a collection of poetry called The Ombly Gombly Book. It was so exciting. There was a form, a structure, I could begin to imitate. The poems were delightful, and silly. (I tracked down a copy of the book on eBay a few years ago – perfect condition, unread, what a thrill after four decades.) Around eight, nine, ten, I used to memorise a lot of poems too. Just perform them for my parents, mostly. No one was leading me down this path, it’s just the path that opened up. I still remember some of these poems quite vividly. One example:
I drive my car to the supermarket
The way I take is super-high
A super-lot is where I park it
Super suds are what I buy
Super-phosphate-fed-foods feed me
Super service keeps me new
Who would dare to supersede me
Super, super, super who?
I remember thinking that line “super-phosphate-fed-foods feed me” was phenomenal. Meanwhile my Dad was a journalist and always at the typewriter. I knew I wanted to do that – be a writer, whatever that meant exactly. Also, when I was around eight, my little brother was very ill and often in hospital. I wrote a short story too, called ‘Felix the Little Red Racing Car’. I remember my plan was very ambitious – it was going to be pages and pages long. As it was, I got a little exhausted after about a page. But there was a shift going on already, through all this, or at least, the macro able to be seen in the micro. Writing as imitation needs to become, at some point, writing as offering.
Jump forward five years: the very great leap forward now. Everything was changing. One moment I was a child, twelve years old. In Year 7 English, there were these class sets of books – lame little American novels, in the genre that would now be called “young adult fiction”, with these neat moral messages that were completely on the nose even to a clueless twelve-year-old. The next minute I’m thirteen, in Year 8, and I’m wandering through the shelves of the school library and I find Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. A completely transformational moment: nothing of my experience of self, of being alive in a body, in a mind, in a world, would ever be the same again. A complete epiphany, utterly exciting, and the excitement has never gone away since. I don’t completely mean that Cannery Row is a great, great novel, though I love it very much and it is a sentimental favourite. It’s just that I discovered a new world that was and is, to all intents and purposes, infinite. That week is still as vivid as any in my life: the sense of total transformation and of limitless possibility. It was as if I knew I had become an adult now. Which is another way of saying one stands outside oneself for the first time: I knew it was me, in this body, until its last breath, from now on. But it wasn’t claustrophobic; through the Cannery Row doorway, it seemed as if I’d stepped inside a vast palace, and I’ve been walking around its numberless rooms ever since.
So then it was a cascade: within months I’d devoured Steinbeck and discovered Faulkner. Everything that was important was contained in literature. It acted as a kind of shield, too, from the extended miseries of adolescence. I wrote my first ‘adult’ poem in response to Cannery Row: it was called ‘Mac and the Boys’ (about the group of alcoholic bums who seem to lead such a life of freedom in the book) and is the only poem since that moment that I haven’t kept. That’s to say, I then built up six years of very bad, very imitative teenage poems, until eventually I began to write a few that had sparks of promise.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Luke Davies: Well, Steinbeck, clearly. I was already obsessed with America, at thirteen. Growing up watching television essentially seemed to be a form of growing up American. At fourteen, a school mate handed me a copy of On the Road and said, “You’d probably like this. Have you heard of it?” Another mini-leap forward. What a great book for the tortured adolescent male. Kerouac made mysticism out of yearning and restlessness. Also, at the time I really thought the drugs sounded like a fabulous idea.
What’s changed? Well, the passage of time means you get to read more books, so it’s more about flow and gradual metamorphosis than overt change. My reading got wider, but never less passionate. And poetry remained always the spine, or the bedrock, choose your metaphor. I used to spend entire weekends at the State Library of NSW, sitting crosslegged at the poetry shelves (I can even picture exactly where they were in that vast reading room), leafing through volume after volume of obscure poetry (published!), wondering – I mean, being in wonder – and trying to work out what the poets were saying, were doing.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Luke Davies: Unless I’m misunderstanding the question, everything is completely refracted through the everyday. Or rather, there is nothing other than the everyday. Or rather, everything I write, even if it’s, say, about the Battle of Maldon in 921 AD, is about my own everyday, in that it emerges from my consciousness. I’m not explaining myself well. I’m going by the theory that this is the only life we have. And therefore there is only one real subject in literature: how are we to live, in the face of our impending deaths?
