A slim, athletic woman gets up out of the audience. The black curtained room insulates her against sound. She mutters a few pleasantries to the audience. There is laughter and then a moment of silence. Her voice suddenly sounds in a droning tone:
‘The first sounds filling the mouth with self
My death on your lips
My birth on your sigh.’
Her vocal dynamics come to articulate a sort of poem, laced with surges of extended polysyllables, breaths, chant-like whirs, interweaving registers, accents and idiom.
These phrasal fragments and words arrange themselves in the thick timbre of her voice:
‘and the word is space
and its obliteration
the tongue of sacrifice
at the edge of the other words
Interdetermined absence’
The audience is silent, somewhere between the text, our consciousness, a sort of musicality, and absence. The codes within everyday language lay exposed only to be pieced back together. I’m left quietly contemplating, and a little in awe. I’ve never heard this kind of song.
What is most striking about Amanda Stewart is her poetic style. Her poetry comes alive in performance. She achieves a multiplied voice in all edges, plosives, throat pulses and psssts. When she reads it is a little like listening to a mishmash of the news, radio, people’s voices, and the sounds on the street. You are thrown into an awareness of the intricacy of their music. This is where you realise her ability to both decipher snippets of theory and allusions to Australian identity and politics and to merge many persons in one, many points of view in one. She is a master of “those moments when things become incredibly ambiguous so the mind is in flux trying to classify sound into meaning.” This edgy ingenuity is a large part of the reason that she has gained the reputation as Australia’s Poet Vulcana.
Her life has not been without polemic having expressed opinions on a vast array of issues in contemporary Australian society. Born in 1959, to a world in the shadow of great upheaval and political change, she encountered certain ethical issues stretching from the politics of nuclear weapons, power plants and waves of feminism. It wasn’t until the formation of one of Australia’s most prominent experimental and interdisciplinary sound groups in 1989, The Machine for Making Sense, that Amanda’s interest in sound and poetry came to fruition. She made her film debut, acting as the narrative poet in the Eclipse of the Man Made Sun in 1991 and co-wrote an opera The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior which was first performed in 1997.
From 1991 onwards she travelled to Germany, France, the UK, USA and Japan. In Germany, she was given a reception that made it her second home and a place to consolidate her poetry. This led to the release of I/T Selected Poems 1980-1996, containing a CD that acts as the notation of her unorthodox form.
Globetrotting days now behind her, Stewart is back where she began, living in a homely terrace in Sydney’s Surry Hills. I arrive at the terrace on a sunny Tuesday afternoon and knock on the door. No answer. I’m five minutes early. I’m looking up at the blue sky. Minutes tick on until I see her walking down the side walk, flustered but smiling warmly at me with grey green-eyes and tresses of unkempt hair. As I enter the smell of dust, old books and cigarette smoke settles. She offers me a couch in her living room. I’m left alone for a moment intrigued by two book cases, records from the 1970s and onwards form a trajectory from the Monkees to Nick Cave. Philosophical oeuvres sit scattered throughout in some erroneous order. Australian literary journals poke their spines out from darker parts of the shelves. Obscure sound CDs are piled in a stack to the side. It’s comfy, shabby and the furthest from derelict. She returns with a huge mug of earl grey.
We start chatting on the obvious subject, writing. “I was either going to be a writer, jockey, or a vet… but I truly came to writing when I had some loss in my life when I was around 10. It was with someone very close to me.” She breaks eye contact for a second. I want to pry further, but she steers the conversation onwards. “I started to write a lot more about the world, death and ageing… poetry became a good friend in hard times.”
“At the first poetry reading I went to I was really quite scared… I was fifteen and I went to the café d’absurde in Balmain… I thought it was going to be an intimidating intellectual environment, but as the poetry reading started someone yelled ‘load of bloody bullshit!’ A brawl ensued. I had to leave the café. It wasn’t exactly the reception I’d expected.” There’s certainly another side to Amanda that her work doesn’t show. A sort of comedian lies hidden beneath. You’re always left endeared by her stories. She’s got that Australian sense of humour, casual and gritty. She gets up and flicks on the heater.
