Tim Thorne

in conversation with Michael Denholm

for New Poetry magazine, 9th and 10th April, Launceston, 1977

This piece is 13,000 words or about thirty printed pages long.
It was first published in New Poetry magazine, vol 25, no 4, December 1977. It is reprinted here with permission. The photo of Tim Thorne, below, is from that issue of the magazine.

¶ Denholm: You played a major part, Tim, in the takeover of the Poetry Magazine and its transformation into New Poetry. Can you talk about what happened and how it too place?

Thorne: Well, in 1967, it would have been probably October-November 1967, I met Bob Adamson in Sydney and he and two or three other people (Kerry Macrae, Dave Rankin, John Elliott and John Blay were probably the main ones involved) had decided that it was probably better to attempt to have some kind of influence over an existing magazine than to do as some people were starting to do then, which was to set up small magazines and start from scratch, because the Poetry Society of Australia and its magazine had quite substantial grants both from the N.S.W. Government and from the Federal Government.

So we went to meetings — the [Poetry] Society had monthly meetings which were mainly workshops and readings — and in about May 1968 I guess was the Annual General Meeting at which Roland Robinson who was President of the Poetry Society at the time, had enlisted our aid as some of the younger members of the Society in preventing the Society and the magazine from coming too much under the control of what he used to refer to rather scathingly as academics. There were a lot of personality clashes involved in that but at that stage Bob Adamson and I were appointed to the Editorial Board of Poetry Magazine as it was known then and various other people were on the Council of the Poetry Society and I also took over the job of running the postal critical workshop which was a soul-destroying task which nobody else was game to volunteer for.

The first issue of Poetry Magazine which was substantially our effort was No.4 for 1968, August 1968, although nobody would have noticed very much change in the contents of the magazine. We were mostly working with material that had been submitted. Just looking through the contents page of that issue there were John Millett, who was quite active in the Poetry Society in those days and writing quite a different kind of poetry from what he later went on to write. Very few other names that could really be associated with the magazine at the moment — a few of those would have been Vicki Viidikas, Robert Gray, Sylvia Kantarizis. Then gradually we started getting more material in from people and gradually the nature of the magazine changed. I was on the Editorial Board from about then although my name didn’t appear, I notice, until No.6 in December.

The magazine came out every two months in those days which meant that you had shorter time to collect stuff and choose it and we found that it wasn’t really helping the quality of the magazine. It was later changed to quarterly and although there was more published because the magazine increased considerably in size, quarterly seemed to be a better mode of operation, everything was less rushed and you had time to choose more carefully.

¶ Are you happy in the way in which New Poetry has developed since the days when it started out?

Yes, I am happy because it took probably a couple of years from then and at this stage I had come back to Tasmania — I came back in early 1969 — and it was mainly Bob Adamson himself doing most of the work. He and Roland Robinson had a few quarrels; Roland left the magazine and it took a while to become established. There were quite a few people associated with Sydney University who helped out for a while. Once again personality clashes tended to get in the way, but I think those people have probably left their mark on it to a certain extent; Carl Harrison-Ford in particular was quite a good person to work on the magazine although he and Bob quarrelled again.

I was certainly very glad to be back in Tasmania and not having to choose sides in the battles that were going on. I think it’s had its ups and downs since then but as far as the amount of quality of poetry that has been published there is no doubt that it has developed tremendously in those last ten years. Not only that, but the fact that now it is not considered unusual for a considerable number of poems published in the magazine to be from overseas, particularly the United States.

Now, back in 1968, when Grace Perry’s magazine [Poetry Australia] published Ezra Pound, this was considered an incredible coup — that you could actually publish a poem for the first time in Australia which had been written by someone as famous as Ezra Pound. You know, the latest issue of New Poetry has poems by Creeley, Duncan, McClure and it has published people like Bronk, Bukowski and various American writers over the last couple of years. So in the areas its drawing from, from the quality of the work that’s being published, and certainly from the quality of the magazine itself as a production it has developed tremendously.

¶ Last year there was talk of New Romanticism in New Poetry with people like Garry Shead and I just wonder what you think about that in terms of, say, some of the earlier work of Robert Adamson’s which had a fairly strong political orientation in some of it with works like Zimmer’s Essay.

Yes, Bob’s always been a Romantic of course. I wasn’t all that keen on that particular issue — mainly I though from the quality of the prose articles. It was all a little bit shallow. I think Robert Duncan had a lot to do indirectly with that particular issue. It came out at the time he was visiting Australia. Bob had been in contact with him quite a bit over the preceding twelve months and this was the direction that Bob was going in.

I think it’s a very strange kind of thing, the New Romanticism — I’ve never really made up my mind about it. I can see certainly in Duncan’s poetry what can properly be termed Romantic and that is fair enough. I tend to shy away from that kind of attitude to categorizing poetry myself and I guess it’s just that it is so easily put down. There was a review of that magazine by somebody in the Australian which really laughed at it, missing the point entirely. But I think it is easy to miss the point if the wrong aspects are emphasised and I don’t think, for example, Clive Evatt’s essay helped at all. One should just look at the poetry and there was some very good poetry in it.

That was a concept perhaps of bravado as much as anything else, in presenting it in the way it was presented — daring to fly in the face of the latest trends. But there is of course a more serious side to it and that’s perhaps illustrated best by Garry Shead’s paintings. What he’s doing and what I believe Bob Adamson is doing in his Grail poems, although I’ve only heard a few read, I haven’t seen them yet. If the New Romanticism is an accurate label for that then I’m all for it. I just tend to shy away from the name a bit because of other associations and connotations which it probably has for most people.

¶ You mentioned Ken Quinnell just before as being an outsider in some ways to events that have taken place in Sydney, say, since the late 1960’s. Ken Quinnell seems to be a person that one comes across from time to time and yet I don’t really know that much about him, other than that he has been involved in New Poetry and I think with people like Frank Moorhouse. Can you say something about him?

Ken Quinnell is the most amazing person. He’s one of those éminences grises that has always been there. I first met Ken Quinnell probably six or seven times before I knew who he was. He was at that stage a professional party gate-crasher. He kept turning up at parties all over Sydney which were totally different sets of people — the only thing they had in common was Ken Quinnell. I guess because I saw him there they had me too. But it was quite amazing. He just kept turning up and nobody knew who he was.

At that stage, I found out, he was quite friendly with Michael Thornhill. In fact it was rumoured that he wrote Michael Thornhill’s film reviews for the Australian. He was editor of various trade journals, a plumbers’ journal and various things like that at that stage for a living and his main interest was film. But he was also quite widely read in contemporary poetry and he wrote a little himself, although he didn’t ever claim to be a poet with a capital P. He was, I guess, an example of the kind of people who gravitated towards the Poetry Society and the magazine in particular once we got it on its feet.

