Not Quite Right features discussions that are unfiltered and uncensored,
and may include themes that are inappropriate for younger listeners.
Also, I swear a lot.
Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to not quite right.
My name is Ed and this is the 5th of a series of interviews that Amanda and I
recorded at the Words and the Waves Writers Festival this year.
This time we're speaking with Maxine Beneba Clark.
Maxine is the inaugural Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne,
and she was at Words and the Waves as part of the Poetry Now panel.
Maxine is the author of 15 books, including It's the Sound of the Thing,
100 New Poems for Young People and Stuff.
I'm Not Sorry for 99 Poems for Young People,
both of which my kids and Amanda's kids have read and loved.
We also had the privilege of attending the inaugural Ebb and Flow Poetry Slam at
Words on the Waves on the Saturday night, which Maxine was a part of,
and I friggin loved it.
It was an absolute highlight of the festival.
Big shout out also to Will Small who did such a great job hosting,
and to all the talented and very brave people who put themselves out there and
got up to read their poetry.
It was really, really amazing to see and I can't wait to
go again next year.
But for now, please enjoy our conversation with Maxine
Beniva Clark.
We're here at Words on the Waves with Maxine Boniva Clark.
Hi, Maxine.
Hello.
And you've just come out of your panel discussion called Poetry Now.
Tell us about that.
It's a great chat.
We talked a lot about, you know, the changing role of poetry, I suppose,
through the ages, what it looks like to get poetry to more
people and that idea of kind of finding something that everybody will love.
So I guess what do you see as the place for poetry in the modern world?
Like, it's got a lot of competition, doesn't it, with other forms media?
Yeah, it's got a lot of competition.
But at the same time, I was taught by a, an Australian poet named Alan Warren,
and he has this quote where he says poetry is the first ever social media.
And I think, you know, there is this sense that, yes,
we're consuming all of these other kinds of media,
but poetry has this amazing ability to be short form,
to be super condensed language and to tell a story in a really short amount of
time.
So it's this kind of thing where we think of poetry as archaic, you know,
in dusty books, in libraries.
But in fact, the stuff of poetry is all around us.
I think a lot of people feel that poetry is inaccessible too.
And I know that's something that comes up a lot when we talk about poetry of like,
is it for the people or is it this literary thing that sits above that,
you know, is a little bit obscure to just the
casual person who comes along?
So what are your feelings on that?
What type of poetry excites you?
They're more that literary side or I guess the pop look, I,
I started out writing poetry for adults and I still do write poetry for adults
and writing primarily in free verse.
So where there's no particular rhyme scheme,
I kind of think of free verse as like the jazz of poetry do You can go wherever you
want.
Doesn't mean it doesn't have a rhythm or whatever.
But my last two collections have been for children.
And when you're writing for children, yeah,
I think that whole idea of literariness is not hanging over you because you have
to write about things that children are interested in.
Also, I'm writing about peanut butter.
I'm writing about roller skating.
I'm writing about lightning, you know, And I think that definitely has been an
interesting exercise in making poetry really accessible.
And is free verse still a part of that for For children's poetry?
Yeah.
And I think about children's poetry or children's books being or rhyme based.
So yeah, in my last two kids poetry collections
there, there are lots of free verse poems, but there's also all those forms that
you're learning primaries or limericks, haiku, sonnets.
So it was a real exercise in both continuing to work in free verse and some
of these forms I haven't worked in for 20 years.
I hadn't written a Limerick since I was at primary school.
So going back and familiarising myself and then realising I OK, that's why,
you know, limericks that form matched a kind of
humour.
It kind of you, you, you go back to understanding why it
worked.
The punch line, the power of the punch line.
Yeah.
And it goes to show as well.
I mean, you're saying it's literary, but it is one of the first things that
you learn about in school.
And like, part of language is poetry of all these
different types.
So it's very fundamental to people.
Yeah.
So you're the author of 15 books.
Yeah.
Adult poetry, children's poetry, have also written a memoir and short
fiction.
So I kind of write anything.
But poetry is my first love.
It's the first thing I published and at the moment, the last thing I published.
And I sometimes think that all of the other or I feel like all of my books have
some poetic element to them, even if they're prose or non fiction.
