The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand [1 ed.] 9781922669230

Citation preview

By the same author Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing Nothing Sacred: A novel in verse

Australian Scholarly

© 2021 Linda Weste First published 2021 by Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd 7 Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic 3051 Tel: 03 9329 6963 / Fax: 03 9329 5452 [email protected] / www.scholarly.info ISBN 978-1-922669-23-0 All Rights Reserved Cover design: Wayne Saunders

Contents

Diane Brown 151

Introduction vii

Jordie Albiston 165 Steven Herrick 1

Lesley Lebkowicz 175

Lorraine Marwood 9

Mark Pirie 179

Sharon Kernot 16

Maureen Gibbons 184

John Jenkins 24

Paul Hetherington 192

Pip Harry 33

Christine Evans 203

Tim Sinclair 41

Melissa Bruce 210

Catherine Bateson 49

Rebecca Jessen 227

Sally Murphy 55

David Mason 231

Brian Castro 63

Jennifer Compton 241

Leni Shilton 71

Linda Weste 247

Diane Fahey 80

Gregory O’Brien 255

Sherryl Clark 90

Alan Wearne 262

Luke Best 98

Michelle A. Taylor 274

Jeri Kroll 104 Bel Schenk 114

Acknowledgements 287

Geoff Page 118

Photo Credits 289

John Newton 124

Notes 291

Lisa Jacobson 131

Bibliography 294

Irini Savvides 138

Index 299

Judy Johnson 145 v

Introduction

I. Beyond the margins ‘The wide view is of a protean abundance, and, in the present, ever-expanding possibilities.’ Diane Fahey There are increasing numbers of verse novels being published in Children’s, Young Adult, and Adult categories, a trend since the 1980s. This trend has been accompanied by a growing interest in the genre within literary and academic circles. With this book – the first collection of interviews to give sole focus to verse novelists in this region – I aim to expand knowledge of the diverse ways such authors combine narrative and poetic elements to compose their distinctive works. Their responses foreground the uniqueness of storytelling through poetry. The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand contains interviews with thirty-five verse novelists who are, or have been resident in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, or the South Pacific. The verse novels featured in the interviews were published in either the Children’s, Young Adult, or Adult­category, between 1993 and 2021. Each author was invited to respond to nine set questions to enable comparative interview responses. As editor I have sequenced the interviews to encourage reading and genre understandings across the three categories. Verse novels and verse novellas predominate. Several titles straddle the boundary with verse biography; these works arguably also function as stories, and in reception are regarded

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as such. I have also incorporated eight verse novelists – Geoff Page, Judy Johnson, Alan Wearne, Brian Castro, Paul Hetherington, David Mason, Christine Evans and myself – whose interviews were in a previous internationally-focused collection of adult-category verse novels from Australia, the UK, USA and Canada. This ensures an important sampling of viewpoints over several key decades of verse novel publication in this region. This book makes a timely entry into debates about the verse novel, in a period when such views are in flux, both within and outside academia. The interviews engage with critique – even that which complicates, marginalises or problematises perceptions of the verse novel. The interviewees reflect on generic boundaries, antecedents of the verse novel in the Western literary tradition, and on recent shifts in the genre’s reception and status. Such discussions will appeal to literary and narrative scholars, as well as to readers and writers of poetry and verse novels with an interest in how the genre is valued, interpreted and appraised.

II. Bridging the divide ‘… step over the threshold of the form, and enter into its world …’ Lisa Jacobson As I prepared these interviews from Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand writers, I deliberated on the value or applicability of a regional collection, mindful that literature is not neutral in the colonial project. To situate this collection, both geographically and conceptually, could draw it into a range of discourses concerning regional poetics (and literary regionalism more broadly) that have emerged since the 1940s. The extent of the discourse is too extensive to survey here, but includes scholarly writing on postcolonialism, settler-colonial relations, colonial unsettlement, bioregionalism, the literature produced by Aboriginal and Māori writers viii

Introduction

and activists throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, into the first decade of the new century and continuing today, as well as discussions taking place within writing industry bodies and writing communities. The prominence of these discourses is evident, for instance, in Jeanine Leane’s reading of Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Living on Stolen Land as ‘a charter for settler decolonisation.’ Leane’s review warns that ‘the mind of settler academics is a dangerous place for First Nations peoples … a space of stereotypes and ingrained assumptions transmitted through the settler discourse of nation, ‘settlement’ rights and belonging.’1 Another example is the recent acknowledgement of Stephen Muecke’s scholarly efforts ‘to unstitch the people and places of the Australian continent from the weave of colonial predeterminations’2. I hope to have anticipated at least some of the challenges of a regional collection, not the least this book’s categorising of the selected Australian writers into a territorially-unceded land. A number of interviewees engage with some of these discourses, though the focus of The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand is rather on the poetics of verse novels; on the interplay of their narrative and poetic elements, and on how those elements come together when a verse novel is composed. Certainly, as a genre, the verse novel reflects the historical privilege of its poetic and its novelistic progenitors – but there are changes at the global level which suggest verse novels are already taking part in the decolonisation of cultural production. I anticipate verse novels in this region will, in the years ahead, contribute in meaningful ways to this revisioning project, to increasingly reflect the diversity of the populations of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The process of collating this volume, did to a certain degree, affirm a sense of regional belonging. For many of the featured writers of verse novels it was significant that there were regional examples to follow. The impact of Dorothy Porter and Les Murray is everpresent; Murray predominantly for writers of adult-category verse novels, whereas Porter has a broader reach. Indeed many contributors mention Porter, whose influence resonates, whether in passing reference, such as Bel Schenk’s ‘Dorothy Porter was on my radar’ or in intensely-felt responses, such as Tim Sinclair’s: ‘I can’t ix

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overstate the impact The Monkey’s Mask had on my understanding of, and excitement for, the verse novel form’, or Rebecca Jessen’s: ‘It goes without saying … a huge impact not only on my verse novel Gap but also for me as a poet.’ Many participants also name Steven Herrick, who, as early as 2004 was dubbed ‘the doyen of YA and children’s books’.3 As Lorraine Marwood observes in her interview, ‘It was reaffirming to know that other authors, especially Australian authors, were using this format.’ Within the region, however, the incidence of verse novel publication is disparate. While Australia has enjoyed a prospering verse novel market for several decades, to date this is not the case across the Tasman. Nevertheless, a number of writers of significance from Aotearoa New Zealand have published verse novels or verse novellas. The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand contains interviews with John Newton, Mark Pirie, Diane Brown, Gregory O’Brien, Sherryl Clark, and Jennifer Compton; the latter two writers were both born in New Zealand (Kawakawa and Wellington respectively), but reside in Australia. Some of these Aotearoa New Zealand writers’ verse novels were seeded in regional exchange. Malachi, An Entertainment, a verse novella by Gregory O’Brien MNZM, was published in 1993 by poet Ken Bolton’s Adelaidebased Imprint, Little Esther. O’Brien spent considerable time in Australia in the nineties, and recalls, ‘… within a few years there was Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune and Craig Raine’s History, The Home Movie, Vikram Seth … and Alan Wearne was hard at work also.’ During the same period in New Zealand, Gregory O’Brien observes, ‘no one was on the case, strangely.’ For John Newton, ‘writing a verse novel had been on the “to do” list for many years, probably since the early 1990s when [he] was a graduate student in Melbourne.’ Newton completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne, and recalls that the time ‘coincided with a boom in Australian verse fiction’. He ‘remember[s] reading Dorothy Porter, Philip Hodgins, Les Murray, Alan Wearne, and the redoubtable comic team of Ken Bolton and John Jenkins.’ Mark Pirie attended literary events in Brisbane in 2000, and he too, recollects, ‘It was there I learned of the Australian developments in the verse novel. It was a more popular form over there at the time. I liked x

Introduction

writers like Alan Wearne and Dorothy Porter … In New Zealand I haven’t seen it used much.’ Clearly there is a need to trace the genealogy of verse novels in Aotearoa New Zealand, though that task is beyond the scope of this book. There is certainly a linked tradition with the 2009 epic in verse, The Adventures of Vela, by Samoan-born Albert Tuaopepe Wendt ONZ CNZM, with Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s seventy-two poem Māori Battalion: A Poetic Sequence published in 2001, and Māori poet Robert Sullivan’s 2002 booklength narrative poem, Captain Cook in the Underworld. In Australia too, the verse novel is recognised as a literary space where the events of the past can be contested. Aboriginal Australian writers are producing award-winning verse novels. Sally Morgan, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Kirli Saunders were each contacted for an interview. These writers’ contribution and ongoing commitment to mentoring Indigenous emerging writers is extensive, and at the time, Ali Cobby Eckermann was in the process of establishing an Aboriginal writer’s retreat in Koolunga, and Kirli Saunders, who had been awarded 2020 NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year for her work as a teacher, storyteller and cultural consultant, was facilitating the Poetry in First Languages Program (PIFL) on Dharawal, Gadigal, Yuin, Gundungurra, Gumea Dharawal Country, as well as workshops in the Northern Territory and on Ngunnawal Country in The Australian Capital Territory (ACT). I wish to acknowledge their significant achievements. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight – which explores the impact of colonisation in mid-north South Australia around 1880 – won the kuril dhagun Indigenous Writing Competition through the State Library of Queensland and in 2013 was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize, as well as Book of the Year Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary and History Awards. Sally Morgan’s Sister Heart – a verse novel about children of the Stolen Generation, and published by Fremantle Press in 2016 – was shortlisted in the Children’s literature category of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. In the same year, Sister Heart was an honour book for older readers in the 2016 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Awards, and was shortlisted for the Gold Inky Prize. Kirli Saunders won the 2019 xi

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Western Australia Premier’s inaugural Daisy Utemorrah Award for her verse novel manuscript about an eleven year old girl learning to care for country, ‘Mother Speaks’. This verse novel was subsequently published with the title Bindi by Magabala Books in 2020. The success of Bindi continues: as winner of the 2021Australian Book Industry Award – Small Publishers’ Children’s Book of the Year; shortlisted for the 2021 Australian Book Design Awards and for the 2021 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year – Younger Readers Award; and longlisted for the 2021 Colin Roderick Award. A verse novel sequel, Bindi II is forthcoming in 2021, once again by Magabala – Australia’s leading Indigenous publishing house.

III. Embracing the genre ‘The verse novel is an exciting genre because of its versatility and its flexibility to tell stories’ Leni Shilton Each of the thirty-five writers in this book has insights about verse novel poetics by virtue of having composed one or more of their own. Their responses align on the fundamental understanding that narrative and poetic elements are constituent in a verse novel – even if there are different conceptions of the relationship between those elements, and the degree of importance of each. If the interviewees use different terms for the narrative elements that make manifest a verse novel’s narrativity – ‘what makes a story interpretable as a story’4 – nevertheless they still convey that it comprises a storyworld and a temporal sequence of incidents in connection with characters, mediated from particular perspectives, and through acts of utterance or articulation. Likewise, the writers may use different terminology for the poetic elements that make manifest a verse novel’s poeticity, the whatever-it-is that makes poetry poetry.5 A number of interviewees refer to ‘lyric’ in the verse novels xii

Introduction

of other writers, or their own. Lyric poems or lyric passages are present in verse novels in varying degrees – though lyric is not constituent in the verse novel – that is to say, lyric is not a given; poetry is. Poetry and lyric are not identical.6 Lyric is not specific to poetry and can also be present in prose fiction.7 Many of the interviewed writers refer to the verse novel as a ‘genre’. Some ambivalence is evident about the nomenclature, ‘verse novel’. ‘Verse’ attracts some contestation, even though its etymological origins draw attention to how poetry, and likewise the verse novel, employs line; that is, how turns create lines (whether free or metrical). ‘Form’ is used in a number of contexts: one usage treats the verse novel as the sum of its constituent parts, so ‘the verse novel form’ connotes poetry and narrative, or poetry-as-a-novel, or perhaps, verse and novel. Another use attends to the poems’ material appearance, layout, organisation on the page. ‘Form’ can suffice for the sake of generality, as in ‘written in poetic form’; a terminological shorthand, in lieu of poetic specificity. Or the term can refer to a particular poetic form – because it may be that a given verse novel uses a regular and consistent form throughout, or has a fixed form. It may be an identifiable ‘stanzaic form’ such as the Onegin stanza, or a recognised ‘poetic form’ such as the sonnet – but even so, there are many types of sonnets. Indeed, as David Mason signals when he describes his verse novel, Ludlow, as ‘blank verse with variations’ [my italics] – even fixed forms may require flexibility – that is to say, they may have irregularities and inconsistencies. Indeed, variations of ‘form’ abound in verse novels. The verse novel has never been bound to a specific poetic form. ‘Form’ likely risks the presumption that verse novels have just one form. Yet a verse novel for Adults may employ stanzas with mixed forms. A verse novel for children might be written predominantly in free verse, but include a linked-form pantoum, an acrostic, a haiku, and a shaped or concrete-form poem. The term ‘form’ may therefore elide the multiplicity of a verse novel’s poetic material. ‘Form’ may overlook too, the narrative forms or narrative types that a verse novel may employ: fictionalised media reports, sms messages, xiii

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songs, letters, journals, monologues, and so on. Most evidently the term proves inadequate to communicate the interplay that takes place between poetic and narrative elements when a verse novel participates in – that is, negotiates, the conventions of – an adjacent genre or a subgenre, and when modes qualify or modify a verse novel’s presentation. Modes may, for instance, vary a verse novel’s thematic features, require particular forms (poetic and – or narrative), nuance the mood or tone or manner of speech, or in other ways alter the verse novel’s expressive and conceptual qualities. As modes do not change the requisites of verse novels (poetry and narrative remain constituent) and do not have a hierarchical relation with genre – in a given verse novel there could be an interplay of modes, forms, genres and subgenres. Thus ‘form’ not only poses definitional challenges – it has discernible limitations for communicating complexity in the verse novel. The generic identity of the verse novel is intersectional territory; this is particularly evident in a verse novel as diverse in presentation as George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls with its lyric, epistolary, expository and dramatic modes, its eight canto divisions, its multiple forms – both poetic and narrative – letters, ballads, lyric poems, sermons, a newspaper article, photographs, songs and a stage script. These poetic and narrative elements – each with its own affordance, its ‘different potential for use’8 – bring particular benefit as they come together – and then modify still more – in productive interplay. Which poetic and narrative elements to choose? How extensively to employ them? Such choices are made by the participating verse novelists based on a range of factors which they share in these interviews. Some writers foreground the poetry. Some writers’ choices weigh in favour of narrative. Some writers favour reader engagement and telling a compelling story. And there are many writers who describe the choices as flexible; who choose according to the project and what it requires. Whatever their choices, each of the featured verse novelists appreciates that the accretion of poetic and narrative elements culminates in a verse novel of unique composition. The interviews are an opportunity to convey the complexity of those compositions, and improve verse novel reception. A frequent assertion in xiv

Introduction

many interviewees’ responses is that the technical demands of writing a verse novel can go unrecognised. Notwithstanding the challenges that verse novelists face in securing publication, not one of these thirty-five writers is adamant that they would never want to write another verse novel. And that’s quite remarkable. Indeed, some of these writers have already written two verse novels, three, four, five … and Steven Herrick’s verse novel tally amounts to twelve. Verse novelists deem the effort as worth any risk. In the words of John Newton: ‘If we played the percentages we wouldn’t be poets. In the end, quixotic though the task may be, I can’t say conclusively that I won’t come back to it.’

IV. Time to notice The verse novel form is a huge mountain to climb, and if you get to the top there’s probably no one there to notice. John Newton A range of factors impact on verse novel reception today – particularly the processes and culture of the creative and literary industries, publishing and marketing sectors, and archival and library services – where notions about the genre are held by publishers, literary agents, booksellers, literary award judges and commentators, book reviewers and librarians. A number of verse novelists in these interviews express concerns about publisher or reader reticence about the genre, the challenges of finding a publisher and the compromises that are sometimes deemed necessary for publication. Sometimes the reticence is mirrored in their own views, as John Newton acknowledges: My reading has taught me that the form has a multitude of different uses – that there are as many different kinds of verse novels as there are poets game enough to take up the challenge. As a reader, I have to admit to a suspicion of the

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form that has still not entirely left me; I never pick up a new example with unqualified relish. And yet by now I have been surprised, disarmed and entranced so often that I have come almost to expect it. Writers of verse novels refer to and title their works in quite varied ways, for reasons as diverse as the works themselves. Nomenclature variations mean that verse novels may not be readily identifiable in the marketplace, or the archive. This has been the case, of course, across several centuries; the verse novel has reached its reading audiences cloaked in a range of terminological guises. In the eighteenth century, Anna Seward chose ‘poetical novel’ to subtitle her four verse epistles, Louisa. In the nineteenth century, Emily Bronte’s Gondal’s Queen was accompanied by the subtitle ‘a novel in verse’. Alexander Pushkin chose ‘novel in verse’ too, once his serialised chapters of Eugene Onegin were united in 1833. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning was intent on writing a ‘novel-poem’ but eventually published Aurora Leigh: A Poem in 1856. Even the practice of explicit subtitling, as a means to signal genre, is inconsistent; by way of illustration, only one of Christopher Le Farge’s three verse novels were published with explicit subtitles, in contrast to each book in Gilbert Frankau’s trilogy of two verse novels and a verse novelette published between 1912 and 1937. There may not be a signalling of genre; a verse novel may be designated only by its form, or mode, or by its relation to other genres or subgenres, thus Aurora Leigh is a ‘blank verse Bildungsroman’, Derek Walcott’s Omeros is ‘a postcolonial epic’, and The Monkey’s Mask is ‘an Erotic Murder Mystery’. But the nomenclature of verse novels does not fully account for the challenges of locating verse novels in the archive. A sample of just ten verse novels in the National Library of Australia catalogue reveals differences in how they are classified by ‘Form/genre’. Two of the ten books are solely identified as ‘Novels in verse’. A third book does not have a ‘Form/ genre’ listing at all, despite having an explicit verse novel subtitle. Four books receive multiple category listings which include ‘Novels in verse’. The final three books in the selection are designated with other ‘Form/ xvi

Introduction

genre’ categories – none of which are ‘Novels in verse’, even though one is explicitly subtitled. The increased visibility and publicity that accompanies prize-winning books plays a role in shifting perceptions of the verse novel, and may even be counteracting reticence about nomenclature. Many of the verse novels discussed in this collection have won or been shortlisted for awards and prizes. From the highest award, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, to the State and Territory Premier’s Literary Awards, to the independent and bookseller and industry awards – it is entirely feasible that soon there will be few prizes in which the verse novel has not already satisfied the criteria of excellence. As prizewinning or shortlisted titles, verse novels will be more likely to be purchased by school and public libraries, more likely to have wider readership, more likely to receive media exposure, more likely to attract scholarship, and more likely to be known to emerging generations of writers. To be a prizewinner, or achieve a shortlisting, is not straightforward, however, for a verse novel. By virtue of its complement of poetic and narrative elements, a verse novel may be eligible for entry into awards and prizes through either the poetry category, or the novel category. To enter a verse novel into poetry awards might be thought uncontroversial, even readily accepted and unproblematic, given judging panels comprised of poets are the norm. Lyric poetry continues to have valorised status since claiming prominence over narrative poetry in the nineteenth century, so compared to a stand-alone lyric poem, a poem emanating from a booklength verse novel may strike judges as incomplete. Whether the prize is for a single poem, or for a book length submission, the number of lines and number of pages accordingly can also be an impasse. A verse novel will exceed the number of pages stipulated for poetry book entrants, yet have fewer pages than the average prose fiction entrant. Of course, where verse novels are eligible to enter into the novel category of an award, the entries are unlikely to be judged by poets. The category into which a verse novel is entered may depend upon the work itself. Les Murray’s first verse novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral xvii

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won the 1980 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, whereas Fredy Neptune, Murray’s second verse novel, won the 1999 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards – Fiction Book Award. Similarly, Dorothy Porter’s first verse novel, The Monkey’s Mask, published in 1994, won the Age Poetry Book of the Year and the National Book Council’s Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize (the Banjo), whereas her third and fourth verse novels What a Piece of Work, and Wild Surmise, were shortlisted in 2000 and 2003 respectively for the Miles Franklin Literary Award – for a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases. Similarly, her fifth verse novel, El Dorado, was shortlisted for the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Award – for fiction. The assessment as to which category it is appropriate to enter is a decision for the verse novelist, or the publisher, or may be predetermined by the award guidelines. To continue with the example of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, it is evident that the introduction of additional categories has opened eligibility pathways for verse novels. A children’s fiction category and a young adult’s fiction category were introduced in 2010. That year, Lorraine Marwood won the children’s fiction category prize with her verse novel, Star Jumps. In 2013, Lisa Jacobson’s Young Adult category verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award – in the category for poetry. Sally Morgan’s verse novel, Sister Heart, won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award – for children’s fiction, (the Judge’s report refers to the book as ‘a story’ – and the term ‘verse novel’ is not included in the report). Brian Castro’s Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria, a verse novel written in thirty-four cantos, won the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Sharon Kernot’s Young Adult verse novel, The Art of Taxidermy, was shortlisted in the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award – for young adult fiction. Verse novels are in fact starting to make new inroads into awards and prizes that bypass the binary of choosing either the poetry category or the fiction/novel category. Lorraine Marwood’s latest verse novel, Footprints on the Moon, for instance, was shortlisted for the 2021 NSW Premier’s History Awards – Young People’s History Prize. xviii

Introduction

A further challenge that verse novels face, and which may impact on their ability to secure publication pertains to word count. As yet there are no commonly accepted or shared guidelines on word count for verse novels or verse novellas in any category. It is not appropriate to assume the applicability of prose word count ranges for novellas or novels, or for the subgenres of science fiction, fantasy, thriller or historical fiction. While publishers and agents, educators, and writers themselves might consider a verse novel word count range useful and desirable for market purposes – the diversity of verse novels published, even in recent times, reveals substantial variance in extent. Of course, such conventions are but one industry consideration; publishing cost may be an overarching or decisive factor, as it is with prose novels. The positive outcomes for verse novels are, on the whole, encouraging. Verse novels are being noticed. The verse novels featured in these interviews were published by twenty-nine separate publishing houses, ranging from boutique small presses to multinational-owned companies. A number of the more-recently-published verse novels discussed in this collection of interviews have found university presses receptive. The loss of Dorothy Porter – one of the verse novel’s most vital proponents – in 2008 coincided with some challenging years for poetry publishing in the region, and verse novel reception reached a critical juncture; call it cynicism, or scepticism, but a decidely dismissive attitude to the genre took hold for a while – and perhaps some of that sentiment is evinced in the declaration: ‘For a brief moment, verse novels caused a flurry of excitement but this soon settled into fad.’9 Fourteen years on, however, there is no sense of boredom with the verse novel; the genre still seems fresh and full of pluck. The verse novel is more noticeable – not less, in the settings, virtual and place-based, where these interviewed writers teach or study, where verse novels are purchased, and read, and most certainly beyond.

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Steven Herrick

‘… poetry or narrative … verse novels where the author is aware of the tension and weight of both strategies appeal to me the most.’ Steven Herrick is an Australian author of twenty-five books, including twelve verse novels for children and young adults, the titles of which are: Zoe, Max and the Bicycle Bus (University of Queensland Press, 2020), Another Night in Mullet Town (University of Queensland Press, 2016), Pookie Aleera is not my Boyfriend (University of Queensland Press, 2012), Cold Skin (Allen &

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The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

Unwin, 2007), Lonesome Howl (Allen & Unwin, 2006), Naked Bunyip Dancing (Allen & Unwin, 2005), By the River (Allen & Unwin, 2004), Tom Jones saves the World (University of Queensland Press, 2002), The Simple Gift (University of Queensland Press, 2000), The Spangled Drongo (University of Queensland Press, 1999), A Place like this (University of Queensland Press, 1998 reissued 2017), Love, Ghosts and Nose-hair (University of Queensland Press 1996, reissued 2017), and a verse novel in prose poems, Do-Wrong Ron (with Caroline Magerl) (Allen & Unwin, 2003). His books have been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award on nine occasions and have twice won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. He has received three grant fellowships from the Australia Council for the Arts. His Love, Ghosts and Nose-hair was the first verse novel for young adults published in Australia. His verse novel By the River won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2005; and both the Katholischer Jugendbuchpreis and the prestigious Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 2019. He visits over one hundred and fifty schools each year throughout the world talking about his books, and spends three months of every year riding his bicycle in exotic locations.

Another Night in Mullet Town (2016) Cold Skin (2007) By the River (2004) The Simple Gift (2000) A Place Like This (1998) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? The Simple Gift is the story of a sixteen-year-old boy who escapes a violent father and meets an old homeless man and a young woman in a small country town. I wanted to tell this story through multiple first-person

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Steven Herrick

narrators and felt the verse novel format was ideal for this purpose. I love the democracy of multiple first-person narrators – each character can be given equal weight and be able to tell their own story. I see this genre as, I imagine, how a film director sets up his/her cameras – each scene deserves a variety of angles and perspectives. For example, early in the story I have the two young characters, Billy and Caitlin, meet. This meeting is seen through both characters eyes/words/thoughts. The verse novel hopefully allows me to step lightly through this potential minefield of ‘repeating’ scenes. In effect, ‘the simple gift’ is a study in empathy – each of the three main characters try to make sense of the other’s actions and responses while the reader is invited into a stream-of-consciousness narrative. My affection for multiple first-person narrators has driven all of my verse novels, with the exception of By the River and Another Night in Mullet Town which both have a single narrator. In my 2007 verse novel, Cold Skin, nine narrators feature. This allowed me to explore how each character is affected by the death of a girl in the town, and hopefully lets readers understand the motivations of each character. Only by using the multiple first-person narrator format would I have attempted such a story. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I start every book with one main character and a central location. At this early stage, where the story is set is as important as the characters who’ll inhabit the text. All of my books use actual geographic locations, although I change the names of towns/streets/villages. I usually have one issue I want to focus on and am content to allow my character to wander the landscape until the other characters announce themselves. I know this sounds loose and haphazard, but my primary concern in the first draft is establishing the character’s voice and mapping the landscape. In The Simple Gift I wanted Billy to stay in an abandoned train carriage I remember sleeping in when I was a teenager. Once I had Billy set up in this location, the rest of the story unfolded easily – meeting a homeless man 3

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

named Old Bill who lived in a nearby disused carriage and beginning a friendship with Caitlin, a girl from a private school. Put simply, I allow the first character in my story to map out the terrain of future events. I never use a storyboard and rarely know where my narrative is meant to end. I’m content to build character and location in an unhurried fashion. Once I’m confident with the characters’ voices and the location, I develop the narrative. Again, I know this seems haphazard, but I always have a theme or subject matter I want to discuss and this first draft is important in laying the foundation. The central theme of The Simple Gift is not homelessness, but how we view a community, a family – what binds us together. Taking time with location and character development probably works the same way for me as it does for the reader – it brings me closer to the characters and their story. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? In By the River I have only a single narrator, so the main issue is how to develop all the other characters in the story. The obvious solution was to have scenes where Harry, the fourteen-year-old narrator is witnessing the actions and conversations of the other characters. I also included more dialogue, which can be problematic in the verse novel. However, I see this challenge as no different than when I write a prose novel – only dialogue which adds to story and character development should be included. Perhaps the opposite problem occurred in Cold Skin where nine narrators can lead to a similarity of voices and confusion in the narrative. I hopefully solved this by taking time to develop the characters in the beginning through giving each a believable backstory – their age, social class, occupation, all became crucial in a story set in 1948. Of course, this setting also raised issues of language, but I resolved this by not indulging too much in colloquialism or cliched Australianisms, rather letting the inner voice of each character come to the fore, and focusing on the physical setting, the social mores and class structures which defined the age, rather than the language used. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? 4

Steven Herrick

I’m primarily concerned with getting an authentic voice for each of my characters and an atmospheric location for my story – I’ll create it using language that reflects the circumstances of the character and story, without necessarily wanting to show off my poetic abilities. I don’t have a metaphor per line count. I’m concerned with not confusing or boring my readers. I’m not offering them a poetry lesson – just a good story told in a poetic, yet clear and concise way. In By the River I aimed to write a short atmospheric story of a young man coming to terms with the death of his friend – much of the imagery is centred around his life beside the river and in the outdoors, so it felt much more natural to include descriptive landscape poems that spoke to human emotions such as grief, hope and belonging. And perhaps using only a single narrator in this case forced me to look outwards to the location as the source of my imagery. By the River is certainly my most poetic verse novel, and my favourite. A similar situation occurred with Another Night in Mullet Town which tells the story of the gentrification of a ramshackle seaside village, told through the voice of a sixteen year old local named Jonah. Jonah fishes at the lake with his friend, Manx, wishes he could talk to girls, and watches his community being irrevocably changed by real estate development. The village, lake and nearby beach were perfect settings and potent images for this conflict. So location is both the first step, and the foundation, for all of my verse novels. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? While I’m always aware of the push and pull of poetry versus narrative, I find a different strategy works best for me which is to understand the inner voice of each character and let those voices guide the keyboard through this dilemma. Harry’s voice in By the River is most comfortable outdoors, doing and observing things, so the poetic easily came to the fore without much effort. 5

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

The poems in By the River are structured in a self-contained way – similar to how scenes are played out in film – sometimes with the same kind of tightly controlled final lines to indicate the end of scene. What I’m trying to do here is capture the essence of each scene, each moment. The choice of line breaks in By the River were more tightly controlled in order to change the pace of poems – I wanted to heighten emotion, or the relevance of action, by how I arranged the lines – like a river, I wanted the speed and tempo of the flow to be critical. Of all my verse novels, By the River has more poems that can ‘standalone’ – they don’t necessarily need the narrative to make sense. This episodic control is what I’m most pleased about with this book. Yet in Cold Skin where there’s a murder investigation, the narrative tended to be dominant. This is not so much me deciding, as the story and theme demanding what I should focus on. Added to this, Cold Skin adopts some of the forms of the crime fiction genre – a whodunnit, the police procedural; clues and motives examined – these perhaps added to a focus on the narrative more than the poetic. In the editorial process for all my verse novels, I’m aware that parts of the story may lack a poetic focus, or a narrative drive, and that’s where I’ll make more blatant decisions. However, I repeat, if the voice of the character is authentic, I’ll know what works, and how easy it is to change things. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? In By the River I wanted to celebrate my childhood/teenage years where I spent most of my day outdoors. I wanted the main character, Harry to have a strong attachment to the landscape. Despite its theme of coming to terms with grief, it was a really enjoyable book to write because this connection between landscape and character allowed me to explore the range of images I recalled from my youth. In writing the truth, I could be much more poetic than in writing fiction. I wanted to celebrate this connection to land and so I found myself narrowing down the location of each poem – a swamp; a paddock; the roof of a house – I revelled in the detail, so the poetry came easily. And because of this connection, a sense of joy and reflection permeates the book, I hope. 6

Steven Herrick

The poems in By the River are much more self-contained than in my other verse novels – perhaps because I saw this book as a study in grief and hope, so each poem could stand alone. While there’s a clear narrative, it’s unhurried and thematic, rather than demanding. As I said above, the poems are much like a river – there are periods of quiet reflection and surges of emotion and tension. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I love how the verse novel easily allows me to use multiple first-person narrators. In Love, Ghosts and Nose-hair, The Simple Gift, and A Place like this there are three narrators, each treading a different course of the same story. In Cold Skin, as I’ve mentioned, there are nine narrators. In Lonesome Howl there are two dominant narrators. Only in By the River and Another Night in Mullet Town do I follow the more usual practice of a single narrator. I’m always excited by how poetry, and verse novels in particular, can step lightly over terrain where a prose novel may get bogged down. For example, in By the River, we learn much more about Harry’s emotional range and character than we do of what he looks like. Poetry allows me to give landscape a certain potency, strength and character. The physical world – the river, the swamp, the bats, Cowpers Paddock – all take on added meaning and emotion, I hope, when used in the narrative. I also love the simplicity of poetry, how so few words can tell a story – perhaps it allows the reader to do more work, to be more involved? Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I suspect every novel I’ve read has been influential, in some way. However the only one I recall making me want to rush to my study and begin writing another verse novel was Frenchtown Summer by Robert Cormier. Short, simple, eloquent – a boy trying to make sense of his father and the world around him. It’s only one hundred pages, but is evocative beyond words. I’d recommend it to every fan of verse novels. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? A writer can learn from great books, but they can also learn from poor books, or books written in a way that the reader finds … difficult. What 7

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

I’ve learned from reading some verse novels is that I should avoid what I call ‘the poem as diary entry’ – a series of poems that sound and read like someone’s jottings in a diary. Yes, I’ve talked a lot about the inner voice and its importance. But the inner voice should not be a diary entry – it should not just tell the story, or expose character – it has to have some poetry, some sense of the evocative, some sense of wonder and elevation. Perhaps herein lies the conflict of every verse novel – is it poetry or narrative, and the verse novels where the author is aware of the tension and weight of both strategies appeal to me the most.

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Lorraine Marwood

‘There is so much to enjoy and learn about the verse novel’ Lorraine Marwood is an award-winning poet and writer for children. She has published seven poetry collections: Skinprint (Five Islands Press, 1996), Redback Mansion (Five Islands Press, 2002), That downhill yelling (Five Islands Press, 2005), A Ute Picnic and other Australian Poems (Walker Books, 2010), Note on the Door and other Family Poems (Walker Books, 2011), Guinea Pig Town and other Animal Poems (Walker Books, 2013), 9

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

and Celebrating Australia (Walker Books, 2015). Her six books for children include four verse novels: Star Jumps (Walker Books, 2009), Ratwhiskers and Me (Walker Books, 2008), Leave Taking (University of Queensland Press, 2018) and Footprints on the Moon (University of Queensland Press, 2021), as well as two novels published in Penguin Books’ Aussie Nibbles Series, The Girl who turned into Treacle (2007) and Chantelle’s Cloak (2011). Star Jumps won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Children’s Fiction 2010. Guinea Pig Town was a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable book, and shortlisted for the Speech Pathology Award 2013. Leave Taking won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature 2019, was shortlisted for the 2019 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards – Book of the Year: Younger Readers, and shortlisted in the Queensland Literary Awards 2019. Poems by Marwood have also been anthologised in: 100 Poems for Australian Children (Random House, 2002), Lines in the Sand (Frances Lincoln UK, 2003), Poems about Water/Poems about Earth (Evans Brothers UK, 2006), Side by Side: New Poems inspired by Art around the World (Harry N. Abrams, New York 2008), Celebrate! End of Year Reciter (Triple D September 2007), The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001–2010 (Les Murray Quadrant Books, 2012), Rich and Rare: A Collection of Australian Stories, Poetry and Artwork (Ford Street, 2015), and To End all Wars (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018). Her poems have additionally been published in literary journals including Southerly, Island, Westerly, Quadrant, Poetrix, Famous Reporter, Going Down Swinging, Mascara, Four W, Antipodes USA, Poetry New Zealand, Orbis UK, Wascana Review Canada, and were commissioned for Moving Galleries – poetry on Connex trains 2009. Marwood has held residencies in Adelaide and Brisbane with the May Gibbs Literature Trust 2009 and 2016.

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Lorraine Marwood

Footprints on the Moon (2021) Leave Taking (2018) Star Jumps (2009) Ratwhiskers and Me (2008) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I wanted to have a departure from my farm based poetry and verse novel Star Jumps, to write for a slightly older audience – early high school – and explore two social history events which changed the world at that time, 1969: man landing on the moon, and protests against Australia’s involvement with the Vietnam War. I knew the two elements of prose and poetry could be combined effectively, and in this novel I used titles for each poem, rather than chapters. Some characters, some narratives, are just naturally made for the verse novel genre and the angst and emotion in these two events was just the fire I needed for my writing. Sharnie and her sister were definitely characters I wanted to create, to convey the uncertainty of transition to high school, the changing nature of their relationship, and of course the changing nature of school friendships, including bullying. I also wanted to include a taste of, or reference to, popular music of the 1969 era. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? My very first draft was in poems with titles and brevity. I like to allow emotion and readers’ interpretations to breathe through the white spaces. But as each version evolved, it became more chapter based, and in the last thorough revision/rewrite, as I focused on bringing the main character Sharnie to the front, I reverted back to the original idea of poems with titles, to lead the reader into the narrative. This was a deviation from my first verse novel, Ratwhiskers and Me in which I tended to use broken sentences to convey narrative and was more focused on narrative rather than poetry. It is also a departure from the other two verse novels, Leave

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The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

Taking and Star Jumps. This was perhaps the hardest verse novel to ‘get right’. It has evolved through many versions, but always with the strong characters of Sharnie, Cas and Gail. It was hard wrestling with the elements of narrative fiction and also trying to balance the brevity of the poetic images I wanted to convey. Footprints on the Moon is also the longest verse novel I have written so far. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Yes, it’s always a balance to thread narrative with exquisite poetry that both enhances the emotional impact and advances the plot lines. And from the writing of my first verse novel to this latest one, I am very conscious of allowing my natural poetic voice to weave poetry through the narrative. In Footprints on the Moon it was a conscious balance between the two verse novel strands – how can I allow poetry to bring depth and beauty to the topics of man on the moon and the protest movement and horror tactics of the Vietnam War? How can they be child-centred, child-evoked? childrelevant? And that’s where the poetry and narrative weave in an atmosphere of authentic facts – less personal objects like black and white television, classrooms that rely on pull down wall maps, simple school lunch fare … But, conversely, because there were so many themes in this novel, it was also hard to continue to promote Sharnie as the main character and for her to develop and own the story. I streamlined the characters and events to focus more on the protest movement side and also to show the build up to the moon landing. As always I needed the emotional impact a verse novel makes – so grief again figures in this novel and becomes the climax event. So because there were so many ambitious themes in this verse novel, it was very hard to still develop the conventional characteristics of a narrative novel; not so the poetic elements. Many scenes and minor characters disappeared from the original version and other scenes more relevant to progressing the story were written. It is always hard to edit out particular poems or scenes that were 12

Lorraine Marwood

magic to me. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I am not conscious that I decided to employ any obvious technique or device – I think my style and unique voice has certainly been evolving as the years pass and I am always writing poems and this propels my writing forward too. I think, on reflection, that short sentences, repetition and line placement add to tension or emphasise a poignant part of the narrative as well as imagery and metaphor. In Footprints on the Moon I have used titles for each narrative poem. This is a departure from previous verse novels of mine and suits the intense multilayered subject matter, providing indicators of change of scene or situation. I’m a great believer in details in poetry, so facts about the moon landing and the social conditions of the times also played a big part. Research was important to get moon facts accurate for the cousin Lewis to provide lighter moments in the narrative. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I found this particularly definitive in the emotional points of the book – the moon strand of the novel contains the most poetic parts of the novel. Narrative strands include facts about the moon and the moon landing and preparation which are narrative driven. The death of Grandma, the sudden fizzing out of friendship between Sharnie and Mia all employ poetic devices, as does Gail’s aim to gain recognition for her brother’s death in Vietnam. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Often the subject matter of the novel lends itself more to the verse novel format. For me Star Jumps, depicting the effect of drought on a dairy farming community, was particularly suited to short, both narrative- and poetry- driven lines. Drought is an emotional topic. Leave Taking, dealing with loss on two levels, was very much poetically driven to convey without 13

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

heavy handedness, the grief Toby felt about the death of his sister and leaving the family farm. In Footprints on the Moon there is grief on several levels – and the effects of that grief to deal with – and I feel the verse novel was the most effective way to convey this – especially for Sharnie who is grappling with high school, the changing sister bond, the death of her beloved grandmother and the growing awareness of an imperfect, tangled world around her. Titles for the blocks of poems was a technique used, as was the narrative device of Lewis as a quirky character, suited to sharing the facts of the moon missions and the disorientation of grief. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I never thought this form would be for me – but it is a natural progression from my writing as a poet, both in the children’s sphere and literary sphere, and it quickly allows me access to several platforms at once, providing the reader with layers of subtle meaning and allowing the reader to navigate their own feelings and responses to grief or emotion, or loss or change. I feel an energy surge, a creativity surge, when I write in the verse novel style. I can often sketch out a character in verse novel format and that helps cut to the chase in terms of the character’s desire and goals in the story. I feel the verse novel is greatly underrated and needs a steady readership to enhance its status – there are so many great stories to be told using this format, with lashes of unobtrusive emotion. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? The early verse novels I read such as Girl coming in for a Landing by April Halprin Wayland, Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, Sherryl Clark’s Farm Kid, Sarah Crossan’s Toffee and works by Steven Herrick, Sally Murphy, and Kat Apel all resonated with me – but Girl coming in for a Landing was the trigger point to start me on Footprints on the Moon – and to make it a school-based verse novel. The others were influential in that they were a great read, contained story within a verse format, and had a concentrated kernel of emotion – 14

Lorraine Marwood

without it covering you in a sickly cloying miasma. It was reaffirming to know that other authors, especially Australian authors, were using this format. There is a freshness in the verse novel format, breathing space, anticipation and using words to flesh-out characters and emotions in a sparing way. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Perhaps the chronological poem format of Sharon Creech’s Love that Dog? Or, in other novels, that every poem has a title for the format? My current novel is written in that style (but not the other verse novels I’ve written). I also like the perspective of story told from a couple of characters. There is so much to enjoy and learn about the verse novel format and each novel written pushes me further.

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Sharon Kernot

‘To the uninitiated, verse novels look deceptively simple, but in reality they’re not easy to write.’ Sharon Kernot writes fiction and poetry. Her verse novel, The Art of Taxidermy was shortlisted for the 2017 Text Prize and published by Text in 2018. In 2019, it was nominated for several awards including the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature, the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards, the Gold Inky Awards, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Her first novel, Underground Road, was published in 2013 by Wakefield Press. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals and 16

Sharon Kernot

anthologies such as Island, Mascara Literary Journal, Southerly, Aesthetica, Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Poems, and Australian Love Stories. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Adelaide University and a PhD from Flinders University.

The Art of Taxidermy (2018) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? The idea for the novel came from a conversation I had with a student who mentioned that she was interested in taxidermy. It seemed an unusual activity for a young person and I was surprised and also a little horrified when she revealed that she also caught small prey herself that she would freeze and later use for taxidermy. I found it macabre but also intriguing, and decided to write a short story based on the idea. I knew nothing about taxidermy but once I began my research I became fascinated with the work of artists such as Julia De Ville, Rod McRae and Polly Morgan. Their work is complex and beautiful, often commenting on our problematic relationship with animals and nature. This is contrary to what I initially had in mind, which was closer to taxidermy as the hunter’s trophy. As an animal lover myself I found it difficult to write about a character who would deliberately kill animals for their art and so the focus of the story changed to one where the protagonist is interested in death, decay and the process of preservation as a means of creative expression as well as a way of dealing with grief. In addition to researching taxidermy artists and visiting the exhibits at the South Australian museum, other influences include Dorothy Porter, Steven Herrick, Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, Julia Leigh’s book Disquiet and mortician Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory.10 How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development?

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The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

As mentioned above, it began as a short story – one that really only just touched on the character and her macabre interest in taxidermy. My writing group they said they were intrigued by the character but wanted to know more and suggested I turn it into a longer piece – perhaps even a novel. At the time I’d just completed a novel and wasn’t too keen on beginning another so soon. I had, however, wanted to write a verse novel for some time, since reading the works of Steven Herrick and Dorothy Porter. As an experiment I decided to turn the short story into verse. I had no idea whether it would work as a novel but the first poems or scenes were promising and so I continued. Once I decided to explore the protagonist Lottie’s story in a longer form, I had to introduce other characters, a backstory, and have some sort of narrative thread to follow. The original idea was that Lottie would grow up during the course of the novel but for some reason I didn’t manage to do that. It became obvious that the story was about the young girl, her grief, her fascination with death and mortality, and her growth as an artist. Nevertheless, I persisted with the original idea and wrote a few poems/ scenes at the very end where she had grown up and was reflecting back on her life. Because the character was young for the majority of the novel, I thought the story might still suit a YA audience and I sent it to literary agent Danielle Binks who suggested I enter it into the Text Prize. I was thrilled when it was shortlisted and I received an offer of publication. Of interest, one of the first things Jane Pearson, my editor at Text, asked me to do, was delete those poems where Lottie has grown into an adult. I worked on the ending several times with Jane until we had something was much stronger and more suited to a YA readership. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? The fact that I was intent on the character growing into an adult at some stage became problematic as I said above. I think it slowed the writing down and took my attention away from the main focus of the novel. In addition, it caused an issue relating to the tense of the story. I began writing 18

Sharon Kernot

in first person past tense which fitted with the idea of the protagonist reflecting back on her eleven-year-old self. But later, when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to grow up, I often wondered if present tense would be more appropriate. This became particularly relevant because there are poems that convey memories about Lottie’s mother. These flashbacks are written in present tense to differentiate them. It seemed counterintuitive to write the flashback scenes in present tense while the rest of the novel is written in past tense – but I left it that way in the end. Punctuation was a bit of an issue. As a poet I generally use minimal punctuation, often using the end of the line as a means of punctuation in itself. My editor decided it would be better to include all punctuation and as a consequence all the commas, colons and semicolons that I’d deliberately left out, were inserted. I think it is better with them, particularly as the book is for a younger audience. And now when I write poems I think more carefully about the punctuation and how it affects the poem. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? From the beginning I was keen to write from the perspective of a naïve or unreliable narrator so that I could maximise the mystery and ambiguities within the novel. Writing solely from the perspective of a child who has limited experience and knowledge of her past enabled me to withhold information surrounding her mother’s death until late in the novel. It also enabled me to present the character, Annie, who is actually Lottie’s dead sister, in an ambiguous way. In the first part of the novel it’s not clear whether Annie is a friend, a relative, whether she is real or imagined, dead or alive. Furthermore, writing from a young child’s perspective allowed me to explore death and dying in fresh ways and from a different angle. I wanted Lottie’s interest in taxidermy, death and dying to be mysterious and her motivations for collecting the dead creatures to be ambiguous, so that initially it is unclear as to whether she is killing or just collecting. As a poet I write free verse poetry, and the poetic techniques that I used most in the novel included those that I normally use – repetition, rhythm, alliteration, similes, internal rhyme, and some end rhyme. I was aiming 19

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

for brevity and rich imagery, but I was always mindful of narrative drive and pace. I tried to vary the length of the poems in the novel to provide a sense of rhythm overall. I also focused on the visual aspect of poems – their balance and shape. I wanted the novel to be visually appealing so I was pleased when my publisher decided to include some illustrations throughout the book. I’ve always thought of titles as an important part of a poem, but in a verse novel perhaps they are more important as they can fulfill several functions: position the reader, move the plot along, flag a change of point of view, highlight the subject matter, or indicate that a poem is part of a series. As a poet, I always read the titles but I remember one of my early readers stating that she didn’t read the titles and I wondered how this might affect the reading. I think at the very least it might make it more difficult to follow the story. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I have to admit that this was my first verse novel, and in many ways it was an intuitive process. My main concern was ensuring there was a sense of narrative drive whilst trying to create poems that weren’t just chopped up prose. I’m not sure if I achieved that as well as other verse novelists – it’s quite a balancing act to do them both well. I wanted to ensure the story moved forward and that the poems weren’t just circling around an idea, bringing the narrative to a standstill. I wanted the novel to be engaging and accessible so it appealed to a wide audience – as well as having poetic elements, and the compression and brevity of a verse novel. I would say I focused more on poetic strategies such as imagery to highlight the landscape and nature, death and dying. Poetry is an emotional language, I think, and it enabled me to explore the themes of death and dying without appearing to be overly sentimental. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted the novel to have a sense of the gothic, to be dark, mysterious 20

Sharon Kernot

and creepy to reflect the subject of taxidermy, and the themes of death and dying. At the same time, I wanted the reader to feel a close connection to my protagonist who is a little strange and perhaps not the easiest of characters to identify with. I was aiming for a sense of mystery and intrigue surrounding the death of Lottie’s mother, the fate of Annie, and the motivations of Lottie and her interest in taxidermy. As discussed above, I endeavoured to achieve this by writing in first person from the perspective of the protagonist who has limited knowledge and a naïve view of the world. The structure of the verse novel with its short poems, its gaps and silences and loose chronology also enabled me to leave questions unanswered that I hope enhanced the mystery and intrigue. I was trying to position the narrative so that readers could view the storyworld through the protagonist’s eyes, to see taxidermy, death and decay as something beautiful, but also feel her grief and understand how individuals grieve in different ways. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? Verse novels are fascinating in the sense that they can do everything that a regular novel can do and more. They are sumptuous little pieces that can be read quickly but benefit from a second reading. I think verse novels can appeal to readers who don’t normally read poetry. Some readers have told me that they weren’t keen to read The Art of Taxidermy because they don’t like poetry, stating that they’ve always found it indecipherable and difficult to understand. But once they started to read, the narrative and the accessibility of the poetry drew them in. In this sense, perhaps verse novels can offer a way into poetry. As far as young readers are concerned, the speed at which many YA verse novels can be read can appeal to reluctant readers and those with short attention spans. Similarly, the additional white space throughout a verse novel may be more attractive and welcoming than the dense blocks of text in a regular novel. Young Adult verse novels provide an accessible and engaging way into poetry and can open up a conversation about poetry in the classroom. 21

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

Of interest, one bookseller asked me whether I thought my verse novel should be placed in the poetry section or with the novels. I suggested it would be better placed with the novels but perhaps most verse novels would sit comfortably in both sections. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Yes, I read Dorothy Porter’s and Steven Herrick’s verse novels prior to beginning my own. Both authors have a highly accessible and engaging style and I was hoping to achieve something similar. Porter’s verse novels are dark and mysterious and I was keen to replicate this in my work. I wanted mine to have a dark, gothic feel, to be grounded in the natural world and the cycle of life and death, but also to be beautiful. Steven Herrick’s verse novels, being for a Young Adult audience, were also very much on my mind as I was writing and so in hindsight, it is interesting that my novel inevitably suited a YA readership despite my attempts to write a novel for adults. While writing I continued to read verse novels by other writers including Jeri Kroll’s Vanishing Point, Bel Schenk’s Every Time You Close Your Eyes, and Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone. They are all excellent and different in style and subject matter, and they enhanced and broadened my understanding of verse novels. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? To the uninitiated, verse novels look deceptively simple, but in reality they’re not easy to write. With the added element of poetry, verse novels provide more tools to work with than a regular novel, which is wonderful – but it does means that there are more things to consider and juggle. I felt it was sometimes difficult to get the balance right between narrative drive and poetic technique. The verse novels that I’ve read vary dramatically in subject matter, tone, and poetic and narrative style. They are rich and diverse and seem to offer numerous possibilities for exploration. Many of them employ multiple viewpoints, which is something I didn’t do in The Art of Taxidermy but 22

Sharon Kernot

intend to do in my next verse novel. I found Jeri Kroll’s use of both poetry and prose in her novel Vanishing Point an interesting way to introduce variety, create narrative drive and differentiate characters. I look forward to reading more verse novels in the future and discovering how others have approached this form.

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John Jenkins

‘use rhythm and poetic devices to advance the story, while keeping one’s characters in lively play’ John Jenkins is a widely published and anthologised poet and author. He has published nine poetry collections: Poems Far and Wide (Puncher & Wattmann, 2019), Growing Up with Mr Menzies (John Leonard Press, 2008), Dark River (Five Islands Press, 2003), Days like Air (Modern Writing Press, 1992), The Wild White Sea (Little Esther, 1990), Chromatic Cargoes (Post Neo, 1986), The Inland Sea (Brunswick Hills Press, 1984), Blind Spot (Makar, 1977), and Zone of The White Wolf and other Landscapes (Contempa, 24

John Jenkins

1974). He has also written three verse novels. His most recent verse novel, A Break in the Weather (Modern Writing Press, 2003) was Commended in the 2004 Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Book Award. Gwendolyn Windswept, co-written with Ken Bolton, was serialised in Otis Rush magazine, Nos 9 to 13, 1994/5, and The Ferrara Poems was co-written with Ken Bolton (Experimental Art Foundation, S.A., 1989). Jenkins has also co-written with Ken Bolton the poetry collections Lucky for Some (Little Esther, 2012), Poems of Relative Unlikelihood (Little Esther, 2005), Nutters without Fetters (PressPress, 2002), The Wallah Group (Little Esther, 2001), The Gutman Variations (Little Esther, 1993), and Airborne Dogs and other Collaborations (Brunswick Hills Press, 1988). In addition to two works of fiction, The Arthur Tantrum Letters (co-author, with Robert Harris) and Stitch and Time 1975, Jenkins has published several non-fiction titles: as editor, Travelers’ Tales of Old Cuba (Ocean Press, 2002, revised edition 2010); Found About: Art in Public Places; Chapter 6 of Writing Art, A Series of Essays on the Nillumbik Art Collection, (Nillumbik Shire Council, 2006); as co-writer, with Rainer Linz, Arias: Recent Australian Music Theatre (Red House Editions, 1997); and as writer/ editor, 22 Australian Contemporary Composers (New Music Articles, 1988). Jenkins has been the recipient of numerous prizes, residencies, and fellowships, as follows: Open Winner of the 2018 Elyne Mitchell Writing Award for his short story, ‘The Girl Who Wasn’t There’; featured in 2014 as part of the World Lit teaching and reading series hosted by The Arts House, Singapore; winner 2013 Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize, and 2003 Arts Rush/Shoalhaven Poetry Prize; 2004 winner of the International James Joyce Foundation Suspended Sentence Fellowship for his long dramatic poem, ‘Under The Shaded Blossom’, which included reading and teaching sessions at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin; Commended for a play entered in the 2014 Fellowship of Australian Writers Di Cranston Award; Second and Third Prize in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for 2013; recipient of a grant from Arts Victoria, 2005; and recipient of Literature Board Australia Council Grants in 1973, 1974, 1994 and 1997. Born in Melbourne in 1949, Jenkins lived in Sydney after 1974 before returning to Victoria in 1978/9. He has travelled 25

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extensively and now lives in Kangaroo Ground, a semi-rural outer suburb of Melbourne.

