John Forbes: Yes. Well that's a reasonably, um, accurate assessment if you're talking about it in terms of what it's more like. It's more like doing a piece of macramÈ than it is like writing a letter. It's like recognising something's there, that you didn't know was there, and putting it together: finding out something - because I don't really work from having something to say. I work from getting a line, or a couple of lines that suggest some more lines, and that's how they develop. And the poems . . . write themselves in a way. Well, once you start writing you see what the shape of the thing's going to be, why it's going to be like it is, and . . . they don't write themselves but they do suggest the shape that they're going to take.
Cath Kenneally: Are you saying there's a sort of free associating going on - that you start out with a line and then [JF: : Mm.] if you free associate you'll find out what you wanted to say?
John Forbes: It's not free association - it's formal association. The form of the poem suggests whats going to come next. Sometimes you have a poem and it's not working and you change it around and it [snaps fingers] 'comes out', like crystals coming out of a solution.
Cath Kenneally: Does that mean that it was 'there all along', that it's just a question of finding it?
John Forbes: In some of the senses of the word, yeah. Not in a metaphysical way but just in the possibilities of the language it's there.
Cath Kenneally: Yeah well I was going to ask you that - whether in a way it was a sort of, you know, an exercise a bit like philosophy. I mean, if you say it's finding out what you know, it sounds like it is.
John Forbes: Finding out -
Cath Kenneally : Or, 'what you want to say' - is that different?
John Forbes : Yeah, finding out something that you're not sure about - it's a surprise - surprising yourself. I mean, if you know what you're going to say the poem tends to be boring. It tends to either turn into a sermon or a reflection or . . . If you're finding out something new it's sort of more original.
Cath Kenneally : Are those things you don't want to be, a sermon or a reflection - you don't ever want a poem to be either of those things?
John Forbes : Well, not just. I mean I suppose all poems partake of other things to a certain extent, depending on their content, but not something where . . . By sermon or reflection I'm probably being pointlessly derogatory about sermons and reflectionsÖ
Cath Kenneally : Mmm.
John Forbes : I mean something like . . . . where you know what you're going to say anyway, where you're just embroidering, or illustrating a point - rather than making it, creating it.
Cath Kenneally : If we go back to the macramÈ idea, is there some sort of element of therapy involved?
John Forbes : Ummmm . . . [CK laughs] . . . not noticeably. Um. Perhaps there is for John, I don't know. I'm not um -
Cath Kenneally : There must be, I -
John Forbes: I don't know what macramÈ is, when I really think about it. It's like petit point isn't it?
Cath Kenneally: Basket weaving.
John Forbes : Um, "element of therapy"?
Cath Kenneally : Mm.
John Forbes: Well I've known quite a few poets for quite a long time and if there's an element of therapy it's, er, very marginal and very ineffective. Cos most of them are just as crazy as when I first met them. Myself included. I mean, . . .
Cath Kenneally: Well if there's not an element of therapy is there an element of compulsion? I mean it's -
John Forbes: I think so. To a certain extent. When it's working there is. I don't feel compelled to write a poem in the sense that: I must write a poem. But when I've got a poem going I feel compelled to finish it - to fix it up -
Cath Kenneally: When did it hit you that a poet was what you were going to be - the flash of light that said, Other things from henceforth . . .
John Forbes: Well when I was about fourteen and a half or fifteen I decided that's what I'd do. And I set about it in a fairly serious fashion. When I went to university I did the subjects I thought would help me write better poetry. I did English, Latin and Philosophy. Then in second year I took up Fine Arts and dropped Latin. The big mistake was not taking up Fine Arts but was dropping Latin. I should've dropped English - um - because I never found it very useful for the process of writing - though I did find Philosophy and Fine Arts useful, in different ways, . . .
Cath Kenneally: Why would a fourteen year old decide to be a poet?
John Forbes: Oh! Oh well, . . .
Cath Kenneally: . . . and what conception of being a poet did you have at fourteen?
John Forbes: Good question. I suppose I . . . Well actually I was a bit older than that - I suppose I was fifteen or sixteen. I was interested in doing it: it seemed difficult to do well, but well worth doing if you did it well. And I think because I'd moved around a great deal when I was a kid I was a bit of a loner - though not particularly happy about being a loner - it seemed poetry was something you could do yourself and you didn't need a team or you didn't need to be integrated with groups of people and um, also, as I say, it was more a challenge to do something well.
Cath Kenneally: So you decided to be a poet rather than just a writer.