Her laugh is full of open enthusiasm. She’s pretty composed. I wonder if there were any difficulties for her in the pursuit of a largely neglected art in Australia. The public seems to close its ears when it hears the word poetry. “There is a pressure to be prolific and be obvious but bugger it. You have to go at your own pace. When I was young, I sent my poems off to six publications and five of them rejected my work. However, one accepted it and sent back some curt notes. They were gold back then. It didn’t stop me doing it. You have to have a strong interior and internal resilience.” Poets aren’t alchemists. In Australia, they’re expected to be able to wield a spinning wheel of gold, or a day job and support themselves unscathed. “There’s more money in Europe. I don’t believe that Australians don’t have an interest. It’s just that there’s a greater infrastructure there, financial viability, a bigger population and a ‘sing for your supper’ tradition in Germany, and Scandinavia.”
There is a certain marginalisation in Australia for poets, especially of the experimental kind. “In some ways I feel a bit marginalised in the poetry scene in Australia; being labelled as a ‘sound poet’… Sometimes I get irritated because people pigeon hole me in a little experimental sac hanging off the mainstream…” She looks at me with a more furrowed brow. Her poetry doesn’t fit neatly into the lines of any genre just as her personality is free of a lot of the pretentious dogmas that can hang around poetics scenes. “It freed me up from theoretical debates… you can get very wound up in those debates… music gave me the freedom to create outside of that world… My poetry became more oral. A friend of mine, Richard Veller who was publishing the journal New Music Articles recommended that I try and notate my poetry at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney to a computer. It vomited out a rather complex score.” I’m imagining a sheet full of disjoined and scrawled notation, a sheath that doesn’t do her skill of performance justice.
She’s dynamic. A natural performer. Her poetry never seems to dip too deeply into theory, just as when she speaks she never excludes you from her experiences. A large part of her struggle must’ve been centred on contemporary poetic debate and the institutions that propelled them back in the eighties. “Back in those days, there was a big split between historical literary critics and the, what were considered, ‘philistine’ post-structuralists and postmodernists… I don’t feel like there’s any basis for that old antagonism anymore. It was a big deal back then. It’s such a relief that there are people coming onto the scene now who’ve absorbed all those histories and don’t feel a need to wage that old war.” We’re now left with a small underground poetry movement in Australia that is conjured back into the public’s eye with the occasional poetry prize.
This poet Vulcana of the 1980s, however, didn’t give in. She wouldn’t pass on from her reflections on life and their expression for commercial ends. “It is precisely because they do not make easy sense that they (poems) have been excluded from currency except as high art or advertising.” We both have a grin on our faces from the quixotic tone of her old-hat self. We cast the reel back.
“That was back in 1982. Oh dear, what an idealist I was… To some extent it is really difficult. I’ve become more cynical. When I was in my twenties I was having a freak out because I couldn’t get a job. I had some very bad administrative jobs. However, I got a production job… I got a grant for a project. When you go into full time work you have very little time to spend on the side. But in my thirties I fell for Germany and Europe. I knew you could work professionally there, so when I was in my early 30s I wanted to focus on Europe.” I’d felt similar things in Australia, often having reveries about France and Europe. Yet it’s a funny place to be, in between the two places, one so young, and full of creative possibilities, different things to express and the other, post-industrial, full of culture-rich illusions, a playground for the mind. It all seems to play into Australia’s ears. I’m sure it would be a deafening sound for someone like Amanda.
“After five years of working in Europe, I felt really cut off from Australia. I thought f***, I’m getting cut off from my own context. I tried to reconnect here, putting my eggs in all sorts of basket… I’ve now become a Jill of all trades… I’m planning to take a few years off to get back to non-performance based poetry. It’s where I feel most at home. ”
I find this intriguing as she’s naturally entertaining me. Her ring tone bleeps. We’re suddenly in a rainforest with cicadas and bird calls. The travelling bus stops. She speaks to what sounds like her PA who she calls ‘honey.’ We pause the conversation. She pulls out a cigarette. Smoke lifts above the books. I tell her about a certain block I’d been feeling writing wise since I hit university. People rarely talk about their artistic blocks, but they reveal a lot about someone. There must’ve been some necessary obstacles, or hurdles to jump over for this aspiring jockey come competitive athlete.
“When I was studying I was in a block. I worried, but without it I would not be where I am now. I had to change my substructure. You have to let it all sink in…. I was reading Joyce, Burroughs, Lacan, Derrida et cetera... I was completely overwhelmed. I had a sort of confidence in my poetry yet I became blocked. I was writing shit... It was as if I was travelling to new countries and worlds but I didn’t have control over their languages so I couldn’t express myself. I thought I might have to give up writing. Everything I wrote was dreadful and I knew it was dreadful.” Despair is a common artistic vice, especially with the seismic changes that come with growing up next to such huge bodies of theory, such a burgeoning world. It is difficult being inchoate in our society, yet this was the time when Stewart was opening to the world and a represented identity in it. It wasn’t a light-hearted affair. It’s something which is pretty direct for writers.
