IP eNews 52

[David talks about how My Planets: a fictive memoir, his latest project, fulfills his dream to reconstruct his early years as well as to continue his ground breaking work with digital media.]

My Planets is certainly my most ambitious project to date. It's a story that began at my birth, when I was given up for adoption by my biological mother. In those days, women who had children 'out of wedlock' were pressured to give them up for adoption, supposedly for the sake of the child.

Like other women in her circumstances, my mother spent the latter months of her pregnancy in a 'home', which was little better than the female factories of the 19th Century. The inmates were regarded as fallen women who had to atone for their sins. So they had to work for their keep, often in demeaning jobs, remaining invisible to the wider society until they had given birth. Is it any wonder that so many women came away from this incarceration psychologically scarred, felling doubly guilty for abandoning their child.

The Planets project became my way of coming to terms with my missing past. In a very real sense, I was a part of a Stolen Generation with no rights to my past. For years I was told I effectively had no past, that all records of my early years and my biological family had been destroyed in a fire. This was a lie. In another version, the records had survived but the originals had been shipped to me in Australia. They never arrived, and no copies had been kept at the home. All they could tell me was that my biological mother had given the social workers the impression that she was quite intelligent, and she was thought to be quite attractive.

From fragments of evidence, I've determined that I was in a Jewish orphanage for the first two years of DR_KSP

my life. I was fostered out briefly, but then taken away from the foster home when it was determined that I was being pampered too much and was scoring low on developmental tests.

Eventually, I was adopted by a self-employed truck driver and his wife. He seemed about eight feet tall to my eyes, and I idolized him. But he had a congenital heart problem, worsened by smoking, and suffered a heart attack one 4th of July (American Independence Day) while we were in a field setting off fireworks. He died the next day, and I was alone again. I say alone because my adoptive mother had a mental disorder that she'd kept mostly in check while he was alive but which steadily worsened after his death.

For years, I had no interest in pursuing my biological roots. I'd formed the view that opening yourself up emotionally led to hurt, so setting up barriers seemed the safest thing to do. Writing became a means of keeping society at arm's length, reshaping it, dealing with it on my own terms.

Even after finding my biological family, my emotional engagement with them has been...careful. I was keen to gather as much evidence about what they knew – and what they thought they knew – about my early life, but I did this as an objective observer, a mediator between often conflicting opinions they offered to show themselves in a positive light, what was real.

That's where the central metaphor of The Planets came in, providing a structure for my reflection, a context for situating elements of the emerging story. As I reconstructed these realities, I could see them playing off against each other, almost contrapuntally, gaining more meaning as they were set against each other from different spatial perspectives. Always interested in the suggestive qualities of music, I decided to add Holst's The Planets Suite as a key element and to use the mythological associations of the individual planets as locales for themes I discovered along the way.

Composing the texts for the work was an organic process, with the content and themes determining their form rather than the other way around. So there are sections of poetry, prose poetry, literary prose and straight documentary.

As this stage, My Planets is a book but also an eBook, with spoken word and musical enhancements. The next step is to make it into a film. I certainly have enough resources at hand, from several trips back to my birthplace and reams of film and audio footage. I've had preliminary discussions with the staff at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, who have expressed interest in collaborating with me on producing an interactive work as well as a film. It's a good place to work and would bring me full circle from my first substantial digital title The Gallery, which I refined in residence there back in 2000.

[Tongues of Ash is Keith Westwater's first book of poetry and was the winner of the Best First Book in IP Picks 2011. A New Zealander, Keith works for the agency involved with assisting the city of Christchurch following the devastating earthquakes of the past few years. Keith is interviewed by Assistant Editor, Kayla Clibborn.]

KC: Your first published poetry collection, Tongues of Ash, has been inspired and driven by your love and appreciation of the New Zealand landscape. What is it about the New Zealand landscape that inspires you?