A Break in the Weather (2003) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? This is a verse novel about climate change, a global phenomenon which impacts on all parts of the planet and does not respect national borders. That said, my story is set mostly in Melbourne, country Victoria, Central Australia, the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, suburban Adelaide, weather stations in Tasmania, and seas toward Antarctica. The universal is thus given a sharp national and local focus; though the narrative does take a late side-trip excursion to Denmark, before landing back home with a coda: a happy domestic family scene, set in Perth, Western Australia. It concludes, finally, with some searching questions about the future. Although my verse novel’s subject matter is deadly serious, I did not want to write a dry diatribe, but coax the narrative to bring my central characters to life in an interesting and engaging way, while allowing the drama of various characterisations and interactions to both enliven the story and almost just by the way illuminate my over-arching subject matters and themes. The human and natural consequences of larger human actions are thereby, I hope, brought specifically into play. My four main characters are Bruce Quinn, a weather scientist who has a love of adventure and the outdoors, as well as a nagging philosophical bent, the latter mainly revolving about the ultimate nature of time. Bruce is also something of a budding poet, but not self-realised as such; he’s a nascent poet, in embryo. There is a love story at the book’s centre, when Bruce meets a Japanese tourist at Uluru, namely Miko Tanaka, an extremely clever and sophisticated young lady. Miko is a mathematics prodigy, with a highly

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developed interest in and knowledge of science. She is extremely observant and the clear intellectual equal of Bruce, and just as adventurous. But Miko has an additional dimension; she is slightly mischievous, she loves life and is never po-faced or pompous; indeed, she likes to sometimes amuse herself by taking on certain made-up roles, and in one of her personas calls herself ‘adventure girl’. This is her own self-knowing and deliberately silly private joke, an assertion of her determination to live the way she wants. It is merely a self-conscious balance against any and all forms of restrictive seriousness; in order to embrace the widest possible freedom for a person of her background and resources. If people are too dull to see the wry selfamused smile behind Miko’s play-acting, then she thinks they are dullards who simply need glasses. The ‘villain’ of my story is a certain Imre Nero, a weather scientist who does research for the fossil fuel lobby, a tame expert, inordinately attracted to corporate perks: a self-interested climate change denier. The fourth of my main characters is a mature senior scientist, Dr. Kato, a mentor and colleague of Bruce, and the tireless intellectual opponent of Dr. Nero. My story also has a near-death escape scene towards the end, when Miko and Bruce flee a raging bushfire in the Blue Mountains. But all ends happily, at least for Bruce and Miko, although the bigger questions at play are, necessarily, never resolved, remaining poised as open questions. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? It required a huge amount of research – although I was always mindful of the old saying that too much information is a burden on poetry. I wanted to understand the dynamics of climate change, at least as it was understood circa 2003. Happily, I have long been interested in the hard sciences, and have read avidly and kept up to date with things scientific ever since I was a child. The natural world and its workings has always fascinated me. As you know, it’s just as important not to not drop any clangers, or bits of obviously wrong info, into any narrative, just as it is to check your facts and refine your arguments. So a lot of research is just to be sure of your 27

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ground, without the huge sweep of facts and figures at hand necessarily being quoted or included in your actual narrative, or trotted out in the arguments and reflections of specific characters. After all, it’s a verse novel you are writing, not a scholarly essay or chapters of a textbook. Just two of the unusual areas I researched were the evolution and growth of coral reefs, and attendant complex biology of coral polyps; and the dynamics of global ocean and air currents. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Yes, the balance between including strong arguments and persuasive information about the nature of climate change, while also advancing the story in an absorbing, interesting and surprising way. The balance between the hard science and the human story; between advancing my love-andadventure story, which is at the centre of the book, all counterbalanced and enlivened by insights of and from the natural world. There is also access to the free flow of my character’s thoughts and feelings, their inner worlds, as a counterpoint to the inner workings of nature. We have bright flashes and glimpses into the oceanic realms of life submerged on the reef, and also scenes that gain from newly settled and domesticated settings – counterpoised against wild, ancient, desert or dangerous landscapes. There is also the sense of a journey, both in times and place; an inner and outer journey, and a deeply poetic one into private and public spaces; and via the advancement of attendant ideas. To keep these various dimensions in place and play, in such a way that the narrative was always a lively and engaging one, was probably the main challenge of the book. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? Immediately before starting on A Break in the Weather, I read classic Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto’s magnificent 1516 verse epic, Orlando Furioso. Quoting from my Notes: ‘Ariosto’s poem was written in the Italian ottava rima, with eight-line verses, each of ten syllables, and following 28

John Jenkins

an ab-ab-ab-cc rhyming scheme. A Break in the Weather is also written in octaves, but the lines vary between 10, 11, 12 and (occasionally) 13 syllables. I have dispensed with the ab-ab-ab structure for my first six lines, substituting a shifting, decorative pattern of internal rhymes; of full, half and part rhymes. But the couplet is (usually) more or less retained because of its punch, clock-like regularity and the opportunity it gives to make a concluding point.’ Employing a modern and elastic variant of this traditional form provided a sort of conceptual grid into which the poem could pour and inhabit, stabilising and making more regular its many variations, shifts in attention, and the lively irregularity of an everchanging narrative. In addition, I have already alluded to some of the key narrative techniques I felt necessary to employ: namely, maintaining strong human interest at the centre of the story; continuously advancing the story in time and place; and, where possible, within arresting, atmospheric and absorbing settings; with the entire narrative-unfolding conceived as an ongoing journey; and conceptually, by illuminating key ideas along the way. To add excitement, there is a dramatic escape from danger (bushfire!) which carries the subtext of the greater enclosing planetary dangers posed by climate change itself. All the while, the narrative surfaces with a very explicit and erotic love story. Some episodes are given to the punch and counter-punch of professional rivalry between a formidable ‘villain’ (namely Nero) and Bruce (the latter helped by Bruce’s key ally, Kato). There is also an element of playful parody, particularly in the beginning, when I hint at heroic, mythical, mysterious, Jungian origins for my hero Bruce. These expectations are then deliberately deflated, as being just wishful thinking and imagination. (Remarkably, some reviewers of A Break in the Weather asserted that I intended and subscribed to the Jungian, mythical tropes that I was obviously parodying, which was very disappointing as this demonstrated a blind knee-jerk set of presumptions, not to mention lax standard of reviewing at the time. Although, to counter 29

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this, the book also did receive what I thought were some very fair and perceptive reviews). I also make playful references, here and there throughout A Break in the Weather, to other poems I have written, and their implications, and to other Australian poets and friends of mine. In this way, I mirror the playful personality of my co-hero, Miko. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? See answer to previous questions, above, all of which, at least in part, address this question. I also emphasised the poetic in wide panoramic views suddenly focuses on small detail, and then back to the wider view: trying to find the universal in the particular, and vice verse(a). Also by entering the interior monologue-like flows of particular thoughts and reflections: particularly of my main character, Bruce. Many descriptive passages also have a wider metaphorical or allegorical reach, such as the fire sweeping through the Blue Mountains, and in descriptions of teeming life and then coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Poetic effects: The sudden interior subjective apprehension of the infinite expansion of time; and thoughts and ideas at the edge of consciousness; and moments of subjective ‘slippage’ that occasion insight or humour. Poetic again: The delicacy of nuanced balances in the natural world. Narrative: An absorbing, challenging, gripping and interesting story. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? For me, this very versatile form allows the combination of several of my writing interests: simultaneously, I can work as a poet, story teller, journalist, non-fiction writer and researcher, etc. The regularity of whatever verse form one employs (whether it be loose or strict) and inherent rhythms and musicality, changes in pitch and tone, 30

John Jenkins

and so on, all help to keep the story on track in a regular, nicely textured and forward-advancing way. The verse form also allows quick changes of scene, and one to flip between interior thoughts of characters and the outer world they inhabit, often at that precise simultaneous point in the narrative flow, all adding to a sense of depth, allowing reverberating nuances, and narrative resonance. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Yes, very clearly. Particularly Ludovico Ariosto’s 1516 Italian verse epic, Orlando Furioso, and Byron’s epic satire, Don Juan, both written in the same ottava rima format; though I am a little wary of Byron and his personal prejudices, particularly concerning women. I also greatly admire Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey, written around the eighth century BC.; also some of the Norse Sagas, such as Njal’s Saga from ancient Viking Iceland. Then there’s the beautiful and ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Plus the roughly-or-later-Confucian-era classic, the ShihChing or Shi-jing, a collection of inter-linked poetry, dating back to the 11th century BC. (By the way, many classic Chinese novels owe a lot to previous poetic traditions; for example, Outlaws of the Marsh, or Tale of the Marshes, from the 14th C. Also Journey to the West, better known as Monkey, from the 16th C. Also add the Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the 18th C, which has many deeply ‘poetic’ moments, as it mirrors the rise and decay of an important family, revealing much about Chinese aristocracy of the time.) Back in Europe, we have the anonymous English authors of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Middle Ages. Also the Kalevala, a Finnish epic; the enchanted Mabinogion from Wales; and re-telling of Arthurian legends later by English Romantic poets. Earlier, Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, which I have never liked – it’s just too pedestrian and stodgy. Much better is Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude and those other narrative poems of the Romantic era that I have already mentioned. In the wonderful Indian tradition, we have some great masterpieces, 31

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probably the work of many masters, who stitched many pieces together and retold these many-handed stories over time: for example, the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, dating from the eighth century BC, and the magnificent Ramayana, at least back to the fifth century. In 1986, Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth wrote a verse novel titled The Golden Gate, about fashionable young people in San Francisco, which I thought a very accomplished effort. Among the moderns, I also very much like and admire John Ashberry’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and also the longer narrative poems of the American poet Kenneth Koch, such as The Duplications, and The Art of Love, and others of his. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I have learned how to exercise an unbridled imagination, and the huge value of including wit, humour and poetic insights, the timeless currency of good characterisation – and having an interesting and exciting plot, with lots of twists and turns. Also, the essential contribution of good dialogue, monologue, interior thoughts and reflections … and of tactful and unintrusive third-person anonymous narrative; and/or occasional use of first person and various tenses. Add to the above, the essential dimension of drama, atmosphere, setting and situation. Also how to use rhythm and poetic devices to advance the story, while keeping one’s characters in lively play; and generally creating an absorbing and convincing narrative world. Finally, always to be fearless, innovative and daring. To go for broke, even if not baroque! And, of course, the perennial ingredient: that of good, old-fashioned story telling, which – to descend into culinary metaphor – should add spice and zest to the lingering sweetness and subtle flavours of the poetry.

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Pip Harry

‘I think verse novelists are so clever in the way they say so much, with so few words.’ Pip Harry is an Australian author and journalist. Her young adult novels include I’ll Tell You Mine (2012), Head of the River (2014), and Because of You (2018), shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards: Older Reader, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and Queensland Literary Awards. Her first middle grade verse novel, The Little Wave (University of Queensland Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards – Book of the 33

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

Year: Younger Readers, the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature, and the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year awards. The Little Wave has been adapted for the stage by Meerkat Productions. Pip works as Editor for the Australian and New Zealand Association (ANZA). Her latest verse novel for young adults, Are You There Buddha? was published by Hachette Australia in mid 2021.

The Little Wave (2019) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I’d been reading verse novels for children for a few years before trying the form myself. I liked the immediacy, vivid imagery and energy of verse novels, and enjoyed the work of Australian authors Steven Herrick and Kat Apel, and international authors Thanhha Lai, Ellen Hopkins and Sarah Crossan. The Little Wave is a realistic contemporary verse novel, which tells the story of three very different children who are brought together when a city school invites a country school for a beach visit. The initial idea came while I was sitting on the sand after a swim at a beach near my home. A group of schoolchildren (part of a residential camp which brings rural children to the coast) exuberantly ran down to the beach, playing in the surf, exploring rock pools and building sandcastles. It was lovely to see many of the children experience the beach for the first time. I wondered what this was like for them, and how a coastal trip might send a ripple into their lives, and the lives of their city hosts. The stories are told in first person, with alternating narratives from three characters – Jack, a boy living in the remote Australian bush; Noah, a surfer from a beach suburb in urban Sydney; and Lottie, a lonely, bug-loving girl who is Noah’s classmate. The central themes are grief, loss, destructive relationships, recovery and the power of friendship and connection to overcome adversity.

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Pip Harry

How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? At first, I switched between the two boy’s voices – playing with different verse styles, and highlighting their different use of language. For example, Jack uses more Australian slang and humour, while Noah is more reserved, using low key, urban, surf lingo. I used the device of pen pal letters between the characters, to drip feed key information, and reveal the characters inner thoughts and feelings. I wanted the verse to be lyrical and vibrant, but not inaccessible. It was important to me that the book would appeal to more reluctant readers, and children who had not read a verse novel before. Setting was a key area of focus – I set out to contrast the dry, sparse bush town in rural NSW and the busy, vibrant and beautiful coastline of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? While I was clear on the structure and storylines for each character, this was my first experience writing and editing verse, so mastering the poetry was definitely a learning experience. I worked with editors – Mark McLeod on the copy edit, and then Vanessa Pellatt on later drafts. Both editors are experienced in verse, and they helped me trust the reader (not over-explaining the text) and polish up the poetry, stanzas and line breaks. I found the process of editing verse considerably more exacting and arduous than editing prose. Every word choice, full stop, comma, and line break were considered, and the finished book was more concise and direct than my previous young adult novels. There were no wasted words! Several changes were made. In early drafts I italicised the dialogue. Later, I decided to change to traditional speech marks, to make it clearer who was speaking. Stylistically, I’d also made all of Lottie’s sections lowercase, to reflect her shy, unhappy state of mind; the way she minimises herself around her classmates. But that also became uniform in the edit stage, as I felt it might be distracting and confusing for younger readers. I removed many of the uncapped words and exclamation points for Jack. The title was changed from Bush to Beach to The Little Wave. Some 35

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

have pointed out that this title refers to the ‘aspects of our lives that might seem insignificant to the casual observer but in fact point to more seismic shifts beneath the surface; shifts caused, for example, by grief, loss, and destructive relationships.’11 I would agree with this observation! Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I set out to make the three plots in The Little Wave increasingly interwoven, creating layers and parallels for the reader to uncover: Lottie is dealing with the loss of her mother and her father’s subsequent grief and hoarding, Noah is being bullied by his ‘best friend’ and Jack faces significant challenges with his family’s poverty and his mother’s addiction. Each character connects, changing the course of their lives. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I didn’t intentionally set out to emphasise poetry over narrative – much of the book was written on instinct (by the seat of my pants!) and with a desire to tell the story the best way I could. Having said that, when the characters are looking back in time and remembering a significant, impactful experience, they do lean into more poetic lines and concepts. For example, Noah recounting a near drowning experience, and Lottie remembering the happier times she spent with her parents before her mother died. The scenes at school with the kids interacting in the classroom and playground are generally a straightforward, linear narrative – helping to keep the story fast paced and engaging. There is certainly more poetry when the children describe their natural waterways and coastal surroundings and their connection to their environment: i.e Lottie wading into a polluted lagoon looking for insects; Jack spending an afternoon at the local river; Noah describing the feeling of catching a wave: Being on a wave is like riding a rolling ball of energy 36

Pip Harry

that travelled hundreds of kays across the ocean. You get the spend the last moments with it, before it crashes into the sand and disappears.12 What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I set out to use strong, sensory imagery – especially when describing the natural environment of the coast and the outback. For example, surfer Jack describes Manly Beach: The beach is my backyard, always there. Tide coming in, and going out. Sometimes bright green flat grey or dark blue Wild and thrashing, or gentle as a sleeping cat, sly rips shifting underneath.13 I also emphasised various sounds and rhythms in playful ways. For example, Jack describes playing cricket: My bat cracks the red leather ball. Crack! Whoosh! Run, run, run.14 Metaphor and simile helped create mood, tone and meaning – for example when Noah has a near drowning experience, he remembers the experience 37

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

as if he were a fish being dragged out of the ocean: Thrown like a flathead, with a hook in its jaw, on the deck of their rubber speedboat.15 Lottie compares her decrepit house to rotting teeth: If houses were teeth the rest of Gilbert Street would be straight, white and minty brushed. My place would be rotten, crooked and yellow.16 I broke lines up for effect, and sometimes to emphasise a character’s gentle sense of humour. For example, Jack compares his difficulties at school to failing on the cricket field: At school, I’m always Out. For. A. Duck.17 I also used white space and played with the layout of the text on the pages, to surprise the younger reader, and make them think about the text placement and how it can be related to the narrative. In some instances, I used shape to tell the story. For example:

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Harley pushes into me from behind. ‘Oi, Noah, who’s your girlfriend?’ ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I say, taking A. Big. Step. Away. From Lottie.18 What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I adore the verse novel as a form – both as a reader and an author. I love its playfulness, imagery and use of white space. I think verse novelists are so clever in the way they say so much, with so few words. I love how the language captures sound, and movement on the page, how vibrant and energetic the narratives are, and how quickly I turn the pages through the story. I love that verse is so rich in metaphor, and that the writing shows us the character’s raw emotions. Verse is a powerful way for young people to discover stories. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? There are many incredible verse novels for children and young adults that have influenced The Little Wave and my upcoming verse novel Are You There Buddha? To name a few: Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai Pookie Aleera Is Not My Boyfriend by Steven Herrick Bully on the Bus by Kat Apel Crank by Ellen Hopkins One, The Weight of Water, Moonrise, and Toffee, all by Sarah Crossan Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? 39

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand

As a new verse writer, these novels helped me to understand the form, and inspired me to be brave with my language choices, and not be overly prescriptive or didactic. I observed how clever their authors were with text placement, dialogue, word choice and metaphor. How strong their sense of place was, and the swiftness of pacing. Reading these verse masters was the best way for me to learn and grow as a writer.

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Tim Sinclair

‘If you want to write a collection of poetry, don’t pretend it’s a novel. If you want to cut a novel into line breaks, don’t pretend that’s poetry. Your reader is smarter than that.’ Tim Sinclair is a Sydney-based writer of young adult fiction, poetry. He has published two verse novels: Run (Penguin, 2013), a parkour thriller set in Sydney was a 2014 Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book, and

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also longlisted for the 2014 Inky Awards; and Nine Hours North (Penguin, 2006). Other works include two poetry collections: Re:reading the Dictionary (Cottage Industry Press, 2011) a word-nerd’s homage to some of the more retiring words in the English language, which was launched at the 2011 Queensland Poetry Festival, and Vapour Trails (Cottage Industry Press, 2005). Sinclair is an occasional sound creator, and published the spoken word poetry concept album, Brothers of the Head (Cottage Industry Press) with Ben Winch in 2004. Individual poems have been published in literary journals including New England Review, Cordite, and Blue Dog. Sinclair has spent a lot of time at the back end of the business, with day jobs at the South Australian Writers’ Centre (Adelaide), Poets House (New York), and the Australian Society of Authors (Sydney). He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. His PhD investigated young adult post-apocalyptic fiction. He is currently working on a YA post-apocalyptic epic that he hopes one day to finish.

Run (2013) Nine Hours North (2006) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I’ve written two verse novels, Nine Hours North (2006) and Run (2013), and they are quite different to each other – both in terms of what I was trying to achieve and where I was in my development as a writer. Nine Hours North was my first novel, and I have always traced its beginnings to one source: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. I’d written a lot of poetry before encountering this book, but as a confirmed narrative junkie I was overwhelmed and overjoyed to discover this book – in which not only did every poem sing in the way that poetry should – but in which there was character development, connection, narrative. Having had this revelation, I spent the next five years trying to do it

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myself. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to do and say everything, but I didn’t have the tools yet. In other words, I was doing what most first-time novelists do. But having ‘discovered’ the world of verse novels, I read all that I could get my hands on (which at the time wasn’t that many, especially in the Young Adult field), and kept working away. Run was a very different proposition. I had a much better handle on plot and pacing and character development and all of the tools of the novelist’s trade. What I really wanted to do was explore the typographic potential of poetry to represent the movement and energy of parkour, something I’d become fascinated with. My influences therefore became concrete poetry and typographical experimentation; the crossover between poetry and visual art, and the ways you could represent mood and image and landscape on a page in a way that prose would not allow. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? Nine Hours North was my first novel, so my approach was an enthusiastic fumble of sporadic energy. I’m not embarrassed to say that I had five 80 cent notebooks carefully labelled with the categories that my year eleven English teacher had taught us to use to examine the novels we were reading in class: ‘Plot’, ‘Theme’, ‘Character’, ‘Setting’, and ‘Appearance versus Reality’. I figured I could reverse engineer. It worked for a while, until I hit the limits of my ability and became frustrated at the unwieldly mess I was producing. Luck/fate/destiny intervened in a complicated series of events that saw me enrolling in the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where the feedback of my peers and some incredibly constructive criticism from my teachers finally gave me a way forward. The main thing I found of use during this time – and the thing which really allowed me to find out what it was that I was actually trying to say – was becoming less precious with my words. Coming originally to the project as a poet, I had a much more conservative view of the words I wrote, as though I had a limited supply and each one had to be carefully 43

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considered before being placed upon the page. Through the practice of daily writing exercises and the regular deadlines imposed on us through the MA program, I learned the value of overwriting. I developed my ‘sculpting’ technique. Most of the poems in Nine Hours North are about 100 words long, and most of those words were dug out of the 2,000-word long rambles that I had to get down on the screen in order to find out which ones actually mattered. It was tremendously freeing. I always conceived of Run as a much more plot-heavy thriller, so the process was very different. I’ve now written five novels (including prose novels), and Run remains by far the most detailed in terms of pre-plotting. I did a lot of experimentation in terms of how to make ‘parkour poetry’ work on the page, but once I had the plot down in detail, I was able to write very quickly. I used my sculpting technique again, but often found I needed to produce less gibberish in order to get to the gold. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Nine Hours North began as my ‘Japan book’, loosely based on the time I spent living in Nagyoa as an English as a Second Language teacher in the ’90s. There was a lot of me in there, and in part that came about through my experience of working as a poet in the confessional mode. First person is tremendously seductive, and incredibly effective at drawing the reader in to a story. And my poetry up until then had been very much following in the self-indulgent/self-exploratory mode. In other words, I got stuck in my own experience. Once I realised this, and started more consciously to craft the ‘I’ of the story into his own character, things started to work. There was also a lot of Japan in there, and as long as I kept calling it ‘my Japan book’, that bogged me down. Once the characters had come more fully into their own, I was able to strip back the amount of Japan I was trying to put into everything. It became much more organic. It made sense to the story, and the development of the characters, rather than overtaking everything. (It had returned to its ‘Setting’ notebook. Whew.) One of my main concerns with Run was making sure that the visual experimentation I wanted to do was not going to slow down the 44

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momentum of the book. I was determined to make this book fast-paced, in keeping with the subject matter, so I made some tough decisions to axe anything that interfered with that rhythm. The other rule I set myself was that this typographical experimentation was not allowed to dominate other elements of the novel. It could not come at the expense of the characters, for example. The reader had to care about these characters and their world, or it would have been an exercise in gratuitous experimentation. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I started writing Nine Hours North in the same way I’d been writing poetry up until then: loosely, with an emphasis on wordplay and ambiguous punctuation. I’d always loved messing around with the rules of grammar (who among us raised by Dr Seuss can claim otherwise?) and got a thrill from the defeated expectation or the unexpected double meaning. To be entirely honest, I didn’t know what I was trying to say a lot of the time, and I got a bit lost in style over substance. I thought I could encourage the reader to find their own meaning if I didn’t prescribe the way it had to be read. There’s merit in this approach, in the hands of a master. If I’m being generous, I’d say I got there sometimes, some of the time. However, a novel can only take a reader so far without delivering some kind of payoff (be that an engaging character, a world, a story), and the moment when I realised that, Nine Hours North really started to become something. I will be forever grateful to Eva Hornung for gently pointing that out to me in her role as supervisor in the MA program I mention above. Clarity. Full stops. Sentences that communicated to the reader when they ended. It was a revelation. And it freed me up to develop all the other parts of the novel that desperately needed to be developed if it was to become a novel. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? As I have mentioned, Run was my attempt to really incorporate more obviously ‘poetic’ elements into the novel than I had used in Nine Hours 45

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North. This is not to say that Nine Hours North didn’t use a lot of the conventions of free verse, but once I had finally settled on the style I stuck to it, in the interest of allowing the style to ‘disappear’ for the reader; allowing them to focus on the characters and the unfolding world through which they were moving. With Run, I wanted to play. The idea of ‘parkour poetry’ had been the seed of excitement that set the whole project underway – everything else came after that. I wanted to include as much of that experimentation as I could without losing momentum, or turning the novel into a series of disconnected visual vignettes. I was determined to write something that moved as quickly and with as much agility as a traceur (a practitioner of parkour), and any time I felt my poetic experimentations were slowing that down I modified them, or took them out entirely. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? For Run I used the term ‘parkour poetry’. It’s where my excitement in the project began. I was thrilled with the idea of space, of allowing the words to jump across an enormous field of white, or balance on the edge of an inky clifftop. It became a fun technical challenge, too. I’m not a visual artist, but I have a giant stack of notebooks from this project – filled with what you might charitably call ‘visual experimentations’. A lot of the parkour-heavy action sequences of the novel I wrote first on paper (very unusual for me), trying to replicate the particular movements of parkour, or represent the way my main character would leap here, then balance for a moment before jumping there, and then roll away to disperse momentum. From there I would edit the words into the shape I wanted, and then try and sketch them onto the screen using InDesign with all its possibilities of typographical manipulation. Once I got to the stage of working with the publisher, it became a really interesting challenge of working with both the editor in terms of story and the designer in terms of layout – with the designer translating my visual sketches into the final publishable work. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? Honestly, I vacillate between wishing people would just get over it and 46

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realise that a verse novel is a novel, and wanting them to realise just how superior verse novels can be to their plodding prose cousins. People have a lot of resistance to poetry. They shouldn’t have, given how we are surrounded and immersed in music completely stuffed with end rhymes (and other poetic structures). And the occasional breakout still happens – witness the rise of the InstaPoets Rupi Kaur et al a few years ago, or the incredibly energetic Slam Poetry scene – but by-and-large, poetry’s reputation remains as fusty, dusty, and irrelevant. Especially to teenagers. Which is precisely why I think the verse novel is so important to the Young Adult world. It is enormously gratifying the number of high school librarians who have told me that Run has kept their most reluctant reader enthralled. Seventy-five percent fewer words, just as much excitement. It’s a trick. It’s subversive. Readers who would never even visit the poetry section of the library might pick up a verse novel if it’s hidden in drag somewhere between Suzanne Collins and Garth Nix. And I like to think verse novels have the potential to be a gateway drug, too. Once you’ve got people over their ruthless resistance to poetry through the poetry-in-disguise ruse of the verse novel, they might just give in and go pick up a slim volume. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I can’t overstate the impact The Monkey’s Mask had on my understanding of, and excitement for, the verse novel form. I had actually read Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate some years previous to this, but it read to me as such a formal exercise that I didn’t (and still don’t) really think of it as a verse novel. Since that first glorious discovery I’ve read many verse novels, all of which have no doubt made their mark on my own writing, in that often-nebulous way that these things happen. Books like Anne Carson’s Autobiography Of Red, Ellen Hopkin’s Young Adult novels like Crank and Impulse, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s heartbreaking Ruby Moonlight. I guess Run has its roots more in Concrete Poetry than any particular 47

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verse novel. The formal experimentation, typographical extravagances, and almost visual artwork that emerged in South America in the ’50s (quickly taken up around the world) has a glorious appeal to me, and I tried to incorporate into Run some of what I learned from those writers/designers/ artists who were pushing the formal boundaries of language. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Not everything is possible. Not if you want to write a novel. I actually think the limitation of the novel as a form is one of its strengths. If you want to write a collection of poetry, don’t pretend it’s a novel. If you want to cut a novel into line breaks, don’t pretend that’s poetry. Your reader is smarter than that. Anything is possible. You can achieve much more in a verse novel than a prose novel will allow. You’ve been given an extra dimension when you write in verse. It’s up to you how much you want to exploit that. Whatever you have actually written, some people are going to be deterred if they think it’s poetry, some people are going to be intrigued, and some aren’t even going to notice. As long as the words don’t get in their way. And that is probably the final note, as a writer. The story comes first. The story has to come first.

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Catherine Bateson

‘… writing my first two verse novels certainly taught me a lot about novel writing.’ Catherine Bateson is a poet and writer for children and young adults. She has published sixteen books to date, including three collections of poetry, the most recent being Marriage for Beginners (John Leonard Press, 2009). Her three verse novels for young adults were all published by University of Queensland Press: His Name in Fire (2006); The Year It All Happened (2001); and A Dangerous Girl (2000). His Name in Fire was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Young Adult Book Award. Bateson has twice won the Children’s 49

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Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award – Younger Readers. In 2013 she was awarded a three-month residential fellowship in Paris. In 2017 she was a guest poet at the Clifden Arts Festival in Ireland and also a featured guest reader at Over the Edge readings, Galway.

His Name in Fire (2006) The Year It All Happened (2001) A Dangerous Girl (2000) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? By the time I came to write my first verse novel, I already had a collection of poetry published, by Pariah Press, a Melbourne based cooperative press. I also convened La Mama Poetica, a long-standing poetry venue, initially with Mal Morgan, and later by myself. I’d taken to writing some longish sequences of poems following characters and situations and enjoyed combining persona poems with a sense of story. I’d had the idea for a novel in my head for quite a number of years but regarded prose as the natural form. However, the prose version wasn’t working and eventually I scrapped the beginning of it, and started writing it as a verse novel, confident that poetry was a form which suited both my writing skills and the novel I had in mind. So, it wasn’t that I had any real influences in mind – more that I had been writing poetry seriously for at least fifteen years before I came to write A Dangerous Girl, my first verse novel. It certainly did help that Steven Herrick was published by University of Queensland Press, who had also published my second collection of poetry, The Vigilant Heart. When I finished writing A Dangerous Girl, I realised I’d left my characters at a point which allowed me to write a sequel, so I applied for a grant to complete The Year It All Happened. For a while, I thought I’d be a verse novelist. I loved the urgency that poetry brought to the novel – and

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the story and character that the novel brought to poetry. However, the writing of both of these taught me a little more about writing novels and in between these two verse novels, I began Painted Love Letters – originally as a short story sequence. His Name in Fire was written during a break between writing prose novels. I’d been battling with a speculative fiction novel and it was a relief to be back on home territory. The story idea seemed to fit the verse novel form – it had the emotional energy that required the urgency of poetry. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? When I decided to rewrite A Dangerous Girl as a verse novel, I simply took the prose beginning I had already written (some five chapters from memory) and transformed them into the opening nine poems. It was clear to me from the start that each of the four characters would have their own first person voice. This system was followed in the sequel, The Year It All Happened. I find first person narration suits me – and I’d always written persona poems so, again, this made sense to me. It’s also a way of directly connecting with the reader. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? The one element that the verse novel isn’t suited to, in my opinion, is dialogue. Coming to the verse novel primarily as a poet meant that I hated the littered look of a poem with quotation marks and found the normal, dialogue techniques of prose made poetry ugly on the page. Having multiple points of view partially solved this but led to another question – how does the reader know exactly whose poem they are reading from the get-go? I solved this by writing different forms of poetry. The poems of the characters John and Merri are written in free verse, formally shaped. Leigh’s poems all take their title from the first line and use Leigh’s journal also as a title. This made sense to me as she wants to be a journalist. Nick’s poems are either small prose poems or haiku. And again, this made sense to 51

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me because he’s into web design and there’s a large internet haiku presence, which I had just discovered the year before I moved A Dangerous Girl from prose to poetry. When I was writing His Name in Fire, I was listening to a lot of music and I decided that the book could use song lyrics as a way of dividing it into sections. I loved writing these! I was teaching Professional Writing and Editing at Gippsland Technical and Further Education (GippsTAFE) and a couple of my students were great music-listeners too, and I took one of the song lyrics in to get their opinion. One of my all-time favourite teaching moments was hearing those two students in the hallway talking about it: ‘I know she reckons it’s inspired by listening to Christy Moore, but I thought it was more Cowboy Junkies.’ ‘Did you? Maybe with a bit of Tom Waits?’ I gave the lyrics to his dad’s band, TJ and the Blue Runners. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? As I said, one of the problems with a verse novel with multiple points of view is to indicate quickly which character is speaking. I used a mixture of poetic forms to achieve this. I also used song lyrics as a framing device in His Name in Fire, to indicate sections of the novel, rather than using sections to divide the novel. His Name in Fire had a larger cast of characters, to reflect the country town environment. Instead of descriptive poems – I decided the ‘voice’ of those characters would convey setting more successfully. If I’d relied on descriptive poems to indicate the setting I would have had to use a third person narrator as well as the first person poems and this didn’t feel comfortable for this particular novel. Molly’s backstory is indicated both in the titles of her poems – she writes to ‘Seb’ but it’s also increasingly revealed in the content of the poems. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I don’t recall doing either of these deliberately. However, I do know that I ‘tested’ His Name in Fire against the Hero’s Journey blueprint in 52

Catherine Bateson

a class I was teaching at GippsTAFE and added a number of poems to indicate that the circus rehearsals weren’t going smoothly. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Overall, I wanted to tell a story and create strong characters but do it with the urgency of poetic language. There were particular parts of each novel that I felt lent themselves to this lyrical intensity – John’s attempted suicide, Merri’s birth poems and Molly’s poems to Seb. Some individual poems, too, lent themselves to a laconic humour that the pared down nature of free verse can successfully achieve. I was very conscious of using circus motifs, particularly fire-work and music motifs throughout His Name in Fire. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I love the form, particularly for young adults and younger readers. The combination of lyrical language with a story delights me, and I know it would have completely captivated the child-reader I was. However, I find the form less compelling when it’s used for adult fiction. I think then I miss some of the novel’s techniques – great dialogue, more backstory and so on. It’s hard, too, to maintain a consistent quality of each poem in a verse novel. There are necessarily poems that simply move the plot forward. Having said that, I still love reading poetry sequences! Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? From memory, I hadn’t read many young adult verse novels other than Love, Ghosts and Nose Hair and The Spangled Drongo, both by Steven Herrick, before beginning to write A Dangerous Girl. Maybe I’d read Sharon Creech’s Love that Dog, but I’m not sure. I had, however, read a lot of poetry – and many poetry sequences. I can’t pick any in particular that influenced A Dangerous Girl, but I’m sure all my reading poetry and writing poetry for adults over the years contributed to the verse novels! What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I came to writing verse novels as an already published poet. It was only after I had written A Dangerous Girl that I began to read a few more verse 53

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novels, the most memorable being Out of the Dust and Aleutian Sparrow by Karen Hesse. I’m not sure what these taught me. However, writing my first two verse novels certainly taught me a lot about novel writing. I haven’t attempted a verse novel since His Name in Fire – the subjects I’ve wanted to tackle haven’t readily lent themselves to that form. I have, however, continued to write a lot of poetry, including a sequence that revisions the Rapunzel story. And, naturally, I’ve continued to read a lot of poetry. Some favourite poets include W. S. Merwin, Jim Harrison, May Swenson, Dorianne Laux, Lorine Niedecker and Kim Addonizio. In the past six months for various personal reasons, I’ve turned my attention back to poetry and have been writing a lot of individual poems. I wouldn’t be averse to tackling another verse novel in the future, but I’d want to find the right subject matter and character.

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Sally Murphy

‘From the moment I first picked up and read a verse novel I was hooked.’ Sally Murphy is a children’s author and poet, with a love for all things wordrelated – reading, writing and speaking. When she can’t be found with her nose in a book, or writing, or speaking about reading or writing, she is an academic at Curtin University where she teaches future teachers, filling them with knowledge of Australian Children’s literature and how to use it in the classroom. Sally’s publications include 52 books for both the trade and education

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markets, including four verse novels: Pearl Verses the World (2009), Worse Things (2020), Roses are Blue (2014) and Toppling (2011), all published by Walker Books Australia.

Worse Things (2020) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Worse Things was written as part of my doctoral project (completed in 2018). As such, I wanted to produce a major creative work, but also to take my writing into some new territory. My previous verse novels were each from a single first-person perspective, and tended to be long poems rather than distinct, individual poems. I wanted to experiment with using multiple voices, which, at the same time lent itself to a series of shorter, stand-alone poems. The work of Steven Herrick, whose verse novels for children generally use multiple voices, was influential to this decision. I had also seen the use of multiple voices in other verse novels, and was keen to try this for myself, liking the opportunity to explore multiple perspectives and develop more than one character deeply. My doctoral focus was on children’s poetry in its various forms, so I was also keen to experiment with poetic form, and the multiple voices seemed to provide this opportunity. The theme I chose across the various aspects of my thesis was belonging, and again, using multiple voices seemed a way to explore different versions and viewpoints around belonging. It is hard to explore belonging from just one angle. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I had been keen for some time to write a verse novel set against the backdrop of sport. At the time I was involved in junior sport through my children, as a spectator, as well as being part of committees of sporting clubs. I was aware of the highs and lows of organised sport, and, on a personal level, how being part of a team could impact the sense of belonging.

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When I decided to use this idea as one of my doctoral pieces, I first started figuring how I could use multiple sports and multiple characters. Initially the plan was alternating voices – one male, one female and, since I was playing with voice, I wanted to write a third voice in second person ‘you’. Initially, this voice would actually be each character observing the other, but this would become clear only gradually. I wanted to create a sense of mystery around who was watching who, and why. When I started writing, however, this voice quickly became a third character, Amed, and the second person voice soon became mostly first person, although in his first poem Amed does speak in second person, as if he is addressing Blake. He is watching Blake from a distance and interpreting what he sees, before applying this to how he himself is feeling. The first draft of the novel was written over several months, and, unusually for me, I had some feedback before it was completed – because my supervisors were keen to see my progress. There was some concern from early readers about how the three characters were identified. I had planned to be ambiguous about which character was speaking in the early stages, making it gradually clearer as the story unfolded. Early drafts also used Amed’s second person perspective for further into the narrative, but feedback was that the effect was creepy rather than intriguing. Amed was not clearly enough defined as a character in his own right, and so seemed to the reader to be potentially a stalker or nefarious lurker. This was not my intention, and so I needed to rework. This input was unusual for me, but helpful in enabling me to experiment with what did and didn’t work. Revisions again had input from my supervisory team, as well, at a later stage, from my publishers when I submitted the manuscript. I found over time that trying to complete the work as a doctoral project as well as a commercially publishable book did have some challenges and, by the time I submitted for examination the manuscript had been rejected and put aside. Later, I resubmitted it to the publisher (Walker Books) and eventually it was accepted, edited and published, along with sensational illustration and design work from Sarah Davis. 57

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Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? As mentioned, I had difficulty with the voice of Amed. I wanted to portray him as a watcher, because he has limited English speaking skills. I wanted to replicate the idea of being isolated by the invisible wall that language creates. As such, he would be watching, and interpreting what he saw, but not interacting fully with his peers. However, this meant that not only did he come across to early readers as voyeuristic, which was not my intention, but there was also limited opportunity to portray him as a character in his own right, rather than just a spectator. I came to realise it was important to really show Amed as a well-rounded character, and so I needed to show his home life, and glimpses into his past, as well as to find ways of having him interact with the other two characters. I also had to work out how to give Amed a voice that hinted perhaps that English was not his first language, but that was not stilted or simplistic. I tried to make his language slightly more formal, but still the voice of a young person. I also found that the definition poems, scattered throughout the book, while not in Amed’s voice, emphasised the way that a second language learner might rely on translation and dictionaries. When considering how to differentiate the three voices, I was keen not to use the characters’ names at the start of each poem. I wanted to leave readers wondering who was speaking and even to not be specific about gender, especially early on. I considered using different fonts, but knew this would be a design decision if the manuscript was accepted. I then tried using visual symbols as a visual cue above each poem – initially using three different wingdings symbols and then some fairly crudely drawn sporting symbols (a football, a hockey stick and a soccer ball). Early readers found this confusing, and after experimenting I realised that perhaps the use of names was most effective. In the final manuscript and in the book each poem is captioned with the character’s name, except for the separate definition poems which each focus on one word, and have that word as the title. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? 58

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Like most verse novels, Worse Things is written in free verse. I love the way that line length serves to give this kind of poetry its own rhythm, and the way line endings become their own special piece of punctuation. I use some seemingly quite simple poetic techniques, including the use of lists, either making whole poems lists poems, or by using a list within a longer poem. This gives an opportunity to seem minimalist, while making some powerful points. For example, when Joelene wants to show how much she hates hockey, she writes a list of things she hates about hockey. There is no doubt about her feelings, and the next one-line poem, about things she likes about hockey, provides conclusive evidence. I also use repetition, so that characters will focus on similar words or phrases, often in adjacent poems, to really explore different versions of a similar theme or event. When I wrote about Blake’s thoughts about Cowan, the fictional town the story is set in, I realised it would be effective to have the other characters do the same. These poems are separated by other events, but a reader should hear the echoes of the earlier poems, and the contrasts created. Having lived in a lot of country towns I realised that people’s views, and experiences of a town, can be really varied. The use of multiple narrative voices is a technique I used here for the first time. I enjoyed the opportunity to reveal events from a chosen perspective. The final scene in the book, for example, is from Amed’s perspective, even though it is a key moment in Jolene’s life. I did this for a few reasons – one of which was that Jolene’s grief was not something that can be easily resolved and would go well beyond the final pages. The other consideration was that I really wanted to empower the character, Amed. He has been disempowered by the events of his life, and, since coming to Australia, by a language barrier. I did not want to end the book with one of the other characters fixing things for him, although I wanted them to be closer to each other. I wanted it to be Amed who knows the thing to do that might help Jolene, and to bring Blake along. Belonging, the theme I was exploring, is not just about being helped – it is about feeling a valuable, and valued, part of something. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the 59

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poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? In an early draft I experimented with a definition poem – a poem seemingly not from any of the characters’ voices, but something like a dictionary entry, yet teasing out a word from the previous scene. I enjoyed this so much – and also found that it complemented the idea of Amed as a second language learner – that on the next draft I looked for more places to add these in. Each provides a definition of a key word but also closes with an interpretation that can be linked back to the text. The use of a special poetic form here (one I created for the purposes of the book) allows those themes or recurrent words to be focused on and teased out. They also provide, in the final, published work, a visual feast. The book is not heavily illustrated, but each definition poem has its own spread with rich, evocative illustrations which offer the reader so much. I especially adore the double page spread for the poem ‘Death’. Sarah Davis’ work is simply stunning. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted to take readers inside the experiences and perspectives of three very different characters. The effect I was hoping for was that readers would feel they were living these experiences rather than just watching on. The use of first person, heightened by the use of poetic technique means there is minimal interpretation happening for the reader. Instead they are, I hope, feeling what each character is feeling, and seeing what they are seeing. I want them to care for the characters, and to grow with them. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I love it. From the moment I first picked up and read a verse novel I was hooked. I feel that for readers they provide depth of experience, but in a way which is very accessible. For a reader lacking confidence, rather than seeing poetry they may see white space – the breaking up of text with line breaks and even illustrations. For a confident reader they may see poetry and know it will go in deep directions. For either reader there is the same opportunity to enjoy where poetry takes them. I have been really pleased to see verse novels become more mainstream, 60

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in terms of acceptance by teachers, booksellers and critics. This helps to get them into the hands of readers. It was pleasing, for example, to see three verse novels in the Younger Readers category of the 2021 Notable list in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards. When they are shelved in nonfiction, along with other poetry, because of the Dewey system, I feel sad that this means they are harder to find. Though when I urged a room of librarians to take them out of the nonfiction section and shelve them in fiction, one librarian was adamant I was wrong – she felt every library needed two copies – one for the fiction section and one for the reader who goes looking for poetry. I couldn’t argue with that. I do think we have a way to go to see them accepted for general reading. Although they will use a verse novel in the classroom, adults tend to see poetry and think it may not be accepted by young readers for pleasure reading. For me, generally child readers aren’t threatened by poetry – but some don’t even realise that’s what my novels are, and that’s okay by me. I call that poetry by stealth. After all, the verse novel is a narrative, so the story should be front and centre. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Who I am as a verse novelist is perhaps the sum of the many, many verse novels I have read – mostly for children and young adults, though also for adults. The two biggest influences have probably been Margaret Wild and Steven Herrick. Wild because hers were the first verse novels I read. I didn’t even know the term verse novel, and I remember being surprised and a little perplexed when I opened a novel and it was poetry. But it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the form and to know I wanted to read more, and ultimately write them. As I sought more out, I came to Herrick’s work, and that love was cemented. Others followed, but I still think Herrick is the best verse novelist in Australia, and beyond. I wish Margaret Wild had written more in the form, because she, too, is brilliant. You see that poetic skill in her picture books, even when seemingly written in prose. Going back to the question, it isn’t easy to pinpoint specific influences on Worse Things, because I read so many verse novels, but Herrick’s use 61

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of multiple viewpoints certainly influenced me to want to try a multiple viewpoint work of my own. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Everything! When I started reading them, I knew I wanted to learn to write a verse novel and imagined some sort of how-to book or course. There wasn’t one, but the more I read, the more I started to understand how a verse novel is paced, how poetic techniques and narrative techniques complement each other. I think reading widely in the genre or form you want to write in is essential – it is learning by osmosis. It wasn’t until I returned to academic study that I found articles and books exploring the form that have also helped refine my craft.

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Brian Castro

‘… [the verse novel] returns the reader to rhythms and presences and to the archaeology of words.’ Brian Castro was born in 1950 in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage. He is the author of eleven published novels, Birds of Passage (1983), Pomeroy (1990), Double Wolf (1991), After China (1992), Drift (1994), Stepper (1997), Shanghai Dancing (2003), The Garden Book (2005), The Bath Fugues (2009), Street To Street (2012), Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria (2017), a volume of art and poetry, Macau Days (with painter John Young), and one collection of essays, Looking for

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Estrellita. His verse novel in thirty-four cantos Blindness and Rage won the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Mascara Avantgarde Award for Fiction. Castro has also been awarded the Australian/Vogel Literary Award (1982), the Age Fiction Prize (1991), the National Book Council ‘Banjo’ Prize (1997), the Victorian Premier’s Award for Innovative Writing (1992), the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction (1992, 1993 and 2003), the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction (2004), the NSW Book of the Year (2004), the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction (2006), the Patrick White Award For Literature (2014) and The Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry (2018). He is currently the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria (2017) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? My work practice, even in the composition of novels, has always been a four-stage process, the first being a composition of fragments of poetry metamorphosing into prose segments and then progressing onto three prose drafts. So it was natural that Blindness and Rage began that way and then somehow remained as a novel in verse, so to speak. Intransigent, stubbornly resisting colonising master-narratives of the grand novel forms, it took on a poetics which was grounded in the real but was playfully risky. The subject-matter rested on a curiosity about the number of secret literary societies in Paris, particularly about OuLiPo, the workshop for potential literature founded by Raymond Queneau and whose membership comprised among others, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Harry Mathews. The basic rule of this workshop practice was a kind of mathematical constraint applied to literature in a ludic mode. I took it a step further: it involved not just a constraint in terms of literary practice but a renunciation of all authorship including one’s name and existence. A terminally ill protagonist therefore, had to make real choices about the death of the author and the afterlife of the work. 64

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My major influences were Dante’s Inferno and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. But I was also inspired by works such as James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, which is both epic and apocalyptic and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, whose over-versifying I queried. I also read a lot of W.H. Auden’s longer works and of course, John Ashbery’s SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror. While constricted by brevity, I was determined not to be restricted by rhyming patterns, mainly because they became an artificial scaffolding upon which the craft is hung out to dry, overly noticeable and insufficiently mute. Thus rhythm was the main driver and it was fortuitous I was simultaneously reading Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on prosody, which related rhythm to a kind of mnemotechnique in reminding us of the presence of the body. Prosody connects us to the physical world and delivers us back into its space. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? The work chose me. At the University of Adelaide we recently had a ‘French Centenary’ a series of papers and symposia on the influence of the French in Adelaide over the last one hundred years of solitude. In August 1981, Georges Perec was invited to a residency at the University of Queensland. From there he travelled to Sydney and Melbourne and thence to Adelaide, where he gave a talk in the French Department. He did not know he had incurable cancer. While in Australia he had begun a novel entitled ‘53 Days.’ He would never finish it. Upon his return to Paris, he was diagnosed and died within a few months. The author of Life: A User’s Manual said Australia ‘fucked him up.’ In my verse novel (the first draft of which was unsuccessful in being constrained to around 53 days), the protagonist Lucien Gracq travels to Paris knowing he has terminal cancer. He will stay 53 days before his euthanasia appointment in Amsterdam. He ascribes his incomplete verse novel to the authorship of a woman with whom he has fallen in love. Will this Beatrice abrogate his debt to intertextuality, save him from cancer, relieve him of the aspirations and futilities of literature?

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A year before I had set out for France without any of these ideas in mind. I was to give a paper in the University of Lyon IV and spent two weeks in a Sabbatical.com rental apartment in Paris preparing for it. The professor who owned the flat gave me a list of instructions; when to put out the garbage; when to expect the cleaning lady; where the good restaurants were situated. These were listed under the title: 11 rue Linné: Mode d’emploi. It was only after I returned to Adelaide that I realised I was staying next door to Perec’s former apartment. Life and literature were complementary: a user’s manual. I had to put things together retrospectively from their fragmented form, like a paratextual jigsaw of critics, biographers and personal experiences. I had to locate in memory the atmosphere of the rooms and streets. The form manifested itself very early in the piece; thirty-four cantos in order not to replicate Dante’s thirty-three. Sometimes it broke into prose narrative, but this was to shatter the process in order to re-make it. Shattering and re-making is something inherent to my writing; maybe it’s a kind of Shintoism. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Whether I’m writing a novel or poetry, the cognitive process is only a shadow of the rhythmic unconscious, not the other way around. Narrative of course has its own patterns, so sometimes matching inspiration and decision may have deferred to some kind of problem-solving, but this was fairly rare, as in the case of letter-writing. Letter-writing in verse is rather awkward and recherché. Letters have a different voice and are mainly addressed to oneself. It is the most self-conscious of acts. So I broke out of the poetic form to take on board Kafka’s remark in his letter to Milena Jesenká: Writing letters means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.19

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One is not driven by decisions; one is simply driven without choice and then sacrificed to the reading public, often with a remarkably high rate of failure. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I think that initially I was very frustrated while reading some contemporary prose novels. I mean the so-called ‘world literature’ or ‘global’ writing which seems to originate from a marketing decision. These novels seem to be characterised by a non-style. They are driven by storytelling and seem to have discarded the literary rhythms employed as far back as Homer, whose rhythms, even if one cannot understand ancient Greek, laid down a memorial sound, a memory-shroud which resides inside the body. So I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to sacrifice stimmung or atmosphere, to story. I felt I could do this much better in the form of cantos. Each canto, while almost self-contained in its incantation, can fit like a Lego brick into the whole. Each canto is a room or a landscape, so that one can enter or leave while embodying specific moods. Sometimes the use of binaries is a good method. Since my protagonist has terminal cancer, I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as a Metaphor. She decried the way narrative is metamorphosed into a figment that wards off death. I think metaphor was overly demonised by Sontag in that she wanted to relieve it of its romantic connotation. While I am not in the least romantic, I believe metaphor is at the very basis of language. We are what we speak. I think a good metaphor is real and natural and a good forced metaphor supplements pleasure. The failure of ordinary words points to a deficiency of enrichment and wonder. According to Paul Ricoeur, metaphor breathes life, passion, colour and spirit into discourse. In one sense, Sontag’s approach is an intimation that metaphor must lead to the death of the author, effaced from the scene of writing. Individuality is lost, writing is a sacrifice. Style, a measure of uniqueness, is thrown into the maw of clinical deconstruction. I would prefer the life-giving ‘magic mountain’ to the surgeon’s execution order. You could call this binary a narrative technique … a flight from science in the face of a purely human ending. If death 67

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appears as the ultimate irony, then metaphor masquerades as life, making the experience of death a final illusion. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? The overarching philosophy, if you like, was the notion of failure. So there are no triumphalist passages or divine decree verging on ridiculous transcendentalism. Death mocks us as we try to climb onto our own shoulders. Thus the narrative is quite singular and linear. Having said that, in Blindness and Rage I’ve emphasised the hallucinatory, which gave priority to the function of meter, where hallucination works to relax and disinhibit the creator and hopefully the reader. Improvisational jazz works in the same way. My father was a jazz pianist and I carry some of that genetic legacy in the inner ear. I was guided by this, since both poetry and narrative are drives. The trick is to make them work simultaneously. I love works created out of the constrictions of poetics. It is because I am a creature of language and languages – and they function according to a grammatology which conforms as well as resists. For example, as George Steiner wrote in an exegesis of the future tense: ‘Hope and fear are supreme fictions empowered by syntax.’20 Readers and listeners will ‘hopefully’ understand; there is an incantatory appeal to an unconscious and then to an ideal reception. Form conforms to this prayer but resists immediate reception. However, it lingers in memory. Narrative has to wait longer in order to catch up cognitively. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Probably something between the literal and the hallucinatory; perhaps schizophrenic voices and music in the context of social chaos. The subtitle, A Phantasmagoria, is a kind of exegesis of the verse novel as a magic lantern probing consciousness, a technology which mirrors, with or without metaphor, the illusions of catastrophe and melancholia, providing allegory, narration and commentary which would have to be unpacked after the initial phantasmatic experience. Walter Benjamin as a flâneur experienced modern cityscapes as a phantasmagoria. His Arcades Project had been the 68

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inspiration for one of my previous novels. My protagonist, who originates from provincial but humble Adelaide, is traumatised by literary Paris – by its arrogance as well as by its cultural depth and power. He has to speak truth to power and to speak it in the way of a dead man walking. Paris would fuck him up. Brevity and concision have been staples in honing my writing. The shortness of time, of breath, exerts a reach and breadth – which of course falls short in aspirational terms. Pope’s Dunciad comes to mind here. A mock-heroic satire on Grub street and dullness, it satirised over-reaching and raised it to a literary artefact: Maggots, half-form’ d, in rhyme exactly meet, And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.21 Literary aspiration is offered to many, but only by a few is it well executed … pun intended. Which leads me to speak briefly about humour. Humour is essential to eliciting a kind of ‘white laughter’ i.e. the laughter of the gods over the meaninglessness of life. It is a digression to offset any semiotic overload or too much gravitas. It is another musicality which rumbles at baser levels and in its various forms, triggers bodily reactions to something beyond tragedy and beyond a joke. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I’m rather skeptical of generic fixations. Some writers define them to protect their turf. Poetry is not an angelic art-form, nor is prose a prosaic or monetary enterprise. Some poets cannot bear the prose-poem, nor can rapid readers bear reflection. I think the verse novel, if we fling out its obsessive versifying, is the great enemy of story-telling; I say this positively. It returns the reader to rhythms and presences and to the archaeology of words. It slows down time through compression and storage. It brings back enrichment to a literature which seems to have been degraded by Story. What more futile task is there than telling the story of Kafka’s Castle, as opposed to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts? Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? 69

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I mentioned them earlier and throughout. Verse novels existed well before the bourgeois novel – Chaucer is an example. They are the antitheses of the long story – that marketeering of nineteenth-century plot, character and setting. The nineteenth-century serial novel brought with it an industrious and grinding engine manufactured for mass readership, while the epic or the saga was a kind of communal ecstasy, an asylum for the displaced, a life-in-death enrichment. Perhaps I agree with Heidegger here: life-in-death is a way of being. Perhaps a way of being authentic. It is a kind of stasis which defies productivity and the opportunistic ‘going forward’ of information-capital still being regurgitated from the nineteenth-century. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I’ve learnt something which I probably already knew but didn’t quite crystallise or articulate to myself: constriction and brevity. I’ve always painted myself into a corner and then painted myself out. Now I’m comfortable with the risks and the wastage. Magritte speaks to me most of all … a landscape painted on a jail wall into which one can step out. A verse novel is like that: There is a narrative to be sure, but there is also language and there is rhythm and there is pressure. Like blood pressure, there is a systolic and a diastolic process. Pressure and relaxation. Prosody, practised best perhaps in this form whose limits I don’t like to generically define, is about the rhythm of pressure and humour. Between heartbeats is the freedom of invention, the forced metaphor, the ludic referencing harkening back to primal texts, to the literal experience of reading, which is where I mainly abide. It energises the real between easy rhyme and difficult silence.

