Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? Some poems evolve slowly, others take forever stubbornly refusing to ever get it right. I picked this poem for 2 reasons. Firstly, it talks to that process of writing: Sometimes an implacable poem comes at you like death. As often the piece never works until you take it under the lake, one last chance.
But it also was an unusual poem in its birthing. I had a best friend (Mark Leabeater) since we were 12. His death was devastating to me, like so many people (often not poets themselves) poetry seems to present itself as a way to contain the uncontainable. Make it tangible & bearable.
After his death I knew I would have to “get it down”. But it didn’t happen for nearly a year, it had been fermenting somewhere in the back of my brain.
It emerged when I was on tour in the southern part of Australia. I had a bit of free time and was just wandering through the coastal brush. And the poem came out like a haemorrhage. Problem was I am incapable of remembering any of my poetry – I had no pen or paper and I had to memorise this fairly long poem until I could get back to my motel. I somehow did and it was finally put down on paper and survives largely untouched in all the years since.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. Everyone thinks of Australian coastline as warm but as you get down to the southern ends it can be quite chilly. I was on a winter tour finishing at, I think, Eden (a name like that demands quite a bit!). It is a former whaling port unique because the fleet entered into a partnership with killer whales whereby they together corralled other whales into the harbour where they could be slaughtered.
But it is beautiful country and through a mix of design and inactivity there are large areas of nature retained. I was off on a relaxed coastal walk winding down after a workshop I ran.
Eden, New South Wales, Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden,_New_South_Wales
What month and year did you start writing this poem?
June 2005
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? No, this creature came into the world fully formed. My latest book Time Taken is a new and selected. I edited many of the pieces fairly rigorously but this one really defied any change.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? In some ways it is a challenge for the reader because of the cascade of imagery. But that cascade was fundamental to the appreciation of the poem because I was trying to encompass a life and the art form we both shared. All prompted from his last word – “poetry”. How do you tease out the parameters without going wide & wild?
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? In a funny way because this poem came out as a sort of effluxion combined with the fact I had to memorise such a long poem until I could get to paper plus this was grief fermented over months I didn’t really respond emotionally until I got to my room and wrote it all down. I just stared at the final scrawl for what must’ve been an hour, and then I cried.
Click to order THE AMBROSIACS
https://islandpress.tripod.com/ISLAND.htm
Has this poem been published? And if so where? I can’t remember what magazine it first appeared in but it was incorporated into my book The Ambrosiacs (Island, 2009) and as I said before it is in my new and selected –Time Taken (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022)
Click to order TIME TAKEN from Puncher & Wattman
Click to order TIME TAKEN from Amazon
Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html