Article
Interview with Katherine Gallagher
June 14, 2011
MB: When did you start writing and what motivated you?
Katherine Gallagher: When did I start writing poetry? Around 1964. And that was by accident more or less, as a result of reading The Penguin Book of Australian Verse with my then boyfriend who was doing a thesis on a neglected Australian poet. I belong to that generation who had a very British-oriented education and it was suddenly amazing to be reading poems relating to Australian experience. We also read from other poetries: British (Alvarez’s New Poetry), New Zealand, Japanese, French and American.
All these poets, and particularly those in the Penguin Australian Verse sparked off ideas and I said, “I’m going to write some of this stuff.” This was the mid-sixties, and in Australia, poetry was becoming more noticed, largely through lively, well-attended readings, sometimes politically inspired (this was also a time of agitation for Aboriginal voting rights), and a rise in performance events. Unfortunately, my love relationship wasn’t going as I’d hoped, but it had provided a spark, and I had the “poetry bug” for life. I suppose it says something about my political idealism at the time that my first-ever poem, ‘Life-line’, was a response to the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1965, an event that stirred Victoria to widespread protest. It was published in Poetry (Sydney) in 1966 and later became ‘Poem for the Executioners’, appearing with a few changes in The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse (ed. Peter Porter, OUP, 1996). It starts:
This is a blinding place.
Only the hangmen see
fixing the knot of shame
upon their chosen tree.
As for the motivation to continue to write poetry, that initial impetus was spurred on in the late 1960s, early 1970s by the international women’s movement with its diverse and exciting possibilities opened up through networking and the appearance of all-women poetry anthologies such as Rising Tides (USA, c. 1960) and Mother I’m Rooted (Australia, 1975) showing women they had a ‘voice’ to reclaim. Today, the option of writing poetry seems to have been there for years as a key to identity, an idea of self, offering perspectives – a way of seeing, a way of life. Indeed speaking from now, over forty years later, the idea of not writing poetry is unthinkable. Sometimes I remind myself that it came to me by accident. What if . . .?? There’s no answer to that. My continuing motivation is also focused partly by the next question of who inspired me.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Katherine Gallagher: In the great excitement of ‘discovering’ poetry in my late twenties, I was amazed to see how much Australian poetry had been written. I discovered Judith Wright, my ‘poetry godmother’ – a great poet and trailblazer, and in many ways, my greatest influence; also A.D. Hope, Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, Francis Webb, James McAuley, David Campbell, John Shaw Neilson and various younger poets. Mostly blokes, of course. Women poets were only getting geared up and it was difficult to write without an existing women’s poetry tradition. I published my first poem in 1966 as K.M. Gallagher, but shortly after changed my name to Katherine. In the general ferment around Melbourne University and the Victorian Fellowship of Writers, I met and read poets such as Judith Rodriguez, Vincent Buckley, Philip Martin, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Anne Elder, Kris Hemensley and Bruce Dawe. What I knew was very much a ‘Melbourne’ scene. But a lot was happening elsewhere, and the Les Murray-Robert Adamson-John Tranter Sydney ‘phenomenon’ was about to take off.
In 1964, I started teaching at Newlands High School, Coburg, in the northern suburbs. During the year, teaching kept me too busy for writing poetry but in the summers of 1965 and 1967, I attended two eye-opening seminars on Australian literature at Armidale’s University of New England, in northern New South Wales. These were my first personal contacts with national literary names – Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally, David Ireland, the young Les Murray who was being talked about by the ABC’s Clement Semmler as the “poetry voice” of the future, and various others. Gwen Harwood, later so significant in 20th-century Australian poetry, wasn’t being ‘talked about’ as a national name as yet.
At the 1967 conference, I showed Judith Wright some of my poems. She was extremely kind and supportive, told me to read widely, especially the Elizabethans, the Metaphysicals, the Augustans and the Moderns; talked of how in her second year at Sydney University, she’d dropped out of her Honours English course which seemed to be “Beowulf and more Beowulf”, and had persuaded her father to let her stay on but to use the time reading in the library instead – Asiatic literatures as well as European. Handing me my poems, she said, “Keep going, you’ve got something there” – words I needed to hear.
For beginners, that sort of encouragement is crucial. Besides, at that time, there were virtually no workshops to give poets the training and lift-off necessary to sustain them as fledgling poets.
Another important step on the way was having my first poem published in 1966, in Poetry, the then Australian Poetry Society’s magazine. Placed next to a poem by the already well-known Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and called ‘Life-line’, it, as noted earlier, was a protest piece inspired by the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Victoria.