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Leni Shilton

‘The verse novel is an exciting genre because of its versatility and its flexibility to tell stories and draw readers into the inner life of a character.’ Leni Shilton is a prize-winning poet and essayist, teacher and researcher. She grew up in Papua New Guinea and Melbourne and has lived in Alice Springs for over thirty years where she has worked as a creative writing lecturer, a prison educator and a bush nurse and health educator. She was the course coordinator and lecturer in creative writing at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary

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Education in the degree program. Leni’s PhD Giving Voice to Silence (Southern Cross University, 2016) comprised a verse novel based on the life of Central Australian historical figure, Bertha Strehlow, and an interrogation of the use of the verse novel as a dynamic and effective choice of genre for the telling of Bertha’s story. Leni has written two verse novels Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow (University of Western Australia Press, 2018) and Malcolm: A Story in Verse (University of Western Australia Press, 2019). Walking with Camels was shortlisted for the 2020 Northern Territory Chief Minister’s Book Award. Her works have been published in national and international journals and anthologies including Plumwood Mountain (2015), Underneath (2015), Communion #3 (May 2015), Coolabah (2015), Coastlines (2015), Axon (2014), Women’s Work (2013), Art Monthly (2013), Swamp Writing (2013, 2014 & 2015), and Borderlands Magazine (2019, 2020), and broadcast on Radio National’s ‘Poetica’ and Sunday Extra’s ‘The year that made me’. Her poetry has also been presented in multimedia exhibitions with visual artists Pam French (2004 & 2017) and Kieren Sanderson (2004). Her verse novel Malcolm was developed as a theatre script with award winning playwright Mary Anne Butler, and performed at Araluen Theatre in 2011. In 2010 her poetry manuscript Coming of Age was shortlisted for the Picaro Press Awards and selected work was published in the Picaro Press/Byron Bay Writers’ Festival Anthology. In 2009 Leni won the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry. In 2010 and 2012 she won the Poetry and Essay sections respectively, of the NT Literary Awards and in 2015 she was a finalist both in the Poetry and Essay sections. In 2016 she won the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre Award with Into the West – Bertha Strehlow’s Journey to Piltadi. Leni taught and performed her poetry as the featured poet for Red Room Poetry’s ‘The Disappearing’ education program, and was long-listed for the 2017 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. From 2011–2013 Leni was on the Selection Panel for the Varuna Writers’ Fellowships. She was a member of the Program Advisory Committee for the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF) for two years and has appeared as a guest speaker at the EWF/Digital Writers’ Festival in Melbourne 72

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in 2013 and 2015. In January 2014, Leni was a presenter at the Watershed Conference of the Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. She was a judge of the 2020 Stella Literature Prize and appeared as a guest at the 2020 Perth Festival’s Weekend of Literature and Ideas. Leni was the 2013–2014 recipient of the Varuna The National Writers’ House-Tyrone Guthrie Centre Writers’ Residency Prize at Annaghmakerrig in Ireland, and was invited to return again in 2015. In 2015 Leni was a recipient of a major ArtsNT Arts Development Grant and a Northern Territory History Grant to develop her verse novel for publication. Leni is a founding member of the Alice Springs publishing initiative, Ptilotus Press. The Press is a community-based small press that aims to promote Central Australian writing. Leni also promotes and supports writing in Alice Springs and Tennant Creek by regularly facilitating community-based writing workshops. She currently works with senior Indigenous women from the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands developing cultural community-led domestic violence prevention programs.

Malcolm: A Story in Verse (2019) Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow (2018) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow arose in the poetic form quite naturally as I explored her writing, and researched details about her life by reading the diaries of her husband TGH (Ted) Strehlow. As I read more about her and the life she entered when she married Ted, I became more intrigued because I found that the character of Bertha was at odds with the era. This includes her marriage to Ted and the seemingly radical move to Central Australia in 1935. Marriage for women of this era was usually exemplified by a total abandonment of the self, resulting in women being subsumed into the life of their husbands upon whom they 73

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relied for their financial, material, emotional and physical support. Any property that might have been hers prior to the marriage became his; the name, children and future were his. What is interesting about Bertha, and what drew me to her story was that despite this cultural pressure and the dominance of societal expectations of the day, she created her own path and continued to command her own voice in a space where women’s voices were (and are) so often silenced. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I had already written a verse novel prior to Giving Voice to Silence – Uncovering Bertha Strehlow’s voice through poetry, and at the time I started Bertha’s story, the first book, Malcolm (2019), was still an unpublished manuscript. It was only accepted for publication after Bertha’s book was published. I say this because I knew when I started Bertha’s story I already understood the genre and felt confident in exploring it again. I knew the book needed a strong character as the narrator and I knew the narrator’s interaction with the setting (or landscape) was vital for the story to be dynamic and engaging. This was clear to me from the outset and seemed to be the only way to write the story. I approached the writing of the book by allowing the poems to arise in response to my reading and researching Bertha’s life. She lived in Central Australia in the 1930s and it is a place I know intimately after living in Alice Springs for thirty years. I wrote poems, not in any linear way, but as I imagined Bertha might have responded to the experiences of living in a desert landscape. It was an extremely enjoyable writing time as I let myself drop into her character. The writing included responding to a number of questions such as: What would it have been like to travel on the old Ghan train to central Australia in 1935 in the heat of summer? Or to travel to Hermannsburg in the middle of a dust storm? Or to live on a Lutheran mission that believed that the only way to save Aboriginal people’s lives was to convert them to Christianity? Or seeing camels for the first time? Or travelling by camel into the western deserts of Central Australia? Or losing a baby in the desert 74

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and pleading with God to save your life? The poems are facts as they answer the questions I was asking. They allowed Bertha to speak, revealing the wonder and terror of her experiences. The background research was thorough and rigorous as I examined texts, journals, letters, essays and books written by both Bertha and Ted, as well as many other historical sources. The poems are also fiction. They are my words, my poetic rendering of Bertha’s story. The research led me to read the copious diaries written by Ted Strehlow; these are held at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. For gaining a sense of Bertha’s perspective of the desert, I focused on the three key papers she wrote about her experience of travelling across the desert in 1936. But it was the folder of Bertha’s letters written between 1942–1955, given to me by Bertha’s son John, that gave me the opportunity to hear her voice. These were long detailed letters written when Bertha was living in Adelaide, and sent to Ted while he was travelling, first in Central Australia and then in London and in Germany. They held the many details of family life that Bertha felt Ted was missing out on as he was away for long periods of time. She wrote about the children’s progress at school, a dinner party with friends from Alice Springs, or a visit to the theatre. She wrote about repairs on the house, buying a new fridge, and of getting the outside toilet moved onto the veranda. Her writing was engaging and entertaining and my days spent reading the letters were a joy. It was like eavesdropping on a one-sided conversation, and I was left wondering what Ted wrote in return. Bertha was a teacher, working in a number of high schools in Adelaide teaching English and Ancient History. She lived in her family home along with her children and her father, until his death in 1962. Her sorrow at his loss was acute. Bertha was a vital and energetic woman who was easy to write about. The book grew as I wrote poems and my research progressed alongside my writing. I know the landscape of Central Australia intimately and wrote about it from a place of knowledge. It is country I have lived in and travelled through for many years. I have friends in Aboriginal communities across the Centre. It is a place of immense beauty and power and the lands 75

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hold such reverence for the traditional owners. As the book got close to completion I started working on the structure and the narrative. It wasn’t possible to do this until I had all the poems, and it was only then that I could craft the work. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? When I first started writing Walking with Camels, Bertha, who passed away in 1984, still had three living children, and I was in close contact with her youngest son, John Strehlow. I was very conscious that I was writing a story based on a real person. I wanted to honour her life and I wanted her son’s approval. Due to a complex family history, much of the Strehlow story is public property. In 1985, a number of years after the death of Ted Strehlow, his second wife Kathleen Strehlow, sold the ‘Strehlow Collection’ to the Northern Territory Government. This collection includes a huge number of sacred Aboriginal artefacts, field journals, thousands of photographs, and film and audio records of sacred ceremony, and was protected by an act of parliament.22 Given the complexity of the family’s history, it was very important to me that I be completely open with Bertha’s son about my interest in his mother and why I wanted to write about her. At the time I was writing Bertha’s story, John was also writing a book. The subject of his work was his paternal grandmother, Frieda Strehlow. There were days when both John and I would meet at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. In this quiet space surrounded by books and diaries created by John’s father, Ted and his grandfather, Carl, John wrote about his grandmother as I wrote about his mother. John was completely supportive of me writing about his mother. Initially he was somewhat bemused about the choice of verse novel as the genre. But, like many who read verse novels after not having experienced the genre before, he was completely won over – to the point where he thought it was the only genre for the story of his mother. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? The poetic and narrative techniques were not so much conscious choices but instinctive ones. I wrote poems that developed the character 76

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and the place. The poems tell the history of Central Australia as much as they tell Bertha’s story and the camel journey. The poems helped me to make the narrative decisions. Through the poems, I wove my way back and forth through Bertha’s life and through the history story of Central Australia. The loss and dispossession of the Aboriginal people of the centre is told at the same time as Bertha finds out about the impacts of government decisions on Aboriginal people’s lives; about the atrocities. The devastation of the landscape due to drought and over-grazing was also the devastation of people’s lives, and Bertha’s voice was a vehicle to reveal this. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? The decisions of whether to choose between poetic strategies or narrative were in constant interplay throughout the writing process, and movement between the two created a dynamic and energetic writing opportunity which was both extremely enjoyable and challenging. It is this interplay that is at the core of the verse novel. In Young Adult Fiction (YAF) verse novels there might be a choice of narrative over poetic techniques, as this creates an energy that propels the novel forward. There is energy, too, in the use of the first-person point of view, which many very successful YAF’s employ. I decided to engage the first-person point of view in both Walking with Camels and Malcolm as it arose naturally in the poetry, but also to maintain the energy of the work. The first-person point of view also invites the reader to engage with the inner monologue of the main character, offering insights that might be otherwise missed. This creates the opportunity for the reader to experience landscape – remote Central Australia, and the inner-city Melbourne, as the main character experiences them. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? It is vital that the reader be drawn into the character’s life – in all its messiness, pain, joy, wonder, fear and doubt. This was most important to me: that the reader would know my character and come to love them as I do. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? 77

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The verse novel is an exciting genre because of its versatility and its flexibility to tell stories and draw readers into the inner life of a character. Delving into poetry in this way reveals the depth of the storytelling that can be achieved in poetry. It is an addictive form to work in for a poet because of the distillation of imagery and construction of sentences that give maximum emotional impact with the least amount of words. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I have been influenced by many verse novels in the writing of my work. After I started writing my first verse novel, Malcolm and understood that what I was doing was writing a verse novel, I read all the verse novels I could find. I was given a copy of Dorothy Porter’s What a Piece of Work, many years before I started Malcolm. That work, along with The Monkey’s Mask were defining works for me. My list of verse novels quickly grew when I realised I needed to educate myself on the genre. Emily Ballou’s The Darwin Poems was a profound experience. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate expanded possibilities with structure and poetic comedy but I learnt from them that I couldn’t write in a stanza form as they have done. Reading Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust and Catherine Bateson’s His Name in Fire taught me about the power and drive of character. Philip Hodgins’s Dispossessed and Geoff Page’s The Scarring taught me that landscape is a reflection of the personal. These two books in particular revealed to me how landscape can expose rawness and loss in character and how through poetry it can be a vehicle to explore huge and painful issues. I studied many works that explored historical fiction in a poetic form. These included Adrienne Eberhard’s Jane, Lady Franklin, Dael Allison’s Fairweather’s Raft and Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s Possession. These books were pivotal in revealing the breadth of flexibility available to me in this genre – as they explore oceans, yet at the same time allow historical characters to come to life as they live and breathe in their watery landscapes. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I learnt I can write both fiction and non-fiction, and I can develop 78

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dynamic characters and invite readers into poetry, many of whom have never read poetry before. The verse novels I have read have taught me about the diversity and richness of the genre. I learnt about the intelligence of the genre that reveals what we can learn about ourselves, and our world in rich colour. I learnt that the genre honours character and narrative without losing the beauty and intensity of poetry – it’s quite a feat. I regularly seek out and read verse novelists’ individual poems to experience the voices of the poets in a variety of genres, so the verse novel has lead me to explore poetry more widely.

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Diane Fahey

‘the verse novel can deliver a powerful sense of the voice, of voices, set free to articulate and shape a story – hence it is potentially very empowering.’ Diane Fahey is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently November Journal (Whitmore Press Poetry, 2017).  She has been shortlisted for six major book awards, with  Sea Wall and River Light (Five Islands Press, 2006) winning the ACT Government’s Judith Wright Prize in 2006. Among her awards for poetry are the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Wesley Michel

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Wright Poetry Prize, and a shortlisting for the 2020 Montreal Poetry Prize. Diane Fahey has received a number of writing grants from the Australia Council, the Victorian Government and the Government of South Australia. She has undertaken residencies in Venice and at Hawthornden Castle, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Cill Rialaig, Varuna and Bundanon. In 2013, she was selected for Australian Poetry’s International Poetry Tour of Ireland. Her poetry has been represented in many literary journals, in Australia and overseas, and in over seventy anthologies. Diane holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney for her research titled Places and Spaces of the Writing Life. She lives in the bayside town of Clifton Springs, Victoria.

The Mystery of Rosa Morland, a Verse Novel (2008) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? There is, in the room where I sleep, a ‘mystery’ bookcase, containing all of my detective stories and novels – single-author fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and many others, and anthologies such as, from the Oxford Press: Twelve Tales of Murder, Twelve English Detective Stories and, my bedtime reading at the moment, Twelve Mystery Stories. The Penguin Book of Victorian Villainies is another favourite. I have also collected anthologies with a railway theme: the true-crime The Victorian Railway Murders, as well as the fiction-based Mysterious Railway Stories and Murder on the Railways. Elsewhere around the house are bookshelves containing novels by – to proceed alphabetically – Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters (with Jane Eyre a particular favourite), Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and (skipping ‘F’), Elizabeth Gaskell. Some of these writers’ works centre on female characters who engage with situations of imposed suffering and limitation to reach a space where an essential freedom and authenticity is possible. Interestingly, one of the strongest female characters in Nineteenth

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Century British fiction is Marian Halcombe in Collins’ The Woman in White, which happens to be one of the most brilliant mystery thrillers of all. Designated ‘a novel of sensation’, with strong Gothic elements, The Woman in White incorporates many human and social issues still at the heart of the matter today: child sexual abuse, oppression and exploitation of the vulnerable, and the predatory ruthlessness of some individuals with a sense of entitlement whether by virtue of maleness, extreme wealth, and/or various configurations of social and political prestige and power. In Collins’ novel, Sir Percival Glyde, after leaving a trail of extreme damage and cruelty, meets his end in a burning church, but the three key protagonists survive what he has inflicted on them – two of them to marry (each other), while Marian, who has been prepared to venture into moral ambiguity in order to find ‘the woman in white’, attains a circumspect happiness. That’s a general background. Specific influences that I can name? The police detectives in Dickens’ Bleak House and Collins’ The Moonstone – Bucket, and Cuff – are two of the many informing influences on my own police inspector, Ernest Watts – reaching even to the detective-in-lovewith-the-victim?/culprit? of noir Hollywood dramas of the 1940s and ’50s. Watts is a sad-sack, rather insignificant-looking man, but he harbours some surprising secrets, and is possessed of a very sharp mind. Most of the other characters on the train have no direct literary antecedents, though the subplot around Charlotte Winter and Anne Morgan has a connection with the Georgette Heyer layer of my psyche, belonging to the early teenage years, hence the imagery of masked balls, swapped identities etc, that comes into play at points. Helen Westwood, who has been caught in an abusive marriage, is a figure who chimes with various past literary representations, including Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, while having a powerful contemporary resonance. And what of the origins of the central character of Elinor Pierce (who writes fiction under the name ‘Rosa Morland’)? There is, of course, the broad influence of so many strong and spirited female characters in the works of Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and others, as above, but in more particular terms, it’s hard to say. Though I do remember that, towards 82

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the end of 1999, I boarded a plane with M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret in my stowed luggage, and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds – with its transgressive heroine, Lizzie Greystock – in my handbag, en route to Ireland where, in a high room at Annaghmakerrig (the Tyrone Guthrie Centre), I would begin writing The Mystery of Rosa Morland. As I’ve made clear, mystery stories have been, and remain, a passion – though my enthusiasm is mainly directed towards fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and what is termed ‘The Golden Age’ of detective fiction. Most such works have, of course, a murder at their centre, so putting the reality of death in the spotlight. Yet the complexities of plot, the machinations of the guilty characters and the intricately clever investigations and revelations of the detectives who are their nemesis sweep us along in these more traditional mystery stories, where we are much more likely to be interested in the who, the why and the how, than in the what – that key, enabling fact of the whole enterprise, the destruction of a human life. This means that there is a powerful diversionary pull, and perhaps for some readers a kind of magical thinking is involved, too – because while the suffering and death is happening to someone else, it is not happening to oneself. All of this posed a challenge for me as I set out to write my own mystery story because the basic fact is that, in order to write a piece of detective fiction, you, the author, have to kill someone. I couldn’t face doing this, so finessed, constructed a plot in which a person, Baron Maldonbury, an actual murderer, may or may not be murdered on a train going from London to Edinburgh on the last night of the Nineteenth Century. If he is murdered, the culprit may or may not be Elinor Pierce. There is no solution given to the mystery in the verse novel which forms the main part of the book, but various inconclusive clues/clews can be found there, as well as in the substantial biography section which follows, and in the three fictional stories by Rosa Morland, which appear in different places in the book. It follows that one of the key questions to ask is: Is there in fact an actual death, an actual murder? Or is the writer, myself, doing what Rosa Morland does in her stories – spinning a kind of controlled fantasy in the 83

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course of which human malevolence is encountered and then countered, (or not), by spirit, ingenuity, imagination – and a highly weaponised sense of irony? In Rosa Morland’s third story, ‘The Masked Ball’, the heroine, Sarah, is described by the hostess, Lady Cynthia, as ‘a sweet but very retiring young lady … indeed, not so young anymore, I believe she’s twenty-three’.23 So she is not likely to be equal to dealing with the Count, who appears in full Gothic glory ‘in a floor-length black cape’ lined with crimson, peering from ‘the eye-holes in his narrow mask’.24 However, it’s possible that he might bear injuries suffered by the previous proxy for Lord Maldonbury, in the second fictional story, ‘River of Life, River of Death’, who was swept away in a raging torrent after trying to drown the woman risking her life to help him. He was believed to be dead – ‘Laura’s eyes followed the struggling figure till they saw only blank darkness’25 – but it may be that, even after his fall from the train, then the bridge, and perhaps, too, some severe collisions with floating objects in the swollen river, he survived, and took on another guise: ‘When he entered and walked slowly down the left side of the ballroom, [Sarah] noticed his severe limp and curved posture. It was as though the sense of ambivalence about him extended even to his height – he might once have been quite a tall man.’26 Yes, here he is again. It would seem I’ve allowed for the possibility of redemption, reclamation, given him more life and time. True he has to contend with his injuries and now has a Transylvanian accent, plus he’ll have to cope with not getting the girl. But Rosa and I have done our best for him, it’s up to him now. Since I don’t believe in revenge, have I invented a (relatively) nonviolent form of revenge, sublimated to the fictional realm, in a verse novel which is a kind of non-violent murder mystery? How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? Once I’d launched into writing the dramatic monologues through which the main story is told, (the first monologues were from Watts, the detective, the actor Florence Ellesmere, and Dolores, a macaw who 84

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is her muse), I found myself propelled by a strong energy to create the other characters. Though aware that many literary influences were at work – deliberately and consciously, and perhaps also unconsciously – I had a sense of much more freedom of movement than in my usual work as a poet. I enjoyed being inventive for its own sake, so often felt surprised when the characters took on independent life. At the same time I knew that these were an inner cast of characters, with some of them informed by various personal feelings and experiences, by parts of myself or my life – and also that, whether I liked it or not, some characters would reflect back to me aspects of myself I had not intended or chosen to reveal: lost, discarded or unlived parts of myself. This was very much as in my poem ‘Primal Scene’, which appears in The Wing Collection, where the female detective, in pursuit of a solution to an unnamed crime, gathers the suspects for the ritual ‘final disclosure’ scene: ‘I turn slowly, / meet each pair of eyes – / all blue-green, like my own. / After a tortuous silence / an unexpected voice begins to speak.’27 I also played in many of the themes and concerns I’ve pursued elsewhere in my poetry, taking them in new directions. Various characters embodied or allowed me to explore my fascination with: creativity, healing, and transformation; birds and the natural world; the desire for beauty, and the efflorescent power of art and literature; and the themes of time and mortality, appearance and reality, true perception and illusion … Another presence was the political dimension of life, ever with us, built on the tension between power and powerlessness – where resources, material and monetary, can be manipulated and/or appropriated by the powerful, and where individual human lives, understood by many as sacred, of measureless value, are treated as fodder in the quest for ascendancy and dominance. On that score, I’ve walked long journeys in exploring the imbalances of power between men and women in patriarchal society in past books such as Metamorphoses and Listening to a Far Sea, based on figures in Greek mythology, and The Sixth Swan, based on the Grimms’ fairy and folk tales. In my own understanding of these conflicts, (which also operate at a universal level), I see that there is the desire for power ‘over’ – associated 85

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with imperialism of all kinds, as well as bullying and abuse at ground level – and there is the kind of empowerment that arises from within, a spiritual and personal empowerment that involves both an acceptance of finiteness, a sense of being part of a larger whole, and an openness to life though which one can claim one’s own freedom and agency, truth and strength. I see creativity as one of the key pathways of transformation on these fronts. My main spiritual influences are Christian humanism, Buddhism, and life itself. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Once I had decided to include a detailed biography section, I was able to fill in a lot of details about the characters and their life stories, and indeed began to embellish these. As the section grew larger I realised that the whole book was, on one level, about story telling. So the prose biographies were supplementary to the poetic monologues, and provided background and context as well as following up on future links between the characters on the train. Re the famous distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’, the biographies could be purely the latter, straight narratives, while the monologues were more about ‘showing’, letting the characters and their situations be revealed by their own words and actions. Finally, the three fictional stories by ‘Rosa Morland’ embedded in the text, enabled me to add clues about the central events on the train and their aftermath, as well as allude to the backstories of key characters – mostly in a not very serious way, employing literary pastiche and a sense of burlesque at times, with a large degree of, to put it politely, authorial landscaping. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? As above, I chose a diverse range of techniques. This was partly in response to the notion of The Death of the Author, (yet another murder story!), which I’ve always viewed as an attack on originality, and on creativity itself. The word tells its own story – the roots of ‘author’ are from the Latin auctor, literally ‘one who causes to grow’, which developed from augere, ‘increase, originate, promote’. My own view is that, in writing creatively, one is serving a process that is beyond one’s own ego and intentions, while 86

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at the same time drawing upon one’s deepest resources of feeling and understanding, to shape something that will be organic, cogent, and have a form of independent life. Creativity is, at its best, original, generative, surprising. When I came to write The Mystery of Rosa Morland, one objective was to address the issue of originality, and of the status of the author’s presence in a work. One could say that in my book, recycled elements, as it were, abound – deliberately so, as I have detailed. But in the process some are decisively transformed, archetypes and stereotypes wear new costumes, left-of-field possibilities emerge, and sea-changes occur. That, for me, is the whole point. A creative work is both an artefact, and a conduit – the locus of an infinity of relationships within the author, and within the reader, and between them: their lived experience, their stored memories, their psyches. And all through the medium of language, an infinity of infinities. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Most of the two sections in verse (‘Before Midnight’ and ‘After Midnight’) in The Mystery of Rosa Morland are composed of dramatic monologues written in blank verse, or iambic pentameter, the form most often used by Shakespeare in his plays. The exception is a long speech at the end of ‘After Midnight’ by Seamus L’Estrange that – in order to cover a lot of narrative ground – moves into prose after an initial monologue. Some thoughts on dramatic monologues. Recently I encountered a memorable phrase describing the dramatic monologues of Hamlet as being possessed of ‘a transcendental interiority’, with the claim that this introduced a new threshold of self-reflective awareness into literature. Certainly, one can have direct glimpses, and more than glimpses, of a character’s inner life, through this self-revelatory form, have access to their deepest, most secret thoughts. Robert Browning wrote not a few memorable dramatic monologues, most famously, ‘My Last Duchess’, where a moving portrait of the dead Duchess emerges, despite himself, from the words of the Duke who, also despite himself, gives us a self-portrait of a man of intemperate, self87

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delusional pride that turns murderously on the very gentlenesss and loving generosity which are the wellspring of his wife’s personality. The doublemirror effect of simultaneously direct and unintentional self-revelation can be enthralling – as it is also in Henry James’ dazzling and uncanny The Aspern Papers. The reader is enticed to walk the knife-edge of what exactly is revealed, and what is concealed. In my verse novel I wanted my characters to speak naturally, candidly, with a distinctive voice, but also (at times, in some cases) deviously and deceptively. And I wanted them, as above, to reveal more than they intended. For me, character was as important as plot, perhaps more so. Indeed, one of the mysteries of the book is, simply put, the mystery of the human personality, inlaid with its drives towards, and desire for, beauty, truth, love – potential agents of transcendence – as well as power, anger, and greed of many kinds – potential agents of destructiveness. Cue Hamlet again. Perhaps the plot to confront Lord Maldonbury with a ghost – herself, Elinor Pierce, assumed to be dead by Maldonbury – could be linked, remotely, of course, to the appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, and the Players’ dumb show of a murder. By using surprise as a weapon, Elinor Pierce hopes to provoke the guilty party into selfbetrayal, so leading – with Watts on hand as witness – to legal retribution. But … What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? We know the verse novel has ancient roots going back to the oral tradition, as in the case of Homer. Now, as well as a remarkable diversity of verse novels by a wealth of writers, past and present, across many cultures, there has been an explosion of verse novels for Young Adult readers, and children. This can only be a good thing, marrying the forward-moving energies of narrative with the inner and outer exploration, and the depthsounding, that can happen in poetry and drama. And the verse novel can deliver a powerful sense of the voice, of voices, set free to articulate and shape a story – hence it is potentially very empowering. Also, I take it that the verse novel has been, and is, a particularly important genre for Australian poets – I imagine there may be interesting reasons for that … 88

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The wide view is of a protean abundance and, in the present, of everexpanding possibilities. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I’m one who – despite the above compendium of literary influences! – goes my own way. One wants to step into a new space. So while I admire the various verse novels I have read, I am, like each writer who adds to the repertoire of this compelling but elusive genre, in a different part of the forest.

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Sherryl Clark

‘… if you’re going to write a verse novel, the poetry should be as strong and poetic as possible.’ Sherryl Clark was born in New Zealand and came to Australia in 1978. While studying an Arts degree at Deakin University, she began a long career of writing and teaching. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Hamline University in the USA and a PhD in Creative Arts from Victoria University. Her PhD topic focused on fairy tales and the unconscious in writing. In 1996 her first children’s book was published, and since then she has had over 70 Children’s and YA books published in Australia, as well as the UK and USA. Sherryl loves poetry, and has written two collections and four verse 90

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novels. Her verse novels, all published by Penguin Children’s Books are: Farm Kid (2004), Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not!) (2007), Motormouth (2010) and  Runaways  (2013).  Farm Kid  won the NSW Premier’s Award and  Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not!)  was a Children’s Book Council of Australia Honour Book. Her fifth verse novel,  Mina and the Whole Wide World, was published in July 2021 by University of Queensland Press. Sherryl also writes adult crime fiction, and her first crime novel, Trust Me, I’m Dead was published in July 2019 (Verve Books, UK). A sequel was published in 2020.

Mina and the Whole Wide World (2021) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? There were two media images in recent years that affected me deeply – one of the tiny Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, dead on the beach, and then the small boy in Syria in the back of the ambulance after his house was bombed. I kept thinking about how children are the ones who are affected, whose lives are destroyed, and about refugees and countries and power and corruption and powerlessness and desperation. It all kept rolling around inside me, until I wanted to write something for children about it. But I didn’t know what or how. I had written some poems for adults about these things, and I started to think about a verse novel. The globe of the world kept coming up as an image – with all the countries marked out on it. I didn’t even think they still used them in schools (I did find one school that did). The title came then – Mina and the Whole Wide World, thinking of the globe in her arms. So I wrote three or four poems about a girl who finds a globe in a garage sale, and then I stalled. The issues of appropriation loomed so large that I couldn’t work out how to tell the story. I had completed a PhD on fairy tales, and one of the key elements was the use of fairy tales in child therapy. While I focused a lot on Bruno

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Bettelheim and his book, The Uses of Enchantment, I also found several recent studies where fairy tales had been used with children suffering trauma from war or abuse, or who were terminally ill. And then there have been studies on how reading fiction can help children to learn empathy, to walk in other people’s shoes. So I felt that telling this story was important, and I really wanted it to be about learning how to understand and feel the experiences of someone not from your small, enclosed, media-driven world. To not only see and understand for yourself what they have endured, but for that ‘seeing’ to change you. So those were the initial ideas. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I wrote four poems and got stuck. Now and then, I’d come back to them but I couldn’t write any more because I didn’t know whose story it was. I felt it would be wrong to jump in and invent a refugee boy or girl and go from there. I called several different people and organisations who help refugees to ask if anyone would or could help me, but I think they thought I was a journalist or misunderstood what I was asking. Everywhere that I tried, the answer was ‘no’, so I gave up. The poems sat there for well over a year. Then I was granted a one-month residency at Arteles in Finland. Arteles is out in the country, about 40 km from Tampere (NW of Helsinki). My proposal was to go there and write and research a crime novel for adults, which I did. But while I was there, suddenly the poems for the verse novel started coming out. Perhaps it was being out of Australia? Or being in a room in silence, totally alone, staring out at a lake? Perhaps the saunas and dips in another deep, icy lake jogged it free? Once or twice a week, I loved to go to a vegetarian café in Hämeenkyrö, a nearby small town, and write. But instead of the crime novel, the verse novel came out in several huge bursts. I wrote the whole thing in a few weeks, and mostly in the café. I have no idea why that place worked the way it did! I do know that in the first session, as I sat there, I suddenly realised that the story belonged to Mina, the girl with the globe, and it began with her ‘territory’ being taken from her. Mina not only doesn’t understand why, 92

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indeed, she doesn’t want to understand. She’s too angry and is looking for someone to blame, and she blames Azzami. The novel is about how she comes to understand his story, and then helps him to share it with her classmates. Once I started writing the poems, I felt I had to keep going in each session until I ran out of words. So in a two- or three-hour-sitting, I might write fifteen poems. This is similar to the other verse novels I have written, but more intensive. In the past, I might have written six or eight at a time, a bit like writing a chapter. For Mina, perhaps I knew that it had to be completed before I went home, or I’d lose the momentum. In any case, I finished the first draft a week before I left Finland. The editing process with University of Queensland Press was so beneficial. It wasn’t until I had to really look intensively at each poem, with an editor asking lots of questions, that I started to see all of the things I had put in there, things I wasn’t totally aware of; not just the initial ideas I have described here, but things that were clearly in my subconscious and ended up on the page. I feel like the verse novel has about ten themes, not just one. Funnily enough, another aspect of my PhD was to explore how to write original fairy tales relying as much as possible on my subconscious, and here I have done it with this verse novel! Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? The appropriation issue, as I have said. I’m hyper-aware of it, but I honestly feel that I have done everything I can to tell an authentic story with depth and meaning. I believe poetry can do so, uniquely, because it allows so much room for the reader. Poetry is not about dictating, not for me anyway. Having chosen Mina as my narrator, a white Australian girl battling to understand (under duress), I then had to show and convey her understanding to other characters who are not at all sympathetic. This is the core of the story for me, this internal battle. That she does battle to achieve the understanding and empathy is what counts. In life, so many can’t be bothered, or want to hold on tightly to their ‘territory’. Mina’s story 93

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is many people’s story, but, more than anything, I think that potential to change and understand – the move towards something better inside us – lies within our kids. And while the first draft came so strongly, eventually, bursting out, the editing process drew out the nuances, the extra layers, making them stronger and better expressed. In the end, it was the punctuation that stymied the editing process a bit. I love to write free verse for children that mostly ignores punctuation. In Farm Kid, I didn’t even want full stops at the ends of the poems! I came around to it. In many of my verse novels I use dialogue, so then there’s the issue of how to punctuate the dialogue without too many restrictions or rules. But also – is this free-wheeling approach going to upset school teachers? Will they understand why the punctuation is so minimal? That it’s conveying flow and ideas and then leaving the important thinking gaps via white space and stanza breaks? It’s tricky, because poetry is so rarely taught well in primary schools, or even at all, and yet it is so amazing in the way it opens kids up to language and imagery and ideas. Our solution was for me to devise a ‘set of rules’ for Mina that I felt worked with what I was trying to do, and we stuck to that. It did get tweaked a bit. But I come back to the whole issue of the lack of poetry in schools and wish so much that it was a staple. There are many studies and reports on the benefits, and I have seen them myself, seen teachers amazed at what comes out of the poetry workshops I run for them, and yet … Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? Free verse, which I use in all my verse novels (and most of my poetry). And very sparse poetry; I’ve found that really sparse poetry does two things – it allows kids who are not very good readers to read the novel with ease, but it also means that more able readers can enjoy it, too, and often see the gaps and read into them. I also try to use poetic devices such as simile and metaphor, and imagery of course. I don’t like verse novels for Children and YA that are more or less chopped up prose. To me, if you’re going to write a verse novel, the poetry should be as strong and poetic as possible. Offer more than prose, if you like. 94

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Telling a story is important, too, and keeping the story moving forward. I think also, though, in some of those gaps I have talked about, there have to be moments where the reader can stop and think and feel what the characters are experiencing. Moments where the gap has an ‘oh’ or a ‘hmm’ or a ‘wow’ in it. I’m not sure how I create the gaps – I kind of feel my way through the poems and the gaps or moments appear for me. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? It probably sounds fluffy to say this, but those decisions were mostly what felt right. I think it’s the same with all of the verse novels. I have a story, and I tell it with poetry and poems, and try to use poetic devices and imagery as much as I can. So I think the two strategies work together as I write. It’s both conscious and unconscious. In the revision, I look at the strategies separately. Is the narrative strong enough? Do poems need to be deleted, or do I need another one here and there? Does one poem lead into the next, do I need a change of pace or a gap, what is the climax of the story, how do I get there, is it high enough and meaningful enough? And the ending – do the last poems create an effective ending? I also check to make sure none of the poems are slipping into being didactic. What the story is really about needs to rise from below. Mina and the Whole Wide World has so many themes, so many things in there that I wanted to say, without knowing how I was going to do it. But most of them rise from below, I hope. Revision means the poetry gets a going-over as well. In particular I look for clichés. When a first draft bursts out in big rushes like Mina did, it’s inevitable that clichés will creep in, but then the metaphors and similes still have to work with the characters, with the story. It’s not about being too clever, it’s about finding the words that are the strongest and best. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted the poetry to be important – to feel like this was the only way to tell this story, so that kids could feel or sense the story, as much as read it. Of course, I won’t know if I succeeded until they have read it! But I 95

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managed it with the other verse novels, especially Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not!). It’s the bonus of doing school visits – you get to hear from the kids themselves what they think. You can read bits aloud and see their reactions, and they ask lots of questions as well. I think I also want the story to be powerful enough that it’s read for that alone – if that means poetry takes second place in the reader’s experience, that’s fine. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? For me, it’s the best way to tell the most emotionally affecting stories. I know with Motormouth I tried several times to write it as a prose novel and it just sat on the page and died a turgid death. As soon as I realised it had to be a verse novel, it took off. I feel like I don’t have to explain the emotional core of the story. It appears in the gaps, in carefully chosen words, the right words at the right moment. When I look back, I can see Farm Kid and Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not!) were both about loss, Motormouth was about truth/lies and betrayal, and Runaways was about abandonment. Those themes are all sitting ‘in the basement’, as I think Stephen King says about his ideas. But for me, it’s more than ideas, it’s the power of words to create more than what they simply signify when you put them together in a certain way. So for me, that way is poetry. That’s where the power lies really, for me. I know other writers write quite prosey verse novels, and that’s what works for them. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? The first verse novels I read that really influenced me were Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse and Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. I’ve since read others that I liked, but those two are the ones I go back to, and the ones I recommend to others for reading. Out of the Dust has poems with long lines and a strong narrative, and the imagery is terrific. Love That Dog is so minimalist but so powerful. Mostly, I think every poem I have ever read has been an influence. I have so many favourites. I could name a dozen and then keep going. One of the pleasures of teaching poetry is sharing them with students. I 96

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love reading Billy Collins’s poem, ‘The Lanyard’ out loud and seeing the responses. Some of the best responses have been from young male students – it takes them where they least expect to go and has a big impact. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Firstly, I learned what a verse novel was! Before I wrote Farm Kid back in 2003, I’d read very few verse novels and it had never occurred to me to write one myself, even though I’d written a lot of poems. Then I attended a summer workshop in Fresno, California, and met Janet Wong and read her verse novels and poetry. Then it occurred to me that poems I had written about growing up on a farm could form the basis of a story, a verse novel. I think initially I only had twenty-eight poems, then Julie Watts, the publisher at Penguin Children’s Books, read the poems and encouraged me to write more – and I ended up with a book. I think I have learned about the importance of imagery and poetry while telling a story – for me, it’s about the spaces and gaps. Not spelling everything out. Those are the verse novels I enjoy the most. When I read a prosey verse novel, I find myself getting very impatient and picky – I get the urge to take out a pen and start cutting! What usually happens is I give up. I’ll go back and re-read the ones I love to read, to remind myself what works for me, and also what more I have to learn. But I am continually on the look-out for more good ones. I have three on a pile right now waiting to be read. The way that really good verse novels move me also reminds me not to force myself. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work for me – to say, ‘Oh dear, I haven’t written a verse novel for a while, better churn one out!’ I was feeling really sad that I couldn’t get Mina to work, and now I’m astonished at how it burst out, but I think that’s just how they happen for me. I have to be patient and keep writing other things while I wait.

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Luke Best

‘I wanted to hold the reader with more theatre and energy, especially if I was going to try and pull the prose-readers over to the dark side.’ Luke Best is the author of verse novel Cadaver Dog (University of Queensland Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Thomas Shapcott Prize, and Shortlisted for the 2021 Australian Literary Studies (ALS) Gold Medal, the 2021 Mary Gilmore Award, and the 2020 Anne Elder Award. He has been published in The Australian, Overland, Stilts Journal, Verity La, Mascara Literary Review, Tincture Journal and Concrescence Zine and has performed his 98

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poetry at Queensland Poetry Festival. He lives in Toowoomba where he was born in 1982, and works in a completely unrelated to field to writing.

Cadaver Dog (2020) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Cadaver Dog was born out of a combination of these intrigues: true crime and true crime podcasts, historical natural disaster – including the 2011 Queensland floods upon which the story is set – and narrative longform poetry. True crime has long been a fascination of mine and I cannot drive a car or go for a jog without a pair of earphones whispering to me the details of a grisly murder or a daring heist. I regard it as more a wild fascination with the way humans treat each other, rather than an unhealthy obsession with the macabre. I live in Toowoomba, Queensland, the setting of Cadaver Dog where in 2011 we experienced an inland tsunami through our central business district, and subsequent major flooding in other parts of the Darling Downs. I wanted to write about it. Not a factual re-take, but rather a fictional ‘inspired-by’ story that focused more on the human reaction to trauma; how do the characters in the story react to disaster? Who do they become when faced with trauma? Luke Davies’ Interferon Psalms was a major influence. Although more a long poem than a verse novel, his sweeping narrative and the ‘God-soaked’ but ruinous and woeful world the narrator speaks from was unforgettable and so very stimulating. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I wrote my first line before I even knew a verse novel would follow. I wrote: Found by a cadaver dog, and yet not dead. Then I did what a lot of poets do; I left the line cold and alone in a Word doc while I went about my daily life. 99

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In the ensuing days and weeks the line sparked a lot of thought, and I wondered what could accompany it. The ‘collection poet’ in me wanted to make it a one-pager about who-knows-what, trying to cram a heap of theme and feeling into four or five stanzas. But the ‘long-form narrative poet’ in me wanted to tell a story. They say ‘write what you know’, so I based it in my hometown. I drew on my memory of the 2011 floods, which neither myself nor my family were actually affected by. The novel progressed as any other; line after line, with only a vague idea of the end plot. Suffice to say there was a lot of going back and forth, adding stanzas here and there, omitting sections, trying to control pace. The novel started to take form and gain momentum, sort of like rising floodwater. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Pace was a problem. The story moved too quickly, as mentioned, much like the swift water in the scenes. I had to rein the story in and add sections to slow down the narrative; add bulk to the text, add context where it was missing. Then there was the problem I’m sure all verse novelists face; how to add description, background and meat to a story using poetry – not just prose with line breaks. The editorial process helped me pare back on the text and eliminate filler words that littered the manuscript. Unnecessary uses of articles ‘a’, ‘the’ and ‘an’ were rife. I decided on the stream of consciousness technique for the narrator, a woman, who would start the story off in present tense and circle back to retell the events of the flood in past tense, taking the reader ‘by boat, back five days’, only then to return to present tense later in Part Two. There was a lot of editing – getting my tenses intact. The challenge in my decision on the stream of consciousness technique was how to maintain momentum when only the narrator speaks, and no one else. No dialogue and few other characters. I wished to delve into the woman’s state of mind; the disintegration of it like everything around her. 100

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Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I adopted form. I structured my stanzas to appear on the page as a sloping hill or cliff, symbolising The Great Diving Range where the story is set. I also adopted an acrostic-like technique for each stanza. My stanzas contained nine lines; the third-, sixth-, and final line of each containing only one word, which when read together forms a vertical poem or message. I’ve included an excerpt below (here I’ve emboldened the three words to highlight the effect. Take note of the hilly slope of the stanza, too.) The door is bolted shut. I locked it days ago. I’ve been camping on the deck. Been prey for the mosquitoes. Since the surge, I’ve been seething. Been plotting or charting. Been blue or black. It’s a process. The way a bruise implies trauma at the scene, then the capillaries brown. And what of the perpetrator? 28 It was quite the challenge maintaining this throughout. It forced me to break lines where usually I may not have. Some of the vertical poems fell into place without too much editing. Others I laboured over, restructuring stanzas countless times to achieve the effect. I’ve been surprised by how many people have read the book and didn’t pick up on this device without my pointing it out. I did set out to conceal the messages, but I believed the average reader would notice it after a few pages. One reviewer of the book noted that every third line was ‘noticeably shorter’ than the others, causing a ‘hiccupping rhythm’, but seemingly failed to see the three-word messages planted there. I will say I’m proud of achieving it throughout the book. My aim was that if you picked up the book and read only the three-word vertical poems you could get the gist of the story without reading the text in full. 101

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If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? My editor gave me valuable advice on the need to ‘show’ not ‘tell’. I was being too descriptive, bogging down too much in the detail of the scene, forcing momentum when actually what was needed was for the narrator to reflect and ruminate a little, like a poet would. Many sections in the book were not a part of the manuscript draft I originally sent to the publisher. The parts added were almost always the narrator thinking back to a past event or memory. This ultimately added depth and backstory that was missing at the start. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? With the use of the sloping stanzas mentioned earlier I was hoping for the reader’s eye to tumble down the page, but also add a little staccato to match the protagonist’s staggering state of mind. I was hoping for stilted momentum – which I guess I succeeded in, judging by the beforementioned ‘hiccupping rhythm’ which the book’s reviewer observed. I adopted a lot of metaphors and simile. I even say it in one of the lines; that the story is ‘hard to retell without metaphor’. I just couldn’t write a story about an inland tsunami without lots of comparison and analogical language. I also used plenty of alliteration. I wanted the poetry to be musical. But it also helped to convey the narrator’s voice in the colloquial style I was aiming for. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? Michael Symmons Roberts, a UK poet, wrote that ‘verse novels are the awkward children of successful parents, destined to disappoint both of them’.29 But I love it as a form, completely. I’m a poet first and foremost, but I love to tell a story. I don’t have the patience or skill to write a novel in prose. In fact, I envy the novelist who can write a five-hundred-page doorstopper. So, the verse novel is my chosen style, and I cannot see myself writing poetry for a collection for quite a while. To quote a good poet friend of mine who regards the writing of long102

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form narrative as a ‘Sisyphean task’; this is coming from a poet who writes phenomenally gorgeous collection poetry. He says he’s ‘never struck a theme or subject that could withstand the sustained blow torch focus of a long narrative’. So maybe we have merit, us verse novelists. And I think my friend is right, it takes a lot of focus to write one. I guess the trouble lies in whether our readers have enough focus in turn to read them to the end. Or are poetry readers too accustomed to picking a page, any page, and reading from there? I, myself, have purchased a verse novel, knowing it’s a verse novel and split the book in the middle like it’s a poetry collection. Only to berate myself and go to the start. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate inspired me regarding form. Talk about Sisyphean tasks. The focus and attention he had to sustain to write 590 sonnets and keep to plot and theme is phenomenal. Other influences were the Australian poets Dorothy Porter and protégé Bec Jessen with their respective volumes The Monkey’s Mask and Gap. However, the biggest influences were not verse novels, strictly speaking. The already mentioned Interferon Psalms by Luke Davies was vital for its aura and fable. Another was Year of the Wasp by Joel Deane for its great retelling of toil, and its epiphanic style. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? As mentioned, I learnt from Seth’s The Golden Gate that I wanted to adopt form. I learnt from Robin Robertson’s The Long Take that I didn’t want to write a book like that, to be frank. While it is a great achievement in its own right, and gave the verse novel as a form a boost with its Man Booker short-listing, I wanted mine to be edgier. I wanted to hold the reader with more theatre and energy, especially if I was going to try and pull the prose-readers over to the dark side – and prevent the collection-poetry readers from just picking a page, any page. 103

Jeri Kroll

‘… keep the story moving within poems as well as between them.’ Jeri Kroll is an Adelaide-based writer for adults and young people. Her verse novel, Vanishing Point, about anorexia, first love and animal-human relations, was published by Puncher and Wattmann in Australia in 2015 and released in America in 2014. Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards (Griffith University Young Adult Book Award), it was adapted for the stage by Professor Leslie Jacobson at George Washington University and selected for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 10th Annual ‘Page to Stage’ Festival 104

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(2011). A staged reading with music was performed by Horizons Theatre in 2012 and a 90-minute musical production (composer Roy Barber) was held at George Washington University in 2014. Jacobson’s production became a winner in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, leading to its final iteration at the national festival in Ohio (2015). The title poem ‘Vanishing Point’ was shortlisted for the Rosemary Dobson Prize (2009) and a sequence from the novel was runner-up in the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (2006). Kroll has published six collections of poems: Workshopping the Heart: New and Selected Poems (Wakefield Press, 2013), The Mother Workshops (Five Islands Press, 2004), House Arrest (Wakefield Press, 1993), Monster Love (Wakefield Press, 1990), Indian Movies (Hyland House, 1984) and Death as Mr. Right (Friendly Street Poets, 1982), which came second in the Anne Elder Award. Kroll has also published two chapbooks: Swamp Soup and other Poems (Picaro Press, 2012) and Felis domestica and other poems (Picaro Press, 2009). The Mother Workshops was adapted into an ABC Radio National Poetica program (aired 2006, 2010). Kroll’s poetry has been on the syllabi of South Australian senior schools and she has written Teachers’ Notes for three books. She has won or been shortlisted in state and national awards in Australia and America and been included in the Mattara Poetry Prize Anthology and commended in the ABC Bicentennial Literary Awards. In addition to being an editor and critic, Kroll is a fiction writer. The title story of The Electrolux Man (Hyland House, 1987) was published overseas in English and Dutch. Riding the Blues (Lothian 2001), Beyond Blue and Better Than Blue (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998, 1997) are young adult fiction. Mickey’s Little Book of Letters (Lothian, 2004), Bruise and Goliath (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998, 1997) are older reader novels. Kroll has published a chapter book and six picture books, two of which were Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Books. Several have been published overseas in English, Japanese and Korean. Kroll is Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at Flinders University.

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Vanishing Point (2015) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Two primary forces drove my creative process as I began writing my verse novel, Vanishing Point. The first results from my own creative history. I had been experimenting with poetic sequences for more than two decades and in each book they had become longer and more complex. Like many writers, in early books I had sometimes divided poems into parts and had to grapple with thematic consistency and/or narrative drive. Figurative language might have been the dominant feature, responsible for emotional and psychological intensity, but I still needed to produce momentum to guide readers through. Narrative logic can come from the way in which images or episodes are ordered. Many of my poems followed multiple strategies; I aimed to tell a story, create a portrait of a personality or capture a memory. Eventually, I composed a long titular sequence, House Arrest, which opened my fourth collection and was bound together by images of domestic incarceration while concomitantly relating a trip to Florida with my sevenyear-old son to visit my mother. I became absorbed by the changes I could ring on themes, the way in which I could intertwine images and narrative, which led to my fifth collection, The Mother Workshops, grounded by one organising principle – the manner in which various poetic forms could give voice to the disintegration of a personality through Alzheimer’s disease. Each poem fulfils three functions: it is an exercise in linguistic and poetic exploration; a biographical portrait of what my mother had been and what she was becoming as she progressively deteriorated; and an autobiographical record of how I responded to my mother’s decline. The next step in poetic experimentation for me naturally seemed a verse novel. The second impetus for attempting one comes from my own educational background. As an English major in the United States, I had read widely through North American, European and World Literature, including classical epics and medieval romances, which are extended narratives in verse. The first novels I learned were in fact long poems. I 106

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have written about this literary ancestry in an essay, ‘Strange bedfellows or compatible partners: the problem of genre in the twenty-first century verse novel,’ where I investigate how others have discussed the differences and similarities between past and present poetic narratives, in particular the long poem and poetic sequence. I was still revising my own verse novel and this scholarly study fed into my desire to maintain a strong narrative drive as well as to explore a number of poetic forms to deepen Vanishing Point’s texture. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I have to start with a story, because this question boils down to what writers are predictably asked at festivals, meet the author sessions and schools: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Vanishing Point has been part of my life since 2005. I was lucky enough to be granted an international exchange residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annagmaghkerrig, Ireland, and duly arrived in a temperate summer. There’s nothing like an artist’s retreat to give you time to wander physically and mentally. I was gifted with a spacious room and study in a stately home set in spectacular grounds: well-groomed gardens, lawns sweeping down to a shimmering lake, a forest of oak, sycamore and ash. That description sounds like a travel advertisement and doesn’t do justice to the magic of the place. The chirring and humming of insects and birds and the wild perfume of the flowers in the gardens lulled me into a creative daze. Afternoons after losing myself in work or beating my head against the desk, I would circumnavigate the deep lake that refused to reflect my selfobsessed face but drew me inward nevertheless with its drift and calm or its jitteriness after a storm. Sometimes I needed a test and explored dense woods that seemed to mark the edge of civilisation. I wandered from the path, knowing I’d have to fight my way through the wildness back to the orderly world. That was good preparation for wrestling with words. This was the environment I inhabited for a month where the voice of my central character, Diana, came to me. At first I thought she could be the vehicle for a sequence of poems about anorexia. During the residency 107

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I wrote about six pieces, but while furiously completing the last, waiting for the taxi to take me to the bus station, I found I was scribbling more notes about what else she wanted to say. In other words, the verse novel exists only because Diana wouldn’t stop talking. But as she implanted the rhythms of her speech in my brain, I realised that I couldn’t simply listen to her. Her tale involved more than her inner life, which meant I needed to explore how her outer life – family and environment – had brought her to these emotional and physical extremes. What had pushed her essentially to give up on life and to starve herself? Poetic monologues suited her psychology but I needed to discover the forms that would allow me to flesh out these other pressures. Narrative verse and even, in some cases, prose, became a vehicle for capturing alternative points of view. Of course the protagonist, Diana, still remains the dominant voice, but my Irish experience gave birth to her love interest, Conor, who leaves the landscape I briefly knew to bind himself to one that couldn’t have been more different – the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The second event in my life that forms the history of this hybrid crossover verse novel was meeting Professor Leslie Jacobson of the Department of Theatre and Dance at George Washington University. In 2008 Leslie came to Adelaide as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in Drama. She studied and worked at the Flinders Drama Centre and at TAFE SA (Technical and Further Education South Australia). Feminist anthropologist Diane Bell, who had taught at George Washington University but had subsequently retired to rural South Australia, introduced me to Leslie, and we agreed to swap work-in-progress. I showed her about thirty pages of Vanishing Point that I had managed to complete juggling a full-time academic job and associated writing commitments. The first thing she said to me was, ‘I can see this staged.’ And so began a collaboration that lasted through the completion of my manuscript. Along the way, I created additional characters and Jacobson extracted portions of the manuscript-in-progress to workshop with her classes. The final phase of this chapter of the verse novel’s history occurred 108

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roughly five years later. Over this period Vanishing Point had been adapted as acting-class exercises, readings, or staged performances, including one at the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts ‘Page to Stage’ Festival in Washington DC. The culmination was a ninety-minute production with music (composed by Roy Barber) in October, 2014, which brought home how transformation into another genre can enhance, expand and refine the original work, even while modifying it. That production became a winner in the Kennedy Centre American College Theatre Festival. To summarise, I feel that the dramatic treatment of Vanishing Point reinforced my own commitment to poetry as an oral art, a performative genre. The manner in which my text’s metaphors were duplicated or transformed in playscript and song forced me to reconsider meaning and sound. During revision I paid close attention to each monologue’s verbal texture as well as to the linguistic fluency of prose sections. Hearing actors rehearse added to my sense of how I wanted the work to hold together. It is worth noting that I always read material aloud to myself in private whether or not I am preparing for a public performance. I want to conclude here by saying something about the revision process. Relinquishing primary authorial control to adaptor, director, actors and other practitioners in a collaborative form such as drama allowed me to become more objective, highlighting facets of the verse novel I had overlooked or neglected and reaffirming what I thought of as risky decisions. This give and take facilitated the revision process before the manuscript became a printed artefact in late 2014 (in America) and 2015 (in Australia). Revision necessarily involves re-reading and thus reevaluation. At the conclusion of this project I was not the same person and writer that I had been when I began. Experience chastens, shapes and hopefully strengthens. My character Diana expresses this truth herself after a hospital stay and a near-death experience during a bushfire in a poem entitled ‘Rereading.’ She says: ‘I guess I’m reading back into my life and out of it again – old texts and new.’ 30 109

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Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? The key challenge I faced was recreating the narrative energy of a prose work that draws readers in while keeping them engaged with the poetry itself. So I had to resolve two problems: how intricate to make the plot and how lyrical or expository the poetry. I wanted to keep the story moving within poems as well as between them. That entailed giving space for each voice to establish itself and to create emotional intensity while creating narrative tension to encourage readers to turn the page. Detail and imagery needed to perform dual functions then. To address this challenge, I mapped out storylines revolving around first love and anorexia, including related subplots: one concerns Diana’s brother, who has Down syndrome, and the other her romantic interest, Conor, who introduces her to horseracing. The pivotal question driving both narrative and character portrayal is the question: how do you learn to feel comfortable in your own body? For young women in particular, female role models of the past promote unattainable body images and consequently restrictive pathways to selffulfillment. In a broader sense, gendered perceptions of female potential offer limited ways of being in the world. Another problem I had to solve, therefore, was how to integrate competing influences and pressures into a story that culminates in a possible way forward for Diana not dictated by familial guilt or patriarchal world views. The animal-human relationship became key for me, grounding narrative, thematic and metaphorical coherence. My character learns about herself and her body by interacting with horses, which necessitates moving beyond self-obsession; developing bonds with another species promotes that deepened knowledge and learning about the landscape in which they flourish expands it. The narrative thread pushes the action forward while metaphors relating to animal and human bodies, food and the environment bind the text together. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? The hybrid verse novel as a genre allowed me to create a portrait of 110

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a young woman coping with familial and societal pressures. On the one hand, the narrative is fairly linear; it begins in the present with infrequent flashbacks. The complexity, or layering, comes with its poetic character. I challenge readers with a mix of forms and chose this strategy to allow myself to discover aspects of the story and each character’s personality that I might not have been able to using only one poetic mode. Vanishing Point includes free verse, sonnets, blank verse, prose poems, prose and a haiku. In addition, the verse novel contains a classical dimension that blends Greek and Roman myths about Diana or Artemis, the virgin goddess, hunterin-chief to the gods, and her positive and negative alter egos through the centuries. My contemporary Diana’s namesakes function as foils against which she measures herself. Her interaction with horses and with her Irish lover, Conor, help her to develop personal, psychic and physical strength. When she achieves a stable sense of self, she implicitly or explicitly begins to critique what she has come to understand as outmoded role models. The result is a novel of two hundred plus pages that I still hope offers a good narrative ride while being aesthetically pleasurable. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? In general, my central character’s monologues are the most poetic, given that is where I hoped to achieve maximum emotional intensity. But as well I find that poetry works to manifest Diana’s growing understanding of another, nonverbal species. Conor is already comfortable in his own body and that enables him to enjoy an intense tactile and gestural connection with his horses. As the animals he lives and works with, he exists ‘in the moment’ and this ability to be in the present encourages Diana out of the confines of her mind. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I believe that figurative language in both poetry and prose can capture the texture of an individual’s life and their environment. Landscape is significant in my verse novel and the metaphors and similes I deploy are designed to render its impact on someone who has grown up in the 111

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city. Diana’s romantic partner, Conor, has vivid sensual memories of the Irish landscape he has left behind and has developed new bonds with his adopted Australian home. He communicates the pleasure he takes from his surroundings to her and that literally and metaphorically expands her horizons. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I have elsewhere postulated that the contemporary verse novel is what could be called ‘an interstitial genre’31 and that prose and poetry at once ‘speak to and critique each other’,32 operating in a liminal space that does not conceal a work’s dual nature, but rather celebrates it. Genre slippage is meant to be productive. This is especially true of a verse novel that attempts to be a crossover work like Vanishing Point, addressing adult and young adult readers. Some of the experimentation I had attempted and the possibilities I sensed in the verse novel also fit into the practice of other contemporary women writers. In another essay33 I compare Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe. Lynn Keller’s study of long poems by women34 provided me with an insightful taxonomy of a variety of forms that fit her definition of narrative works in verse that attempt to push the boundaries of genre. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Aside from the classical epics, medieval romances and pre-twentieth century verse novels that I have read, only a few contemporary or twentiethcentury verse novels have influenced me. I can imagine re-reading works such as Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers and Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, among others, because the language alone offers rewards, let alone the innovative plots. As any writer, every book I’ve ever read simmers below in my subconscious, but no one work has influenced me. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? It would be fair to say that many young adult verse novels I’ve read made me realise that I did not want to emulate them. In some instances 112

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they became a ‘how not to do it’ text. I do not respond to those that only imitate the rhythms of ordinary speech, eschew figurative or nuanced language for the most part and construct narratives that reflect the visual and print habits of computer-literature generations. I might read them quickly, admiring the pacing, and appreciate the punchy storylines and occasional turns of phrase, but they do not offer much that would make me want to return to them. Their language can date, just as it does in prose works. Some writers and critics have argued that the young adult verse novel is in fact its own subgenre, distinguishing it from adult works. I believe that patronises young readers, assuming that they cannot appreciate textured or nuanced diction. I say all this knowing that I’m not the target audience. The oft-misused term ‘literary’ to designate both adult and young adult fiction implies that any text that employs figurative language, complex grammatical sentences more than twenty words long (the standard length of newspaper sentences) or demanding concepts that stretch the imagination will not appeal to the majority of readers. If they are not offered anything but popular fiction or poetry, that is what they will probably choose to read. Individuals who decide to study creative writing at university offer instructive cases. Many discover that being exposed to literature from other periods and cultures, although initially testing, widens their verbal and structural toolkits. Being introduced to the concept of ‘writing back’ often becomes a creative spur. They can adapt if not imitate what predecessors have achieved. This truth holds in particular for postgraduate students. In Vanishing Point I aimed to create a work that had the narrative pull of fiction coupled with the emotional impact and aesthetic pleasure of nuanced poetry. I chose a hybrid or interstitial form such as the verse novel so that poetic values would not be compromised in favour of story drive or thematic integrity. Both genres should speak to each other. The challenge, of course, was getting the balance right.

