Poet of the Month with Dan Disney

Dan Disney’s latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Jordie Albiston (a treasured friend and magnificent experimental formalist); Mary Oliver (for her extraordinary open-hearted courage of expression, viz. ‘[m]y work is loving the world’); John Kinsella (a hero, latterly a friend, who peerlessly calibrates creative and critical production to an exemplary, engaged ethics); Juliana Spahr (for her legitimate ferocities); Jane Hirshfield (for her quietly astonished veracities).

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, it changes according to the project’s methodologies. With each book, I try to shift the processes that catalyse the poems.

What prompts a new poem?

A desire to explore for language’s myriad contingencies. The trick is to find a way to ‘stretch’ the material interestingly, for interesting reasons.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Silence; a well-cleaned space; a good pen and excellent paper; an empty expanse of time.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

Working to the logic that suggests ‘there is no such thing as a wrong poem, but the trick is to get things working as interestingly as possible’, by the time a draft moves from paper to computer screen, it is more or less finished. Unless there is a line or image that doesn’t work well: in which case, the poem takes years.

Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?

The young William Wordsworth: so that we could walk together. And the old Wordsworth: so that I could ask what on earth turned him so unashamedly into a Tory.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

It often changes, but one recently published book I keep returning to out of a deeply felt sense of admiration and astonishment is Jaya Savige’s Change Machine (UQP, 2020).

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

In Australia, Ali Alizadeh’s Marx and Art (Rowman &

Littlefield, 2019) is an excellent and timely provocation; similarly, I adore the courage, acuity, and intelligence of Martin Harrison’s Who Wants to Create Australia? (Halstead Press, 2004); Philip Mead’s ideas are central to the discourse, and his Networked Language (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008) remains seminal and revelatory.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? My wife says (approvingly) that in a previous life I was a monk. So, both!

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

Sean Bonney’s Our Death (2019) is a tool with which to renew thinking; it is a terrifically strange, sometimes brutal, sometimes hilarious book. Bonney was militant, and the real deal, and we lost him far too soon. Given that this book’s argument is essentially against any modern manifestation of those authoritarianisms Plato sought to concretise, I think Bonney would be profoundly bemused to know someone wants his book inside Plato’s city-state.

What are your favourite lines of poetry?

Tomaž Šalamun’s (translated) aphorism always stays with me:

Little robin bones pinned to the cosmos. Who whistles? Who calls?

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

With some exceptions (presidential inaugurations, Twitter poets breaking records, poems as highly profitable NFTs, etc.), poetry in a post-textual age is becoming even more marginal. In our so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, social dimensions are shifting paradigmatically; poets need to remain savvy and alert to possibility. In Australia, the recent spate of proposals (viz. ‘Creative Australia’) are extremely exciting, and I am inclined to reverse Walt Whitman’s fiat: to have great readers, perhaps there must be great poets too. I am excited to see so many intelligent, structural possibilities coming into play right now (poet laureate, etc.). In Australia, these are important steps towards raising both the visibility of and regard for poetry and its poets. g

Into the void

A potent posthumous envisioning

Anthony Lynch

Frank by Jordie Albiston National Library of Australia Publishing $29.99 hb, 160 pp

The Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, proved to be an able diarist as well as a skilful and adventurous photographer. While Hurley participated in a number of expeditions – as well as serving as an official war photographer in both world wars – the late and much missed poet Jordie Albiston has drawn on Hurley’s diaries from Mawson’s sledging trip of November 1912 to January 1913 and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of November 1914 to September 1916 for what has become her fourteenth and final poetry collection.

Albiston’s workings in and with the historical archive are evidenced in many of her prior collections, most notably Botany Bay Document (1996), The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998) and – drawing from her own family archives – The Book of Ethel (2013). For the 2017 collection Warlines, Albiston drew on letters written home by Victorian World War I soldiers, describing her use as ‘a kind of literary mosaic’ in which she employed no words of her own. In the posthumously published Frank – Albiston died in March 2022 – the poet has painstakingly, and successfully, pursued a similar project. Deploying no words of her own – aside from an enlightening essay adapted from a speech she gave two years ago describing her process and this project, and reproduced at the end of the book in what might be called a ‘postscript’ – the poems build momentum from clusters of words and phrases hewn entirely from Hurley’s diaries.