There’s a beautiful description of him by Roland Robinson in a letter to me — “that lean grey wolf, Quinnell”. He was, like Carl Harrison-Ford and in fact Adamson himself at that stage, definitely on the outer with Roland who liked really of course to have everything under his own thumb and who I think wanted to preserve the kind of Roland Robinson image that had grown up through the Jindyworobaks and so on, and had this innate distrust of people when they had academic qualifications or middle-class pretensions or both.

¶ You first probably made your name as a poet with a book that was published by Lyre Bird writers. Can you tell me why you gravitated towards Roland Robinson?

Well, that was in 1968 — it would have been about July or August 1968 — at this stage everyone was on very good terms still — that Roland suggested that the Lyrebird Writers Cooperative had never really ceased to exist although it had ceased to function for fifteen years, I guess. It was started in 1948 and petered out about the early fifties. And that all they really needed — he was still the managing editor — was a manuscript.

At that stage I said “Right, I’ll give you a manuscript”, so I quit the job I had, having saved the grand sum of about $300 and decided that I would devote myself to preparing the manuscript and in September 1968 I have him the manuscript of Tense Mood And Voice and the Lyrebird Writers were born again. It was submitted to the Commonwealth Literary Fund as it was in those days, to the Board who were prepared to subsidise it although I had to delete two poems which contained four-letter words.

In those days the political side of the Board, the actual Commonwealth Literary Fund Board was a board of politicians and then as well as that there was a Commonwealth Literary Fund Advisory Board which contained people like Douglas Stewart (oh, I couldn’t remember exactly who else was on it — Rex Ingamells; I’m not quite sure, but I know Douglas Stewart was on it and he was probably the most influential and important person on it as far as poetry was concerned.) I ranted and fumed against him only to find out that it was in fact that the Advisory Board had been overruled by the politicians who didn’t like to think that the Commonwealth Government was funding the publication of four-letter words. So I reluctantly, at the time reluctantly, agreed to leave the poems out. One of them wasn’t a very good poem anyway — I don’t think I’ve ever published it since. The other one was quite reasonable and I did publish it in Shapcott’s anthology.

So it was published and it appeared in September 1969 after I had come back to Tasmania, and then in the same series Bob Gray’s first book, Introspect, Retrospect, was published. Wilhelm Hiener, who was another person who was in the Poetry Society although not very active from the point of the magazine although he was publishing quite a bit at the time — his book came out and Joan Mas — her first book. There were three, that’s right — there were Gray, Hiener and myself and then Joan’s came out in another series with Peter Skrzynecki’s first book. And I think that was it. Then Joan and Roland split up and the writers cooperative was no more.

I never found out what happened to most of the copies of Tense Mood And Voice. They did a print run of 500. I received royalties for the sale of 250 and the rest of the books haven’t been heard of since. Nobody knows where they are. They may be gathering dust somewhere in a warehouse or they may be anywhere. I actually haven’t done very much about finding out but I guess I could contact the printers and see if they have any. But they’re changing hands at quite a high price now, so maybe I’ll leave it.

¶ You told me when I met you the other week about your discovery of Jennifer Maiden. Can you tall me something about that?

Oh, yes. The postal critical workshop which I mentioned before — I said it was a soul-destroying job. It wasn’t quite so bad because onetime (it may have been late 1969 or 1970) the mail arrived and there was a huge envelope full of hand-written poems with a two-page hand-written letter accompanying. I breathed a rather deep sigh and was prepared to wade through the first couple of pages and consign the rest to a few cursory comments and stuff them back in the pre-paid envelope, having read the letter which didn’t sound very hopeful at all, and then I glanced at the poems and realised that here was something, here was a kid who was probably 17 or 18 at the time who wrote and said, I’ve never had anything published so I don’t know whether it’s any good or not. I left school when I was 15 and I’ve been working in a factory every since. But anyway, tell me what you think of them, if it’s worth continuing to write.

And so I wrote back and told her it certainly was worth continuing to write and of course she has, and yes, I guess that’s something to say — that I discovered Jennifer Maiden. Most of the other young poets who were first being published at that time tended to gravitate together out of coincidence. Later on, of course, people came because of the magazine but at that stage the magazine hadn’t really established itself in the way it did over the next few years, and a lot of it, I think, was largely luck. Certainly the way I first met Adamson was purely chance, although no doubt I would have met him sooner or later.

¶ How did you meet him?

Well, I’d gone to Sydney as I said in September 1967. For a couple of months I hadn’t met anybody. I went primarily to write. 1 was living in a little one-room flat in Glebe. I had no job for a while so I had no money. I hadn’t met anybody who was in the least interested in poetry. So things were bleak. And what was worst of all, I hadn’t written anything. And then one day after an anti-Vietnam War demonstration which I had decided to go on, never even having been politically involved before, but I had fairly strong feelings about conscription in particular.

So after the rally I went back to what was the original Third World Bookshop before Bob Gould moved on to bigger and better things across the road and there was a party out the back of that and I met a girl who was with a bloke who said he knew where there was a party. So for want of anything better I clutched my flagon of cheap red and crammed in the back of an old FE and off we went, to find that the party in fact consisted of Bob Adamson and Denise [Reid] who was the girl he was living with at the time, John Elliott who was another éminence grise and determined that he was going to write the ‘Great Australian Novel’ and just never got around to writing it. He had his portrait painted for the Archibald once as “John Elliott, man of letters”. David Rankin — there may have been a couple of other people.

It was discovered, after some coaxing actually from Dave Rankin, that I write poetry. He kept asking me “What do you do?” I said, “Oh, I’m a storeman”. He said, “Yes, but what do you do?” I said, “Load trucks, unload trucks, look after the stores”. “Yes, but what do you do?” I said, “Oh, oh, I see. I write poetry”. He said, “Bob here writes poetry too”. At that stage, with my Tasmanian experience of having people say “Oh, you write poetry; so do I” and showing me stuff of varying quality, I was rather dubious. Anyway, Bob started talking about poetry and obviously he was serious about it and Dave said, “Look, have you got any poetry on you?” I said, “No, I don’t actually carry it with me all the time.” He took me back to Glebe to pick up my collected works which at that stage were written in long-hand in an exercise book and we took a look through them and Bob and John made comments.

Bob was working on [his poem] “Jerusalem Bay” at that stage, he had been for some time and he was to continue to work on it for another couple of years, and I stayed up till about ten o’clock the next morning talking to Bob, after everyone else had gone to bed, about Rimbaud and Shelley. The one thing he remembers from that evening was that he said “What do you think of Shelley?” And I said, “Oh, fantastic writer. I think she really did a good job on Frankenstein.” It was almost the end of a friendship from the beginning, but fortunately Bob does have a sense of humour.

And so that was the type of luck that started it all off, and then I was to meet other people who were quite active and writing at the time, such as Kerry Macrae and John Blay, Vicki Viidikas and John Tranter whom we met later, Robin Ravlich. Actually I met both Tranter and Robin Ravlich at a poetry workshop that was organized by Grace Perry and run at Sydney University by Craig Powell — that would have been sometime during 1968. There was another chap there by the name of Peter Carthew; I don’t know what ever happened to him. He wrote a few reasonable sort of things but he faded out. There were always people coming in and fading out.