“I was confronted with my self… I questioned whether poetry was just a crutch for my ego… I hoped that it would lift. I couldn’t stop writing, although I considered it. It’s what I do, who I am. I’m just glad I didn’t release what I wrote publicly. There’s a pack of piranhas out there, and perhaps there should be. You have to wait for when the block breaks.” She looks over at me reassuringly, reclining in her chair, looking out of the window. There’s an understated wisdom in a person like Amanda yet there’s no fuss in her depth of explanation, or if there is fuss, she’s aware of it and openly calls it, in an ironic tone, ‘wank.’ She lends more to me. “I was blocked. My mind was so full. I kept feeling that I’d found something, yet nothing would come. I’d always written from experience, but I decided I wasn’t going to write from my own experience; that it was a way to radicalize form. It really mucked me up. Ironically, it was a terribly important thing to do. It completely changed my substructure. It was like an athlete using a new technique. I’d been exposed to writers that were much more self-reflexive and I was compelled to get rid of the old substructure and when I did there was nothing there. Then something came, and took that space, and my block broke.”
You can see why our poets are so vital when you have conversations like these. In the realm of pop culture it seems that people don’t like this sort of sensitivity. They do in a sense, but they find the intimacy of poetry hard to gulp down and digest because it takes a little more work, especially in our speed and money driven world. Stewart stated in 1982 that “one must control sense to make money.” Those words certainly hold a more urgent meaning now more than ever, with the rise of advertising, and the slow decline of poetry and an independent publishing industry.
“I have a real beef about how badly funded the Arts are in Australia. We have so many great artists here that get treated terribly… There is a propensity for the mediocre and the safe… It makes people feel comfortable, makes them feel understood… Yet poetry is a very empowering thing… Poetry’s a play between form and matter… understanding and the unknown… it is pithy and self aware… a poet is always approaching the text in a very specific and powerful way. They have the chance to look at the complexity of meaning and to test it… Poetry is a key to freedom of thought. It can be a friend in boredom; it can be a friend in hard times. It’s all fine and well having freedom of speech, but unless you have freedom of thought who really cares about what you say.”
As I leave the house I feel as if I've lifted the cover off her work. I got to know that non-author identity that was no longer textual or contained in dusty bookshelves. We shared instead what came from a voice, two mouths and four ears:
‘The first sounds filling
The mouth with self
My death on your lips
My birth on your sigh.’
Research and References
Websites and Online Resources:
Keefe, E. 2008, ‘those strange movements of the mouth and throat: Merging fields of inscription in the work of Amanda Stewart’ accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://whenpressed.net/work/ellaokeefe/those-strange-movements.
Stewart, A. 2005, ‘Postiche’ accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s862622.htm.
Stewart, A. 1995, ‘Absence’, accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://whenpressed.net/work/amanda-stewart/absence/
Books
Stewart, A. 1999, I/T selected poems, Split Records, Sydney.
Stewart, A. ‘Statements’ in eds. Brooks, D. & Brenda, W. 1989, Poetry and Gender: Statements and essays in Australian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, p. 63.
Smith, H. ‘The transformation of the word: text and performance in the work of Ania Walwicz and Amanda Stewart’ in ed. Fuerry, P. 1994, Representation, Discourse and Desire, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, pp.221-239.
Journal Articles
Manning, J. 2000 ‘Amanda Stewart, I/T: Selected Poems’ in Heat, vol.1, no.15, Giramondo Publishing, Melbourne, pp.301-306.
Stewart, A. 2000, ‘A Comment on “absence” (1995)’, in Heat, vol. 1, no. 15, Giramondo Publishing, Melbourne, p.306.
Newspaper Articles
Clarke, M. 2007, “The road less travelled – THE CRITICAL GUIDE – CULTURE CULUTRE’, The Age, 24 November.
Jenkins, J. 2007, ‘Excerpt from: From page to stage’, The Australian, October 16.
Ferguson, S. 2006, ‘Constantly evolving’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney) November 23.
Eastman, W. 2005, ‘A bold test of artistic nerve’, Hobart Mercury, October 13.
Creagh, S. 2005, ‘So different this time, even though it’s all the same’, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19.
Everton, D. 2000, ‘Four in the mix Machine for Making Sense – Spotlight on:’, Illawara Mercury, May 12.
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