Michelle Cahill at Hornsby Girls High
Hornsby Girls Lecture 2014 | Michelle Cahill
Good morning girls, my name is Michelle Cahill and I am a poet. It is really cool to be working with a group of year 7 students so I would like to thank the staff of Hornsby Girls especially Ms Foster for organising this because just by being here makes me feel that what I do as a poet is actually valued by the state education system. Also it’s a privilege to be working with the Red Room Company, which is one of the most innovative and passionate poetry organisations in Australia. Every year the Red Room Company adopts conceptual themes and frameworks within which poets can write and perform new and exciting material. This is given a platform that can be staged as event, published in print form and other digital media. And what is very exciting is that the Red Room works to bring poetry to our social institutions like schools, gaols, transport, even the parliament as well to public venues like festivals and historic homes. For as long as I have been writing professionally, the Red Room Company has been growing into one of the most vital and visionary presenters of Australian poetry.
Now I know that as a cohort you girls are among the brightest young women in this state and that Hornsby Girls is one of the best schools, so I am privileged to have been invited to share my poetry projects and experiences with you. But I do have a confession to make. I am finding this a little difficult because it’s hard to talk about what I do: there are a lot of segues and cross-overs in my writing related work. In order to write poems I research, I edit, I discover and I postpone. Sometimes I do nothing for a very long time. But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean I am a novice. I guess that poetry is something that for me was largely self-taught, and even now that I have travelled overseas to perform as a poet it is unusual for me to speak with such focus about what poetry actually is. When poets are asked to do readings they may read for 15 minutes. On other occasions we may be part of a panel speaking in a more technical language for an audience of mostly fellow poets. Or we may teach students who are studying creative writing where there is an assumed understanding. But in fact it is very interesting and also quite difficult to say what I think poetry is.
A poem is a collection of words in a unique arrangement that might be structured formally or informally. A poem can be a story in words or it can be a song or a rap or sometimes even a sonata in words. Poetry can be narrative (storytelling) or lyric (songlike): I am more of a lyric poet though I also write narrative poems. And just to make thinks more complex, more recently in the 20th and 21st century poetry can be theoretical or concrete. (Show slide of AIRPOET by Richard Tipping)
So for me I think this might be something quite new: my life as a poet was always a secret thing. I grew up in a family where poetry was appreciated on one side and not on the other side. I grew up in a family where having a good education and a university degree was emphasised because it was going to help you build a secure future for yourself. Now I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you. Can we do a quick count. Could you put your hand up if you think your mum and dad would like you to get a good education and have a secure career when you leave school?
I’d like to let you in on a secret: though it is deeply satisfying being a poet is not very secure. Being a poet involves taking risks. Often it involves spending your time differently to the mainstream of society by which I mean you don’t necessarily keep a 9-5 job, in fact you may stare at your blank page or your computer screen for hours without marking it with words or punctuation. And people may call you lazy or self-indulgent because of this. Don’t listen to those people. Or you may find yourself taking alternative poetry-related travel and pathways in your poetic career because in many ways our society does not value cultural achevements as much as material possessions. So that often as a poet I have had to progress sideways rather than upwards, taking creative and career opportunities, investing my time and resources into travel to attend gigs and performances. The process of making poetry out of words is not only inventive but selective. For my poetry the choice of words is crucial so that if I get it wrong the poem might not work. But this risk is also exciting because I am stringing together words in a new combination and when I get it right I am making something entirely new. Something that nobody has ever thought of before. So sometimes what I am writing might even enable a reader to experience a description or an event or a story in a completely new way. Or at other times it might bring to life some kind of social or environmental injustice to people or to animals in a powerful way. I like it when my poems do this because it makes the process seem worthwhile.
One way to describe my poetry is by taking a chronological approach. I think I wrote my first poems when I was about 12. I remember we had a wild cat which we nick-named Speedy the Greedy. I had found him in the national park behind our home. He was very skinny and hungry and as I carried him home he scratched me deeply on the upper arm: I still have the scar. But the Speedy the black cat left other marks on my emotions and memory. I enjoyed watching him especially when he stalked his prey and hunted lizards and birds in the garden. One day after watching him hunt I wrote my first poem. I enjoyed getting the words to match up with the cats sleek movement. What I was doing in fact was learning the very basic poetic skills of observation and image. Trying to find the right words and the music of the line to suggest the agile, elastic movement of the cat’s limbs. An image can evoke many senses: the sight, the touch, the sound, the smell but for me it was the physical and kinetic essence of the cat that I wanted to capture in words. And the accuracy of my image needed to be as good as the accuracy of the cat’s paw. I had to strike with words.
