Before I ask you anything about the poems collected in Jump Out Any Window, I’d like to ask what influenced you to begin publishing Bold Monkey Review? How challenging was the start-up? What motivated you then and how has the publication evolved since?
Hi Jason, thanks for showing a continued interest in my work! I am very grateful you can spend some of your time to my chapbook.
I originally started Bold Monkey in 2008 to showcase some of my poetry and photographs. Dancing on Thin Ice (2008) my first crazy chap had recently been published through erbacce-press and I was keen to promote it. The cover uses a double exposure image which combines a photo of a kangaroo I took on Myall Lake in New South Wales with one of the main streets of Aylesford Nova Scotia, where my grandparents raised six kids, including my father.
The blog soon evolved to help sharpen my writing skills and I sometimes posted extended reviews of books or films that we were studying in class to help develop my high school students' critical language skills. Previously, apart from a few short pieces for classroom discussion, I had not written anything substantial since university. As a full-time teacher, I was continuously overwhelmed by the demands of the job- preparing intricate lessons, disciplining children, marking student work, and increasingly, documenting in detail what you are doing to meet dumbed downed & frequently faked registration requirements.
A few years later, I started to use the blog to help promote some small press writers out there by using my evolving skills to review their new work. Many of the early reviews still remain on the blog and include discussions of books by Peter Bakowski, Mather Schneider, Charles Bukowski and several others.
A break of sorts, developed when I was up in Brisbane, after I reviewed poet Rob Plath’s excellent poetry book a bellyful of anarchy (2010) on Bold Monkey: https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2017/12/book-review-rob-plath-bellyful-anarchy.html
For years afterwards, Wolf Carstens of Epic Rites Press sent me review copies from his publishing house, unfortunately, now defunct. Many of the reviews also included extensive interviews with the writers and also still appear on the blog, including those of important small press writers: William Taylor Jr, John Yamrus, Todd Cirillo, Brenton Booth, Matt Borczon, Mike Meraz, Wayne F. Burke and others.
The blog has also shifted over the years from a review of books to the publishing the new work of writers. The first I chose in 2013 was a writer friend Terence Rissetto from New Zealand whose work remains the most viewed of all the writers I have posted on Bold Monkey: https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2013/03/featuring-terence-rissetto-new-zealand.html
Submissions to the blog are usually through word of mouth. I have never publicly called for submissions apart from the About Me profile located at the bottom of the main blog page. This may perhaps change in the future.
Over the years the blog has evolved naturally and without too much fuss. I simply post what I like and don't get too wound up about the poetics or personalities. I am not interested in "likes" or in personal comments- the babble tends to swamp the Art and tends to encourage clueless fuckwits to anonymously form an opinion.
The twenty poems you’ve chosen for Jump Out Any Window seem to speak to each other in a way, like they belong together. Were these poems selected from past writing or written with a theme in mind and intended to be read together in this collection?
I think all of the poems were written after The Rough End of the Pineapple (2020), the first full-length collection of my poetry. I simply wanted to publish some of the best work I had not previously collected in Pineapple or in subsequent chaps.
The persona of the poems in the new chap for the most part is very consistent, whether I use first or third person point of view. The voice is typically wry, cynical but hopefully, empathetic. Most of the poems are narrative in form and character driven. Perhaps what best binds this chap together is my fascination with the ongoing circus of damaged people and the antics of their behaviour that I attempt to describe.
I love the intricacies of language and have made an honourable, but hugely underpaid career of it as a HSC teacher over decades, but I try in the chap to keep the words clean and uncomplicated, as in most of my writing.
‘Jump Out Any Window’ is a fitting title for this collection. Is there a story behind your choice of this?
The title Jump Out Any Window is an obscure reference and casual salute to the poet Charles Bukowski. In a May 1963 letter to his early publishers, Jon and Louise Webb regarding the upcoming publication of his first collection Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965), Buk writes:
“I am so in love with the book you are doing. This keeps the keenly biting down somewhat and I go on, but very much afraid. I am hypo of some sort and only decency of- of what?? effrontery? Is in destroying myself, and I keep drinking and looking out of windows, flowers, grass, people down there…grass people down there…ah, ha, I can still laugh, and you people are so good, god damn it, my madness, I am so unkind, this is the book, my love, yours, but I look ahead, and if I am there, here, anywhere, I have a title for another book, be there another book, another me, another anything: LEAP OUT ANY WINDOW.” (Charles Bukowski LIVING ON LUCK: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s Volume 2, Edited by Seamus Cooney, ECCO, 1995, pp. 39-40).
