- After being born in California, you went rather quickly to South Australia. I’m assuming it wasn’t a kidnapping. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Well my parents were fourth generation South Australians. I was conceived in Sheffield England where my father was doing his PhD in biochemistry. My poor, sea-sick, pregnant mother carried me across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary to New York. Then on trains across America to Berkeley California where dad was doing his post doctorate at the University of California. I was born in 1959 and lived in a house on Hearst Ave. I discovered not so long ago the Alan Ginsberg was living a few streets away and finishing his final draft of Howl at the time. So, no, I wasn’t kidnapped. We were just returning home after dad’s post doctorate. I was too young to remember Berkeley or the San Francisco Bay area but it’s a fact I do love steep towns by the sea and I’ve been back several times, once to produce a four-part radio series based on Vikram Seth’s brilliant verse novel The Golden Gate. Those were the days! That kind of radio production (four hours of poetry with a cast of twenty actors) just doesn’t exist anymore on the ABC.
- When did you get serious about writing?
To tell you the truth I’ve always been haunted by it. I was hearing lines and verses in my head from a very early age, but I guess I became more committed to it around about the age of sixteen. Several things happened at that time. I inherited my grandfather’s poetry collection which was mainly English Canon but did include some contemporary poets like Yevtushenko. I’d started sending poems away to various places and getting published in Youth Writes magazine. I also received a four-page rejection letter from Rodney Hall at the Weekend Australian in which he gave me huge encouragement and he went on to publish me in the newspaper a year later. For my sixteenth birthday I asked for and was given Robert Frost’s Selected Poems and I found Michael Dransfield’s Inspector of Tides in an op shop. Not long after that, I made my way to Friendly Street Poetry Reading (still going here in Adelaide) and started to learn from some of the poets who went there like Peter Goldsworthy, Kate Llewellyn, Richard Tipping and Andrew Taylor. My high school subjects were science and maths but my favourite subject was English so when I got to Adelaide University I switched to arts and studied as much modern Australian and American poetry as they would let me squeeze into a B.A. University was free in those days and I had zero idea about how I would make a living afterwards – I just knew I was going to give poetry a serious go.
- You have been writing for a long time and have several collections. What prompted the idea of gathering a New & Selected? It must have been quite a task.
Time and vanity. I’m sixty-six now. Of my eleven books only four are still in print. I guess I wanted to rescue a few things. The making of the book coincided with the death of my mother and me becoming an elder/orphan and I suddenly felt the need to sort things out and leave stuff I wanted to preserve in one place. I read through all the old collections and thought there were some good ones that still worked and I also had enough newish stuff to make it a New and Selected. Luckily, my publisher at Wakefield Press, Michael Bollen liked the idea and supported the book. Selecting took a couple of years. Poems went in and out. The ones that stayed are the ones that insisted. I did ask for some help from a poetry-loving friend, Arthur Giannopoulos, who was prepared to read all the old books. His list was quite different to mine but helped me rescue some.
- When revisiting earlier poems, were there any surprises about the writer you once were?
There were some shocks of recognition, a bit like seeing your 80’s haircut in an old photo album. Things I’d forgotten I used to be into, certain styles or influences. In Now Then I can identify several phases over the last forty years of writing: a minimalist period when I was keen on the eastern Europeans to be found in the Penguin Modern Poets series (Miroslav Holub helped me edit my second book) an interest in Asian forms such as the pantun, the haibun and the lüshi, a bit of postmodernism around the time I was writing the Anakronismos group in Rooms and Sequences, and more experimental, or more traditional formalist phases. One overall surprise was discovering that throughout those different phases I actually have a style. It’s not something I’ve consciously worked on, it’s just accumulated. The oldest poem in Now Then was written when I was sixteen years old and the newest just last year. Looking back through all of them, I could see that there are certain features to my poetry: an oblique view, a love of sound, particularly internal half-rhyme, a pared-down flintiness that might partially come from the dryness and flatness of the South Australian landscape, an interest in human/nature interfaces particularly in fringe zones such a suburbs and industrial areas, the odd bit of Zen philosophy working indirectly through imagery (saying by not saying) and the occasional touch of agitprop.
- How did you decide which older poems still worked in the present? Was that challenging?
You need to ask yourself a fundamental question. Why do I read poetry, anyone’s poetry? For myself, I’m attracted to work that takes me convincingly into someone else’s world and where I can admire the skilful visual/aural/sensual use of language, free of cliché or platitude. I want an original take, a bit of wit and humour and to read poetry that has intelligence and feeling. Not only do you come away with ideas, but the sense of having felt something, experienced it. So when I came to assess my own older poems I guess I was looking for the same things. I’m also not ashamed to say that I want to be entertained. And by that, I mean the old Latin sense of ‘entertainment’, of ‘being held’, of wanting to spend time together with a poem and the mind that created it and to revisit it over time.
- Did you revise any of the selected poems, or did you choose to let them stand as they were written?What informed those decisions?
There have been a few tweaks. I re-edited about a dozen of the already published poems. Sometimes it takes a decade or two to see what’s needed. I always liked the story about French painter Pierre Bonnard continuing to alter his paintings years after they had been sold and were hanging on someone else’s walls. There were things that were out of date, that had to go, terms or assumptions that are embarrassing now but were not seen that way in the eighties. There was a bit of clunkiness I hadn’t seen before, even in well-published works. Sometimes I found a better word after all this time to finally be happy with a line. I made some choices to edit where I still really liked a poem but felt it had flaws and some to omit the whole thing because it felt stale or just not relevant anymore. Also, you have to be tough on a Selected, it’s not a Collected in disguise, so I only took a handful from each book. I ran the manuscript past trusted readers: Susan Hampton, John Jenkins and Peter Lach Newinsky to make sure they didn’t think my favourites contained any duds. I also did a final edit with Polly Grant Butler from Wakefield. It was good to have a young editor check me out for signs of fossilisation.
- How do the new poems relate to, or depart from the earlier work in the collection? Do you see a continuity in your work?
The new poems were written from 2016 until 2025, so they overlapped with the period of the covid pandemic and horrible wars in Ukraine and Gaza. It was also a period when I lost family and friends, so there are several elegies. One for the artist Ann Newmarch, a suite of poems about the death of my mother, and an earlier one about my father’s death from a particularly nasty form of dementia. There are also a number of poems dealing with the various impacts of the climate crisis and our general abuse of nature and I think this is where I see a lot of continuity with much earlier poetry. Being the son of a soil scientist and a mother who was a teacher and a nature lover, I think I’ve always had an appreciation of the natural world and also a strong desire to see it protected and respected. I used to call myself a secular humanist but I don’t anymore. I now think that was way too anthropocentric. And while humans are capable of great good, it’s clear how much systemic damage we do as an alpha species, therefore I now describe myself as a secular naturalist. Still no gods. But a reverence of the entire natural system and the belief that we must play a part in it to benefit all species, not just ourselves. That’s what I hope a reader will get from this book.
You can get Mike Ladd’s book from https://www.wakefieldpress.com.au/product/now-then/