cNº4 1998 ISSNo 1328-2107 r d i t e Poetry and Poetics Review $ Denis Mizzi, Untitled. 5 Adam Aitken interviews Martin Harrison Kevin Hart on Experience and Transcendence and the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer Simon Patton on Jennifer Compton’s hammer! Adam Aitken Interview with Martin Harrison 3 CORDITE Poetry and Poetics Review A quarterly review of Australian poetry Kevin Hart Experience and Transcendence– the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer 10 Publisher CORDITE is published by CORDITE PRESS INC. 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He spent a lot of time travelling up and down AA How has your work in radio influenced your New South Wales–the south coast and north thinking in poetry? coast and some of the inland areas–during and MH I’ve always been interested in electronic after the war, travelling and meeting mainly media and I also realised early on that I would local Aboriginal people and writing down their work in radio–it has all sorts of connections in stories. my life to do with childhood; radio is often a AA There’s a sense that in your poetry the childhood experience for people. Your love of “I”–the poet–is on a pilgrimage through various things starts there. Also because I feel that a landscapes–a pastoral surface–but not in the Gig Ryan lot of writing is just not for the page. Writing is way David Campbell writes pastoral. What’s something that goes on in film and television, your sense of writing the Australian landscape Rameses and other forms of electronic media as well. as a certain unravelling of myths rather than a It’s part of the environment I live in. reinforcement of, say, the country-city divide? Pillar after pillar towers my name. You seem to use images in a linear way, Not all of these could express the life I feel AA MH That dialectic has worn itself out. I’m not as TV would. denying that there are regional differences in flash through me. MH Yes. I am trying to write poetry that lives in Australia, city Australians underestimate that. My ideas span the earth the same world as watching TV, listening to City-based Australians have very little under- standing of what the place looks like from radio and watching movies. And I’ve been think- but now tours litter at my feet ing a lot about what the poetic image means some of the bush areas. But I agree I’m not these days–the classic Horatian definition of interested in arguing that the country is a kind folding their waxy guides. pictoria poesis has to be rethought from gener- of idyllic space. I’m interested in talking about ation to generation. I’m trying to make my work the country as no less a technological invention Here, I watch life fall apart in front of me coexist with contemporary ways of perception. than urban space. It’s an aspect that’s con- as we hurtle towards death. I’m interested in the kind of detail that the stantly underestimated. Its importance is not camera can provide that the writer can be inti- understood. It seems to me that in this country I hope you’ll last mate with. If you take a room or a scene or a you have got to have a many-levelled sense of but every monument freezes. person there is something about the way those place. I know this can be very troublesome, images cover the object, and something about because memory and attachment is many lev- w the lingering attention you can give to what’s elled but not in the sense that there be several produced there. It defines a different stories running side contemporary sensibility. I by side. I mean your attach- My Anatolian agent writes to complain like that kind of attentive- ment to a house or a room or of my negative review. ness. a view is yours and it res- Words cut me to the bone, onates in a thousand different AA People think that the ways. But that is a little differ- way TV and radio influence ent form what I’m saying, I wear what I wore to your wedding poetry is a very contempo- which is that you have got but then the day glittered in sunlight. rary phenomenon but in fact somehow to have this double in your work you owe a lot vision of spaces and places. to Roland Robinson’s aes- Tomorrow I’m reading out loud They do have multiple histo- thetic. He says “the thing is ries–they have Aboriginal histo- in services to hedonism. to keep moving”. I’m think- ries, early settler histories, I write my plaque on the spongey world ing of your poem ‘Moon contemporary histories and so Gazing in Sorrento Dusk’. and hail the puny days. on. You’ve somehow got to You call the moon a “break- keep those sides of things through moon”, “ moon of together. And so I try to keep eternal knowledge”, and you that possibility open in the also say that “everything poems. about it was the opposite of how I felt”. How are these You mentioned the elegy to ideas sourced in Roland Roland Robinson. That is one Robinson’s poetry? of the reasons why the moon became important in that MH I wanted to write an poem. I was trying to tell a version of the elegy for Roland. He published some of my first moon. It is in some ways an aboriginal story. poems, I admired his work and I enormously I’m trying to have two moons in that story–the liked him. He was one of those great generous moon of Diana and the reincarnational moon of human beings basically.