Later, in 1968, I attended a workshop led by Judith Wright and Bruce Dawe prior to the 1968 Adelaide Festival. I’d greatly admired Dawe’s satiric edge and his ability to combine the colloquial and the lyrical in an authentic, dramatic voice. He was also a keen reader of American poetry and read us lots of James Dickey and Donald Hall as well as his own work. Judith Wright also read from her poems, occasionally saying, “I think I’d write that differently now.” At the time, I couldn’t believe how she could be ‘dismissive’ of some of her earlier poems, but in effect, this was good training for a poet – to know that nothing is set in stone.
Quoting Blake, Wright told us that perception was the great secret of it all. If we wanted to be poets, we’d have to observe well. She gave us haiku exercises, and talked about the “spirit of haiku” – which has remained a life-long interest for me. After all that, I felt I was on my way to becoming a poet. Growing up on a farm at Eastville, I had the landscape – knew every stick and stone in some places. But now, almost suddenly, poetry became my way of seeing. . .
Today, my style has greatly diversified; I still like to use the lyric voice but have expanded it into other voices – monologues, collages and the surreal. I often use set forms – for example, the pantoum, sonnet and villanelle. With time, with changes in experience, one’s poetry develops and becomes more various. But the basic core remains. I’m a lyric poet and in my various collections, I’ve drawn on my different worlds: Australia, Britain — particularly London — and France. My subjects mostly centre around the journey, place, exile, and belonging. I’m passionately interested in voice, and like to write in a mix of colloquial and more formal tones – celebratory, serious, idiosyncratic. I love satire, the surreal – circling the ironies. When I started, I wanted to write on social issues such as racism and education and several poems were published in the Victorian Secondary Teachers’ Magazine. To quote Stevie Smith: “Poetry is a strong way out.”
In 1969, I finally left my teaching job and travelled overland to London. But leaving wasn’t easy. I was thirty-three and needing to ‘get away’ after an unhappy love-affair. As I said:
It would be my first trip,
thousands of miles past a dread
of leaving – I saw Australia draped
Dali-style on a thread. . . .
(from ‘Farewell Poem’)
London was another great discovery, as I suddenly found myself face-to-face with my British heritage and that included British poetry. However, my next move was to Paris where I lived from 1971 to 1979 and where I met my husband, Bernard. At this time, French, which I’d studied at school and university, became another important interest. All these diversions and influences – art, poetry, history, landscapes, people.
Nowadays, my reading is more wide-ranging, with an emphasis on the poem rather than the poet. In the UK, I belong to the Poetry Society and the Poetry Book Society, and in Australia, the Poets’ Union, Melbourne Poets, the Victorian Writers’ Centre, and now, the recently formed Australian Poetry. Of course, over the years, in the global upsweep of English-speaking poetry, American poetry has come to dominate the scene. But everything has become more global and it’s a challenge to keep up. Poetry is a matter of taste, but for me, poets such as the Americans Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty, Adrienne Rich, Michael Donaghy and British/Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney, Carol Rumens, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and Penelope Shuttle sit alongside Les Murray, Peter Porter, Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood, Fay Zwicky, Robert Adamson et al. And then there’s the profusion of younger poets, particularly British and Australian.
Your question asked: “What’s changed?” Everything has, in a sense, particularly for English-language poetry by women; this has vastly expanded. Since I started writing back in the 1960s, due to modern communications developments – internet, broadband, online publication – plus population growth and changes in actual travel, everything’s become more global. Our planet has been transformed. I guess the most important overall change for me is that I’ve become a hybrid, with allegiances to various cultures. Australia counts but as I set it out in my poem Hybrid, life is more in perspective:
I have swallowed a country,
it sits quietly inside me.
Days go by when I scarcely
realise it is there. . .
I talk to this country,
tell it, You’re not forgotten,
nor ever could be.
I depend on you –
cornucopia packed close
with daylight moons
and bony coasts,
the dust of eucalyptus
on my teeth; mudded rivers
burnished smooth
under the cobalt crystal
of a lucent sky.
It is my reference-point
for other landscapes
that, after thirty years,
have multiplied my skies.
As far as poetry generally is concerned, we are able to ‘read the world’, especially thanks to translation, but as humans we need also to keep in focus the regional, including our local suburb. “The danger of travelling is how/ it takes you over . . .” (‘Plane-Journey Momentums’).
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Katherine Gallagher: My poetry has ‘followed’ my life – too much, some, including myself, might say. However, my ‘everyday world’ is the source of my inspiration, the stepping-off point. When I read a poet, whatever his/her style, I like to feel there is a real person, an authentic voice, behind the poem. Everything in poetry points to the great momentum and sum of human experience. However, it’s the poet’s life which provides the starting points onto the ladder of the poem, whether straightforward lyric or surreal. It’s important to remember Robert Frost’s dictum that in writing poetry, we’re not trying to tell people something they didn’t already know – we’re trying to give them “the shock of recognition”.
