ON GIFT AND GUTS

Here I wrote a Q&A with The Wheeler Centre on writing and my ideas about it - interestingly, the parallels between elite athletes and dedicated writers emerged in my thinking for the piece. Thanks also to Jo Case, ed. of the Centre's 'Dailies' webpage, for the interview.

Working with Words: Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet and editor. She is blog editor atCordite Poetry Review, publisher at John Leonard Press, curator of the Gilgamesh Modern Salon, and recently completed a Hot Desk Fellowship at the Wheeler Centre. Her new book of poems, The Book of Skins, will be published early 2014.

We spoke to her about dealing with writerly doubt, remaining open to helpful advice about your writing (and immune to praise or criticism), and why writers are like athletes.

What was the first piece of writing you had published?

My first pieces of journalism were on music when I was 17 at theMelbourne Herald where I was a cadet – it was Melbourne’s former evening broadsheet, later subsumed into the Herald Sun under Murdoch. My first published poems (paid) were in Meanjin in the early 1990s.

What’s the best part of your job?

Being able to say what I want to say, through writing. I consider it a privilege. I also write across genres – essays, poetry, feature articles, and on activist issues – so I feel, nearly always, personally, diversely and mentally engaged with what interests me, and usually, passionately.

What’s the worst part of your job?

At times I have suffered a terrific, disabling, inner experience of doubt about being a writer, especially of poetry. Now I am steely with myself about this. I’ve developed – as I think most writers and artists need to – what I call a psychic toughness towards this nervous energy. Doubt is useful, it keeps you open to always attempting new ways of using language. I also think you can approach the writing act like a dedicated athlete trains for competing or a dancer trains for performing. You train, psychically, to be ready to write, and then do it, no matter what, little by little – or sometimes via an unexpected leap – to new levels.

What’s been the most significant moment in your writing and publishing career so far?

It would be a series of moments – a particular publication, getting a fellowship, writing a new kind of piece – a growing clarification about what I want to do with writing. As part of this, I have become intent with myself in making writing (alongside caring for the ones and issues close to me, obviously) the priority in all that I choose to do.

What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?

‘Bum on seat’ – William Burrough’s advice on writing. To ‘turn up’ at the desk (or where it is you write) – and write. Balancing that, you also develop a sense of a piece’s energy flow; if it ebbs, it’s good to turn away for some time, even a few hours. I often go to bed then. The painter Renoir was very attuned to this creative energetic flow. He said you also have to ‘loaf around’ a bit. But stamina, being able to sustain and remain with the flow of a piece of work when it is present, is also very important.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?

I have never really been surprised by anything. I think it’s optimal to remain open to helpful advice or editing about a piece of writing, to accept what might assist it – while also being aware that people’s ‘advice’ can sometimes be masking an unconscious rivalry or intention to undermine your writing. So I try to be immune to praise or criticism, while remaining open, as I said, to what others do genuinely offer as positive assistance.

If you weren’t working in writing and publishing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

Writing is my passion, it’s a life-force for me. So I don’t think about an alternative.

There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?

Writing, in my view, is a co-creation between the writer and the force and energy of language. Writers love words, tenderly, I believe. For me, this relationship approaches an intimacy, with patterns of change, maturation and challenges, which mirror the relationship with your human beloved. The act of writing, like an intimate relationship, is a co-creation. Can this be taught? Absolutely – but the seed of that kind of passion for language has to be present in both the student and the teacher.

What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?

Find your own way, find your words to express what you want to say. That way you have the opportunity to write uniquely. Above all, become crystal clear – I would say, even, ruthless – that you will do nothing else, no matter what the challenges are.

Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?

I am terribly old-school in my support for physical bookshops; I know the wonders of e-technology and online ordering, but I still am able to make do with ordering books into favorite bookshops, precious to me, such as Melbourne’s Collected Works. I also read books at the State Library of Victoria; for example, you can source multiple translations for the same book, if that interests you.

If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?

I’m not very good with the fictional. I read poetry and non-fiction almost exclusively. To be honest, I am blessed by relationships with some extraordinary ‘real’ people. I would always prefer to have dinner with them – and we would talk, as usual, about writing, art, love, things that matter, I believe. Oh, and AFL, athletics, and sport too. I am passionate about sport – and see many parallels between elite athletes and writers. You can have the gift to write, but you also have to have guts – and do the long hard yards of training.