¶ You mentioned Robin Ravlich. Is that the Robin Ravlich who is on Broadband?

Yes, yes.

¶ I wondered that. I knew Robin Ravlich wrote poetry, that you also wrote a poem about her and I wondered whether she was the same person.

Yes, I don’t think she’s written very much lately, actually. She tended to move from one area of the arts to another and dabbled somewhat. But she certainly has a talent. She may have written quite a bit and not published it of course recently, but if she has I’d like to see it.

¶ What seems interesting in relation to her is that she has, I think, a Masters or a Ph.D. on something like Architecture or Town Planning.

Yes, that was a later interest which she took up, apparently. She was a first-year Arts student just fresh in from Broken Hill when I met her.

¶ You mentioned about your experiences in Hobart with poetry. At the University you were editor of Diogenes, a literary magazine and reading back through that, through the issues of Diogenes, it seems interesting to me because of the people who wrote for it, people like Michael Hodgman, Terry Aulich, Patti Warn was an editor, Vivian Smith, James McAuley. How valuable do you think that experience was as regards your own writing, and also in terms of editing and the people whom you met?

Probably the last you mentioned was the most — I think there was very little value in any of the writing that was submitted to it at the time I was editor or on the editorial board. There were one or two things that showed promise; in fact I remember the short stories of John Colman in particular. But from 1962 onwards Diogenes was only a shadow of its former self, I mean we relied on name poets such as James McAuley and Vivian Smith, and the rest was, well, editing hardly came into it because you had to print everything that was submitted practically to make up the volume and then write some more to fill in the spaces.

The 1961 edition which was before I got to University was the classic one of course — that was the one that contained a very long article by Professor Orr on the question of justice.

Unfortunately there seemed to be some kind of relation between the appearance of that as it was at least a semi-official organ of the University and that the Budget for the magazine was cut considerably the following year.

¶ It seems a great taboo subject the Orr Case. I noticed in Humphrey McQueen’s Australian Media Monopolies that a programme on the ABC on the Orr Case was cut or wasn’t programmed. Did you find that at the University at that time that it was an untouchable subject?

[Professor Orr had accused the University of Tasmania of apathy, neglect, and maladministration. A Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into these and related charges. But the university soon levelled four charges at him, including the allegation that he had sexual relations with a Miss Suzanne Kemp, daughter of a Hobart businessman. Orr denied the charges, but he died before the truth emerged. — Editor.]

Well, not to talk about or to do anything about. It was certainly probably the issue as far as students were concerned and of course almost fifty percent of staff, but as far as getting interrupted by the slightest little thing. I remember one incident — the Commemm. issue of Togatus — it would have been 1962, I think; it was when Jim Frayle was editor — right at the time that came out or was due to come out, unknown to anybody on the student body, the governor in his role as visitor to the University was about to be approached concerning a stage in the settlement and it looked as if the governor was going to be favourable, as he had pressure from various sections of the community.

At this stage you had the moderator of the Presbyterian Church, you had the Anglican Bishop and you had the Roman Catholic Archbishop all on the same side and all on the side of Orr. Unfortunately just at that particular time the Commemm. edition of Togatus came out and it contained, as the Commem. issues of Togatus always did in those days, a front-page of mock-up news, “Martians invade Disneyland” or that sort of thing. But right in the middle of all these obviously phoney stories was an article that was taken straight from, of all newspapers, the Brisbane Courier Mail, which in turn had got it from, I think, News Of The World, concerning the governor’s son who had recently married a girl who had just undergone a sex-change operation, and to those who didn’t know it just seemed like another facetious article perhaps in somewhat worse taste than the others. Unfortunately, it was true, or fortunately perhaps for them I don’t know, but as far as the impact which Togatus made on the governor, it didn’t help the Orr case.

Yes, I guess that was my first taste of kind of active politicking, not that we, looking back on it, we didn’t achieve enough in time, but in those days university campuses were not what they were to become ten years later, or five years later even.

¶ There were some interesting people who would have been at the University at your time, people such as George Wilson, Malcolm McRae, James McAuley. McAuley, for instance, is supposed to have had a great impact on Peter Conrad, probably one of the best English graduates from this University for a while. Did they have much impact on you?

The two people that had the most impact on me were Vivian and Sybil Smith. McAuley was a great lecturer, a great showman, but he didn’t take me for many of the courses I did in English. But Vivian Smith, certainly as far as poetry was concerned, probably more than anybody. And his wife, Sybil, on more general areas of literature and philosophy. She took a course in the History of German Literature in German which could have been and perhaps should have been, looking at the syllabus for it, one of those terrible introductory potted histories. But she really made it live and I really started to understand major issues in literature.

Vivian, for his comments on specific poems and on the technique and craft of poetry — he was lecturing in French in those days, of course, he’s now lecturing in English at Sydney — but he probably had more effect than anybody else. He’s one of the most honest people that I’ve ever come across. He probably could have a much better name than he has in poetry had he been less honest, had he been inclined more inclined to the grand gesture. His giving up of a career as an academic in French is typical of the man. He felt that despite his qualifications, despite the brilliance of his lectures, that he wasn’t being totally honest in dealing in the linguistics and the poetry of a language which wasn’t his native language, and so he went back and did another M.A. in English and proceeded to be a lecturer in English at Sydney. But certainly what he had to say about not only the symbolists, people like Mallarmé and Valéry in whom I was particularly interested at the time. But even more obscure, earlier French poets, Louise Labe, Sceve, D’Aubigne, people like that, the early sonnet writers. Just from the point of view of looking closely at a poem, and seeing how it worked, I probably learned more about writing from what he said about other people’s poetry than from any other single source.

¶ What other people do you see as strong and informative influences on your writing, people you have met, not who you’ve read?

I’ve probably mentioned them all now, I think. John Tranter perhaps more than any other of my contemporaries, even more than Adamson in some ways, although the effect that Adamson has had on me has been profound but it has been more from a personal point of view than perhaps from my writing. I don’t think I’ve learned very much from Bob’s writing because we’re just approaching things from different angles. I occasionally have found myself writing, and thinking “Would Tranter like this?” which I wouldn’t do with Bob. I think he has a great talent and he is certainly the best writer of reviews of poetry in Australia at the moment.

¶ He seems very important as a promoter of literature, too, as editor of various magazines like Transit.

Yes, Transit, I think, only ever survived two issues, but it was important at the time. He opened that little extra wider field which we weren’t contacting as far as the Poetry Magazine was concerned. I guess by the time we took it over we, in a sense, became the Establishment, which we felt was quite ludicrous really. I don’t think any of us was over 25 at the time.

