Interviewed by Samuel Elliott.
About the Poet:
Michael Farrell’s previous collections include living at the z, ode ode (shortlisted for the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award), BREAK ME OUCH, a raiders guide (published by Giramondo in 2008), thempark and thou sand. His second collection with Giramondo open sesame (2011) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry. His most recent collection, I Love Poetry, won the 2018 Queensland Literary Award for Poetry and was commended in the 2018 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. He was the winner of the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
About ‘I Love Poetry’:
In I Love Poetry Michael Farrell continues to affirm poetry as a mode of thinking. His poems aspire to both memorability and meaning, and to invoke new Australian realities – ‘the rhyme’s a moral that becomes a fence; a fallen-down fence is a joy forever.’ The tone is playful and ironic, more under the skin of the mind than in its face. Poems like ‘Into a Bar’, in which Blue Poles and INXS entertain themselves with digital prune juice and a video burger, or ‘Cate Blanchett and the Dif cult Poem’, with the actor and Waleed Aly, add new dimensions to Australian icons. ‘Great Poet Snowdome’ is a story of kitsch involving Sydney and a pope – a recurring gure in the book, since he reappears as Pope Pinocchio, alongside the Professor of Milk and Sugar. There’s a Mad Max riff (‘Put Your Helmet On’); a One Direction revision (‘Drag Me Down’); and new appreciations of lyrebirds, kangaroos and chocolate frogs. There is Sid Vicious and there are lamingtons. There is everything that loves poetry: Weetbix, Iron Maiden T-shirts, motorbikes, and you.
INTERVIEWER
Many of your poems featured in ‘I Love Poetry’are almost narrative driven, such as ‘Acadreamia’which features dialogue and a character’s thoughts. Devices not regularly seen in some poetry. Was challenging the form like this always your intention or did it just happen organically?
MICHAEL
The narrative element has been there since ode ode. It’s part of the mind-blowing aspiration that was in my early poetry, and gets especially intense, I think, in Cocky’s Joy. I wanted to expand the possibilities of poetry, as well as entertain. Narrative is one way of holding reader attention. In I Love Poetry, it’s more of a gentle vibe. ‘Acadreamia’ is a loving but humorous homage to the poet Martin Harrison: he is the basis of the Professor character.
INTERVIEWER
Whether it’s Cate Blanchett, or ACDC, or INXSyou seem intrigued by iconic Australians and Australiana in general. Was this what first drew you to penning the collection of ‘I Love Poetry’, was it at the forefront of your mind and the poems flowed from that? Or did the poems arise over the years as you have maintained an interest in iconic Australians and Australiana?
MICHAEL
Again, it’s a follow-on from Cocky’s Joy, in particular. In that book, a lot of the references are to colonial Australia. I am interested in what poetry can contribute to thinking about national culture and history, not merely as textual addition. But I was also interested in how an icon could function as a character – or something else at the same time, as in ‘AC/DC As First Emu Prime Minister’.
INTERVIEWER
With ‘Cate Blanchett and the difficult poem’, you’ve vividly realised a realistic scene of Blanchett testing herself with the titular difficult poem, while ensconced in a dressing room with Waleed Aly. It features, among other elements, Blanchett (and Aly’s) thoughts and dialogue. How did it feel with writing such a poem revolving around two real, living and high profile people? Did the possibility of they themselves reading it play on your mind at all? If so was that daunting or exhilarating?
MICHAEL
It was energising – especially after so many poems which treat historical figures, or, in the case of AC/DC and INXS, the already enshrined – to imagine two, culturally active, contemporary people. I’d like them to read it: but there was also the idea that a poem like that would encourage readership; as well as challenge the idea that intellectual culture can function perfectly well without poetry. That’s a contemporary lie – it can’t. Stories are not enough (though of course poetry tells stories); David Marr is not enough.
INTERVIEWER
You still seem to have fun by playing with the form, including drawing awareness to it. In that same poem you mention ‘if this was nonfiction they’d be playing with their phones.’ – So was there always an element of playfulness running through your work and generally through your craft? Is it, and has it always been, innate and essential to your poetry?
MICHAEL
When things are peaking in writing a poem, I want to do as many things as possible. There is a strong vein of comedy in my poetry; I’m actually not sure how playful it is.
INTERVIEWER
To counter that though, these humorous poems are occasionally interspersed with darker ones, albeit ones that seemingly have discord and possibly anguish burbling under the surface. Such as ‘Death of the Poet’that charts[?] the unnamed businessman and his estrangement from his family and eventual untimely death. Or ‘Holiday Pattern’which features dark imagery and is evokes a tremendous sense of loneliness and isolation. Does their need to be darkness in one’s work, or in this instance a collection of poems, in order to truly see the light?
MICHAEL
I do want my poems to be rich, and to vary in their affects/effects. I prefer not to think in what we might call ‘binary terms’; also I’m not comfortable with ‘dark’ as a figure for the negative.