KW: I think my inspiration is more to do with landscapes per se than specifically the New Zealand landscape (which is the one I happen to be most familiar with and which has great variety of form and ecology anyway). But I also think the notion that the physical beauty of a landscape must be inspirational for a poet is not necessarily true. I drafted one poem for 15 years and I never got it to really 'work' until I stopped trying to describe a particular landscape's 'beauty' in romantic terms and wrote instead about my connectedness and memories associated with that landscape. It was published on its first submission in this form.

I therefore think my 'inspiration' arises more from the interconnectedness that landscape has with places I know, my memories, and my personal identity than from the landscape on its own. Having said that, if a reader is reminded of the beauty of New Zealand landscape when reading a poem then that is fine by me.

KC: Place is obviously an important part of your creative process. Do you find it takes on its own voice or character in your poetry?

KW: Again, there is a strong connection between place, landscape and memory in the genesis of many of my poems. I have a theory that when we enter a landscape, even if we are just looking at it, the landscape is also entering us. This reciprocity, the entering of the person by the landscape, is akin to the 'terroir' of a wine, that peculiar mix of soil type, climate, aspect, and water availability which is said to provide a wine with its unique character. (Interestingly, 'terroir' broadly means 'a sense of place'.) I think we are all collectors of the terroir of landscapes or places that enter us, whether we are aware that they have done so or not.

When we leave a place that has entered us in this way, it is always with us. Maybe when we return, even in our imagination, we are sampling from the collection of terroir that has accumulated in our memory. In my case, poems (sometimes a bit 'corked'), rather than bottles of wine are the result.

KC: Through your observations as seen in your poems, you have addressed many issues relevant to New Zealand that reflect themes likely to appeal to an international audience e.g., the issue of homelessness in The Bucket Man Poems, where you pay homage to Tinakori Hill resident, Robert Jones. Do you hope to paint a certain picture of New Zealand for your international audience, while encouraging them to consider similar themes and issues in their own homeland?

KW: With The Bucket Man Poems I was interested in reflecting the behaviour of the Bucket Man through the mirror of the mainly 'Christian' society in which he lived. I use Christian references and allusions in the poems to compare the Bucket Man's own charitable acts towards other homeless people with the acts of the non-homeless he came in daily contact with.

In one sense, I am building on a painting by Duncan Smith of the Bucket Man created some years before his death, which portrayed him walking a wet Wellington Street while behind him was a crucifix and a street-lamp 'halo'. Duncan Smith said at the time that he was asking through the painting for people to reflect on what they might say to the Bucket Man if they met him on the street.

In another sense I am trying to draw attention to the paradox of the Bucket Man's homelessness and isolation in an urban environment and also to the KeithW civic community's response to this. (Shortly after the Bucket Man's death, the local City Council proposed banning homeless people from grouping together or from frequenting certain places in the city; there was an immediate public outcry which stopped in their tracks any changes of this nature to the city's bylaws.)

It wasn't my intention in writing the poems to reflect themes to an international audience nor to necessarily paint a 'New Zealand' picture; if, however, a reader 'goes there' with these poems, then that is OK too.

KC: In the final section of the work, Tourists on Safari for Nirvana, you explore and consider your experiences in other countries. The title alludes to the idea of travellers' constant quest for greener pastures; do you think people place too much emphasis on the foreign beauty of overseas destinations, in turn missing out on the beauty of their own home?

KW: These days (younger) tourists seem to be on a constant quest for adventure, new adrenalin-raising activities, or experiences which bring an element of possible danger to them. In this respect it's all a bit Ernest Hemingway-ish. I'm not too sure whether 'beauty' (or much else for that matter) has a look-in any more. I am trying to say this in the poem 'Yunnan Pines, near Shangri-La', which the phrase 'Tourists on safari for nirvana' comes from. The line continues...'or one more bungee/jump; no surely/Shangri-La left long ago/for some other earth'.

KC: What is your reasoning behind the title, Tongues of Ash? Since the 2010 Canterbury earthquake, you have worked as a Training Manager for the Earthquake Commission; is there a relationship between this role and the title of your work? How has your close relationship with the rebuilding of areas devastated by the earthquakes influenced your poetry?