But there was an immediate sense from other poets who weren’t involved in the magazine directly, that we were just another Establishment clique, which we had no intention of being, but force of circumstances, particularly from Melbourne people and Adelaide people, say people like Richard Tipping, although there was never much antagonism there, but they felt that they had to do something in Adelaide and so Mok was started by Richard and Rob Tillett. The Melbourne people were doing their own thing, and Nigel Roberts came up with Free Poetry. I’ve always thought that Nigel treated us with amused, slightly scornful tolerance, and Tranter did the same thing with Transit. It was just at this stage of course that Michael Dransfield came on the scene. I never met Dransfield actually.

¶ There seems a great myth about Dransfield.

Well, it seemed that to me because I picked up the Australian one Saturday morning and there was the first of his poems that Rodney Hall had published and there it was — obviously a guy with incredible talent. He didn’t come into the circle of people I knew in Sydney until after I had left. I once had him pointed out — crossing Liverpool Street in Sydney once, and I think that was the nearest I ever came to meeting him. But he was obviously a kindred spirit.

¶ When you left the University you went, what, to Melbourne first or to Sydney?

When I left University I went teaching at Ulverstone — the great cultural centre of the north-west coast which has also given the world Ian Paulin and indirectly Peter Finke, which was perhaps the first attempt, or the first that I ever heard of, to get a literary magazine in Tasmania, that was similar to the little magazines on the mainland. Again, it only lasted a few issues and the poetry in it was bad in a lot of cases. That was started by some kids I used to teach at Ulverstone who were interested mainly in folk-music at the time but grew from that into other areas of the arts.

¶ What did you do from moving from Ulverstone — you then went to Sydney?

Yes, to Sydney, directly.

¶ I see. So you weren’t involved in any poetry movements in Melbourne at all?

Not at all, really. I knew a few people in Melbourne but I didn’t really have anything to do directly with anything that was going on at that stage at La Mama or Monash apart from visiting occasionally. I didn’t go to Melbourne very much. From the time I went back to Sydney I think I only made one visit to Melbourne, just down and back one weekend, and then I went in again at the end of 1968 on my way back to Tasmania. That’s where I first heard Russell Deeble read.

¶ In Tense Mood And Voice you dedicated poems to John Colman whom you’ve mentioned before and to Jon Hawkes and Helen Treloar. Can you say something about that? Colman was editor of Togatus I think at one stage, wasn’t he?He was also involved with Diogenes.

No, I don’t think he actually edited Togatus. He was editor of Diogenes and he was quite active in the Literary Society. I think he’s at the University of New England now. He was at Perth for a long while. He was the only person ever to go through and do an Honours degree in Philosophy while there was no Chair. He was a brave man. Yes, well, the poem, I think, is an attempt to capture John’s personality, which was rather strange.

Those three poems, well the third one is slightly different, and the second one is different again, it’s sort of a vignette, but they’re both obviously in a highly derivative Eliot style, although a lot of people have misunderstood that. It was a deliberate attempt to use Eliot form but to move away from the feeling of the poems that Eliot did in that form.

I’ve toyed with the idea for a long while actually of writing a novel in verse which would carry on from those three scenes and expand and make Jerome, who is Colman in the first poem, but then who is more me in the other two, the central character. I abandoned the idea of it. I guess what I’m doing now in The Atlas is the same kind of thing, it’s autobiographical and it draws on the kind of scenes that I would have put in that work if I’d ever got around to writing it. So I guess it really is that work in a different form, a different guise.

¶ Can we move now to the feminist poets. Women writers seem to be in the forefront in Australia in some ways. What is your opinion of the new women writers in Australia?

Well, I think one should make a distinction here between feminist poetry and women writers who happen to be excellent poets and may or may not be feminists, but I think it’s certainly true that as part of the growth and the Rennaissance of Australian poetry in the last ten years there have been a lot of women doing a lot of really good things. I think particularly of Jennifer Maiden, Jan Harry, Sylvia Kantarizis, Dorothy Hewett, Vicki Viidikas, Judith Rodriguez just to mention a few who come to mind.

But I think as far as specifically a sort of feminist program of writing I think the problem there is the same problem that you have with any kind of political or polemical approach; that you have on one extreme the writers I’ve mentioned, you have at the other end of the spectrum as it were people who write feminist propaganda really which is in verse form, which generally tends to be very bad poetry. I’m thinking of things like the Mother I’m Rooted anthology and [Kate Jennings’ volume of poems Come to Me] My Melancholy Baby and the work of people like Joanne Burns, which I think is an important contribution to the feminist movement rather than an important contribution to literature.

As I said I think one can draw a parallel with, say, political poetry, that you either do the kind of thing that Dennis Kevans does brilliantly, or you write the kinds of things that I was attempting to do in poems like “Metal Fatigue”. But in between that area are some very bad poems that I don’t think really succeed as propaganda either, and I’ve been guilty of writing that kind of thing myself. That is, I think it’s a very vexed question, the relation between poetry and politics.

There’s a lot of room for misunderstanding, a lot of problems associated with the use of irony, and, I think, of course, it depends on the society in which you are writing, you can do what Mayokovsky did if you’re living in the kind of society that Mayakovsky was living in. The same with Neruda. But it’s a problem that I can only approach from the kind of angle I was coming at it from in poems like “The Moving Mirror”, “Metal Fatigue”, “Western Addition” and take it from that kind of approach. I think poetry that tries to be propagandist is usually not very effective propaganda and poor poetry.

¶ Which is why you have been so critical of Graham Rowlands’ poetry?

yes, although — yes, I guess that’s so. Because I can’t really accept it as serious poetry. One may agree with his sentiments, but wish that he would see things a little bit more clearly and put them in a better relationship with each other than he has in the poems of his that I’ve read.

¶ America seems to have had a very strong impact on you with the people who you like, and your experiences when you went to Stanford, and took up a Creative Writing Fellowship. Can you talk, Tim, about your time that you spent in America and the importance it had on you.

Yes. I didn’t really write very much while I was there and what I did write was largely based on previous experience in Australia. I tend to have a long time-lag, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, emotion recollected in tranquility. For example, “Elegy For Jenny” was written some twelve years after the death of the woman it was about. So the American experience, the year I had there, apart from occasional poems, tended to come out in my writing much later.

While I was there I guess the people whom I met and who had the most influence on me were Ken Fields and Donald Davie who were taking the course that I was doing at Stanford, and Davie was certainly very important for encouraging me to look at the projectivist poets in particular. The whole experience was one of taking things in rather than putting them out. I was reading a lot and talking to people, getting quite involved in political activity as well and just sightseeing, I guess.

But as far as poetry specifically is concerned I went back to an academic atmosphere, having been quite anti-academic for some years prior to that and that was good for me and it got me back into thinking more seriously about literary traditions if you like, what had been done before and how other people had seen things and put them down. So it was important from that point of view.

It was also great to meet people and I met Tom Gunn and Ed Dorn in particular that I remember and discussed things with, which was immense value. I didn’t meet Duncan until last year when he came to Australia. But he’s probably one of the most important people writing in America at the moment.