Bukowski never used the title.
The title perhaps also conjures the idea that some of the poems in the chap will leap, perhaps explode onto the page & into the minds of its readers. Oh well, you can always hope.
As with many of the poems in The Rough End Of The Pineapple, some of these poems feature specific locations in Australia and Canada. One poem, 'In A Daly Waters Dunny', features the beer keg urinal I saw a photo of on Bold Monkey in an older post titled “Australian Dunny Art: https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/search/label/Australian%20Dunny%20Art
I was wondering how many of the poems here are drawn from your trip to the Northern Territory in 2021?
The poems ‘Dry Town’, ‘Tennant Creek’, ‘In A Daly Waters Dunny’, and ‘Guzzling Quietly At The Cudgee Bar’ are some of the obvious poems I wrote during that N.T. trip between May-July 2021, before the deadly Delta COVID wave hit Australia.
Previously, in the chap ‘The Beast With Three Legs’ (Between Shadows Press, 2022), I had also published the satiric poem ‘Uluru: At The Car Park Nearing Sunset’ from that amazing trip. It was my first trip through Australia’s Red Centre and up to the Top End- and back home- a distance of over 12,000 kilometres. I didn’t write more than a dozen poems during the journey, I was more focused on the day to day survival- of driving incredibly long distances, setting up camp, finding/cooking food and preparing to locate & reach the next destination. If poems popped into my head I sketched them down briefly. I never consciously sat done to write anything. I simply tried to enjoy the moment without reducing it to words. Then again, I took heaps of photos.
(Image, George Anderson, Coober Pedy Cemetery, 2021).
The trip was unfortunately cut short when we were in camping at the Barkly Homestead in the N.T. when word spread that Darwin had been locked down by Delta and shortly afterwards, Townsville, Queensland where we were headed. There was no phone reception in the remote town and panic broke out and the camp ground was totally emptied by 10 am. We expected to be put in quarantine when we reached the Queensland border but the police only questioned drivers at the NT border, so we snuck through. We then headed south through Mount Isa where we had a cracked windscreen replaced.
New South Wales was now in total lockdown and we slowly made our way over the next few weeks in our return to the Gong through outback towns such as, Winton, Longreach, Charleville, Cunnamulla, Bourke, Nyngan, Narromine, Cowra and Yass. Wonderful, culturally rich towns. Each one unique.
The poem 'Dry Town', definitely a bleak poem and one of my favorites here. It’s tight and understated, and being that I have no experience in Australia or its Northern Territory, I had to do some research to discover it. What can you tell me about this poem?
Dry Town
The guy in the Pathfinder
says he now knows why
his daughter works in Utopia
says I must have noticed
the police presence in Alice
how they have cops checking
IDs outside every liquor store.
He tells me the locals
can drink beer in the pubs
but it is the fortified wine
they are really after & how
they'll drive to Mount Isa
& back
800 kilometres each way-
to get it.
The poem ‘Dry Town’ was inspired by our visit to Alice Springs and derived from a variety of conversations with fellow travellers, armed policemen outside bottle shops and a friend who was temporarily stationed there. At the time in Alice there were severe restrictions on the purchase of alcohol, particularly by Aboriginals from remote communities visiting the town. To buy a six-pack, for instance, you had to produce a photo ID which was checked by a Territory policeman and then recorded by the cashier. You could only purchase booze once per day and the days and hours in which the bottle shop were open were limited.
The laws were introduced by the Howard Government in 2007 as part of their Interventionist policies into Aboriginal communities. They used the pretext that sexual abuse of minors was rampant in indigenous homes to legislate a swag of intrusive federal laws.
For an overview of government policies related to the Intervention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Territory_National_Emergency_Response
In contrast to the 'grog runners' depicted in the poem, Utopia is a dry town in the N.T. and is an artist mecca of sorts, particularly for women. It is the birth place of Emily Kam Kngwarray (1910-1996), a prominent indigenous artist presently featured in a Major Exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra I visited this week.
(Detail from Wild yam V 1995: Utopia, Central Desert, Northern Territory
synthetic polymer paint on canvas)
(Detail from Kam 1991, Utopia, Central Desert, N.Y.)
In the context of the poem, I reckon dry Utopia clearly represents a vibrant, artistic alternative to the drunken mayhem that excessive booze brings to many outback Australian towns.
The legislation related to the N.T. National Emergency Response was later deemed racist and repealed in 2022, which lead to more street chaos and crime and inevitably, the reappearance of federal politicians, followed by new restrictions. It is a complex issue which will not be resolved without extensive discussions with Aboriginal communities which directly address larger issues of self determination and especially of directions towards a Treaty.