So I agree with the adage that it’s best “to write what you know” but to explore the unknown ‘knowns’ in that everyday so that it’s possible to bring them into precise focus and make engaging, exciting pieces. In exploring experience, poets can learn to make the ordinary extraordinary, to discover and develop their art from the quotidian. I would like to write/paint ‘the world’ in metaphor – one attempt is the poem Circus-Apprentice (Arc, 2006): “I’m leaning it all – acrobatics, clowning,/ riding bareback and trapeze,/ fire from a sleeve: my hand’s a wand.”
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Katherine Gallagher: My response to this question is related to the answer to question 3. I am a lyric poet, and hence subjectivity plays an important role in introducing the reader to my thoughts and feelings on a range of subjects. At the same time, I have expanded my range to vary use of the lyric ‘I’, to bring in other voices, monologues, narrative and lyric sequences, generally arriving at more objective forms. Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” I guess most poets have taken Emily’s advice and tried to avoid mere confessional poetry, mere “telling it how it was”. Poets need a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity in their writing.
The late Peter Porter wrote an introduction to my book, Fish-rings on Water (Forest Books, 1989) which included the following:
Just as everybody likes tunes in music, so our taste, if we admit to it, is for lyricism in poetry. The last two hundred years have seen verse surrender to prose so much of the public’s attention – stories, comments, arguments, drama, human character even: in return poetry has been given the role of custodian of language and has become the place where psychological understanding, and the machinery of words come together. This does not mean that poets today cannot make poems out of the full range of experience which gets into prose fiction and journalism. But it does suggest that what they will be seeking is a distillation of the wider world, a sense of packed feeling, of much contained in little, and that the words chosen will make a memorable shape in their own right. . .
I feel this summary is what I am angling for – a compression of feeling, but poetry which contains dramatic exploration geared to projecting and recalling “heightened states of feeling”.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Katherine Gallagher: I see myself as an Australian Modernist poet with hybrid connections to France where I lived in the 1970s, to the USA (through reading) and the UK where I’ve lived since 1979. These many influences have coalesced and made me more ‘global’. I would also define myself as part of the growing world tradition of women’s poetry that takes its place alongside and, increasingly, within the mainstream tradition. I see myself as ‘political’, with left-liberal goals, underlined by what we used to say in the early excitement of the women’s movement: “The personal is political and vice versa.” I feel that much writing that aspires to influence politically, slips too quickly into propaganda. “Tell the truth but tell it slant” is a good censor to factor in.
For most of my poetry-writing career, I’ve seen Australia from the point of view of an ‘expatriate’ and this has sharpened my quest for ‘belonging’. I had my doubts about leaving Australia – and missing the landscape and my family. Problematic. At the same time, this situation has accentuated the importance of poetry to me. Poets are by nature ‘outsiders’ but living away from Australia has increased my sense of sometimes living between countries in a ‘no-man’s land’.
In an earlier poem, c. 1987, I wrote the following about this:
On this trail I stake my futures,
know that beginnings are old hat
to be recognized like the moon’s stare.
I tell myself this is no fool’s
paradise, floating on clouds. Here
I ape survival, sing my cagey repertoire
and occasionally see myself dancing
in a space where hemispheres meet.
(from ‘International’)
Since those days, I have come to feel more at home in my situation. My overall feeling is that poetry helps to keep me real. and in touch. As poet Moniza Alvi said about my 2006 collection, Circus-Apprentice: “For Katherine Gallagher, it is poetry rather than her native Australia or her adoptive England that is ‘this country you keep coming back to/ that walks you home to yourself’.”
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Katherine Gallagher: All of these factors come into play but the most challenging aspect has been simply dedicating myself to poetry, keeping on, finding time to write despite other demands (job, home, etc.) I have had a few grants for specific projects, but have mostly had to work (classes, workshops) to earn my living. I’ve usually done supply-teaching or poetry residencies/visits in schools. A grant can be an extremely useful spur, encouragement and affirmation.
However, the writing is only a first step. Getting published is always problematic – every poet will attest to that. Regarding my books, I have been lucky to meet interested people, usually with a connection back to Australia who’ve given me vital assistance and made a link for me into publication. Similarly, networking within groups – sometimes local ones such as the Poetry Society Stanza group in the UK or women’s groups/poetry groups here and in Australia have helped to provide that sense of community, continuity and support so necessary.
