A Word in Your Ear

This issue, two of our guest poets for our National Poetry Day celebration on 25th August wax lyrical...

Diane Brown, author of Taking My Mother to the Opera, talks to Lynley Edmeades about her debut collection As the Verb Tenses. Both Books are published by Otago University Press.

DB: Did poems play much of a part in your childhood reading?

LE: Not explicitly. Classical music and books, for sure, but poetry was only something I discovered for myself as I got older. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I really started falling for poetry. However, I do remember a time when I was very young, maybe about five or six, when I would run to the back of the paddock that surrounded our house, and climb a tree beside a little stream. Up the tree I used to compose verses to myself, even though I didn’t really know what that was. It all twee rhymes and clichés, but I think I was looking for poetry even then.

DB: Were your parents keen readers themselves?

LE: Yes and no. My mother knew the importance of books and so encouraged us to read, although she and my father never really had time to read themselves when I was a child—it was a busy house! Now that they are older they both read a lot. My mother would put money aside every month to buy my sisters and I books, and I remember the excitement of coming home from school with a new book that was mine to keep (my mother would order them through a school book club).

DB: The early poems in your collection reflect a childhood in rural NZ. There are some funny experiences all beautifully captured. The small yellow truck which runs into the paddock when the father forgets to put the handbrake on, for example. Are you a city person now or does your heart belong to the country?

LE: I don’t really think of myself as either. I do think the land pulls you back, if that’s where you’ve come from. I’ve had the good fortune in the past few years of spending sustained periods of time up in Cambrian Valley in Central Otago. I’ve felt really connected with the land there, and think that eventually my lifestyle will be more suited to the countryside than the city; I crave the slowness and simplicity of that life. But Dunedin has so much to offer and I really love living here. At the same time, I think that some of the childhood poems that reflect a rural NZ, which you mention, specifically belong in my first collection. I suspect it is something that most poets and writers go through at some stage in their early career: the need to revisit some of those developmental years, in an attempt to make sense of our place in the world.

DB:There is a sly self-deprecating sense of humour in many of your poems. I’m thinking of lines like: "it was like a scene from a Victorian novel. Except we were in Masterton". Does humour come naturally to you?

LE: Perhaps, yes. I don’t think it is something you can learn, but I do think it is something that can be cultivated in poetry. I think humour is integral, especially to writers; without it, we would take ourselves too seriously. It also makes the world seem much less broken, momentarily.

DB: You gained a MA in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Queens University in Belfast. Ireland is steeped in poetry and it seems to me that poetry is a much more respected occupation in Ireland than in New Zealand. Why did you go there in the first place and what was this experience like for you?

LE: During some overseas travels I ended up in Belfast for a few months, working in a restaurant and bumming around. I was so struck by the literary landscape of the place, although I had no preconceived ideas about the city at all. I had just come from London, and was really looking for somewhere else to be that could offer an escape from the eddy of a big city. In retrospect I think I was probably homesick: Belfast reminded me a lot of Dunedin, so I felt comfortable and quite relieved to be there.

Upon returning to New Zealand, I got a job at Unity Books in Wellington. After a few years there I then began thinking about doing an MA somewhere. I was quite adamant that I wanted to do it overseas: I felt quite claustrophobic in Wellington, and I found the literary community very difficult to become part of, at that time. I applied for a few places in the UK and when I gained acceptance to the program at Queens, I didn’t bother considering anywhere else.

I spent just over a year in Belfast doing my MA. I was really committed to poetry, very diligent and focused, and I was surrounded by good people who felt the same way. Some of those people became good friends, and together it felt like we were really doing it, the poetry thing. You’re right, Ireland is steeped in poetry and it is a much more respected occupation there. I think being there gave me a lot of confidence in the art form, its necessity in the world. The course itself was stringent and taught me a lot about craft, about the importance of craft. In particular, I was privileged to work with Belfast poet (and inaugural poet laureate of Northern Ireland), Sinéad Morrissey, who taught me a great deal about craft and integrity, for which I am really grateful.

DB: In 2015 in Dunedin I went to a reading by Irish poet Von Groarke. She had just judged the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize and I remember her saying that she found NZ poems much more conversational than Irish poetry. Do you agree with her?