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Bel Schenk

‘… the verse novel fits well into this new world …’ Bel Schenk is the author of three poetry collections: Urban Squeeze (Ginninderra Press, 2003), Ambulances & Dreamers (Wakefield Press, 2008) and Every Time You Close Your Eyes (Wakefield Press, 2014). She has been published widely both in Australia and overseas and has taught writing in schools, for local councils, and at writers’ organisations such as Express Media where she was previously the Artistic Director.

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Every Time You Close Your Eyes (2014) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I completed a PhD in Creative Writing in 2012 and Every Time You Close Your Eyes was my project (with an accompanying exegesis). I studied at that level mainly because I wanted a really consistent and one-on-one mentoring experience. The community I was engaged in, mainly writers of prose fiction, gave me a different perspective of my work which I found to be invaluable. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I was very shy of the term when I began writing it, so the poems were in the form of an ‘interlinked narrative’ – meaning that I would write individual poems with the same setting, namely New York City during the blackouts of 1977 and 2003. I did a lot of research. I researched the blackouts as well as New York after September 11, 2001, as the attacks on the twin towers drastically changed the way the city functioned. People were on high alert when the blackout of 2003 happened. Over time, certain recurring characters became more interesting to me and I fleshed out their stories to weave into the narrative. Pretty soon after writing these poems, I couldn’t help the fact that I’d written the first draft of a verse novel. After that I focused on the narrative structure and character motivations. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? My main issue over time was the structure, although once I decided to break the book into Part One and Part Two I had a lot more freedom to play around with different and contrasting themes. It also made the narrative feel faster and less plodding. Of course, having parts spanning two different time periods posed different problems, but they weren’t as hard to fix. Another problem I identified was trying to sustain the plot after the 115

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initial blackouts. As the main thrust of the story happens on the first page in each section, I needed the characters to have more going on than just needing to feel safe. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I think I use quite a traditional storytelling strategy – the third person omniscient narrator who knows the thoughts and feelings of the main characters. It helped shape the ideas and themes. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? The interlinked poems I have mentioned just weren’t working, so I knew that I had to weave in a narrative structure for readers to understand the background. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? My main influences were two novels by Ian McEwan that begin with a tragedy of sorts – Saturday and Enduring Love. How the characters come to terms with a change in both their own lives and the world around them was of enormous interest. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I think it has potential to be a game changer – people are changing their reading habits and I think the verse novel fits well into this new world of multi-tasking and short stints of reading. I’m not suggesting they are easy to read – far from it – but that people don’t seem to have the time to spend hours reading. Therefore, being able to read one or two poems in one sitting and then come back another time is filling a need. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? The Bridge by Hart Crane was the biggest influence on me – though it’s technically classified as a ‘long poem’. It’s inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge and uses New York’s urban landscape throughout. I have to admit that I hadn’t read it when I began writing mine – my supervisor, the poet Jill Jones, put me onto it. I had a heartbreaking moment where I thought ‘oh, it’s been done before’ – but they are very different books. I started 116

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reading poetry for fun in the ’90s when Dorothy Porter was on my radar. I’m an admirer of Tim Sinclair and am always impressed by his ability to work his characters into stories. His dialogue within the poetry is excellent. Anne Carson is another writer who has inspired me. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? You have to be interested in your characters and you have to know them well. That’s the main difference I found between writing a verse novel as opposed to an individual poem. You’ve got room to explore and you’ve got so much time to get sick of them! I began another verse novel last year and would like to continue with it, although I’ve currently put it on hold in favour of individual poems.

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Geoff Page

‘I think verse novels are a difficult form but very satisfying for readers if well handled by the author.’ Australian Geoff Page grew up on the Clarence River in New South Wales and is based in Canberra. He has published twenty-three collections of poetry as well as two novels, five verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and verse biographies: Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry, 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013),

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A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (extempore, 2012), Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press, 2014), Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry, 2015), Plevna: A Verse Biography of Sir Charles Ryan (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016), Hard Horizons (Pitt Street Poetry, 2017), The Secret (William Heinemann Australia, 1996), The Great Forgetting (with Bevan Hayward Pooaraar) (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997), Bernie McGann: A Life in Jazz (Kardoorair Press, 1997), The Scarring (Hale & Iremonger, 1999), Collateral Damage (Indigo, 1999), Darker and Lighter (Five Islands Press, 2001), My Mother’s God (Picaro Press, 2002), Drumming on Water (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2003), Cartes postales (Picaro Press, 2004), Freehold (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005), Agnostic Skies (Five Islands Press, 2006), Europe 101 (Picaro Press, 2006), Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza: A Movie in Verse (Pandanus Books, 2007), Seriatim (Salt, 2007), Bahn Dance (Picaro Press, 2007), Long White Cloud & Indian Pixels (Picaro Press, 2008), Coffee with Miles CD (River Road Press, 2009), A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (Extempore, 2011), Coda for Shirley (Interactive Press, 2011), Cloudy Nouns (Picaro Press, 2012), Shifting Windows: Travel Poems 1986–2010 (Picaro Press, 2012), 1953 (University of Queensland Press, 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013), and Cara Carissima (Picaro Press, 2015). Page’s latest title is Elegy for Emily: A Verse Biography of Emily Remler 1957–1990 (Puncher & Wattman, 2019). Page’s criticism and anthologies include: Day by Day: Selected Poems of Salvatore Quasimodo translated with R.F. Brissenden and Loredana NardiFord (Indigo, 2002), A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry (UQP, 1995), Eighty Great Poems from Chaucer till Now (UNSW Press, 2006), Sixty Classic Australian Poems (UNSW Press, 2009), and as editor, The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets (Indigo, 2003), winner of the 2004 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards for poetry, Best Australian Poems 2014 (Black Inc, 2014), and Best Australian Poems 2015 (Black Inc, 2015). Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, Hindi, German, Serbian, Slovenian, Greek, Catalan and Spanish. Page has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and 119

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the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. His book, 1953, was shortlisted in the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. He was also the winner of the ACU Poetry Prize in 2017. Page runs the series Poetry at the House and Jazz at The Gods (now Jazz in Concert at the Village) on the Australian National University campus.

The trilogy Lawrie & Shirley: A Movie in Verse (2006) Coda for Shirley (2011) Cara Carissima (2015) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? The trilogy, Lawrie & Shirley: A Movie in Verse (2006), Coda for Shirley (2011) and Cara Carissima (2015), developed from my interest in romantic comedy films and social satire more generally. I originally aimed at a Rom/ Com for and about the elderly but the two selfish middle-aged daughters, Sarah and Jane, took over the plot – of the whole trilogy eventually. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I wrote Lawrie & Shirley as a stand alone verse novel in the form of a screen play (rhyming tetrameter quatrains abcb). It was also produced as a stage play (a one-woman show with Canberra actor, Chrissie Shaw). I wrote the first draft of Coda for Shirley in Ireland in 2010 over six weeks while on a grant at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan. It’s a verse novel but I also drafted a play version of it (produced in Canberra, 2018). Cara Carissima was written directly as a verse play in 2014 (partly at the suggestion of Caroline Stacey of the Street Theatre in Canberra) and produced in Canberra in 2015 in the Courtyard Theatre. It’s the intermediate instalment in the Lawrie & Shirley saga. Coda for Shirley is its chronological conclusion.

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Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? In my ‘serious’, historically-based verse novels I have used a relatively loose iambic tetrameter and trimeter, more or less in random order and almost entirely without rhyme. To my ear this gives a background or ‘shadow’ feeling of the ballad stanza without being tied to it. I found it important to keep to these line lengths and not include others e.g. dimeters or pentameters (though there are a few of the latter in my first verse novel, The Scarring. With the Lawrie & Shirley trilogy, I quickly settled on the strict iambic tetrameter form and maintained it throughout. Iambic tetrameter for comedy goes back at least to Jonathan Swift and I find it very congenial for both comedy and satire. I also used full rhyme throughout since halfrhyme tends to disconcert the reader or audience member unless it’s very close to a full rhyme. The story, told over the three books, slowly evolved. It spans three generations; starting as a Rom/Com for the elderly (the protagonists, Lawrie and Shirley are 82 and 70 respectively) and quickly becomes a satire on the aspirational middle class in Canberra (and, I hope, elsewhere). The ‘story’ of the three works tended to ‘write itself’ as Shirley’s two daughters, Sarah and Jane, try to destroy their mother’s late-life romance and suffer the appropriate consequences. Sarah’s husband, Barry, is later dumped by her but quickly and irritatingly takes up with his Executive Assistant, the somewhat younger, Cara. Coda for Shirley traces Shirley’s decision to leave her inheritance (which includes most of Lawrie’s money) to her grandsons, Giles and Jack (who had been sympathetic to Lawrie, unlike their mother and aunt). Shirley rightly considers her two daughters as well enough set up already. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I found the rhymed iambic tetrameter quatrains moved the story along quickly, tended not to be too dense in texture, and offered considerable comic potential. Maintaining the full rhyme (abab) in dialogue is an 121

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interesting challenge. It’s hard but not impossible to make dialogue sound ‘realistic’ when using rhyme. The demand for rhyme can also take you to some interesting comic places which you might not find otherwise. It can be hard on the actors though. The final instalment, Coda for Shirley, has three long scenes only which, again, is a challenge for actors. Perhaps the long scenes also contribute to the ‘delay of reader satisfaction’, so important to many narrative works across the genres. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? With verse novels I always try to balance metaphoric density against the openness needed for narrative momentum. Too much of the former can slow the story down; not enough suggests the work may as well have been in prose, a defect of some Young Adult verse novels I have read. In all three verse novels (plays) I divided the narrative into separate, linear scenes and avoided ‘voice over’ narration, as it were – using the ‘show’ not ‘tell’ maxim. Sometimes the characters themselves describe extended ‘off-stage’ actions that take place over weeks or months. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted readers and/or audience members to have a feeling of effortless satiric comedy where they would more or less forget the form and enjoy the story, its ironies and wisecracks along the way. And perhaps a sense of playing with the traditional expectations of the genre. Of course, the rhyme scheme helps a great deal in this. As stated earlier, full rhymes tend to be more effective in comedy than half or slant rhymes. The latter work well in lyric poetry, especially if they are maintained conscientiously throughout, but much less well in comic poetry where the reader/listener my be distracted by apparent inconsistencies. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I think verse novels are a difficult form but very satisfying for readers if well handled by the author. Readers of the Lawrie & Shirley saga have told me they enjoy its ‘speed’ and the fact that they are given characterisation, 122

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dialogue, setting and narrative momentum just as they would be in a prose novel but much more economically in terms of length and rate of ‘consumption’. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I suppose Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (the Penguin translation) and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate were a significant influence. I like the way both authors are sentimentally attached to their characters – and can forgive them almost everything. There’s probably a cute and inherent humour in this situation. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I am familiar with other verse novels in the Australian tradition, for example, Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral and Fredy Neptune and those of Alan Wearne and others, though not so much with those written for the Young Adult audience. My other more ‘serious’ verse novels include The Scarring, Drumming on Water, Freehold and 1953 (the latter of which some have considered, wrongly, as a verse novel). I’ve also written two verse biographies, Plevna, and Elegy for Emily. It’s almost as if I want to prove that there’s no genre that can’t also be done in verse – though I suspect (in fact I’m sure) that philosophy will not be amenable. Overall, the main thing I’ve learned is the important lesson of how much metaphoric and/or linguistic density to employ. The balance has to be ‘just right’. If not, you have a disaster on your hands.

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John Newton

‘I was trying to write a kind of rococo tragedy.’ John Newton’s verse novel Escape Path Lighting, a satirical account of a creative writing school set on an imaginary Pacific island, was published by Victoria University Press in 2020. Newton has published three other volumes of poetry: Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado (Untold, 1985), Lives of the Poets (Victoria University Press, 2010) and Family Songbook (Victoria University Press, 2013). His work has been included in numerous anthologies of New Zealand poetry over the last thirty-five years. He has also published two books of literary and cultural history, The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngãti 124

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Hau and the Jerusalem Commune (Victoria University Press, 2009) and Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature 1908–1945 (Victoria University Press, 2017); and a work of art criticism, Llew Summers: Body and Soul (Canterbury University Press, 2020). In 2020 he was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago; he has also held the JD Stout Research Fellowship (Victoria University of Wellington, 2010) and the Ursula Bethell Fellowship (University of Canterbury, 2017), and been Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato (2015). He has an MA from the University of Canterbury and a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Escape Path Lighting (2020) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Writing a verse novel had been on the ‘to do’ list for many years, probably since the early 1990s when I was a graduate student in Melbourne. In that sense it was a formal problem waiting for a suitable occasion to drive it. What eventually got me started was the combination of a locality and a grievance. I was living at the time on Waiheke Island, in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, and I could see that it had the makings of a good comic setting. At the same I wanted to say my piece about the teaching of creative writing and its effect, as I perceived it, on the critical conversation about poetry. Escape Path Lighting began with the decision to set a fictional creative writing school on a version of Waiheke, with the island reimagined as a generic South Sea paradise. The project became a more-or-less genial polemic against the technocratic, anti-Romantic attitudes that ‘creative writing’ discourse encourages. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I always wanted the book to be as ‘novel-like’ as possible: not just a sequence of connected poems, but plot-driven, with a large cast of

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characters. The characters and story suggested themselves readily, and I had most of the cast and a largely complete storyline from quite near the beginning. The plotting of the story, though, is governed by something a bit like stanza form. The three books or sections (which I thought of as three ‘acts’) are each divided into six chapters. Each book ends with a party scene that brings the whole cast on stage. I wanted this contrivance to be up-front and visible, and for the story to unfold as dictated by this formal structure. I spent a long time, then, mapping the events of the story on to the formal template – allowing the form to draw out the details of the plot and character development. The structure meant that the chapters didn’t have to be written consecutively; because I could see it whole I could pick it up more-or-less anywhere. Obviously there were surprises along the way, and a couple of characters developed in ways I hadn’t anticipated. But there weren’t any major deviations from the original outline. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Of course in one sense writing is never anything but problem solving and decision making. However, the big decisions were mostly made before the writing began. There were plot details that had to be finessed; and some issues with the handling and laying out of dialogue, and with how much metrical deviation to allow in the process. But the major calls about the mapping of the plot onto the formal structure, and about voice and point of view, were arrived at early and didn’t change. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? The story is told in the third person, though usually focalised through one or other of the main characters. The narrative voice is omniscient, intrusive, pleased with itself and its language choices. I wanted a stagey atmosphere rather than a realistic one. The guiding principle was verbal extravagance, and this seemed to call for a foregrounded narrator who could act as a vehicle for it. One of the two main storylines tracks a character in psychotherapy; there’s an aspect, then, of psychological realism. But even 126

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here the narrator is always intruding. The psychoanalytic dimension of the story is, in one sense, just another register for the narrative voice to play with. The metre is a very loose – perhaps ‘vestigial’ – blank verse. The line defaults to ten syllables but contracts and expands as necessary. I was looking for a minimal, and flexible, regulating device. A residual iambic beat becomes more obvious in some of the explicitly comic scenes, and recedes in the more naturalistic passages, particularly the chapters (therapy sessions, a character sharing in a twelve-step meeting) that are narrated in direct speech. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? The novel is consciously plot-heavy: quite a lot happens, there’s a big cast of characters and lots of threads to follow. So storytelling is always in the foreground and narrative strategies never recede for long. In writing it, however, I was conscious of the need to regulate the pace: slowing down the narrative allows the language to pool and generate the kind of comic excess that was crucial to my conception of it. This is most obvious in a series of set pieces – party scenes, a teaching scene, an extravagant sex scene and so on – where the fun is in trying to manage these novelistic occasions in verse, and seeing what kind of surplus can be generated in the process. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? The key note of the novel is a kind of exhibitionistic verbal comedy. To some extent the narrative thread of the book is really a structure to throw language at. In places that language is more lyrical – landscapes, seascapes, passages of interior reflection – but mostly it aims at a not-especially-‘fine’ excess. The reader is always being invited to applaud a performance. At the same time, however, I wanted to replicate the sensation that I have enjoyed as a reader of verse novels, arriving at the text conscious of its staginess and generic strangeness – expecting a difficult journey – and then finding, to one’s surprise, that it’s absorbing, immersive: in fact you’ve forgotten that you’re reading poetry! 127

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If Escape Path Lighting worked as intended, the reader would find themselves vacillating between these two experiences. In the back of my mind I have always had the model of Mozart’s comedies. (An aspiration, I hasten to add, not a comparison!) What I enjoy most about Cosi Fan Tutte and The Marriage of Figaro is the way that their comic formalism is able to contain, and hold together in the same theatrical space, absurdity, irony, farce and the most grievous lyricism. That’s the effect I wanted to generate. I was trying to write a kind of rococo tragedy. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I don’t have a wide-angle answer to this question. I can only describe why the form appeals to me, and how I’ve tried to use the things I like about it in this particular project. In a word, it’s the artificiality of the verse novel that appeals. The moment you resort to verse, any story you’re telling is explicitly denaturalised. To put it over-simply, life doesn’t rhyme. ‘Real’ life reaches all the way to the right-hand margin. To narrate a story in verse is to commit, up front, to a certain base-line of absurdity. And yet, as I mentioned a moment ago, I’m continually surprised at how immersive the experience of reading verse fiction can be. Again, there’s the operatic sensation: the sense of being surprised by an emotional range that seems to be at odds with the formalistic setting. On its own modest scale, the narrative I was trying to patch together in Escape Path Lighting demands the same agility, the same flexibility of mood as the Mozart comedies. Aspects of the story are more-or-less realistic; others are palpably absurd. The challenge is somehow to hold them together. There are novelists in prose who have the chutzpah to manage this (Pynchon, for example, whose mark on this book is evident). But it strikes me, in prose, as formidably difficult. In verse, on the other hand, the explicit element of formal contrivance implies a kind of global comic dispensation, within which everything that happens is absurd, but where some events – less absurd than others – can resonate in other emotional registers. 128

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A briefer, pithier way to put the case would be to argue that the verse novel form is perverse. It knows that it’s foolish, eccentric, contrived – but this is a knowledge that it disavows. In other words, having admitted its own absurdity, it still wants to play on the reader’s feelings and on their credulity. In another sense, though, I know I’m probably asking too much of the verse novel form – or, rather, approaching narrative verse in a way that asks too much of the reader. Narrative implies forward propulsion: the more successful it is the more quickly we turn the pages. But, perversely, I also want the text to be read slowly – to be read as a poem, not just a story. There’s a contradiction, perhaps, between a modernist and postmodernist demand. If the novel worked, the reader would have the experience of wanting to read both quickly and slowly: of being carried forward by the narrative, and detained (distracted, impeded, slowed down) by various forms of intricacy and difficulty. But can anyone read both ways at the same time? This leaves only that ‘ideal’ reader (figment of the modernist imagination?) who would follow up a fast reading with a contemplative, analytical one. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? The time I spent in Melbourne coincided with a boom in Australian verse fiction. I remember reading Dorothy Porter, Philip Hodgins, Les Murray, Alan Wearne, and the redoubtable comic team of Ken Bolton and John Jenkins. But the text that made the deepest impression was John Tranter’s The Floor of Heaven. Tranter was already a key poet for me, and it was my admiration for that book that seeded the idea of writing a verse novel myself. I don’t think I’ve tried to imitate any of Tranter’s effects; — parts of Escape Path Lighting have a faux-Seventies atmosphere that might suggest otherwise, but that’s a predilection that I take with me everywhere. It’s there in my enthusiasm for Alan Brunton, New Zealand poet, performer and stage writer. Nothing Brunton wrote could explicitly be called a ‘novel’, but his particular combination of narrative impulse and hyperbolic comedy has always appealed to me. 129

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While I have read a certain amount of northern hemisphere verse fiction, I have not been especially aware of its influence. However, I do draw directly on Dylan Thomas, in an opening chapter that introduces the main characters and localities with a night-time ‘fly-over’ borrowed from Under Milk Wood. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? My reading has taught me that the form has a multitude of different uses – that there are as many different kinds of verse novels as there are poets game enough to take up the challenge. As a reader, I have to admit to a suspicion of the form that has still not entirely left me; I never pick up a new example with unqualified relish. And yet by now I have been surprised, disarmed and entranced so often that I have come almost to expect it. The verse novel form is a huge mountain to climb, and if you get to the top there’s probably no one there to notice. Still, I know it can be done; reading, I catch glimpses of the experience I would like to generate. If we played the percentages we wouldn’t be poets. In the end, quixotic though the task may be, I can’t say conclusively that I won’t come back to it.

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Lisa Jacobson

‘I really like the idea that the verse novel catches out readers who would not usually even venture near poetry and who find themselves deep in the story, reading poetry despite themselves.’ Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer whose works have been published in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, the US and the UK. Jacobson studied literature at The University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, and has a PhD in Creative Writing. Her verse novel, The Sunlit Zone (Five

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Islands Press, 2012) won the 2014 Adelaide Festival John Bray Award. It was also shortlisted in the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the 2013 Stella Prize, the 2012 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (as a manuscript). Individual poems have also won or been shortlisted for major awards: the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Fish International Poetry Prize (UK). Her earlier (debut) collection of poetry, Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press, 2005) was short-listed for the National Book Council Awards. Jacobson has also won the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Award, second prize in The Age Short Story Award (Melbourne), and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Her work has been broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Poetica and Books & Arts Daily. She received an Australia Council Grant to complete her latest book of poetry, South in the World (UWA, 2014).

The Sunlit Zone (2012) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I had recently returned from a scuba diving trip to The Red Sea on the edge of the Sinai Desert, a small strip of land that joins Israel to Egypt, a magical place where you can swim directly from the shore to hover above coral reefs lying just beneath the surface of the shallows, or just stand in the water and gaze at the mountains shimmering red in the sea mist. In The Sunlit Zone, I wanted to capture something of this place and also draw on it as a metaphor for something deeper. Whilst diving I learnt that the ocean has three layers – the sunlit zone, the twilight zone and the midnight zone. In the sunlit zone, life thrives because it is close to the surface of the ocean and the sun. Coral and sea plants are plentiful, as is the marine life. In the twilight zone, the light drops out, the color spectrum is reduced to blues, and there are fewer fish. In the midnight zone, there is total darkness, and life is scarce. This is where giant sea worms and lantern fish with huge jaws

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and lanterns attached to their heads lurk. Metaphorically, this transfixed me and captured my imagination. The novel is called The Sunlit Zone because in the shallows, life is rich, whereas in the midnight zone, life is scarce. But it is only by descending into the deep that we return to the shallows and appreciate the life seeming there, and are richer for the experience. I guess I believe in the ‘suffering transforms us’ model of life. Life can be hell on earth, but by walking through hell (as Dante did in The Inferno) we can discover a pathway to peace. I think our time on earth teaches us this. This is the journey of The Sunlit Zone. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? The way you approach a very messy ball of wool that the cat has tangled up; you have no idea where to find the end. I wish I could be one of those writers who began at the beginning and ended at the end, but I’m not. My novel was like a large unwieldy piece of knitting with lots of holes in it, which I steadfastly filled. Eventually there was more knitting than holes, and I knew I was nearing the end when there were just a few dropped stitches to retrieve. I did lots of visual mapping and timelines, spread out the sections on the floor of my living room and paced around them, rearranging things. I’m not sure if any of it helped. In the end it was sheer persistance, and trust that the story knew how to tell itself if I just kept listening to it. And eventually, a garment worthy of wearing was completed. Of course it is never the garment you at first envisaged in your head – but it is a serviceable piece nonetheless. And in the end, I think you just say, enough! Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? One major challenge was not being able to spend as much time crafting the poetry as I would for, say, a one page poem – if I had done that I would have been ninety years old and still completing the work because it’s just not possible to give a book length work the kind of microscopic focus that a shorter poem allows. That said, once I had the narrative down, I did comb over the work again and again to test it for rhythms, refine the imagery, 133

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and so on. In the end it felt a bit like combing for head lice in my daughter’s hair (she was about seven at the time I was writing the book). You can catch most of the lice but there will always be the ones that get away. Another decision I made fairly early on was that this would be a speculative work, not a work of science fiction. This gave me certain creative freedoms when imagining Melbourne in the future, and the kinds of genetic/technological developments that might take place. For instance, I have been told it would not be scientifically possible to cross-breed a domestic cat with a lion, but then again, the idea of flight, or the internet were once mere fancies. I have often been fascinated by scientists who say a new planet has been found, but the evidence is conclusive that no life exists there because the planet lacks the conditions for life to exist – air, water and so forth. But who is to say a different kind of life form can exist that does not require these conditions? This leads me, indirectly, to a third problem solving decision I had to make with regard to characterisaton and what I had to ask existentially of the two main characters in the novel: what kind of creatures are we and what do we need to survive? This is different for everyone, and it is what makes the novel such an important art form – because no matter what genre it falls into, novels mirror, in essence, the complexity of human existence. In The Sunlit Zone, North, for instance, is a land creature whereas her twin sister, Finn, is a water creature. Jack the boat builder is probably both, in that he could venture out into the sea in his boat, but was uncomfortable when North gave him the immersive experience of scuba diving. North, conversely, also had some of the sea in her, and would spend long hours underwater as part of her research work. Finn however grew pale and sick if not near or in water; it called to her, it tugged her. The Sunlit Zone is top-heavy with imagery because that is how I write, but at some point I had to make some strategic decisions about which imagery I wanted to be recurring. The pier, for instance, was a deliberate recurring image, being symbolic of that liminal space between water and land, and I guess boats falls into that category also. But sometimes, the work felt too watery and ocean-based, so I would throw in a different kind of image at odds with the 134

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thematic preoccupations – the horse was one such image. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? After looking at many verse novels, including those which had been written in a more formal metre, I decided to go with free, blank verse. Vikram Seth’s classic verse novel, The Golden Gate, was written entirely in sonnets, and while this was admirable and rigorous, I wanted a looser feel to the work. One of the key aspects of all art is, I think, knowing the rules so you can break them. I knew how to write sonnets and could well have written my book in this form or similar. However, while I liked the idea of echoing the great epic narratives of the past such as Beowulf and Paradise Lost, with their sweeping themes and rhythmic rigour, I also wanted to layer the work with a contemporary touch by loosening the traditional form to make it more in sync with poetry as it is written today. I also wanted the novel to be a page turner, and had admired Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask for this quality. Crime fiction does this well. Driving the narrative forward so there was always something happening, or about to happen, was also intentional. If I was going to ask people to read an entire novel in verse, the least I could do was to keep them awake, curious and keen. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? This is a good and relevant question because this is precisely where the tension lies when writing a verse novel. Do you let the narrative gallop forward or slow down, rein in the story and focus on the poetry? I think the answer is all of the above. I felt more focus was given to the poetry when the narrative was sitting, as it were, at the heart of the story, giving pause to feel whatever it was that was happening for a particular character at that time. For the protagonist, North, this was usually unresolved personal grief from the past, as well as a more general, existential grief that spoke to environmental issues such as climate change and dehumanisation. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? What I really wanted was to replicate the ebb and flow of the ocean, to give the sense of each poem washing in or washing out like the tides, 135

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sometimes crashing upon the shore of the page in long, loose waves, at other times just rippling in and out again. In this way, the shape and feel of each poem prompted that of the next one. It was a very intuitive process, focusing very much on sound despite the blank verse, but with contrasts in the emotional tone of the poems, so that sometimes an intensely sad poem was deliberately followed by a comic one. As much work can go into shaping free blank verse as metrical verse. I could not tell you the metrical rhythms of the verse I was using, only that for months afterwards, and sometimes even now, I find myself writing emails in the same rhythm. It was hard to break out of this rhythm when writing new poetry after I had completed The Sunlit Zone. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I really like the idea that the verse novel catches out readers who would not usually even venture near poetry and who find themselves deep in the story, reading poetry despite themselves. I think this is particularly important for young adult readers, who may be reluctant to read poetry, and there are now so, so many quality verse novels written for this readership that it has become a genre in itself. I regard The Sunlit Zone as a crossover novel, in that it can be read by both adult and young adult readers. I also think that once readers step over the threshold of the form, and enter into its world, the verse novel speaks to that primal part of ourselves that just loves a good story with a beginning, middle and end. This does not mean that the form has to be traditional – there are many subversive verse novels out there such as Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, that have loosened up what it means to have a beginning, middle and end. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Several verse novels have influenced The Sunlit Zone, in particular Philip Hodgins’s Dispossesed, and Catherine Bateson’s and Margaret Wild’s young adult verse novels. Philip Hodgins was such a skilled craftsmen, and knew how to place his work locally without it ever being stereotypically Australian. Bateson and Wild know how to tell good stories in free verse with warmth and style. Others, which I won’t name, have given me pause 136

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to write a mental note to self: that is not how I want to write my verse novel. I’m not keen on cleverness for its own sake, or book-length narratives that are so fractured that I have no idea what the hell is going on. I think we need to honour the reader by allowing them the space to do their own imagining without requiring them to do double back flips in order to get through the work. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? That while the verse novel is a beast which takes very different shapes, the foundation for each is storytelling. That there are rules, but that these are there to be broken. That the form is most certainly alive, breathing and is making a significant contribution to literature in general and poetry in particular. Could a novelist who writes poetically write a verse novel as effectively as a poet? Then again, poets have written novels. So the question remains.

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Irini Savvides

‘… everyone warned me that writing a verse novel was a bad idea … They were right in some ways. I did it anyway.’ Irini Savvides’ writing career has two threads to it. The first is as a Young Adult author. Her first novel, Willow Tree and Olive, received several awards including a White Raven in Bologna in 2002. Irini was named one of the finalists in the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second novel, Sky Legs, won the 2004 Peace Award. Other titles straddling

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YA and Children’s literature she has written include the historical fiction, A Marathon of Her Own, the novel, Aliki Says, and her only verse novel to date, Against the Tide. Her picture book, Hide and Seek, was translated into Japanese and sent to child survivors of the tsunami. Savvides has been a judge for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (2014–16) in the Young Adult and Children’s sections. In this last decade the other skein of Savvides’ writing has been centred around creative writing and the island of Cyprus. Savvides was awarded a PhD in 2013 with the Writing and Society Group at the University of Western Sydney. The PhD was a hybrid thesis entitled Harvesting Sophia – Re-Imagining the Cyprus Problem. It entailed an exegetical work on six contemporary female Cypriot Poets and a novel that spanned three decades: Images of the Missing. Savvides has since written a Young Adult novel called Being Ap, and a memoir, Lines in Time, about her Cypriot writing experiences. Most of Savvides’ post-PhD writing has been published in scholarly journals including: Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches; Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus; and Kunapipi, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture. On the craft of creative writing, Savvides has published in ALEA Journal of Literacy Learning for the Middle Years. She has several forthcoming essays and conference papers: ‘A Metaphysical Meeting Place’: Essay on Gail Jones’ in Sixty Lights, Reading Like an Australian Writer (Ed.) Dr Belinda Castles (University of New South Wales Press Ltd); ‘The Paramithou, the poet and Pherepapha: A response to the poetry of Professor Stephanos Stephanides’, and ‘How to Chant for a Thin Place’ in Borders and Bridges in World Literature and Art (University of Cyprus).

Against the Tide (2008) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Metaphorically, the figure of Penelope – and the story shroud that she weaves by day and unweaves by night – has fascinated me for decades

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now. Her metis (cunning) has captivated me. Others judge her as a woman waiting for her hero, husband Odysseus. I find her a figure who loves enough to stitch hope into her story shroud. Ostensibly a death cloak for her father in law; the fabric she weaves buys her time. It is the only story told three times in The Odyssey. The loom Penelope weaves on needs to be constructed; it is so large it takes up an entire room; the frame, I imagine, is a dark heavy olive wood. The wool, the colours, and the silk woven … a craft my grandmother used to earn her keep. The crunch and stench of silkworms, the love of the woofa and its click clack click clack rhythm. The sounds of Byzantine chanting, the call and response across the church, the repetition of threes, signifying the Trinity. Structurally I like unpicking patterns in texts, structures … I love that The Odyssey has twenty-four sections and there are twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet … once when I was writing my PhD and avoiding my work I spent a week unpicking Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping, stitch by stitch to chart all the skeins … it delighted me … I didn’t do anything with my diagrams and notes … I simply wanted to see the seams. In regards to poetry, I heard Dorothy Porter talk at Varuna, and heard PiO and Steven Herrick read at pubs. Contextually the Cronulla Riots were fresh in my mind and still turned my stomach … it had been only five years since the borders in Cyprus opened. Plot-wise … I met a colleague who swam ocean races. I kept hearing phrases that echoed in my mind. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? For me, I do not really think the writing occurred in stages. It was more an immersion for me – getting into the water and swimming until my vision cleared. With this text, everyone warned me that writing a verse novel was a bad idea; it would be both my six headed Scylla and my Charybdis in one. They were right in some ways. I did it anyway. Looking back at the text now, it is uneven and some of the voices are more successful than others. The best poems I think came from listening and observing. I drove all over New South Wales to watch Ocean Races (and one in Victoria too) and I listened to the sounds of the ocean swimmers’ language. I watched 140

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moments and jotted them down in moleskin journals. I sat on the sand with my nieces who were not allowed to swim deep in the ocean, as I could not save them. I read interviews of transcripts of people who had been attacked in the riots. Visited Cronulla. I am fascinated with ekphrasis, so I seek out hidden stories from images. I wrote out the imagined stories behind the pictures of the Cronulla riots … put my character on the train to listen for the collision of cultures … I learnt that like all things, verse novels hinge on longing, and the impossibility of reaching that desire. I learnt to listen well … to the phrases people used to claim space as theirs. I traced the phrases the media had used in Australia in 2005. I was struck by the phrases used regarding Cyprus and its division (at that stage 34 years earlier) and fighting over surf and sand at Cronulla … the echoes surprised me. I listened to how others had written novels in verse … I read different translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad … lots of Dorothy Porter, Steven Herrick, Catherine Bateson and Sharon Creech. I too loved that dog. It was a web. I collected the threads for a year and wrote over a summer. I learnt about cadences. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Voice, it is all about voice … and as I said above, I look back now and find the text uneven and somewhat naïve … I guess the first time you try a skill it is very raw … I needed to get the phrases of the ocean swimmers and so I interviewed my friend and then I simply sat and recorded things I heard at the beach. I once had two high school friends who had rhyming contests that went on for days until we forbade them – because of course the rhymes get more and more forced and you lose the meaning, which is the whole point of the process. I played with this idea and one of my characters, Chrissie, spoke in bad rhymes; I like her best still. When Chrissie’s ‘friends’ banned her from rhymes … how was I to find her voice? I made her rewrite even worse pop songs (as my two friends did decades ago) and then realised that rhyme might be the lesser of two evils. I actually really dislike rhyme in most poems so it was amusing playing with it. Some say it is assemblage … I say it is weaving thread. 141

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One great godsend I received when I was writing was a Varuna National Writers’ House mentorship run by the beautiful Deb Westbury. In one way it was terrifying – the others in the group were actual poets. Then there was me – a Young Adult writer who just wanted to learn how to? The greatest gift they gave me was to make me read my writing aloud … you cannot fool your voice … when it works, it is clear. I read a lot of Deb’s poetry. She could ‘see’ in a way others did not. I think poets do … and I am not one, not even close, but I enjoy playing with form and doing what I shouldn’t on the page. Once I asked a Professor could I write my assignment as a play … she said yes! Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ and why? Looking back in time this is hard to answer. I wind a skein of wiles. When I write I keep copious notes in numbered moleskin journals. Once the text is out, I shred them. I know others like to keep records of their writing process. It feels to me like having a corpse in the shed. So this answer comes from a recent reading of Against the Tide … amidst much wincing and a few laughs. A chorus … polyphony … metaphors … the feminist bi-communal Greek-Turkish group Hands Across the Divide …35 unbeknownst to me, at that stage I was starting to gather the concepts for my next project, my PhD research, and these groups were important in Cypriot history. I wondered how a book could straddle the divide of poetry and prose – maybe awkwardly to be honest – but it did lead me to complete a hybrid degree on Cypriot poets across the divide, and a novel, Images of the Missing. So much does depend on the red wheelbarrow … ‘round balls of a Mediterranean mother’s love’36 … I tried for a mood that mirrored the tide … the motif of home … nostos … it is impossible to answer this question simply, twelve years after the event, as it is tinged with hindsight. I know I tried using parallels between the two worlds … the language that teenagers use and which I have been hearing in the classroom for thirty years. Yet it still (and maybe we should be glad about this) escaped me … metaphors that may have felt inventive then, feel trite now. It is raining as I write this … so much depends on this. Last week the Turkish Prime Minister 142

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went into Varosha, the ghost town in Cyprus – for a picnic contravening international law … it rained that day … I was so glad. Ghosts watched and waited for a time when men in armour could shake hands … ah the repetition in his-story … red and white flags … red wheelbarrows … white chickens … so much depends on the rain. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise poetic strategies over narrative strategies, or vice versa what guided these decisions? To be candid, the writing is not so conscious by this stage. I just surrender to the words as they spill onto the page, and then I read them again and shift through them until I find I am captured by a sound I like, or an image that I want to play with – then I try again to refine and pare it back. I do remember seeing Andre on the beach – a young Sudanese refugee who was in the Nippers group that I watched training one morning – he was so exuberant he had to play on both teams as he could not stand still and wait for his next turn … trying to capture his effervescence on the page … how impossible. But at the same time … so much depended on it … catching phrases that were poetic and narrative strategies within themselves … insular peninsular … and Waltzing Matilda sung like a weapon,37 Gary’s Original Greek Yum-Cha,38 ‘steaming hot / racist rhetoric / turned my stomach’ …39 What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Giving words to worlds I did not know … I try to listen to its sounds so unfamiliar to my ears 40 it’s just me and the blue. / One stroke after another .41 waves of syllables …

Ef terpi Kyr-i-ago …42

refrain … Effi’s voice is all irony, yiayia yoyos 43… a Greek chorus … its alphabet strange, flowing together in ways that still make no sense to me 44… a kollouri 45 plot twist or two! 143

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What are your thoughts on the verse novel form? Hallelujah that Elizabeth Acevedo won the Carnegie Medal for The Poet X. Haunted by Camino nursing the woman with no voice in Clap When You Land. Happy to leave it to the experts. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Images … of ghosts, to be quite honest, stay with me. Even now when I read Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog I am humbled by the precision with which she has captured Jack’s voice and his journey with poetry and loss and longing. I laugh aloud still … and I still cry. There is a also hope and delight in Herrick’s early young adult verse novels that caught me unawares. I still read the poem where his Jack is given the key to a home that needs a new owner in The Simple Gift … ghosts of lost children … hearing their echoes under water. Lost souls. On the sea. The missing. Pets. People. Poems. Is Rime of the Ancient Mariner a verse novel? … I love that poem … telling the same story over and over … some of us carry the sea in us … we carry it in us and it carries us from week to week.46 What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? So much depends upon Herrick’s ghost in the red dress.

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Judy Johnson

‘… verse novels are still evolving …’ Judy Johnson’s Jack, a verse novel  regarding the pearling industry of Torres Strait in the 1930s, was first published by Pandanus Books (2006), with a 2nd edition published by Picador (2008). It won the prestigious CJ Dennis Award in 2007 – later the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and was on the syllabi of the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne. Johnson has also published six poetry collections and several poetry chapbooks: Wing Corrections (Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 1998), Light and Skin (Newcastle: Picaro Press, 2002),

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Nomadic (Melbourne: Black Pepper Press, 2004), Navigation (Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2007), Stone Scar Air Water (Walleah Press, 2013), and Exhibit (Macao: Flying Island Books, 2013). She is one of four editors of a landmark 25-year retrospective anthology of Australian verse, Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016). Her fiction novel, The Secret Fate of Mary Watson, was published by Harper Collins Fourth Estate (2011). Her most recent book, Dark Convicts (UWA Poetry, 2017) is a poetic exploration of her two First Fleet ancestors, who were African-American ex-slaves. Johnson has won the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, the Val Vallis Queensland Arts Award and the Regional section of the Newcastle Poetry Prize (all in 2002) as well as the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize (2001), the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (1995 and 1998), the Roland Robinson Poetry Award (2000), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (1998) and the WB Yeats Poetry Prize (1998 and 2000). Her chapbook of poetry, Wing Corrections, published by Five Islands Press (1998) came second in the Anne Elder Award and was on the Year 11 literature list in Western Australia for two years. An earlier version of Nomadic won the Wesley Michel Wright Award.

Jack (2006; 2008) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? The oceanic landscape was the first compelling idea that came to me, and that decision directed much of Jack’s architectural framework. Initially, I had been reading a book about the history of the crown of thorns starfish infestation on the Barrier Reef by Queensland academic Regina Ganter. I was fascinated, not so much in the subject of her scientific inquiry (as important as the work was) but in the interviews she undertook with pearl shell divers about their experiences collecting mother-of-pearl. I found the juxtaposition of their harsh, day-to day lives on board and the beauty of what they’d seen underwater compelling. I knew then that I wanted to write a book highlighting that environment. It seemed like fate when I questioned Dr Ganter about the content of her interviews and 146

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she was enthusiastic about someone approaching the material creatively. She generously offered me her original research transcripts and abstracts of interviews to use as I wished in my book. In terms of poetic influences, I owe much to Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the verse novels of Dorothy Porter, who was my mentor in the initial, critical stages of writing Jack. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? First came the location and time. I decided to set a verse narrative on a pearl shelling lugger in the Torres Strait in the 1930s. It was in this decade that England replaced beautiful mother-of-pearl shell buttons, with cheap plastic imitations. The shelling industry was under threat and its workers were worried about their futures. I thought that generalised low morale would add extra tension to my story. Secondly, I decided to use dramatic monologue as the narrative vehicle. I wanted my main character to have a Shakespearean fatal flaw that would drive him inevitably towards his fate. In order to keep the reader caught up in that momentum, I concluded there should be just one person telling the story. That was Captain Jack Falconer: an embittered, clever, self destructive anti-hero. By having only Jack’s point of view, the reader would have to draw their own conclusions by sifting through the layers of his unreliable narration. Once I had my character, and his presence was strong enough in my head, the plot followed fairly quickly. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Ironically the problems (or rather hiccoughs) I experienced were a result of those initial decisions I made. Setting my verse novel on a pearling lugger meant that I had to learn everything there was to know about boats, and luggers in the 1930s in particular. It was a steep learning curve. Before I began my research, I didn’t know starboard from port. The other issue I faced was that of my own gender. My main character and all the members of his crew were men. Dramatic monologue allows no narrator to stand between character and reader. And no interpretive breathing space between 147

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author and character. Several times when I showed my male partner a monologue I had written in Jack’s voice, he would pull me up and say: a man wouldn’t arrive at that conclusion in the way you’ve written. It wasn’t the conclusion he was doubtful of. But the thought processes that preceeded it occasionally didn’t tally with his experience of male mental processing. I always took his advice in those instances, figuring he was more qualified than me to know. Oddly enough, he found nothing to complain about in the abusive sexual encounter I constructed between Jack and one of his young crew members, thinking it rang true. Gender politics aside, it reinforced to me that sometimes, as human beings, we move into a mental and emotional space that seems neither male nor female, while at other times, gender differences surface. It’s common sense of course, but I hadn’t thought that deeply on the issue before. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? The use of first-person dramatic monologue was my biggest narrative decision. I also used a lot of space within lines, particularly indents, to mimic the pauses in human thought and speech, or to withhold something for a few beats for effect. Beyond that, I employed standard techniques of fiction such as foreshadowing and building of suspense. I tried to pace the sections in the book as chapters with a traditional beginning, middle and end, which cumulatively gathered force and intensity. I used imagery widely to create vivid pictures of the sometimes exquisitely beautiful, sometimes squalid surroundings, but this too proved a bit of a challenge. I had to rein in my own imagistic impulses and instead filter the impressions through Jack’s moods, perceptions, web of belief and yes, gender. This was less difficult as time went on and I knew him more intimately. Dorothy Porter likened dramatic monologue to method acting, and I came to accept the truth of it. Often I would still be in character as Jack Falconer when I took my daily walk and would attract some strange stares because I was unconsciously holding my shoulders squared and striding out as a burly, testosterone-fueled man might. In hindsight, it was a strange time to live through. In no book I’ve written since has a character I’ve 148

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created seemed so real to me. For at least a year after finishing the work, I had nightmares that Jack was out there in the world looking for me … and one day I would walk around the corner and his flesh-and-bone realness would confront me, angry with the way I had orchestrated his destiny. I knew it was nonsense, nevertheless I was a little frightened of it happening. Frightened of him. It sounds like the plot of a Stephen King novel, or else a touch of the Victor Frankenstein’s, I know. It’s a testament to how much I gave myself over to the story. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? What inevitably guided the poetic/narrative balance at any one time was whether or not I needed to get part of the story across for clarity or whether a mood, emotion, atmosphere would more usefully serve for what I wanted to say. Most of the poems in Jack are a combination of narrative and lyric, one bouncing off the other. I’ve always loved to write long narrative poems, usually concerned with some aspect of history and often dramatic monologues. My years of practice in creating narrative bridges to support lyrical passages without jarring the reader out of the experience of the poem stood me in good stead. A lot of those decisions are made in the editing process. It becomes obvious where there is too much narrative to the point that the lyricism is lost and vice versa. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? The poetic effects I was aiming for were largely atmospheric … which is why I was inspired by the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. That work is a Masterclass in using poetics to create mood. The use of personification is particularly powerful. The way Coleridge gives agency to the elements of the natural world, creating a larger than life, mystical space where anything might happen, and often does. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? The perfect verse novels to my mind are both narratively engaging and poetically interesting. But every reader is different. Some will value lucidity over poetic density or the other way around. I’d like to say verse novels are 149

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gateway drugs for non-poetry readers to hardcore collections, but I think the opposite is more likely true. Verse novels have the potential to attract a wider novel-reading audience, but there must be a willingness on the part of the poet to meet the novel lovers halfway, by providing an absorbing story and not allowing the poetry to grandstand. Verse novels in Australia until recent times have been somewhat disadvantaged when it comes to consideration for prizes. Poetry judges have been reluctant to regard them on the same par with collections, and fiction judges have been suspicious of their novelist credentials. This has changed favourably over the last couple of years and it augurs well for poets taking chances and experimenting with the form. Like prose poetry, verse novels are still evolving and I look forward to further interesting developments. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Anyone who reads Jack will notice the debt that I owe to Dorothy Porter through the style, power and sheer readability of her own verse novels. Her death was a great loss to Australian literature. What a Piece of Work was perhaps the book of Porter’s that most influenced me whilst I was writing Jack. Her unlikeable protagonist, psychiatrist Peter Cyren, reassured me that having an unpleasant main character in a story is no bar to creating fascination in the reader, if you draw that character well enough. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? When I became interested in writing a verse novel, I binge-read every example I could get my hands on: contemporary, historical, Australian and culturally diverse. I suppose I was looking for a bright star, a guiding principle that I could lean on whilst writing my own. Nothing of the sort exists of course. What I have learned is that, like poetry itself, the world of verse novels is a broad and inclusive church. Long may it remain so.

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Diane Brown

‘I think some of that reluctance to engage with verse novels is dissipated if there is an opportunity to hear it read aloud …’ Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs an online and face to face creative writing school, Creative Writing Dunedin, teaching fiction, memoir and poetry. She has published eight books: two collections of poetry – Before The Divorce We Go To Disneyland (Tandem Press, 1997) and Learning to Lie Together (Godwit, 2004); two novels, If The Tongue Fits

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(Tandem Press, 1999) and 8 Stages of Grace (Vintage, 2002), the latter a verse novel which was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards 2003; a travel memoir, Liars and Lovers (Vintage, 2004); a prose/poetic travel memoir, Here Comes Another Vital Moment (Godwit, 2006); a poetic memoir, Taking My Mother To The Opera (Otago University Press, 2015) and a poetic novella, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child (Otago University Press, 2020). Brown’s writing straddles the line between prose and poetry, and between fiction and nonfiction. She is commencing work on a poetic memoir, The Women Between the Lines, tracing the lives of her maternal ancestors. She has held the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and has had two residencies at the Michael King Writers’ Studio, in 2005 and 2019. She won the Janet Frame Memorial Award in 2012 and the Beatson Fellowship in 2013. She has been the Dunedin organiser of National Poetry Day for a number of years and is the Poetry Editor for ‘The Mix’ in the Otago Daily Times. In 2013 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to writing and education. She lives in Dunedin with her husband, author Philip Temple.

8 Stages of Grace (2002) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? At the time I started writing 8 Stages of Grace, I had only read one verse novel, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. It completely gripped and excited me. I admired its accessibility and bravado, energy and wit. I had two published books at that stage. Before the Divorce We Go to Disneyland merged poetry and prose; poetry in first person, prose in third. It won the Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Book Awards in 1997. If the Tongue Fits was a novel made up of short titled scenes and also included poetry. There is a huge push back from mainstream publishers who would rather writers stick to prose. My publisher said, ‘If only we could wean you off poetry.’ I considered that a challenge and decided to write a verse novel.