Yes, American poets have had an influence because I think that’s, in a sense, if there is a centre of writing and I would dispute that there really is, in the last twenty years that’s where it has come from — it’s come from Black Mountain, from San Francisco, from New York. Although as I said, I don’t think that one can really talk of a metropolis in poetry any more, or in any of the arts. I think regionalism is probably where it’s at at the moment, that being an Australian poet is in a sense irrelevant. That one is a poet within the context of a language and a society rather than a nation. Although of course there are obvious things that Australian poets have in common because of the environment they write in. But then the Australian environment physically is pretty varied and to write out of Tasmania for example — there’s quite a difference between that and, say, Les Murray writing out of the north coast of N.S.W. or Bob Adamson writing out of the suburban streets of Sydney or the Hawkesbury.

So obviously there were things in common — not only that but also linguistically. Australian English is in a sense different and of course this is an important part of poetry. But it is a minor part, really, compared to the sort of overall approach that the sort of movement, well, to use a title of Dorn’s the movement from Idaho out, or from Launceston out, or from wherever you are out, is the important thing. I think what he did in North Atlantic Turbine is to go beyond geography, taking that as a basis, as Olson had of course with Gloucester, but looking beyond what is important, and it is very important of course, in being in a region, of totally responding to the particular area of the surface of the earth where you are, which in Dorn’s case and in say, Silkin’s case goes right down to basics like geology and to build from that out into areas of wider social concern, of historical importance rather than geographical.

In Australia people such as Francis Webb, I think, have done the same kind of thing, although writing from obviously quite a different approach. Webb’s poetry of course is saturated with the Australian environment but his themes are universal. This of course if the important side of it. So I don’t tend to look at Australian poetry and American poetry or British poetry as entities; I think I have learned more about being an Australian poet from people like Olson and Dorn, Duncan, Plath, more than I have from people say like Douglas Stewart, Rodney Hall, Roger McDonald. One could even say more, I think, that perhaps I’ve learned as much from people I’ve only read in translation like, Mayakovsky, Quasimodo, Takamura, Voznesensky, the Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, that I don’t really see the national entity as being the very important thing either in poetry or in anything else.

¶ Can you move on from here and talk perhaps about some poets in Australia who haven’t been published much. I’m thinking here of John Forbes who Chris Aulich really likes, Nigel Roberts, Alan Wearne.

Yes, I think Forbes has a great talent; as you say he’s only had that short section in the Angus & Robertson’s Poets of the Month series, plus individual poems, or those same poems actually, in magazines such as New Poetry. I believe he has another book in preparation at the moment but one can say that he is a writer of great promise without being patronising, because I think there is very little on paper yet to go on. I think Forbes will develop into a very important writer. He has a very interesting approach. That poem that he won the New Poetry award with a couple of years ago “Four Heads and How to Do Them” I thought was excellent. I think he has moved on from there even; he tends to put that poem down a little bit as an exercise, but it was, pretty good for an exercise.

Another writer who has published very little but I think has an amazing talent is John Blay. John is perhaps better known as a playwright but his poetry is full of surprises, he has a highly individual style.

Alan Wearne I like very much; his latest book which is his second. He is probably a little more published that the others I’ve mentioned, but the final section of New Devil, New Parish is interesting — nothing quite like it has been done before, well, in recent times anyway — the series of dramatic monologues with an inter-connected set of characters. The whole impression of it is more poetic than dramatic, if one can make that distinction. And his handling of language is very well controlled and very skilled.

You mentioned Nigel Roberts. Well, Nigel is perhaps more of a Melbourne poet living in Balmain and he has done some very good things — much better than some of the Melbourne people because I don’t think he takes himself quite as seriously as they do. He’s a master of the surreal joke, the throw-away line, “Albert Schweitzer is an instant pudding”. Whether he’s written enough that would stand up to the test of time as far as his important poetry is concerned, I would reserve judgement on. I believe he has a book coming out this year and I’d be very interested to see what he has been doing lately. My judgements on Nigel tend to be based on the first few issues of Free Poetry and the things that he was doing at that time. He may very well have moved on considerably from there. I’m looking forward to the book to find out whether he has.

¶ Can you talk also about some older poets in Australia. I’m thinking of the late Anne Elder and also John Blight.

John Blight does, I think, seem to write the same poem over and over again. Anne Elder is a fascinating example. She is a very underestimated poet. She published very little in her lifetime. The book that has just dome out of her collected poems is, well I’ve only just got it and haven’t really done more than dip into it — I’m looking forward to reading it thoroughly and I will be reviewing it. I’ve always admired what I’ve seen of hers over the years. She doesn’t seem to have been attached to any particular school or even to have gone out of her way to publish very much. I’m glad that her work has been collected and I think it will be valuable to look at and assess her complete oeuvre to see whether she’s really as excellent as she seems to have been on what I’ve read so far.

Other older writers — I’ve mentioned Webb and I think he was a very important influence on the younger writers, probably more than any other of the older writers.

David Campbell is an example of a writer who has gone on developing, unlike Blight and perhaps unlike Hope and McAuley. He has gone on and kept on, changing and moving out and I think going on to better things all the time.

Going further back, of course one can’t underwrite the importance of Brennan and Slessor, probably the two giant figures of the first half of the century. And Judith Wright of course, as well. I’ve never been very keen on people like Fitzgerald and Steward who to my way of thinking, were rather sloppy in their handling of language. But they did some interesting and probably for the time, important things. But Australian poetry really never seemed to catch up to what was happening elsewhere in the English-speaking world until the last ten years.

I don’t think that the kind of things that were being done say in England in the 1950s with the Movement poets were very easily translatable into Australia. Or very profitably; perhaps easily but not profitably translatable into what was happening in Australia at the time. I think one can with more justification talk about an Australian poetry of those days than one can now and I don’t think what there was was really terribly important apart from those few individuals, particularly Webb, whom I’ve mentioned.

¶ Can you talk about the Prism Poets, people like Sylvia Kantarizis, Max Williams.

Prism’s first series started [in 1971] with my second book, Bob Adamson’s second book, Robin Ravlich and Charles Buckmaster. Then it lapsed for a while and then the recent series — there were eight books. Most of those people I hadn’t met personally or have only met since, such as Max Williams. I first met Max in June 1975 when I went to Sydney to talk about New Foundations and Max is an amazing person. I think when I met him he was 48 and he had spent 40 years in prison and institutions of one kind or another. The reason was that he didn’t like them and so he kept escaping and being caught and brought back — he was even in a couple of escapes with Darcy Dugan — he never got as far as Dugan; he was always the one who got caught; while everyone was catching him Dugan got away.