KW: The poems in Tongues of Ash were all written before the first Canterbury earthquake on 4 September 2010 and therefore before I became involved in my current role with the Earthquake Commission. The title of the collection comes from a line in the poem 'Navigation Point on the Desert Road' (The cutting's orange side/speaks millennia in tongues of ash) and refers to the layers of ash that can be seen in road cuttings on the Desert Road, the main road crossing the North Island's volcanic plateau. These layers provide a visible record of the volcanic eruptions which have occurred over long periods of time on the plateau.

Since starting my role with the Earthquake Commission, I have been travelling to Christchurch almost weekly and have experienced many of the aftershocks (including the 6.3 magnitude quakes in February and June of this year). I initially thought that this experience would be a fertile ground for poems, that like liquefaction, they would just bubble to the surface. It has, however, taken about a year for this to start happening for me and I am only now embarking on a series of poems that are to do with the Canterbury earthquakes.

SC: It's very difficult for me to think of a poetry that isn't part of this 'sub-genre' because almost all language, I think, is profoundly ecological. There's certainly a large body of eco-poetic theory out there, but the poetry it deals with is very diverse. However, in terms of what we might think of as 'nature poetry', or poetry about non-human environments, I have a selective engagement with much of it.

As a younger writer I was profoundly influenced by poets like Robert Gray and Martin Harrison, whose

poems are remarkable for their often brilliant articulations of what it looks, sounds and/or feels like to be in the world. Others like Michael Farrell and Peter Minter have excited me because they suggest new possibilities for writing about the environment that are yet to be explored by many of the more widely-recognised Australian 'nature poets'. More broadly, Patrick White, David Malouf and even Midnight Oil have made me keenly aware of the historicity of Australian landscapes, and of why we need poetry to evoke this historicity.

KC: You experiment with form and style, (breaking worlds in half, skipping lines) which all leave an impact on the reader. When you decide to break some of these conventions, do you have a particular goal or type of impact in mind?

SC: Poets should scrutinise not only the meanings of words, but also the syntactical currents running through and between them. Splitting open a word, for example, is a more dramatic version of the line-break: the syntax trembles, producing divergent rhythms and exposing hitherto hidden sounds. A poem needs to dance unpredictably, otherwise it's worn out, or it's just prose. Here, the word 'dance' relates to my interest in the performativity of poetry, something that began in childhood when I discovered Michael Jackson. For me, more than any other musician, Jackson is a breathing nexus of lyric, rhythm and dance; you can see how his bodily movements translate to vocal punctuations, which in turn produce those unforgettable hooks. Jackson showed us, in Puff Daddy's words, "that you could see the beat".

The closer that poetry is to an embodied, musical performance, the more often words need to be broken up or even omitted – many of the world's songpoetry traditions show us this, as do many of Jackson's songs.

KC: There is a certain metamorphism to a lot of your poetry, between people and landscape; 'Broome Song' and 'Broome Beach Art' come to mind. Where does the inspiration for this kind of insight come from?

SC: Part of what makes poetry so special to me is its StuartC

power to propose new, exciting connections between hitherto disparate parts of the world. The poem is flexible enough to allow radically different kinds of existence to share the same space, as opposed to demanding that one 'thing' be more 'real' or more present than another. This fluid understanding of the world is particularly important in much Aboriginal philosophy, where features of the landscape can be all kinds of different things, depending on the context.

Broome in particular interests me because it is like a microcosm of the continent as a whole: to understand how the landscape was produced by Dreaming tracks, then marred with massacre sites, resort hotels and McDonald's, one needs to be able to visualise quite surreal forms of metamorphosis as fundamental to Australian history and ontology.

KC: Is this concentration on the relationship between people and landscape, part of a personal self-discovery of your own?

SC: Certainly. One of my main preoccupations during the writing of this book was about how to come to terms with my position on the edge of an enormous country. Australians spend a lot of time looking out to sea (and buying houses close to it!), instead of thinking about what lies stretched out behind them.