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To my knowledge at that stage no verse novels had been published in New Zealand. The Monkey’s Mask inspired me, but I didn’t think I could emulate it in any way. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I started as I always start, at the beginning with no real ideas but knowing it was time to write something substantial. I had been writing some poems about a road trip I took to promote If the Tongue Fits. I did not want Ruth the main character to be me, so I made her the widow of a high-profile media personality who has reluctantly published her private journal dealing with grief. I was able to use my original poems and then adapt them to Ruth’s circumstances. However, that wouldn’t have made a novel-length book. At the time I was working as an English as a Second Language Teacher and was living on the North Shore in Auckland which had an influx of new arrivals, mainly from Taiwan and Korea. Again, I had poems which I was keen to put to good use. I decided Ruth could teach English to her neighbour, Grace. Grace was based on a combination of a couple of students. In particular a student told me about a dream she had and called it 8 Stages of Grief. At that stage, I had had no close family or friends die, but I was interested in the subject and thought that grief could be the premise of the novel. This was the poem: ‘A baby is born, grows into an old man; you love someone he go away.’ Grace flutters her hands, bird-like. ‘But you live with someone you don’t love.’ She watches me to see if I understand. Her face is tiny; intensely beautiful in its scrutiny. I repeat the words like a mantra. ‘A child grows into an old man, a person you love leaves you, a person you don’t, 153

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lives with you. Right?’ I ask. Grace smiling inaccessibly, nods, and adds, ‘Happiness is a moment.’ I wonder if she dreamed the four other stages; if dreams are different in other languages. If metaphor is untranslatable.47 Apart from her husband, Andrew, I had to throw in some other significant deaths for Ruth – her father, a still-born daughter and later, her mother. I was in my late forties when I started writing it and would soon embark on a shift from Auckland to Dunedin. Perhaps I was having a mid-life crisis. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? I think the most difficult decision for me, apart from the story line, was to fix on some sort of form. I had written parts of the story in prose and part in poetry but then I thought it was too much like Before the Divorce We Go to Disneyland. I took a deep breath and decided to properly embrace the verse novel concept. The Monkey’s Mask was obviously set out as poetry. I wanted something that would look more like a novel with longer lines and with a lot more words and would perhaps fool readers into thinking this was a novel. I loved poetry but was disturbed by the fact that it was so often off-putting and alienating for the general reader. I have been told I have a subversive streak and I suppose this might be evidence. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? Once I fully committed to the idea of a verse novel, I had to find a form that would work for the story and for me. I must have read a review of American poet, Donald Hall’s The Old Life – an anecdotal sequence of autobiographical poems. Although I was writing something which, like a lot of fiction, had autobiographical elements, most of the story was fictional. As soon as I started reading The Old Life, I saw how I could adapt 154

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the form of his longest sequence to my story. Basically, Hall has one long line followed by one indented line. I took the original poem, 8 Stages of Grief, changed the form, saw that it worked and adapted the first draft. The whole story flowed for me. My longer lines were longer than Hall’s because my story is longer and fictional. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I stuck rigidly (or relentlessly, as one reviewer said) to the form because it made it easier for me to see where I could go and where I could not. Anne Kennedy, reviewing the book for the New Zealand Listener, said that I put the poetic voice and the narrative inextricably together.48 I think that is true. I had to be economical because there is no room for fluff. I’m sure at times I had to ditch some things which just didn’t fit the style, but learning what to cut and what not to cut is one of the most important aspects of writing, of any kind. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? At the time, I’m not sure I ever thought in terms of what effects I hoped to achieve. I hoped to find a form that would serve the narrative and a narrative that would fit the form and hoped I could pull it off. I wanted to write something that would engage me as a writer and be challenging too. It has just occurred to me that a driving force in all my writing is pattern. I love to do jigsaws, sudoku and code crackers which are all to do with perceiving pattern. In my poetry I like to have a particular arrangement of stanzas, usually the same number of lines. I try not to impose my liking for order on my students’ work, but I often find it messy and thus disorganised and lacking craft. In Before the Divorce We Go to Disneyland I wrote something that could serve as manifesto for my writing then and since. I wanted to write stories that would turn me into liquid. Soft and flowing. Sliding down the throats of readers. But I live in 155

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the suburbs and my name is on the school lunchroom roster. When I am talking to the headmaster, I never forget the rules of grammar. I keep all clothes buttoned up. My tail tucked away.49 An interpretation of that might convey that I want writing that flows easily with the reader but also has one foot on the ground, and knows there are rules. I would say now that I haven’t always kept my clothes buttoned up and my tail tucked away. But I think there may be an element that appearances are deceptive – that my writing may be more hard-edged and satirical than at first appears. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? Obviously, I love the form. I love the idea of writing that has been honed and crafted and cut away to get to the core of the story. However, I am also aware that verse novels are not particularly popular with the reading public. A bookseller told me she watched someone pick up 8 Stages of Grace, attracted by the cover, no doubt, and when she saw the form, quickly put it down again. I think some of that reluctance to engage with verse novels is dissipated if there is an opportunity to hear it read aloud so the reader can hear the musicality behind it, even if it is not all that obvious. I have been disappointed that in New Zealand my work has been largely ignored by academia and English departments. I have had some writing grants by private trusts and by Creative Writing New Zealand but no university fellowships. I have not received invitations to talk to students either. This lack of support has been demoralising. As a result, I turned away from the idea of writing another verse novel and tried to write a more conventional novel. When that failed (my only unpublished work), I wrote memoirs instead. However, poetry insinuated itself into Here Comes Another Vital Moment, a hybrid of prose and poetry travel memoir, and in Taking My Mother to the Opera, a memoir about my parents, when I again fully embraced a poetic form. That was quite successful from a poetry point of view, so much so, I recently turned again to the idea of a poetic fictional 156

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narrative, this time, a novella. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? As mentioned already the only verse novel I had read at the time was The Monkey’s Mask. Beyond realising verse novels were a possibility I can’t really say that I was influenced. In some ways I see myself as a naïve writer, preferring not to think, compare or analyse too much but just write. Lloyd Jones’s The Book of Fame straddles the line between prose and poetry and certainly pays attention to some of the elements of poetry in layout and compression. Under the title, in somewhat smaller type, it states ‘A Novel’. I’ve always considered that that book could be considered a verse novel, but it was not promoted as such. Again, I wouldn’t say it influenced my writing, but it possibly gave me permission to experiment a little further. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? The importance of keeping the reader engaged. I occasionally feel some verse novelists are entertaining themselves at the expense of the reader. Sometimes I have given up on finishing reading a verse novel because, quite frankly when I spend most of the day either writing your own work or reading and critiquing writing from my private students, I want to read something a little more straightforward. Something which has tension, character and plot, or engaging narrative. I am always interested in reading verse novels but living in a country where very little attention is given to verse novels it is hard to even know about their publication. Recently I read Charlotte, written by David Foenkinos and translated by Sam Taylor. Over 200 pages it is more accurately described as a novel rather than novella. It’s a stunning story based on a real German artist, Charlotte Salomon, who had fled to France but was taken into custody in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. I read a review that described it as a verse novel. Indeed, the layout looks like verse. The novel is composed of endstopped lines. Foenkinos said that he found the material so overwhelming, he had to write it like this order to breathe. It has to be read like this too, 157

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from one sentence to another. The story does not flow in the way one might expect of a verse novel. That is not to diminish its achievement in any way. It clarified for me, notions of musicality and flow and the importance of choosing a form that would be harmonious with the narrative. I have yet to read The Long Take by Robin Robertson. I’ve picked it up once or twice and am excited by the poetry of it but had trouble connecting to the story. I think the problem is, that my time for reading is very limited. The last moments of the day. For such a book, you need an expanse of time uninterrupted by the demands of students, domestic life, dogs wanting to go for a walk or at present, an overwhelming crisis such as a global pandemic. I look forward to a time, less pressured, more able to accommodate serious reading.

Every Now and Then I Have Another Child (2020) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? In the beginning of creating Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, I didn’t have any ideas or influences. I simply had a dream one night and then woke up and wrote it down in poetry form. I had recently published my poetic memoir, Taking My Mother to The Opera, and had no fixed ideas on what I was going to write next. How did you approach writing this verse novella? What were the various stages in its development? The novella began as a single poem about a dream. In the dream I was wandering around a city with a baby strapped to my chest. I wasn’t sure if the baby was alive or dead, but knew my job was to protect her. I also had an encounter with a down-on-her luck version of me, a doppelgänger. In the resulting poem, I added some wry thoughts about motherhood from the perspective of a woman with grown-up children.

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Who Are You? She doesn’t have a name. First, I need to comprehend her. Her pale, almost waxy, skin. Every now and then, when I think it’s time, I try to feed her warm milk—not my own, I’ve dried up as expected—what was I thinking, having a baby at my age? Her eyes gaze into mine as if she’s known me forever. Her mouth open, like the antique doll with porcelain face, tangled brown hair and dark glassy eyes I threw in the fire when my mother disappeared. ‘Who are you,’ I yell, but she’s gone in deep to the other side. To follow her would kill me; there’s no oxygen down there. I reel on the brink of the pit calling out the name I have not given her and do not know. For now, I’ ll leave her underground and close to my chest because a character, if not a baby, can be in two places at once. Over here and over there. 50 Finding Yourself on the Other Side Haven’t you sometimes discovered yourself teetering on the edge of a lake or skyscraper with no memory of how you got there? And yet you know it’s not dementia, it’s more like you’ve slipped into another life, running on a parallel track one layer behind. In that life, I wander the streets of my newly alienated city looking for the man who offered to take the baby from the hotel to a place of safety, even though he was a stranger to me. Perhaps he could see I was not up to mothering. 159

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Across the square, their hands twitching on batons, police stand by watching the homeless rioting. An old-fashioned fire engine drives onto the footpath heading towards me. ‘Out of the fucking way, lady,’ the fireman yells. I jump sideways. ‘Watch out for my baby,’ I say, patting her back, in the timeless way of a mother, although I’ve forgotten the details of her birth. But we all feel that, don’t we, when handed a white-wrapped bundle the midwife says belongs to you now and forever. A lie. There comes a time they must slip from your grasp.51 I often dream about babies and consider they represent another creative work. Reading this poem aloud to people, I realised it had a powerful response, so I decided to extend it into a longer narrative work. I was interested in the characters and what they had to say. It developed organically, gradually moving away from a collection of disparate poems, into a proper narrative with plot and story, dialogue, and point of view. This meant I had to change various poems, so they fitted into the storyline. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Although the main narrator, Joanna has much in common with myself, being a writing teacher, a mother of two grown up sons and living in Dunedin, NZ, I did not want the novella to be autobiographical. I had to construct a back-story for her. At first, she had a husband, but then I thought this made her too comfortable in life, so I ditched the husband. I also decided to make her haunted by the fact her mother disappeared when she was ten. This was the central theme in a novel I wrote some time ago, but have never published, so I was in effect cannibalising my own work. Mostly the decisions I had to make concerned the plot: was the student murdered or not, was the doppelgänger real to Joanna or not, what 160

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happened to Joanna’s mother, would readers believe in the concept of a child in a mural, coming alive? Above all, did I know what I was doing? How conscious was Joanna about what she was writing? An early reader, a poet friend, read the beginning poems and told me metafiction was old-fashioned and that I should drop those elements. I didn’t want to, mainly because I was having too much fun. Some interviewers have said I was toying with the reader and I definitely was. Some readers who are quite literal, have become confused over what is real or not. My advice is to forget about that and enter into the story as you enter into a novel and a dream. I think some people see poetry as being more real and truthful than fiction. I like to think that that I do have emotional truth in the narrative, but it is not real life. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? Of huge importance was the form. I wanted to differentiate the speakers using different layouts. The bulk of the book is narrated in the first person by Joanna, in five lines stanzas with an indented last line. The baby and the boy speak in 3-line stanzas, the doppelgänger in long lines, short lines. I went through many different iterations, moving from long prosy lines to honing it down to a more pared-back version. It took a long time to find the musicality in it. I read every stanza over and over, taking out words, adding them in and was gratified when the editor who has edited many poetry books told me I was terrific at line breaks. I am often accused of being too prosy and always want to reply, I am a narrative poet. For me, content is as important as sound. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? It is always difficult to straddle the boundary between the poetic and the narrative. I tend to favour narrative strategies over the poetic, partly because I am conscious, perhaps too conscious, of keeping the reader engaged. I think it is perhaps easier in a verse novella than a verse novel. The tolerance of readers for the poetic might be greater than in a longer work. 161

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For instance, in Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, I structured the book into nine chapters which are more or less even in length. Each chapter is numbered, and the beginning of each chapter begins with a short verse of five lines – intended to act as an introduction to the chapter. No one has ever commented on those poems, so I really have no idea whether they work or not. Straddling the boundary in a small country which doesn’t have much of a tradition of verse novels or verse novellas can mean that comment is fairly limited. I also began with a prologue and epilogue. I wrote the epilogue as a stand-alone poem before I started on the novella, but I thought it fitted the narrative perfectly well. A woman who dreams and wakes up a different person from the day before and is not quite sure who she is. I manipulated the form, so it fitted more seamlessly. I did add other poems written independently of the novella. On reflection, I think I did that to break up the flow whenever I feared it was becoming too plot driven. Also, my husband, a writer himself, was reading as I wrote. He occasionally would say cut back on the cops. For example, a student of Joanna’s dies in the narrative. It’s not obvious whether the student died naturally or was murdered. The police get involved. Although I was enjoying creating repartee between Joanna and the police, I trusted my husband’s judgement. In my experience more lyrical, less character-driven poems that stand alone force the reader to slow down and allow time to absorb the poetry. I made these insertions in an intuitive way. For instance, about a third of the way into the book, my main narrator Joanna has an encounter with her doppelgänger, Anna, who is stalking her. Anna slithers away. The next poem is called ‘The Pattern of Memoir’: In the days before synthetics from China, women knitted. My Brownie teacher taught me at seven; words or wool, anyone can master it. First, the unravelling of elusive, possibly false strands of memory. 162

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Next, you settle into long days, row after row, hoping for a garment approximating truth, knowing anything re-knitted is always a little uneven, a compromise at best. I make no mention of the casting off. The way your hands finding nothing to do now, start searching for trouble again, unearthing that old thing in the back of the wardrobe just itching for a makeover, a whole new life.52 There is no apparent reason for this layout. I probably decided I liked the look of it. I have always practiced writing in this spontaneous way, trusting my unconscious self. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I was hoping that I would create a book that was easy to read and would flow and sound good when read aloud, but at the same time, look at contemporary issues – like being a mother of adult children living overseas. I also wanted to look at issues of identity, creative writing, loneliness and broader issues that the world is facing like climate change, homelessness, inequality. What are your thoughts on the verse novella as a form? I think it’s a great form, and more easily achievable than writing a verse novel. It doesn’t ask too much of readers and the short form allows more flexibility for inserting poetry that is more lyrical. I have long been concerned with the fact that not many people read poetry. Most readers are other poets and I want to reach beyond that audience to engage with new readers and encourage them to enter into a dialogue with poetry. I grew up in a working-class family and was the first person to get a degree, albeit as an adult student. It is important to me that I don’t alienate readers who haven’t had that advantage; they can be introduced to poetry and realise it has something to say to them. 163

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Despite loving the form, I have been constrained by publisher pushback. My publisher asked me to call my work a poetic narrative as they do not publish fiction. Unfortunately, this approach means you reach less of an audience as poetry is not as widely reviewed as fiction. However, I remain grateful to be published by a University Press with an excellent reputation. Have verse novellas you have read been influential on this work in some way? I am not aware of having read any verse novellas, at least not any books that call themselves a verse novella perhaps for the reason mentioned above. Most books of narrative poetry simply are classified as poetry. I have read books by New Zealand poets with a strong narrative push, and tell of a journey, usually interior, but none with such a strong emphasis on plot. What have you learnt about writing verse novellas from the verse novellas you have read? I was hugely impressed and moved by Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter and note that it is described as part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief. The story of a wife dying is fictional so given the attention to the fundamental elements of poetry, attention to language, layout, metaphor and musicality it could well be called a verse novella.

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Jordie Albiston

‘… I allowed myself to fill the gaps, as it were, with my imagination.’ Jordie Albiston is acclaimed as a major Australian poet. Albiston’s works of poetry include: Nervous Arcs (Spinifex Press, 1995); Botany Bay Document: A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper, 1996; reprinted 2003, 2013); The Hanging of Jean Lee (Black Pepper, 1998; reprinted 2004, 2013); My Secret Life (Wagtail #15: Picaro Press, 2002); The Fall (White Crane Press, 2003); Vertigo: A Cantata (John Leonard Press, 2007); The Sonnet according to ‘m’ (John Leonard Press, 2009); Kindness 165

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(Red Rag Press, 2013); The Book of Ethel (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013); XIII Poems (Rabbit Poets Series #1: Rabbit Poetry Press, 2013); Jack & Mollie (& Her) (University of Queensland Press, 2016); Euclid’s Dog: 100 Algorithmic Poems (GloriaSMH, 2017); Warlines (Hybrid Press, 2018); The Cyprus Poems (Picaro Press, 2018); Element: The Atomic Weight & Radius of Love (Puncher & Wattmann, 2019); Fifteeners (forthcoming: Puncher & Wattmann, 2021); as well as two poetry titles for children: Sukie’s Suitcase: Three Picture-Poems (Little Barrow Press, 2018); and Barkwoofggrrr! (Little Barrow Press, 2019). Albiston has had 150 poems published nationally in journals and newspapers, 50 poems anthologised, and a further 100 poems have been published internationally (sometimes in translation) in Austria, Canada, China, Holland, Ireland, Japan, Macedonia, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, UK, and the USA. As Editor, Albiston has published The Weekly Poem: 52 Exercises in Closed & Open Forms (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014; reprinted 2018) and Prayers of a Secular World (with Kevin Brophy: Inkerman & Blunt, 2015). Her numerous awards include: 2020 shortlisting Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for Element: The Atomic Weight & Radius Of Love; 2019 winner Patrick White Literary Award for outstanding contribution to Australian literature; 2018 nominated ABR Book of the Year for Warlines; 2018 shortlisting NSW Premier’s Award for Euclid’s dog; 2017 shortlisting Queensland Literary Awards for Euclid’s Dog; 2017 nominated ABR Book of the Year for Euclid’s dog; 2017 recipient State Library of Victoria Fellowship for Warlines (research); 2016 shortlisted Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize for ‘Boy’; 2016 twice nominated ABR Book of the Year for Jack & Mollie (& Her); 2013 winner National Fine Music Award for ‘A Brief History of Love’ (composer Rachel Merton); 2011 writer-in-residence Hypatia Trust, Cornwall, UK; 2010 winner NSW Premier’s Award for The Sonnet according to ‘m’; 2010 runner-up Chief Minister’s Award (ACT) for The Sonnet according to ‘m’; 2010 selected The Age Annual Top 100 Melbourne’s Most Influential, Inspirational & Creative People; 2008 shortlisting Victorian Premier’s Award Best Music-Theatre Script for The Hanging of Jean Lee; 2004 winner Grand 166

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Prix Marulic (Croatia) for Dreaming Transportation (composer Andrée Greenwell); 2004 shortlisting NSW Premier’s Award for The Fall; 2003 shortlisting Queensland Premier’s Award for The Fall; 2003 shortlisting Victorian Premier’s Award for The Fall; 2003 winner MusicOz Songwriting Award for Dreaming Transportation (composer Andrée Greenwell); 1999 runner-up Gwen Harwood Memorial Prize for The Fall; 1997 recipient DJ (Dinny) O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship (University of Melbourne); 1996 winner Mary Gilmore Prize for Nervous Arcs; 1996 shortlisting NSW Premier’s Award for Nervous Arcs; 1996 runner-up FAW Anne Elder Award for Nervous Arcs; 1992 winner David Myers University Medal (La Trobe University, Melbourne); 1991 winner Convocation Prize (La Trobe University, Melbourne); 1991 joint winner Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Albiston has presented her poetry at fifty national literary festivals including Australian National Poetry Festival, Canberra Poetry Festival, Goolwa Poetry Festival (SA), Melbourne International Arts Festival, Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Mildura Writers’ Festival, Perth Writers Festival (WA), Queensland Poetry Festival (QLD), Sprung Writers’ Festival (Albany, WA), Sydney Festival (NSW) and Tasmanian Writers’ Festival (TAS), as well as internationally. Various television/radio readings, interviews & documentary specials include: ‘Book Chat’, ‘Dimensions in Time’, ‘Snap Shot’ & ‘Between the Lines’ (all ABC TV); ‘Making History’ (Foxtel); ‘Poetica’, ‘Books & Writing’, ‘The Box Seat’, ‘The Deep End’, ‘The Listening Room’, ‘Life Matters’ & ‘Arts Today’ (all ABC Radio National); ‘The Afternoon Show’ (2BL, Sydney); and ‘Writers at Work’ (3CR, Melbourne). Albiston has entries in Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century World Poetry, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.). Critical analyses of Albiston’s work can be found in Axon; Biography (USA); Feeding the Ghost: Criticism on Contemporary Australian Poetry; Truth and Beauty: Verse Biography in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (NZ); and Westerly. The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998) was adapted for music-theatre by Andrée Greenwell; performed at Sydney Opera House (2006) and Melbourne Arts House (2013); and released on cd (2013). Botany Bay Document (1996) was 167

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adapted for music-theatre (as Dreaming Transportation) by Andrée Greenwell and performed at Sydney Festival and Sydney Opera House (2003/2004); and released on cd (2004). Albiston’s poetry has also been set to music by composers including Leonard Lehrman (New York), Barry McKimm (Melbourne), Raffaele Marcellino (Sydney), Rachel Meton (Brisbane) and Peter Skoggard (Canada).

The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998, 2004 & 2013) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? My second book Botany Bay Document, published in 1996, was a collection of documentary poetry concerning the experiences of various women during the first fifty years of white settlement at Port Jackson and Botany Bay (NSW, Australia). This work involved researching and repurposing such public archival materials as ship log books, maps, reportage, songs, paintings and etchings, as well as private materials such as correspondence and diaries. I had so enjoyed the writing of this book that I wanted to move my poetry deeper into the documentary realm by examining the life of one woman alone. This would allow a focal narrative thread to be established and maintained, with perhaps greater opportunity for canniness, evolution and intensity of voice. Although I held a clear albeit general concept for this new work, it was imperative to locate the ‘right’ subject. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated. To my mind, the subject needed to be a woman who did not already inhabit too great a space in the communal imagination, yet there also needed to be sufficient extant information on which to base a whole book. As I found, not many women fit this brief. It took about six months to resolve this poser. I was employed in the back room of a bookshop, receiving orders, and a face appeared. The face belonged to Jean Lee, and there she gazed from the cover of a new biography – the only one having been published about her at the time – and I knew I

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had found my subject. And so began the writing of The Hanging of Jean Lee. How did you approach writing this verse biography? What were the various stages in its development? I absorbed myself in the biography mentioned above and met with one of its co-authors. He was able to provide me with further data – police reports, court documents, prison records – which he had acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. While written accounts are essential to documentary poetry, so too is a personal sense of witness. To this end, I visited physical loci of Lee’s life: her hometown of Dubbo; her teenage suburb of Chatswood; the Carlyle Hotel in Spencer Street, where she and her cohorts lodged while in Melbourne for the Spring Carnival (horse racing); the Universal Hotel in Carlton where they met their victim, ‘Pop’ Kent; and the house around the corner in Dorrit Street, where the murder of Kent took place. Of particular import was my tour of Pentridge Prison. Fortune was on my side, as the prison was open to the public for a short time before undergoing development as a residential precinct. I was not only able to have myself locked in the D Division cell where Lee spent her last days in solitary confinement, but sit by the lawn which covered the mass grave of executed prisoners – including Lee – who were buried beneath in lime. I also visited the hanging beam, which had been brought from England many years before for that purpose. A film about the bushranger Ned Kelly – hanged from the same beam, albeit in its former site of Melbourne Gaol – had recently been completed. For some reason the filmmakers had erected a new beam for the shoot, and the original lay on the prison floor. It was an eerie and extreme experience to run my fingers over the grooves in the beam’s centre, where so many ropes – both in Melbourne, and previously in England – had gouged their trademark impressions. This sense of witness – of place, of ‘thing’ – is an integral trigger for the creative powers of vision, fancy and transfer. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Central to this work was my own position as writer. Jean Lee was 169

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a single mother and an alcoholic. Later she became a petty criminal, a prostitute, an accomplice to murder. However, she was also an object of domestic violence, poverty and male exploitation. What should be my stance: condemnation for a perpetrator, or empathy for a victim? I tussled with this for some time before deciding to sit on the fence, that is, to avoid imposing any personal view and simply present the facts as they stood. I have never been too fussed about ‘the reader’, and, in this case, I felt the reader – whoever that is! – could reach their own conclusions on the matter. Another quandary concerned the episodic pattern of events. Were the poems to be arranged as incidents occurred, everything slowly but surely catapulting toward the inevitable? Or would a blending of timeframes provide a more gripping efficacy? I eventually elected the former strategy, with a few later poems – interrogation, confession, reportage – interspersed with the skipping rhymes and school reports of the opening childhood poems. This schema seemed to possess the capacity of portent while maintaining rightful chronological sequence. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? The title tells the fate of Jean Lee before the book is opened. That was good to get out of the way, allowing me to move through the narrative at my own pace and without the obstacle of having to build up to an unknown conclusion. To me the drama lay elsewhere, in the moment-bymoment progression of a bright and vivacious young girl to the woman Lee ultimately became. The murder of Pop Kent made major headlines in late 1940s Australia, not least because a woman was involved. Jean Lee was the last woman hanged in Australia and the only one to be hanged in the twentieth century. While Lee subverted the conservative post-war image of decent housewife and mother, there was great public unease concerning both her part in the crime, and her sentence. Questionable police and court proceedings were under acute scrutiny. The Labor Women’s Organising Committee condemned the court decision while women’s temperance groups held demonstrations outside the prison gates. Indeed, the Victorian premier himself – John ‘Black Jack’ McDonald – later commented: ‘The day I had 170

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to order the hanging of a woman was the saddest of my life.’ The story was big news. In order to capitalise on the explicit cultural drama of the happenings at hand, I decided to marshal my material according to a newspaper-type template. I consequently divided the book into four sections: Personal Pages (which begins with a poem entitled ‘Birth Column’), Entertainment Section, Crime Supplement, and Death Notices. In addition I included a number of found poems redacted from actual newspaper articles, all with the title ‘Reportage’ followed by the relevant newspaper moniker in parentheses. Other devices I employed revolve around voice. I listened to many 1940 radio programs in order to emulate both the music and ‘speak’ of the era, as well as reading transcribed verbalisations pertaining to school mistresses, prison wardens, and so on. It was critical to engineer a sensation of tone both authentic and engrossing. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? That is an instinctive thing. Certainly, where there existed no written record, I allowed myself to fill the gaps, as it were, with my imagination. An example of this felt license is the number of diary entries I wrote for Lee, when she left no actual diary behind. The ‘Dear Diary’ poems permitted me to bring Lee – as active agent – into the ‘within’ of the text, rather than risking her being left without. Of course a surfeit of procedural legalese is de rigueur for any crime and punishment tale. To incorporate all the particulars of investigation, court case, appeal and counter-appeal would inescapably occasion a lengthy and possibly desiccated outcome, one where poetry may struggle for breath. But to compress such details without jettisoning the nub is no cinch. I puzzled long and hard over the conundrum of what to disregard and what to keep, striving for a clean and spare page while preserving sufficient features of the story to keep the whole thing in motion. Specific moments I considered worthy of an extra level of lingering were those pertaining to a certain gravitas: Lee’s experience as a new mother, 171

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her love for partner-in-crime Bobby, her broodings in solitary confinement. The listing of facts, even in poetry form, can be lifeless and dry: it is the interface between history and one’s own invention where poems that live may be generated. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I was hoping to create a poetry both full and sparse. I wanted there to be room for other minds, other imaginations to move around. One enabler was to drop all punctuation and utilise lacunae in place of periods and commas. These concrete spaces function like pauses in a musical score, the silences actually written into the structure. Perhaps verse biography is more empty, more flexible than regular biography as a result, thus sanctioning a greater openness of ‘truth.’ I also wanted to place the sometimes tedious, often grisly facts within a context of poetic restraint and contemplation, a feel that may be swamped by the mandatory glut of information in traditional biography. It is not the preordained function of the documentary poet to simply recycle history in broken lines: rather, as Emily Dickinson wrote (in poem 1263), to ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ Sometimes telling ‘all the truth’ requires leaving some of it out. What are your thoughts on the verse biography as a form? I am surprised this form is sometimes considered a contemporary genre. In fact, given the Homeric epics, documentary poetry is probably the first kind of verse ever composed. Having said that, the verse biography is a slippery animal, one that (thankfully) defies a sure pinning down. Somewhat akin to prose poetry, verse biography does not recognise distinct generic boundaries. It is a free bird, concocting itself as it flies, picking up seemingly insignificant pebbles of truth along with significant rocks of fancy and dropping them onto a non-litigious page. Verse biography may contain prose: it may contain soliloquy, colloquy, inventory, dream. It may be impelled by cause without effect, or effect without cause. It may depend on traditional or experimental forms for its foundation; sketch out a multivocal, multidirectional plot free of niceties and academic protocol; it need not dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘t’; it can poke around below the 172

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radar of accepted notions of reality; it may breathe fire without fear. After all, it is only poetry … Have verse biographies you have read been influential on this work in some way? Three such titles come to mind. These I read before publishing my own debut collection, and they impacted my work at a visceral and elementary level. Perhaps the biggest influence on my thinking as a documentary poet remains William Carlos Williams’ ‘long poem’ Paterson (a verse biography of his township and its major river in New Jersey). The initial quartet comprising this poem continues to astound me with its joyful brew of history, journalism, dialogue, fable, missive, definition and song. As well, Williams’ visual formatting – whereby words (and spaces and figures and integers and various fonts and punctuative devices) – populate the real estate of the page in a manner that remains wholly innovative, and this before the advent of computer technology. In Williams’ own words prior to the preface: ‘: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column, a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration …’.53 Paterson endures as a stunningly modern read after more than seventy years. It is an astonishing and poeticallycharged scramble of fragment, elocution and demotic, misspelling and disspelling that returns ever greater prizes for the re-reading. Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie (both Canadian, both half a century old this year) also influenced me significantly on first encounter. I was struck not only by the mosaic approach of melding fact and fiction, but the sense of easeful consent these poets were able to grant themselves. Again there is much invention and play on a textual level (particularly with Ondaatje), and both poets have assumed the authority to actively enter and inhabit their respective subjects. The embodiment of artistic liberty for the documentary poet helps cultivate a strange and beautiful dexterity that is so easily lost to the burden of ‘truth’ (or ‘career’). I remember during the writing of The Hanging of 173

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Jean Lee my publisher, Kevin Pearson, sent me a note simply saying ‘Give yourself permission.’ I still have that note, and it has guided me through tricky times more than once. What have you learnt about writing verse biographies from the verse biographies you have read? An obvious point is that verse biographies offer a compelling alternative to readers, and may generate new audiences for stories normally found only in history books. Having said that, I am afraid I don’t go out of my way to read verse biography as a genre. Like much poetry, I often find such books lacking in terms of formal thrill and risk. My interests have altered over the years, and I find myself far more excited by form than content in terms of my own poetry, and that of others. Of course there are verse biographies that almost buzz on the page but, like anything, there are those that don’t. I suppose I have learned what to avoid doing as much as what to do by those I have read. In particular, the act of breaking factual prose into lines will never, in itself, equal the creation of art. As in all poetry, the ‘show’ is as crucial as the ‘tell.’

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Lesley Lebkowicz

‘It’s a powerful form – flexible and compelling.’ Lesley Lebkowicz’s fifth book,  a collection of poems, Mountain Lion, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2019. In 2013 Lebkowicz was winner of the ACT Poetry Prize, and her verse narrative, The Petrov Poems was published by Pitt Street Poetry. The Petrov Poems was featured on ABC Radio National’s Poetica program in April 2014. Lebkowicz’s poetry is represented in several anthologies, has appeared on buses, and has been installed as part of a public art program in the paving in Canberra City. Her poems were shortlisted (2006) and also won (2007) the David Campbell Award for Poetry. Lebkowicz’s 175

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earlier works (published as Lesley Fowler) include the poetry collection Crossing the Sky (Five Islands Press, 2001), a work of fiction Washing My Mother’s Hair (Mockingbird, 2001) and a work of nonfiction, translated with Tamara Ditrich, The Way Things Really Are (Buddhist Education Foundation, 2006). She also works in ceramics and both her creative practices are informed .

by a long practice in an ascetic form of Buddhism. She lives in Canberra.

The Petrov Poems (2013) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? None consciously, but I used to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses obsessively when I was younger and while it’s not a novel, it’s close. I’d read Dorothy Porter of course, and I especially like Akhenaten and Crete, so there again you have a narrative line with separate poems. I think these two of Porter’s could be described as narrative sequences and The Petrov Poems is more of a novel, but these may have been influences. I didn’t have a conscious model. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? Initially I was going to write the story of the Petrov Affair from the point of view of the women involved. And for a while I did this, but of course I had to know about Vladimir as well and as I read material about him I realised he was a gift. Anyone less like your stereotype of a spy would be hard to imagine. He behaved like a bumbling idiot: he tried to recruit Bialoguski – who’d offered his services to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) – to spy for the KGB; and he ran a racket selling liquor he’d bought duty free. I did massive amounts of research in the National Archives and the National Library. I read ASIO files. I’m not an historian but I was enchanted by the process. Sitting with an ASIO file (everything in triplicate) in front of you – reading about humans making a mess of trying to work out tricky things about other humans – is like reading a novel. I researched carefully and didn’t violate the information. There’s an abundance of it. I used 176

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everything that caught my attention. The Petrovs’ lives were chock-a-block with material made for a novel. The story about Dusya throwing the pie at the Ambassador’s wife is true. I also talked to Canberra people about their memories. I walked around the Embassy, the Petrovs’ house and the Hotel Kingston for hours and the details have infiltrated several of the poems. I thought I’d research first and then sit down and write. In fact I wrote drafts of poems as I researched and then had a pile of poems and no idea of how I was going to organise them. I adopted chronological order simply as a way of organising the material – and then didn’t feel any need to discard it. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? I had to ditch lots of poems. (I have enough left over to do a verse novella: The Petrovs Defect Again). I wanted to keep the pace fairly fast and some of the poems I wrote reiterated ideas and emotions already explored in others, so they were discarded. I did downplay some of the terrors the Petrovs went through immediately after the defection. I put in only one suicide attempt. I hope I showed how hard it was on them at a personal level: there’s no glamour in their defection, but I didn’t put it all in. I feared it would be overwhelming. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I played around with the sonnet. If there’s a predominant form in The Petrovs, it’s probably the sonnet – but not the formal sonnet of earlier centuries. No end-stopped rhyme, though generally fourteen lines and a volta of sorts. I had fun ringing changes on the form. If there were places in the book where you felt it was better to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided those decisions? No I didn’t, but this may in part be because I didn’t follow the form of the verse novel as Dorothy Porter does in her later books, and as Lisa Jacobson used it. My poems are chapters; I’ve written a series of poems which form a narrative. My intention was always narrative. I was always writing a novel – it’s just that the chapters or scenes were discrete poems. 177

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That still left me room to play: I personified ASIO, which meant I could write lines like ‘ASIO puts its head round the door …’ or ‘ASIO cooks chops …’. I had fun with the ASIO character. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted readers to understand the Petrovs as people, not as spies. Their dilemmas were human and often heart-rending, even though they were probably not the easiest people to be with (unless you wanted to stay drunk with Volodya). I’m so happy that several people (in reviews and in private emails) have commented on the compassion of the book. That’s meant more to me than anything else. I also wanted to take the reader in as close as possible to the Petrovs, so I used the intimate forms of their names (Volodya and Dusya) and gave a lot of their interior lives, especially for Dusya, but I resisted using the first person for such a complex narrative. The third person allowed me to have the overview which I might have lost if I’d worked in the first person. The story takes up a large canvas (perhaps a Bosch?) and the first person might have got me bogged down in one corner (someone about to be hit by the contents of a chamber pot?). What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I love them; what Homer and Virgil wrote might be called verse novels if they were being published now. It’s a powerful form – flexible and compelling. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I’ve read Dorothy Porter, Judy Johnson, Geoff Page, Vikram Seth and others, but I am not aware of a conscious influence. What have you learned about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I’m not aware of intentionally using other poet’s strategies. I think everyone follows their own sense of what will work.

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Mark Pirie

‘… a form that can be explored further and innovated upon …’ Mark Pirie’s Tom, a novel in verse was published by Poet’s Group in Christchurch, New Zealand, an imprint of the Canterbury Poets Collective in 2009. Pirie is a Wellington writer, editor, publisher and critic. From 1995–2005 he initiated, co-edited and produced the literary magazine JAAM (Just Another Art Movement). His works include many books of poems, edited anthologies, a collection of song lyrics, a rugby/business biography of his grandfather Tom Lawn, an art book (photography and drawings), and a book 179

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of short fiction. In 1998 he edited The NeXt Wave anthology of New Zealand Generation X writing. He currently edits the HeadworX New Poetry Series and the poetry journal broadsheet: new new zealand poetry. In 2003, Salt UK published a selection of his poetry, Gallery, and in 2009, Pirie was awarded (with Tim Jones) the Vogel Award for Best Collected Work for co-editing Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry From New Zealand (Interactive Press, Brisbane, 2009). In 2016, his selected poems, Rock and Roll, was published by Bareknuckle Books in Brisbane, Australia.

Tom (2009) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Tom, a novel in verse was written and completed in 2001 (with some minor revisions in 2008). Set during the mid-’90s in Wellington, New Zealand, it focuses on the life of a struggling student and artist, a young city idler who has been labelled a representative of ‘Generation X’. Tom’s eclectic literary precedents can be found in the poems of Frank O’Hara and Roger McGough or in works like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, A.S. Byatt’s Possession, and Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4. Tom makes use of postmodern pastiche in the form of journal entries, notes, quotes, prose poems, free verse, rhyming verse, haiku and essays, and includes a vast array of literary and pop culture allusions and jokes. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? While I was studying English at Victoria University of Wellington writing poetry and editing JAAM literary magazine (predominantly for young writers), a mentor Harry Ricketts suggested I keep a journal of my life. I kept a diary/journal 1995–1996 of what was going on in those years. The journal was personal, of course, dealing with real life people (and not for publication) but the concerns relating to my generation at the time were

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more universal and deserved public circulation in another format. When I was a young student in the 1990s, the term Generation X became widely used in the media for describing my generation. Reacting to this label was a concern for my generation at the time, and I also put together a collection of writing called The NeXt Wave (Otago University Press, 1998). I had an idea to use the material from my diary/journal as comments on pop culture and literature at the time and put it into the mind of a fictional character called Tom Grant, who coincidentally was also the name of the private investigator hired to investigate Kurt Cobain’s death (Kurt being an icon of my generation). I hammed up my diary/journal fragments and poems for effect, fictionalised it with rewrites, and turned the material into a narrative, a verse novel. It was like a film in words (I had also been a film student). The book idea was a year in the life of a young person in the 1990s, an emerging artist trying to make sense of the world and the times he was living in. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? One of the problems was making the characters and incidents from my real-life diary/journal into fictional and funny events and not to make them easily recognisable to the people in real life who might know where the characters came from. At the same time it was important to use the real-life situations I had been through to make the character Tom Grant believable and authentic. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I didn’t use the classic narrative verse form for my verse novel. I decided to make it more postmodern, a medley of various forms and styles, but mostly the prose poem (in first person narrative) was employed to drive the story along with bits of verse from the writer’s journal interspersed to give the sense of an emerging artist experimenting with form themselves. A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (Literary Fiction) and Sue Townsend’s The Secret 181

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Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ (Young Adult Fiction) gave me ideas. Townsend’s diary narrative of what was happening to Adrian Mole was something that influenced the diary narrative of what was happening to my character Tom Grant. Also the pastiche of poems and the literary jokes found inspiration in Byatt’s novel, which I had been reading for one of my courses at Victoria University of Wellington. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? Prose poems were useful for telling the story of Tom Grant in traditional narrative terms as his university year progressed from beginning to conclusion. But throughout the book Tom’s own poems and drawings were used to tell events going on in his life as well to break up the narrative structure, i.e. poems for his girlfriend Kate and other friends. What guided this process was deciding how to keep readers interested in the character Tom. Interspersing the diary entries with his poems and drawings gave it more interest than just ‘a diary in the life of Tom’, and enabled me to include literary allusions and jokes as well. I also paid an artist Timon Maxey (a painter/designer) to illustrate the book. The drawings Timon provided complement the text well. I did my own illustrations originally but didn’t use them as I thought they were too ‘serious’ and Timon’s were humorous and funny. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? The poetic effects used in Tom were mostly comic verse and witty postmodern writing to achieve humour. The poems of Frank O’Hara and Roger McGough were influential. McGough has written a short verse novel, too: Kurt B.P. Bungo and Me. It’s in his book for school children, In the Glassroom. The narrative effects to be achieved in Tom were probably hard-edged realism and black humour, looking at a young person’s life, the coming-of-age novel. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? In my 20s, I was invited to Australia for Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival in 2000 and again in 2001. It was there I learned of the Australian 182

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developments in the verse novel. It was a more popular form over there at the time. I liked writers like Alan Wearne and Dorothy Porter. In New Zealand I haven’t seen it used much. I only know of two other verse novels here by Diane Brown (8 Stages of Grace) and Albert Wendt (The Adventures of Vela). Another new verse novel was published in 2020 by John Newton, Escape Path Lighting. I haven’t read it as yet. (I found it listed with several other entries for verse novels in the National Library of New Zealand catalogue – not all Adult verse novels.) Verse novels are a form that can be explored further and innovated upon outside of traditional narrative verse or sequence styles, or the long poem in New Zealand. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I don’t think I would have been influenced directly by another verse novel. But I did have a look at what others were doing in the genre. Verse novels were popular as Young Adult Fiction in the United States. I looked up the genre online and looked at what others were doing. I think in retrospect I would have changed my subtitle to ‘A Novel in Poems’ or a ‘Poetry Novel’ rather than ‘A Novel in Verse’ but ‘verse novels’ seemed the key search term at the time. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I probably read other verse novels to see what other verse novelists were doing with form and structure but not to be influenced by them. My take on the verse novel was intended to be more postmodern and inventive. Tom is probably unlike the verse novels of Diane Brown and Albert Wendt in New Zealand or the Australian verse novels I had read from my travels. My verse novel was more experimental with form and structure, while still retaining a traditional narrative basis for the story of Tom Grant’s university year and potential breakthrough as an artist.

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Maureen Gibbons

‘I think it is a challenging form, offering a richness to its readers by the plethora of devices – narrative and poetic – involved in its creation.’ Maureen Gibbons  has a Doctor of Creative Arts from Curtin University of Technology. She was an advisory teacher/writer in residence in priority schools in country and metropolitan districts in Western Australia. Until recently, she tutored in poetry and facilitated creative practice workshops for postgraduate research students. Maureen’s writing has been published in journals including

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Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Biography 15 (2015), Westerly 62.1 (2017) and Cordite Poetry Review 57.1 Ekphrastic (2017). Her book The Butter Lady: A Silhouette Biography in Verse was published by Rabbit, Poets Series No 6, (2016).

The Butter Lady (2016) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? When I began writing The Butter Lady I was grieving the death of my partner of fifty years. In retrospect, I think I was searching for a sense of home in what Abigail Bray describes as ‘the limitless country of writing …’.54 As a regular walker in the park, I’d caught glimpses of the Butter Lady, close to the tennis courts where she camped. In November 2001 the Butter Lady’s body was discovered by a gardener in the park. At first the press reported her death as murder and I was shocked by the news, as I had seen her the day before and sensed that she wanted to speak. In 2001, I collected newspaper articles which stated that her bag contained evidence proving she was a homeless, educated, well-travelled woman who had lost touch with her family. I collected related information from a variety of other media outlets. Her body was identified nine months after being placed in the morgue. Dental records in a passport photo, discovered in an old Centrelink file, were traced back to a dental practice in Barmera, South Australia. The realisation that the Butter Lady had so few friends or family who knew where or how she lived, motivated me to fashion a voice for her, and to research the life circumstances that led to her homelessness, and subsequent death. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? Even though I was completing my Doctor of Creative Arts from Curtin University and held an ethics clearance, each line of inquiry to gain

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factual evidence led to a closed door. For example, I was unable to gain access to her few remaining possessions, her beret and letters and the Kings Park Board were unable to release the name of the gardener who found the Butter Lady’s body. The question that arose from this situation drove my initial research: ‘How can contemporary generic strategies best be utilised to represent the life and death of a real marginalised figure?’ You could say I wrote, in this instance, from a place of dogged determination or a deep concern over the deliberate silencing of a woman’s story. I needed to find theorists and poets whose work would show me a way to construct a life narrative from scant evidence. Leonard Cassuto’s concept of a silhouette biography with its reliance on contextual detail to build the sense of a real life provided this. His theory draws on the social and political context of the subject when archival evidence is not available. I was able to construct a persona for the Butter Lady through interviews, both real and imagined, by people who had caught glimpses of her in the park or had tried to meet her needs at refuges and soup kitchens. In addition, Liz Stanley’s book The Auto/Biographical I demonstrated how I could use my experiences of being a woman growing up at the same time as the Butter Lady to bring about a deeper understanding of her circumstances and those like her. It was my intention to interpelate readers who would understand her not as ‘other’ – rather see her a person like themselves and to feel empathy for her. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? At the outset of the writing process, I was aware of not wanting to romanticise or to objectify the homeless –rather I needed to present a detailed context, factual or imaginary, which far from romanticising their situation, presents it as ‘reality’ thus highlighting the marginal figure’s resilience. I do recall during the process of writing the silhouette verse novel, I felt the text was not as poetic as I imagined it to be; that in my effort to produce narrative tension, the voices of the people interviewed, both real 186

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and imagined, sounded very prosaic. Their dialogue lacked authenticity and/or a currency of sound that was pleasing to the ear. Jordie Albiston’s verse novel, The Hanging of Jean Lee, affirmed what I was trying to do. I used the techniques of slant rhyme and rhythm to bring more music and emotional currency to my work. The text provided examples of using the Australian vernacular, ordinary dialogue, emphasising the poetic devices of alliteration, assonance and metaphor. The text’s use of the narrative strategy of analepsis provided a model to flesh out fragments of the Butter Lady’s and her friend Patsy’s lives prior to their separation. I drew on Dorothy Porter’s narrative strategy of varied focalisations to sketch portraits of the central characters. I noted how Porter’s use of ‘Oz ordinariness’ represents Bill as the typical hard-boiled, tough-talking detective of contemporary popular crime fiction. Yet other poems in the verse novel work against this stereotype by constructing him as gentle and tender. For example, he is sensitive to the beauty of the flight of Eastern Rosellas, and the music of their ‘bell notes’. To discover metrical patterns in each line of each speaker, I counted syllables, the length of phrases and where accents fell in sentences. I observed the metaphors used for different speakers in different situations and applied these techniques in my work. In Paul Hetherington’s verse novel Blood and Old Belief, I was touched by the text’s sensitive crafting of a family in crisis in a drought-stricken environment. Encouraged by Hetherington’s portrayal of his character’s survival, I focused on constructing characters with strong threads of resilience, humour and resolve. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? My text was a hybrid text, relying on newspaper articles, letters to the Coroner and interviews with detectives and people who were involved with the homeless. In the version of my story I submitted for my Doctor of Creative Arts, I concluded with poems in the voice of the deceased woman, thus privileging her voice. These poems were models of how I wanted the rest of the poems to be. They found their way into the fictional narrative by way of a poetry book given to Patsy by the gardener who discovered the body. The poems relied on imagery, meter, repetition, assonance, 187

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alliteration and metaphor. Through her written language, I fashioned for Lily a powerful position, resisting the stereotyping of the mentally ill. I created Lily’s (the Butter Lady’s) book of poems to resist the image of an uneducated, permanently unemployable person. The poems were not included at the conclusion of the published version as at that time, as I did not have sufficient confidence in my writing to insist on their inclusion. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I think the trajectory of the story was the driver in this instance. I favoured narrative techniques in order to progress the narrative, to develop ‘real’ characters and create tension. Patsy’s internal focalisation enabled the reader to identify with feelings of grief and concern over the separation from her friend, the Butter Lady. When the tone of the narrative was more contemplative I used a fusion of poetic and narrative strategies. My research pointed out that if we want to emphasise connectedness and inclusivity it is achieved by increasing sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other unfamiliar people whose lives are different from our own. Such increased sensitivity make it more difficult to marginalise people different from ourselves by thinking they have no feelings. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted to create narrative tension by involving the reader/s in the quest for the Butter Lady’s murderer, and the circumstances that had influenced her life choices. Through the focalisation of pseudo-detective Patsy, a childhood friend of the marginalised subject, an ease of passage between the past and the present became possible and with that, a framework for the reader, albeit tenuous, from which to imagine what it would be like to be in similar situations and to ‘toy’ with likely outcomes or explanations. My life experiences and knowledge of Kings Park, gained from twenty years of daily walks, underpinned the creation of settings in the narrative. I lived on an orchard during World War II and experienced an adolescence with similar notions of gender with the restrictive roles constructed for 188

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women and men in post-war Australia. When writing the poetry, I utilised documents such as the Coroner’s report and the newspaper accounts changing the names to respect the privacy of those involved. I sat for long periods in the park where the Butter Lady camped; where other homeless characters, and visitors were known to frequent. I focused on the sounds, sights, textures, fragrances and the reactions of birds and insects in the area to my presence. I attempted to exercise patience to capture the ‘rhythms’ and events of each place over different seasons, and to bring those aspects into the trajectory of the imagined life story I was constructing through poetry and prose. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I think it is a challenging form, offering a richness to its readers by the plethora of devices – narrative and poetic – involved in its creation. I must admit I wanted my silhouette verse novel to privilege poetry, but I found that I was unable to achieve that goal. Instead it seemed to be a tug-of-war between the two, or, on a more productive day, a give and take between the two. I discovered that multi-focalisation is an effective strategy to develop characters and to avoid definitive closure of conversations about the homeless. Shaping the story of the Butter Lady through a number of eyewitnesses and their differing perceptions provided the tool to interpelate an imagined readership with the facility to entertain many perspectives. Put simply, to listen with a poetic ear, to engage with lives different from their own and perhaps to experience a heightened sensitivity to their plight. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Several years have lapsed since I wrote the Butter Lady and on reflection each of the novels I read during the writing process of the silhouette biography in verse, either directly or indirectly influenced the text: The Hanging of Jean Lee, by Jordie Albiston; Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado; Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse; Paul Hetherington’s Blood and Old Belief; Drumming on Water by Geoff Page; Three Stories in Verse by Barbara Temperton, and The Night Markets by Alan Wearne. Each of these novels, through their diction, their metrical patterns, their characterisation and 189

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settings, plot and storytelling devices provided examples of the scope of the genre, and most importantly, within these books, I found the stimulation and models to adopt this form in the writing of my first verse novel. To broaden my knowledge of those who live in non-traditional dwellings, I read books and articles such as The Mole People by Jennifer Toth. I watched videos of homeless people and visited refuges, and interviewed people who work in the capacity of providing resources. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? The verse novels I chose to read either offered solutions to the queries that arose during the process of writing The Butter Lady or triggered further, deeper thought about why I was drawn to the central figure and those like her and the context in which they lived. Michael Ondaatje, the author of the silhouette biography, Coming Through Slaughter, forced me to think about my own ‘invested relationship’ to the Butter Lady, the ways in which our lives mirrored each other and the impetus that brought to the writing process. In addition, Ondaatje’s utilisation of the historical and the imaginative, heightened my interest and gave my quest a direction. For the ‘invested author’ of The Butter Lady, there was a moment of recognition that the corpse could have been mine – when I read that the Butter Lady had been found dead in the vicinity near to where, I, dressed in a night gown and slippers, was picked up by a young man who asked where I needed to be driven. It was the early seventies, and I was an ‘escapee’ from shock therapy. This sobering moment was the trigger that set-in motion the process of constructing a life narrative with a homeless woman, about whom I knew little, at its centre. Jordie Albiston’s The Hanging of Jean Lee offered a model or such generic choice, with its especially effective use of the resources of poetry privileging voice, orality, performativity, metaphor, near-rhyme and rhythm. Like Coming Through Slaughter, Jordie Albiston’s The Hanging of Jean Lee (1988) is based on fact. The fifty-five poems construct a narrative that traces significant events spanning the thirty-two years of Jean Lee’s life. The text represents people, places and events that shaped Lee’s life 190

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trajectory from birth to execution by hanging at Pentridge for the part she allegedly played in the murder, in Carlton in 1949, of William (Pop) Kent. Albiston uses contextual evidence to flesh out the known details of a controversial life and thus creates a kind of ‘silhouette’. Like Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado, the verse novel constructs a range of focalisers – Jean, her mother, and several minor characters including Jean’s hangman – and also creates fictionalised versions of real documentary sources which she presents as partial evidence open to multiple interpretations. The local place settings, and the multiple perspectives of the characters that inhabit them provide The Hanging of Jean Lee with the kind of contextualised framework that gives a silhouette biography its authenticity. Her verse novel’s structure is testament to a privileging of organic order and cohesion. These verse novels, and the theoretical articles that underpinned them, each contributed to the construction of my work: The Butter Lady: A Silhouette Biography in Verse.

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‘… there is much more subversion and reimagining of the form to come.’ Paul Hetherington has published thirteen collections of poetry and six poetry chapbooks. Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel (2003) was published by Pandanus Books. Hetherington won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award (poetry) for Six Different Windows (UWAP, 2013) and the 1996 Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award for Shadow Swimmer (1995). He was shortlisted for the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in

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the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards for Burnt Umber (UWAP, 2016), and was a finalist in the 2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Competition (UK) and the 2017 Bridport Prize Flash Fiction competition (UK). He was commended in the 2016 Newcastle Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 Periplum Book Competition (UK). In 2015–16 he undertook an Australia Council for the Arts Residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome and in 2012 he was awarded one of two places on the Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland. In 2002 he won a Chief Minister’s ACT Creative Arts Fellowship. His poems have been published in anthologies, journals, magazines and online. He is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI). He is one of the founding editors of the online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He founded the International Prose Poetry Group in 2014.

Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel (2003) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? A number of different ideas drove the composition of the work. It began with a kind of visitation – the voice of the character who became Katherine. She arrived in my life out of nowhere, and eventually vanished again after I was well into writing the verse novel. It seemed to me when I first began to hear her speaking to me that she was communicating from the past – probably the nineteenth century – and I began the work by trying to set the narrative in that time. However, I soon had a strong impulse to make the verse novel contemporary – to give it immediacy and because I wanted the work to be located in twentieth-century drought conditions – so I shifted it into contemporary Australia and, as I did so, Katherine’s voice became fainter and less immediate. Nevertheless, I wanted to stay with the decision to make a contemporary work, and throughout my writing, Katherine’s character continued to interest me most. It’s possible that this interest related to the developing lives of my two daughters, although I’m not sure how strong an influence 193

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that was on the book. It’s also likely that the book relates in a general way to my mother’s experience of growing up in mallee country in South Australia where there was scant rainfall and where her father and mother eventually abandoned their property. The Australian drought in the late 1990s and early 2000s also contributed to the book. It was the background situation behind my depiction of the drought conditions affecting my fictional characters. More broadly, I wanted to explore how families function – and often fail to function well – and how intimate, personal and familial relationships intersect with broader issues of belief and ideological convictions that frequently distort these relationships. I wanted to depict how pressure on familial relationships can cause various kinds of sundering. The book is, additionally, a meditation on human dependency on the environment – in other words, there is a statement about climate change and its threats implicit within the verse novel as a whole. I also wanted to develop my interest in narrative poetry by writing a longer and more sustained poetic narrative than I had previously attempted. I had written a number of poetic sequences – and my book Canvas Light (1998) is a series of four fairly extended and connected verse narratives – but I had never before attempted a single novelistic poem. I aimed to construct a book-length and narrative-driven lyric meditation, combining the lyric impulse with my interest in delineating character and making a story – and, as a result, although I had some very positive reviews of the book, I also received comments from a couple of reviewers suggesting that the finished work lacked sufficient plot, or that it wasn’t as narrative-driven as one might expect from a verse novel. Such comments do not concern me much because that’s the kind of work I wanted to make – a book more like an opera libretto than a traditional verse novel, and one in which the reader is able to achieve immersion in the circumstances, thoughts and feelings of the main characters, rather than being continually pushed forwards by a conspicuous narrative drive. Perhaps the book is fairly introverted, too. I was interested in the inside lives of the characters rather than in mapping incident – although a fair 194

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bit does happen. It’s just that the lyric emphasis within the work frequently stalls the tendency of narrative to press forwards through time. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I wrote the book in parts and the final division into fairly short sections or chapters reflects that process. However, I didn’t write all of the parts of the book in their current order. Instead, I tended to write particular short sequences, exploring one or other preoccupation, or sketching one or other of the characters. Or I concentrated on a particular incident in the book. Later, I put the whole thing together and added other parts. Then I edited and shaped what I had. I wrote the book long-hand into notebooks and then typed the poems out, so it was a fairly intensive process that included a fair bit of revision along the way. I also drove with a friend to Cowra in order to get a better sense of the country where I had set the book, and I brought what I saw on that trip back into my writing. Also, I conducted some research into Cowra’s history – although only enough to serve my poetic purposes. More generally, writing this book required me to give myself to it in a way that’s hard to describe. I had a sense throughout my making of the work that it was writing me – in other words, that all of the characters and the drought that they were experiencing already belonged to the world, and I was writing – or transcribing – it as best I could, thanks to the verse novel’s entry into my life and imagination. It was hard work – the book didn’t come particularly easily – but it felt like a different kind of work from the work I usually do in writing a lyric poem, for example. It almost felt like a process of translation, and a kind of ventriloquism. As a result, I still think of Blood and Old Belief as Katherine’s, Cecilia’s and Jack’s book – as if they never quite gave their story to me but, instead, lent it to me for a time. In my mind, it remains a story that I made out of their words, convictions and beliefs, that were never entirely my words, my convictions or my beliefs. Having said that, I also felt that the book involved a process of negotiating with them. They put up with me making it a contemporary work, for example, even though they may have belonged earlier in time in the original inspiration. 195

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One of the things that has subsequently struck me about the writing process is that I resisted planning the book in advance – or even as I went along, except in the most cursory and informal way. I wanted to discover the story as I went; I wanted the lyric writing and the narrative writing to emerge together and not to overly encumber one another, if that makes sense. And I never wanted to quell or modify the book’s idiosyncrasies because they were so much part of how the work came to me. In this way, there was a stubbornness in the conception of the work that still lingers in its pages. The obduracy of the character’s situations, and of the drought they experienced, demanded a certain kind of obduracy from me as a writer. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? I had to solve a fair few problems. Probably the main issue, as with many extended works, was the imaginative challenge of trying to find a way of structuring and encompassing the full scope of the work. I didn’t want to tell the reader too much, because my idea was to write a book that functioned through suggestion as much as through explicit storytelling, so questions I had to address included: how much do I need to say, and what are the ways I should find to say it? As a result, a key issue was how to organise the book in terms of who says what, and I eventually decided to include a third-person narrative voice along with the voices of the three main characters. I wanted to write the book in blank verse while also allowing each of the characters to speak differently. To get this right required some experimentation with the writing, and some revision of already-drafted passages. Cecilia – Jack’s wife and Katherine’s mother – speaks in traditional blank verse (i.e. iambic pentameter), partly because she is somewhat formal and elaborate in her speech patterns, and absorbed in her personal history, anxieties and beliefs. Katherine speaks in iambic tetrameter, in a less convoluted manner than her mother, but not unlike her in her level of self-absorption. Jack speaks, rather tersely, in iambic trimeter. He is closely connected to the Australian landscape and alienated from much of his life, and the shorter three-beat lines suit his circumstances. 196

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The narrator’s voice shifts in its emphases and meter, depending on its subject matter and how closely aligned it is at any point to particular characters and their stories. To get the narrative voice to work as I wanted wasn’t a huge ‘problem’ but I spent a lot of time trying to refine it, and adapt it to its different purposes. I also worked hard to get the balance between first- and third-person utterance functioning. I needed to decide what ‘happened’ in the book and why, which also took some puzzling out given that, as I have said, I resisted working this out in advance. The book unfolded more-or-less intuitively – and even in its subsequent structuring and re-structuring – and, as a result, the process of composition felt a bit like getting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in place, including all the pieces of sky – I wanted the work to be dense but also to stretch into depictions of landscape and space that worked in counterpoint to its somewhat claustrophobic tenor. Mind you, this space and drought and dry heat was also oppressive, and that was one of my aims – to give the work room to breathe, but not to allow the reader an escape from the ongoing crises that it depicts. In this way, I guess one of the problems I tried to solve was how to make an uncomfortable work readable – a key part of which related to my sympathetic depiction of Katherine’s character. More generally, because the characters ‘told’ me a lot of what happened as I wrote the work, part of my problem-solving was to remember to listen to what they were saying to me; and, in doing so, not to override the concerns they were expressing by introducing too many extraneous ideas or tropes. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I’ve mentioned some of these techniques above. I suppose the biggest decision in terms of technique was to choose to write in meter rather than free verse – but I wanted the meter to ‘sound’ fairly natural, and to have some of the qualities of real speech, while also investing the lines with a poetic tension that connected to the characters’ own tensions and anxieties. In terms of narrative technique, my use of the third-person narrative voice was essential. It enabled me to ‘tell’ parts of the story in a fairly direct and 197

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often pithy way, while also allowing me to set up a to-and-fro between the overarching narrative voice and the first-person voices of each of the characters. Other techniques I employed were those connected with the need to construct some narrative drive in the work, while also creating its lyric dimensions. I looked to give the incidents in the work human drama allied to the forward unfolding of storytelling, but simultaneously to slow the work down as often as I needed to, in order to allow the lyric emphasis to come to the fore. I established the importance of the setting of the work at its outset, including providing colour in my depictions of place and landscape. And I sought to keep the language of the poem sufficiently condensed and figurative so that the reader would readily understand that the work was primarily poetic in its concerns – which is to say that the narrative dimension of the work was not going to be its main emphasis. Rather, I was inviting the reader to spend time exploring the characters and their situations through the work’s lyric gestures. Blood and Old Belief is very much character-driven and yet the characters are all relatively isolated from one another, so I had to find a way of making each of them independently interesting. My solution was to give them a fair bit of space and time to speak about themselves and their circumstances – in what amounts to various forms of soliloquy. This means that they are connected closely through their articulation of related poetic themes and tropes; and through their expression of shared preoccupations. Another issue I considered was how enjambment might work in the verse novel. I employed a good deal of it, to keep the poetry moving and, more generally, I tried to make the meters I was using as flexible as possible – not only to reduce any sense of formality that might come with writing in meter, but also to create a sense that the poetry reflected the different personalities of the main characters. I tried to keep the writing fairly taut and condensed most of the time. I also imagined the Australian landscape and the work’s overall sense of place as like a fourth main ‘character’, so I took some trouble to create a sense of this landscape that was dynamic, shifting and relatively detailed. 198

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If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I was always equally interested in the narrative strategies and poetic strategies that I mentioned earlier, and I suppose I believe that they must be created together in a verse novel if that novel is going to be a poetic as well as a narrative success. Some verse novels aim at a fast pace and at building narrative speed and complex plot development, and I admire many such works. However, not all of them place poetry at the centre of their enterprise. I think it’s a difficult balance to try to get right – to find a way of making something genuinely poetic that extends into discursiveness and presents a narrative arc. In terms of my own priorities, I always wanted the narrative aspects to take their cue, as it were, from the poetic preoccupations and compulsions within the work. I wanted to make the work resonate poetically in a way where themes and tropes presented in one part of the work would connect to and develop those presented in another part. In this sense, I conceived of the work as an extended form of lyric utterance rather than as a ‘novel’, per se – although I note that many contemporary novels, even those written in prose, increasingly tend to be ‘poetic’, so I guess the lyric impulse isn’t really inimical to novel writing. I wanted Blood and Old Belief to take the poetic into the quotidian world in order to see the quotidian transformed – and to try to show how the poetic inheres in everyone’s lives whether they notice it or not. More than anything else, I wanted the book to tell a set of connected stories, but to do so with a lyric emphasis – by which I mean that I wanted these stories, as much as possible, to inhabit the timelessness of lyric utterance as well as to be about particular people in a particular place and time. Overall, there were undoubtedly times when I wanted to emphasise narrative, such as at the opening of the work; and other moments when I tried to bring the writing almost to a complete stop, in narrative terms, in order to emphasise the state of mind, or situation, of one of the characters. I believe that the lyric is especially good at delineating states of quandary 199

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or ambiguity, and I tried to use the lyric writing in that way. I guess I saw the work as ebbing and flowing between a kind of lyric stasis and moments of action and development. Even at the work’s conclusion, both of these impulses exist in a kind of tension. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? My idea was that the book’s poetic and narrative effects would go hand in hand and that the particularities of the narrative I was telling would be absorbed into the lyric expression I was aiming to create. This does mean that the book is neither traditional verse novel nor is it made out of traditional lyrics – although, as I have indicated, the lyric impulse is central to a number of the poems within the work. It is, I suppose, something of a hybrid kind of work, but not too far removed from some of the impetus that drives poetic drama, or opera in that it attempts to present a heightened sense of experience while also closely connecting to the quotidian and the domestic. I hoped that the characters would take on a mythopoeic dimension (in a small way), as people who were part of a larger environment and representative of issues that were bigger than they were. And I wanted the book to speak directly about some of the complexities of intimacy – to say some of the things that are hard to express about how people try and often fail to live together. This matters to me because it is such an important issue for so many people and yet it is no so often spoken of in English language literary works in a poetic register. I wanted to understand something about how people fail to connect even when connection may well be what is most valuable to them, and may be the thing that might save them. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I enjoy the verse novel because so much can be done with the form. The combination of narrative tropes and narrative drive with the poetic allows a writer to work in ways that are otherwise difficult to access in the contemporary world. Once, most literary writing was in one or other form of poetry, and the verse novel reminds us that such forms of speaking are still possible; that the poetic is able to reach much more widely than the personal lyric, and is able to engage in highly suggestive storytelling. 200

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I suspect that the verse novel will find its way back into contemporary literature as forms of writing evolve and as genres continue to become more fluid. But what the verse novel will be is impossible to predict. Various contemporary writers, such as Anne Carson, are already subverting the conventional idea of what a verse novel might look like, and I’m sure that there is much more subversion and reimagining of the form to come. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Many of the verse novels I have read have undoubtedly influenced my work in one way or another, although I wasn’t conscious of emulating any particular work when composing Blood and Old Belief. I have always enjoyed reading verse novels, including Byron’s Don Juan (if you can describe this work as a verse novel), Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, or even the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, which seems to me to be almost as much proto-verse novel as epic poem. There are many recent Australian examples of verse novels that I have enjoyed, including works by the Australians Dorothy Porter, Judy Johnson, Lisa Jacobson and Les Murray, along with internationally well-known works such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate – and many others – but, as I have indicated, the influences on Blood and Old Belief also came from other quarters, including opera. I suspect that another influence on my verse novel were the ancient Greek tragedies. It’s not that Blood and Old Belief in any way tries to enter their territory or methods, but I have long been drawn to the implacable way many of those works unfold, and the way in which once a reader is inside the logic of the plays there is a sense that nothing remains untouched by the work’s interior logic and the unfolding machinery of the action. This appeals to me because it gets at crucial ways in which experience operates, and the irredeemable nature of so much of what we do and say and know. And so much ‘action’ in these plays is the action of speaking poetically. We see people doing things but we also hear about what they have done; or about the implications of former action, and the complexities are thus as much verbal complexities as they are the complexities of action 201

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that what we see and witness. The Greeks have always reminded me that speaking is action. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? I don’t always have a clear sense of what reading works by other people teaches me. But, in general terms, reading almost any respectable verse novel will indicate that the form requires a certain range and depth to come off, and a willingness to venture into more expansive territory than most lyric poems attempt. The form’s versatility and its protean tendencies have often struck me, especially the ways in which verse novels remind us that we can speak about anything we like in poetry; and that poetry remains a viable way of addressing the quotidian and the expansive, as well as the lyrical. I like the ways in which verse novels often travel through significant reaches of space and time, and frequently attempt to gather a broad sense of experience that conjures a significant sense of space-time continuity. Verse novels also often re-collect experience, bringing what is past back into a new narrative present, and connecting the idea of what its characters know to larger patterns or issues over which they have little or no control. Pushkin does this brilliantly in Eugene Onegin, turning Onegin’s cynicism and world-weariness against him in a simple yet brilliantly effective manoeuvre, demonstrating how much Onegin is hamstrung by his own limitations and decisions. More generally, I especially enjoy the ways in which verse novels bring storytelling and poetry together, and thus encourage the development of a narrative ‘voice’ for the work. Most verse novels are as interesting for the way their ‘voice’ is inflected, or the voices of their characters are inflected, as they are in terms of the events they narrate. Thinking about this reminds me that there is no ‘right’ way to approach the form. Every verse novel needs to find its own way of speaking and its own emphases.

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Christine Evans

‘… some stories need the verse form to come into being.’ Christine Evans’ award-winning plays have been produced in her native Australia, the US and the UK. Selected production highlights include You Are Dead. You Are Here, developed with Joseph Megel and Jared Mezzocchi (HERE Arts, NYC, 2013), Trojan Barbie at the American Repertory Theater, the Garage Theatre, Playbox Theatre (UK) and Charing Cross Theatre (UK), the

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plays Weightless, Mothergun and All Souls’ Day at Perishable Theatre, Slow Falling Bird at Crowded Fire, San Francisco and at Darwin Theatre Company; and My Vicious Angel at Belvoir St. Theatre, Vitalstatistix, and the Adelaide International Festival of the Arts, all in Australia. Her plays are published by Samuel French (Trojan Barbie) Smith and Kraus (Best Monologues, 2010) and TheaterForum. NoPassport published her anthology, War Plays, in 2013. Selected honours include a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Award, two MacDowell Colony residencies, a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Fulbright Award, Perishable’s International Women’s Playwriting Competition (2000 and 2002), the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, Plays for the 21st Century Award, the Rella Lossy Playwriting Award, and 2009 and 2013 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) Playwriting Fellowships.

Cloudless (2015) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Cloudless (UWA Publishing, 2015) is a polyphonic novel about disparate lives colliding one hot summer beside a public swimming pool. It took me by surprise. I had absolutely no intention of writing a novel, let alone a novel in verse. I usually write plays. However, I was at a tenday silent writing retreat in Texas, led by playwright Erik Ehn, who encouraged us to ‘follow your writing; don’t make your writing follow you.’ I wanted my writing to ‘follow me’ into my next play, but instead, in the quiet and the dry heat and beauty of the landscape, my mind returned to long-ago Perth summers of my childhood, and a different kind of writing emerged. Since the retreat was silent, I wasn’t hearing the American voices that usually surround me, living as I do in the US. This created space for the sounds and voices of my earlier life in Australia to echo in my inner landscape. When I started writing, my characters’ voices were laconic and dry, the lines were short, and the form just started unfolding that way on the page. So – I followed it. I’d say the silence and dry heat of the 204

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landscape, then imagery and memory, then the visual layout of the lines on the page, were driving forces, respectively. The novel emerged from sensememory, rather than from an initial idea. But then, as often happens with my playwriting, some seeds of real events and places shaped the story. It’s set around Beatty Park Aquatic Center in North Perth, where I spent many hours in childhood; across the road is Perth’s first women’s refuge for women fleeing domestic violence. I worked there briefly in the ’80s (it’s since moved) and scenes and characters from that time are burned indelibly into my memory, such as the day we workers took the mums, and all the refuge kids, over the road to the swimming pool. The urban swimming-pool setting gave me a way to write the hard brilliance of the light in Perth, and some of the harsh truths hidden in its shadows – the racism; the venal, money-driven development that turned the city into wind tunnels; violence against women. It also opened ways to celebrate ordinary beauty and its mysteries: the summer lives of children; the moral struggles of a bus driver; the magpie that guards a small child at night; the runaway teenage mum who returns, decades later, to the place she lost her son. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? With joy and looseness, followed by a sense of vertiginous terror – what on earth am I doing? I’m a playwright! I wrote the first draft pretty quickly – it was really two quite separate halves, with a thin connecting thread. I knew early on that it was a novel about place and displacement. Mapping my fiction on to the landscape of a hot, dry Perth summer gave me some bones to build on. One of my characters, Kevin, is a bus driver, who provides a kind of clock and map and working rhythm to this landscape. Then I have three Indigenous characters from Geraldton, who are lost in Perth; and an autistic girl, Bat Girl, and her family who live down South. Mapping each of their journeys, and the places where their lives collided and drew apart, gave me a loose architecture for the story. Once I had a first draft, I shared it with T Greenwood, a novelist and 205

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freelance editor, who suggested weaving characters from the second half into the first part of the novel. So, I did that, then worked with Australian dramaturg Peter Matheson to integrate the various threads and make sure the imagery resonated throughout the book. It has a magical-realist strand; an important focus towards final drafts was strengthening the ‘real-world’ anchors for those magical flights. I wrote a lot of drafts! For me, an image or scene that concludes the work often comes early. I had my ending by the end of the first draft – Sally Jo, an Indigenous teenage mother, returns twenty years later to the bus stop where her young son, Jerome, disappeared. It’s a bitter-sweet and elegiac moment. It came to me as a vision, which is nice when it happens – but then there’s all the hard work of back-writing and filling in story, so that by the time we arrive at this ending, it’s earned. Finding Sally Jo’s story, and writing it, took much longer than ‘seeing’ this ending. Making the thing move in time – that’s the hard work. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Yes – integrating the first and second halves of the story; keeping narrative tension and connection going with eight different characters and points of view. There was also a lot of line-by-line work. Narrative is primary in Cloudless, but the soul of the book is in the language, so balancing those aspects took a lot of concentration. I wanted the imagery to carry the emotional subtext of the book. I don’t have a background in poetry, nor do I consider myself a poet, but I am a trained musician, and I had to rely closely on my ear. It was slow work. I read it aloud to myself, walking around the room. I was listening for the language to sing. I also had an interesting conundrum as the novel drew close to publication. I sent the MS to a list of agents. Several came close, and one major international agent would have signed me – but only if I rewrote it from verse to prose, since novels in verse are hard to sell. I thought about the offer very seriously, because the possibility of a larger readership and international sales was attractive – but at that point, was in discussion with UWA Publishing. I decided to go with my initial vision of the book rather 206

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than rewrite it. I could have done it, but I felt I needed to see through the impulse that had generated the book in the first place – a joyful ‘following’ of the writing, which appeared to me in the verse form. It was a hard choice, because the likelihood is that very few people will ever read my book, given that UWAP is small and local (they make beautiful books, by the way). I believe it deserves, and could reach, a much wider readership. But the book lives in the form that it came to me, and that gives me joy. I don’t want to insult the muse. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I think my background as playwright really infuses the book. I wanted to create a polyphonic work, locating the narrative drive as much in the interconnections between the characters as in the more traditional ‘hero’s journey’ arc. The book is written in an intimate third person; each section is named for one of the characters, which means that point-of-view rotates. I wanted the story to emerge like a puzzle from the sum of these disparate (and necessarily incomplete) points of view, and in the gap between what the reader gleans and what each character knows. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? There’s a poetic vision to the structure of the book: it maps story onto space. Poems are architectural in this way: they make shapes on the page. I wanted the narrative to carry the book, and the poetic strategies to work by stealth, as it were, and crucially, through the juxtaposition of elements. Having said that, I do love (and indulge) the power of language to evoke landscape and interiority within the same movement – the mind links images to make meaning. Cloudless, grounded as it is within multiple points of view, is also image-dense. I tried to listen to my characters, to draw on their own sense of language, rather than fully impose a unifying style on them. Some of my them (Bat Girl, who drives the second half of the novel) are quite idiosyncratic. Or they’re very young (Jerome is four). This means that Bat Girl and Jerome’s 207

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sections have more magical elements than the others, and work by a poetic logic of association. There’s not much overt rhyme in Cloudless, but there’s a lot of assonance and near-rhyme – and a kind of rhyming of images that recur in different characters’ stories, such as the brilliance of light bouncing off water, a black snake slipping out of view, and so on. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted readers to be absorbed in the story and its characters, as in a dream or a memory of summer: a bit brighter, more mythic, moving in a more cloudlike way, than quotidian experience. The novel evokes childhood experience, with its mix of children and adult characters, but it’s written for adult readers. It is powerfully about place. It is light on the surface and deep underneath: I wanted the resonance between elements and individual stories to linger long after finishing the book. Tragic things happen in the book, but it’s also a story of love, connection, beauty, the unseen world and its strings that bind us together. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I don’t have a fixed view on that, except that I really enjoy it as a reader. I love white space on the page, and the necessary compression and suggestiveness that the form commands. You don’t just read ‘between the lines,’ but in the dance between the line, the verse and the page. It’s similar to playwriting in the sense that it’s architectural: the reader (or actors/ director/designers/audience) has a role in its completion. I believe that form and content are symbiotic; the final form emerges from the dance between the material, the writer and the way language itself resonates in the ear and appears on the page. In our current era of book industry anxiety, however, reflected in the need for driving plots, accessible story-telling and the book club book, I think there’s nervousness about how ‘readable’ the verse novel is. Publishers don’t want to scare off readers. This is ironic, given that the verse novel is now primarily a young adult and children’s book form, and those young readers don’t seem to be intimidated by it. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I really love Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. As a playwright, I’m 208

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deeply influenced by the ancient Greeks that Carson, as a classics scholar, is steeped in – the scope and polyphony of the stories to which they return, over and over; the rewriting; the sense of the gods and their role in human lives. The mix of elevated and quotidian story inspired me. I was also moved and astounded by Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray. Otherwise, I’d say that poetry, crossover fiction such as Ali Smith’s Hotel World, and visual art are stronger influences for me. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? My experience, particularly with the two novels mentioned above, is that the ‘novel’ part is the engine, which drives each book along, and the language and its form gives each work its particular angularity, resonance and suggestiveness. There are book-length poems that work differently, foregrounding the verse and allowing looser, more associative, connections than narrative (I appreciate many works in this mode, such as Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History). However, the heart of a novel beats through character(s) undergoing a transformative experience. It doesn’t have to be a forced, faux-Aristotelian one; we just need to travel with them as life de-rails them, and they struggle to find a way back, forward or sideways. And to return to form and content: some stories need the verse form to come into being. For instance, Ros Barber’s wonderful novel The Marlowe Papers is in iambic pentameter, not for its own sake, but because her protagonist, Christopher Marlowe, is the real Shakespeare on the run, and that’s how he’d have been writing.

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Melissa Bruce

‘… the verse novel offers a high stakes game, yet one worth taking the risk to read or write.’ Melissa Bruce holds an MA in Writing (University of Technology Sydney), a Diploma in Directing (National Institute of Dramatic Art) and a B.Ed. in Drama, Media Studies, Language & Literature (Victoria College, Rusden). Melissa has worked as a theatre director (inc. Sydney Theatre Company, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Griffin Theatre Company,) stage manager (inc. Royal Shakespeare Company, Victoria State Opera) and writing teacher (inc. University of Technology Sydney, The University of Notre Dame, 210

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The University of Sydney Centre for Continuing Education, NSW Writers’ Centre). Through her business, ‘MB Performance Consulting’ (est. 1997), Melissa has provided individual and company training to a wide variety of clients, helping to improve written and verbal communications. Melissa has worked as an editor (inc. Sydney PEN Magazine, University of Technology Sydney Anthology) and has written and directed stage, radio, and educational plays (inc. STC, ABC, ATYP, Big hART) and published short stories, poetry and essays in various Australian anthologies and journals. The Australian Society of Authors awarded Melissa a mentorship to develop her debut novel, Picnic at Mount Disappointment (Ginninderra Press, 2017), which was Highly Commended by the Society of Women Writers NSW, and Winner of the 2017 Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Fiction.

Picnic at Mount Disappointment (2017) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I had an interest in exploring the teenage experience and voice of disillusionment; that dangerous liminal phase we call ‘coming of age’. I live on the cliffs of South Head, near the famous Sydney suicide spot named The Gap, where, on average, one person a week leaps to their death. Recently, two teenage girls jumped hand in hand. Over the past two decades my role as teacher and mentor to many teenage writing students has placed me in close proximity with the verbal and written expression of their inner turmoil. And of course, I remember my own. One of my great challenges in committing to write this book is related to context. I questioned the value and relevance of stories by and about privileged white women in a world filled with suffering silenced minority voices, but some of these young people taking their lives are from wealthy white western homes and schools like mine. Coming of age is no picnic, for anyone. Add the current context of a suffocating planet, megalomaniacal

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leaders, a culture of accumulation, of celebrity, and social media’s demands for popularity through dangerous comparison and trolling. It isn’t hard to imagine a sense of hopelessness about the world and an extreme sense of ‘not enough-ness’ about the self. Increasingly, all kinds of kids are being medicated and hospitalised for unsurprising conditions like anxiety, depression, addiction and anorexia. I describe the modern western umbrella condition as The Cry of the Western Soul. I know this cry and it is the story I felt compelled to tell. As a teen, I found great comfort and life-saving identification in classic confessional Bildungsromane like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I was living in a broken family, on a country property in the pre-digital era and, like so many isolated teenagers, I confided my unexpressed angst in a daily diary. Two days to a page. So there wasn’t much space to unravel confusion, maintain sanity and assuage the pain of isolation. For ten years I wrote journals and then for another ten years I kept them in a locked metal box, to protect them from fire. Until a burglary, when the years of unseen words were stolen from that tempting locked box. Perhaps Picnic at Mount Disappointment had its origins there, in some unconscious desire to reclaim that teenager’s voice. Decades after I lived on a farm at the foot of Mount Disappointment, I published two short pieces inspired by the experience of those years. I then read DBC Pierre’s novel Vernon God Little, narrated by a young American boy, and his voice of lost innocence unlocked the box and set free the voice of the girl who would later become my protagonist. Mount Disappointment was named by explorers Hume and Hovell in 1824. They had expected to gain perspective on propitious grazing fields and to see in the distance Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay but at the peak of their injurious and argumentative climb, they could not see the wood for the trees. That seemed a lovely metaphor for the difficult stage of coming of age. Various personal and literary influences led to the crazy gamble of creating a debut novel in some kind of ‘verse style’. From the age of nine, I lived with my father and the lifeline to my mother, who lived overseas 212

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for a while, was through airletters and postcards. Like the daily journals, a cocktail of explosive emotions required reportage in the briefest form. In order to be creatively brief with my hyperbole, this required me to practise poetic licence and techniques. Poetry was my first literary love, beginning with Dr Seuss and Christopher Robin. My passion for lyric form became wide in taste, topic and style and (mostly secretly) I wrote reams of it. There was something radical and freeing about the space on the page, breaking punctuation rules, the visual pleasure in the shapes of stanzas, addressing the essence and the heartbeat of poetic rhythm. Much to the bewilderment of my Year 6 class, I memorised and performed Alfred Noyes’ poem ‘The Highwayman’ and I am still haunted by the rhythm of this sad tale. Drama was my next love, particularly the more experimental poetic works – the Escheresque absurdity of Beckett, the Kafkaesque nightmare of Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis, The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot, the pauses of Pinter. After graduating with a B.Ed. in Drama, I stage-managed for the Victorian State Opera an adaptation of the epic verse narrative by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was weeks and weeks in rehearsals with the rhythm of all that water everywhere. My ear remained tuned to poetic rhythms when I stage-managed for the Royal Shakespeare Company. For six months we toured England and Ireland with The Comedy of Errors and The Tragedy of Hamlet. Five nights a week I waited in the wings with Yorick’s skull, amongst other props, and by the end of the season found myself speaking and thinking in iambic pentameter. On completing a Diploma in Directing from NIDA, my debut public production for Griffin Theatre Company was of an abstract, poetic play called Water Daughter by Sean Monro. And my debut production with the Sydney Theatre Company was Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, which is written with unusually formatted, overlapping dialogue. Later, when invited to direct for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, I chose another poetic play called The Swan by Elizabeth Egloff. Snippets of poetry and rhythm float like cells in my bloodstream and are part of my inner 213

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dialogue. And with amazement, I recently discovered a direct ancestral line on my mother’s side, to a sibling of Shakespeare, though the genius has been somewhat diluted. The first verse novel I recall reading as a young person made a powerful impact. archy’s life of mehitabel by Don Marquis is narrated by a ‘free verse’ poet turned cockroach (now living in purgatory) who cannot reach the typewriter shift key. It is delightfully unpunctuated. There seems something irreverent and untamed about a verse narrative whilst ironically, simultaneously being so carefully and economically considered. I find it an intriguing and enjoyable juxtaposition. So although I did not set out to write Picnic at Mount Disappointment as a verse novel, in contemplating the various influences that led to its creation, perhaps there is nothing surprising about the evolution of its form. Finally, as a writing teacher, I work hard to inspire non-readers to read. The text-message-twitter generation’s concentration is diverted into bite-sized clicks and swipes. How do we inspire young people using digital platforms to read sustained narratives? How do we hold attention? Of course, a well-told story is key, but how to lure (particularly teen) readers away from the distractions of messaging on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook and immerse them in a long-form story? Picnic at Mount Disappointment is set prior to the digital era so perhaps it was an instinctive response to juxtapose a narrative set in the past with the telling of it in a new, more familiar format. And in today’s information-overload, perhaps it was an unconscious desire to offer some peace with a little more space on the page. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? During my theatre directing studies at NIDA, I attended a masterclass facilitated by Richard Wherrett, then Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company. He praised the results of my work but described my process as ‘circuitously perverse’. My writing process is no different. Picnic at Mount Disappointment found its form after a lengthy exploration period. It reminds me of a line from Edward Albee’s play, The Zoo Story, about a 214

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person sometimes having to go a long way out of their way to traverse a short distance. And maybe an author has to write a great deal in order to create a work of brevity. Apparently the original version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land contained almost twice as much material as the final published version.  Along the way, there were many stages, influences and obstacles that helped shape the final work. Each time my canoe bumped the rocky sides of the river it would reawaken me to seek the central organic flow. Initially, responding to a callout for ABC Radio National’s Country Viewpoint, I submitted two brief non-fiction stories and was invited to record both to air. This encouraged me to further explore the same material. My reading of Vernon God Little had reinvigorated a pre-existing affinity with the theme and voice of lost innocence and disillusionment. It unleashed the voice of this work and I handwrote around 70,000 words of non-fiction in brief recollected scenes. In order to invite a richness of inspiration and evaluation to the process, I commenced a Master of Arts in Professional Writing (UTS) and used these scenes to explore the material and form. The first subject was ‘Narrative Writing’ and I developed one of the scenes into a short story entitled ‘Wandong Wingding’. I felt encouraged to commit to the voice and theme when Cardigan Press published it in their Allnighter anthology. In preparation for the Novel Writing subject, I drew on my collection of non-fiction scenes to write around 100,000 words of the material in prose form, submitting the first 30,000 for review. This received all-round positive feedback regarding the voice, ‘it sings’, but also included a horribly helpful tiny yellow post-it note stuck on the front page by inspirational author Debra Adelaide, with a small question and a large problem. ‘Plot?’ Now, I love contemporary dance, non-verbal puppetry, arrhythmic music, avant-garde poetry and abstract art, but I also understand that a voice without a story can be like a picnic short of a sandwich. Believable and engaging narrative is important to me. Real life can be awfully plotless. I decided to veer well off the proverbial non-fiction track and from thereon 215

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charged determinably into fiction. I started again, deleted pages of words, creating character arcs and designing overall narrative shape for my new protagonist, Lucinda Smeaton. By then I’d committed to writing a novel, but the following subject was the Short Story where I was blown away by the madly brilliant lengthy footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s collection, Interviews with Hideous Men. The feedback on my own work however, was returned from author Tegan Bennet Daylight, with the ‘over-writing’ criticism. For revenge, I aggressively wrote the next two stories with as few words as feasibly possibly. Both received High Distinctions and were immediately published. By the time I reached the preparatory subject for the final Masters’ Project, my half-written fictional prose novel was a little weary, like a horse taken out one too many times on the same old trail. In quiet desperation I recalled the experience from the Short Story class and, as an experiment, I rewrote the entire first chapter in as few words as possible. Miraculously, the horse bolted. It galloped off beyond the place where it had been stalled before. It was like recognising an interior dialogue that had always talked and thought in short-lined, rhythmic form. I couldn’t stop. I even wrote emails and cards like that for a while. I still would. If I could. When I submitted this ‘experiment’ for review, great enthusiasm was shared for the voice, style, shape and narrative momentum but just when I was celebrating the relief at having found the most organic form for the cry of this teenager’s soul, author Tony Macris sympathetically shared that it could be impossible to publish because nobody publishes verse novels. I didn’t like the highfalutin label ‘verse novel’ or the doomed prediction and chose not to let that in. Besides, I thought, you can’t return a baby simply because it doesn’t seem to fit the world. By great chance, my final Masters’ Project supervisor was Gabrielle Carey, co-author of Puberty Blues, a writer with a passion for the experimental brilliance of James Joyce. Sharing immediate affinity with and support for the draft, she nicknamed it ‘Puberty Blues goes Bush’ and 216

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was the first to refer to it in the YA genre. After concluding the Masters, I applied for and was grateful to be awarded an ASA Mentorship so we could continue to develop this work together. During a week’s retreat at Varuna, The Writers’ House, I took a long Govetts Leap walk where the mountain gods offered an epiphanous gift by inspiring the thematic title and also two key scenes (one almost entirely true and the other entirely fiction) that would end up becoming the invisible pillars that held the temple of the story together. During that delicious retreat, I created a massive Hume and Hovell-style map, which helped me sharpen the character arcs, and build suspense and narrative momentum so that the story, comprising lyric and narrative elements, became as balanced as possible. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Writing this book finally confirmed for me that the mega-problemsolving-decision-making challenges are not an aberration from but rather ARE in fact the art of writing, which reminds me of all of those questions and revisions and decisions in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. The usual decisions had to be made: Non-fiction/Fiction? The latter won due to the need to build character arcs, dramatic suspense and realise satisfactory narrative plot and momentum. First person/third person? The former won due to the desire to invite the reader intimately into the unreliable and turbulent inner world of the troubled teen. Present tense/past tense? The former won due to the liveliness which I thought would help engage younger readers. It brought the action of a story set in the past into the present moment. And in the absence of a retrospective tone, let the reader feel, alongside the protagonist, a sense of uncertainty about the future. How to differentiate language styles between Lucinda’s self-written journal entries, interior thought-monologue, dialogue and awkward 217

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attempts at poetry. Structure, chronology and backstory – explained in next question. The decisions were made through a process of trial and error until the work felt fluid, engaging, logical and sustainable. Key narrative decisions were made in response to the protagonist’s character arc. The work went down a few dead-end bunny burrows. For a long time, Lucinda was recovering in awfully dull ways from a broken leg which could not have mended before the story’s end, so I had to unbreak it. The property fire initially claimed the family home, but I needed the house for the final chapters, so the fire was extinguished sooner. There were also questions relating to how long Lucinda went missing and later who or what might be shot. These were also decided through trial and error. The whole process led to an affinity I now share with a concept I’ve heard discussed by other authors such as George Saunders and Elizabeth Gilbert. They suggest an idea might pre-exist, and that our job as an artist is to somehow retrieve and arrange the pieces, like a puzzle, into the awaiting picture, this ephemeral vision we’ve had of something already there – like a sculptor chipping at rough marble to discover the statue beneath. After the story flowed out in verse-style form, perhaps the biggest decision was whether to retain it. I had clearly been warned about the prejudices and challenges associated with the form which were confirmed when my agent supplied me with a souvenir collection of publisher responses in different versions of this: I can see why you are excited about this. Melissa’s story is very powerful, and I’ve had some interesting discussions about it with one of our editors here who has also read it (and loved it) … I love verse novels – the immediacy/simplicity of them – but the commercial reality is that they are incredibly hard to sell. (Pan Macmillan) Various learned persons supportive of my creation sympathised with the dilemma but suggested I rewrite the novel in prose form. This seemed 218

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the most logical option but quite aside from the arduous time it would have taken, I knew from all the trial and error that the story was now in its ultimate organic form. This was how it wanted to be born. This was how it came out fully formed. I held on. Eventually, I was thrilled to discover an independent publisher, Ginninderra Press, whose flavour for Australian poetry rendered them bravely unafraid of a verse-style novel. The next hurdle was worse. In its original format, with sometimes a word or two to a line, dear publisher apologised, kindly explaining that my lengthy page count meant that a paperback copy would cost well over forty dollars and that I might want to find another publisher if I didn’t want to compromise the integrity of my story. Horrified to be reminded of the harsh commercial reality of art, I calculated that to render it ‘cost-effective’, I’d need to cut 30,000 words from a 68,000-word novel. Having already created the entire story in as few words as possible and having already exhausted other local publishers with their commercial concerns, this left me with no apparent hope. But with ridiculous positivity I said, ‘That’s fine, leave it with me.’ Off to the country with my Catastrophe to welcome from the Literary Gods a tricky solution. Word by word, beat by beat, adhering to rhythm reading aloud I elongated and re-spaced line after line without losing a word or integrity 219

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’til the story met the ‘cost-effective’ page count conclusion. Off to the country with my Catastrophe to welcome from the Literary Gods a tricky solution. Word by word, beat by beat, adhering to rhythm, reading aloud I elongated and re-spaced line after line without losing a word or integrity ’til the story met the ‘cost-effective’ page count conclusion. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? The most important poetic element of this work has always been the rhythm. The story is written in free verse with occasional rhyme to highlight a point or feeling. New lines, spacing and stanzas were arranged for rhythm and emphasis in an effort to mirror the narrator’s experience and feeling. New lines were only capitalised to begin a new sentence. It was a risky path to choose a first person, present tense, fifteenyear-old disgruntled narrator. If the reader was to ride the journey with Lucinda, her voice had to be sustainable, consistent and bearable to read. I made her an unreliable narrator, prone to hyperbole, whose confusion and exaggeration might enlist both pathos and amusement. I hoped that her often inaccurate interpretations might invite readers to remain alert to unravelling her truth. I wanted to create a naturalistic intimacy with her stream-ofconsciousness interior monologue and also to highlight her experience of isolation and separateness. I used what David Lodge in The Art of Fiction describes as ‘teenage skaz’. The reader could be right in there with her but 220

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also sense her aloneness amidst the noise of that tangled inner conversation. Her experience of separateness was further emphasised by the use of metonymic labels for people such as her stepfamily (Bigstep, Midstep, Littlestep) and lovers (Twin One, Twin Two). By the end of the story, she is more able to connect and see others as individuals with their own complex interiors, and calls everyone by their given names. To further highlight Lucinda’s isolation I used personification in relation to the ‘friend’ she names Empty Ness, a wind vent on the roof with whom she keeps solitary company, gains perspective and hears whispers from ancient ancestors. She anthropomorphises her horses, particularly when alone, and symbolically names the first one White Sails, alluding ironically to her frustration in being stuck inland on a farm without a driver’s licence. I chose a chronologically linear narrative within a circular frame, so the end mirrors the beginning but in reverse. Lucinda travels to and from Wandong in a Volvo car with rear-facing seats, arriving facing backwards and departing facing forwards. Her perspective has turned 180 degrees. The intention was to create a sense that minimal events had occurred in the big picture whilst monumental tectonic shifts had occurred within. Backstory was required to give context to the family’s current situation but for immediate engagement, I chose to begin the narrative on the moving train, as they say, rather than back at the station, and to bring in the backstory a little later. I planted foreshadowing devices, even literally including ‘Chekhov’s gun’, to build suspense and concern for potential dangers, particularly in relation to Lucinda’s unreasonable goals, her promiscuity, increasing angst and also the vulnerability of their property to fire. I used dramatic irony in the title and location. Lucinda’s farm is based at the foot of Mount Disappointment, a place of unrealised expectations, and this small mountain is situated along the Great Dividing Range, mirroring the troubles of her broken family and her sense of being wrong, even if she happens to have been born on the ‘right’ side of the tracks.

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In the distance you can see Mount Disappointment. Promising.55 Imagery was important in terms of atmosphere and symbolism and to create a pleasing balance between her inner thoughts and her outer world. It was also important to help contrast her life on the farm with her city visits or between her expansive modern brick home and her new friend’s dairy-farming fibro cottage, where the latter harbours a more nurturing environment. I employed intertextuality to highlight Lucinda’s romantic fantasy; that life might be like the movies she’s seen, and wants to be cast in. I alluded to contemporary Australian works which had been adapted into film at the time of the story’s setting, such as My Brilliant Career, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Man from Snowy River. These enabled me to set up the precipitous potential for a disillusioned fall, a hard yet necessary landing in a less Kodachrome-tinted reality. And I created the story in a series of active scenes, in order to bring a cinematic quality to the here and now of her daily life. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? I desired a balanced pas de deux. I read every scene aloud to check for narrative flow, rhythm and sound. The verse-style form was the vehicle, the carriage for the narrative journey. The carriage needed to provide the most comfortable, pleasing and interesting ride but not to distract from the view. I tried to delete anything self-consciously poetically gratuitous – to ‘kill my darlings’. Occasionally the poetic values were slightly emphasised for various reasons, such as to reflect emotional confusion or to enhance 222

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sensory experience or atmosphere, and other times the narrative momentum required more factual reportage, as the respective excerpts below indicate: We are laughing so much that we have to sit down in the grass to stop from falling There are tears in our eyes – not a cloud in the deepest bluest of skies just a flock of high-flying birds going by and then simply insects buzzing, and the growing of the grass …56 I’m about to tell her that Mum’s coming back when suddenly there’s a loud smash. We can’t see a thing. I think we’ve been shot but it doesn’t hurt. She breaks hard. Nearly gives us whiplash. ‘What the…?’ She stops the music and we take stock. ‘Damn!’ she says, banging the side door. ‘Stone must’ve hit the windscreen. Stace will kill me.’ 57 What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? It was very important to me that the poetic form did not distract from the reader’s immersion into the story. The brevity, line changes and stanza breaks were intended to aid emotional and dramatic emphasis and to propel the story forwards, rather than to invite the reader to examine the machinations. Even as Lucinda was in many senses stuck, railing at circumstance in a fenced paddock, I wanted to create a contrasting feeling of aliveness, of life galloping along, sweeping her forwards in directions beyond her control. Of ‘riding’ towards her fate. I imagined this story in audio form and wanted the rhythmic element 223

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to lift the words off the page like a play. I hoped the fragmentation of the verse format and the stream-of-consciousness narration might help create a more experiential sense of the confused teen spirit. And I hoped a contemporary audience, particularly teens with short attention spans suffering information overload, might be inspired by the familiar, speedyeasy-to-read, text-message style format. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the verse novel. As a writer, I confess to being uncomfortable about my book having been written and categorised in this genre. I am fully aware of the prejudice, the reticence, the aversion for some. In Vikram Seth’s verse novel, The Golden Gate (at the beginning of the fifth chapter), the author is dropped like a hot rock at a plush party when he mentions that his next work is written in verse. I actually prepare people, reassure them. ‘Don’t panic,’ I tell them, ‘it’s not an epic cryptic poem’ (as though that was a bad thing). I almost want to say, ‘I’m sorry, it just came out that way’. Many readers, (the majority have been adults but also male and female young adults) with or without previous verse novel experience, have shared various versions of this same response: ‘At first glance I was concerned about the format but once I started, I didn’t even notice.’ So while I love to read the form, I hope and pray that my next book does not come out this way. Yet if it does, of course I will embrace it. As for categorisations – no wonder the marketing departments balked at my book. My mentor described it as ‘written in libretto’, Gleebooks house it in the Poetry section, various libraries house it in YA, friends shelve it with Non-Fiction, and in Berkelouw Books and my family house it is in Fiction. I do have a problem with the limiting genre description label ‘verse novel’ and have discussed this in an article for Writing NSW magazine Newswrite entitled, ‘A Rose by any other Name.’58 It is used to encompass such a wide variety of experimental and hybrid forms which in this digital era are becoming increasingly numerous (think smartphone app fiction like Hooked – Chat Stories). The new digital formats lend themselves 224

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beautifully to brevity in form, will likely become more common, and we will need differentiated labels. Overall, I continue to be excited by the potential of non-traditional narratives that take risks with form. Recent works that have made significant impact have included Mateship with Birds (Carrie Tiffany), No Friend but the Mountains (Behrouz Boochani) and of course Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders). With theatre, a great production can be a magical experience whereas a bad one can be an endurance test. Film can be a little more forgiving, even if only due to the cost. Similarly I think the verse novel offers a high stakes game, yet one worth taking the risk to read or write. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I’m not aware of a direct influence from any specific verse novels but I do know that reading archy’s life of mehitabel at a young age opened a door. The format seemed wicked and wondrous and set free the idea that traditional rules can be broken to serve a creative purpose. The verse novels which may have had an indirect influence on this work, particularly enlightening in terms of variety of form, include Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Constantine Phipps’ What You Want, and works for young readers by Steven Herrick and Sally Murphy. My general influences have come from a wide yet primarily Western variety of works that dance around traditional form, including epic poetry (Tennyson, Eliot, Ovid), verse drama (Shakespeare, Sophocles, Eliot, Molière), poetic prose (Anne Michaels, Marguerite Duras), narrative verse (Kahlil Gibran, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Kate Grenville’s short verse story ‘Blast Off’), Australian operatic libretto (David Malouf, Jordie Albiston), narrative song (Dylan, Cash, Joplin, Mitchell, Cohen, Cave), epistolary novels and collections (Jean Webster, Lionel Shriver, Aravind Adiga, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf), journals (Anaïs Nin), works of brevity (Thomas Mann, Jean-Dominique Bauby), unusually formatted works (Peter Carey) and hybrid forms (Michael Ondaatje, Jennifer Egan, Samuel 225

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Beckett). Some have influenced this work with techniques (narrative-lyric balance, rhythm, imagery, format, emotional impact etc.) and some simply by ‘giving permission’ to experiment. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? From the verse novels (and hybrids) I’ve read, I’ve learnt that an equal balance between the lyric and the narrative is ideal. Also, that the construction of a verse novel offers a strange blend of freedom and discipline. It is exciting to explore boundaries, but after establishing new conventions, great care and exactness is required to consistently sustain them.

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Rebecca Jessen

‘The Monkey’s Mask was my first verse novel and I’ll never forget the sense of exhilaration I felt reading it …’ Rebecca Jessen is the award-winning author of the verse novel, Gap (2014) and the poetry collection Ask Me About the Future (2020) both published by University of Queensland Press. She is the recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers’ and Writers’ Award, the Queensland Literary Award for Best Emerging Author, the State Library of Queensland Young Writers’ Award, and an AMP Tomorrow Maker grant. She has also been shortlisted for the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Sisters in Crime Davitt Award for Best Debut Book. Her writing has been published widely, including in

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Overland, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Journal, Going Down Swinging, The Lifted Brow, Cordite Poetry Review, Impossible Archetype and Voiceworks.

Gap (2014) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Gap first appeared as a short story after winning the State Library of Queensland Young Writers’ Award in 2012. The award was for a short story, however, Gap was written in verse, the same as it appears in the book – so I guess it was a little unconventional (and perhaps lucky) to have won a short story competition! How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? Part One of Gap came very quickly, in a matter of hours. I sat with this part of the verse novel for a year before I attempted expanding it. The rest of writing Gap was a much more methodical process, which it hadn’t been at all in Part One. I navigated this by writing a very detailed list of scenes that I knew needed to happen throughout the course of the novel. This approach gave me a template to work with and then it was (more or less) a matter of ticking each scene off as I went along. It sounds very clinical but it didn’t feel like that at all. Once I got back into Ana’s voice, the words came quick and easy and I could see it taking shape as a verse novel. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? The hardest decision to make while writing Gap was deciding how the story would end. I wrote down a few different endings for Gap before landing on the one in the book. I wanted the ending to be authentic and realistic to the story, and not to come too easily or cheaply. I didn’t feel like it was the kind of story that could be wrapped up neatly. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why?

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Writing Gap was a very intuitive process and some of those decisions regarding form and technique were conscious, but many were invisible to me while I was writing. I took cues from Dorothy Porter’s style of verse, in which she portrays character, voice and plot with grit, honesty and an irresistible danger. I’m interested in poetry that is urgent and honest, told in simple language. In Gap, the free verse form added extra weight to the urgent, breathless nature of the story. I like poetry that is emotionally authentic and told in a simple way. I tend to shy away from anything too obscure or aware of itself as poetry. Dorothy Porter often talked about ‘poetry for the people’ and I took that idea on very early into the writing process; I wanted my work to be accessible to all kinds of readers. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? While writing the first drafts of Gap, my priority was to capture the voice and the relationship between the characters first and foremost. In consecutive drafts I turned my attention to form. Once I had a full draft, I was able to use the free verse form to highlight tension and uncertainty in the narrative and the characters. In the final stages of editing it was definitely a marriage of narrative and form that resulted in the finished book. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I wanted to create a voice that was urgent and unapologetic, a voice that would draw readers in, and I found that in Ana. The use of firstperson present tense in Gap allows readers to really get inside Ana’s head and (hopefully) form some kind of personal connection with her. I used a sprawling free verse style in Gap to convey the sense of urgency about Ana’s situation, and I also wanted this style to mirror the way Ana’s mind was flitting between events that had happened in her life, to really convey her sense of feeling trapped in a thought pattern. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? In an interview with Writers Victoria, Lisa Jacobson said ‘one of the virtues of the verse novel is the pleasurable tension it creates between poetry 229

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and fiction.’59 Verse novels are in a unique position to challenge what readers know about both poetry and fiction. I see verse novels as an appealing gateway to poetry, especially for younger readers. This was certainly the case for me as I came to reading poetry in my twenties; it was the verse novel that drew me in. There’s so much potential for experimentation with its form and structure and narrative, and this is what makes it such an exciting genre to work with. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? It goes without saying that Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask has had a huge impact not only on my verse novel Gap but also for me as a poet. The Monkey’s Mask was my first verse novel and I’ll never forget the sense of exhilaration I felt reading it for the first time – it opened me up to what I knew about poetry, and what poetry could do as a form. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Through reading many different verse novels, and writing one, I learnt that like all forms, there’s not one approach to writing a verse novel. The form can be approached in so many different ways. I love Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone, which is completely different to Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, which is also completely different to Ali Liebegott’s The Beautifully Worthless. There’s such diversity in the way a writer can use the form to tell their story.

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David Mason

‘… at their best they are quite readable – at least as readable as prose, if not more so.’ David Mason’s books of poems began with The Buried Houses (1991, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (1996, winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals (2004). His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007 (2nd edn. 2010), and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS News Hour. His

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memoir, News from the Village, appeared in 2010. Collections of his essays include The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry (2000), Two Minds of a Western Poet (2011), and Voices, Places (2018). His poetry collections include Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade (2014), Davey McGravy: Tales to Be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children (2015), and The Sound: New and Selected Poems (2018). Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (2005), Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1998), Twentieth Century American Poetry (2004), and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry (2004). His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review. Mason has written libretti for composer Lori Laitman’s opera of The Scarlet Letter, which premiered at Opera Colorado in 2016, and her oratorio, Vedem, which premiered in Seattle in 2012. He won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto based upon Ludlow. His Grammy-nominated one-act opera with composer Tom Cipullo, After Life, premiered in Seattle and San Francisco in 2015 and won the 2017 Dominick Argento Prize for Best Chamber Opera from the National Opera Association. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, Mason served as Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, and teaches at Colorado College. He has recently been named a corresponding member of the Hellenic Authors Society.

Ludlow (2007) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? First, there’s the question of genre. I’d read works called verse novels by the likes of Brad Leithauser and Les Murray, and I’d read Derek Walcott’s postcolonial epic, Omeros, and I did think as I set out on Ludlow that 232

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‘verse novel’ was the right term for it – a modern story and an evocation of character in action. But subtract the word ‘modern’ and these things are also to be found in Homer and Virgil and Dante, are they not? Homer is still the gold standard for me, and we call the Iliad and the Odyssey epics, not novels. The one distinguishing factor, I think, is that the epic seems most concerned with conveying the identity of a people – the Greeks or the Romans, the Catholics in Dante and the Protestants in Milton. By that standard, Tolstoy’s War and Peace would be an epic of the Russians. In some sense, Ludlow really is an epic poem, but I hesitated to use that term because it sounded so grand, so inflated. The novel sounded more pedestrian and palatable in our age of diminishment. Ludlow is a story of immigrants in violent conflict with established forces, from corrupt sheriffs to corporate thugs. It’s a story of people who feel they hardly exist, who can barely assert their right to exist and breathe free air. So, in that sense it is an American epic, every bit as much as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather films. I had been contemplating Ludlow for years when I finally began to write it in 2003 or 2004. The Bush administration’s rush into an utterly foolish invasion of Iraq, not to mention the smug jingoism that seemed to be rotting all that was good about America, turning it even more into an empire on a permanent war footing, enraged me so much that I wanted to strike back against the power brokers in a story. I had lived away from the American West for twenty years, and was now living in Colorado, a state where I have ancestral ties and where my story takes place, and I wanted to ground myself in the place, the languages of the immigrants one can find in all the graveyards of the small mining towns. Because I had lived in Greece and speak Greek and also have some Spanish, because I was married at the time to a Scottish immigrant, caring for her mother, hearing those accents daily in my house, I felt equipped with the vocabulary for my story. I thought particularly of the macaronic language of Walcott and wanted to bring something of that to my American idiom. The big surprise was to find myself writing from the point of view of a young girl, part Mexican and part Welsh, an orphan with a very tenuous 233

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sense of her own identity. The grounding of my story in purely fictional characters, as well as the attempt to give life to historical figures like Louis Tikas and John Lawson and Mother Jones, meant that I was not interested in a documentary account of the Ludlow Massacre. I wanted to find the ground sense of these people’s lives, to live as much as possible through their skin, their eyes, their weaknesses and terrors. The narrative voice that evolved could be authorial and omniscient on occasion, or as intimate as I wanted, and I loved the freedom of that. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I had an uncle who, like my father, grew up near the Ludlow battlefield in southern Colorado. He had retired and was moving to Ireland, and one of the books he unloaded on me was George McGovern’s history of the Colorado coalfield wars. The book mentioned Louis Tikas, a Greek who had something to do with the miners striking in 1913–14, but offered no other information about him. As is often the case with me, I carried that story around in my bones for a decade before beginning to write. It was really when I stumbled onto Zeese Papanikolas’ wonderful book, Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, and when I moved back to Colorado in 1998, that I began to see I had unique opportunities. My experience of immigrants and immigration, my languages, and my knowledge of the landscape I had loved since childhood were all preparation for writing this story. West of my father’s hometown of Trinidad, Colorado (Santissima Trinidad to early Spanish traders and soldiers) was a wall of mountains I loved, the Sangre de Cristo range. The river flowing east from those mountains, through Trinidad and finally out to the Arkansas, the Mississppi and the Gulf of Mexico, had been called El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio. (You hear about it as The Picketwire in various cowboy movies.) The landscape itself is Dantean, and I had always thought of my family as lost souls, deracinated by history. North of that river are two mountains the Indians called the Huajatollahs, or ‘the Breasts of the Earth,’ and near that is the little volcanic butte called El Huerfano, ‘the 234

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Orphan,’ which led me to the nickname given to Luisa Mole, one of my protagonists. The land itself is storied, and the poet’s job is to reconnect the story to the land and to the people. The fact that most Coloradans had never heard of the Ludlow Massacre, that it was not taught in the public schools where Americans seem to live in terror of their own history, made it even more imperative that I tell this story. I felt uniquely positioned to write it, as I had been practising narrative and dramatic verse for years. One day during a Christmas holiday, 2003 or early 2004, I sat down at my stepdaughter’s dining room table in Minneapolis and began to write. I quickly discovered Luisa, this girl whose very existence seems in jeopardy from birth. I discovered I was writing in blank verse with variations, but decided I would also use rhyme at the ends of some chapters and scenes – the way Shakespeare does in many of his plays. And I discovered I was using a lot of the diction of the place, the mining industry and the times – slang and obscenity and technical terms and phrases in several languages and dialects, none of which would be footnoted or explained. I wanted an experience of immersion, not explanation. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? My earlier answers touch on some of this. One major issue was that, as a leftish professor-poet, I might be seen as being politically pious, taking the side of the immigrants against the corporations. It was very important to me that the story be earthy, occasionally obscene, and violent. I was not writing about angels, but about human beings with all their warts on. I did not want to portray the union men and women as being particularly virtuous, since many of them weren’t, and I did not want to portray the business class as being entirely evil, since some (like my own greatgrandfather, who briefly ran one of the notorious company stores) were just ordinary decent folk trying to survive. All sides in this conflict were armed, and all sides committed atrocities. Violence is a human activity we occasionally overcome. Hatred or fear of the other is a human ugliness we learn to overcome. And war, as we have learned since Homer, does not often reveal the better angels of our nature. 235

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My solution to the problem of political piety was controversial, at least in some of the reviews and responses to the book. I made myself a character in the story, appearing on occasion to let you know of his investment in telling the tale. It was a device I had seen in plenty of fiction, from Vonnegut to Kundera and others, and I thought Why not try it? Call it postmodern or not, I did enjoy the narrative freedom it gave to me. I could move about in time or space at will, treating the story of 1913–14 as one wave in the sea, so to speak, placing my story in the context of vaster history. At the same time, I did not want to betray my characters or my story. It still seems to me that Walcott’s Omeros is marred by his effort to please academic critics – he abandons his story in favour of a postcolonial vision, and while this makes interesting classroom fodder it turns the embodied experience into a matter of ideas for discussion. I didn’t want that. As I said earlier, I wanted immersion, I wanted the ground sense of the story to live and breathe and hurt. One other influence: the early films of Terrence Malick (especially Days of Heaven) with their ironically vulnerable young girl narrators, their sense of the larger time-scapes in which our stories occur and, ultimately, our lives vanish. Meaning exists not only in the intimacy of the braided stories of individuals, but also in the fact that they live in this story. The story itself is the only aspect of their lives we will ever know. In this sense, my fictional and historical characters have the same lives. And so do I. I will vanish in precisely the same way they do. Only the story remains, and perhaps if I am lucky a few well-fashioned lines. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I’ve already mentioned the blank verse with variations and occasional rhyme. The hope was to make swift movement, even a page turner. Occasionally the verse slows down, as in this description of the butte called El Huerfano: A solitary cone of rock rose up from lacerated land, the dry arroyos, scars that scuppered water in flood season 236

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down to a river. In dusty summertime the cottonwoods eked out a living there in a ragged line below the high peaks. The ground was a plate of stony scutes that shone like diamonds at noon, an hour when diamondbacks coiled on sunbaked rocks.60 All those hard ‘sc’ and ‘ek’ sounds, some from the Scots, are intended to convey the feel of ground so tough it would be hard to get a shovel in. The sailor’s noun, ‘scupper,’ for the drain in a bilge, turns to a verb for the function of arroyos during flash floods. This is just one example of verse-consciousness in the writing. If I am using verse, shaping these 8-line stanzas into something like paragraphs, some enjambed and some not, I should let the verse sing out every now and then, while on other occasions it barely contains the forward momentum of the story. I’m also proud of passages such as this one concerning a relatively minor character, Too Tall MacIntosh; his life story floats in time, seen from a distance when, as an old man, he remembers a catastrophic mine explosion and the kiss his wife gave him when he went to offer help: The corbies flocked to piñon scrub observing wagons loaded with the sooty sticks that once were men. Two hundred sixty-three. ‘Our brethren,’ Lawson said. Then Ludlow – everything so hard and fast for months. Too few remembered now. The wars had blotted out the past. Except old men like Christie MacIntosh who had gone to work to feed his family after the whole turmoil, after the killings and the failures, after the union sold John Lawson out, after 237

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the long disgraceful struggle came to nought. He’ d shoveled coke into the furnaces of Pueblo’s mill until they made him lead a crew, then moved him to the office where he tallied loads of coal until retirement. Three decades passing like a dustbowl cloud, a long train wailing through the arid night freighted with lives he’ d never see again. That long train hauled the grief mined from the mesas by the immigrants into a silence like forgetfulness. A gunshot? No, a neighbor’s car backfired. He touched his cheek and walked into his house.61 There are other technical moments to consider. The climactic battle scene is written in a loose hexameter as a nod to Homer, the variations rather like those you’d find in the Robert Fagles’ translation of the Iliad. And one of the brief interludes in which the narrator talks about uncovering the story is written in prose – a perhaps more arbitrary decision for the sake of variation. I love the way the narrative voice moves in some Virginia Woolf novels, the sentences like a Steadicam in their flowing through time and space and point of view. I tried for that kind of rhythm as well. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? Elsewhere I’ve argued that stories are shapes, forms, just as much as sonnets or villanelles are forms. A story has a lyric arc as much as a narrative one, and at certain dramatic or emotional cruxes the verse ought to switch into overdrive. If you believe Poe, the truly poetic pitch cannot be sustained more than about a hundred lines, so those of us who write verse at length will inevitably find peaks and valleys in the verse tension and frisson. 238

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Sometimes the story is running full speed, sometimes the verse arrests the attention, and perhaps in the rarest moments both are happening at once. The section about Too Tall quoted above might be one of the more lyrical moments in Ludlow, and perhaps the vision of Luisa Mole as an old woman, returning to her haunts in Trinidad decades after the massacre. Several of the final stanzas of the book are rhymed, as if lyrical time were the only way to convey such a story. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? More than anything, I want my readers to be moved. That means they have to be picked up and transported to another place. I want the story to hurt and to stay with them, and I really don’t care if they remember who wrote it. I want it to stay there in the psychic landscape like a desert butte, whether you know its name or not. To me the great advantage of the novel as a form is that – more than the other arts – it allows us to feel the passage of time. A short novel like To the Lighthouse and a longer work like Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time in a sense have the same subject – time’s passage as our bodies and our souls apprehend it. The novel distills experience, just as a good lyric poem does. To me, Ludlow is a drama of psychic identity as much as it is a political book, and it is a story about stories, about their very nature more than their meaning, the way they exist in time. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? Why does anyone assume this new-fangled device we call prose should dominate the market? The prose novel hasn’t been around that long, and it’s a far less efficient way of telling a tale. Graphic novels and verse novels have something in common, and at their best they are quite readable – at least as readable as prose, if not more so. Verse novels and graphic novels have more in common with cinema than prose novels do. Some audiences are afraid of verse novels, perhaps, because they are afraid of poetry. Too much modern poetry has taught them to be bored when they see things typed up in lines. Yet verse novels are often read by people who claim not to like poetry at all, while certain poets and critics look down upon them as a capitulation to narrative. Obviously, I think 239

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those poets and critics are idiots. They seem to think the Academy is the arbiter of taste, which means they are totally out of touch with reality. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? I’ve listed some works earlier. The strongest influences on me were Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Terrence Malick, with a dash of Francis Ford Coppola and a sprinkling of John Steinbeck and a few lumps of George Seferis, Constantine Cavafy and Robert Burns. How’s that for a literary stew? What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Trust the story. Don’t get too poetic.

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Jennifer Compton

‘Don’t force rhymes. Try to have a climax.’ Jennifer Compton was born in New Zealand and settled in Australia in 1972. She is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her poetry has been widely published in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the UK. Her essays, short stories and memoirs have appeared in many publications and been broadcast on radio. ‘The Magic Teaspoon’ was published in The Best Australian Essays 2012. Her stage play, Crossfire, jointly won the Newcastle Playwriting Competition in 1974, premiered at the Nimrod Theatre in 1975, and was published by Currency Press. The Big Picture also premiered at the 241

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Griffin Theatre in 1998 and was also published by Currency Press. Compton’s first book of poetry, From The Other Woman, was published as part of the Five Islands New Poets Series in 1993. She was awarded the NSW Writers Fellowship in 1996, the first time this was awarded to a poet. Aroha was published by Flarestack Press in the UK in 1998. Blue was published by the Indigo Imprint of Ginninderra Press in 2000 and was short listed for the NSW Premier’s Prize in 2001. In 2004, Compton was a guest at the International Festival of Poetry in Genoa, and another book of poems, Parker & Quink, was published by Ginninderra Press. Barefoot was published by Picaro Press in 2010 and short listed for the John Bray Poetry Award at the Adelaide Festival in 2012. This City won the Kathleen Grattan Award in New Zealand and was published by Otago University Press in 2011. In 2013 Compton’s poem ‘Now You Shall Know’ won the Newcastle Poetry Prize and was published in the eponymous book. Her verse novella, Mr Clean & The Junkie, was published by Mākaro Press in New Zealand in 2015. She lives in Carrum, Melbourne. Forthcoming from Recent Work Press is the moment, taken.

Mr Clean & The Junkie (2015) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I thought it was going to be a long poem in the style of a verse novel (or novella) which purported to be a film script, which I could enter for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. But it got longer and longer and I lost the plot and put it away on the ‘To Do’ pile for years and years. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask was being made into a film. I was dead jealous and wanted to make it abundantly clear to film makers that Mr Clean & The Junkie would make an excellent film. (Two Hands with Heath Ledger and Bryan Brown was floating around on the edge of my consciousness, although I never saw it).

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White heat for a week. Years and years frowsing in the ‘To Do’ pile. I sent the first two chapters to a poet/friend of mine. He replied that it wouldn’t do, it was so markedly ’70s. (Or words to that effect.) (At that stage it was set in the present.) What a clue! It is set in the ’70s! And once it is tied to the ’70s, it is in the past, it doesn’t matter how many more years pass before I finish it. More years pass. I have just finished a big project and I am at a loose end and in a tidying up mood so I go to the ‘To Do’ pile and pull out Mr Clean & The Junkie. (Two and a half chapters and rough notes.) I put it on my desk and put my hand on it and vow I will either finish it or abandon it. With the other hand I am idly facebooking and Mary McCallum of Mākaro Press asks me for a book for the Hoopla series. No no no – I say – I have nothing. Then I say – Hang on. Would a verse novel do? So then I set to and had two months of white heat with Mary exhorting me on. A long gestation book-ended by periods of white heat. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? I remember fact-checking and finding out the Casino hadn’t been built in the late ’70s! I had to have the casino. (I had gone there and placed one bet in the spirit of research.) I toyed with making it another (mythical) city. But no. This was my tribute to Sydney. It had to be Sydney. I also toyed with setting the story later. But no. My poet friend was right – the story reeks of the ’70s! In desperation I decided to confess and throw myself on the mercy of the reader. When children are playing and they come up against something that can’t work – they just say, well I have a magic staircase. If the other children are nice children they say – oh yes and it has a golden bannister. I liked letting the reader into the difficulties of holding a text’s nose to the party line so much, I went back and re-added Mr Clean’s place of residence – The Toaster. (I had also visited that in the spirit of research! I’d been shown a flat with a view of the Opera House and the 243

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bridge by a friendly concierge.) I had mourned the loss of The Toaster, and once I had found a way to have it again, I wrote it back in. I also removed the one cigarette the Junkie was smoking on the steps as we first meet her. I had neglected to have her smoke any other cigarettes and it was easier to take one out, than to have to find places for her to light up. (Although of course so many people smoked in the ’70s. They smoked everywhere, even inside, at the roulette table.) I was gambling on the fact many if not most people would not notice that all the smoking had been airbrushed out. I had a battle with myself when Hemi turned up. He was a big surprise, I had not been expecting him. Did I have the right to write him? But he was such a takeover artist! So far I have not been called to account for it. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I decided to write a film script. And also at the same time to write the experience of seeing a film. But also at the same time to write the experience of making a film. I decided to allow myself that pure pleasure of controlling everything, of being everything, of being everywhere. And when it came to continuity problems, such as the casino not being built in my time frame, I decided to stare the problem down and to not care one whit. I chose the music, thinking there would be no copyright hassles. (But it turned out there were. I had to change a few lines because apparently it is fair dealing to quote the title of the song, but not the lyrics.) But I do not know what the techniques I decided to use are called.  Why? I had been offered the chance to write a film in Sydney in the ’70s. But I just didn’t believe in the chance and did nothing about it. (The film the director made was My Brilliant Career.) And that chance I missed has always rankled. So I came around again and gave it to myself. I chose to write it as poetry because it seemed to me that film and poetry have a lot in common. They leave a lot out. They jump from big moment, to close up, to big moment with narrative urgency. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? 244

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I think it is fair to say I was always after the narrative. Several times I remember bashing at the poetry to make it say things I needed it to say within the strictures of couplets. Get in, say it, get out. Don’t doodle on. Film doesn’t. And poetry doesn’t. Well, that is a rule that is made to be broken. I am thinking of the long shot in Lawrence of Arabia watching the camel arrive. But in the script I bet this shot was described quite succinctly. Not that I know, of course. But I imagined if the reader wanted to pause and see Jon’s mother flying down the stairs in a welter of negligee in slowmo – they could. They could see it in their mind’s eye over and over again. So the poetry had to bear the weight of the narrative. And I never regretted couplets. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? It was the brisk novella form I had in mind, I think. Which is why I try to call Mr Clean & The Junkie a novella. And film. Film is so bossy. It tells you exactly where to look. And how to feel. I was writing a love story – in microcosm and in macrocosm – so I was kind of hoping readers would fall in love all over the place, with the city, with the music, with the way things used to be, with the lovers, with the desperate risk of being alive … when I ask my hero to WasteMaster the frangipani or peony or rose I am hoping for a visceral empathy. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? It’s a fallow field, as far as I am concerned. It started well, with brawny blokes strapping themselves into the hames and dragging the wooden plough with all their strength. Kudos to those guys. (I think it was part of the oral tradition.)(I think it was involved with dance, with the haka, with corroboree.)(And song.) I kind of object to verse novel as a nomenclature. I write poetry, not verse. Verse seems to me to be a notch below poetry. When I am introduced on stage no one says – Jennifer Compton, a wonderful versist. Or versifier. So who came up with ‘verse novel’? I think we need a re-branding here. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? 245

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I’ve read Omeros by Derek Walcott, Jack by Judy Johnson, The Scarring by Geoff Page, 1953 by Geoff Page, Dart by Alice Oswald (maybe that is creative non fiction), Fredy Neptune by Les Murray, and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Women are not empty vessels. Try to love (or at least like) your characters. Women have a valid point of view. Don’t force rhymes. Try to have a climax. A tiny bit of connective tissue never goes astray. If a cul-de-sac beckons, don’t venture in unless it is brilliantly fascinating (to someone else apart from you). Listen to your mother. She knows all the stories.

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‘… approach each verse novel with openness and a sense of discovery.’ Linda Weste is an Australian poet. She has a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne where she teaches poetry. Her debut work of fiction, Nothing Sacred, an historical verse novel set in the late Roman Republic, won the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, and was highly commended in the 2015 Anne Elder Award. Other poems and poem cycles have been published in Westerly (University of Western Australia Press) and Best

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Australian Poetry (University of Queensland Press). Weste is a former Reviews Editor for TEXT Journal (Australasian Association of Writing Programs), and a reviewer of poetry for Australia Council-funded journals.

Nothing Sacred (2015) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? I read a footnote in a collection of Catullan poetry – that a German scholar had ‘mapped’ Catullus’ ‘Lesbia’ onto Clodia Metelli in 1862. My curiosity about Clodia Metelli led to Cicero, the late Republican Roman orator, and his speech Pro Caelio. Classicists consider this speech to be a masterpiece of rhetorical slander, and in it, Cicero refers to Clodia as ‘Medea of the Palatine.’ I began to envision a suite of poems that would imagine Clodia Metelli; that would build imaginatively on the trace of her presence in the historical archive. Then, upon reading that Clodia’s brother, Clodius Pulcher, was accused of dressing in women’s clothing to gain access to the Bona Dea, the women only rites, I decided to extend the work and base it on the siblings, set against the nexus of complex social relationships in late Republican Rome. It was important to me to differentiate the book so it wasn’t about the Triumvirate, the wars, the Rubicon and so on – what interested me was the relationship between Clodia and Clodius – not the rumoured incest, likely slander of the time – but why these two, born of the elite, chose to transgress. My ideas also arose from a fascination with the longevity of sexual metaphor: many of the sexual metaphors we use today have been with us since antiquity. Indeed it seemed to me that Romans were particularly aware of the seductive, manipulative qualities of word: its invitation, temptation, and teasing; its enjoyment and consumption; its play with surface and depth. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? I first wrote a cycle of ‘Claudia’ poems, then a series of epigrams – 248

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imagined as Clodia’s – which playfully applied my knowledge of roman invective and sexual metaphor. The poems that followed were built up in a series of layers, but often began with a scenario, for instance, in which a character could utter a particular expletive, or enact a particular cultural practice. One might presume the research stops, then the writing starts, but for me it is a process of synergy. I used the online sites Perseus Digital Library, the Digital Loeb Classical Library, Diotima Materials for the study of women and gender in the ancient world, to name a few. The primary sources were artefacts such as coins, jewellery, sculpture in digitised museum collections. Secondary sources included translated texts such as the Corpus of Latin Inscriptions for tombstones, Cicero’s speeches, Varro on agriculture, Martial’s epigrams, Seneca and Sallust on luxury and pleasure, Plautus’ comedy Curculio, and Petronius’ The Satyricon. I researched Latin and Greek etymology and pronunciation, numismatics, nomenclature, the study of architecture and monuments, political speeches, ancient place names and geographical boundaries, agricultural methods and food preparation, festivals and artefacts, gender and sexuality, clothing and jewellery, mythology and religion, slavery, gladiatorial combat, and animals for pleasure and show. I also read earlier creative writing set in the period – Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa Series, Tom Holland’s Rubicon and Colleen McCullough’s Caesar’s Women, followed by the works which had filled the fascination with Rome for an earlier generation of readers, Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March – I enjoyed these works, but wanted to differentiate my work from theirs. Nothing Sacred’s working title was CxSIX – no one knew how to pronounce it. I laugh about that now. I had chosen it because at the time the book had six main characters whose names began with ‘C’, and I was thinking about Pirandello’s play Six characters in search of an Author. The book was nearing publication when I changed it to the current title – which is attributed to Juvenal. Juvenal was not yet born in the period of late Republican Rome, nevertheless in his Satires he offers an anecdote about 249

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‘the type of man whom you invite to dinner and who proceeds to seduce your wife, your cook, your household … for him nothing is sacred nor safe from his groin.’ Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? There were so many decisions to be made – to keep control of the process, I had to document each decision I made and the reason why. Often the decisions were cumulative. For instance, although I had a rationale for including Latin words, the act of including them meant I needed to learn to conjugate them. I could conjugate verbs in German. I knew the nominative and accusative cases so I’d conjugate the latin, and check it once a month with a researcher in the Centre for Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne. Two ongoing challenges for the duration of the project were historical approach and narrative events. In relation to the former, of course the view held today is that history is the fiction of the present; we’re mindful of history’s subjective construction. I was sceptical about adopting an historicist approach – the presumption that I could attempt to honour historical actuality, authenticity and factuality – and thought adhering to research could risk making my representation of the times inflexible, unresponsive to fiction’s needs. Yet if I chose a presentist approach – I’d be imposing present-day attitudes on the past, and this could stifle the ‘otherness’ of antiquity. So it didn’t work to impose either approach on the book as a whole. Instead I faced the decision anew with each poem. In ‘Gargantuan’ for example, I recount – in the voice of the character, Cicero – the killing of twenty elephants (an actuality Cicero documents in Letters to Atticus). To do so, I had to think about this death in the Roman context of animal games as a popular past-time (authenticity). But to engage today’s readers – who would likely view the killing with revulsion – and draw attention to the significance of the incident for the times, I aestheticised the scene, and made the language as beguiling as I could. The book’s chronology also required some problem-solving. I first devised a timeline to align the narrative of Nothing Sacred with events in 250

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the late Roman Republic. Then I placed the poems in dated sections with a date page, for instance 66BCE. When I prepared a preliminary index of poems for publication, I realised the sections were uneven, with six poems in 66BCE, only one poem in 65BCE, fifteen poems in 61BCE, then in the period 50–42BCE there’d be fourteen poems covering a period of eight years. To resolve this somewhat, I moved six poems into a prologue and also created an epilogue. Of course, in the BCE sections the years decrease numerically, so when working with the dates I had to be very attentive. Trying to align characters with event dates was another challenge. I created a spreadsheet so I could plot the birth dates of Cicero, Clodius, Clodia, Caesar and so on … I could then work out the characters’ respective ages at the time of any given event. Toward the manuscript’s completion, to check the sequence of poems, I spread the manuscript out, page beside page, one hundred and fifty pages on tables placed end to end in a spacious room at the University, and paced up and down, reading – only to realise that one of the character–speakers of a poem in the latter stages of the novel had already died. It wouldn’t work to place the poem earlier in the sequence because the event corresponded with a later date, so I reworked the poem so that a different character could speak the words instead. A further challenge was to manage a ‘cast’ of characters who speak in first person. I had to try to differentiate this on the page. This was important for the characters with main roles who speak and act in the narrative poems – Catullus, Cicero, Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, Metellus, Caelius, Cloelius, Clodia and Clodius. I used an en-dash to add a stilted quality to Cicero’s speech, for example, so even his casual conversations would sound pompous and oratorial. Catullus’ speech is ‘clipped’ – I was aiming for ‘witty’, ‘cynical’ and ‘knowing’ – but I had to incorporate signs to convey he was an outsider, since he was from the equestrian class not from the senatorial class, the ruling elite. Then there’s Manius Graecus ‘The Greek’, a foil to Catullus, to help show how Catullus’ attitude and behaviour isn’t aligned with the elite. He’s unlike the other characters – those I’ve mentioned, but also Fulvia, Calpurnia, Terentia, Cornelia, Tiro, 251

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Atticus, Mark Antony, Milo, Cataline, Appius and Vettius – who all have a biographical basis, being personages of the period in which the book is set. I also added two female characters into Clodia’s household, and a nonhuman agent that speaks, Claudia of the Erotic Frieze. She comments on eating, drinking and sexual pleasure. This is a rhetorical device the poet Catullus used. He created a door speaker in Poem 67 who would tell all about the ‘comings and goings’ from a ‘certain woman’s house.’ There are some other characters mentioned, Lucullus … some other senators, but these are the main ones, about twenty-four in all. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? I enjoy reading theatre scripts and libretti – so first-person presenttense appealed to me for its intensity and immediacy. I wanted to revitalise the classic means of writing about the ancient world – the first-person prose memoir, and instead use present tense, narrative, ‘verse vignettes’, short scenes in which characters advance the events through their speech and actions. The benefit of this, to my mind, was its immediacy and interiority, especially for emphasising the interpersonal and political machinations at Rome. I chose free verse at the outset because it offered flexibility in line and rhythm, and enabled me to differentiate characters’ voices. I planned to use assonant rhyme to keep rhyme buoyant, but also used some end rhyme – but not in a scheme; end rhymes are less imposing when repeated every fifth line or so. I made most other decisions during the writing, and ended up using a range of poetic elements. I wanted the book to utilise word-play, and one way to do so was to create slippage between words from English, Latin and Greek. This could enable dual meanings, dual readings and double entendres. For example, the poem, ‘Valentine’ plays on the use of ‘bird’ – apparently one of about one hundred and twenty Latin sexual metaphors for the penis, along with three Latin euphemisms for pubic hair – filix, pilus and pecten – that is, ‘fern, forest, nest’ – to shape the poetic syntax. The poem anticipates Catullus’ Poem number 2, and has Clodia declare about the poet, ‘He’ll recall my pet my plaything, in my lap or at my breast, and wish himself 252

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wings; and desire like bird: fern, forest, nest.’ This word-play made the task of writing the verse novel enjoyable. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? Decisions were made poem by poem, according to the need or imperative of each, rather than made uniformly across the manuscript. For the majority of poems, the poetic strategies and the narrative strategies had to be in sync. There are poetic trills or stepped, cascading words, gaps mid-line, tightly packed words for a breathless effect, loosely spaced words to convey a character’s contemplation, or tentativeness. In some poems I wanted words to manifest as embodied. The words of the Syrian sausage vendor mimic his billowing arm motions as he appeals for help to put out his housefire. To depict the buoyancy of senatorial debate, words are propelled rapidly using crossfire formations on the page. Another example is the choice of emphatic short lines in a column down the centre of a page, in a poem where Cicero is pontificating. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I hoped the choice of first-person present-tense would give the verse novel a sense of dramatic staging and immediacy. With this choice of narration, characterisation is purposely kept in a restricted perspective. As the events unfold, the reader gains the advantage of being privy to each character’s thoughts, while bearing witnesses to how characters’ thoughts are contradicted by their outward actions. None of the characters are omniscient, so the reader gleans what each character is inferring of other characters, the sort of mind-reading which I hope brought some depth and complexity to character depiction. The reader can discern the intrigues playing out, and the unstated motivations of the characters. I wanted the poetic effects to be nuanced; to manifest at the local level, particular to each poem, subtlely, or more pronounced – according to, and complementary with what was taking place within each poem. I was mindful, though, that these variant poetic effects at the micro level – still needed fidelity to the manuscript as a whole. 253

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What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? I’m particularly mindful of their diversity and uniqueness. My understanding of the verse novel arose from my PhD research, as well as from writing one. I find it constructive to consider the contexts for its changes during different time periods. The verse novel can differ considerably when working with or against sub-genre conventions – as a crime verse novel or a speculative verse novel, or a comic novel in verse, for instance. Kevin Young’s noir in verse Black Maria comes to mind. I enjoy verse novels as stories, but also appreciate the particularities of their construction, their complement of poetic and narrative elements – these being contingent on a writer’s intended themes and effects. I prefer to approach each verse novel with openness and a sense of discovery. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Absolutely. Judy Johnson’s Jack and Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado were pivotal in influencing how I approached Nothing Sacred – Judy Johnson’s Jack for the unfolding delivery of narrative events in first-person present tense and the nuancing of characters’ speech for inflection or emphasis, and Dorothy Porter’s verse novels for their buoyant narrative momentum. Other influential works were Derek Walcott’s Omeros – for its exhilarating use of language – ‘in the leoparding light’ comes to mind; a line I still take delight in. David Mason’s Ludlow was instructive as a model employing longer lines. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? When I read, I often consider the affordances of particular poetic– or narrative techniques. I have mentioned the ways that particular verse novels directly influenced the writing of Nothing Sacred, but I have also learnt techniques from reading across children’s, young adult and adult verse novel categories, which I hope to experiment with in future works. Something that continues to fascinate me about verse novels is how their multifarious combinations of techniques result in such distinctive works.

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Gregory O’Brien

‘The verse novel is a tremendously hard form to make work.’ Born in Matamata in 1961, Gregory O’Brien is a Wellington-based poet, painter, essayist and art curator. He has published numerous collections of poetry as well as editing and contributing to books about artists including Colin McCahon, Rosalie Gascoigne, Fiona Hall, Euan Macleod, Noel McKenna and Robin White. His most recent work, Always Song in the Water: An

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Oceanic Sketchbook (Auckland University Press, 2019) is a book-length essay traversing notions of regional and a wider Oceanic identity. An excerpt appeared in Sydney Review of Books. O’Brien has spent considerable time in Australia. His 2010 monograph Euan Macleod – The Painter in the Painting was published by Piper Press, Sydney, in 2010. In 2018, Ken Bolton illustrated and published O’Brien’s latest collection of poems, Mannix & Culhane (Little Esther Books, Adelaide). In 2022, Auckland University Press will publish O’Brien’s new collection of poems, House & Contents, and his monograph on the painter Don Binney.

Malachi (1993) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? It is over thirty years ago that I wrote Malachi, and my perspective on the book has changed with time. Rather than being led by ideas or influences, Malachi was a reasonably accurate account of (or response to) a 600km return journey by car from Wellington to the Trappist monastery at Kopua, in the central North Island. I was heading up there to attend the funeral of the abbot, whom I had met on a number of occasions. I was travelling with a carload of Home of Compassion nuns, most of them from the Pacific Islands – so this was always going to be an interesting, highspirited outing. In my notes at the back of the book, I mention the overt influences upon the poem. The most important debt is to Ken Bolton whose verse novella The Ferrara Poems (written in collaboration with John Jenkins) offered a formal model and gave me the nerve to set forth in this manner. I’m also grateful to Ken Bolton for publishing Malachi as a book in 1993. It is worth recording how Ken came to know of the poem. I had been introduced to his poet-friend Laurie Duggan at a poetry reading in Melbourne late in 1990. Some time later, I gave Laurie a photocopied edition of the poem which my brother, Brendan, a hand-printer, had run off and letterpress-printed a cover for. Anyhow, Laurie thought the poem 256

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might be to Ken’s liking, so he duly passed it along. I recall being worried at the time that Ken Bolton was far too cool and cosmopolitan a customer to cope with the unabashed mysticism (and lyricism) of Malachi. Next thing, however, Ken said he’d publish the poem and, good lord, a handsome Little Esther Book eventually came to light, with artwork by Ken Bolton on the covers and inside. Seriously, I cannot tell you what a major event this was in my writing life. At the time I was reading other longer-format poems: Duggan’s The Ash Range shook me up and continues to inspire me to work in non-fictional forms which relate to, but differ from, the verse novel. A few years later I found my way to Derek Walcott’s Omeros … How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? The poem was written relatively quickly. It emerged from accumulated notes from the day-trip. I have always kept a workbook, with numerous visual and verbal projects unfolding at any one time. Malachi, as a possibility, seized my attention and ran itself, basically. I like the form of the road-movie poem … On that note, I am a great admirer of the shortfilm version of The Ferrara Poems and, during the years when I convened a poetry workshop at Victoria University in Wellington, I used to always have the class watch it. The film of The Ferrara Poems is a little gem, like the Sydney Opera House. The opening phase of the book is presented as a voice-over, running for the duration of the fifteen-minute film. There is something medieval about the ‘voice over’ in film-making – something to do with the voice of God narrating from a conveniently positioned cloud. If only someone would make a film of Malachi! The poem was handwritten and revised in a workbook, then typed. This was in the days before word processors – or at least before I had one. I remember working on the hard copy, making it more ‘poetic’ in some places, then pulling it apart to make it less ‘poetic’. I wanted the tone, the plainness, of the central North Island in winter. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? 257

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Perhaps more than anything else I’ve ever written, I felt that Malachi was handed to me. It arrived at precisely the right moment in my life. I remember the conversation in the car with the nuns as being across a wide range of topics – hence the potpourri of stories that surface in Malachi. It is four nuns and a young writer in a car going on a very specific journey, but also collectively free-associating. My poem is only the tip of that iceberg. These were smart, lively, unpredictable and good-humoured women. One of the nuns was scheduled to sit her driving licence the following week, so she took the wheel for some of the journey northwards. She would accompany changes of gear or turns of the steering wheel with shrieks of uncontrollable laughter. I remember wondering if she would be able to suppress this impulse when she came to sit her practical driving test … Most of the time, my aunt Rita, aka Sister Domitilla, sat in the front with me. She was something like the Mother Superior – although I can’t recall her exact designation at the time. She and I got the front seats because we had the longest legs. The high-spirited, rowdy Pasifika Sisters crammed in the back. No complaints from them – even if the fact we were in a two door car meant that when we made pit-stops we all had to pile out of the vehicle onto the footpath – which wouldn’t have been so bad except that, by the time we reached the public conveniences at Woodville, it had started snowing. For some reason, in the poem, I made the vehicle a blue Renault whereas, in actual fact it was a white car. And the nuns were all dressed in white habits, with veils on. (Or so my memory has it. I wonder if I might be doing some colour-correcting here?) I can’t remember what I was wearing. There was thick snow on the ranges around Woodville; ice covered the road. It’s coming back to me now. It was as if we were driving to the South Pole. The nuns and the car were at one with a more general whiteness. Fog in the morning. Later sleet. Their marvellous, smiling faces. They were all in high spirits because Abbot Hayes, whose funeral we were going to, was a genuinely good man and he was in heaven already. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? 258

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I didn’t think through any technical aspects of the poem. I did subtitle it ‘An Entertainment’ which probably placed it in another, equally vague genre. I always liked the idea of ‘an entertainment’ – it’s a term used by Grahame Greene. Maybe it’s a licence that let’s you get away with less serious/orthodox verbal behaviours. Irishman Flann O’Brien’s satire, The Poor Mouth is one of my favourite ‘entertainments’ – that book certainly echoes somewhere in the basement or backroom of my Malachi. I had Ken Bolton and John Jenkin’s short-lined road-epic The Ferrara Poems playing in my mind at the time – it was on ‘high rotate’, as people say these days but didn’t then. The plainness of the writing I thought an appropriate countermeasure against the mystical/spiritual elements of the story. I had been reading the Life of St Malachi of Armagh, so I had Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s prose in my mind and ear as well. Again, I can’t really say how this helped things along in any specific way. All I can say is that I was swept along in the writing of the thing. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? Again, the narrative looked after itself. The day cleared later on. It was an incredibly cold, blue-skied afternoon. I went for a walk outside the Southern Star Abbey after the funeral. I remember walking by the river. Somehow these details of the day, replaying in my mind, dictated the shape and density and solemnity and humour of the poem. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? I remember wanting a kind of cohesion to the piece. I had been reading quite a lot of Marguerite Duras at the time – and I wanted something of that tonal flatness, evenness. I think, as a writer, she was very attentive to duration (there’s a word that sits snugly alongside her surname). With Malachi, I wanted to run for about fifty pages. It was a one-day outing to Kopua and back, and I wanted the poem to occupy a comparable imaginative/poetic time. Around this time I had also been reading a lot of Thomas Merton, the American poet/Trappist monk, so I suspect some traces of his later writings such as The Geography of Lograire might be 259

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echoing in here. Amongst other poets I was reading: I recall liking John Tranter’s Gloria (more a short story in verse form?) and I cast an interested eye over John A. Scott’s experiments. I was gripped by his language but didn’t really have a clue what was going on in his longer poem forms … Later, along came John Ashbery’s Flow Chart – although maybe that’s moving more in the direction of verse nonfiction/memoir. I wanted to keep the poem uncluttered and unencumbered. It had to keep moving … So there are few diversions or poetic/lyrical indulgences. A white car moving through a white landscape … I wanted the great Trappist virtues of simplicity and clarity. And devotion. What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? The verse novel is a tremendously hard form to make work. Readers usually find it pretty tough going too. If it hadn’t been for the example of The Ferrara Poems I don’t think I would have ever had a serious crack at it. I made another couple of attempts at that kind of extended narrative form. One of them was a narrative sequence of prose poems, ‘Augustine’, which appeared in the journal Scripsi in the early 1990s. (I was reading a lot of Rene Char and other French prose-poets around this time – so that influence also washed in there.) And there was another Malachi-like trickle of heroic couplets titled ‘The sea beneath the sky’ (also called sometimes ‘The sky above the sea’), which Ken Bolton also published in his journal Otis Rush and which was reprinted in my book Winter I Was (Victoria University Press, 1999). I still write sequences of poems and longer narrative poems. Probably the one I consider the most successful is ‘Memory of a fish’, which for a while was accessible on the Griffith Review website. I referred to that piece as a ‘documentary poem’ – which is a label I quite like. The model of Ernesto Cardenal hovers out the back of that poem, maybe. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? In addition to those mentioned above, other practitioners of note: Fred D’Aguiar. David Jones’s In Parenthesis, which I struggle reading, but admire deeply. Probably the form of Malachi was more influenced by 260

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Robert Creeley and various non-conformist, mystical Catholic poets such as St John of the Cross, St Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton and others. I have a lifelong attachment/devotion to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales … That is worth noting. All aspiring verse novelists should read Chaucer. William Dunbar also appealed. I’ve always been a closet medievalist – and the poetic telling of longer tales is something at the heart of that period’s literature. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Back in 1990 – over thirty years ago – I thought the verse novel form might be something to pursue long-term. There was a moment when the genre appeared to be picking up steam … within a few years there was Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune and Craig Raine’s History, The Home Movie, Vikram Seth … and Alan Wearne was hard at work also. In New Zealand no one was on the case, strangely. At the end of the day, I think ‘narrative’ was never my real emphasis as a writer and reader. ‘Documentary’ ways of ordering material appealed more than the ‘narrative/novelistic’. So I drifted off.

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Alan Wearne

‘… the verse novel is the domain of poets not novelists.’ Alan Wearne is a poet and novelist from Melbourne. He has written five verse collections, a verse novella, Out Here (Bloodaxe, 1997), two verse novels, The Nightmarkets (Penguin, 1987) and The Lovemakers (Shearsman, 2008), and Kicking in Danger, a satirical novel on Australian Rules Football. The Nightmarkets won the Banjo Award and was adapted for performance. The first volume of his verse novel, The Lovemakers (Penguin, 2004), won the Kenneth

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Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the NSW Premier’s Prize Book of the Year and the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Book Two of The Lovemakers (Penguin, 2004) co-won the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Colin Roderick Award and the H.T. Priestley Medal. The Australian Popular Songbook won the 2008 Grace Levin Prize.

The Lovemakers (2008) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? The Lovemakers grew very slowly out of a number of obsessions of mine, some very independent from each other, which I attempted to yank, tie or preferably blend together. The work started as the dramatic monologue ‘Nothing But Thunder’ (still a highlight of the opus) which was inspired by Terry Clark and his infamous Mr Asia Drug Syndicate (though in my invention of Kevin Joy and his Joy Boys, they are Australians not New Zealanders). As can be seen in some poems subsequent to The Lovemakers, I haven’t finished with Terry Clark/Kevin Joy and who knows, he may yet make another comeback. It can be said that I have obsessions rather than ideas, these obsessions dominated by particular people or groups, often based on folk I’ve met, known or (like Terry Clark) read about. Here are a few, pretty much in order of appearance in The Lovemakers. 1: At high school, friends of mine and I were entranced hearing about a legendary boyfriend/lover from a girl we knew. Only problem for some adults was that he was in his mid-30s and hovering it would seem on the edges of the underworld, and she was 15. Now the girl was in no conventional sense ‘bad’ (indeed she was a Prefect!) but her widowed mother – having had enough – took them both back to England. The man’s name was Jack, and as a consequence I adapted my knowledge of him into a shady enough character who would appear from time-to-time throughout the work. As too would his dreary friend Bernie Millar, a man devoid of anything positive; and how I loved inventing him! 263

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2: The character of The Kid/The Baron/The Alien/Mr A initially appeared as a taxi driver in The Nightmarkets. He was based on a friend of mine who didn’t finish in a Bangkok prison but rather died of AIDS. He was the sort of person who raved constantly and who had many lives. I liked him though often his presence could clear a room. 3: School days and beyond. More than enough said – though I do like the idea of charting a group of kids into adulthood/middle age, etc. finding careers, spouses, children for them. 4: Young poets. Although to a point Toby Nicholson and his career are based around Michael Dransfield, he also incorporates aspects of a friend of mine who overdosed and died of heroin when he was 20. 5: Dave Price, his wife and children (plus his brother’s children) are based on families I knew very well – though where required they are adapted to fiction. 6: The character of Gibbo: breakfast announcer, comedian, singersongwriter is not based on anyone. Gibbo’s occupations are singularly okay I suppose, though two of the occupations together won’t ‘pass muster’ for me, whilst the three occupations considered together are plain toxic. Fictional – though Gibbo putting the hard word on his mate’s girlfriend isn’t. 7: The Barb, Neil, Roger triangle was based around obsessive events I participated in. 8: The character of Leo and his entourage is based around a friend of mine, a charismatic, bi-sexual ex-High Anglican priest who died of AIDS. 9: Sophie – who introduces the Mr Asia/Joy Boys theme at the end of ‘Book 1’ – was inspired by Terry Clark’s lawyer girlfriend Karen Soich. Sophie and her husband, Daryl, come out of a dreadful couple who were part of a large group household I lived with. Law students who desired to make their fortune out of quiche – I was still writing about them long after The Lovemakers. 10: Kevin Joy and the Joy Boys: as above. 11: Carrie and her adventures in the upmarket end of the sex industry in 70s and 80s Sydney was based on, or inspired by friends, people I’ve known and people I’ve met. 264

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12: The gay Sydney couple Benny and Wal aren’t based on anyone in particular. They are friends to countless in the story, a good clearing house. With Benny I wished to create a very good man who was also quite promiscuous. I should never have killed off Wal. It didn’t work. 13: Craig Stubbs and the other 80s entrepreneurs are of course based on the lives and careers of Messrs. Skase, Bond, Elliot, Connell etc. Like Mr Asia I couldn’t get enough of them. Where do my influences come from? Plenty may be found in places well away from poetry. A mid-afternoon radio serial of the late 50s/early 60s called I think The Golden Road, caught my imagination whilst at home during school holidays. The show was based around 15-minute playlets and its premise was that a subsidiary character in one episode would turn into the major character of the next one, propelling a totally different narrative. Somehow it must have rung true to me, being doubtless a way in which I saw much of the world, and still do. Parallel with this I like the idea of characters disappearing from a narrative and then re-emerging much later. Influenced by The Golden Road? Well I was shown it could be done. Other early influences? At high school I wrote this over-the-top Under Milk Wood inspired evocation of suburbia. Luckily it was salvaged through two fine limericks. Luckily too I had discovered The Rape of the Lock, and began writing satires in rhyming couplets as a result. I still do. When the time arrived to write verse novels I knew that Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues would be exemplars. When a poet’s work is based so much around dramatic monologues and narratives, Browning is the reference point (even if rebellion against him is on your mind) – not just because he basically started this whole form in nineteenth-century English Literature, but because so much of what he did, and did so very well, made his work the benchmark. I still stare at some of his great poems (‘My Last Duchess’, ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’, ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ for starters) and ask: ‘How did he do it?’

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As an actual verse novelist I certainly liked the idea of Browning’s The Ring and the Book being told by multiple voices, and I chose that form to write both Out Here and The Nightmarkets. The notion of a speaker addressing someone and the reader/listener standing in for that someone is mighty potent and a concept I’ve still to fully grasp in my work, there being that slightly easier option of the internal monologue. I can imagine that some influence come from verse forms such as the limerick, to use a somewhat obvious example. I can see how Lord Byron or Kenneth Koch had an impact when I wrote in ottava rima, or John Dryden and Alexander Pope when I attempted couplets. I’m not sure about the use of Australian speech I’ve been commended for. I don’t think I emulated Bruce Dawe, I believe I have always used it on my terms. I cannot be certain what the influences were for the large scale third person narratives in The Lovemakers. I do know that in the writing of the poem ‘1971’ the very great Robert Frost works ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ and ‘Home Burial’ were on my mind. I have often shown students my poem and the Frost pieces – announcing that although Frost had ‘got there’, I hadn’t quite. Though you wouldn’t want your piece to sound too much like a parody, would you? That might revert to parody by default. Speaking of parodies, I did attempt a couple in ‘His Majesty Prince Jones smiled as he moved amongst the crowd’. These were meant to be the work of tragic hippy-poet Toby Nicholson, a Michael Dransfield type creation. John Forbes though said they sounded more like Richard Tipping, and he was right. Thus, an influence? One influence by default occurs in ‘Sophie’. Sometime before I wrote it I had been horrified to read (for review purposes) Dorothy Porter’s What a Piece of Work. I thought it ‘conservative, free-verse doggerel’ and wrote thus in my review. Like many poets I am also given to announcing when required: ‘I can do better than this!’ to which the rejoinder is ‘Okay then, do better.’ Under this self-challenge I composed ‘Sophie’, utilising pithy, free verse stanzas. And then there are those influences you never knew were there. In my twenties I became enamoured with those great ‘one offs’ of Victorian poetry, 266

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Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage and George Meredith’s Modern Love, both strong candidates for verse novel prototypes. The sixteen-line Meredithian sonnet was certainly an attractive form for me and I utilised it often in The Nightmarkets. Amours de Voyage, a series of verse epistles to friends from an Englishman and an Englishwoman travelling in 1840s Italy, is composed in hexameters using a most ‘modern’ English for poetry of its time, with little particularly ‘poetic’ about it. Whether this work influenced me I can’t be sure, though it certainly showed how language verging on the colloquial might be imaginatively used. Modern Love, meanwhile is a knotty, gritty account of a failing marriage, with knotty, gritty language and verse form to match. So, I packed away the Meredithian sonnet and in my late 30s moved back to the actual fourteen-line sonnet, writing what became ‘Roger, or Of Love and its Anger’ in The Lovemakers. The last four poems of this sequence were written first, and in 1989 I read them at a literary event at Lahti, Finland. In the audience was Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. She came up to me, told me she had enjoyed them and said that they sounded like a twentieth century Modern Love. And I hadn’t even known what I had done. But upon this revelation I stepped back, and there it was: my knotty, gritty account of a failing marriage, with knotty, gritty language and verse form to match! Meredith, let alone Modern Love had never been on my radar during the composition of ‘Roger’. Thanks Phyllis, this was one of my great moments as a poet. Now that’s influence. How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? On many levels I can’t quite recall what my approach was, nor most of the stages in its development. Given it took thirteen and a half years, this, I believe, can be understood. For a long while I wasn’t sure what exactly I was doing. All I knew was that I was doing it and what I was doing seemed to be working. Showing friends material, reading in public, and getting sections published certainly helped. Also, the fact that with Out Here and The Nightmarkets behind me I had production templates in my head, albeit flawed and on a smaller scale. 267

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To give some idea as to the variety of composition, the first poem to be finished in this sixteen-section work was ‘Nothing but Thunder’, the third part of Section 9. The last poem to be finished was Section 8 ‘Sophie’. I had, and maybe still have, a facility for writing long works parallel with each other over a long period of time. There’s much I can’t do in poetry though this I certainly can. It may seem like chaos to some, though it never was to me – well never so chaotic that I felt like giving up. Might any chaos come through in a reading? For many I suppose yes. So, the various stages were multifarious and overlapping. I didn’t write for every day of the thirteen and a half years but I did live The Lovemakers every day. For starters there was always research. I recall interviewing people for my Craig Stubbs/Christopher Skase character. Richard Walsh for example had met him through Kerry Packer. Now Packer, Walsh reckoned, was a loud-mouthed, abusive prick at times, but you always knew where you stood with him. Skase though was quiet and creepy. I had already written a fair amount of Stubbs and realised that this side of Skase could never go into my creation. Could you write dramatic monologue spoken by a quiet creep? Well Browning did it brilliantly in ‘My Last Duchess’. My Craig Stubbs was more like John Singleton, much in the way my supposedly ‘Dransfield’ poems were more like a ‘Tipping’ production. I also read much of the Stewart Royal Commission into Mr Asia, though I skipped the ‘economic’ side of that work. ‘Money,’ wrote Wallace Stevens, ‘is a kind of poetry.’ Maybe, but I was more interested in Terry Clark, Martin Johnstone, Karen Soich, Jimmy Shepherd, Alison Dine and the rest of the cast. (And besides all of the above research, people wanted to tell me things.) Perhaps the major stage of development occurred somewhat halfway through writing. (Though how do you know you’re halfway through creating something? Like war – there is no half time.) I got all the pieces I had completed, as well as the poems-in-progress and the notes regarding any I wanted to start and tried to order them. I think I wrote out a number of chapter headings and stuck them around the walls of the room I was living in. It sounds good and may have happened. 268

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Of course, once the whole deal was assembled there would be a certain amount of fine-tuning, but once ‘Sophie’ was completed around 11pm on a February Saturday night in 1999 I knew the final piece was in place and the book was essentially complete. I later discovered that the man upon whom ‘Dave Price’ was substantially based, died at that hour. Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Given it was last century I can only look at the evidence of what I wrote and try to deduce. You could say that many, many poems are problems whose writing is indeed the solving. You could also say, and yes I too have said it, that I write too much and quite often don’t know when to stop. Not until I returned to writing narratives in sonnet or villanelle form in The Australian Popular Songbook and Prepare the Cabin for Landing was I able to come to real terms with prolixity. I am glad I devoted a great deal of The Lovemakers to writing in the third person; though often in my monologues, the narrator gets so carried away and digresses or tells tales, that what’s being narrated might as well be in the third person. While third person writing can be a bit more detached, when I delved into certain characters like The Alien, Toby, Kim and Hannah, this detachment was dispersed and passion burst forth. I have never had a problem in writing in a voice or from a perspective other than my own. (I’ve more problems writing about myself!) For those who cry ‘Cultural appropriation!’ I have little time, with the end result of their agenda being then that no-one would write about anything other than their boring selves. You have to use your imagination and try, as Homer did, as Shakespeare did. A big problem with The Lovemakers was the various plots and the huge cast. So be it. I chose the very unpoetic list at the start of each section to help alleviate this problem. Another problem I’m always aware of is to keep under control what I am good at, being satiric for one, and being aware of what I’m less-than-good-at, such as actual, plain description, since I’m much more ‘aural’ than ‘visual’.

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I’ve a number of ‘retrospective decisions’ about The Lovemakers, though I will never put them into place. Though not as many as I have about The Nightmarkets, such as ‘Don’t write it or at least don’t publish it.’ Too late. Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? When a poet decides on a particular verse form it is often the case that having decided on the actual shape and structure they therefore attend to the actual words and thus the poetry. Certainly, without the bounds of rhyme or syllabic count (for example) my own near-enough-to-blank blank verse still helps me orchestrate the sound of a piece. At times I’ve taken liberties with this form, though liberties I trust will enhance the piece. I’ve also read sad examples such as Philip Hodgin’s verse novella Dispossessed where he unsuccessfully tried to wed Australian vernacular speech with a strict iambic pentameter. And whilst never fully subscribing to ‘free’ verse (since I believe no verse can be ‘absolutely free’) I have attempted such examples as ‘Sophie’, admittedly as a self-dare. Sometimes I’ve used verse forms only to discover later why they were used. In ‘Cross Q.C.: Three Villanelles’ we see three brief monologues spoken by a barrister: a cross examination, a summing up and his thoughts following the execution of his client. Only later did I realise that the repetitive nature of the villanelle was made for cross-examining and summing-up. Thus at the time I hardly knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. The ottava rima section ‘Non in spatio sed in muneribus capitus’ (‘Not in head space but in head jobs’) owes much to those poets who have made that form such an adventurously comic one. Though of course it needn’t be comic and one day I must attempt a ‘serious’ ottava rima. As for narrative techniques, in writing The Nightmarkets I recall adopting the motto ‘Take care of the characters and the plot will take care of itself.’ Well it probably did – if you could call what resulted a plot, for really, I didn’t know the book had one. In The Lovemakers, ‘events commenced, to improve’, though I doubt if these could be summarised as an overall ‘plot’. One overall narrative then? No. Overall narratives? Yes. 270

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Certainly one book I do feel an affinity for is the John Dos Passos trilogy USA, in which such problems seem to be confronted and addressed. Perhaps I got to know my characters that much better in The Lovemakers. Sometimes with or without techniques a solid narrative can arise out of characters. There were no actual techniques as I plotted the relations between Toby, Kim and Neil in ‘His Majesty Prince Jones smiled as he moved amongst the crowd’, a tale of love and betrayal within a heterosexual male triangle. I seem to have gone on my nerve and the thing worked. I certainly knew Toby, Kim and Neil better than many others in the volume. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? The poetry being both in charge of, yet also serving the narrative, the verse novelist must be a poet first. Otherwise write in prose. You are writing for those who will buy or borrow or steal, read or listen to poetry. If the readers and/or listeners aren’t au fait with poetry and what it actually does, and have to adjust, that’s their problem. If their experience is limited to the ‘open mic’, ‘performance’ or ‘slam’ variants, again that’s their problem. What guided me? Since at least my teens I’ve worked for an outfit called Narrative Verse in English, whose founder was a man called Geoff, Geoff Chaucer. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Browning, Kipling, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Auden, Koch, O’Hara etc. etc. all guided me. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve? Those which entertained, challenged, engaged and informed. These of course varied from poem to poem since The Lovemakers is also a collection of (albeit interconnected) narrative poems as much as it is a verse novel. Perhaps history will deem ‘even more so…’ What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? After Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos etc. (and their works are hovering the century mark) one could well posit The Novel as Form? But as regards to

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verse novels, they are and probably will be, forever a diversion in the world of fiction, though hopefully not in poetry. The verse novel is the domain of poets not novelists, this is certain. The idea of a novelist who hasn’t written poetry before, announcing ‘I’m going to write a verse novel …’ is laughable. One can imagine the reverse – poets saying they’ll write a novel in verse, though circa 1978, Murray Bail thought I was mad when I told him! So the verse novel impetus does come from poets. Maybe it is the way they take on the celebrity literary form, in the way prose writers took on the epic in the novel. (Strangely, in a threemonth hiatus during my writing The Lovemakers, I wrote Kicking in Danger, a satirical novel on Melbourne and footy. Don’t ask me how I did it.) Has the novelty element which greeted my work and the work of Vikram Seth, Les Murray etc. worn off? Probably. Has something more substantial replaced the novelty? I’d like to think so, though I hardly see the ‘New Arrivals’ shelves of Readings or Gleebooks groaning under the weight of verse novels. As to the future, whether history decides verse novels really ‘work’, the jury, I believe, remains out. Don’t be surprised if late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century verse novels go the way of nineteenth-century verse dramas (wanting to take on the Elizabethans and Jacobeans). Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others, each tried their hand at that form – and where did it get them? When does a long narrative poem or sequence start to become a verse novel? Probably when the poet says so. And if the poet is now deceased? The novel has the potential to be quite an accommodating form. I certainly class Byron’s comic epic Don Juan as a verse novel, as too would be its ottava rima descendent Kenneth Koch’s mock-heroic epics Ko or A Season on Earth and The Duplications. I could also see good reason to consider the Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters as a verse novel. Something hardly possible when it was published in 1915. Closer to home, after I had completed my Juvenal/Dr Johnson inspired series of satires The Vanity of Australian Wishes, it occurred to me that I may have written yet another verse novel. The same goes for three more narrative poems I have completed since then. 272

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For the above works, as for any verse novel ‘passing muster’, a poet must have an interest-nearing-obsession with language, character, dialogue and narrative. All these needn’t be in perfect balance, but when a verse novel lacks them all it ceases to be a novel and probably verse. Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? My main influences are not so much from verse novels as from narrative verse, including monologues and dramatic monologues. The great Victorian practitioners of verse novels Clough, Meredith and Browning more or less challenged me: ‘We can do it … go on … can you?’ The mini explosion in verse novels (not just in Australia) which coincided with Out Here and The Nightmarkets meant that I knew there were a crowd of contemporaries out there doing pretty much what I was doing, Vikram Seth heading the pack – though those contemporaries had no more influence on me than I had on them. The rules of verse novels, if they exist, are still fluid; no-one I’m sure really knows what a verse novel is, and let’s hope it stays that way. One great example I enjoyed is The Whole Truth by American, James Cummins, in which a Perry Mason saga (that’s correct Perry Mason!) is re-told in a ludicrously surreal way in a series of sestinas. Yes. My comments on Porter and Hodgins have been noted. As for Les Murray, I read The Boys Who Stole the Funeral and Fredy Neptune after I finished The Lovemakers. I found the former intolerable, both what it was saying and how Murray was saying it. I enjoyed the latter. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? What verse novels actually are, and indeed what they are worth, is still very much up for grabs. It could be a total way of the future, it could be the ultimate literary mug’s game, or it could be a form of reconciliation between these two visions. Of course, this also applies to my own work.

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Michelle A. Taylor

‘The writer … makes it look simple … You think, ‘I could do that’… This is the hardest writing … You will ever do.’ Michelle Taylor was born in Brisbane in 1968, and grew up in Darwin and Brisbane. She has lived in Suffolk, Glasgow, London and the island of Madeira in Portugal. She has been writing and publishing for over twenty years, and particularly enjoys taking poetry to young audiences as a performer and workshop leader in schools and at literary festivals. Taylor has a degree

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in occupational therapy and many years’ experience working with people with mental and emotional health problems. She also has completed a Master of Arts which researched the role of monsters in stories to empower children and manage fears. Taylor has received many grants including a scholarship from QUT to complete her Master of Arts (Research), two Arts Queensland Individual Writer’s Grants to write The Angel of Barbican High (University of Queensland Press, 2001) and If Bees Rode Shiny Bicycles (University of Queensland, 2003), and Australia Council Literary Grants to write the poetry collections for young readers, If The World Belonged To Dogs (University of Queensland, 2007) and 100 Ways To Fly (University of Queensland, 2019). She is also the recipient of a number of awards and honours. If Bees Rode Shiny Bicycles was voted one of the Top Titles for 2003 by The Australian Centre for Youth Literature. The Angel of Barbican High won the Australian Family Therapists Award for a book useful for therapists, and the Harri Jones Memorial Prize (for an Australian poet 35 years or under whose work in the field of poetry is judged to be outstanding). The Angel of Barbican High was Shortlisted for the 2000 QLD Premier’s Literary Awards – Emerging QLD Author category, won First Prize in the 1994 ABC Radio National Poetry Competition, as well as Second Prize in the 2000 Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry.

The Angel of Barbican High (2001) What ideas or influences did you have in mind when creating this work? Disclaimers 1. I’d never written a novel or a verse novel before (and haven’t since!) 2. I’ve read hundreds of books of poetry. 3. I never learnt anything worth knowing about poetry at school (except that I should fear it and I’ll probably get it wrong). 4. I have no higher qualifications in literature and consider myself under-read on every subject.

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5. I wrote The Angel of Barbican High twenty years ago. 6. At that time, Australia was forging new versions of old ways of storytelling. 7. I began a love affair with two writers of verse novels – Dorothy Porter and Steven Herrick. 8. Poetry can be funny, educational, contain characters and whole chapters, on any topic imaginable – I’m sure you know that. 9. Verse novels remind us that white spaces and silence, symbols, rhythms, metaphors are necessary. 10. Less is more, and harder – for me at least. 11. I never consider myself an expert, especially on things that I spend the most time learning about. 12. Verse novels are a way to introduce poetry to young people, especially if they hate reading and hate poetry! 13. Poems let me step inside, or at least walk gently alongside, people’s inner worlds. 14. They offer a way to be many things at once – myself, someone else, old, young, sad, strong, intelligent, fearful, determined. For me they most accurately reflect the truth of being alive. 15. You can read a verse novel in an hour or two. 16. Life tends not to happen in linear ways, so traditional stories don’t always ‘get’ me. 17. I was pregnant as I wrote many of the poems. 18. Every now and then a poem can change a life. Imagine what a whole bunch of them in the form of a verse novel might do … How did you approach writing this verse novel? What were the various stages in its development? The verse novel speaks its other truth 1 I was created on a whim in the beginning, isn’t that all there is? 276

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and of course, it was love, always love I never went looking … but the words the words kept dancing in my head Ms Loveless Ms Loveless moves like money Ms Loveless moves like money Tinkle tinkle shine it’s really all i had so little and so much a heart over head kind of thing wondering wondering wondering let’s just get to know each other and see where this might lead Ms Loveless was a teacher I knew and didn’t know from high school those cruel and doubting and incredible days when belonging was everything and unattainable no matter which school or club or family or sport colour of your hair marks in maths money in your pocket tell me i’m not the only one who lived that beautiful risk Ms Loveless was a gift she eased another poem from its hinges and another and another so exciting and full of promise but never enough like any relationship, after some weeks there was a decision to be made That was fun but it’s time for goodbye most poems end this way and live alone it’s natural and there should be no shame attached they are meant for a moment the intense affair has nowhere to go

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Let’s write a story together we chose this it hadn’t happened before it’s something you can’t explain love is like that no logic, no narrative, no rules just gut feelings 2 i’ve always said my poems say it better than I do i simply trusted them and why wouldn’t i when they have been my companions they know me better than anyone that’s not to say they are easy mostly the opposite but the paradox is so necessary to love and hate power and vulnerability fear and whatever else there is our relationship was chaos and curiosity (such novices) but the young and in love think they can do anything we made wonderful messes unplanned births deaths arguments break ups self doubt anyone who has a rule book I say to you, I do not! anyone who says you know the ending when you start writing the big poem I never do! Marina Abramovic says each project has seven stages awareness resistance submission work reflection courage the gift 278

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our relationship pushed courage to number one and work pushed in every step of the way for two long years Jez in the poem ‘Ms Loveless’ speaks for me I want to shout I am not perfect like you like your numbers but my mouth is a broken slot machine and the same broken record falls out I don’t know the answer! 62 Can you recall particular problem solving decisions you had to make in the writing process? Poem Versus Story And the winner is – I didn’t anticipate the conflict, the intense rivalry But these kids fought the whole time I wanted to love them equally Be a good parent But they kept at me, wanting me to choose And in the end (I’m almost ashamed to say it) I abandoned some of my beloved poems And chose story Who’s the main character? Person or emotion or theme So many competing voices Being inexperienced 279

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and wanting to please everyone I thought this is how we roll I likely confounded things further By allowing more than one narrator I blamed myself When you don’t have a strong narrative This is what can happen But wait a minute Even when I figured out my story The vying continued I like not having an answer now Choose the correct answer. To write the poem takes: Minutes Hours Days Months Years A lifetime To complete the poem: 1. Sit all day beside it 2. Stare at it over tea and toast 3. Carry it in your handbag 4. Peek at it in your lunch hour 5. Write it out by hand 6. Rewrite it on the computer 7. Say it out loud and listen for something to go ‘clunk’ 8. Dream about it

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To find your way through a verse novel when you become stuck: 1. Have a nap 2. Recite the latest poem to your unborn child 3. Eat wonderful food 4. Read your favourite poets 5. Visit the art gallery 6. Listen to Not the girl you think you are by Crowded House – on repeat 7. Listen to Why does it always rain on me? by Travis – on repeat 8. Print all the pages, arrange them in narrative sequence so they fill an entire room 9. Consult The Cockatrice Poetry Critique group 10. Apply for a Varuna Fellowship and learn from fellow poets – the Varuna Beefs 11. Wake with Mary Oliver and sleep with Rainer Maria Rilke 12. Take Vitamin B 13. Dance to Crowded House and Travis songs with newborn daughter in your arms 14. Make a collage to find out who the characters Jez and Nick really are (yes, this can take days but is a worthwhile investment) 15. Lie on the couch and stare at the trees and sky 16. Bid farewell to a fistful of poems 17. All of the above Which poetic and narrative techniques did you decide to employ, and why? How to build a story from one hundred poems: After ‘How to build an owl’ by William Stafford, and from The Angel of Barbican High, ‘How to build an angel’ 1. Make a bonfire with your dreary novels. Chant over the flames. 2. Invite people over and LISTEN. Ask permission to speak on their behalf. Note what tumbles from your mouth – in first/second/third person – let’s have some fun here!

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3. Do the impossible. Write a letter to an angel. 4. Build your house from heart beats, letters, the shadows of words. Shelter inside these shapes when times are tough. 5. Know the rules, for rules are beautiful, especially when they are broken. 6. All are welcome, loved and necessary in this place – lists, suites, questions, even prose! Our differences are our strengths. What a team! 7. Grant permission to find beauty in the darkest places. 8. Sneak it out at night in a whisper. Say it at first light looking to the sky. Your ears will be the judge, and then will be your eyes. Please note: These ideas are expanded upon in the poem Book of Questions. If there were places in the book where you felt it was best to emphasise the poetic strategies over the narrative strategies, or vice versa – what guided these decisions? Letter to one writing their first verse novel Dear Writer, You will be faced with decisions with each and every poem. I cannot guide you except to suggest know why you write those words, in that way, at this stage. Ask this of each page. I have stolen some of my best ones to rescue the verse novel from myself. They are in my drawer or a new collection. Don’t listen to the loudest brightest ones. Listen to your gut. What poetic or narrative effects were you hoping to achieve?

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Book of Questions (after The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda) Is youth really wasted on the young or is that old people’s rules? Can the paradox in a line be brave and scared at the same time? If poetry was the last thing left on earth would I cover my ears? Have you noticed the way these songs are the only new clothes I need? Isn’t there a way to stand on words? Is that the rhythm on the page or the way my heart smashes against my chest when things are out of control? Does a new neural pathway form when punctuation marks don’t block the synapses? Is another word for non binary verse novel? Why do all the poets visit the shrine of QUESTIONS? Can I hold the darkness in one hand and balance birdsong in the other?

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Is it easier to say what I want when I don’t say it? If metaphors grow on trees why don’t we eat that fruit? I wonder what my parents would say if I confessed my love of symbols? Can this kiss be everything? What are your thoughts on the verse novel as a form? Love/Hate (after the poem Love/Hate by Michelle Taylor from The Angel of Barbican High) Why I hate it?/wank/get to the point/don’t know what you mean/self indulgent/what is it?/low sales /no section in the bookstore for verse novels/where’s the story?/people don’t speak like that/why I love it?/ playground/choices/quick read/escape/people don’t speak like that/who’s to say how we feel and think/not sure what you mean/no right or wrong/paradox/vulnerability /honours suffering/self expression/non binary/ancient/new Have verse novels you have read been influential on this work in some way? Acknowledgements I wish to express my deep gratitude to the following poets and verse novelists. I have lumped them together because they have all influenced me in the art of story via poetic means. (in alphabetical order via first name) Anthony Lawrence

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Catherine Bateson David Malouf Dorothy Porter Dylan Thomas ee cummings Mary Oliver MTC Cronin Pablo Neruda Rainer Maria Rilke Raymond Carver Seamus Heaney Steven Herrick I struggle to quote a single line from these writers off by heart – a problem of my memory and not their influence – but their books line my shelves. And those poems and the words that make them line my inner world too. I carry with me their lights and colours, meters and rhythms, stories and souls, in blood and hair follicles, beating heart and bones, synapses and finger tips. Their influence must have spilled into my verse novel because I cannot imagine writing that novel without them as my guides, my amulets. What have you learnt about writing verse novels from the verse novels you have read? Lessons Like a picture book or the perfect chorus The writer in charge of the verse novel Makes it look simple You think ‘I could do that’ You rush out to make your own Giddy with the freedom Of writing in the first person Making it into so many skins 285

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Those verse novels you read Hid the labour behind a six line poem And you vacuumed up the story in no time – All that wondrous imagery The creative subversity The half filled pages This is the hardest writing You will ever do You learn to pick a topic carefully Or risk writing your own epitaph Your ego running ahead of you Pushing your characters out of the way Scuppering content for form You will learn the hard way By writing To take the stone and excavate Sculpt, sculpt, take away, never add Something beautiful may be inside

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Acknowledgements I wish to thank all of the participating authors for their willingness to contribute an interview in spite of the challenges of the time. I extend thanks to the publishers of the verse novels featured in this collection of interviews: University of Queensland Press; Allen & Unwin; Walker Books; Penguin Random House; Text Publishing Company; Modern Writing Press; Otago University Press; Ginninderra Press; Clouds of Magellan; Puncher & Wattmann; Harper Collins Publishers; Black Pepper Press; Vintage; Tandem Press; Mākaro Press; Victoria University Press; Poet’s Group; Rabbit Poets Series; Five Islands Press; UWA Publishing; Pitt Street Poetry, Giramondo, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Red Hen Press, Shearsman Books, Picador Books, Pandanus Books, Hachette, and Wakefield Press. Permissions were obtained for excerpts of verse novels that were reprinted in this collection. As I adapt or extend some material from earlier publications, I gratefully acknowledge the publishers of the following works published under my name: Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020; ‘Verse Novel Research and Reception in the Twenty-First Century’, New Scholar 3.2 (2014); and ‘“Country” in Representations of Speech and Thought in Australian Contemporary Verse Novels’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14.3. (2014). Sincere thanks to Nick Walker and Australian Scholarly Publishing for their professional attention and care, and publication support. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge that this research was aided by the receipt of a Research Support Grant from the School of Culture and Communication

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at the University of Melbourne. Though not directly involved with this book but nevertheless due a great many thanks are Professor Kevin Brophy AM, Associate Professor Marion May Campbell, and Associate Professor Dominique Hecq, whose support and encouragement I have valued over many years.

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Photo Credits Steven Herrick by Cathie Gorman Lorraine Marwood by Gingerhouse Photography Sharon Kernot by Gary MacRae John Jenkins copyright John Jenkins Pip Harry by Lucia Ondrusova Tim Sinclair by JSP Catherine Bateson by Helen Kempton Sally Murphy copyright Sally Murphy Brian Castro by Annette Willis Leni Shilton by Liam Shilton Diane Fahey by Irena Zdanowicz Sherryl Clark copyright Sherryl Clark Luke Best by Sarah Gage Photography Jeri Kroll by Peter Lavskis Bel Schenk by Rachel Petersen Geoff Page by Marlene Scutter John Newton by Charlotte Handy Lisa Jacobson copyright Lisa Jacobson Irini Savvides copyright Yvette Vignando Judy Johnson by Susan Brown Photography Diane Brown by Philip Temple Jordie Albiston by Melody Lesley Lebkowicz by Peter Latona, Wendy Oldmeadow Mark Pirie by John Girdlestone Maureen Gibbons by Christine Haines

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Paul Hetherington by Michelle Hetherington Christine Evans by Teresa Castracane Melissa Bruce by Christopher Verheyden Rebecca Jessen by Kate Lund David Mason by Chrissy Mason Jennifer Compton by Luke Calder Linda Weste by Kristian Gehradte Gregory O’Brien copyright Gregory O’Brien Alan Wearne by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne Michelle A. Taylor by Benjamin Dougherty

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Notes

1 Jeanine Leane, ‘Living on Stolen Land: Deconstructing the Settler Mythscape.’ Sydney Review of Books (Nov 2020), 2. 2 Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, ‘Thinking in a Regional Accent: New Ways of Contemplating Australian Writers,’ Australian Book Review no 426 (Nov 2020). 3 Christopher Pollnitz, ‘Australian Verse Novels,’ Heat 7 (2004), 235. 4 David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), x. 5 Brian McHale, ‘Beginning to Think About Narrative in Poetry,’ Narrative 17.1 (2009), 13–14. 6 Ibid. 7 James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 22. 8 Brian McHale, ‘Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry,’ Literator 31.3 (2010), 49–50. 9 Bronwyn Lea, ‘Poetry Publishing,’ in Making books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, eds. David Carter and Anne Galligan (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2007), 247. 10 Also published as Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematorium. 11 Judges’ Comments, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Ethel Turner Prize For Young People’s Literature (State Library New South Wales, 2020). 12 Pip Harry, The Little Wave (St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2019), 27. 13 Ibid., 4. 14 Ibid., 18. 15 Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., 31. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 Ibid., 129. 19 Franz Kafka, Letter to Milena Jesenká, Letters to Milena, ed. Willi Haas, trans. Tania & James Stern (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, Inc., 1953), 229.

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The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand 20 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 7. 21 Brian Castro, Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2018), 61–62. 22 Strehlow Research Centre Act 2005 (Northern Territory of Australia). 23 Diane Fahey, The Mystery of Rosa Morland (Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2008), 133. 24 Fahey, The Mystery of Rosa Morland, 134. 25 Ibid., 789. 26 Ibid., 134. 27 Ibid., 134. 28 Luke Best, Cadaver Dog (St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2020), 7. 29 Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Michael Symmons Roberts’s top 10 verse novels’, The Guardian, 20 March 2006. 30 Jeri Kroll, Vanishing Point (Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), 206. 31 Jeri Kroll, ‘Strange Bedfellows or Compatible Partners: The Problem of Genre in the Twenty-first Century Verse Novel.’ (Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2010), 5. 32 Jeri Kroll, ‘Strange Bedfellows’, 7. 33 Jeri Kroll, ‘The Hybrid Verse Novel and History: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Revisioning the Past’, AXON: Creative Explorations 7, no 2 (2017), 1–36. 34 Lynn Keller, Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 35 Bi-communal Cypriot Women’s Group Hands Across the Divide (HAD) (2001– present). 36 Irini Savvides, Against the Tide, 2. 37 Ibid., 234. 38 Ibid., 204. 39 Ibid., 231. 40 Ibid., 199. 41 Ibid., 170. 42 Ibid., 180. 43 Ibid., 199. 44 Ibid., 172. 45 Greek twisted plait biscuit. 46 Against the Tide, 199. 47 Diane Brown, 8 Stages of Grace (Auckland, New Zealand: Vintage, 2002), 33. 48 Anne Kennedy, ‘Sex, Death and the Widow’, New Zealand Listener, 10 August 2002, 60.

292

Notes 49 Diane Brown, Before the Divorce We Go to Disneyland (North Shore City, New Zealand: Tandem Press, 1997), 88. 50 Diane Brown, ‘Who Are You?’, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2020), 12. 51 Diane Brown, ‘Finding Yourself on the Other Side’, Every Now and Then, 21. 52 Diane Brown, ‘The Pattern of Memoir’, Every Now and Then, 49. 53 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1995). 54 Abigail Bray, Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2. 55 Melissa Bruce, Picnic at Mount Disappointment (Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2017), 15. 56 Melissa Bruce, Picnic at Mount Disappointment, 54. 57 Ibid., 236. 58 Melissa Bruce, ‘A Rose by any other Name’, Newswrite, Issue 233 (Sydney: Writing NSW, 2017), 6–7. 59 Lisa Jacobson ‘The Verse Novel’, On Writing. Writers Victoria, 1 July 2014. 60 David Mason, Ludlow (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007), 21. 61 David Mason, Ludlow, 128 62 Michelle A. Taylor, The Angel of Barbican High (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 38.

293

Bibliography Albiston, Jordie. The Hanging of Jean Lee. Melbourne: Black Pepper, 2013 [2004, 1998]. Bateson, Catherine. His Name in Fire. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2006. ——— The Year It All Happened. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2001. ——— A Dangerous Girl. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Best, Luke. Cadaver Dog. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2020. Bray, Abigail. Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Brown, Diane. Every Now and Then I Have Another Child. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, Te Whare Tā o Te Wānanga o Ōtākou, 2020. ——— 8 Stages of Grace. Auckland, New Zealand: Vintage, 2002. ——— Before the Divorce We Go to Disneyland. North Shore City, New Zealand: Tandem Press, 1997. Bruce, Melissa. Picnic at Mount Disappointment. Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2017. ——— ‘A Rose by any other Name.’ Newswrite, Issue 233 (June-July). Sydney: Writing N.S.W., 2017. Castro, Brian. Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria. Sydney: Giramondo, 2018. Clark, Sherryl. Mina and the Whole Wide World. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2021. Compton, Jennifer. Mr Clean & The Junkie. Eastbourne, New Zealand: Mākaro Press, 2015. Evans, Christine. Cloudless: A Novel in Verse. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2015.

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Bibliography Fahey, Diane. The Wing Collection: New & Selected Poems. Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2011. ——— The Mystery of Rosa Morland. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2008. ——— The Sixth Swan. Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2001. ——— Metamorphoses. Sydney: Dangaroo, 1988. ——— Listening to a Far Sea. Alexandria, N.S.W.: Hale & Iremonger, 1998. Gibbons, Maureen. The Butter Lady: A Silhouette Biography in Verse. Melbourne: Rabbit Poetry Journal: Rabbit Poets Series, No 6. 2016. Harry, Pip. The Little Wave. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2019. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Herrick, Steven. Zoe, Max and the Bicycle Bus. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2020 ——— Love, Ghosts and Nose Hair. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2017 [1996]. ——— A Place like this. St. Lucia. Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2017 [1998]. ——— Another Night in Mullet Town. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2016. ——— Cold Skin. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2007. ——— By the River. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2004. ——— The Simple Gift. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Hetherington, Paul. Blood and Old Belief. Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2003. Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony. ‘Thinking in a Regional Accent: New Ways of Contemplating Australian Writers.’ Australian Book Review no 426, November 2020. Jacobson, Lisa. ‘The Verse Novel’, On Writing. Writers Victoria, 1 July 2014. ——— The Sunlit Zone. Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2012. Jenkins, John. A Break in the Weather. Melbourne: Modern Writing Press, 2003. Jessen, Rebecca. Gap. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2014. Johnson, Judy. Jack. Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2007. Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand Kennedy, Anne. ‘Sex, Death and the Widow.’ New Zealand Listener, 10 August 2002. Kernot, Sharon. The Art of Taxidermy. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2018. Kroll, Jeri. ‘The Hybrid Verse Novel and History: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Revisioning the Past.’ AXON: Creative Explorations, Vol 7 No 2. Special Issue: Contemporary Boundary Crossings and Ways of Speaking Poetically. Eds. Paul Hetherington, Jen Webb and Paul Munden, (Canberra: The Centre for Creative & Cultural Research, University of Canberra, 2017), 1–36. ——— Vanishing Point. Sydney: Puncher & Wattman, 2015. ——— ‘Strange Bedfellows or Compatible Partners: The Problem of Genre in the Twenty-first Century Verse Novel.’ Eds. Catherine Cole, Marcelle Freiman and Donna Lee Brien. The Strange Bedfellows or Perfect Partners Papers: The Refereed Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (Nov 2010), 1–10. Lea, Bronwyn. ‘Poetry Publishing.’ Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2007, 247–254. Leane, Jeanine. ‘Living on Stolen Land: Deconstructing the Settler Mythscape.’ Sydney Review of Books, 6 Nov 2020, 1–13. Lebkowicz, Lesley. The Petrov Poems. Sydney: Pitt Street Poems, 2013. Marwood, Lorraine. Footprints on the Moon. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2021. ———Leave Taking. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2018. ———Star Jumps. Sydney: Walker Books, 2009. ———Ratwhiskers and Me. Sydney: Walker Books, 2008. Mason, David. Ludlow. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007. McHale, Brian. ‘Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry.’ Literator 31.3 (2010). ——— ‘Beginning to Think About Narrative in Poetry.’ Narrative 17.1 (2009). Murray, Les. Fredy Neptune. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1998. ——— The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: A Novel Sequence. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979, 1980; Manchester: Carcanet, 1989; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. Murphy, Sally. Worse Things. Sydney: Walker Books, 2020. Newton, John. Escape Path Lighting. Wellington: Victoria University Press,

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Bibliography 2020. O’Brien, Gregory. Malachi: An Entertainment. Adelaide: Little Esther Books, 1993. Page, Geoff. Cara Carissima. Adelaide: Picaro Press, 2015. ——— Coda for Shirley. Brisbane: Interactive Press, 2011. ——— Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza: A Movie in Verse. Canberra: Pandanus Poetry, 2006. ——— Drumming on Water. Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2003. ——— The Scarring. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1999. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Pirie, Mark. Tom: A Novel in Verse. Christchurch: Poets Group, 2009. Pollnitz, Christopher. ‘Australian Verse Novels’, Heat 7 (2004), 229–252. Porter, Dorothy. El Dorado. Sydney: Picador Pan Macmillan, 2007. ——— What a Piece of Work. Sydney: Picador, 1999. ——— The Monkey’s Mask. Sydney: Picador, 1994. Roberts, Michael Symmons. ‘Michael Symmons Roberts’s top 10 verse novels.’ The Guardian, March 2006. Savvides, Irini. Against the Tide. Sydney: ABC Books for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2008. Schenk, Bel. Every Time You Close Your Eyes. Mile End, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2014. Shilton, Leni. Malcolm: A Story in Verse. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2019. ——— Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2018. ———Giving voice to silence: Uncovering Bertha Strehlow’s voice through poetry. Phd manuscript, Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2016. Sinclair, Tim. Run. Melbourne: Penguin Group Australia, 2013. ——— Nine Hours North. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 2006. Strehlow Research Centre Act 2005, Northern Territory of Australia. Taylor, Michelle A. The Angel of Barbican High. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2001. Wearne, Alan. The Lovemakers. Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2008. ——— The Nightmarkets. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1986. Weste, Linda. Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020.

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The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand ———Nothing Sacred. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015. ——— ‘Verse Novel Research and Reception in the Twenty-First Century.’ New Scholar 3.2 (2014). ——— ‘“Country in Representations of Speech and Thought in Australian Contemporary Verse Novels.’ JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14.3. (2014). Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1995.

298

Index absurdity 128–129, 213 The Adventures of Vela, see Wendt, Albert affordances xiv, 254, 291, 296 Against the Tide, see Savvides, Irini Albiston, Jordie 165–174, 187, 189–190, 225, 294 Aligheri, Dante 65–66, 133, 233–234 alphabet 81, 140, 143, 284 ancient 28, 31, 75, 88, 201, 221, 249, 252, 284: Greek 67, 85, 111, 201, 209; Roman myths 111 The Angel of Barbican High, see Taylor, Michelle A. Another Night in Mullet Town, see Herrick, Steven Aotearoa-New Zealand vii–xi, 10, 34, 90, 124–125, 129, 152–153, 155–156, 164, 167, 179–180, 183, 241–242, 261, 263, 292–295 archives xv–xvi, 176, 186 The Art of Taxidermy, see Kernot, Sharon artificiality 65, 128 assonance, see poetic devices  Atwood, Margaret 112, 173, 292, 296 audiences xvi, 11, 18–20, 22, 113,

121–123, 150, 163–164, 174, 208, 224, 239, 267, 274 Aurora Leigh: A Poem, see BarrettBrowning, Elizabeth authenticity 5–6, 12, 70, 81, 93, 171, 181, 187, 191, 228–229, 250 authors vii, x, 1, 8, 15, 22, 25, 31, 33–34, 39–40, 42, 55, 63–65, 67, 80–81, 83, 86–87, 98, 107, 109, 114, 118, 122–123, 138, 148, 152, 169, 173, 190, 211, 215–216, 218, 224, 227, 232, 234, 249, 275, 287 Autobiography of Red, see Carson, Anne Awards xi–xii, xvii, 2, 10, 16, 33–34, 42, 61, 72, 80, 104–105, 119–120, 132, 138–139, 152, 166, 193, 263, 275, 291 balance 12, 20, 22, 27–28, 30, 46, 85, 113, 122–123, 149, 197, 199, 217, 222, 226, 273, 283 ballad, see poetic form Barber, Ros 112, 209 Barrett-Browning, Elizabeth xvi Bateson, Catherine 49–54, 78, 136, 141, 285, 294 Best, Luke 98–103, 292, 294 bildungsroman xvi, 212 Bindi, see Saunders, Kirli

299

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand blank verse, see poetic meter Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria, see Castro, Brian Blood and Old Belief, see Hetherington, Paul Bolton, Ken x, 25, 129, 256–257, 259–260 Botany Bay Document, see Albiston, Jordie The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, see Murray, Les A Break in the Weather, see Jenkins, John Bronte, Emily xvi Brown, Diane x, 151–164, 183, 292–294 Browning, Robert 87, 265 Bruce, Melissa 210–226, 293–294 The Butter Lady, see Gibbons, Maureen By the River, see Herrick, Steven Byron 31, 201, 266, 271–272 Cadaver Dog, see Best, Luke cantos xiv, xviii, 64, 66–67 Cara Carissima, see Page, Geoff Carson, Anne 47, 117, 201, 136, 189, 208, 225 Castro, Brian viii, 63–70, 292, 294 Catullus 248, 251–252 characters, characterisation xiii, 3–8, 11–12, 14–15, 17–19, 21, 23–24, 26–28, 30–32, 34–36, 38–39, 42–46, 50–54, 56–60, 67, 70–71, 73–74, 76–79, 81–83, 85–88, 93, 95, 99–100, 107–111, 115–117, 122–123, 126–127,

130, 134–135, 141, 147–148, 150, 153, 157, 159–160, 162, 178, 181–182, 187–189, 191, 193–200, 202, 204–209, 216–218, 229, 233–234, 236– 237, 246, 249–254, 263–265, 268–271, 273, 276, 279 Chaucer 31, 70, 119, 261, 271 chronology 21, 218, 250 Clark, Sherryl x, 14, 90–97, 294 Clarke, George Elliott xiv classics 209, 250 Cloudless, see Evans, Christine Clough, Arthur Hugh 267 Coda for Shirley, see Page, Geoff Cold Skin, see Herrick, Steven Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 144, 147, 149, 213 comedy 78, 120–122, 127, 129, 213, 249 composers 25, 105, 166–168, 232 composition xiv, 64, 193, 197, 267–268 compression 20, 69, 157, 208 Compton, Jennifer x, 241–246, 294 contemporaneity 25, 34, 67, 82, 111–112, 119, 135, 139, 146, 150, 163, 167, 172, 186–187, 193, 195, 200–201, 215, 222, 224, 231, 287, 291, 296, 298 contrivance 126, 128 conventions xiv, xix, 46, 226, 254 creative writing 17, 42–43, 64, 71, 81, 90, 105, 113, 115, 124–125, 131, 139, 151, 156, 163, 184, 193, 247, 249 Creech, Sharon 15, 53, 96, 141, 144 crossover fiction 209

300

Index enjambment, see poetic devices environment 36–37, 52, 107–108, 110–111, 135, 146, 187, 194, 200, 222 epic xi, xvi, 31–32, 42, 65, 70, 106, 112, 135, 172, 201, 213, 221, 224–225, 232–233, 259, 272 Escape Path Lighting, see Newton, John essays 25, 63, 75, 139, 180, 211, 232, 241 Eugene Onegin, see Pushkin, Aleksandr/Alexander Evans, Christine viii, 203–209, 294 Evaristo, Bernardine 112, 292, 296 Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, see Brown, Diane Every Time you Close your Eyes, see Schenk, Bel evocation 233, 265 experimentation 18, 25, 43–46, 48, 56–58, 60, 106, 112, 150, 157, 172, 181, 183, 196, 213, 216, 224, 226, 230, 254, 260 exposition xiv, 110

A Dangerous Girl, see Bateson, Catherine Dante, see Aligheri, Dante  dialogue 4, 32, 35, 40, 51, 53, 94, 100, 117, 121–123, 126, 160, 163, 173, 187, 213–214, 216–217, 273 diary 8, 171, 180–182, 212, 265 dimeter, see poetic meter diversity ix, xix, 79, 88, 230, 254 drama – dramatic crux, effect, poem, scene, study of, or treatment: 22, 25–26, 29, 32, 88, 108–109, 170–171, 198, 200, 213, 217, 221, 223, 235, 238–239, 253 dramatic monologue, see poetic form dramatic verse 235 or verse drama 225, 272 dreams 154, 162 Eckermann, Ali Cobby xi, 47 8 Stages of Grace, see Brown, Diane El Dorado, see Porter, Dorothy emotion 5–7, 11–15, 20, 39, 51, 74, 78, 96, 106, 108, 110–111, 113, 128, 136, 148–149, 161, 177, 187, 206, 213, 222–223, 226, 229, 238, 279 The Emperor’s Babe, see Evaristo, Bernardine encounter 42, 84, 87, 148, 158, 162, 173 engagement xiv, 221 English 43, 63, 75, 81, 105–106, 156, 180, 200, 252, 265, 267, 27; as a Second Language 44, 58, 153; authors 31; language 42; Romantic poets 31

Fahey, Diane vii, 80–89, 292, 295 fantasy xix, 83, 222 fiction x, xiii, xvii, xix, 6, 10, 12, 16, 25, 30, 41–42, 51, 53, 59, 61, 64, 68, 75, 77–78, 81–84, 86, 91–92, 99, 105, 113, 115, 125, 128–131, 134–135, 139, 146, 151–152, 154–156, 161, 164, 173, 176, 180–183, 185, 187, 191, 193–194, 205, 209, 211, 215–217, 220, 224, 230, 234, 236, 246–247, 250, 257, 260, 264, 272, 291, 297

301

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand figurative language 106, 111, 113, 198 film 3. 6, 76, 82, 120, 169, 181, 222, 225, 233, 236, 242, 244–245, 257 first person, see point of view flexibility, inflexibility xiv, 127, 172, 175, 178, 198, 250 Footprints on the Moon, see Marwood, Lorraine form, see poetic form Fredy Neptune, see Murray, Les freedom 27, 81, 86: of experimentation 115, 226; of creation; of invention 70, 134; of information 169; of movement 85; of narrative, narrative voice 234, 236; of writing 285

Herrick, Steven x, xv, 1–8, 14, 17–18, 22, 34, 39, 50, 53, 56, 61, 140–141, 225, 276, 285, 295 Hetherington, Paul viii, 187, 189, 192–202, 295–296 His Name in Fire, see Bateson, Catherine history x–xi, 11, 73, 75–77, 106, 108, 124, 142, 146, 149, 165–167, 172–174, 195–196, 209, 234–236, 250, 261, 271–272, 292, 296 Hodgins, Philip x, 78, 129, 136 Homer 31, 67, 88, 172, 178, 233, 235, 238, 240, 269 House Arrest, see Kroll, Jeri hybrid 108, 110, 113, 139, 142, 156, 187, 200, 224–226, 292, 296

Gap, see Jessen, Rebecca genre vii–ix, xii–xix, 3, 6, 11, 62, 71–72, 74, 76, 78–79, 88–89, 107, 109–110, 112–113, 122–123, 134, 136, 172, 174, 183, 190, 201, 217, 224, 230, 232, 254, 259, 261, 292, 296 Gibbons, Maureen 184–191, 295 The Golden Gate, see Seth, Vikram Gondal’s Queen, see Bronte, Emily Greece 232–233 Greek 142–143, 251, 292; Greek tragedy 201

iambic pentameter, see poetic meter iambic tetrameter, see poetic meter iambic trimeter, see poetic meter The Iliad, see Homer illustrations 20, 60, 182 imagery, see poetic devices imagination 29, 32, 84, 113, 129, 133, 165, 168, 171–172, 195, 265, 269 immersion, in story, 140, 194, 223, 235–236 impetus 106, 190, 200, 272 influences or counterinfluences ix, 2, 11, 17, 26, 34, 39, 42–43, 50, 53, 56, 61–62, 64–65, 73, 78, 81–82, 85–86, 89, 91, 96, 99, 103, 106, 110, 112, 115–116, 120, 123, 125, 130, 132, 136, 139, 146–147, 150, 152, 157–158, 168, 173, 176, 178, 180, 182–

haiku xiii, 51–52, 111, 180 The Hanging of Jean Lee, see Albiston, Jordie Harry, Pip 33–40, 291, 295 Herman, David 291, 295

302

Index 183, 185, 188–189, 193, 201, 204, 209, 211–212, 214–215, 225–226, 228, 232, 236, 240, 242, 248, 254, 256, 260, 263, 265–267, 273, 275, 284–285 inspiration 66, 69, 166, 182, 195, 215 interiority 30–32, 87, 127, 164, 178, 207, 216–217, 220–221, 252 Jacobson, Lisa viii, xviii, 22, 131– 137, 177, 201, 229–230, 293, 295 Jack, see Johnson, Judy Jenkins, John x, 24–32, 129, 256, 295 Jessen, Rebecca x, 103, 227–230, 295 Johnson, Judy viii, 145–150, 178, 201, 246, 254, 296 journalist 30, 33, 51, 92, 173 journals, journal entries xiv, 10, 16–17, 42, 51, 72, 75–76, 80–81, 98, 112, 139, 141–142, 153, 166, 173, 180–181, 184–185, 193, 211–213, 217, 225, 228, 232, 248, 260, 287, 295, 298 Kernot, Sharon xviii, 16–23, 296 Kroll, Jeri 22, 23, 104–113, 292, 296 language: Greek 119, 140, 173, 202, 233–234, 249, 252; colloquialism 4, 102, 267; dialects 235; English 252; French 65, 260; immigrant 233–235, 238; Latin 249, 252; linguistic features; power of 188, 207; Scots 233; slang 35, 235; Spanish 233; translation 58, 118, 123, 141, 166, 195, 232, 238 Lawrie & Shirley, The Final Cadenza:

A Movie in Verse, see Page, Geoff layout xiii, 38, 46, 157, 161, 163–164, 205 Lea, Bronwyn 291, 296 Leane, Jeanine ix, 291, 296 Leave Taking, see Marwood, Lorraine Lebkowicz, Lesley 175–178, 296 libretti 225, 232, 252 line xiii, xvii, 5–6, 12–13, 19, 28– 29, 35–36, 38, 41, 48, 51, 59–60, 96, 99–102, 121, 127, 148. 152, 154–155, 157, 161–162, 172, 174, 176–178, 185, 187, 196–197, 204–206, 208, 214, 216, 219– 220, 233, 236–239, 243–244, 252–254, 259, 267, 283, 285 linearity or nonlinearity 36, 68, 74, 111, 122, 221, 276 literature viii, xi, 10, 16, 25, 34, 55, 64–67, 69, 73, 85, 87, 106, 113, 125, 131, 137, 139, 146, 150, 166–167, 181, 201, 210, 261, 265, 275 The Little Wave, see Harry, Pip long poem, see poetic form The Long Take, see Robertson, Robin Louisa: A Poetical Novel in four Epistles, see Seward, Anna Love that Dog, see Creech, Sharon The Lovemakers, see Wearne, Alan Ludlow, see Mason, David lyric, see poetic mode Malachi, An Entertainment, see O’Brien, Gregory Malcolm: A Story in Verse, see Shilton, Leni The Marlowe Papers, see Barber, Ros

303

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand Marwood, Lorraine x, xviii, 9–15, 296 Mason, David viii, xiii, 231–240, 254, 293, 296 Masters, Edgar Lee 246, 272 McHale, Brian 291, 296 memoir, see also verse memoir 119, 139, 151–152, 156, 158, 162, 232, 241, 252, 260, 293 metaphor, see poetic devices meter, see poetic devices Mina and the Whole Wide World, see Clark, Sherryl mock-heroic, see poetic mode modernism 129, 239 moderns 32 modes, see poetic mode The Monkey’s Mask, see Porter, Dorothy monologue, see narrative voice Morgan, Sally xi The Mother Workshops, see Kroll, Jeri Mr Clean & The Junkie, see Compton, Jennifer Murphy, Sally 14, 55–62, 225, 296 Murray, Les ix–x, xvii, 10, 123, 129, 201, 232, 246, 261, 272–273, 296 The Mystery of Rosa Morland, a verse novel, see Fahey, Diane myth 29, 85, 111, 200, 208, 243, 249, 291, 296 narrative xiv, 3–7, 11–13, 20–21, 26–30, 32, 34, 36, 38–39, 42, 57, 61, 64, 66–68, 70, 76, 79, 86, 95–96, 99, 103, 106, 110, 112, 115–116, 122, 127–129,

133, 135, 137, 155, 161–162, 168, 177–178, 181–183, 186–188, 190, 193, 207, 209, 214–215, 221, 225, 229–230, 239, 245, 250, 259–261, 265, 271, 273, 278, 280, 291, 295–297 narrative drive, momentum, pacing, propulsion, rhythm or tension 6, 8, 13, 20, 22–23, 31, 68, 88, 100, 106–107, 110–111, 113, 115, 122–123, 129, 135, 155, 164, 176, 186, 188, 194, 207, 217, 222–223, 238, 244, 254 narrative elements vii, ix, xii, xiv, xvii, 4, 12–13, 217, 254 narrative effects 6, 13, 20, 30–31, 37, 46, 53, 60, 68, 77, 87, 95, 101–102, 111, 116, 122, 127, 135, 143, 149, 155, 163, 172, 178, 182, 188, 208, 223, 229, 239, 245, 253, 259 narrative forms or types of, xiii–xiv narrative poem, poetry or verse xi; xvii, 13, 32, 99–100, 106–108, 135, 147, 155, 164, 175, 194, 213–214, 225, 235, 251, 260, 265, 271–273 narrative scholars viii narrative strategies or techniques 1, 4–5, 8, 13–14, 18–19, 22, 28–30, 32, 36, 45, 52, 58, 60, 62, 67–68, 76–77, 86, 94–95, 101–102, 110–111, 116, 121–122, 126–127, 135, 142–143, 148– 149, 154–155, 161. 170–171, 177, 181–182, 184, 187–189, 207, 217–218, 220, 222, 226, 228– 229, 236, 238, 244, 252–254, 258–259, 270–271, 281–282 narrative voice: 4, 126–127, 234, 238; first person 181,

304

Index 252; third person 266, 269; monologue 147; multiple voices 59; ventriloquism 195 narrator 3, 4, 5, 7, 19, 52, 74, 93, 99–100, 102, 116, 126–127, 147, 160, 162, 197, 220, 236, 238, 269, 280; unreliable narrator 19, 147, 220 Newton, John x, xv, 124–130, 183, 296 The Nightmarkets, see Wearne, Alan Nine Hours North, see Sinclair, Tim nomenclature xiii, xvi–xvii, 245, 249 Nothing Sacred, see Weste, Linda novel xvii, 4, 7, 10, 13, 15–16, 18, 21, 31, 33, 41, 44–51, 54, 63–64, 66–67, 70, 81–82, 91–92, 96, 102, 105, 116, 118, 123, 125, 129, 137–139, 142, 146, 149– 151, 154, 156–157, 161, 176–177, 182, 189, 199, 204–205, 212, 215–216, 218, 225, 233, 238– 239, 262, 271–273, 275, 281 novelist 43, 128, 137, 150– 151, 205, 262, 272 novelistic technique, see narrative strategies or techniques novella 152, 157, 162, 164, 245 O’Brien, Gregory x, 255–261, 296 The Odyssey, see Homer Omeros, see Walcott, Derek omniscience, see point of view opera 128, 152, 156, 158, 167–168, 194, 200–201, 210, 213, 225, 232, 243, 257 orality 190 ottava rima, see poetic devices

pacing, see narrative momentum Page, Geoff viii, 78, 118–123, 178, 189, 246, 297: Cara Carissima 119–120, 297; Coda for Shirley 119–122, 297; Lawrie & Shirley, The Final Cadenza: A Movie in Verse 119–122, 297 para rhyme, see poetic devices pastiche 86, 180, 182 pastoral, see poetic mode persona 27, 50–51, 186 personification, see poetic devices The Petrov Poems, see Lebkowicz, Lesley PhD x, 17, 42, 72, 81, 90, 91, 93, 115, 125, 131, 139, 140, 142, 254, 297 Phelan, James 291, 297 Picnic at Mount Disappointment, see Bruce, Melissa Pirie, Mark x, 179–183, 297 A Place Like This, see Herrick, Steven plays 87, 109, 122, 201, 203–204, 211, 235 playwright 72, 204–205, 207–208, 241 plot, plot development 12, 20, 32, 36, 43–44, 53, 70, 82–83, 88, 100, 103, 110, 112, 115, 120, 125–127, 140, 143, 147, 149, 157, 160, 162, 164, 172, 190, 194, 199, 208, 215, 217, 229, 242, 251, 269–271 poetic devices 13, 24, 32, 94–95, 171, 184, 187, 189: alliteration 19, 102, 187–188; assonance 187, 208, 252; end rhyme 19, 47, 177, 252; figurative language 106, 111, 113, 198; full or perfect rhyme 29, 122; half, part or 305

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand slant rhyme 29, 122, 187, 190; imagery 5, 13, 20, 34, 37, 39, 78, 82, 94–97, 110, 134, 148, 187, 205–206, 222, 285; internal rhyme 19, 29; metaphor 5, 13, 30, 32, 37, 39–40, 67–68, 70, 94–95, 102, 109–112, 122–123, 132–133, 139, 142, 154, 164, 187–188, 190, 212, 248–249, 252, 276, 283; personification 149, 221; repetition 13, 19, 59; 140, 143, 187; rhyme 41, 69, 121–122, 128, 170, 235, 239, 270; rhythm 19–20, 24, 30, 32, 37, 45, 59, 63, 65–67, 69–70, 101–102, 108, 113, 134–136, 140, 187, 189–190, 205, 213, 215–216, 219–220, 222–223, 226, 238, 252, 276, 283, 285; simile 19, 37, 94–95, 102, 111; white space 11, 21, 38–39, 46, 60, 94, 168, 208, 276 poetic meter 68, 87, 187, 197–198, 285: dimeter 121; hexameter 238, 267; iambic or iambic pentameter 87, 127, 196, 209, 213, 270; iambic tetrameter 120– 121,196; iambic trimeter 196 poetic form: ballad xiv; blank verse xiii, xvi, 87, 111, 127, 135–136, 196, 235–236, 270; cantos 64, 66–67; concrete poem xiii, 43, 47, 172; couplets 245, 260, 265–266; long poem 25, 32, 56, 99, 106–107, 112, 116, 173, 183, 242, 272, 292, 295; monologue or dramatic monologue 84, 87, 147–149, 263, 265, 268, 273; sonnet xiii, 103, 111, 119, 135, 165, 166, 177, 238, 267, 269; villanelle 238, 269–270 poeticity xii poetic mode: elegiac 206; heroic 29,

260; ludic 64, 70; lyrical 35, 53, 110, 127, 149, 162–163, 202, 239, 260; mock-heroic 69, 272; satirical 124, 156, 262, 272 poetic strategies or techniques 5, 13, 20, 30, 36, 45, 52, 60, 68, 77, 95, 102, 111, 116, 122, 127, 135, 143, 149, 155, 161, 171, 177–178, 182, 188, 199, 207, 222, 229, 238, 244, 253, 259, 271, 282 point of view: omniscience, see also narrative voice politics 82, 85, 148, 186, 235–236, 239, 249, 252 Pollnitz, Christopher 291, 297 polyphony 142, 209 pop culture 180–181 Porter, Dorothy ix–xi, xviii, xix, 17–18, 22, 42, 78, 103, 112, 117, 129, 135, 140–141, 147–148, 150–152, 176–178, 183, 187, 189, 191, 201, 225, 229–230, 242, 254, 266, 276, 284, 297; El Dorado xviii;The Monkey’s Mask xviii; What a Piece of Work xviii; Wild Surmise xviii possibilities vii, 22, 46, 78, 87, 89, 112 postmodernist approaches 180–183, 236 prizes xi, xvii, 10, 16, 18, 25, 34, 64, 71, 73, 80–81, 98, 105, 119– 120, 132, 146, 150, 166–167, 173, 175, 192–193, 231–232, 242, 247, 263, 275, 291 problem solving decisions 4, 12, 18, 28, 35, 44, 51, 58, 66, 76, 86, 93, 100, 110, 115, 121, 126, 133–134, 141, 147, 154, 160, 169, 177, 181, 186, 196–197, 206, 217, 228, 235,

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Index 243, 250, 257, 269, 279 productive interplay xiv prose xiii, xvii, xix, 4, 7, 11, 20, 23, 35, 43–44, 47–48, 50–52, 61, 64, 66–67, 69, 86–87, 94, 96–98, 100, 102–103, 108–113, 115, 122–123, 128, 142, 150, 152, 154, 156–157, 172, 174, 180–182, 189, 193, 199, 206, 215–216, 218, 225, 231–232, 238–239, 241, 252, 259–260, 271–272, 282 prose poem, see poetic form protagonist 17–19, 21, 64–65, 67, 69, 82, 102, 108, 121, 135, 150, 209, 212, 216–218, 235 psychology 106, 108, 126 publication viii, x, xv, xix, 18, 55, 73–74, 157, 180, 206, 241, 249, 251, 287 publishers xii, xv, xix, 20, 46, 57, 97, 102, 152, 164, 174, 179, 208, 218–219, 227, 287 punctuation 19, 45, 59, 94, 172, 213, 283 Pushkin, Aleksandr /Alexander xvi, 65, 78, 123, 201–202 Ratwhiskers and Me, see Marwood, Lorraine readers viii, xi–xii, xvii, 3, 5, 10–11, 14, 18, 20–22, 34–35, 47, 50, 53, 57–58, 60–61, 68–71, 78–79, 83, 88, 94, 98, 103, 106, 110–113, 116, 118, 122, 131, 136, 150, 154–155, 161–163, 174, 178, 182, 184, 186, 189, 206–208, 214, 217, 220, 224–225, 229–230, 239, 245, 249–250, 260, 271, 275

reception vii–viii, xiv–xv, xix, 68, 287, 297 research 13, 17, 27–28, 30, 71, 73–76, 81, 92, 115, 125, 134, 142, 147, 166, 168, 176–177, 184–186, 188, 195, 243, 249–250, 254, 268, 275, 287, 292, 296–297 resonance 31, 82, 208–209 rhyme, see poetic devices rhythm, see poetic devices The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor The Ring and the Book, see Browning, Robert Robertson, Robin 103, 158 rococo 124, 128 romances 106, 112; Romantic 31, 67, 125; romantic comedy 120–121 Ruby Moonlight, see Eckermann, Ali Cobby Run, see Sinclair, Tim satire, see poetic mode Saunders, Kirli xi Savvides, Irini 138–144, 292, 297 Schenk, Bel ix, 22, 114–117, 297 Seth, Vikram x, 32, 47, 65, 78, 103, 112, 123, 135, 178, 201, 224, 261, 272–273 setting xix, 4–5, 28–29, 32, 35, 43–44, 52, 70, 74, 99, 115, 123, 125, 128, 147, 188, 190–191, 198, 205, 222, 243 Seward, Anna xvi Shakespeare, William 87, 147, 209–210, 213–214, 225, 235, 240, 269, 271 307

The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand Shilton, Leni xii, 71–79, 297 The Simple Gift, see Herrick, Steven Sinclair, Tim ix, 41–48, 117, 297 Sister Heart, see Morgan, Sally slant rhyme, see poetic devices sonnet, see poetic form speculative fiction 51, 134 Spoon River Anthology, see Masters, Edgar Lee stanza, see poetic form Star Jumps, see Marwood, Lorraine story xiv, 2–8, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 20, 24, 26–32, 34–39, 44–46, 48, 50–54, 57, 59, 61, 69–77, 80, 83–84, 86, 88, 91–97, 99–102, 104, 106–107, 110–111, 113, 116, 121–122, 126–129, 131, 133, 135–136, 139–140, 143–144, 147, 149–150, 154–158, 160–161, 164, 171, 176–178, 181–183, 186–189, 194–197, 205–209, 212, 214–223, 228–230, 233–243, 245, 259–260, 265, 278–281, 284–285, 297 storytelling vii, xi–xii, 67, 69, 78, 86, 137, 190, 196, 198, 200, 202, 208, 276, 284 storyworld xii, 21 subgenres, see genre The Sunlit Zone, see Jacobson, Lisa syntax, see language: linguistic features Taylor, Michelle A. 274– 286, 293, 297 third person, see narrative: narrative voice Thomas, Dylan 130 Tom, a novel in verse, see Pirie, Mark

tragedy 69, 116, 124, 128, 213 Tranter, John 129, 260 trilogy xvi, 120–121, 271 tropes, see narrative tropes typography 43, 45–46, 48 Under Milk Wood, see Thomas, Dylan unreliable narration, see narration utterance, see narrative voice Vanishing Point, see Kroll, Jeri ventriloquism, see narrative: narrative voice vernacular, see language verse: verse biography vii 119, 167, 169, 172–174, 185–186, 189–191, 295; verse drama see dramatic verse; verse epic xi, xvi, 28, 31–32, 201, 213, 225; verse epistles xvi, 267; verse memoir 152, 156, 158, 162, 260; verse narrative 107, 147, 164, 175, 181, 194, 213–214, 260, 273; verse novella vii, x, xix, 152, 158, 160–164, 177, 242, 245, 262, 270; verse trilogy xvi, 120–121, 271; verse vignette 46, 252 villanelles, see poetic form Virgil 178, 233 voice, see narrative voice Walcott, Derek xvi, 201, 232, 246, 254, 257 Walking with Camels, see Shilton, Leni Wearne, Alan viii, 123, 183, 189, 261–273, 297

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Index Wendt, Albert xi Weste, Linda vii–xix, 247–254, 287–288, 297–298 What a Piece of Work, see Porter, Dorothy white space, see poetic devices Whylah Falls, see George Elliott Clarke Wild, Margaret 61, 136 Wild Surmise, see Porter, Dorothy Woolf, Virginia 225, 238, 240 word count xix, 219 word play 45, 252–253 Worse Things, see Murphy, Sally writers vii ix–xvii, xix, 22, 25, 42, 48, 69, 72–73, 81, 88, 96, 106–107, 112–115, 133, 142, 152, 167, 180, 183, 201, 211, 217, 227–229, 242, 272, 276, 285, 287, 291, 293, 295, 297 The Year It All Happened, see Bateson, Catherine Young Adult vii, 1, 2, 18, 21–22, 33–35, 39, 41–43, 47, 49, 53, 61, 77, 88, 104–105, 112–113, 122–123, 136, 138–139, 142, 144, 182–183, 208, 224, 254

309