John Forbes: Yeah, yeah. I wasn't very interested in being a writer as such. And I'm not very good at writing prose, my prose is fairly . . . well, I can write sort of serviceable prose, but that's something I taught myself to do from writing reviews.
Cath Kenneally: What about a poem like . . . "A Dream"?
John Forbes: Well that is in prose because it occurred actually just as a dream, and it's in prose because it's, um . . . er . . . has no necessary form and it's just a recounting of experience. And that's why it's set in prose. But it was such a nice dream that I er that I wrote it down.
Cath Kenneally: Yeah. You feel that the distinction between prose and verse makes a difference there? [JF: To me, yeah.] I mean it seems perfectly at home in this book [The Stunned Mullet].
John Forbes: It is, yeah. It's just the shape is different. I mean, perhaps you could write out all the other poems in prose and not lose any of their effect. I don't think so though.
Cath Kenneally: It interests me in the context of performance of poems - where people don't know, unless you indicate in rather artificial ways where the breaks are.
John Forbes: Well I think the structure of the poem, the shape of the poem, is more a function of its creation, in that that shape is how it seems to suggest itself to youÖ
Cath Kenneally: So it's for your satisfaction, rather than the reader's . . . edification really.
John Forbes: I don't know. I suppose to solve it you would have to re-write the poems in prose, but I just don't think they'd work as well - the line breaks in most of my poetry are ways of associating images together, so that they sit there on the page, whereas if it's in prose everything is given equal amounts of attention.
Cath Kenneally: Yes, and you've got that narrative impetus too, that makes people feel it has to go on.
John Forbes: Yeah. Which is not the case with the poetry.
Cath Kenneally: I've been looking at Stalin's Holidays and The Stunned Mullet. Almost ten years between them. What do you feel has happened in that time? What sorts of poems are in Stalin's Holidays that perhaps you wouldn't write now?
John Forbes: The ones in Stunned Mullet are more miserable.
Cath Kenneally: [Laughs] Yes, I was actually going to say that reading this I got . . . I wasn't there, and I got a terrible sense of nostalgia and the sense of the joie de vivre of the good old days . . .
John Forbes: Weren't you there, in the 1970s? Cath Kenneally: I was there somewhere - but I wasn't where you were.
John Forbes: No. Well that's not exactly reportage that book, but there's just a more genial spirit in it. Perhaps I was happier then. No I wan't happier, I was much more miserable in a lot of ways. But I was more hopeful. Now I expect to be miserable all the time. [Laughter] And so I've become reconciled to it. So I'm less miserable but not as hopeful. Um . . . Oh, technically I think some of the poems in that are pretty dodgy - not as smoothly written . . .
Cath Kenneally: Would you still write a poem like "Am I a Door - Six Poems Say Yes"?
John Forbes: No. No, that was very much mucking around, imitating people whose work I didn't understand . . .
Cath Kenneally: And that was all youthful exuberance and that's all gone? [Laughs]
John Forbes: Oh, well, no I just don't need to imitate people that way. I don't think that "Am I A Door" is a very successful poem - but I just put it in the book cause a lot of people liked it. It's . . . I mean, my feeling reading Stalin's Holidays - which I was doing last year when I was putting this New & Selected Poems together - is that it was very 'young', um, very naive-but-ferocious. [CK: Yeah.] And the best poems in it I still think are good - you know, there's a dozen of them I think are terrific (modestly) - but there's a few in it I don't think are much good - even though various people like them for different reasons.
Cath Kenneally: What about the whole business of . . . that's what I'm interested in, is how your sense of yourself as a poet - I mean you haven't had any problems with identifying yourself that way for a long time - how has that sense evolved? And you say you didn't have any problems identifying yourself, from an early age, as a poet: This is my profession, this is what I'm doing. It must have evolved quite a bit over those years. Where does the line come in - what poems does it come in - where you say "I feel the sang de la poËt - the tonight show version - coursing through my . . ."?
John Forbes: Oh yeah, yeah. That poem, what's it called, "Serenade".
Cath Kenneally: I mean you say that and then you instantly deflate it with that ironic comment. John Forbes: Well I don't think I ever felt le sang de la poËt - in the full sense of "the blood of the poet courses in the veins". Because I've always been very chary of Romantic identifications. I don't have enough sense of self-confidence to be a Romantic - um, but I understand why people are - and I feel happy for them (tiny-brained fools) . . . [CK: laughs] Um, . . .
Cath Kenneally: There's another phrase somewhere I picked out - and again I haven't identified it - and you say "and like any poet avoiding myth and message to fake a flashy ode". Which is again self-deflating.