What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?

There’s not a particular one. I think we are constantly choosing to read books that are apt for a particular time – that we are being significantly impacted all the time, hopefully. I tend to have a handful of books that sit near my bed, or which I cart around, that infuse what I am trying to learn at that time. They are like talismans, too.

This year, that would have included Albert Camus’ book on Algeria (The Algerian Chronicles), Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Leishman translation), Francis Webb’s Collected Poems, Tolkien’s Return of the King, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection. The through-line would be an interrogation about how humans have the potential to reach into and integrate higher principles of character, endeavour and love.

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Jacinta Le Plastrier’s new book of poems, The Book of Skins, will be published early 2014. She blogs atwww.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com.

In the latest Guncotton blog piece (ed. Jacinta Le P), for Cordite Poetry Review, Jen Jewel Brown discusses Paul Kelly's most recent musical endeavour, the 'Conversations with Ghosts' CD,  built around powerful, iconic poetic texts such as Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells', Judith Wright's 'Woman to Man' and poems by Dickinson, Yeats and Les Murray.
http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/collaborative-kelly-stalks-arcane-new-ground/

Jen Jewel Brown
Collaborative Kelly Stalks Arcane New Ground

15 September 2013

And to the bottom I will follow

Conversations with Ghosts (CD) by Paul Kelly
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2013

While a long-time voracious song-writer and performer in his own right, Australian musician Paul Kelly has also been a collaborative nomad, drawn to criss-cross with others during his career. And Kelly’s collaboration most likely to grip poets is also his most recent – Conversations with Ghosts – an ambitious song-cycle of twelve haunting poetic texts.

First performed in 2012 and reprised live this September with concerts in three states, Conversations with Ghosts began in 2010 when the South Melbourne-based Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) proposed to Kelly that he collaborate with the school on a modern classical song cycle. In the CD liner notes, his co-composer and conductor James Ledger (then resident at ANAM) recalls two of the works – the musical re-imagining of W.B. Yeats’ poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and Kelly’s own lyric, ‘The Chimes at Midnight’ – came as a quick birth, in a couple of hours, Ledger at the piano, Kelly singing alongside.

Live, the Melbourne Recital Centre performance I saw in October last year felt like a grand strike for poetry, with the centrepiece, Kenneth Slessor’s mighty ‘Five Bells’, sombrely and conversationally rolled out by Kelly, whose poetic memory through a long night of mostly spoken, part-sung word was notable.

So dark you bore no body, had no face, 
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air ...

That such a wild and sustained poem – Slessor’s mourning of his mate’s drowning – should be re-imagined within a modern classical and slightly rock setting is something to celebrate.

And ‘Five Bells’, given this kiss of life, still seems so quintessentially Australian, and, of its time (1930s), bohemian:

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward ...

The sounds of ANAM’s young post-graduate ensemble vaunted high and crisp into the ribs of the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall in the Melbourne Recital Centre, in complex classical arrangements for the likes of Emily Dickinson’s ‘One Need Not Be a Chamber To Be Haunted’, Scottish poet Norman MacCaig’s ‘Basking Shark’, and more from Australia’s canon with Les Murray’s ‘Once in a Lifetime, Snow’ and Judith Wright’s ‘Woman to Man’.

The other-worldly, apocalyptic and cryptic Yeats is given a second jolt to the heart with a sophisticated orchestration for his ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, whose opening sally, ‘That is no country for old men’ is familiar to many, not least as inspiration for the title of the Oscar-winning film of 2007, directed by the Coen brothers. The ongoing melancholic – and salutary – ringing of bells in Conversations with Ghostscontinues with ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’ (from ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’) by Tennyson:

The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Viola and harp work were highlights live, and violins, keyboards, double bass, clarinet, saxophones, French and other horns, percussion and frequent lead lines from the variegated recorders of soloist Genevieve Lacey unfolded compositions, by turns, experimental and occasionally (although not uncomfortably) traditional, with the Celtic tang often expected from Kelly. Ledger’s work with the baton brought the disparate elements together with authority.