So is this your most recent book?
Yeah, my most recent book stuff.
I'm not sorry for.
99 more poems for young people.
And when we say young, what age group do you have in mind?
It's interesting.
And this collection was written after talking to teachers and then kind of
saying, where's the contemporary poetry for young
kids?
So it goes anywhere from age 17, from age 7 to age 14, really.
So some high schools are studying it, but also some primary schools are
studying.
And I found that really interesting as well that I think kids in that age group,
there's this, like, I think particularly post COVID,
there's this really big gap in a maybe the most literary child in the class and
the child, it was the least literary.
So I kind of wanted to create a book where anyone in the classroom can pick it
up and read something, even if it's just a 7 syllable haiku,
which was also an interesting exercise in considering not just form,
but actually how difficult is this to read?
Yeah.
Well, Ed and I, we each have children who are in that age
group and voracious read and and so it sounds like something I think that would
be quite appealing to the readers, but also for those kids who, you know,
get intimidated by a big page of words.
Yeah, might be much easier just to jump in and
read a few poems and kind of connect with something that way and then grow from
there.
Sort of a quicker pay off in a way too with for the reader.
You don't have to commit to a whole novel.
You're sort of getting something complete in a in a small back in.
And I think it kind of also kind of mimics how young people consume anything,
right, Even as a so attention spans, I don't know you, but you,
but mine definitely shrinking.
So that idea that you can just open it, read a poem and then come to it another
day.
Well, I mean, we're, you're talking to some flash fiction fans.
Yeah.
So, yeah, like we love the yeah, short form.
And for that reason too, for adults that sometimes it's all you
can manage.
You know, it's like you still want to engage in it,
but you can get like a complete story quickly.
Yeah.
And get that satisfaction.
And look there.
There isn't necessarily a huge difference or a huge gap between regular fiction and
poetry.
So we run a flash fiction competition and we've had poetry that's won that or or
done really well in the competition.
So it's a that short form writing.
Often there is like an overlap between just general fiction and poetry.
And you've mentioned as well you write short fiction too.
And so it's not necessarily a whole different thing to write short fiction.
And prose can be quite poetic as well in nature.
Yeah.
I think some of my favourite writers for write across the genre, you know,
that understanding you're working with words,
so there's going to be some kind of bleed usually if you're a writer, I feel.
So what then, I guess defines poetry in the modern
world, like as a separate pursuit.
Does it still have, like, something that you can point to and say
this is poetry and this is not?
Is it about the performance?
Like, we've got a poultry slam coming up, which you're also participating in?
Yeah, I'm doing just like a feature set while
the judges deliberate.
OK.
All right.
Yeah.
Look, I think that's the $1,000, 000 question, isn't it?
What is poetry and people?
And I think that's also a, it's interesting because I think it's,
it's, it's a question that often comes from the
Academy in inverted commas saying that's not a poem.
And I think things like fragmented language,
the condense condensing of language, really vivid images,
that ability to just say something profound in a really tiny amount of space.
I mean, I say profound, but you know, I write poems about tomato sauce and
peanut butter, you know, as well as those kind of profound to
sound.
Absolutely.
I, I sort of see that comparison myself to
like, it's that lyrical quality, like a song where meaning is not made
through necessarily literal interpretation of the words that you're
being presented with, but almost like a reading between the
lines of the words that you're, that you're presented with as well.
Sometimes it's funny how any definition that you come up with,
there's always going to be exceptions.
Like you, you're talking about concise language and,
you know, evoking, I guess these detailed images.
But I'm also thinking about epic poems in history,
which are not concise at all and are not condensed at all.
They're very long and they tell epic stories.
So that's also poetry.
So yeah, it's strange just trying to lock that
down.
Trying to.
Yeah.
And I think it maybe it can't, it can't be contained.
I think on the flip side of it, I pick poetry.
I do a lot of work in schools and some of the things I point out to them is the use
of poetic techniques in the carpet or in the fridge, like the word Coca Cola.
It's got onomatopoeia, it's got alliteration, it's got assonance.
You know, originally the drink was made out of the
cola nuts.
So it's an abbreviation.
