The speaker in this chapbook seems to have a deeper understanding of time and space than the narrator in your collection The Rough End Of The Pineapple. The speaker also plays a less central role in these poems and appears to be outside the poem and looking in, at events. Can you discuss your treatment of time and space in this collection?
Many of the poems in the chapbook in the collection were written well before the publication of The Rough End of the Pineapple. At the time, I was dabbling with post-modern theories of deconstruction in my Preliminary & HSC classes whilst studying films such as The Matrix, Blade Runner, the revisionist Clint Eastwood Western Unforgiven and Michael Ondaatje's amazing first novel The Collected Works of Billy The Kid.
There is no common speaker in the chap. Each poem is unique and the poems tend to deliberately blur the specifics of time & space. The chap features what I call my “abstract” poems.
The poems were initially written as experiments in form & style without publication in mind. The chapbook is an attempt to affirm but also to subvert post-modern ways of thinking. I'm not blindly bowing down to po-mo and sometimes try to playfully kick it up the ass.
This is perhaps best represented in the following poem:
Running Away With the Spoon
amongst the electric cacophony of memory
the sobbing knife plunges in & out
time as an uneven continuum;
Foucault behind us retching loudly
The elephant in the room
her pink diamante decorated pager
a series of displaced recollections;
a face resembling an overcooked cabbage
Her hips dizzy, whispering
in constant flux. A chance comfort
in a squalid, idiom filled illeism
like a mad dog to its faeces
The first poem I wrote in this style was aptly titled ‘Centos’ (2008): http://www.poetrycemetery.com/andersonnew.htm
In The Rough End of the Pineapple you will also find some examples of my abstract work, such as ‘On Obscurity’ and ‘Diary of a Semi-Colon’. More recently, I was encouraged by Henry Stanton of The Raw Art Review who ran with three poems from the chap in late 2020.
I also hugely salute my publisher John D. Robinson of Holy & Intoxicated Publications who accepted this experimental chap without any bullshit or requests for revision. Robinson has now published three of my chapbooks Fuckwits & Angels (2019), The Portal (2020) and The Factory of Eccentric Poetics (2022). The hugely talented Englishman has had an amazing writing career trajectory of his own but has also published small alternative press poetry heroes such as Doug Draime & A.D. Winans and as nurtured and encouraged many other writers- including myself.
I want to jump right to one of your abstract poems, because you take some exciting risks in this collection. The poem ‘Danger Falling Man’ is a short piece, but I feel time and space have been opened up and expanded in this short poem, to include the weight of the protagonist’s entire life. What were your challenges in writing this poem?
The main challenge, as with most poems in the chap, is to try to shift from my usual clear, narrative style while still retaining a sense of coherency and order. I also didn’t want the poems to come across as too contrived, as intellectual bullshit. Poems in this style open themselves up to the criticism that they are wanky literary exercises which foreground form over substance. Ever try reading AMERICAN HYBRID: A Norton Anthology of NewPoetry (2009)? It's total crap!
A couple of days ago in response to your question, I opened my workbooks for the first time since the conception of the poem. As you know, I prefer my poems to speak for themselves, but as a high school teacher over decades, I also like to explain things in detail, including the dull, unimportant aspects of my writing.
Most of the words in 'Danger Falling Man' were lifted from my HSC Extension 2 students who were creating material for their Major Work short stories: https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/11-12/stage-6-learning-areas/stage-6-english/english-extension-2017/major-work-advice
While examining their work, I compiled a list of some of their oddly memorable lines. I later reshuffled the lines and broke the writing into stanzas to create new and absurd meanings.
Notes for 'Danger Falling Man' (click to enlarge)
I was intrigued how some filmmakers, writers and musicians used an eclectic mix of different styles and source materials to create something entirely new. ‘Danger Falling Man’ is a “found” poem which uses a cut & paste style. The speaker uses multiple voices and ironically, I reckon is in serious danger of "falling" short artistically in the mongrel pastiche creation of the poem.
Another abstract poem is ‘A Bee Collecting Honey’. I am deeply concerned by the urgency in each troubled line of ‘A Bee Collecting Honey’. I am attracted to each image in this poem and yet I have failed to understand or experience the poem, as a whole. What can you tell me about the subject of this poem and its title?
The chronology of the poem’s narrative is deliberately thrown into disarray and instead is revealed in fragments. It uses compressed images and associations to reveal a woman’s tormented life which has been tragically cut short. This idea is sharply contrasted with the serene, natural image of a bee collecting honey in a field:
A Bee Collecting Honey
her skeletal body
his own filled with hollowed hope
the red claret-stained concrete reeking of loss
the wild tattoo of her life robbed by stealth
disappointment was a polished slab
beneath her thin-mattressed soul
hooks tearing at the innards of her throat
he is a missile spiraling out of control at 25 metres per second
a streak of blue & red for a face
a freshly cut lawn seeping from pall-bearing lips
she kneels convulsing in the mud beside the limp boy
bags of sand hunched tight under the sagging sun
There are several poems in this collection that refuse to be easily defined. ‘Skinned’ is another poem that, like ‘A Bee Collecting Honey’, resists a linear interpretation. I struggled with ‘Skinned’to experience it chronologically, but I couldn’t bend it into something straight. I experience “Skinned” as a dream.