But he came to poetry as Adamson did, in prison, but more directly than Bob through Rodney Hall’s creative writing classes at Parramatta [Gaol] out of which of course came that University of Queensland Press publication Poets From Prison with Jack Murray, Eric Mackenzie and Robin Thurston. Murray and Mackenzie were quite — well, there was some quite good stuff in there, but I think Max’s work shines there, and what he’s done since then, the Prism book, I thought was excellent. Max is probably — we were talking about the New Romanticism earlier and I think Max is an example of that. He is, I guess, given his biography, he has this natural love of the outdoors and it comes through in his work. He is a very precise observer. Once again I guess this can be easily traced back to biographical reasons. He is a very precise and accurate observer of the world.

The others — Sylvia Kantarizis, I only know through her poetry. I reviewed that book of hers, Time and Motion. I was really pleased to see that there was somebody carrying on the surrealist tradition without being merely derivative. There is a poet in California called Sotere Torregian, who claims to be the last of the surrealists. The difference between his kind of work and Sylvia’s is the kind of difference between a good print of an old master and a fresh original work and yet they were both considered to be in the same tradition. It’s good to see.

I’ve studied the surrealist movement quite a bit because it’s always fascinated me as being one of the great points of conjuncture between poetry and politics. And yet I’ve always been disappointed in surrealist poetry, particularly in English and I’ve tried to work out the reason for it. I think it has a lot to do with the nature of the English language as compared to French and Spanish where it obviously flourished more and perhaps also with literary traditions, that the sort of incantatory repetitions come across better in French because there is more of a tradition to draw on from other literary movements. Despite the surrealist claim of making everything new, of course, what works is the tension between that attempt. There is a dialectic between being new and being part of a literary tradition and they lived that dialectic. And other writers have copied their techniques and their subject matter, with varying degrees of success — mostly fairly limited because it is an attempt to impose something which was very much of its time in the 20’s and early 30’s.

But Sylvia Kantarizis seems to come at her poetry from the same approach. But she is writing now and here, well not here literally, she’s in Cornwall, I think, but she’s writing in the place she is; she’s not pretending to be in Paris in the 1920s.

The others — well I’ve mentioned Dorothy Hewett. Rapunzel In Suburbia, I think is again an excellent book which I feel, well we’re kindred spirits in a lot of ways, that she is coming not from the same kind of experience as I am but by organizing her experience in the same way as I have, in say, the earlier poems from New Foundations and particularly from the second book, from The What of Sane.

Dorothy Porter is perhaps the most amazing of them all, of the poets who were published in that series. Her book is truly unique; it defies categorization. She has an amazing attitude towards language; she does the most outrageous things and somehow gets away with them. That’s a fascinating book. What were the others?

Oh, The Dragon Principle, yes. The Dragon Principle is again, and this is what would mark that series of books, they’re not bound together by any common approach. What they have in common is that they are all so remarkably different and Stephen Murray’s book worries me. It’s a fascinating book. I wrote a review of it, once actually for New Poetry which wasn’t published. I still wonder to what extent I totally missed the point of what he was doing. But I didn’t knock the book. I thought it was a fair review and I certainly think he’s a good poet again with potential. And I think what he is trying to do is perhaps a bit big for him at the moment but it’s amazing. I am so pleased he’s doing it.

And the other book which I think again marks a new approach is Kerry Macrae’s book and that is very interesting in that he has quite deliberately taken the ego out of poetry. It’s a book which is presenting objective reality, but it’s presenting it in a very highly organized and informed way. I think he tends to slip in a couple of places and take the easy way out. But it’s a fascinating book. If I could perhaps just quote from a review of it I wrote in March 1976: “The reader discovers that there is a narrow strip of ground between sentimentality and hard-edged objectivity. Macrae brings these two apparent opposites almost together because of his refusal to take up the protective shield of irony. The poems abound in lines and phrases which are intellectual in their final impact but arresting enough on a first reading to give the reader something to retain, to work at, and finally to relish ... in that fiercely contested no-man’s land,” (that is between sentimentality and hard-edged objectivity), “the poet’s meticulously honest attempts to range his personal emotions alongside the physical facts of his existence in his environment without over- or under-stating them result in some of the most courageous poetry recently published in Australia. Not that it is courageous in the sense of breast-beating public confession or of daring stylistic innovation; it’s the relentless search for simply clarity of statement and the refusal to be cowered by the enormity of love into a linguistically shallow response.”

He does falter occasionally, but I think he’s — well, I finish the review with, and I can only quote this again: ‘Kerry Macrae has with this book performed the rare feat of setting down a new direction for Australian poetry. The poetry of the rational man — fire stolen not from heaven but the dialectic of human life on a physical earth.” If I were writing that again today I would probably not refer to Australian poetry as I had because I just don’t believe that Australian poetry as an entity is an important thing to talk about. But that book is, and he is an amazing person. I mentioned his name before as one of the first people I met in Sydney through the Poetry Society. He has a reputation, at least with Bob Adamson, of being an intellectual with a capital I. I think, primarily because he was one of the first intelligent people that Bob Adamson talked to about poetry, but he certainly is and his approach is, as I said in the review, he has a very cool intellect and a very keen perception of things.

The other book in the series was Jennifer Maiden’s The Problem of Evil which again is tremendous in its handling of language. She is one of the most skilled writers in Australia. She has a craft in her writing that would stand up to anything being written in English, and again, I mean there is no such thing as a craft without vision, and she has both and they’re very finely balanced. I think it was one of the most important series of books put out as a series that I’ve come across.

Some of them I think will take a while for people to discover — I don’t know particularly how well some of them are selling, for example. Not that selling is so important when you only print 600 in the first place! But some of them got very few reviews. But I think as long as they’re around people will realise just how important they are. I think we are now seeing in some ways the serious flowering of that growth of poetry that started in the late sixties.

We are now sorting out the stayers if you like from the days when everybody who had long hair and marched hi an anti-war rally went home and wrote a poem. Which was important. But now you are seeing the people like Jennifer Maiden, like Kerry Macrae and John Forbes, who are serious talents and who are going to be important writers in I suppose the next couple of decades.

¶ Can we move away from poets associated with Robert Adamson and New Poetry and Prism Poets to other schools of poets in Australia. I’m thinking of poets who publish with South Head Press or poets connected with Canberra Poetry or the former magazine Canberra Poetry. Most poets seem to associate themselves with a school of poetry or certain editors or publishers.

Yes, as far as South Head Press is concerned I think there are one or two excellent poets. I think Bruce Beaver has done some very good things. You couldn’t really classify him as part of any particular school of poetry. Bruce Beaver is very much a unique individual I don’t think there’s been very much good poetry come out of Melbourne in the last ten years or so.

I think the established poets in Melbourne in the late 50s and early 60s, people like Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Evan Jones, R. A. Simpson — although both Buckley and Simpson have developed and are doing much more interesting things now than they were in those days. But I think that’s the strength of Melbourne poetry; not the great new wave that came up simultaneously with what was growing in Sydney.