INTERVIEWER
There are some poems that are very different to many of the others, such as ‘Into a Bar’ which features Blue Polesand INXS and is easily one of the most experimental poems out of the entire lot. Would you agree with that? Was that one of the most challenging to pen, or did you feel freedom in subverting all norms and expectations and just producing whatever felt right?
MICHAEL
Yes and no. There are times when I (writers) have conceptual breakthroughs: ‘Into A Bar’, ‘Fancy’, and ‘AC/DC As First Emu Prime Minister’were part of a series of poems which I think achieved something new in terms of the icon/image-as-poetic-figure. Once I’d cracked that, they came fairly easily. (There is another quasi-acrostic, formal element, that tied them together, and which also helped produce them, in terms of their lines.)
INTERVIEWER
Prevalent in the great majority of the poems that comprise the collection, is a pervasive sense of nostalgia. Found in ‘Food Time Lucky’when recalling the longstanding dinner date between youths and in ‘Great Poet Snowdome’where the youths featured are admired and wondered at. How much of your own youth served to shape the collection? Did memories or snippets of them serve as seeds from which some of the poems sprouted from?
MICHAEL
I think ‘Food Time Lucky’is more speculative than nostalgic, though it does draw on a lot of aspects from my upbringing in a small town (Bombala, in New South Wales). And ‘Great Poet Snowdome’is, perhaps, nostalgic for / a romanticisation of, life in Sydney, as well as spoofing aspects of Rome, all within a framework of kitsch (I had been reading Daniel Tiffany’s Silver Planet).
INTERVIEWER
If so, how did it feel to put yourself and your own life up there within poem form for readers? Was there a sense of vulnerability? Or elation? Have your memories guided and shaped your contemporary work?
MICHAEL
I rarely write anything that derives purely from any source, so the autobiographical is, in a sense, just another element in thickening the pot. It is also a challenge: what can I say, how much do I want to give away – and how can I employ irony to convey/imply fictional selves?
Then, there is also often the twinning of the autobiographical with the historical or fictional or whatever, which then becomes one element that then gets ironically combined with other things already (conceptually) prepared.
INTERVIEWER
‘I Love Poetry’encompasses many disparate themes and subjects in an array of types of poems. That said, did you ever find any memory or any subject to be taboo for whatever reason? Do you oftentimes challenge yourself with your craft? Be it in this way, or others?
MICHAEL
Yes. Mostly, I am looking for new ways to write poems, however minimal that new aspect is. But occasionally, I get fed up with the incremental, or perhaps reach a kind of impasse, and make a concerted break with what I’m doing. BREAK ME OUCHis probably still the most radical break in that sense. But I’ve dropped a lot of elements that were characteristic, and picked up new ones that then become so. Recently, I’ve been writing line-based poems, almost abandoning enjambment and punctuation again. More recently, I’ve adopted a new form which is still secret.
INTERVIEWER
Does the eponymous ‘I love poetry’poem itself encapsulate not only thematically what the collection is about and what drives you as a poet? It’s certainly one of the longest poems featured throughout and I found it contained some of the most vivid and exquisite imagery and sense of place, but I wondered if it was the one embodying the whole collection. How did you go about selecting it? Was it the first one penned and all other pieces followed thereafter?
MICHAEL
It wasn’t first. It came to embody the rest of the book to an extent, I think. And I liked the way Gregory Day characterised the poem in his review of the book in the Australian. He read ‘poetry’ as being a character. For me, also, ‘I’ becomes everything. It’s an anti-hater poem, an anti-Ben Lerner poem.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a set process for writing a poem? Are you a creature of habit? Or do you pen one when the inspiration strikes?
MICHAEL
It has evolved. Both – I try to maximise the chance of inspiration by trying to regularise reading and writing time. –
INTERVIEWER
Do you edit your poems, or do you disagree with editing poems?
MICHAEL
I edit them, but I don’t think every poem is sacred. If they’re a bit crap, I don’t try to make them edible.
INTERVIEWER
What was your earliest memory of writing a poem?
MICHAEL
Mooning about among my grandparent’s cherry trees (with the chooks, probably), writing in my head.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the toughest part of being a poet?
MICHAEL
I could say having no money – but this is partly a symptom of the way poetry is treated.
INTERVIEWER
Who are some of your influences? Have they changed over the years? If you could meet your idols, would you want to?
MICHAEL
I was most influenced by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Monique Wittig, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. That’s most of the American modernists, but not all. But I was also influenced by pop music and art history. Gradually, theory and literary history began to influence me as much as poetry itself. I met Stein, and she was nicer than she probably was in real life. I wish I could’ve met Gennady Aygi, the Chuvash poet; I think now I’d probably rather meet Travis Scott, or a Turkish poetry critic.
INTERVIEWER
What are you currently working on?
MICHAEL
I’m not quite ready to say.