The poem ‘Skinned’ is one of my earliest “abstract” poems. I like the way it defies definition & how it really doesn’t make much sense if you examine it closely. This is in sharp contrast to my over-rational day job over decades as a high school teacher in an elite institution.
I cannot recall the specific context of the poem and why it was written, apart from it being an experiment. In my notes to the poem the term “skinned” refers to a recent trend to cut out the full back tattoo panels of heavily tattooed corpses and to preserve them as Art.
In the poem, I perhaps imagined the words, like the deceased’s tattooed skin expressing a montage of feelings and experiences.
Find the poem ‘Skinned’ online here: http://clockwisecat.blogspot.com/2011/01/skinned-by-george-anderson.html
I like the term “compressed images” you used, like forcing air into a balloon, until it can’t take anymore, just before it pops. It describes how engaging the images in these poems are for me. Who are some of your influences for found and cut and paste poetry?
I was looking for new forms to express my poetry and for my students to submit to the school’s long-standing poetry journal Ephemeral. There is plenty of material online.
As far as “non-lineal” texts are concerned, I found useful John Ashbery April Galleons, Michael Brennan Autoethnographic and Michael Farrell ode ode- the latter whom I met in Sydney while a member of the Poet's Union. More recently, a poet friend gave me a heads-up to an article 'William Burroughs: The Cut Up Method' which might interest you: https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html
How many of the poems in The Factory of Eccentric Poetics are, in part, made up of the many voices you have heard and read from your students over the years?
In the collection the purely “found poems” would include my favourite ‘Moth’, ‘A History of Lies’, ‘His Brain is a Fish’ and a few others. As I mentioned previously, they were written as experiments to contrast with my characteristic, more accessible work.
I’m imagining that some of the lines in these poems remind you of students you have taught. Is there an echo, for you, of your classroom, layered in the “found” or “cut and paste” poems that you have mentioned?
Interesting question. I have dealt with the concept of students in my classroom being layered in my imagination in my chapbook of school poems ‘The Portal’ (Holy & Intoxicated Publications, 2020).
The found poems are usually lines taken from numerous unidentified students and therefore I am unable to link specific lines to specific students. Perhaps the best thing I got out of the process was to turn the arduous task of grading students into a creative event.
In the title poem, ‘The Factory of Eccentric Poetics’, I feel you are describing a very raw creative process that surrenders to chaos or madness. However, it interests me that the poem itself has melodious language and meter. What can you tell me about your intent for this poem and your choice of meter and language?
Today, I found my notes on the poem for the first time since writing it. I borrowed & heavily edited a student's short stories written for exam purposes. I discarded about half of the found lines, shuffled them beyond recognition & added a few words here & there:
The Factory of Eccentric Poetics
in the underworld of his mind
it was madness, it was madness
the flecking monochromic images
the pastiche, tedium of sentences
dancing towards an endless nothing
trading notes, rhythms & off-beats
dissonant/ out of tune as though
several songs were ushering at once
sledge-hammering out of their imprisoned cadence
The title is of my own invention and I surmise it derives from the description of the trumpet player near the end of the poem attempting to rise above “the tedium of sentences" and after many failed experiments finds his voice- "sledge-hammering out of their imprisoned structure.”
Henry Denander’s cover beautifully illustrates this artistic quest.
I love the line “sledge-hammering out of their imprisoned structure”, and I think The Factory of Eccentric Poetics is great title for this book. How did you go about selecting the poems for this chap?
First, I listed the poems which I labeled abstract, perhaps about 50. Then I culled the mongrels in terms of merit- language, sound, idea, coherence. Later, I intuitively sequenced them. The whole process took at least two months.
Another poem that moves me in this collection is ‘The God Of Doors’. I have a strong emotional response with this piece and keep coming back to it. What can you tell me about this poem?
The poem is another one of my digs at suits, the establishment, which views the economy as supremely important- far more important than other matters like our health. It uses images from cinema-photography to show the failings of government & business, particularly when viewed in terms of our present crisis.
The God of Doors
like a darkly bruised banana
I miss the flesh of her pale lips
I miss the depth of field
of her spider-bite piercings
I miss her tight aperture,
her perfectly sculptured combover
instead- the self-satisfied swagger
of bewildered suits
towards goals as purposeless
as birds without wings
the diamond necklaces of short-sightedness
Where is the chapbook available for purchase, and what’s next for you, George?
Just received my shipment and there are about 5 copies still available for $5 each plus postage (from Australia).
Next for me? I’m presently working on a chapbook for Between Shadows Press called ‘The Beast With 3 Legs.’ Cover art by Danny D. Ford. I return to my clear narrative poems which are character driven.
Thanks again, Jason for taking the time to carefully read my work!
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