I don’t think there’s been very much good poetry come out of that whole Melbourne underground scene. Melbourne has always had the reputation of being more radical, more innovative than Sydney and it’s certainly true in a lot of areas. But what has happened there is that there has developed a scene where there is much more political awareness, much more of an attempt to get poetry off the page into the streets as it were, and you have pub readings, you have workshops like the ones at La Mama with dozens of people, everybody getting up and reading their poetry. And out of this whole energy, this tremendous creative energy, one would expect a few great poems to arise and I haven’t seen any evidence of them yet.

I think there’s much more an inward looking thing, although on the surface it would appear more outward, its going out and jumping up in the middle of the crowd at the football match and reading your poems, factory gates and this kind of thing. Although I will admit that the kind of poetry that is written there is the kind of poetry that comes over much better at a reading than it does on the page.

I discovered that for myself recently at the Montsalvat Poets’ Festival in Melbourne where things I’d read and had disregarded as having much literary value I heard and the performance is part of the act and its a different medium really from the kind of poetry that I do. Although I do read my poetry and I like what I’m writing to be read. But I think there’s a difference — I don’t perhaps write it to be performed in quite the same theatrical sense that somebody like Pi O, [Russell] Deeble, or people like that would do. But I just seriously don’t think there is much talent for writing, I don’t think there is that much interest in language among those people.

¶ What about people like Walter Billeter and John Jenkins?

Billeter, I think, is much more of a serious poet than most of the Melbourne people. I think he and Buckmaster were probably the two from that period who really did write well. Billeter — some of his translations have been very good. I think again he’s tended to get sidetracked by this Melbourne ethos to a certain extent into doing some things that are perhaps not worth doing. But most of the people, I’m thinking of things like the Foundation series of magazines that has come out recently or back to The Drunken Tram which I think was one of the worst anthologies.

What worries me is the attitude that is adopted both by the poets themselves and by critics and some editors that this is radical, revolutionary, this is the poetry of the new Left. In fact there is very little that is radical or revolutionary about it. It’s mostly tired, old, self-indulgent, pseudo-romantic, ego-tripping. That might be a bit tough on some people, but that’s the general impression I get, from people like [Robert] Kenny and Dugan, Hughes, Harrington, people like that. I think Terry Gilmore is probably a poet who would do better out of that scene. Billeter I mentioned. I’m not quite sure about Hemensley; I never have been. I don’t think his talent lies in writing poetry but he undoubtedly has talent. There are a lot of people there, I think, people like Deeble and Pi O, are performers, they’re not really poets.

¶ Do you read magazines like Contempa?

I’ve seen them; I don’t go out of my way to read many of them. I’ve read a couple of issues of Ear In A Wheatfield. There seems to be a sameness about them all but there isn’t just anything there to hold my attention, to hold my interest.

¶ What about a magazine like Luna, which is a different type of magazine?

Once again there has been very little real poetry, that I would personally be interested in reading a second time, or a third or a fourth. Vivian Smith always used to say “Never comment on a poem until you’ve read it five times”. I just could not read most of those five times. Maybe I should; maybe there’s something there that I haven’t got, but I would say on the first two or three readings if I haven’t found anything I’m not going to go back for a fourth and fifth.

¶ Can you talk a bit about writing reviews now. You write in the Australian which probably doesn’t go along with the political views that you espouse. I wonder how you feel.

I do it for the money, pure and simple. I don’t like writing reviews. It’s too much like work; although it doesn’t really take me long to do one. It’s good money for the amount of time I need to put into it. But I tend to put off doing it, which is not good. I complain if a review of my book doesn’t come out until some months after it’s been published, and then I turn around and do the same to other people. I get a bit disappointed.

I know enough about publishing and about newspapers to know that they don’t exist for the promotion of poetry, but I get disappointed when they chop good bits out of my reviews or when they massacre them with an inappropriate headline. Probably I’m exaggerating when I say it’s only for the money because I do feel that I can say important things about books that otherwise may not get reviewed. I would rather write something longer about fewer books, but there aren’t the outlets for that sort of thing although I’ve done a few reviews for New Poetry. I feel happier writing that kind of review. That’s harder work but it’s more satisfying.

I feel that the value in writing reviews apart from the financial reward is the ability to say something honest about what’s being written. And perhaps also the negative side of that to prick the bubble of pretentiousness when it arises. I guess that’s why I write reviews.

¶ Can you say something about the importance of Rodney Hall as poetry editor of the Australian?

Well, the importance of Rodney Hall was that he discovered Michael Dransfield. That was the greatest thing he did. The other thing was the Poets From Prison that I mentioned. I don’t as a rule like the things he publishes in the Australian. I’ve stopped submitting stuff. He’s almost always rejected mine. Rodney and I just don’t see eye to eye I guess on what makes a good poem. I think he certainly has published some good poems in the past. We don’t obviously disagree about everything that’s been written.

I think it was important that he discovered Dransfield, that he encouraged Adamson, and there’s been a few other good, young poets. He’s not afraid of publishing poets that don’t have a name, which is good, unlike some former poetry editors of other Saturday publications where you really had to have about five books behind you before they would read your poem, I think. I think probably the quality of the poetry published by the Australian is somewhat higher than that published by the Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, which isn’t saying very much. But that’s all worth it in that he gave us Dransfield.

¶ Can you talk too of Shapcott’s anthology that he put out in the late 60s?

Oh, that terrible thing. Oh, the Australian Poetry Now; I thought you meant the recent one. That was an interesting attempt — he certainly had done his homework and he managed to cover an extremely wide range. Consequently he got all the good people in along with the dross. Although the interesting thing is that various people would pick out various poets in that anthology as being the good or the bad as it were. He certainly hedged his bets though; he had a bit of everything in there and it makes very interesting reading. As an historical document I think it’s probably quite important.

The individual poems in it, well some of them are probably on their way to being classics. It was very important that something like that come out at the time to widen the market for those who had otherwise only been published in small magazines. I think historically it was of great importance. I don’t know whether it will stand the test of time as an anthology, but it was an important document at the time, extremely important and very valuable.

It’s probably time for something like it again, although they have just reprinted it so I guess that won’t happen — I’d like to know how many schools for example it’s in. That would be interesting because there are certainly enough poems in there. The approach” to poetry in schools, not just in this country but everywhere, is, as far as I can find out, abominable. Kids are being given all kinds of rubbish; in most cases they could write better stuff for themselves. In some, not enough cases, they do. In fewer cases they get them published. But most schools don’t acknowledge that anything has been written since the teachers in those schools were at school themselves, which was the last time they read poems. So that any kind of contact between kids of 14, 15, 16 and the contemporary poetry is purely chance. Which is unfortunate because kids are moving away into other areas of interest at a time when we could be discovering all kinds of new talent.

And I don’t think universities have helped very much, for exactly the same kind of reasons. The approach is a bit more sophisticated but I think the mentality is the same.