So there's all of these things that I feel like the tools of poetry are often
used to make us buy something, think something or make us.
But as soon as we put them in a poem, all of a sudden, like, no, I don't.
I don't do poetry, but I think the stuff of poetry is just
all around us.
Yeah, absolutely great.
And I don't know, I have a feeling that this just me
speculating, but like, poetry's always been around.
And even though there was varied forms of writing,
it was all kind of poetry in a way, right, Until you have the novel.
And that is where that distinction between poetry and something else,
some other kind of writing is drawn.
But it's not necessarily a natural distinction, right?
It's all just words, as you say.
It's all just ways of expression.
Yeah.
I mean, I feel that very much that poetry was the
first thing.
You know, it was there before, as you say, for other literature.
And certainly from my cultural background, you know,
of African diaspora and the people of the tribes in West Africa that kept history
and told stories, they did so with drum and poetry.
Drum and speech, that was the first way of kind of
recording histories and telling stories.
And that's across cultures, too.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's all over the world.
You see that?
Yeah.
Before written language.
But I'm interested too, because your panel is very much about
contemporary poetry and contemporary Australian poetry in particular.
I mean, we're talking about the poetry sort of
defies definition.
Yeah.
Is there a definition of where we're at now in poetry?
I think the wonderful thing about contemporary Australian poetry is it
absorbs so many different poetic traditions.
You know, you have Indigenous song lines, you have poets like myself that are
bringing other traditions from other parts of the world.
You have the Western tradition.
So I think what defines contemporary Australian poetry is its diversity,
the fact that there are so many different kinds of poets writing in so many
different ways.
I mean, if you can have a haiku and a Limerick
together in harmony.
Yeah.
And maybe that is part of it too, that it's kind of a human language,
you know?
And we all, I mean, of course you can write poetry in
different languages, but that there's something about that
lyrical quality or about storytelling through words that it crosses cultures.
And so I'm curious.
So you you start writing for adults and you've moved, you know,
your latest two books kind of more teenage years.
So what drives you as a poet, I guess, in terms of your interests?
Are you trying to get people into the cult of poetry?
Yeah.
I mean, I, I had the fortune of having two of my
other books put on the year 12 list in my state.
And so I started doing something I thought I would never do,
which isn't going into high schools because teachers would ring me up and say,
hey, we're studying your short fiction, come and thought to the kids.
And that was a really interesting exercise.
Those books were not written for teenagers,
but you're there with teenagers unpacking work and unpacking life and stuff.
And teachers would say to me, almost every school I went to,
what poetry book is there that we can study?
And I kind of go, you know, I grew up in the age of far out Brussels
sprout, you know, revolting rhymes and that kind of thing.
And there was a few books that I would point them towards, you know,
Bindi by Curly Saunders or Sister Heart by Sally Morgan.
But they were invariably versed novels.
Yes.
And so the first book I I had written kids picture books in Rhine before,
but the first book for that age of kind of 7 to 14 was almost like a special
project.
And it was almost like pulling teeth, to be honest.
When I first I was like, let me fill this gap that I've been told
about.
And then I just fell in love with it once I re remembered the structure of how to
write a Limerick, how to write, you know, and I think I fell in love with, you know,
obviously once it was published, kids would, you know, send, oh,
here's an acrostic poem that I wrote in response to your acrostic poem.
Or here's a video of me and parents would send a video of their kid performing when
all the poems on assembly for you.
And I just remembered that, you know, when you're in primary school and you
just love poetry, there's none of this like poetry is daggy
and poetry is hard and poetry is not for me.
It's something that's fun and that's in your world.
And that's I said to my brothers, let's do another one.
You know, they loved it.
Let's let's do another one, one last poem.
There's 100 in the first collection, 99 in there.
I'm going down, you know, lowering my expectations.
But yeah, I think something that started out really
as a like, almost like a special interest project.
And I think as well there is this resistance.
I mean, as I said, I write in free verse when I write vowels.
There is a resistance to rhyming poetry in the adult world.
But you can do really interesting, fun things with language when you're
writing a poem about a kid jumping in a puddle.
Yeah.
Or, you know, there's a poem in here called Rats in the
Roof that kind of mimics the sound of rats inside a roof.
