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     ARTICLE
 Poetry Diary WA December 2008    
     .


 ARCHIVE: Thomas Shapcott

 

On World Poetry Day,  March 21, 2003, the Queensland Minister for Employment, Training and Youth, Minister for the Arts, the Hon. Matt Foley announced a new poetry award, the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.  Stylus spoke to Tom Shapcott on his writing career and poetry.

 

Interview: Rosanna Licari

  


 

 

I believe you were an accountant before you became a fulltime writer.  Did you begin writing to escape from the debit and credit columns?

 

Yes, I started working in my father's Accountancy practice in July 1951. I left school after Junior, and wanted to go into journalism, but in 1951 there were no vacancies. Dad suggested I learn shorthand and typing to prepare me for that calling, but after 6 months there were still no jobs so Dad suggested I start as a Junior Clerk in his practice. He knew that once I was there the wages earned would be pretty tempting. They were. (I had also actually won an Accountancy scholarship at school, so of course he suggested I take it up!). In 1960 I got my accountancy qualifications and went into partnership with dad. The practice was called Shapcott & Shapcott; Dad died in 1972 and I kept up the practice until I sold it in 1978, to take up a 3-yr writing grant from the Literature Board. I managed to stretch that out to 5 years, when I became Director of the Literature Board myself.

 

I published my first poem in 1956 and my first book of poems in 1961 and by the time I sold the practice I had published 7 collections of poems, edited 4 anthologies, written a book on artist Charles Blackman and a number of libretti  for composer Colin Brumby, so I guess it could be said that the accountancy job was flexible enough to let me do all these things (as well as doing a BA at Qld. Uni as an evening student, and bringing up 4 children). The accountancy job had some good points: it was essentially a tax practice (I ended up being one of the few Australian accountants at that time specialising in tax for people in the arts, for international travel and academics). The busy times were about 8 months of the year, and a fairly slack period between April/June.  Ironically, though, a lot of my writing was done in the busiest tax period. Adrenalin, I think.

 

 

What work impressed you in your early writing career and what impresses you now?

 

The first poem that really gripped me, gave me a high voltage charge, was Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover'. That was in 1947 when I was helping my older brother Bob burn his Junior books!  The page with that poem sort of stuck in my hand as I tore out the pages, and I read it.  It was magic.  I had not realized language could be used in that way, and the sound values were what compelled me.  A year or so later I read 'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold, and that showed me how blank verse could be used to build up a resonant, emotional effect.  A year or so later someone gave me T.S.Eliot's 'Four Quartets'.  Then I discovered Dylan Thomas.  These were the turning points that set me onto poetry as a powerful and expressive way of communicating.  They were all very much concerned with language, with words, and the magic that words can bring.

 

As I developed, I read and read and by the early 1950s the Penguin Book of Modern American Verse opened new doors, especially to ways of experimenting with language and layout.  I could go on.  I am still learning.

 

 

 

Who do you think has made the greatest contribution to Australian poetry? 

 

I don’t think it is a question I can answer. Different people at different times. Christopher Brennen in his Poems 1913 was a major force, though it was years before this was recognized.  Kenneth Slessor, certainly, for a handful of great poems.  Then in the 1940s/1950s I  would have to put Judith Wright, who was a major formative influence on me then.  Of later poets, those still living, I like to read their work but I don't think it is for me to make final judgments.

 

 

 

Do you have a preferred poetical form you like to read or write in?

 

I have always been interested in form, as well as in language.  Poetry belongs there, for its concentration, its way of playing with the constraints of form and transcending them, and for the way form and language can bounce off each other.  I began writing in free and experimental ways in the 1950s but no editor or publisher would look at them -- the shadow of  the Ern Malley affair still blighted any attempts at experimental writing.  My first published poem, in The Bulletin, was a sonnet, but at around the same time Kenneth Slessor, who was editing Southerly, accepted a set of 6 much more experimental poems (though, by today's standards they would look pretty conventional).