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Luke Davies: This may just be a question about semantics. Every individual poet’s work is completely subjective, in the sense that it is and can only be that poet’s work. On the other hand, self-expression is not a good enough reason to write. Nor is poetry about the emptying of the contents of one’s head, though you wouldn’t always know that by browsing the poetry shelves. Perhaps the question is trying to probe the difference between poetry that is overtly about the experience of self, as opposed to poetry that is more about external events, and things out there. But these are just close range category errors. In any case, very bad poetry is to be found abundantly in both types.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Luke Davies: Well, the tradition of poetry. If pressed to be more specific, I’d say the tradition of English-language poetry stretching back through Shakespeare (who is in a sense, for the purposes of this question, the great progenitor) and earlier.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Luke Davies: It’s definitely the paying-the-rent and working-other-jobs thing for me. All other endeavours are secondary to Poetry, the Central Matter-At-Hand, though of course, something of the primary Myself-As-Poet goes into the other work I do, all the other forms of writing. Poetry is the best self-perpetuating force for reminding us that money is not that important, or that the world view that how much we gather and accumulate has some kind of bearing on concepts of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ is rather limited. But it’s nice to be comfortable, too, and to not have to live hand-to-mouth. It can be an enormous difficulty. I feel fortunate in that I love all the things I write, poetry and prose and film and so on. But active poesis can easily desert those who move too far from their centre.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Luke Davies: I read voraciously and widely, but there tend to be a few realms I return to more often than others. They seem to move in pulses of several years, then go into hibernation, then return. The biggest ones would be history, archeology, geology, cosmology, comparative mythology (including religion), physics and fiction.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Luke Davies: Australian poetry to me is simply the Australian subset in the tradition of poetry in English. While you could certainly divide it into further subsets, I don’t think you could define it very cohesively beyond that. I definitely see myself as an Australian poet, in the sense that it’s the only identity and history I have, my particular kind of Australian-ness. But if it came down to choice, I’d rather be seen as a good poet than an Australian poet. But I’ve had seventeen and a half thousand days of my own ‘everyday life’ on this planet so far, and a lot of them took place in Australia. Poetry helps expand the experience of the present moment, so it might be worth saying also that that is 25 million minutes.
MB: In reference to the heated debates around poetics and poets, Don Anderson once described Australian poetry as Australia’s only “blood sport”. More recently critics have seen Australian poetry in terms of a “new lyricism” (David McCooey) and “networked language” (Philip Mead). What is the current state of play in Australian poetry in your view? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
Luke Davies: At any given time I’m sure the poetry wars are real. But profoundly ephemeral, in the big picture. That is to say, whatever arguments are causing heat right now, in the realm of theorising about poetry, they will seem weirdly trivial even in ten years time. (Thanks to the internet, and the proliferation of archiving, we’ll have greater ease of access to just how weird, and how trivial. What a depressing thought.) Instant globalethernetics aside, it will be, as always, Time that sorts out what mattered. The rest is chatter.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
Luke Davies: Poetry is in fact the culture thinking out loud, and good poets are those who can hear the thoughts most clearly. Poetry is “memory become image, and image become voice” (Octavio Paz). So I guess it’s valuable to society, albeit in a “this is good for you even though you don’t know it” kind of way. In it rest the truest, most fundamental artefacts of what matters at any given time; this is what makes The Waste Land great.
Luke Davies: I was seven or eight. I was obsessed with a collection of poetry called The Ombly Gombly Book. It was so exciting. There was a form, a structure, I could begin to imitate. The poems were delightful, and silly. (I tracked down a copy of the book on eBay a few years ago – perfect condition, unread, what a thrill after four decades.) Around eight, nine, ten, I used to memorise a lot of poems too. Just perform them for my parents, mostly. No one was leading me down this path, it’s just the path that opened up. I still remember some of these poems quite vividly. One example:
I drive my car to the supermarket
The way I take is super-high
A super-lot is where I park it
Super suds are what I buy
Super-phosphate-fed-foods feed me
Super service keeps me new
Who would dare to supersede me
Super, super, super who?
I remember thinking that line “super-phosphate-fed-foods feed me” was phenomenal. Meanwhile my Dad was a journalist and always at the typewriter. I knew I wanted to do that – be a writer, whatever that meant exactly. Also, when I was around eight, my little brother was very ill and often in hospital. I wrote a short story too, called ‘Felix the Little Red Racing Car’. I remember my plan was very ambitious – it was going to be pages and pages long. As it was, I got a little exhausted after about a page. But there was a shift going on already, through all this, or at least, the macro able to be seen in the micro. Writing as imitation needs to become, at some point, writing as offering.
Jump forward five years: the very great leap forward now. Everything was changing. One moment I was a child, twelve years old. In Year 7 English, there were these class sets of books – lame little American novels, in the genre that would now be called “young adult fiction”, with these neat moral messages that were completely on the nose even to a clueless twelve-year-old. The next minute I’m thirteen, in Year 8, and I’m wandering through the shelves of the school library and I find Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. A completely transformational moment: nothing of my experience of self, of being alive in a body, in a mind, in a world, would ever be the same again. A complete epiphany, utterly exciting, and the excitement has never gone away since. I don’t completely mean that Cannery Row is a great, great novel, though I love it very much and it is a sentimental favourite. It’s just that I discovered a new world that was and is, to all intents and purposes, infinite. That week is still as vivid as any in my life: the sense of total transformation and of limitless possibility. It was as if I knew I had become an adult now. Which is another way of saying one stands outside oneself for the first time: I knew it was me, in this body, until its last breath, from now on. But it wasn’t claustrophobic; through the Cannery Row doorway, it seemed as if I’d stepped inside a vast palace, and I’ve been walking around its numberless rooms ever since.