Hey.
So this idea of kind of doing something that maybe I wouldn't think of doing
because I have this, you know, just, I suppose that poetry conditioning.
I studied poetry at university.
So that conditioning of, of what is and what isn't the stuff of
poetry.
Did you want to share one with us?
Yeah, I might read Rats in the Roof.
OK, since I've mentioned it.
OK, this is rats in the roof.
Rats in the roof.
Scratch, scratch in the roof, play catch in the roof, play stacks,
stacks in the roof of rats in the roof.
Rats in the roof snack stacks wax on the roof, wax stacks on the roof.
Slap slaps on the roof.
**** rats, put cats in the roof to chase Rats in the
roof, take backs in the roof.
Bash bash hatching the roof Thatch Thatching the roof from rats in the roof
by rats.
Oh no wax in the roof.
Rats hatched in the roof.
New batch in the roof rats.
Amazing.
That's kind of the most basic, You know, how do I use as fewer words,
as few words as possible to kind of create a new rhyme scheme that would have
been so fun to put together?
I imagine.
Yeah.
And, you know, like, I'd never thought I would have written a
poem about rats in a review you asked me five years ago.
And that's probably on the.
It's on the easiest end in the book, you know, there.
And there are poems that in there that aren't fun, you know,
that are about being bullied at school or about losing a grandparent.
You know, they're not not all kind of these bouncy
things, but I feel like being forced to work
within the realm of childhood just kind of allows you to do all these things that
you wouldn't normally do.
I think we think of kids as being, you know, like God.
We can only tell them the nice things and let's have the fun poem about the rats
and so on.
But actually kids are deep thinkers too and have a lot going on.
So they would appreciate, I think, that whole spectrum of storytelling that
you're sharing with them.
The other thing it sounds like it's allowed you to do,
like there's the constraint of working within like that mindset,
the young adult mindset and the things they're dealing with.
But also it seems to have given you the freedom to explore all this other range
of different kinds of poultry that you wouldn't really get to explore if you're
writing for adults, you know, Rats in the Roof might not be so well.
And it's interesting because I do, I have got an adult collection coming out
in November and the brain shift between.
I wrote these two back to back and then kind of pulling myself out.
And I have found that some of the fun of this has bled into the adult.
Like I'm now starting to write, you know, there's a poem in my adult collection
titled Just so You Know, and it's about Gen X's and how cool it
was to be a Gen X eating a Chico Rolls and wearing a hypercolour T shirt.
And it's addressed to teenagers.
It's kind of like we were cooler than you and we had the mullet first.
And, you know, and I don't think I would have ever
written that poem had I not, you know, real level children.
Faithfulness.
Simple.
Yeah.
Do because it's I mean, you've gotta be driven to do it,
for a start.
You gotta enjoy what you do.
But that's how we connect too.
Or one of the wins that we can connect.
But I do think there is this kind of, you know,
if you are humorous in adult poetry, like it's a dry santorial humour,
you know, it has to be highly intellectualised and
you can't just kind of look, I don't know, I feel like we're talking about
contemporary poetry.
I feel like there's a market for, yeah, the fun stuff.
I mean, certainly I love that sort of thing.
And it can be more accessible, you know.
So I don't know, maybe you need to take that,
that pressure off yourself a little.
People like new things as well.
People like to read things that they're not used to reading.
So I think it's always good to kind of break those barriers.
And I think above all, what people value is authenticity as well,
people writing what they love and that comes through on the page.
And that's probably what's happening here.
Like you're, you're loving these poems and the kids
are loving the poems as well.
So there's no reason why that wouldn't happen for adult poetry as well.
Yeah.
Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you wanted to
talk about?
Any other books that you wanted to plug?
Yeah.
What's on my, I mean, maybe some of my favourite Australian
poems.
Yes.
Or collections.
Throat by Ellen van Nievel.
A Little Bit Long Time by Halle Coby Eckerman.
The drop off by David Savage, who I was just on the panel with.
Yeah, I think there's some of my most recent
either reads or rereads in terms of Australian poetry.
Take that on my recommendations.
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for chatting with us, Maxine.
Thanks for having me on the show.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right Podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Writers Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.