As is clear in the book, however, by 'edge' I'm not referring only to a geographical location. As a non-Aboriginal Australian I live on the periphery of an enormous, unfathomable body of history and culture. I am forever aware of the fact that my presence here, and my family history, is inextricably related to more than two centuries of dispossession of Aboriginal lands and repression of Aboriginal peoples' rights. How to speak and, indeed, how to live with this awareness was a driving question throughout much of Edge Music.

[Kayla Clibborn interviews Guy Salvidge, author of the diastopian novel Yellowcake Springs, 2011 winner of the IP Picks Best Fiction award.]

KC: Both Yellowcake Springs and your previous novel, The Kingdom of Four Rivers, depict post-apocalyptic, dystopian futures reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. Have you drawn inspiration
from any particular authors or texts for your work?

GS: I've always written dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction. My first story that I can recall writing was called 'The Day After' and it was a gruesome tale about a group of boys hiding in a fallout shelter
after the bomb. One by one, they go up to the surface and never return. I was twelve when I wrote that.

I certainly read those famous Huxley and Orwell texts, but a novel that influenced me profoundly at
a tender age was Robert Swindells' Brother in the Land ≠ another post-nuclear tale.

As an adult, my major influences include J G
Ballard, William S Burroughs, Harry Crews, Raymond Chandler and Philip K Dick, all of whom can be considered writers of the apocalypse in their varying ways. In researching Yellowcake Springs, I also read a number of factual accounts relating to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

KC: You have dedicated this novel to your two children, with the message, "may they never have to live through this". What concerns or fears do you have for our society in the future in terms of themes you have dealt with in the book, such as overpopulation and environmental decay?

GS: We seem to be living on the precipice. I've always felt this way, as though our civilisation can and will be swept away by forces beyond our control.

When I was a child, nuclear war seemed to be the major threat, and so I was always writing about that. By then, the Cold War was over and the nuclear threat was fading. It wasn't until I saw Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 that I realised that
climate change would be the global threat of this era, and that I could write about it in fiction in much the same way that others had written about nuclear war previously.

Overpopulation, both as a practical and a philosophical consideration, is close to the heart of
Yellowcake Springs. One of the ironies of our lives is that the planet would be far better off without us. Having children seems an especially foolish thing to do in these times, and yet I love my children more than anything and feel that they have massively enriched my life.

Here's the crux of the overpopulation problem – no one thinks of his or herself as an unnecessary surplus.

KC: Did you find it challenging to appropriate your factual research and knowledge of the issues facing our society and their potential consequences, into a fictional form?

GS: In truth, I find it more of a challenge NOT to sketch the issues facing our society on a canvas

called 'the future'. My mind is always jumping five or ten steps ahead, considering possibilities that may never eventuate. It should be pointed out, however, that I don't consider Yellowcake Springs to be an exercise in prophecy – merely a warning in the same way that Nineteen Eighty-Four was intended to warn the people of 1950 of the dangers of totalitarianism.

But if you want to write about the possibility of nuclear power being used in Australia, then you have to set your story in the future anyway, due to the long lead time it would take for such projects to be completed. What we call 'the future' is something akin to a bomb testing site, a place where we can play out our desires and fears without being harmed
ourselves. The real challenge for me would be depicting these issues in a contemporary framework.

KC: What made you choose fiction rather than creative non-fiction as a vehicle? Are confronting issues, such as those addressed in Yellowcake
Springs, more easily absorbed through fiction?

GS: Absolutely. In writing fiction, one creates characters for whom the world around them is normal and mundane, even if for us it might appear nightmarish.

Instead of writing a dry tract about the possible
dangers of nuclear power, foreign takeovers and climate change, all of which are pressing issues here in Western Australia, I much prefer to depict these problems imaginatively. One of the reasons for this is
that fiction writers pose questions, they do not offer solutions.