LE: To a degree, yes. I think there was a tendency in New Zealand poetry a few years ago towards the conversational. But there is also that element to Irish poetry too, at times. Perhaps when she says “conversational,” she means “informal”? I think that might be more apt. I think we are lucky in New Zealand to be slightly freer of tradition, in a way; we can experiment with form and tone a lot more. At the same time, I envy the place that poetry has in society in Ireland. They know the importance of it, whereas we are only learning that here. I guess we can’t really have it both ways.

DB: You are now completing a doctoral thesis in the relationship between poetry and the music of avant garde artists, John Cage, Getrude Stein and Caroline Bergvall. And yet the poems in your first collection, As The Verb Tenses are all delightful to read and very accessible. Do you feel your academic work has an influence on your own writing?

LE: I do feel like my academic work has an influence on my poetry. Perhaps it is not obvious in this collection, but I feel like the work I am doing now it is probably more so. My Masters thesis looked at the relationship between poetry and music in the work of John Cage, which comes from a question I was kind of obsessed with for a while: can poetry come close to the affectivity of music? This obsession then formed the genesis of my current PhD, which looks at sound in experimental poetry. Prior to that I had tried to write poetry to accompany several Bach concertos, which I found particularly challenging. Some of this poetry has found its way into As the Verb Tenses, particularly in the series Instrumental. I think there is a lot of sound-related work in the book, but it might not be explicit. I suspect this trope will be more obvious in my second collection.

DB: Although there is a sense of loss in some of your poems the overall emotional tone for me is one of joy. I feel this is not always the received view of NZ poets who are often perceived to be full of doom and hand-wringing. Would you describe yourself as a naturally happy person?

LE: It’s funny you say that, because I feel like there is a vein of loss that runs through the whole collection. I guess where there is joy it is from the sheer delight of language. Maybe there’s a joy in having found language at all. While I think that joy comes naturally to me now, it hasn’t always been the case. I’ve suffered from severe depression and mental illness for most of my adult life. My guess is that I don’t yet have the confidence in my poetic voice to expose some of that stuff, so perhaps the joy of language offers some kind of alternative.

DB: What are your poetry influences?

LE: That’s a tough question. I suspect music is a big influence. I think my academic work is a big influence; it gets my brain going, and I like the feeling of my brain being pulled in different directions. The biggest influence, I suspect, is language itself. I love learning about other languages, about our own language, about new words, about how to put them together. I love the possibilities, the slipperiness, and the playfulness.

DB: For myself I find poetry does not present itself to me every day? is it the same for you or do you always have a poem on the go?

LE: No, definitely not everyday. There are always a few pieces on the go that could be revisited if I get the time. But generally, I can’t live in that space everyday. It would be too intense, and I wouldn't get anything else done. Also, in doing academic work, I can sometimes be in a very dense critical framework. At times like that, it is not helpful to try to write poetry; I have to take my critic hat off first.

DB: Are you interested in fiction writing as well?

LE: I used to think so. I’ve tried writing short stories, and while I do enjoy it somewhat—all those worlds and characters to shape—I just don’t think I’m very good at it. I find the thought of writing a novel completely overwhelming. That might change one day, if the idea is sustainable enough. I read a lot of fiction, and because I have some distance from it, it appears to me like this wonderful, mysterious craft.

DB: What qualities does a poem have to have for you to consider it successful?

LE: Good question! I think a successful poem has to have a good degree of craft. It needs to be doing something with language, stretching preconceived meanings into new territory. It also needs to have integrity. I’m not really interested in experimentation for the sake of it, which comes back to the craft thing again. I think to break the rules you have to know what the rules are, and this always comes through in good poetry. A good poem doesn’t have anything to hide.

DB: What do you consider to be the themes in your poems?

LE:Language. Time. Memory. Sound.

DB: Do you have lots of unpublished poems under your bed?

LE: Yes.

DB: What’s next for you in your poetry life and in your academic life?

LE: Well, I have this PhD to finish, which should be around the beginning of 2017. After that, if funds allow, I’d like to get back to the poetry for a sustained period, to get working on my second collection. My partner is also an academic. Our work might take us overseas again in the short term, but it might also keep us here.

DB: Do you see yourself teaching?

LE: Hopefully. I’ve done some tutoring and lecturing throughout my PhD, and I really love it. I’d also like to teach creative writing, if an opening came up. I find it really stimulating.