It was heartening and exciting to be invited to participate in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and the Australian Poetry Festival’s Inventing the Tradition in 2010 when I went back to Australia to help promote my latest collection, Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2010, distributed by Eleanor Brasch Enterprises). Home turf – and meeting many poets who’d formerly been only names on the page . . .
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Katherine Gallagher: I’m not an academic and have only a peripheral interest in poetics, literary theory and linguistics. I find newspapers, biography, history, letters and literary history very useful as inspiration for poems, and Google has made research much easier. I like doing mixed-media sequences, involving art, music and sculpture: anything that brings the writing life up-close and varies it.
I’m a fan of short stories too, especially Katherine Mansfield’s. Her stories capture vivid images and incidents with an immediacy and intensity which I see as very akin to poetry. In fact, I wrote and published short stories before giving up in the mid-Eighties because of restrictions of time and money. I had to choose between stories and poetry. Poetry was my first love, so . .
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Katherine Gallagher: This is one of those questions such as, “How long is a piece of string?” I suppose the easiest answer is that ‘Australian poetry’ is poetry about Australia or highlighting Australian experience in some way, and usually written by Australians, possibly hybrids. There’s an article in this month’s Australian Book Review (June, 2011) exploring the paradoxes in ‘Australian-ness’ apropos of the Miles Franklin Award. I think the long-running worry about the ‘Australian factor’ in literature is probably past its sell-by date and suggests a continuing concern which has little relevance any more.
And yes, inasmuch as one gets to be defined, I see myself as an ‘Australian-poet’ but part of the British wing of Australian poetry. I am emphatically not a ‘foreigner’. In Australia, I’m often referred to as a UK poet, as happened recently in the Victorian Writer and The Age. Oh dear. But I don’t feel I’m a UK poet. I’m an Australian-born poet who lives in the UK, I’m a hybrid with allegiances to both cultures. Leaving your country of birth doesn’t mean that you leave it behind. It is part of you.
People leave their country for a host of reasons, and in my case, I lived there for the first thirty-three years of my life and have my books distributed there; also, I have many members of my family there and visit every couple of years or so when I can afford it. My Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems was published by Arc Publications in April and was distributed in Australia later in 2010. I went there to do readings and general promotion of my work in August-September, 2010.
In June, 2009, I was interviewed for the ABC’s POETICA programme. That was a marvellous, wide-reaching experience. Also, I am very pleased to be included in Australian anthologies, recent examples being Motherlode (the 2009 Puncher & Wattmann women’s anthology edited by Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse) and Antipodes (Phoenix Education, 2010, ed. Margaret Bradstock). The internet has greatly facilitated communication internationally and there’s less emphasis on nationalism for its own sake. So I guess that Auden got it right when he said that a poet’s hope was to be “like some valley cheese,/ local, but prized elsewhere”.
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?
Katherine Gallagher: At the Australian Poetry Festival, 2010, Inventing the Tradition, organised by the Poets’ Union, I was amazed at the complexity and richness of the poetry being read and discussed, by a range of poets, many of them academics. I think David McCooey in his article ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’ (Agenda, Australian issue) deftly explores and sums up the situation of Australian poetry at present, with pointers to the future:
Australian poetry, then, is a poetry of survival. Those who practise it have to survive the condition of being a poet in a time and place mostly indifferent to poetry and poets. As readers we survive poetry, even poems that can look like threats. But the poetry might also survive us.
Contemporary Australian poetry survives by responding, as I’ve suggested, in various material ways to the difficulties of publishing in a limited market. But it also survives through various types of poetic renewal (which I have termed the ‘new lyricism’). Renewal can be formal (such as the recent attraction to the verse novel), but it can also be less obvious. It can be about a deep interaction with the world (and ceasing to care about looking ‘Australian’) and with a profound and local engagement with what appear to be basic categories of literature: the uncanny and the lyric mode.
And so even as Australian poetry appears to be declining, it returns, stranger and tougher than before. . .
Of course, it’s difficult to generalise about a nation’s poetry – so many styles and allegiances within the overall picture. But today, the debates are ongoing – with considerable sophistication, a mark of maturity.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
Katherine Gallagher: At a time when climate change is hastening our dependence on international co-operation and insights into the way we live, poetry is an invaluable many-sided mirror, a powerhouse of communication. It is one of the great arts.
Our world is increasingly global but we live in diverse cultures, usually with a diversity of languages. Poetry International Web is a uniquely global wonder-bank of poetry. Our respective poetries provide a place where we can debate the differences, similarities, merits, inspirations and prospects for the future. We must hold up the poetry mirror to ourselves and the rest of the world from childhood onwards. It is a matter of urgency.