This is how I learned that images work by comparison by describing two things which are similar to each other but in a unique way. The technical word for this is simile. That’s how images can work very powerfully in language because language is like clay or paint: as poets we have to shape it or apply it and become as skilful as the potter or the artist with her brush. Sometimes the things that inspire us are very ordinary and everyday but we see them in a new way and before we forget that little insight we jot it down as an image.
A famous English poet Ted Hughes who wrote many wonderful animal poem talked about poems being a way of capturing animals. Growing up as a child living in Yorkshire where he could roam the moors and woodlands Hughes wrote this
“My pursuit of mice at threshing time when I was a boy, snatching them from under the sheaves as the sheaves were lifted away out of the stack and popping them into my pocket till I had thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of my coat...I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special…something perhaps which we are very curious to learn.
I can really relate to what Hughes is describing here: the fascination for things outside of me which are different to me or even different to the world I am familiar with. This is also why when I travel to unfamiliar countries I am very inspired to write poems because everything external to me, to my inner world is new. And Hughes is naming here the special quality of the poem, its curiosity, the way it exists often in a quirky form which maybe not perfect but so right for itself that you could not change a single word without undoing its wholeness. There is something marvellous about this little achievement of completion or wholeness. It’s like doing puzzles with language. Hughes compares it to drawing, which he loved. When he was four he remembers drawing from an animal book his aunt bought him. He says: ‘I can remember very vividly the excitement with which I used to sit staring at my drawings, and it is a similar thing I feel nowadays with poems.’
Hughes said that the poem is like an animal and he was able to show this by writing poems which are like windows between what was outside his mind and what was inside. A very famous one is called
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
The poem begins in the poets study with an imaginary forest from which the fox emerges half hidden and nervous. The images evoke a stealthy creature and then surprise us with a sudden intrusion of fox smell, but it is also about the process of writing, of bringing the living fox on to the page and into the poem. So in this poem Ted Hughes is hunting as well as writing and there is something both delicate and cruel being evoked. Hughes was a huge believer in magic and the mythic folklore of England and in some ways the poem is a challenge to the scientific reasoning, which validates things that are real over things that are imagined.
Here is another animal poem by a famous American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who like Ted Hughes was also very good at art so it really demonstrates those beautiful skills of observation and making similes or original and interesting comparisons. See if you can pick out some of the similes or comparisons as I read the poem…
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
ags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly-
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
- if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels- until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Elizabeth Bishop’s starting point is the real fish, already caught, dead and the poem works by its almost obsessive focus on every detail of the fish’s body right down to the fishing lines hanging from its jaw like a beard. The descriptive technique is pursued by this poet to the point that the image begins to be a story and the story feels alive, not the animal. The story does not feel as if it being controlled by the poet because she is almost scientific in her descriptive approach. It reads like an carefully elaborate report or a post-mortem. But somehow through this story the poet is being guided, transformed by empathy and what she does is interesting. She obeys the intention of the story to the extent that she releases the fish. The fish has been caught in that liminal space between life and death. For Bishop the fish only has a life in the water and not on the page like Hughes’ fox. And yet through the power of her description she has somehow brought it to life. But her poem seems to be more respectful of the fish. Her poem raises a question that poetry can be guided by or suggestive of ethics.
Both these poems have powerful images, both create a sense of the inside world of the mind and the outside reality of the animal and the poem or the language is like a medium or a window between the two. Inner and outer worlds are two dwelling places for the poem.
