Prose Poetry and Painting with Words: Conversation with Paul Hetherington

I caught up with Australian poet Paul Hetherington, at the University of WA Club, to talk to him about his latest collection Burnt Umber (UWA Publishing).

 

‘I’ve loved the visual arts for all of my life—nearly as long as I can remember. I can still recollect as a child my parents taking me to a gallery where some of the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly paintings were shown. I don’t really remember—because it was such a long time ago—exactly what I thought of them. I think I found them strange, I think I found them weirdly impressive and weirdly moving without really knowing quite the story they were narrating. But they were also puzzling and curious. They seemed to be very immediate, they weren’t simply paintings that I was standing back from and examining as aesthetic objects, they were almost pressing on me. Their meanings were pressing on me. The weirdness of their imagery—the strangeness of the flat textures, and the weird geometric shapes, and the unruliness of them were pressing on me.’ – P.H.

The full interview was published in Westerly, and is linked here.

Playing with Light and Dark: Conversation with David McCooey

I first became interested in David McCooey’s work while studying an Honours unit at the University of Western Australia, where for an assessment I responded to his essay on Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry, only to learn that he too had taken the same unit some years before. Five years later, David and I caught up on the UWA grounds, assailed by the mockery of kookaburras and occasional bursts of sunlight (literally star struck), to chat about the process of drafting his latest collection, Star Struck (UWA Publishing).

 

 

‘I think lyric poetry is an estranging kind of art, generally. If you think about the theory of defamiliarisation whereby you try to make people see things anew, then the disquieting, the uncanny, and metaphor, are all ways of doing that. Of course the uncanny is by definition something that takes in the everyday; the uncanny is the disquieting interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar. I am deeply attracted to that.’ – D.M.

Read our full conversation on Cordite, here.