London, June 2011
Katherine Gallagher: When did I start writing poetry? Around 1964. And that was by accident more or less, as a result of reading The Penguin Book of Australian Verse with my then boyfriend who was doing a thesis on a neglected Australian poet. I belong to that generation who had a very British-oriented education and it was suddenly amazing to be reading poems relating to Australian experience. We also read from other poetries: British (Alvarez’s New Poetry), New Zealand, Japanese, French and American.
All these poets, and particularly those in the Penguin Australian Verse sparked off ideas and I said, “I’m going to write some of this stuff.” This was the mid-sixties, and in Australia, poetry was becoming more noticed, largely through lively, well-attended readings, sometimes politically inspired (this was also a time of agitation for Aboriginal voting rights), and a rise in performance events. Unfortunately, my love relationship wasn’t going as I’d hoped, but it had provided a spark, and I had the “poetry bug” for life. I suppose it says something about my political idealism at the time that my first-ever poem, ‘Life-line’, was a response to the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1965, an event that stirred Victoria to widespread protest. It was published in Poetry (Sydney) in 1966 and later became ‘Poem for the Executioners’, appearing with a few changes in The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse (ed. Peter Porter, OUP, 1996). It starts:
This is a blinding place.
Only the hangmen see
fixing the knot of shame
upon their chosen tree.
As for the motivation to continue to write poetry, that initial impetus was spurred on in the late 1960s, early 1970s by the international women’s movement with its diverse and exciting possibilities opened up through networking and the appearance of all-women poetry anthologies such as Rising Tides (USA, c. 1960) and Mother I’m Rooted (Australia, 1975) showing women they had a ‘voice’ to reclaim. Today, the option of writing poetry seems to have been there for years as a key to identity, an idea of self, offering perspectives – a way of seeing, a way of life. Indeed speaking from now, over forty years later, the idea of not writing poetry is unthinkable. Sometimes I remind myself that it came to me by accident. What if . . .?? There’s no answer to that. My continuing motivation is also focused partly by the next question of who inspired me.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
Katherine Gallagher: In the great excitement of ‘discovering’ poetry in my late twenties, I was amazed to see how much Australian poetry had been written. I discovered Judith Wright, my ‘poetry godmother’ – a great poet and trailblazer, and in many ways, my greatest influence; also A.D. Hope, Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, Francis Webb, James McAuley, David Campbell, John Shaw Neilson and various younger poets. Mostly blokes, of course. Women poets were only getting geared up and it was difficult to write without an existing women’s poetry tradition. I published my first poem in 1966 as K.M. Gallagher, but shortly after changed my name to Katherine. In the general ferment around Melbourne University and the Victorian Fellowship of Writers, I met and read poets such as Judith Rodriguez, Vincent Buckley, Philip Martin, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Anne Elder, Kris Hemensley and Bruce Dawe. What I knew was very much a ‘Melbourne’ scene. But a lot was happening elsewhere, and the Les Murray-Robert Adamson-John Tranter Sydney ‘phenomenon’ was about to take off.
In 1964, I started teaching at Newlands High School, Coburg, in the northern suburbs. During the year, teaching kept me too busy for writing poetry but in the summers of 1965 and 1967, I attended two eye-opening seminars on Australian literature at Armidale’s University of New England, in northern New South Wales. These were my first personal contacts with national literary names – Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally, David Ireland, the young Les Murray who was being talked about by the ABC’s Clement Semmler as the “poetry voice” of the future, and various others. Gwen Harwood, later so significant in 20th-century Australian poetry, wasn’t being ‘talked about’ as a national name as yet.
At the 1967 conference, I showed Judith Wright some of my poems. She was extremely kind and supportive, told me to read widely, especially the Elizabethans, the Metaphysicals, the Augustans and the Moderns; talked of how in her second year at Sydney University, she’d dropped out of her Honours English course which seemed to be “Beowulf and more Beowulf”, and had persuaded her father to let her stay on but to use the time reading in the library instead – Asiatic literatures as well as European. Handing me my poems, she said, “Keep going, you’ve got something there” – words I needed to hear.
For beginners, that sort of encouragement is crucial. Besides, at that time, there were virtually no workshops to give poets the training and lift-off necessary to sustain them as fledgling poets.
Another important step on the way was having my first poem published in 1966, in Poetry, the then Australian Poetry Society’s magazine. Placed next to a poem by the already well-known Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and called ‘Life-line’, it, as noted earlier, was a protest piece inspired by the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Victoria.