Now here is a poem of mine that starts with a cat and moves into an idea of what the soul is and whether there can be more than one soul. This is an Eastern spiritual binary between active and contemplative, a reincarnated soul as opposed to the Christian concept of one life and its afterlife. My poem doesn’t move between outside and inside the mind, it stays focussed on the real cat, watched by the real poet-observer, who then begins to probe into the nature of reality and ignorance. In particular the poem teases out the Hindu philosophical perspective that dreams are another manifestation of awakened reality and not the ultimate reality of transcendence. Like Hughes’ and Bishop’s poems the notion of capture is present for both cat and for poet: “ whatever moves/towards the shadow of meaning.” The cat cries without knowing why it cries just as the ego seeks to transcend this reality and just as the lyric poem seeks to contain what will always remain undisclosed, what can never be named in language. A few signifiers signal the Vedanta (Hindu) context: the yoga-like asanas of the cat, the ignorance of Maya, even the coconut shell of milk. The phenomenon of hunger is comparable to craving or desire. It causes unease for the speaker. Yet there is also a restful space for the shadow soul.
Two Souls
My cat cries when I enter the garden, as
if I have aroused her from winter’s dream
or as if she wants to sing to me, her name.
What do cats dream of, Lord Krishna?
A coconut shell of milk or a glittering fish?
Now her slender limbs complete their asanas.
Now her neck arches, her jaw, an elastic.
The sharp eye constricts, discerns wind
in the quivering grass from a grasshopper’s
camouflage. But there’s no mistaking Maya.
My cat rehearses the accurate lunge of her paw.
She cries as one compelled, hungry, yet not.
Perhaps my being here deserves an answer.
For weeks I too have watched her, how
she hunts. I’ve heard the moan of her catch
at dusk, which is your hour, Lord Krishna.
Then, no bird sings and only a cat with two souls
dreams of death, her stigma left on a lizard
or on a butterfly, whatever moves towards
the shadow of meaning. As I am born of fire
I burn, my Lord, but I sleep in your arms.
I am one Upanishad moon on fragrant nights.
By day I am the consort of oceans, rice fields,
pale and invisible to you as the sky’s temple.
Having read Vedanta philosophy, I had been thinking for many months about this poem before I let myself write it. Then one afternoon as I watched my cat wake up from her sleep and hunt in the garden, it came to me in one intense spate of writing.
Observation of things other than ourselves is often the starting point for a lyric poet. And it happens naturally. You don’t even have to think about it. There are a lot of other elements that make a poem: the sounds, the use of vowels, the shape or form they take up on the page, the number of lines, the way the lines break up on the page. Each one of these things are things you can use when you come to write a poem during the workshops. And if you focus on what your starting image these other things will fall into place. The words will look after themselves, like magic when you trust your imagination. Sometimes the imagination wants to write a story into the poem so you let it, you don’t worry about the words or what the ending might be because if you trust your process of story- coming-into-poem the ending will work itself out just like magic and you will have amazed.
Because the poem will surprise me is what I love most about writing poetry: I give myself permission to start something which takes me on a journey that I can’t predict. I become the medium. There is something liberating about this. Poetry is 90% trust and 10% technique. Which doesn’t mean I can afford to be sloppy or lazy or shallow about my poetic technique. No way. That 10% craft has to be so accurate, balanced; it has to live day by day. It has to deal with rejection and pain, with fierce, sometimes unfair competition while at the same time it has to live by integrity. There are some things that poetry cannot compromise. I have to learn to balance the bubbly excitement and enthusiasm of having sophisticated and elaborate ideas with the focus and patience of a watch-maker. I have to be precise about my details and my wisdom has to be sharp if I am going to write really good poems. I have to live with a lot of doubts and insecurity and learn to trust what isn’t real or what the world tells me isn’t valuable until it becomes as close and as far away to me as a god. Poetry is about taking an invisible journey, one that is often speculative which means it is embarking into something that isn’t real but which becomes tangible and what comes out of all that are the poems. And they do have their own life. They are not me.
Now here is one of my poems about a visit to the Art Gallery. It’s about me driving there, lying on the grass outside the gallery and observing the statues which have been imported from overseas: in particular the huge bronze statue by the British sculptor Henry Moore. But also the poem enters into my casual thoughts about being a foreigner as I observed that strange bird with the curved beak you see in Hyde Park. He’s called the white ibis. He’s scruffy and he scavenges food from the trash bins. You can see the Ibis in Wollongong, Sydney and the Gold Coast. He is very much a local bird yet he reminds me of the Egyptian god Thor, so you’ll see I bring this reference into the image I use, making a simile. There are also other lines in the poem where I make images by comparison: a train crossing the harbour bridge is compared to a snake. Sometimes I use visual nouns as verbs. I’ll read the poem and see if you can pick them out.
