1. Damen,tell us about yourself.  What was your childhood and adolescence like? What were you into?

Oh no – I started as a massive rule follower and I have only settled into that groove as I have aged.  There is little to say – the kids in primary school used to say ‘the only reason you never get the cane is because your father is the principal’ but I never got the cane because I never found a rule I didn’t want to follow!  My parents tell me that I was desperate to read – that I came to them totally distraught, crying that my sister could read, why can’t I?  She was two years older than me and in grade one. I don’t remember that but I do remember when I finally worked it out, how I quickly read all the readers and then wanted more.  The librarian complained to my parents that I was trying to read from the adult section and they told her to let me.  I was voracious then.  These days – who has the time?

I had the perfect base to become a writer – parents who were in Education (my mother specialised in early education) and who loved great writing.  My parents had both been in amateur dramatics and my mother also taught and was herself highly credentialled in AMEB Speech and Drama.  They knew how to read aloud to a child and they knew what to read.

I have always loved music and our house has been a place for singing and music growing up.  I would be woken in the morning to my parents singing as they got ready for work, or humming or whistling.  My mother could have represented Australia in whistling.  We had a piano and I briefly toyed with being a great pianist, but I came to it a little late and frankly without the drive and patience needed to put in the practice.  Having said that, what few people know about me is that I co-wrote a cassette of children’s songs with my mother and aunt.  This was before the Wiggles were living in mansions with hot and cold running champagne.  What could have been, I wonder? 

There were certainly some great tunes on that cassette.  But music has always been there.  As much influence as any other – anything lyrically heavy, for preference.  I think most people are usually one or the other – music preferential or lyrically preferential.  I was (and remain) astonished and inspired by Bob Dylan.  Unfortunately, my wife (reasonably enough) can’t stand his voice, so Bob is mostly banned from the house.  Every now and then I rebel and put on Bob back-to-back.  Given the extent of his discography, that can take a while!

I was a debater and a public speaker and won competitions in both.  However, I used to vomit before each speech and I still find nerves can be debilitating before an event.  Like probably 90% of poets, I don’t do well in large crowds and with people I don’t know – I can even seem a little socially inept at times, but put me in a room with people I know and I can be positively gregarious.  I was into fantasy and in high school a friend of mine initiated me into Dungeons and Dragons.  I could never get the hang of all those hit points and multi-sided die but I loved the role-playing and the imagination – I was a born Dungeon Master! 

In high-school, I had already decided writing was for me.  I wrote the beginnings of an ambitious and highly derivative fantasy novel and abandoned it after about 20,000 words, I wrote at least three small plays – all comedies -numerous short stories – all science fiction and of course, dozens of poems.  I soon learned that I could get a faster resolution and emotional pay-off from writing a poem then labouring over a novel, so I think I my natural inclination for boredom, or to be more diplomatic – desire to move on to the next, meant that poetry was the genre for me.  One day I hope to return to short story writing and to play-writing.  I have a couple of ideas for both bouncing around in my head.  However, I ascribe to that truth that you have to write at least 100 bad poems before you can write even one good poem.  I am not sure of the number, but I have certainly written that many.  Well, I think that is the same for any writer.  One hundred bad for one good.  Writers can be a little hubristic – believing they can move from one genre to another without putting in the hard yards.  I have no mistaken belief that I would make a good writer of stories or plays.

2. When did you realise you were a poet? 

That’s a fickle realisation – one moment there, the next gone.  I worry after every poem that I won’t be able to write the next. Crazy right?  I have never had a problem writing poems, but I still worry.  After every good poem, I worry about whether this is the last good poem I will ever write – will everything after this be mediocrity?  I am going through that right now.  May the day hasten where a good poem arrives for me. I think I will feel that way until the day I die.

It wasn’t always the case – I remember boasting to a friend of mine at University that one day I would be a famous poet. Not just a poet, but a famous one.  I didn’t realise at the time that famous poets are an oxymoron.  At the time I hadn’t written a single good poem and was years away from writing one.  I think I was writing about seven poems a year at the time.  I didn’t have a great opinion about what was going on in the world of poetry, so perhaps I thought it was an easy target.

I have wanted to be a poet – whatever that is – for a long time. I was reading the Romantics and translations of the Greeks and Romans in High School.  Subconsciously, that was an intentional course in poetry, though I didn’t know it at the time.  I just knew I was bored with fantasy and I had the pretentious idea that I should exercise my mind.  Fortunately, I have relaxed a little since then.

Perhaps it was when I published my first book?  I remember I always said I would try and publish a book of poetry by the age of 40.  It took me three years longer than that but there is something about having a physical monument in your hand to the years of effort you have put in that makes you feel you have done something real.  How do we do that with electronic books?  It gives you something to point at.  It’s like a badge you get.  Or a tattoo.  I wonder if you can get poetry tattoos?  Please write in to StylusLit with suggestions for a poetry tattoo.  Or don’t.  They won’t thank me for suggesting it and I am not offering to get one.