Later, in 1968, I attended a workshop led by Judith Wright and Bruce Dawe prior to the 1968 Adelaide Festival. I’d greatly admired Dawe’s satiric edge and his ability to combine the colloquial and the lyrical in an authentic, dramatic voice. He was also a keen reader of American poetry and read us lots of James Dickey and Donald Hall as well as his own work. Judith Wright also read from her poems, occasionally saying, “I think I’d write that differently now.” At the time, I couldn’t believe how she could be ‘dismissive’ of some of her earlier poems, but in effect, this was good training for a poet – to know that nothing is set in stone.
Quoting Blake, Wright told us that perception was the great secret of it all. If we wanted to be poets, we’d have to observe well. She gave us haiku exercises, and talked about the “spirit of haiku” – which has remained a life-long interest for me. After all that, I felt I was on my way to becoming a poet. Growing up on a farm at Eastville, I had the landscape – knew every stick and stone in some places. But now, almost suddenly, poetry became my way of seeing. . .
Today, my style has greatly diversified; I still like to use the lyric voice but have expanded it into other voices – monologues, collages and the surreal. I often use set forms – for example, the pantoum, sonnet and villanelle. With time, with changes in experience, one’s poetry develops and becomes more various. But the basic core remains. I’m a lyric poet and in my various collections, I’ve drawn on my different worlds: Australia, Britain — particularly London — and France. My subjects mostly centre around the journey, place, exile, and belonging. I’m passionately interested in voice, and like to write in a mix of colloquial and more formal tones – celebratory, serious, idiosyncratic. I love satire, the surreal – circling the ironies. When I started, I wanted to write on social issues such as racism and education and several poems were published in the Victorian Secondary Teachers’ Magazine. To quote Stevie Smith: “Poetry is a strong way out.”
In 1969, I finally left my teaching job and travelled overland to London. But leaving wasn’t easy. I was thirty-three and needing to ‘get away’ after an unhappy love-affair. As I said:
It would be my first trip,
thousands of miles past a dread
of leaving – I saw Australia draped
Dali-style on a thread. . . .
(from ‘Farewell Poem’)
London was another great discovery, as I suddenly found myself face-to-face with my British heritage and that included British poetry. However, my next move was to Paris where I lived from 1971 to 1979 and where I met my husband, Bernard. At this time, French, which I’d studied at school and university, became another important interest. All these diversions and influences – art, poetry, history, landscapes, people.
Nowadays, my reading is more wide-ranging, with an emphasis on the poem rather than the poet. In the UK, I belong to the Poetry Society and the Poetry Book Society, and in Australia, the Poets’ Union, Melbourne Poets, the Victorian Writers’ Centre, and now, the recently formed Australian Poetry. Of course, over the years, in the global upsweep of English-speaking poetry, American poetry has come to dominate the scene. But everything has become more global and it’s a challenge to keep up. Poetry is a matter of taste, but for me, poets such as the Americans Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty, Adrienne Rich, Michael Donaghy and British/Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney, Carol Rumens, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and Penelope Shuttle sit alongside Les Murray, Peter Porter, Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood, Fay Zwicky, Robert Adamson et al. And then there’s the profusion of younger poets, particularly British and Australian.
Your question asked: “What’s changed?” Everything has, in a sense, particularly for English-language poetry by women; this has vastly expanded. Since I started writing back in the 1960s, due to modern communications developments – internet, broadband, online publication – plus population growth and changes in actual travel, everything’s become more global. Our planet has been transformed. I guess the most important overall change for me is that I’ve become a hybrid, with allegiances to various cultures. Australia counts but as I set it out in my poem Hybrid, life is more in perspective:
I have swallowed a country,
it sits quietly inside me.
Days go by when I scarcely
realise it is there. . .
I talk to this country,
tell it, You’re not forgotten,
nor ever could be.
I depend on you –
cornucopia packed close
with daylight moons
and bony coasts,
the dust of eucalyptus
on my teeth; mudded rivers
burnished smooth
under the cobalt crystal
of a lucent sky.
It is my reference-point
for other landscapes
that, after thirty years,
have multiplied my skies.
As far as poetry generally is concerned, we are able to ‘read the world’, especially thanks to translation, but as humans we need also to keep in focus the regional, including our local suburb. “The danger of travelling is how/ it takes you over . . .” (‘Plane-Journey Momentums’).
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
Katherine Gallagher: My poetry has ‘followed’ my life – too much, some, including myself, might say. However, my ‘everyday world’ is the source of my inspiration, the stepping-off point. When I read a poet, whatever his/her style, I like to feel there is a real person, an authentic voice, behind the poem. Everything in poetry points to the great momentum and sum of human experience. However, it’s the poet’s life which provides the starting points onto the ladder of the poem, whether straightforward lyric or surreal. It’s important to remember Robert Frost’s dictum that in writing poetry, we’re not trying to tell people something they didn’t already know – we’re trying to give them “the shock of recognition”.