 

In 1972 the magazine New Poetry wrote an article including a group of my very early experimental poems, pointing out how earlier editors were still too intimidated to take anything remotely experimental.  I have always enjoyed the various formal measures: sonnets (I have written hundreds), Sestinas (my last book has 8 of them), Haiku, Villanelles etc even if only as experiments in themselves.  And of course I have written in rhymed and regular stanzaic forms.  I still do all these things.  I believe one has an essential personal cadence so that it can be expressed in the whole gamut of forms.

 

Sometimes I have used all sorts of variants on standard forms. For instance, one poem ('Water') is a sonnet, but it can be scanned (and rhymed) in both four-stress lines and five-stress lines (the latter being the conventional sonnet form).  I have written a number of acrostics in poems. One of my sestinas also has an acrostic.  Many of these things have been a personal little challenge and are not signalled to readers, who read the poem for what the poem itself does or communicates.

 

 

 

Can you tell the readers more about the Ern Malley affair?

 

The Ern Malley affair was a very famous business in its time.  1944. Australian culture were dominated by very conservative forces. All the experimentation that had happened in literature, music, art, in Europe and America was scorned and generally not available here.  At the same time as the Ern Malley affair, in poetry, the artist William Dobell won the Archibald Prize for portraiture but a group of other artists took him to court to contest the decision, claiming it was not a portrait but a caricature. The papers were full of it, mainly the indignation of people who felt they were being 'fooled'. 

 

So when the conservative young poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart concocted the fictitious poet Ern Malley, they used 'his' poems as satires on experimental writing currently favoured in England (the Apolyptic School) and America.  Max Harris, in Adelaide, had started an avant-garde magazine ANGRY PENGUINS in which he encouraged experiment. A number  of major US poets were in Australia with the American Armed Forces at the time, and ANGRY PENGUINS was the only magazine in Australia they found interesting. 

 

When the supposed sister, Ethel Malley, forwarded her 'brother's' poems, Harris was excited, and devoted a special issue of the journal to Ern Malley (including a painting commissioned by Sidney Nolan, who became a great supporter of the poems). Then Stewart and McAuley revealed the hoax.  It got front page headlines in papers around Australia.  Another 'modernist' folly!

 

Then Harris was charged with obscenity (police witnesses claimed the poems were immoral because one of them suggested a couple were going into a public park at night ("And we all know what people get up to in public parks at night time" claimed the witness, Det.Sgt. Vogelsang). Harris was fined one pound ($2) but the publicity was enormous.

 

As a result of all this, poetry editors for over a decade were very very wary; of any poems which looked in the least 'experimental'.  The rule of the rhymed quatrain in regular metre stayed with us a long time.

 

 

 

 

You have travelled widely. What place has particularly inspired you and what work has come from this?

 

Probably Hungary has been the place that has most deeply intrigued and affected my writing. The novel 'White Stag of Exile' is set mainly in Hungary (and Brisbane) and it involved 3 visits to Budapest doing research.  It was originally conceived as a book-length poem and many poems still remain embedded in it.  Some of the poems (originally published as poems) I set out in the final draft as prose, but the essential cadence remains and also influences the prose-prose bits.

 

 

 

Inspiration, the first lines of a poem, how does it happen for you?

 

One thing I can say: usually when I get one line down I can sort of tell, or feel, what form this is going to develop in - whether a sonnet, a long free verse poem, or even prose.  That is probably from long practice.  As for getting the first line/lines: I think constant writing, persistence, doing five-finger exercises - all these things can help tap the source of a new poem.  A good example of that would be if you looked through my various books of poems.  You would see that there are quite a number based on fruit or vegetables.  Clearly as result of five-finger exercises.  Or poems about various parts of the body: also based upon setting-myself a task and seeing where it leads me.  Visual stimuli can sometimes work: even postcards, or poems based on paintings.  The essential thing, really, is that I feel everyone has something to say, to express, and in doing that, there is a characteristic feeling for words, for the way words jingle or nudge together, that is really almost subliminal, but which helps define that person's identity.  The more we are ourself, the more, strangely enough, we can somehow communicate with others.