John Forbes: Yes, well the idea of . . . in some ways there's no such thing as a 'fake poem'. If a poem's successful it succeeds. It's a self-validating currency in a sense. To be aware of this situation doesn't mean that you're deflating about it, but it does mean that you're not . . . 'being bardic'.
Cath Kenneally: And does it mean that you're not making any large claims for -
John Forbes: I'd make large claims for the poem but not for the poet. And I think that's an important distinction. It's odd, I often feel - and this feeling had something to do with wearing a tie when I was reading at the Club Foote on Tuesday night - I thought, These poems are very good; and I wrote them, but somehow I don't feel , um, as if they're extensions of me. I mean what I'm trying to say is, I've never felt particularly happy with myself or self-confident or, um, good at glad-handing, but I realize the opportunity's there, if you see what I mean? But I don't think I'd ever take advantage of it because I don't know how to - and I'd feel bad if I did. Does that make . . . ?
Cath Kenneally: Maybe this might be the place to ask you about what you think the permanent effects of a Catholic upbringing are. Some of this -
John Forbes: The permanent effects of a Catholic upbringing? Why?
Cath Kenneally: I just wonder, well it doesn't necessarily follow on from what you've just said, but I've thought a lot about being an ex-Catholic and what I notice are habits that I have and that other people - I've compared notes with other people - and the sorts of things that you tend to do is you tend to be a bit of a casuist, um, but you also have this sense of destiny and um, you know, the deep importance, the profound importance of the individual and yet a certain . . . that tendency to self-deprecation is very standard too.
John Forbes: Mm. Well, this is one of the benefits of a Catholic upbringing. You take things seriously but you don't take yourself seriously. And I think everyone . . . the world, would be a better place place if everyone was like that. I'm not sure about the other effects of a Catholic upbringing. I think, in my case, my personality was as much formed by the fact that I moved around a great deal when I was a kid as by the Catholic upbringing I had. I went to about ten schools before I was twelve, and while I didn't move after I was thirteen, after I went to highschool, I think most of the damage is done by then, or the forms are set and um . . . I often used to envy people who'd grown up in the same place, in the same community from zero to twenty, because moving around a lot makes you superficially good at getting on with people but rather shy in other ways. But, you know, you can't continue to blame these things for the way you run your life when you're twenty years on from it. Well you can, but it sounds a bit ridiculous. [Laughter]
Cath Kenneally: And then you take philosophy studies on top of that - that probably cemented the process, whatever it was. There's a phrase, "a casual eschatology" somewhere in "Self Portrait With Cake".
John Forbes: Eschatology is the study of things . . . of 'final things'. Well, a casual eschatology is probably . . . it reminds me of that Tom Lehrer song. You know [sings]
Cath Kenneally (laughing): Are you aware of the last things all the time?
John Forbes (gasps): !!
Cath Kenneally: Casually aware?
John Forbes: At the moment I am but that's more the fact of six bottles of retsina last night - I'm vividly aware of last things, and can see them coming very shortly.
Cath Kenneally: And are you for real when you say that the poems are getting more miserable and you think they're going to keep getting more miserable?
John Forbes: No, I hope they're not going to get more miserable, but - just by comparison - I think you need to read through that book, The Stunned Mullet, without having read Stalin's Holidays. I don't think you'd think I was a particularly miserable person. [CK: No.] But there's so much sort of Yea, yea! yea! in Stalin's Holidays, in - you know, in a very high-toned, rigorously aesthetic way - that the comparison is marked. I mean, The Stunned Mullet's more political too. The 70s were a very good decade for self-disillusion, to become aware. The older you get, I think, the more radical you get - but the more aware you become of how difficult it is to change anything. I never felt, I never believed in anything politically - so I didn't have any illusions shattered, but I just became more and more aware of how society is organized and . . . the breathtaking brutality and ruthlessness that underpins everyday reality. And even in countries such as our own, let alone countries where things are tighter all round, I guess I just got more sobered - by seeing how things were.
Cath Kenneally: Well those 'Bi-Centennial poems' have that sort of feel about them. But even those make me think there's a certain sort of youthful anger about that that maybe . . . I don't know, after a while you get to the point where you think, Well that's just how it is, I'll write about something else, I'll just write about me.
John Forbes: Yeah. But I think I am those things - in the sense that that "Bi-Centennial Poem" started off as a poem about my poetry -
Cath Kenneally: Yeah (quotes): "My vocation calls . . ."