Some of the latest on the situation: ‘Alice Springs still facing high rate of crime, dysfunction one year since return of N.T. alcohol bans (ABC News, 2 February 2024):
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-05/alice-springs-return-of-nt-alcohol-bans/103418838
The poem 'The Drug Bust' tells the hard luck story of how a young man Toe disappointed his very Christian family and wound up in the back of a police car on Christmas Eve. It’s a fun read and the humour and irony may be completely invented, but the poem does strike me as a true story based on actual people and events. How much of this poem is true and how true are the other poems brought together in this chap?
I write fiction but many of my poems and short stories have a firm basis in reality. It is not for me here to say what did or did not happen in my work. As the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in a book I read recently, "Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'." (Quoted in the intro to 'The Thing Around Your Neck' (2009); included in the anthology THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, Selected and Introduced by David Miller, Head of Zeus Ltd, UK, 2014, 947 pages).
As far as ‘The Drug Bust’ is concerned, yes Toe was a good friend of mine over many years & although some aspects of the poem are accurate others are not. This is fiction.
Drug busts are usually associated with narcs and surveillance and extreme violence. In the poem I tone it down. I add a light, human touch to the nasty Drug Wars which have shamefully politicised a medical and human rights issue.
A "Toe" today in Canada, is a happy, stoned citizen who needs not fear encroachment of his enshrined freedoms under The Charter of Rights and Freedoms by dopey, judgmental law authorities or religious fucked fanatics like in Australia.
Some of your word choices in these poems I find amusing and for me they add to the irony at work in the text, like the word “bust”in the first title 'The Drug Bust'. For me it describes more than just Toe’s arrest in the poem. The family are physically separated, busted up on Christmas Eve, and if Christmas is ruined, or a bust, it’s hard to simply blame Toe, because his parents inform the police that take Toe away. Am I over reaching here? Was this word choice intentional? And I guess the broader question is how often do you consider and edit word choice in a poem?
Sure, there is some word play there, sometimes unintentional. I usually simply try to get the word down and hope to entertain my audience, however few. Once it's out there, readers form their own associations, interpretations of the work based on their own experiences and personal histories of reading. Much of the stuff is intuitive, having spent thousands of hours trying to create the stuff; in the mad blend of whirling ideas & images, memorable poems can sometimes emerge from the crud.
I am very conscious of my word choice but I’m not too keen on beating my work to a pulp. Once the poem is on the page, especially the shorter ones, I try to keep my fists off it.
Another fun read is 'The Practical Function of a Colostomy Bag'. I keep coming back to the annoying and over-the-top female character you portray babbling away until she finally exclaims:
“There is nothing like a constant mind numbing
pain to make you aware that you actually exist!”
The words “mind numbing”explain her constant chatter. She’s in so much pain she can’t think clearly. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Yes, pain confirms we are among the living, but in her case, pain has become her identity. I keep coming back to this poem, because her babbling seems almost a defence mechanism or her ego. Her babbling announces her presence. It makes her unforgettable, if not exceptional. Was this intended? Or are these the babbling suggestions of my own reading?
I like your surmising. To me, the persona represented in that poem, I suppose is a composite character derived from several people I have met. I write the stuff with an idea and purpose in mind but as I've mentioned before, I leave it to the reader to read the poem and make of it as they wish according to their own experiences and personal histories.
The persona I had in mind, may not suffer excessive pain but perhaps may exaggerate their perceived illnesses to call attention to themselves. The central irony is that this person’s paranoia and obsessive focus on disease has not prevented her & others, from living a long and healthy life.
Thanks for taking the time and for putting this one out there, George. Anything else on the horizon? What’s next for you?
I slug away one poem at a time and work towards another chap & have a title in mind. Badly broke my right wrist about a year ago while cutting down a tree and still experiencing neurological pain which I am being treated for. Hope to soon rekindle my interest in emerging artists around the globe.
I have also been assembling for a year or so a book of poems entitled NDG Poems, which collects many of the dozens of the poems I have written about the area below the tracks where I grew up in Montreal and lived for 23 years.
Thanks again, Jason!
Buy the chapbook JUMP OUT ANY WINDOW here: https://backroompoetry.sumupstore.com/product/jump-out-any-window-george-douglas-anderson
Read also a discussion of three poems from the collection 'The Mayor of Little Gary Beach', 'Alf's Lost Paradise' and 'Mushroom Carpentry' here: https://georgedanderson.blogspot.com/2024/02/new-chapbook-george-douglas-anderson.html