The performances of ANAM’s players, among the best post-graduate musicians in the country, and Kelly’s casual, yet spine-tingling narrations – his brassy voice often soaring above the ensemble like a cornet – are sharply arranged and recorded on disc. Lacey’s recorder takes a rather clichéd ‘ghostly’ approach in the overture ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, but this could have been a rare failing in arrangement. Kelly’s ‘captain’s pick’ of most of the poetry, his occasional acoustic guitar and his own four lyrical contributions set an unpretentious tone, while Ledger’s complexities of orchestration, including dissonant passages, were strongly played by the young virtuosos.

The closest thing, for Kelly fans, to this collaboration would be the filmic light operaOne Night the Moon (2001, directed by Rachel Perkins) where the more than worthy soundtrack was co-written by Kelly, Kev Carmody and Mairead Hannan; while his crackling, part-improvised (with Professor Ratbaggy) soundtrack to Lantana (Ray Lawrence – also 2001) is another genre-stretching and unsettling long-player.Conversations with Ghosts stands well alongside these two as yet another powerful Paul Kelly collaboration.

Disclaimer: Jen Jewel Brown is is an ex-sister-in-law of Paul Kelly.

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About Jen Jewel Brown

Jen Jewel Brown works for the National Film & Sound Archive and is doing a Ph.D. at Monash. She is an award-winning poet, twice featured in Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.). Brown has worked as a journalist and reviewer since the 70s and authored four books.

In the renewed, regular series of 'Notes From' at Cordite Journal's blogsite, Guncotton, we commission pieces by travelling poets and writers where they reflect on current or recent journeys. Korean-based Australian poet, writer and scholar Dan Disney writes a fascinating piece here on Armenia's capital city Yerevan - and the terrific struggles and courageous faith of writers and artists working there. Proposals to the series are welcome - I am the blog editor - E: jlep@netspace.net.au

http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/yerevan-dan/

Dan Disney
Notes from Yerevan, Armenia

1 September 2013

First impression: Yerevan undulates out the semi-desert, ringed with what look suspiciously like nuclear reactors. Flight SU1860 jolts down at (the recently privatised) Zvartnots airport, and we pass a dis-assemblage of passenger jets in various states of stripped-down decay. In the snow-capped distance, and just over the border with Turkey, Mount Ararat landmarks the otherwise small-hilled afternoon, a daily taunt here to national pride. In 1921, Stalin, Atatürk, and others sat down to reset national boundaries (during the Treaty of Kars): from uptown and dropping into Yerevan’s city centre, it feels like a bay should establish the city’s fringe. Instead, there’s that distant tidal wave of the now-Turkish mountain, where mythology tells us Noah parked his improbable floating zoo.

This stone city is built on the ruins of ancient Erebouni (782BCE), and has been criss-crossed by successive marauders (including Assyrians, Persians, Arabs, Byzantines, Mongols, Turks). It is one of the world’s oldest, continually inhabited cities. The currency is adorned with poets: Hovannes Toumanian (1869-1923) is commonly regarded as the father of modern Armenian letters, while the brilliant Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937) died a counter-revolutionary during the Soviet purges. When I hand over a few notes of Armenian dram in exchange for a visa, the border guard hands back a ‘shnorhakalut’yun’ (thank you), and then ‘welcome you, mister’.

Visiting in 1990, the renowned Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński writes thus of Armenia:

The history of Armenians is measured in millennia. We are in that part of the world that is customarily called the cradle of civilization. We are moving among the oldest traces of man’s existence … The fate of Armenians: centuries of persecutions, centuries of exile, diaspora, homeless wandering, pogroms. (Kapuściński 1995: 46; 231)

This wind-bitten place was a dormant village until 1918, when the Soviets turned Yerevan into Armenia’s capital (the country’s thirteenth). Today it is full of young families and bent police and huge, brutal, upright statues and unkempt parks and public squares bustling with flea markets and sun and overcrowded, dustymashutkas (mini-buses) which jostle across town at 27¢ per ride. I am here as a guest of Mkrtich Tonoyan, director of the Armenian-based arts residency program ACOSS. This monolithic 37 year old is a former teen paramilitary, and carries books likeEducation for Socially Engaged Art with him everywhere. Tonoyan lives by his ethics like few other artists I know: any money generated by ACOSS is channelled directly into projects for children and socially-disadvantaged groups.