John Forbes: Mm. And it was originally just the first and the last section, and it was a poem - I only really liked it because it had some good lines in it - and I wrote the poem about "The Royal Navy arrived . . . " - and I slotted that in. And then I thought of the other two, the other three, one morning while I was waiting for a guy to come and pick me up to go and move furniture, in 1987. And there's a little bit of mucking around, adjustments after that, but . . . I think the weakest section of that poem is the most public - that's number four, the most publicky/private . . .
Cath Kenneally: Is the weakest section?
John Forbes: Yeah.
Cath Kenneally: Why, do you think?
John Forbes: Oh I don't know. It just doesn't seem to be saying much. In a way you could drop it. [Pause] I really wish I had. Because I put this poem in a competition - the prize of which was $5,000 - but, the competition was in three sections: poems up to forty lines in length, poems up to ninety lines in length, then book-length. That poem was about 102 lines long and I thought, 'Oh well, that's just a rough guide, you know - they won't worry about that!' And it was in six sections and they said to me, the people running the competition, said We would have loved to have given you this prize - the poem was really streets ahead of the others, but it's too long. And you've called it "Bi-Centennial Poem" - so you can't drop one of the segments and um, we're really . . . Bad luck Jack! But Les Murray had done the same thing . . .
Cath Kenneally: And he won?
John Forbes: No he didn't win it. No, no, no. He was overlength too. And I said Well, so what you know? Oh, no. People might sue if they put a poem in and it's the right length and yours was longer than the rules. I couldn't believe that this was real, but I could see that it was. So goodbye $5000. But I didn't think at the time - I put that fourth section in as a sort of spreader-outer or something - to give it more space. But just reading it the other night I don't really like it. Maybe it's alright . . .
Cath Kenneally: You think it's sort of nebulously personal . . .
John Forbes: Nebulously personal! Spot on, Cath. Yeah.
Cath Kenneally Well I tend to like that sort of thing [laughing]. It just depends. I mean I like it especially from a male poet, when it appears, just because it's rare, it's rarer. I mean, I don't like it because it's nebulously personal. I don't like it for that reason, but it's nice sometimes when it happens. There was a poem that you read the other night that I don't remember much about except it said . . . it was partly about 'No babies'.
John Forbes: No, no. Not yet. No. [Laughs] No, that's "Chapel Street" and that poem is a good example of poems recognising themselves. I was walking along Chapel Street. I'd just moved into a house down in Melbourne there. Chapel Street was close. And Chapel Street's funny - like one end of it's like Double Bay gone to heaven - and the other end of it's like Enmore. I live closer to the Enmore end. And I was walking along, thinking about food, and I went to go to the chemist and I saw this line, on the front of an old LP tacked up in some second hand record shop, saying "Packed with Raunchy Rock n Roll Hits" and, I don't know how 'fucked' got into it (I don't suppose you can say that sort of thing on radio) but anyway then I saw all these other things that just started composing themselves - like I saw six colour TVs with six Mike Willesees in them, and I saw an Asian guy looking out, 'digging' the street through plate glass, and all the other things just sort of followed automatically. And I was feeling sort of miserable and elated. Well, I was feeling happy cause of the house, but I wasn't real, you know, top of everything - um - and so that's where . . . How does it go? It sort of goes down [searches for poem and reads]:
Now, I put that in - that "Not me yet" is meant to sound Poor, poor, pitiful me, but someone in a creative writing class I was doing at the time I was writing this poem thought it was more like (with snappy bravado): Not me yet. Wouldn't catch me in that racket - No! No way. [Laughter]
Cath Kenneally: I thought you meant Poor me, not me - not 'poor me' but -
John Forbes: That's what it's meant to. But the rhythm of it does give that interpretation - Not me yet.
Cath Kenneally: Well, you do say "it does happen but" just before - or, "It happens but".
John Forbes: [re-reads it] So it could read as a sort of They haven't managed to nail me down yet! Though it's interesting: the person who made that remark was an elderly lady, who would probably construct something like that in those terms of, you know, dodging . . .
Cath Kenneally: That's right - 'feckless young man'.
John Forbes: Well, feckless middle-aged man. Whereas that's not the case at all.
Cath Kenneally [laughs]: Well read us something new.
John reads the poem "Anti Romantic".
interview recorded September 1991 for Cath Kenneally's 'Arts Breakfast' program on Radio 5UV a few days after John Forbes' reading in the New Writing Performed series at Adelaie's Club Foote nightclub. John was on a trip back from Perth and a fist full of dollars from the Experimental Art Foundation enticed him to Adelaide.