The title, Frank, pays homage not only to Hurley but to the frankness of his diary entries. Hurley, an avid diarist, articulated the splendour, difficulty, and practicalities of journeying in some of the most challenging and remote parts of the world. Albiston’s task in surveying the extensive archive of material was undoubtedly considerable, though Hurley himself was a keen observer and no stranger to lyrical turns of phrase. The result we may consider a potent Albiston–Hurley envisioning.

Frank is divided into three sections. The first covers the Mawson expedition, wherein Albiston draws from particular diary entries, retaining dates as poem titles, and assembling words and phrases to construct her mosaic. The result is a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness accruing of detail that dazzles as it unfolds like ‘sastrugi’, or wave-like ridges of ice and snow, before the reader. This collaging sometimes generates metapoetic comments on form – ‘the sky a-glow with prismatic flushings it will rise on the morrow without punctuation’ – while the poems are set fully justified, evoking the photographic medium.

The third section details the ‘Picture Show Tour’ of December 1919 to January 1920, when Hurley toured Australian cities and towns with what were mostly sell-out presentations of film and photos from the Shackleton expedition. Here, Albiston deftly sews lines (italicised) from the expedition diary into fragments from the tour diary. The heteroglossic result is often wry, with, for example, a description of upturned audience faces juxtaposed with an image of penguins following a ship’s wake. Elsewhere, the audience are ‘an unsympathetic mob about as emotional as a crowd of sea elephants’.

The title pays homage not only to Hurley but to the frankness of his diary entries

It is the second section of Frank, focusing on the Shackleton expedition, that comprises the bulk of this absorbing collection. Albiston summarises the section perfectly in her postscript: ‘I’ve coded the primary source material according to six principal and recurring motifs; a day, a night, a month, a vista, a note and a snap.’ The poet selects, magpie-like, from various Hurley diary entries for each poem. While a ‘day’, ‘night’, or ‘month’ might be based on certain dates, a ‘note’ could be about dogs, food, or ice (things that, as the diary entries/poems accumulate, often prove interrelated). A ‘vista’ might describe ocean or ice, but could equally address pressure or disintegration in their various manifestations, the superstitions of ‘comrades’ or a poker game; and a ‘snap’ – a term redolent with popular notions of both ‘holiday snap’ and ‘cold snap’ – might be of land, the ‘Boss’ (Shackleton), or plummeting temperatures. Much of this section lends itself to ‘list poems’ that variously capture the beauty, hardship, boredom, sheer slog, and, sometimes, humour in this long and arduous venture. These include highly specific lists of provisions (paraffin, kerosene, blubber, etc.), food, numbers of seals and penguins slaughtered for food, books read, and poker scores – and of sledging dogs (Hurley’s favourite is named Shakespeare), who figure in every aspect of the food chain: as carriers, consumers, and (late in the expedition) as consumables. It is not always pretty, but herein lies the frankness of Frank.

Albiston long held an interest in form. Here she makes occasional use of the pantoum and other modes of repetition to good effect, aided by ready use of alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme (‘sledging terrifically hot what with snow & Sun glare and us …’). Albiston forgoes traditional lineation; breaks are suggested by extra spacing and dashes. The latter, Dickensonian technique echoes other recent works drawing from the archive –Lisa Gorton’s Mirabilia (2022), for example – that have similarly deployed the dash to construct historical bricolage.

Without wishing to overburden the poet’s words on process, we may reflect on Albiston’s statement in the postscript that this project ‘was my chance to cross over into an expanse of seeming endlessness and silence’. With Hurley’s words set to mesmerising effect in this meticulous ‘curation’ of his diaries, long may Frank, and Jordie Albiston’s entire body of work, resonate. g