¶ Talking about schools, we haven’t said anything about your own teaching and yet you’ve probably spent more time teaching than writing poetry. I’m interested in the teaching you have done because, I think, you’ve taught Japanese for instance, and I wonder how important it is for you — I’ve done very little teaching myself but I think it does teach you a lot to make you think of what you’re trying to do.

Oh, for sure. Teaching language particularly and I always try to avoid teaching English — I had to when I first went out teaching. I hated it. I taught mostly grammar actually. Probably important I think. But teaching foreign language is important because it makes you think all the time about language and how it’s built up and breaking it down into its basic components and also it’s the sense of communication and the ability to communicate that’s being stressed all the time. So I think that the study, and more importantly the teaching, of a language is a great help, to the teacher as well as, one hopes to those being taught.

Apart from that, I think that teaching itself is certainly a challenging job and it’s very good to come into contact with a wide cross-section of the community. 1 would hate to think that I’d become an ivory tower poet, and you certainly come into contact with a wide cross-section of the community when you are teaching in a comprehensive high-school. So there is that value as a human being as well as the value, the specific value of the particular subjects that I’ve been teaching.

Yes, Japanese — I’m not particularly fluent in Japanese myself. I know enough to teach the first two years of high school. I have been fascinated as I was studying Japanese by doing something so totally different. It reveals quite a bit about ways of looking at the world through and using language, much more than European languages where the similarities to English are much more marked. I’m certainly not capable of reading Japanese poetry in the original in any valuable way. My Japanese isn’t so good and the translation of Japanese poetry is something where you just have to accept that you are reading a fraction of what’s there. It’s the same with any translation but if you know a bit about the original language and can look at parallel texts then you get something. If you know a lot about the language and are fairly fluent, as I am in French, then you can read the original without missing too much. But Japanese, I’m not at that stage. So I can’t really comment very much on Japanese poetry that I’ve read, except that I like some of the translations I’ve read perhaps because they’re good as poems in themselves. Particularly as I’ve said, I think I mentioned Takamura before, and one or two others of early twentieth century poetry which was of course very heavily influenced by the symbolists and by Rilke.

¶ You’ve naturally talked a lot about poetry but I’m interested in terms of the other stimuli you get. You said something before how you had some contact with the film society here in Launceston. I’m wondering how important you see developments in cinema and such modern media as influences on your writing of poetry.

Yes. Parallel developments I think rather than influences one way or the other. I’m fascinated by the parallel between Eisenstein and Mayakovsky, for example, and the ways they responded to the kind of society and movements in Russian society in the twenties. I hadn’t drawn any other close parallels. The problem with film is that one tends to be even further behind them with poetry as far as what’s being done in other countries is concerned. By the time you see a good foreign film in Launceston it’s usually a few years old, so it’s hard to talk about exact parallels as to what’s happening in the media at any given time. Film has always fascinated me as a medium; more so probably than anything else except poetry, certainly more so than prose or any of the other visual arts or theatre. I particularly like Jansen and some of the more recent West German directors such as Fassbinder.

¶ Who you don’t really see in Australia very often either in Melbourne or Sydney.

Right. I think there’s probably quite a good parallel to be drawn between the development of Australian film in the last few years and Australian poetry. I haven’t drawn it in any detail myself except to note that there must be a parallel there.

¶ And playwrights too.

Yes, that’s right. And playwrights too, although I must admit I haven’t seen any recent Australian plays on stage. Once again living in Launceston the chances are fairly limited.

¶ Yes I was interested — you mentioned earlier about Michael Thornhill and I was interested too, in terms of this, because I think Thornhill is probably one of the most important Australian directors. I thought Between The Wars was quite amazing in terms of what he did with Freudianism. Can you tell me something about the contact you have with writers in Launceston. I’m thinking here of Tasmanian writers. You said something to me today about James McQueen and Geoff Dean and Chris Aulich. I’m wondering how important it is for you to have this contact living in a place like Launceston.

Well, it keeps me sane, knowing that there are other people in Tasmania, even if only a few. I would have probably irregular and spasmodic contact with any of them but it’s just a comfortable thought that there are other people writing and that they are able to do things and I’m not just fooling myself and thinking that I can write and live in Launceston and should be in Sydney and therefore be writing twice as much, when I know that other people have succeeded in this context as well. No, I think it is important but I wouldn’t say vital in the sense that I would be doing anything different if they weren’t here.

¶ Do you have much contact with poets in Tasmania like Christopher Koch or Gwen Harwood?

Not really directly at all. I’ve met them a few times and that’s about it.

¶ I was interested in looking at New Foundations in terms of some of the people you mentioned, Rosa Luxemburg, Althusser. Can you talk about the people who you’ve been reading in the last two or three years and the type of things that you have been reading.

Well, I’ve been reading, and this was partly to do with writing Lank Tree, the first section of Lank Tree which consists of translations, or double-translations, both from prose into poetry and from mostly French but a few other languages into English and I guess the reading list for that would be Debray, Althusser, Lukacs, Gramsci. Also I’ve read other recent Marxist philosophers and works. Actually one work which I’ve read recently which I found quite fascinating was a polemic on education by [Maurice] Levitas, Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education, which is quite interesting, particularly in its chapters on language, and Chomsky, of course, and as well as that area I like to dabble widely in the sciences, and history in particular. And I’ve been reading — well, just recently I can think of three areas which have been Antarctic exploration, Twelfth Century Europe and I’ve been rereading Caesar’s Gallic Wars and some of Cicero’s speeches, although that was fairly much for a specific purpose — that I wanted for the purposes of a poem to recapture the atmosphere of being seventeen years old, final year high-school student cramming my way through Latin exams. So I tend these days perhaps to read in order to write.

¶ Have you looked much into the fields of, say, anthropology, structuralism, these type of areas?

Not as much as I would like to. I would like to have time to sit down and to go into those areas in more detail. I’ve skirted around things. I’ve read really very little actual anthropology. That’s an area that I want to get into because I know its importance and I can see the connections between that and what I’m doing. So I really should make time as I had to do when I was first challenged to read Olson, to sit down and force myself to do it because I know it will be valuable for itself and possibly for me, for my writing as well. So I really want to get into the Frankfurt School and get into some of the structuralists more than I have. I’ve really only dipped in. And the same with linguistics really. I should perhaps get into more serious study of post-Chomsky writings on linguistics.

¶ What value do you see in the act of writing itself? Do you just see it in terms on becoming a better person yourself or in terms of reading or do you see it — I suppose there are lots of reasons why one wants to write.

Yes, I guess I write for the same reason that Rimbaud wrote — to change the world. Maybe like him, when I’ve succeeded I’ll stop. That only took him four years. It’s to make an impact on the world I guess. An audience is essential. What is not so important is the location of that audience, either in time or in space, but one needs to know that you’re bouncing off something even if you can’t see that something. So I write to be read, obviously, and I write because there are things that have to be said and I feel that I’m the only person who can say them. Because the way that I say them is what I say.