I constantly doubt whether or not I am a poet. Perhaps we all do.  Perhaps that is fundamental to being a poet.  There is a paradox in that. I will continue to tilt against that windmill, I suppose.  I will keep looking for that one great poem.

3. Who are your main influences in writing? 

I have never forgotten attending one of those poetry workshops where all the trendy poets joined and the facilitator (naming no names) asked us all what our poetry influences were.  Like a fool I was honest and indicated that I didn’t really read individual books but that I enjoyed compilations of poetry – like the ‘best of’ collections Australia has had.  There was a moment that you usually see in American teen comedies or in your dreams, where every face looked at me simultaneously with what I took to be a look of mockery on their face and the facilitator said something like ‘well you can’t be much of a poet, if you can’t even name your influences’.  But I must be a poet, because poets never forget and they nurse their grudges.

Of course, there are poets that resonate with me and I can’t help imitating in one form or another. Every now and then I write a crunchy ‘mouth-feel’ poem with lots of alliteration and that will be me doing a Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Most of these become little more than curios.  I have my Slessor poems, my Elliot poems, my Wright, Olds or Carson poems.  Some poets have such powerful visions, such mesmerising voices that their poetry is like a vortex, lesser poets get sucked in.  When I finally come out of the whirlpool, though, having written a dodgy imitation, I find my subsequent poetry generally improved.

[A pause here, while I go over to my shelf] If you would judge me by the books most thumbed upon my shelf, I would say: Blake, Frost, Coleridge, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Elliot, Thomas, Plath, Heaney, Hopkins, Olds, Transtromer, Limon, Stallings, Collins, Slessor, Larkin, Muir, Auden, McNeise, Hughes, Wright, Harwood, Bishop, Murray and on and on.  There is a reason why these were giants of poetry.  I am enriched, inspired and surprised every time I come back to them.

In truth though – my greatest influences are my fellow Australian poets.  I rarely come away from a poetry reading without one or two new books of poetry (which I have to hide from my wife!). I rarely come away from a festival without a dozen books of poetry weighing me down (ditto, the hiding).  These contemporaries challenge me to try different things, to use different styles and syntax to write different ways.  There is a world of poetry to be found just in Australian poetry – the best of anything in the rest of the world is matched by poetry here in Australia.  I am naturally competitive – I want to write poems that are as good as the best poems being written here.

4. How do poems manifest for you? 

As a man on a flaming pie reciting the words to me.  Just kidding.

Like a lot of poets, I keep a notebook in which I write my poems.  In that notebook, I also record ideas or images I would like to write about it.  I tend to chew over these for a week or two and by the time I actually get to put pencil to paper, I have ground out any taste or interest in the idea and I am usually bored with it.  So I will sit and stare at them for half an hour and then write something completely different.  Some examples of my notes include:

Riding the Unicycle at the Circus

Tragedy of the Frogs

The Day the Flies Died

Obsolescence of Power Cords

Man found talking another language

Coffee with Shakespeare

The Bucket of Eyes

The Aerodynamics of Dragons and Winged Horses

Five of these actually became poems and have been published.  For the remainder, if there is someone who can turn these into worthy poems, I wish them luck.

My very best poems are always triggered by other poems.  I might be reading a book of poems and a word or a line takes me down a particular path. Sometimes it is the vibe – the emotional colour of the poem and nothing more. Other poems are prompted from something interesting I have heard.  I need to be interested first because it is so hard to write a poem – it is so exhausting. Not physically, because it only takes half an hour, but emotionally. Mentally.  If I am not interested, I won’t bother. It’s probably a good thing that I need to be galvanised by things that interest me, because my strongest belief is that poems need to be interesting. Obviously, you say?  Well, it is astonishing how many poets write about the same boring thing.  No matter how much the language is heightened and strange, the boring thing remains boring – the poet is guilty of putting lipstick on the pig and then trying to make it dance.

They mostly come in one go.  I will sit down and write a poem from start to finish and that will be that.  I don’t usually compile them.  The risk in that, of course, is that some bloke from Porlock comes knocking at the door midway through the masterpiece you are putting down on paper and when you return to the poem, the inspiration is lost.  That can happen for me.  I get distracted easily.  Because my poems are usually written in one sitting, I tend to only get longer poems as sequences – a series of shorter poems usually on a common theme, which are stitched together. When I write a sequence of poems (my Sonnets with the Moon poem for example), I want every poem in the sequence to be capable of standing alone.  They need to be self-contained. Sonnets with the Moon was written over about a year and a half.  Whenever I was genuinely struck for an idea I would say to myself: ‘oh well, you can always write another sonnet about the moon.’

I think being bored easily is why I’m not such a good editor – at least not of my own work.  I would much prefer to be writing or reading the next thing, rather than putting the hard yards in to polishing a poem.  It is rare I have the patience to turn an almost good poem into an actually good poem because that takes perseverance I don’t have.

5. What challenges do you encounter when you want to write, or do ideas and words flow easily?

I can always write now. When I was just starting out on this poetry journey that wasn’t the case. I thought I must wait until the perfect idea came along and then write it. I ended up writing about five poems a year.  And they weren’t very good.  The truth is, we each aren’t given more than four or five good spontaneous ideas a year, perhaps even less. The rest must be coaxed from their hiding place. Who are we kidding, anyway? It’s not as if the poems end up as we conceive them. Since the idea we begin with rarely reflects the poem we end with, we might as well start anywhere and just put pen (or pencil in my case) on paper and go for it. So I do.

If there is a challenge for me, it is writing a good poem.  Which is the same challenge for all poets.  As I write this, I have been going through a long period where everything I write is pedestrian.  Like I am writing the same poem again and again.  Or more correctly, photocopying them.  Like I am just mailing it in.  I have often wondered whether we only get visited by two or three good poems in our lifetime.  We are either in the right time and place and are receptive to them and write them down, or we do not.  However, even if we write them down, it’s a finite amount.  We use it up and it’s all over. A bleak vision.  For me, the challenge is confidence – I keep trying harder and harder to write material that is worthwhile.  It’s a tailspin I only seem to come out of if I try and write for fun, without concern for the outcome.

Wait. I’ve thought of another challenge: writing the same poem again. I have about five good ideas for poems and about five modes for writing them  – the list poem, the ironic narrative, the single expanded metaphor or allegory, the surreal descriptive and huge lesson for humanity in tiny natural event.  If you go painstakingly through my books (please don’t!) you can probably categorise my poems into these modes.  After a while, it feels like I am rehashing the same poem again and again.  Maybe I am getting away with it, but I think from the depths of those moments when I can’t seem to write that ‘good’ poem, it is because I can see that what I am writing is repetitious and I am straining for something new.

6. You have won many poetry competitions and you recently won the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem for the second time. Do you think winning competitions are a form of validation or even an obsession?

This is a question peculiar to poetry.  I have noted it before – if a playwright or novelist won a bunch of awards, they would be lauded and encouraged.  For poets, there are always a certain percentage who will treat it is as if it is dirty to do so – as if entering competitions somehow sullies the pure pursuit of the art.  I have been told that ‘poets shouldn’t compete with each other’. As if every poem does not compete for its place in every journal, as if we don’t naturally and constantly compare good poetry with bad.

Where things go bad is where one poet makes themselves successful at the expense of another poet – by pulling them down. By gatekeeping.  What I am a big believer in is merit.  Poems should be judged on merit.  That is, more than the accolades, more than prize money, the main reason why I enter competitions. I can mostly be sure that my poetry is judged on its merits.  If it is successful, if it wins a prize, it does so because it was the ‘best’ poem.  Now I could write a whole article on the complicated truth of that – whether or not the best poem wins on the day, but unlike many journals – including many Australian journals—competitions are for the most part anonymous. Only the poems are judged, not their writers.

I could probably write another article on anonymity – most poems give off a million signifiers, a million little hints and signs about who wrote them and their backgrounds, but contests still level the playing field.  If a judge wanted to pursue a particular theme, a particular mission, I guess they could, but they mostly don’t.   

But I have taken your question far astray – I am very proud of my successes – I have won or been successful in multiple countries (Australia, Canada, USA, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England), my poems have been commended by poets I respect: poets from diverse backgrounds, cultures and identities. I have won with long poems over 150 lines, with short poems of less than 10 lines, with narrative poems, with prose poems, free verse, formal and even rhyming.  I have a style, even a ‘voice’, but I like to think you can’t pick everything I have written.  So yes, winning can be a validation.

An obsession? I submit roughly 50% of poems to journals and 50% to competitions.  Most years, if I didn’t get shortlisted in competitions and get to be included in the compilations and anthologies that they often put out, I might barely be published at all.  But I agree – it could become an obsession.  Not the submitting ‘to’, but the writing ‘for’.  I do know that you shouldn’t write ‘for’ something, anything, if you want the elusive bird of poetry to come feed from your hand. Writing for something tends to impoverish the writing.  The spontaneity goes.  The fun goes.  How did the great bards of history do it? They had to write for their kings and their leaders whatever they were told to write.  Perhaps this is why so little remains of these occasional pieces which is worth remembering. 

That’s why I rarely write to a theme.  The poems I write for prescribed themes tend not to sing.  Not always. The one that was joint winner of the Peter Porter was written for the Peter Porter Prize. The one that won the Val Vallis the first time was written for the Val Vallis.  But in both cases. I was seized more by the concept or the idea than by the end point. The obsession is the writing.  The obsession is being read. My wife will tell you I start to get out-of-sorts if I have been prevented from writing for a while.  I get tetchy. Grumpy. And I write to be read.  Don’t let anyone tell you that they don’t write to be read.  That they write only for themselves. Poetry is communication, not introspection.  There is no such thing as a poor poet writing in a garret only for themselves.  Poems are messages to the world. If someone is generally writing for themselves and for no other reason, then that is fine – more power to them – but they aren’t poets.

7. Is there a particular knack to writing award-winning poetry? Is it different from writing for a journal?

Write interesting poems. Write memorable poems. Easy to say, harder to do.  Judges have to read hundreds of submissions. Generic poems about love or birds aren’t going to do it for them after they have read the first sixty or so. Nor will the usual pap about climate change or social disadvantage.  All worthy subjects but unless you come at them from some new direction, unless you can say something new, don’t bother.  But this is true of journals too. During their submission period, many journals are now receiving hundreds of poems.  One thing you probably see less of now and I mourn its loss, is the slow burn poem – the poem which seems innocuous on first reading but has many levels to be unpacked, or which builds slowly to a crescendo, or the poem which takes a strange and unusual turn halfway through.  We are seeing less and less of these all the time – in competitions and in journals. They are a dying breed.  Everything has to punch hard from the start. I don’t know, perhaps they live on in isolated pockets, in the middle pages of books of poetry but you rarely see them in competitions.

What else? A certain length perhaps.  Most competitions tend to have line limits of 40 to 60 lines and most tend to be won by slightly longer poems.  It is unusual for a short poem to be successful.  Most are over 25 lines.  Take a look, I dare you.  Journals on the other hand, tend towards shorter poems.  Journals have a space limitation – their format lends itself to less lines per page, their economics lend themselves to reduced numbers of poems.  Poetry is pushed to the margins.  Of course, I am speaking of physical journals. It remains to be seen what the influence of electronic journals like StylusLit will bring.  Perhaps an opportunity for sprawling, epic poetry once again.  But capacity will always be its own challenge.  Journals of all sorts are run on the rumour of the smell of an oily rag.

It’s ironic, really, because there is often a symbiotic relationship between competitions and journals.  There has been a proliferation of poetry competitions run by journals in recent years.  They thrive off each other. The journals use the competitions to attract readers and subscribers. A good competition burnishes the reputation of its journal. A good competition comes to resemble the aesthetics of its journal. Is it strange, then, that we create these dichotomies between the two? I usually submit to the journal and the journal’s competition simultaneously.  I have never yet had both be successful together.

8. What are you working on at the moment?

I am about to embark on a big adventure and travel for two months in Ireland (with a little side trip to the rest of the United Kingdom).  This travel comes courtesy of the Vincent Buckley Prize which is given by Vincent Buckley’s family in honour of that poet whose poetic life straddled Australia and Ireland and is used to fund a poet from Australia to travel to Ireland or a poet from Ireland to travel to Australia.  It has been a long time since my last really big overseas trip and will be my first time to Europe as a mature writer and person and not as a student amongst students who only wanted to drink, party and go night-clubbing. 

On my last trip to England, I came back with lots of poetry fragments, a cold and fever, a little estranged from the friends I travelled with and with one really good poem.  My greatest achievement that time around was to learn how to play pool in England’s pubs. This time around, I hope to immerse myself in Ireland’s poetry scene – the land of Heaney, Yeats and many others.  I have a couple of gigs (as musicians might say) lined up while I am there, so the poor people of Ireland will have my poetry inflicted upon them.

In some ways, it is a boon to be able to go – so many times I have won a poetry competition in the United Kingdom and had to admit to the organisers that I ‘probably wouldn’t make it to the award ceremony’.  I usually end those exchanges with ‘hopefully one day I will make it over to see you all and to thank you properly’.  Now I get to fulfil that wish.  Even when I found out I had won the Moth Poetry Prize, which comes with a sizeable cash payment, it was just too late to get over for the ceremony.

It is 31^st of January as I write these words, so the other thing I am working on right now are a host of submissions.  It seems that the end of the month is the preferred close for submissions for most journals, magazines and competitions.   The end and the start of the month are also when all the rejections and acceptances come in as editors start clearing out their backlogs. I spent the morning writing a poem that isn’t too bad, I am now finishing up this piece and then will complete those submissions.  Next week, I will begin to count the rejections rolling in.  However, you have got to be in it to win it, I always say.  You should too.

Order Damen’s latest Poetry Collection, ‘Walking the Boundary’ from Pitt Street Poetry at pittstreetpoetry.com/