So I agree with the adage that it’s best “to write what you know” but to explore the unknown ‘knowns’ in that everyday so that it’s possible to bring them into precise focus and make engaging, exciting pieces. In exploring experience, poets can learn to make the ordinary extraordinary, to discover and develop their art from the quotidian. I would like to write/paint ‘the world’ in metaphor – one attempt is the poem Circus-Apprentice (Arc, 2006): “I’m leaning it all – acrobatics, clowning,/ riding bareback and trapeze,/ fire from a sleeve: my hand’s a wand.”
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
Katherine Gallagher: My response to this question is related to the answer to question 3. I am a lyric poet, and hence subjectivity plays an important role in introducing the reader to my thoughts and feelings on a range of subjects. At the same time, I have expanded my range to vary use of the lyric ‘I’, to bring in other voices, monologues, narrative and lyric sequences, generally arriving at more objective forms. Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” I guess most poets have taken Emily’s advice and tried to avoid mere confessional poetry, mere “telling it how it was”. Poets need a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity in their writing.
The late Peter Porter wrote an introduction to my book, Fish-rings on Water (Forest Books, 1989) which included the following:
Just as everybody likes tunes in music, so our taste, if we admit to it, is for lyricism in poetry. The last two hundred years have seen verse surrender to prose so much of the public’s attention – stories, comments, arguments, drama, human character even: in return poetry has been given the role of custodian of language and has become the place where psychological understanding, and the machinery of words come together. This does not mean that poets today cannot make poems out of the full range of experience which gets into prose fiction and journalism. But it does suggest that what they will be seeking is a distillation of the wider world, a sense of packed feeling, of much contained in little, and that the words chosen will make a memorable shape in their own right. . .
I feel this summary is what I am angling for – a compression of feeling, but poetry which contains dramatic exploration geared to projecting and recalling “heightened states of feeling”.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
Katherine Gallagher: I see myself as an Australian Modernist poet with hybrid connections to France where I lived in the 1970s, to the USA (through reading) and the UK where I’ve lived since 1979. These many influences have coalesced and made me more ‘global’. I would also define myself as part of the growing world tradition of women’s poetry that takes its place alongside and, increasingly, within the mainstream tradition. I see myself as ‘political’, with left-liberal goals, underlined by what we used to say in the early excitement of the women’s movement: “The personal is political and vice versa.” I feel that much writing that aspires to influence politically, slips too quickly into propaganda. “Tell the truth but tell it slant” is a good censor to factor in.
For most of my poetry-writing career, I’ve seen Australia from the point of view of an ‘expatriate’ and this has sharpened my quest for ‘belonging’. I had my doubts about leaving Australia – and missing the landscape and my family. Problematic. At the same time, this situation has accentuated the importance of poetry to me. Poets are by nature ‘outsiders’ but living away from Australia has increased my sense of sometimes living between countries in a ‘no-man’s land’.
In an earlier poem, c. 1987, I wrote the following about this:
On this trail I stake my futures,
know that beginnings are old hat
to be recognized like the moon’s stare.
I tell myself this is no fool’s
paradise, floating on clouds. Here
I ape survival, sing my cagey repertoire
and occasionally see myself dancing
in a space where hemispheres meet.
(from ‘International’)
Since those days, I have come to feel more at home in my situation. My overall feeling is that poetry helps to keep me real. and in touch. As poet Moniza Alvi said about my 2006 collection, Circus-Apprentice: “For Katherine Gallagher, it is poetry rather than her native Australia or her adoptive England that is ‘this country you keep coming back to/ that walks you home to yourself’.”
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
Katherine Gallagher: All of these factors come into play but the most challenging aspect has been simply dedicating myself to poetry, keeping on, finding time to write despite other demands (job, home, etc.) I have had a few grants for specific projects, but have mostly had to work (classes, workshops) to earn my living. I’ve usually done supply-teaching or poetry residencies/visits in schools. A grant can be an extremely useful spur, encouragement and affirmation.
However, the writing is only a first step. Getting published is always problematic – every poet will attest to that. Regarding my books, I have been lucky to meet interested people, usually with a connection back to Australia who’ve given me vital assistance and made a link for me into publication. Similarly, networking within groups – sometimes local ones such as the Poetry Society Stanza group in the UK or women’s groups/poetry groups here and in Australia have helped to provide that sense of community, continuity and support so necessary.
