1. Scott-Patrick, can you tell us about yourself.  Where did you grow up and hang out? What were you into back then?I believe you were a performer from a young age.

I was! From the age of 6. I was the lead in all the school plays. I grew up in England, in a tiny village. We had a farm nestled among fields and small forests. My mum would make me practice my lines from the top of the stairs, so as to project my voice. This is where my performance skills were born.

I spent most of my childhood wandering the fields and playing in streams and listening to the rocks. It was low key idyllic. I spent a lot of time watching the local wildlife, following their patterns, relishing in spring. I was an observer from an early age.

Looking back, it’s amazing to think that I grew up as this almost ghost-slip of a child in these huge expanses of green. I was very shy back then – except on stage – and would spend a lot of time alone, walking, watching, listening, imagining. I read a fair bit too, but I remember I always loved making stuff, like little theatres or giant nests.

2. What made you come and settle in Australia?

Divorce. My mum had planned to take us back to Mt Abu in India, where she grew up, but plans changed. So we joined my eldest sister here in WA – she had immigrated after she was married.

Australia was a shock, to say the least. Not only because of the culture, but the landscape was so different. We moved to suburbia and I always found myself seeking out the parks, and then bushland. But there is an ease here that I leant into as an adolescent.

3. When did you realise you were a writer? What was a pivotal moment?

In my teens. I could never really draw like my older siblings, so I pushed myself to write. Growing up in the 90s, I’d say the grunge music and grunge lit at the time, enthused with New Age aesthetic, influenced a lot of my early writing. Artists like Tori Amos, Björk and Kurt Cobain were massive inspirations, as were writers like Poppy Z Brite, Irvine Welsh and Brett Easton Ellis.

A pivotal moment was a radio show called Stereogram on RTR FM that I listened to in like Year 9 or 10. This show was mythic among my older brother and his friends. People adopted a character and would write in fantastical letters, which were then read out on air. There was something thrilling about crafting a weird little manifesto as a high school kid, posting it off, then staying up late on a school night hoping you’d be read out. This really set me up, from an early age, for the crafting of submissions, and the consequent acceptance or rejection. Plus I was in awe of the established letter writers / characters who submitted, so to appear among them from time to time was surreal.

A similar thing happened in the my late teens, early 20s, when I was in university. Somehow I found my way on to the PoetryEtc mailing list that existed at the time, run by John Kinsella. It contained many amazing established writers, so it was this strange space of their poems or commentary appearing in my inbox and me just devouring their work, never really knowing who any of them were (except a few) until much later.  

4. What are your main influences in writing? Is it people, events, ideology or other?

All of the above. I read broadly, but mainly LGBTIQA+, First Nations, BIPOC and female identifying poets. I also investigate broadly, and have a broad ranging subset of tabs on my phone that include articles on the ocean, outer space, grief, nature, aspects of criminology, spirituality and queer history / activism – each of these topics are moving toward future collections.

I don’t subscribe to one influence but rather a broad church of topics. They all spark curiosity in their own ways, and it’s important for me to be able to pivot from topic to topic.

5. How do poems begin for you? 

There’s a few answers to this.

The first is the Ruth Stone school of thought, of poems galloping toward you from across the landscape. This is often the case. Or they’re like a spark igniting a circuitry of words. Although lately they feel like winged beings resting on the bough of my daydreams and singing a song that I then hold on to. These poems have a synaesthesia about them. Their presence is more form, shape, colour and sound. I then have to find the words to fill them.

There are also those poems that come from ideas. These are like building up a Jenga Tower in reverse, with the gaps and silences built in. These come from the broad reading mentioned in the answer above. You see how the ideas fit together and then soon enough you have something architectural you can transcribe to the page.

This questions always reminds me of a dream I had a few years back, which I think is a good insight into the writing of poetry, the creation of art. In the dream, I was in a black room. It was a gallery space. The artwork was made from light, but it was flat, uninspired. However, I noticed that people would stand in a certain spot, gasp and then disappear. So I stood in that spot, turned to the artwork… and it became this incredible prismatic sculpture, all the edges connecting to make a triangular tunnel, at the centre of which was this beautiful vortex. A portal. I too gasped. And then, to my right, I saw that the light of the sculpture was illuminating an exit that was previously hidden by the stygian walls. I passed through it, deeper into the gallery.

Sometimes we just need to stand in the right spot to understand a poem, to see what it can give to others. We have to bear witness to how the light of the poem aligns. The work then comes in transcribing it. Capturing light on a page is always the hard part. 

6. What are the biggest challenges you run into when you start writing, and how do you handle them? Or do ideas and words just come naturally to you?

It truly depends on the poem.

Slam and performance poems come easily. Very easily. But this is from years of practice. I did a show in 2015 called THE 24 HOUR PERFORMANCE POEM, which was exactly as it sounded (with 5 to 10 minute breaks every hour). I went through 300 pages of my own poetry in the first 8 hours and had to improvise the remaining 16 hours. This taught me how to open that space for slam and performance poems to come through with ease.

Page poems are always trickier. As mentioned above “capturing light on a page is always the hard part”. This is the deep meditation of craft us poets love – the presence, the tinkering, the sculpting. The inevitable walking away to return weeks or months later. The poems that take a year or longer are always a great joy. But I do love those poems that come out near perfect, slightly screaming, wet with the rush of writing them down.

I’d say the biggest challenge is patience. I’m a very fidgety person.

7. You were recently the QPoetry! Poet-in-Residence, what were some of the advantages of being on the residency?

This was a high powered, one day residency. I’ve been very fortunate and have done quite a few of these in my career. I absolutely adore them, because you have to set yourself to be open to the experience long before you arrive. You don’t plan as such, just enter that deep mindful state that at any moment a poem could come barrelling up to you. And they do. It’s a incredibly joyous and playful space to be in.

QPoetry! was unique in that I was situated in the foyer of the Judith Wright Centre and had options of engaging, stepping away for moments or effectively putting a “do not disturb” sign up. The residency was, for me, about capturing the ephemera of the day, the moments people might have missed, the small details. You always wish you had more time, but I’m proud of what I wrote, especially a longer poem called What The Poets Say where I asked 15 poets for a line and then wrote a line in response. These poems will be appearing in Queensland Writers’ Centre publication, Writing Queensland.

8. What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I working on my second collection. It’s an extension of my 2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship, exploring the vastness of a submerged marine park off the coast of WA called Perth Canyon. It’s an incredibly fragile ecosystem that plays a vital role in nurturing and supporting marine life from krill to whales. I’m then drawing parallels between this ecosystem and the housing crisis, particularly those who live in their cars in the carparks along Perth’s coastline and drawing on personal lived experience. There is, of course, a lot more to this collection… and still a lot more to explore and write. But I don’t want to give too much away other than I’m using endurance art – or incredibly long walks – to open up new spaces in myself and my poetry, something I’ve always wanted to try since reading Janaka Stucky’s Ascend Ascend. All I can say now is… stay tuned. 

  

Order Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s poetry collection, Clean, from Upswell here.