Article
Interview with David Malouf
June 14, 2011
Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?
David Malouf: I began writing as soon as I could read. Having learned one magic trick, how to turn marks on a page into talk, pictures, stories, I wanted to try the other. What keeps me hooked is that, the magic of transformation.
MB: Who are the writers that first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
David Malouf: Dickens (read aloud to me), the adventure stories I discovered for myself; Shakespeare, first in Lamb’s Tales, then in the original when I was ten; poetry: Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Henry Kendall from the Queensland readers; Dumas and the Brontes. At high school, French poetry, a lot of it learned by heart: Ronsard and La Fontaine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. In first year at university, when I was sixteen or seventeen, Balzac, the Russians and modern poetry, beginning with Slessor and going on quickly to Eliot, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Rilke. At the same time, Conrad and E.M. Forster.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
David Malouf: Can’t answer this. Who knows how what we hear and overhear and observe, and are amazed or shocked or puzzled by, gets transformed into what haunts us into sitting down and ‘making something’ of that haunting?
MB: What is the function or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
David Malouf: Only what is mysteriously hidden in us, conceals itself from us, is really interesting to me. What most of my writing is about, in poetry and prose both, is working out why the interest, the puzzlement, the inability simply to let something pass.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
David Malouf: Not really, but no doubt it is related to a tradition and others will see it, and does have a political content. All this seems to me to belong to an area that the writer does not need to be critically conscious of.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
David Malouf: Each new poem seems to me to demand a radical reassessment, for writer and reader both, of what poetry is and what it might do. It’s a test that only someone who is prepared to rethink what he/she already knows will have the capacity to meet.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
David Malouf: Reading of every sort. Whatever quickens and feeds my interest. But not only reading. Also films, things fleetingly seen on television or on a bus or caught in listening to music or looking at paintings in a gallery or objects in a museum, or figuratively recalled or dreamed.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
David Malouf: The work of Australian poets. That is, of poets whose poems, in so far as they spring from experience (of Australian space, light, weather, habits of thought) and use language that is marked, unavoidably, by local habits of speech, will be different from the work of other users of English: American, British, West Indian, etc. Such a poet can’t be anything but Australian.
MB: 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? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
David Malouf: I have no interest in groups, schools or associations of any kind. Rival attempts to grasp the attention of critics and commentators, to seize the present and control the future, are a mug’s game, a mugger’s game. As for the current “state of play”, poetry is of so many kinds these days, so much is published and in so many forms, so many people are writing, that it is hard for an individual reader to grasp more than a fraction of what appears, and impossible to assess in any clear way who matters and what does not. I’m surprised by how much of what I see is ‘lyrical’; I don’t know why the lyric, with its emphasis on mood, its celebration of the elements, of landscape, the seasons, the various modes of ‘love’, has remained stronger in our poetry than it seems to be elsewhere. But there is no kind of poetry that is not being written here, and no trend, it seems to me, that is more ‘necessary’, or significant or forward-looking than any other. Poems are good – that is, striking, memorable, moving – or they are not.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
David Malouf: What we look for in any of the arts is to be taken to a place of new understanding and emotion where things that have become so familiar that we no longer see or feel for them appear in a new light. For some reason this feeds us with new energy. It is the pleasure of this that we look for; and when we get it once look for again.
Poetry achieves this with words, their connotations, their sound, the sparks they strike off one another in combination, as well as the pictures they make, the hares they start, the landscapes they open in us. This sort of stimulus, the energy it generates and which we take back into our lives, is the only use of poetry, or of any of the arts, that is of lasting significance. Other uses – socio-political, moral – may be there, but they will appeal only for so long as they are immediately relevant, which in most cases means not for long, and will only be open to reanimation, if at all, by scholarship.
David Malouf: I began writing as soon as I could read. Having learned one magic trick, how to turn marks on a page into talk, pictures, stories, I wanted to try the other. What keeps me hooked is that, the magic of transformation.
MB: Who are the writers that first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
David Malouf: Dickens (read aloud to me), the adventure stories I discovered for myself; Shakespeare, first in Lamb’s Tales, then in the original when I was ten; poetry: Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Henry Kendall from the Queensland readers; Dumas and the Brontes. At high school, French poetry, a lot of it learned by heart: Ronsard and La Fontaine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. In first year at university, when I was sixteen or seventeen, Balzac, the Russians and modern poetry, beginning with Slessor and going on quickly to Eliot, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Rilke. At the same time, Conrad and E.M. Forster.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
David Malouf: Can’t answer this. Who knows how what we hear and overhear and observe, and are amazed or shocked or puzzled by, gets transformed into what haunts us into sitting down and ‘making something’ of that haunting?
MB: What is the function or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
David Malouf: Only what is mysteriously hidden in us, conceals itself from us, is really interesting to me. What most of my writing is about, in poetry and prose both, is working out why the interest, the puzzlement, the inability simply to let something pass.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
David Malouf: Not really, but no doubt it is related to a tradition and others will see it, and does have a political content. All this seems to me to belong to an area that the writer does not need to be critically conscious of.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
David Malouf: Each new poem seems to me to demand a radical reassessment, for writer and reader both, of what poetry is and what it might do. It’s a test that only someone who is prepared to rethink what he/she already knows will have the capacity to meet.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
David Malouf: Reading of every sort. Whatever quickens and feeds my interest. But not only reading. Also films, things fleetingly seen on television or on a bus or caught in listening to music or looking at paintings in a gallery or objects in a museum, or figuratively recalled or dreamed.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
David Malouf: The work of Australian poets. That is, of poets whose poems, in so far as they spring from experience (of Australian space, light, weather, habits of thought) and use language that is marked, unavoidably, by local habits of speech, will be different from the work of other users of English: American, British, West Indian, etc. Such a poet can’t be anything but Australian.
MB: 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? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
David Malouf: I have no interest in groups, schools or associations of any kind. Rival attempts to grasp the attention of critics and commentators, to seize the present and control the future, are a mug’s game, a mugger’s game. As for the current “state of play”, poetry is of so many kinds these days, so much is published and in so many forms, so many people are writing, that it is hard for an individual reader to grasp more than a fraction of what appears, and impossible to assess in any clear way who matters and what does not. I’m surprised by how much of what I see is ‘lyrical’; I don’t know why the lyric, with its emphasis on mood, its celebration of the elements, of landscape, the seasons, the various modes of ‘love’, has remained stronger in our poetry than it seems to be elsewhere. But there is no kind of poetry that is not being written here, and no trend, it seems to me, that is more ‘necessary’, or significant or forward-looking than any other. Poems are good – that is, striking, memorable, moving – or they are not.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
David Malouf: What we look for in any of the arts is to be taken to a place of new understanding and emotion where things that have become so familiar that we no longer see or feel for them appear in a new light. For some reason this feeds us with new energy. It is the pleasure of this that we look for; and when we get it once look for again.
Poetry achieves this with words, their connotations, their sound, the sparks they strike off one another in combination, as well as the pictures they make, the hares they start, the landscapes they open in us. This sort of stimulus, the energy it generates and which we take back into our lives, is the only use of poetry, or of any of the arts, that is of lasting significance. Other uses – socio-political, moral – may be there, but they will appeal only for so long as they are immediately relevant, which in most cases means not for long, and will only be open to reanimation, if at all, by scholarship.
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère