by Melissa Buckheit

MB: Hello, Emma. It is such a pleasure tospeak with you about your debut collection, The Striped World (Faberand Faber, 2009), its movements, themes and influences, as well as your currentwriting and travels since its publication. The Striped World wieldsits own power of language and lyric on a confluence of themes and subjects—historical,personal, & natural. When I first heard you read from your collection atthe Stanza Poetry Festival, in St. Andrews, Scotland in 2010, I was struck byyour control of language— below a surface staidness reminiscent of oureveryday speech, you reveal a power sourced in the idiosyncracyof the colloquial, in the sentence form and within it, the question and answer,as well as the roots of Latin and Anglo-Saxon. To this, an almost gentlenesstoward the objects and subjects of your book emerges; your use of language setsyour subjects, narratives and ideas apart from the common, reveals theirhumanity (or animality, I suppose), and particularly,their complexity. The various speakers, whether you, a third-person narrator ora character or person, are not black and white,  but grey—aboveall, they speak truthfully and directly. You often use unique pairings of nounsand verbs to highlight the strange or a sense of survival. In your voice, thereis often playfulness, and a dark and mordant humor often linked to melancholy.Please speak about some of these ideas—your use of language, emotion,tone, depiction of subjects/objects, and your musicality and sources.

EJ: Thank you for reading thepoems so closely and sympathetically. And forsaying, very generously, that I have control of language. I don’t know if thisis true but I do have a tendency when I write to pare back. Not as part of someminimalist philosophy but because I want a distilled language I suppose, aconcentration. And I do find that individual words will resonate more widelyand ambiguously the less you pad or accessorise them.But that desire to pare back can also go hand in hand with an impulse toimaginative extravagance, or the desire to knit together a variety of voicesand shifts in tone. There was a certain breakthrough when I began inserting ‘speech’of people and often objects into my poems, and making the inanimate speak (it’sfunny, but I never noticed this tendency until the poems were collected, andpeople pointed it out to me). This is a way I suppose of not locking the poeminto one perspective, or showing that you’re aware of the limits ofperspective, and are very interested in those limits… You say my speakers are ‘grey’,and I like that. A friend once described them as exhibiting ‘sfumato’, and I like the cinematic or painterly quality ofboth those descriptions, that sense of a fading in and out between speakers andobjects. This certainly happens throughout the poems, not that the process wasthat self-conscious at the point of writing. But I like to admit polyphony andfragmentation without sacrificing the shape and the momentum and the sense ofcompleteness in a poem, which are very important to the pleasure I get fromwriting a poem, and from having written it – poems can appear to me verymusically, as shapes and as structures of sound, before I’m properly aware oftheir ‘content’. And that sound has a visual quality, and can come to me as avisual representation, a kind of primitive score. So I work on different partsof the page according to that mental picture, and have the sensation that I’mknitting together some ‘whole’, however fictive or ephemeral or naïve thatsensation might be.

            Ilike too that you say my characters speak directly and truthfully. I feel theyhave no choice, that the types of creatures I write are always embarrassinglysincere, even when the sensibility of a poem is ironic. I have a poem, forinstance, from the point of view of a goldfish in a little bowl, surrounded bythe dingy paraphernalia of a little goldfish bowl, whose worldview ishigh-toned and quite kingly. The poem’s ironic but the fish is serious. Perhapsthat’s what you mean by humour linked to melancholy –both humour and melancholy are often triggered by a recognition of the strange. And they illuminate the strange.One of my favourite books is Charlie Chaplin’sautobiography, which is a very melancholy book. There’s one chapter in there which is more or less a descriptive list of famous, suicidally depressed clowns. And when you write poems andcreate speakers you often have the sense that you’re exhibiting a pack ofclowns, who may or may not know that they’re clowns, and that you might be thebiggest oaf of all. There’s a line from a Geoffrey Hill poem, which I’llmisquote because I’m plucking it from memory, which goes something like ‘himselfa clown, and a judge of clowns.’ Maybe most poets feel that way. And to tiethese things together for a minute – the idea of different speakers andsubjects/objects, and the sense of a poem as a maudlin curious thing and as awhole and as a performance – I think that certain antic shifts in toneand voice are one of the strengths of poetry. I find it confusing when peopletalk about a poet finding their ‘voice’, as though this were a unitary thing. Idon’t see why poets shouldn’t have as many voices as actors have characters.

MB: Yes, an interesting ideaof confluence. This is very true of ‘voices’. I agree from within my own poetrywriting. It is often challenging for others when one may write in manydifferent styles and with different voices, tones and sensibilities; I think that a poet is often expected, like you say, tohave one voice. This can be boring and is also quite limiting, as well. Emma, whatwere you reading during the years when you wrote many of these poems?  Were there sources which influenced you, particularly,whether evident in your texts, or not? 

EJ: I wrote one or two of thepoems when I was pretty young, an undergraduate. I was reading English atSydney University and was lucky enough to have teachers, some of them poets,who introduced me to a pretty wide variety of literatures and theories, whichstimulated me: you know, Milton and the Modernists and contemporary Americanpoetry and Central European poetry and Australian novels all at once and withouta sense of hierarchy. I wrote most of the poems as a postgraduate student. I’vealways read a lot in translation. It’s hard for me to pinpoint where aninfluence begins or what my sources are. Like a lot of writers, I have atendency to syncretism and my work seems to reflect that more and more. It’s a sortof sad casserole. Saying that, there are some encounters that have changed theway I write, and which I can see blaring through, even though these are rarelythe things that are commented on: city architecture, ballads, religious art, the Blues. I’d say I’m as much influenced by music andcinema as I am by literature.

MB: I’m also curious about the geographicalmovements of the poems—you travel from Australia to Europe, England,America, to the oceans and across ocean-beds, and back to Australia with its wide open spaces. How did place and the local, as the arthistorian Lucy Lippard calls it, surface and shiftyour work in this book, from narrative to style and beyond? Did travel alsoinfluence specific poems?

EJ: I’man Australian who lives in Europe a lot of the time. My mother was English. I’vemoved around a lot in the last five years. I don’t often feel very at home, orvery foreign. I think this movement has mostly inflected the visual vocabularyof my poems, for want of a better phrase, and imagery in my poems isn’tornamental but does conceptual work. That is, I think through things. Certain things that appear –very green fields, leafless trees, cobbles, the wrought-iron Rococo cages ofolder zoos – wouldn’t have appeared if I’d spent all my time inAustralia. But are they always interpreted through a lens of strangeness,because of where I grew up? Probably. But I don’t think I’m interested inchange and difference because I travel; I think I travel because I’m interestedin difference and change. And certainly there are things I’ve come across as I’vetraveled that have been jumping-off points for poems. I spent a winter inProvincetown, Massachusetts, which led to a very place-specific poem called ‘Citizenship’.So a particular place will sometimes provide the narrative germ of a poem,though in terms of their preoccupations they’re not really poems of landscapeor place as such. I wish I could write such grounded poems.

Butin terms of the local and the specific, I think Sydney has been very importantto me. It’s my city. I think it’s shaped my tendencies of thought. There arecertain motifs that recur in my poems – certain interpenetrations ofwater and glass for example, and the motif of the reflected city – thatare probably imprinted in me because of Sydney. I wouldn’t say they were justcosmetic, or decorative though. They’re recurrences through which I think things through. But local, yes. Mytropes would undoubtedly be different if I’d been from, say, Dresden.

MB: Your poems’ movements are vast in the bestsense of the word—you encompass strange and unique narratives, withfigurative shorter poems, mythology, history, personal narrative and parable.Amongst these forms and experiments, you write about immigration, colonialism,prejudices based on race, relationships, both familial and other, and the manyreflections and guises of the self. Please speak about this confluence in yourbook. What organized your attention and focus? What were you essentially tryingto achieve?

EJ: I’m glad you use the word ‘confluence’,because I find it hard to unpick where those different preoccupations end andbegin. The more political preoccupations I generally approach throughnarrative, but even then, at the heart of these narratives there’s often acharacter or figure or object that compresses (at least in my mind) those morevaried preoccupations to an indissoluble point – the parrot in ‘Zoos forthe Dead’, for example, or the pearls in ‘Farming’. I think in images and Ioften write through compressed metaphors, which are the linguistic relatives ofimages. And, as you say, in analogies and parables, which come to me as brief,intense vignettes, almost like movie stills. These are the things that organizemy poems I guess, or at least the things around which the poems orbit. Andthere’s that fascination with where the self begins and ends – the masksof the self which are no less genuine for being masks.And this feeds into the more ‘outward’ looking poems about things likeimmigration and colonialism because these narratives and their consequencespartly organize the self. I think that there’s sometimes an assumption thatthese more ‘philosophical’ preoccupations are solipsistic, and divorced fromthe political. I think that it’s opposed to the solipsistic, to examine thecontingency of the self. And to be aware of your own contingency is afoundation for a nuanced political perspective.

            It’sinteresting to me that I didn’t realize the recurrent nature of my tropes andpreoccupations until I was choosing poems for the book, and going through mywork. Writing is the process through which I discover my preoccupations; I don’tknow and then express them.

MB: I like your articulation:‘the masks of the self, which are no less genuine for being masks.’ Thisconnects to your previous idea about voices, sources, and the narratives and consequences which organize the self. Thereare quite a few poems which touch upon the history ofpeoples and events
 in Australia, your birth country. Perhaps you couldspeak about a few of these poems briefly—particularly their focus onhistory and the depictions of insider/outsider vis-à-vis Australia and theUnited Kingdom. There seems to be a liminal spaceinhabited and created in some of these poems that captures the ‘inbetweenness’ of your subjects and their narratives,including your own ancestors and family. I’m thinking of “Zoos for the Living,”and “Zoos for the Dead.”

EJ: Yes, they’re a funny setof twins, those poems. I wrote a long, bad poem when I was 21, and those twophrases are the only things I salvaged from it. It was built around an openingvillanelle, and the phrase ‘zoos for the living and zoos for the dead’ was oneof the refrain lines, and the poems then had different sections built arounddifferent lines of the villanelle. The idea was to show the guts underneath thevillanelle’s smooth surface. The phrases stayed with me after that poem, and Iknew I wanted to write poems with those titles, though I didn’t really knowwhat they’d be. I wrote ‘Zoos for the Dead’ first, over a couple of years. It’sinteresting that you speak of inbetweenness, becausethat poem evolved similarly to the initial poem, in that it’s built around theintersection of certain narratives and forms, and the inbetweenworld they create. The poem starts as straight terza rima, which getsincreasingly interrupted and fractured as different narratives, real andimagined, intersect. And then you have these otherinbetween elements – the imagined underwatersociety, that alternative commonwealth, and the imagined, projected history ofthe parrot Narcissus, and the shipwreck, and these things are liminal or hybrid or compensatory and mostly sad.Narratives are where we keep our ancestors. Libraries are where we keep ourancestors. Languages contain them, and all these things are zoos, where westand and stare, or so it went in my mind as I was writing the poem over time,though I wasn’t conscious of these things in the blatant terms with which I canspeak of them now. I think I’d write it differently now.

I wrote‘Zoos for the Living’ a couple of years after I finished ‘Zoos for the Dead.’It was conceived as a sort of living twin to the other poem’s stiff littleeffigy – it was about immediate ancestry, rather than more distantancestry, though there’s a little mirror there, in the sense that my mother wasEnglish and came out to Australia, and she did this through an immigrationprogram that was part of the same general White Australia policy that saw mixedrace children being removed from their families, which is described in ‘Zoosfor the Dead.’ And the whole UK-Australia immigration pattern forms part of thescheme of that other poem too, and for a long time I’d seen my very white skinas a kind of telling material, a material consequence of a particularworldview. And if we interpret ourselves through narrative, these, I thought,were narratives for the living, they were more personal, though there’s adrowned society here too – a flooded town in the case of ‘Zoos for theLiving’, rather than a shipwreck, and the interwoven narratives of that town.One thing that I regret about that poem is that I ended up cutting a lot of thequotation marks that were originally included – many of the phrases aboutthe history of the town were from a newspaper article and are quoted verbatim,and that history is very much bound up with a kind of folk or bush poetry thatwas my first experience of poetry, and is important to me for that reason. AndI made the quotes and my own words connect cohesively without any obviousrupture, to mirror the smooth way in which the narratives we create oftensmooth over the ruptures in our experience and personalities, and our distancefrom ‘history’ – just as water covers a drowned town.

MB: The book’s title The StripedWorld, prepares us for both an extended metaphor 
and areality of animals in nature and animals in a zoo. The zoo is not only reservedfor animals, and the animals are a stand-in, it seems, for our human experienceas well— whether pacing, locked up, restless or speaking. And the animalsseem to also be animals. Your poem, “The Mind,” feels like one key among manyassociations and intersections between your multiple themes and your chosenmetaphor—and their clear yet complex relationships; animals, characters—pearl,tiger, the girl, creator, zoo—surface inmultiple poems. Please speak about some of these ideas and the concept of thezoo.

EJ: A zoo is a kind of Gardenof Eden, but a fallen one. You know, there are the gathered animals, and then us,the self-conscious apes, walking around, marveling at apes. A zoo is also atiny empire. I wasn’t even consciously interested in zoos until they begansurfacing again and again in my work, and now I have a fascination for them.They have their own particular iconography. Elephant houses are Orientalist and domed – in the older zoos anyway –and apes have quasi-natural enclosures. In most zoos, emphasis has shifted fromcuriosity to conservation. But there’s still that element of curiosity, ofkitsch. I go to zoos wherever I travel and they all have, for me at least, thatatmosphere of a melancholy afternoon dream. And conceptually they clustertogether all sorts of things – notions of collection, arrangement,taxonomy, perception, spectatorship, ownership, how I tell what I am, what youare. There’s also a lineage of caged animals in poetry… It’s funny,the title of the collection came to me quite late, though looking back itunites so many of the poems. I’d been trawling through and reread my poem “SentimentalPublic Man” – which isn’t openly about zoos at all, and came across thelines ‘my barred heart / saw the striped world move like a beast’, which Irealized was a concentration of what many of the poems were on about –the way subjectivity is a little enclosure, and the world the thing that islooked at, and that looks at you.

MB: Your book is dedicated to your mother,Maureen Jones, who passed in 2007. Several poems seem to speak about yourrelationship. The depiction of birth emerges again and again. I’m thinking ofyour first poem, “Waking,” in particular. If you are comfortable, can you speakabout this subject and its relationship to the other themes in the book? Wereyou still writing this book in 2007, or was it already complete before then?

EJ: I’m pretty fascinated bybirth, that point where you’re yourself and not yourself, separating fromanother self, when you ‘come into your own’ in different ways, though of courseyou’re not immediately individual. Most of the poems were written before 2007. A couple were written in late 2007 and early 2008 – ‘Conversation’was the first poem I wrote after the death of my mother.

MB: I’m wondering what you have beenoccupied with—both in work and writing— since The StripedWorld came out. What preoccupations, investigations or themes areyou concerned with in your current work?

EJ: It’s been an interestingcouple of years. I’ve done a few poetry fellowships – a year in the LakeDistrict in England, some time in Latvia and Italy and, of course, Australia.It’s been a time of real re-evaluation in terms of how I write. There was sucha wonderful lack of self-consciousness about the way I wrote the poems in The Striped World. I was a student,reading a lot, and writing a lot, drawing on different things, but notpublishing much and not at all interested in the more sectarian side of thepoetry world. Then you publish and you’re ‘placed’ or asked to place yourself,which isn’t intuitive for me, and you become more self-conscious about how youwrite, and why you write. So I’ve experimented with some different forms ofwriting; I’ve written more slowly, though I’ve always been a slow writer. I’dsay that what I’m working on is more overtly musical in a formal sense, andmore concerned with address. I’m working on some secular psalms, which drawstogether a lot of things for me – a psalm is the ultimate apostrophe andis also a song. Arab poetry has been one rich source for me in the last coupleof years. I’ve also been writing poems to do with metamorphosis, and withcinema.

MB: I know you have been traveling a lotrecently. I’m curious about your interests with traveling and its influences oncurrent projects.

EJ: Australians travel a lot, so it’s a cultural thing partly. I’vewanted to travel since I was very young. Of course when you’re doing it there’salways that worry that you’ve invested in some indulgent life-experiment orother, but it’s important to me. For me, writing and traveling seem relatedsomehow. I think it’s influenced my recent poems in the sense that they’re notvery rooted; with one or two exceptions, they’re not ‘set’ anywhere at all.

MB: This current issue of The DrunkenBoat is partially-themed around ideas of self and other, dark and light,death and loss, and dual experiences, for which I used an excerpt of Jacques Roubaud’s The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, as aninspiration and prompt. I feel like many of these subjects exist in yourwriting. Can you speak personally about your conception of self and other,among other ideas?

EJ: There’s a short poem in my book called ‘Equator’, aboutthose rituals that take place on ships when they ‘cross the line’, and it playswith the idea of binaries and of dual experiences and the ways in which thesecan be both profoundly real and also illusions. I’m really interested inmeaningful illusions. You know, in the fact of gradation – isn’teverything shading into everything else in some way? – andalso in the undeniable isolation of certain states of being, certain situationsas we experience them. So, yes, ‘self and other’ crops up a lot as a point offascination – maybe it’s also behind that recurring birth motif –because to me it’s astounding that we achieve inter-subjectivity and yet we do,daily, and there’s that grey area of relationship, communication,inter-personality, projection. And poetry – any art form actually –is a space where you can dramatize this in all its fluctuation and uncertainty,because it deals in provisional truth, not rational truth. It’s the sort ofmirror where distortion is ok, distortion is thepoint, because distortion is a part of experienced reality. A Cubist paintingis a realist painting, etc... So I’ve been working onsome poems which deal with the idea of what constitutes self and other in a sortof innocently literal sense—you know, reflections or shadows addressingtheir ‘owners’, that sort of thing—that old childish fascination withwhere ‘I’ ends and something else begins.

MB: Lastly,I’d like to ask you about a preoccupation which has interested me for a longtime—and one about which I have spent many hours reading and researching.You seem to try to balance a life of writing, traveling and teaching, amongother activities. Yet, in the midst of work such as teaching, which involves alot of speech and perhaps an over- exposure at times to language notnecessarily akin to poetry, there is the intention and necessity to create thespace for silence and solitude—utter aloneness. I believe this isabsolutely necessary for the self and for art, as well as spiritual and somaticrealities,  in the most spacioussense of those terms. How do we do this, and is it possible? How
do you carry these impulses, that don’t always converge? I also believethere is a self we only know when we are fully alone—an experience whichagain converges with the creation of literature, art, dance, music, etc... Additionally, travel allows us a freedom and relief; ina way, we are concerned with how we create both an ‘inner space/world’ for thewriter, as women and people, for example, in the home, etc...,as well as how we create an ‘outer space/world’ for the very same thing—freedomof self and spirit. Both of these spaces can be freedoms or not, and hoveringnear all of this reality, is the necessity to earn a living, which brings usright back to balancing teaching (or any given work) and the creation of art.This was a concern of Woolf’s, evident in many of her novels
 andpersonal writing/diaries, as well as some essays. I’ve just dredged up a lotfor you; perhaps you can speak about this, both personally and academically.

EJ: I had this idea for quitea long time that I would be an academic, that it would be a sensible choice, agood and sympathetic way of earning a living while I was writing poems, and offinding that balance. And I think it would be, if I had the stamina for it. Butyou know, I was a graduate student writing this thesis, and living with thisthesis, and I slowly began to realize that if I spent too much of my lifewriting criticism that it would take something from the poetry, that I’d end upfeeding my poems to some monstrous form of the thesis, for decades. Or so itwent in my head. Some people can write poetry and criticism together very well,but unfortunately I’m not one of them. I’ve had to accept my limitations there. Saying that, the fellowship I have at the moment involvesteaching, as opposed to research, and this has been great. It’s great giving anundergraduate a Yeats poem or a Stevens poem for thefirst time and watching that little bomb take root and rattle. But it does, asyou say, take a different mindset to do it well, an expansion outward that canbe at odds with the solitude that’s often needed for writing. One way that Iget around this is to have certain chunks of the week that are packed with workand social commitments and to leave other days free for writing; it’s apractical way to trick myself. I also find that I tend to write in seasons; I’llhave a few months when for whatever reason I write like mad and then I’ll havemore fallow time, when I read a lot and think and wait. I think a lot of thewriting of poems is in the waiting… But I do like your suggestion of the selfthat emerges in solitude which we can’t know at any other time, and I do thinkit’s connected with the writing self, however we define that. Some of my poemsstart life as ‘spoken’ phrases that come into my mind very clearly and withoutwarning, and because I tend to think in pictures rather than words I take thesemoments seriously, because they’re unusual. And this happens most when I’vebeen able to pursue a sort of idleness and aloneness. Though perhaps I’m justtrying to justify a kind of idleness that I’d hate to live without! I think itwas Borges who said that the task of art is to transform what is happening tous, what is continuously happening to us, into symbols, and that a poet neverrests, because a poet is always working, even when they dream. So perhaps thatcan be a justification of sorts for what can seem like a vaguely voluptuouslife, traveling about and taking yourself very seriously and reading andwriting, which, at the end of the day, is staring at so much paper.


MB: Thismakes great sense—I do believe there is an idleness and aloneness whichwe cannot live without; we must seek it, for ourselves, and because what isbeneath the daily is its own sea. How good you’ve realized the work andmovement (traveling) which you seek. Thank you for speaking with us andsharing your work, Emma.