During my month-long stay as an ACOSS writer-in-residence, he delivers a new turbo charger to a rehabilitation centre’s inert bus and, when he visits an association for blind veterans in Stepanakert (the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which remains disputed territory), he promises to fund twenty new handheld laser guidance devices. Tonoyan lives in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Yerevan, together with his mother and grandmother, wife and three kids. We can’t walk 20 metres in this part of town without somebody clutching him in a bear hug. And anything growing on trees in his garden is prima materia: the aim is for home-made vodka which is 96% proof, a liquid corrosive for the psyche. The parties in his studio attract artists from across the Caucasus.

Firmly hand-in-hand into the future with Russia, Armenia remains at loggerheads with pro-American, neighboring Georgia. To talk of some of the other neighbours only raises eyebrows and blood pressure: the war with Azerbaijan is ongoing (at best, a ceasefire), and everyone has an evenings’-worth of outcry over the Turkish-led genocide, which started in 1915 and ended up in one and a half million Armenian deaths later. And though the Soviets left in 1991, they left a culture of censorship behind – as Armenia’s foremost avant-garde poet, Violet Grigoryan, based in Yerevan, knows only too well. Cultural commentator and raconteur par excellence, Grigoryan once hosted her own TV show … which the state closed overnight for its ‘inappropriate’ political content. In her introduction to Deviation: Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature (2008), she contests that:

The concept of ‘drawer’ literature first emerged during perestroika, referring to works that authors hid in drawers … A long time has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of state-mandated censorship. Nevertheless, the censorship survived in the people’s spirit and in those who continued to govern the literary world. (Grigoryan 2008: 7)

So what to do when confronted (as she perceives it) with a cultural economy regulated by reactionary bean-counters? Grigoryan persists with making space to escape institutionalised censorship; she purposefully antagonises any valorised group (‘Academia, the Literature Departments, the publishers and the Stalin-styled creative unions’: Grigoryan 2008: 7), through fostering writing which employs non-normative styles. She is part of a raucous group – the Inknagir Literary Club, based in the city – that demands freedom, plurality, and empowerment. Members are frequently blacklisted, despised for themes which include homosexuality (still largely unmentionable in Armenia), sexual violence, suicide, necrophilia. One academic states that Grigoryan’s cohort are:

Demolishing all the moral, ideological, and spiritual standards in their wake. Preaching their message of verbal freedom, they dragged into literature the stratum of language that has no place in the dictionaries and … literally exudes the stench of decay. (Zhenia Kalantaryan, cited in Grigoryan 2008: 9).

For the Inknagirs, reactions like this means their impact on contemporary Armenia literature is already a fait accompli.

And so, in this small and landlocked country where 80% of the borders are closed and the threat of missiles dropping over Yerevan looms (to almost every Armenian’s dismay, Russia recently sold US$4 billion of arms to oil-rich Azerbaijan), creative producers are struggling to make sense of their role after the death of the Marxist drive toward utopia: are they social workers or social misfits? Is an artist an activist rebuilding communities through art, or a destinateur of programmatic bad taste, smashing everything so as to start again? Either impulse speaks to ideas of engagement and idealism. Tonoyan and Grigoryan embody competing impulses in a dynamic scene populated by artists living each to authentic visions of aesthetic function: in a place where there is almost no opportunity for creative producers to receive support for their work, the Armenian artists I met would welcome visits from funded, comparatively wealthy First World poets. Next time you receive funding or win a prize, consider visiting.

Works cited

Violet Grigoryan and Vahan Ishkhanyan (eds) 2008 Deviation: Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature. Yerevan: Inknagir Literary Club, 2008.

Ryszard Kapuściński (trans Klara Glowzewska). Imperium New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

This entry was posted in GUNCOTTON and tagged ACOSS, Dan Disney, Mkrtich Tonoyan, Violet Grigoryan. Bookmark the permalink.

About Dan Disney

Dan Disney’s collection, And then when the, was published in 2011. He is currently working on a new collection of poems and a collection of essays on the sublime. He teaches twentieth century poetries and poetics at Sogang University, and divides his time between Seoul, Turin, and Melbourne.