 

 

 

What to you are the most important points to consider when writing a poem?

 

Language.  Cadence.  Momentum.

 

 

 

How do you put yourself through the paces when you edit a poem  you've written?  Are there particular questions you ask yourself?

 

The classic answer to this is: put it aside for a week, a month (I am too impatient) and take another look.  An alternative is to look at it after you have written another poem, so that you can begin to see it in perspective.  For a younger writer, there is often a terrible burden, if you have, say, had a poem published.  It seems to sit on your shoulder and whisper "Bet  you can't do as good again!'.  This miserable little genie can only be exorcised by writing and writing more poems.

 

 

 

What advice would you offer the new and emerging poet?

 

Persistence, persistence.  And be prepared for rejections, they are part of the process.  If a poem or poems come  back, rejected, then take another look and see if you can do further work on them yes, but be prepared to send them on to another journal or publisher.  Several of my early poems, which were subsequently reprinted in anthologies, were rejected by the first publisher I sent them to.  As I say: persistence.

 

 

 

A major QLD poetry prize was recently named after you. Do you think prizes mean anything or are they unimportant?

 

Australia is very lucky these days because there are so many prizes, including poetry prizes.  When I started out, there was only the Grace Leven Prize (which I was fortunate enough to win for my first book, and that certainly made my name recognized by editors - a great advantage).  So yes, prizes certainly have value, not only for the cash involved but for those things like getting your name circulated.  One of the hardest things for a new writer is just that: getting people to get to know your name. In my case, I was lucky because of those 6 early poems in Southerly.  That meant every editor in the country registered the name.  Any poetry editor worth their salt should keep track of all the new poets appearing in the journals etc.

 

 

 

Dorothy Porter gets it, MTC Cronin doesn't believe in it,  what about you, do you get writer's block ?

 

I have published an almost indecent amount of poetry so I think I could hardly say that writer's block has been a major problem.  Perhaps some of my critics think I could do with a good case of writer's block, to shut me up. But, as it happens, one can go through periods where nothing seems to work out.  Patience, and a sort of belief in yourself, are the best thing there.  But also those five-finger exercises. They can unearth wonders, and the surprising thing is that they can get you into writing things you had not even dreamt of before.

 

 

 

So have you got any tips you’d like to pass on?

 

 I actually published two books, now long out of print, in which I set out some of these. The most recent is in my 'literary memoir' Biting The Bullet (Simon & Schuster,  Australia 1990). 

 

These are small exercises suitable for doing in a small group. One of the first of these I do with my students is to bring along a piece of fruit (grapes, plum, fig, even custard apple of aubergine on occasion) and get people to do three little exercises: the first, simply to describe what they see in front of them.  Harder than many of them think, and it’s amazing how some people omit obvious things e.g. in the bunch of grapes, they do not even bother to count how many are in the bunch.

 

The second exercise is to write a small passage about their earliest memory associated with that particular fruit.

 

The third exercise is to begin with the words: "Why did you bring me this...." and see where it leads.

 

The purpose of this little exercise is to (a) train in observation, and use of sense perceptions - sight, taste, touch, smell, even hearing; (b) to follow a line of associations; this often turns up surprising discoveries; (c) To ask a question, which in itself invokes a sense of dialogue (the person who asks, the person who replies) and can pick up on any elements from the previous two exercises. 

 

The quotation can vary, of course, but; should be in the form of a question.  This is a loosening up exercise and I usually ask the students to go home and look at what they have written and see if they can polish or develop anything from these pieces.  I myself have written a number of published poems based on exactly these fruit and vegetable exercises; the most recent is probably Figs in my most recent book, Chekhov's Mongoose.

 

 


 

Thomas Shapcott presently lives and works in South Australia and his book, Chekov’s Mongoose is published by Salt Publications, PO Box 202, Applecross WA 6153.

 

For more details on the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize visit www.queenslandpoetryfestival.com   Be quick. Entries close Friday 25 July 2003.