Thus Yellowcake Springs explores some of these issues in a way that doesn't pretend to have all the answers. If these problems were easily solved, then they would be solved. The Fukushima nuclear crisis, which occurred after Yellowcake Springs was completed, brought the issue of nuclear power to the forefront of public consciousness again. Instead of boring readers with a polemic on the dangers of nuclear power, I chose to imagine a scenario in which this debate had been won decades before.

KC: What do you consider to be the appeal of the
post-apocalyptic/dystopian sub-genre of speculative fiction? Do you think it acts as a reversed form of escapism for the audience i.e., offering an exaggerated view of a possible bleak future – prompting an appreciation for reality, rather than a desire to escape it?

GS: Dystopian fiction is necessarily exaggerated, offering extreme visions that provoke readers into responding emotionally and intellectually.

One of the aims of such writing is to allow readers to engage with the issues of the present time in a different context. This desire to confront the issues of our time means that dystopia fiction is anti-escapist.

Personally, I find that problems like climate change
are so vast and seemingly intractable, especially GuyS

given the squabbling between nations and within them, that eventually they become a kind of
background noise. The desire for escape has a powerful pull on us all, a desire which we satisfy with media, entertainment and gaming.

Yellowcake Springs imagines an even more seductive form of escapism, depicting some of the dangers of disengagement from the political process. Dystopian fiction allows us to re-engage with these problems
in a different way.

[Josh Brockbank interviewed Tim Jones, one of two poets who accompanied David on the recent IP tour of New Zealand, about his unapologetically male focused new book, Men Briefly Explained.]

JB: What is it about the father-son relationship that your poetry is trying to unravel/discover?

TJ: I think I'm trying to describe it rather than unravel or discover it. The relationship between fathers and sons has elements of a lot of things – love, emulation, rivalry – much, I suppose, like the relationship between mothers and daughters. I love my Dad very much, and I think the relationship between us is very good now, but it wasn't always easy when I was younger. I think both that love and that tension are in these poems.

JB: A lot of the poetry in Men Briefly Explained seems

to attribute the apathy of married men to stale love and marriage, "Years with a Husband" and "Now What" come to mind. Are these poems designed to serve as a guide for woman, a warning for men, or something deeper?

TJ: "Now What" is actually about a much younger man - me when I was a student, actually; the worst time of my life, when I was depressed without realising it. "Years with a Husband" is one where I (tried to) write from a woman's point of view – I see it as a half-irritated, half-loving poem about a husband who's stuck in his ways. I perceive this danger of 'turning stony' in myself, and it's something I try to avoid. I hope other people will take from these poems what best applies to them!

JB: What kind of feedback did you get from your wife after writing Men Briefly Explained?

TJ: I asked her, and here's what she replied: Her first reaction was to laugh. "Tim never explains anything briefly," was her response. "This is obviously a book of humour." Then, on receiving more information, she said that she was by turns pleased and bemused. She found some sections touching, evocative, occasionally sad, and overall she found the book quite delightful.

I'd just like to stress that these are her own words – but I'm glad she appreciated the humour in these poems!

JB: Do you feel that modern men are losing their masculinity?

TJ: A tricky questions, this. It depends on what you mean by 'masculinity.' Does that mean selfishness, aggression, a propensity to violence, a lack of empathy? If that's what 'masculinity' means, then I think we're better off without it. On the other hand, I do get the sense that many men feel they have lost their previous role (breadwinner etc.) and don't know how to replace it with something meaningful. I'd like to see men, in the widest sense, think of ourselves as carers – for children, for our partners, for other people around us, for the planet.

JB: There is a very strong autobiographical tone to TimJ

your poems. How do you respond to the idea that maybe your book is more of a brief explanation of yourself rather than men in general?

TJ: I have joked that the title of the book would be more accurate if you took the 'n' off the first word in the title – and it would be fair criticism to say that "Middle Class, Middle Aged, Heterosexual White Males Briefly Explained" might also be a more accurate title, though that would make for a very small typeface on the cover. Yes, a lot of the poems are autobiographical, but a number are not – "The Outsider", for instance, or "The Wrong Horse". I'm looking around me as well as looking within.