Pastiche
A winged hieroglyph, the ibis roams
into an architecture of cranes, gantry,
rows of terraces in their heritage tunics.
The park is littered with cigarette butts,
graffiti, the harbour is glazed;
a ferry chalks its way towards the pier.
Flags pole-dance in Woolloomooloo
where pedestrians gather for a drink
or a meal on a Friday evening in Spring.
I lie inertly on the grass, while another
foreigner, the Henry Moore statue,
inspires a different spatial boundary.
Later, driving north across the Bridge,
past the fat silver snake of a train, I try
to imagine a world without diversity.
Stalled in peak hour, I have time to consider
how greenhouse gases are choking the sky.
The parallax drift of roadworks, pylons,
jacaranda blooms are a montage, so familiar
that I feel carelessly numb, reading an sms
at the traffic lights, then texting back.
The poem is called “Pastiche” which is a form of art that adopts or mimics other styles. I think in this poem I am bringing many different images and thoughts about difference including the perspectives of art to suggest that my own self is different. Like the poem I have many paradoxes and influences. My skin is brown, my parents are Indian but I can’t speak Hindi because I was brought up as a Christian and we spoke English in our family. Other than school French I am monolingual but I’ve also lived in three countries: Kenya, England, Australia and I have travelled extensively in India. So I am a bit of a mash-up really. The poem doesn’t go into all of that. It works because it isn’t too serious and sometimes that is a good way to approach a subject which might actually go a lot deeper for the writer or the reader. We call this particular literary skill tone. It works because I’m not forcing something too heavy on the reader. But it does leave a few playful traces of diversity: the Ibis, the heritage architecture which the early colony imported from Europe, the Henry Moore statue.
Because the poem has unspoken possibility is another thing I love about poetry. “Pastiche” could also be suggesting themes about culture & migration as much as an innocent trip to the art gallery. And all of these things have been relevant to my writing because I am a migrant and I’ve lived in other countries so a way of bringing other worlds into an urban Australian setting has been part of my project. Other projects of mine have been to give a poetic voice to the experience of women, the spaces from which they write as mothers and as wives, as well as poets. Another project has been an interest in spiritual things. I am not a religious person, and not so much a mystic, magical poet like Ted Hughes but I have wanted to understand Buddhism and Hinduism as alternative pathways to my Christian beginnings.
Both writing art and visual art are ways of seeing things differently by opening up possibilities. This very famous abstract art work by French sculptor Marcel Duchamp is called ‘Fountain’. It is just a toilet bowl placed on its side. Is it a joke or is it serious? Is it anti-art? Is it a protest? The fact that an everyday object is given a new role makes us ask a few questions. And that is what I’m hoping you can work with in our workshops which will be on Vending Machines.
Vending Machine poems are great for a subject-theme because they bring a living, random, spontaneous poem into the automated machine in the same way Ted Hughes brings his Thought-Fox onto the empty page. Vending machines are a common capitalist icon so to affiliate the Vending machine with the poem suggests a democratic notion of cultural trade: the poet gets paid for their poem. I like this because it’s non-elitist and because of its humorous potential. To me the idea of a Vending machine is about exchange and expectation, also production: you put in your coin and you get your item. That item could really be anything: it could be alive, with emotions or it could be released as a spell, a story, a song or a poem.
The item could be from any culture. Just think of what it feels like to be in a market and be able to choose from a variety of colourful fabrics, flowers, jewellery or food. The choice and the decision is all yours and if you trust your process 90 % and don’t let yourself worry about the words I think you will have as much fun as I do writing a poem.
Before we finish I’d like to show you my books. I’ve published two major collections and two chapbooks and I’ve co-edited an anthology of Contemporary Asian Australian Poetry which will be in the library. It contains the voices of many young poets, and many women poets.
Thank you for having me.