It was heartening and exciting to be invited to participate in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and the Australian Poetry Festival’s Inventing the Tradition in 2010 when I went back to Australia to help promote my latest collection, Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2010, distributed by Eleanor Brasch Enterprises). Home turf – and meeting many poets who’d formerly been only names on the page . . .
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
Katherine Gallagher: I’m not an academic and have only a peripheral interest in poetics, literary theory and linguistics. I find newspapers, biography, history, letters and literary history very useful as inspiration for poems, and Google has made research much easier. I like doing mixed-media sequences, involving art, music and sculpture: anything that brings the writing life up-close and varies it.
I’m a fan of short stories too, especially Katherine Mansfield’s. Her stories capture vivid images and incidents with an immediacy and intensity which I see as very akin to poetry. In fact, I wrote and published short stories before giving up in the mid-Eighties because of restrictions of time and money. I had to choose between stories and poetry. Poetry was my first love, so . .
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
Katherine Gallagher: This is one of those questions such as, “How long is a piece of string?” I suppose the easiest answer is that ‘Australian poetry’ is poetry about Australia or highlighting Australian experience in some way, and usually written by Australians, possibly hybrids. There’s an article in this month’s Australian Book Review (June, 2011) exploring the paradoxes in ‘Australian-ness’ apropos of the Miles Franklin Award. I think the long-running worry about the ‘Australian factor’ in literature is probably past its sell-by date and suggests a continuing concern which has little relevance any more.
And yes, inasmuch as one gets to be defined, I see myself as an ‘Australian-poet’ but part of the British wing of Australian poetry. I am emphatically not a ‘foreigner’. In Australia, I’m often referred to as a UK poet, as happened recently in the Victorian Writer and The Age. Oh dear. But I don’t feel I’m a UK poet. I’m an Australian-born poet who lives in the UK, I’m a hybrid with allegiances to both cultures. Leaving your country of birth doesn’t mean that you leave it behind. It is part of you.
People leave their country for a host of reasons, and in my case, I lived there for the first thirty-three years of my life and have my books distributed there; also, I have many members of my family there and visit every couple of years or so when I can afford it. My Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems was published by Arc Publications in April and was distributed in Australia later in 2010. I went there to do readings and general promotion of my work in August-September, 2010.
In June, 2009, I was interviewed for the ABC’s POETICA programme. That was a marvellous, wide-reaching experience. Also, I am very pleased to be included in Australian anthologies, recent examples being Motherlode (the 2009 Puncher & Wattmann women’s anthology edited by Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse) and Antipodes (Phoenix Education, 2010, ed. Margaret Bradstock). The internet has greatly facilitated communication internationally and there’s less emphasis on nationalism for its own sake. So I guess that Auden got it right when he said that a poet’s hope was to be “like some valley cheese,/ local, but prized elsewhere”.
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?
Katherine Gallagher: At the Australian Poetry Festival, 2010, Inventing the Tradition, organised by the Poets’ Union, I was amazed at the complexity and richness of the poetry being read and discussed, by a range of poets, many of them academics. I think David McCooey in his article ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’ (Agenda, Australian issue) deftly explores and sums up the situation of Australian poetry at present, with pointers to the future:
Australian poetry, then, is a poetry of survival. Those who practise it have to survive the condition of being a poet in a time and place mostly indifferent to poetry and poets. As readers we survive poetry, even poems that can look like threats. But the poetry might also survive us.
Contemporary Australian poetry survives by responding, as I’ve suggested, in various material ways to the difficulties of publishing in a limited market. But it also survives through various types of poetic renewal (which I have termed the ‘new lyricism’). Renewal can be formal (such as the recent attraction to the verse novel), but it can also be less obvious. It can be about a deep interaction with the world (and ceasing to care about looking ‘Australian’) and with a profound and local engagement with what appear to be basic categories of literature: the uncanny and the lyric mode.
And so even as Australian poetry appears to be declining, it returns, stranger and tougher than before. . .
Of course, it’s difficult to generalise about a nation’s poetry – so many styles and allegiances within the overall picture. But today, the debates are ongoing – with considerable sophistication, a mark of maturity.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
Katherine Gallagher: At a time when climate change is hastening our dependence on international co-operation and insights into the way we live, poetry is an invaluable many-sided mirror, a powerhouse of communication. It is one of the great arts.
Our world is increasingly global but we live in diverse cultures, usually with a diversity of languages. Poetry International Web is a uniquely global wonder-bank of poetry. Our respective poetries provide a place where we can debate the differences, similarities, merits, inspirations and prospects for the future. We must hold up the poetry mirror to ourselves and the rest of the world from childhood onwards. It is a matter of urgency.
London, June 2011
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