So then it was a cascade: within months I’d devoured Steinbeck and discovered Faulkner. Everything that was important was contained in literature. It acted as a kind of shield, too, from the extended miseries of adolescence. I wrote my first ‘adult’ poem in response to Cannery Row: it was called ‘Mac and the Boys’ (about the group of alcoholic bums who seem to lead such a life of freedom in the book) and is the only poem since that moment that I haven’t kept. That’s to say, I then built up six years of very bad, very imitative teenage poems, until eventually I began to write a few that had sparks of promise.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Luke Davies: Well, Steinbeck, clearly. I was already obsessed with America, at thirteen. Growing up watching television essentially seemed to be a form of growing up American. At fourteen, a school mate handed me a copy of On the Road and said, “You’d probably like this. Have you heard of it?” Another mini-leap forward. What a great book for the tortured adolescent male. Kerouac made mysticism out of yearning and restlessness. Also, at the time I really thought the drugs sounded like a fabulous idea.
What’s changed? Well, the passage of time means you get to read more books, so it’s more about flow and gradual metamorphosis than overt change. My reading got wider, but never less passionate. And poetry remained always the spine, or the bedrock, choose your metaphor. I used to spend entire weekends at the State Library of NSW, sitting crosslegged at the poetry shelves (I can even picture exactly where they were in that vast reading room), leafing through volume after volume of obscure poetry (published!), wondering – I mean, being in wonder – and trying to work out what the poets were saying, were doing.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Luke Davies: Unless I’m misunderstanding the question, everything is completely refracted through the everyday. Or rather, there is nothing other than the everyday. Or rather, everything I write, even if it’s, say, about the Battle of Maldon in 921 AD, is about my own everyday, in that it emerges from my consciousness. I’m not explaining myself well. I’m going by the theory that this is the only life we have. And therefore there is only one real subject in literature: how are we to live, in the face of our impending deaths?
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Luke Davies: This may just be a question about semantics. Every individual poet’s work is completely subjective, in the sense that it is and can only be that poet’s work. On the other hand, self-expression is not a good enough reason to write. Nor is poetry about the emptying of the contents of one’s head, though you wouldn’t always know that by browsing the poetry shelves. Perhaps the question is trying to probe the difference between poetry that is overtly about the experience of self, as opposed to poetry that is more about external events, and things out there. But these are just close range category errors. In any case, very bad poetry is to be found abundantly in both types.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Luke Davies: Well, the tradition of poetry. If pressed to be more specific, I’d say the tradition of English-language poetry stretching back through Shakespeare (who is in a sense, for the purposes of this question, the great progenitor) and earlier.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Luke Davies: It’s definitely the paying-the-rent and working-other-jobs thing for me. All other endeavours are secondary to Poetry, the Central Matter-At-Hand, though of course, something of the primary Myself-As-Poet goes into the other work I do, all the other forms of writing. Poetry is the best self-perpetuating force for reminding us that money is not that important, or that the world view that how much we gather and accumulate has some kind of bearing on concepts of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ is rather limited. But it’s nice to be comfortable, too, and to not have to live hand-to-mouth. It can be an enormous difficulty. I feel fortunate in that I love all the things I write, poetry and prose and film and so on. But active poesis can easily desert those who move too far from their centre.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Luke Davies: I read voraciously and widely, but there tend to be a few realms I return to more often than others. They seem to move in pulses of several years, then go into hibernation, then return. The biggest ones would be history, archeology, geology, cosmology, comparative mythology (including religion), physics and fiction.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Luke Davies: Australian poetry to me is simply the Australian subset in the tradition of poetry in English. While you could certainly divide it into further subsets, I don’t think you could define it very cohesively beyond that. I definitely see myself as an Australian poet, in the sense that it’s the only identity and history I have, my particular kind of Australian-ness. But if it came down to choice, I’d rather be seen as a good poet than an Australian poet. But I’ve had seventeen and a half thousand days of my own ‘everyday life’ on this planet so far, and a lot of them took place in Australia. Poetry helps expand the experience of the present moment, so it might be worth saying also that that is 25 million minutes.
MB: In reference to the heated debates around poetics and poets, Don Anderson once described Australian poetry as Australia’s only “blood sport”. More recently critics have seen Australian poetry in terms of a “new lyricism” (David McCooey) and “networked language” (Philip Mead). What is the current state of play in Australian poetry in your view? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
Luke Davies: At any given time I’m sure the poetry wars are real. But profoundly ephemeral, in the big picture. That is to say, whatever arguments are causing heat right now, in the realm of theorising about poetry, they will seem weirdly trivial even in ten years time. (Thanks to the internet, and the proliferation of archiving, we’ll have greater ease of access to just how weird, and how trivial. What a depressing thought.) Instant globalethernetics aside, it will be, as always, Time that sorts out what mattered. The rest is chatter.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
Luke Davies: Poetry is in fact the culture thinking out loud, and good poets are those who can hear the thoughts most clearly. Poetry is “memory become image, and image become voice” (Octavio Paz). So I guess it’s valuable to society, albeit in a “this is good for you even though you don’t know it” kind of way. In it rest the truest, most fundamental artefacts of what matters at any given time; this is what makes The Waste Land great.
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