Interview | In conversation with Sally Ann Murray (2019)

Congratulations on your lovely volume.

1.You are a novelist, short story writer, poet and a professor. How do you juggle the different roles? And why the long break between open season (2006) and now?

Ah, clever trap. See how you make ‘roles’ sound like significant achievement, in the first question – and like lack, in the second! Tricky… Anyway, once we add in all the female reciprocities, for good measure (wifemother-daughtersister….), then maybe I don’t juggle very adeptly, after all, and only muggle by, adaptly. But look, I have become more forgiving of myself: if a woman drops the ball, I like to think that in scrabbling to find it there’s the opportunity to discover something you otherwise wouldn’t have. A kind of aleatory, chance procedure! More systematically, I’ll admit that I am a mental list maker, a virtual box ticker, and even creatively I find deadlines helpful, a way of working to task that stokes the old engine. Overall, as a professional person, while I take things seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously. It’s liberating to own the accomplished persona of the satirical clown, the provocative gadfly. A predisposition to playful curiosity, even in situations that prefer doxa and gravitas, this makes space for creativity, inventiveness, odd new alignments and lived connection. Your second question, about the ‘long gap’. So, I have several poetry collections. An odd novel. But don’t forget that writing – across various modes – hasn’t stopped, since Small Moving Parts came out in 2009. Hardly. There have been scholarly articles and chapters, several successful PhD and MA supervisions, and I’ve had many short stories published, some of them formally unusual, others focussing on difficult areas of gender and sexuality. There’s a stand-alone collection there, advanced in the making. 

2. Please comment on the lovely cover.

The image resonates with the collection. It’s a piece by artist-architect Renée Rossouw. A 2018 linocut called ‘Kabuki in Ochre’, part of the series ‘Line Kosmos’. Even the simple, geometric Bauhaus typography and the layout of the text…these feel beautifully designed but also visually experimental. At the same time, the image carries with it some of the Kabuki characteristics: not only a type of Japanese theatre, but a Japanese drawing practice that follows meditative, unplanned forms in making and drawing. The artist tries not to lift her pen so that the lines flow like life organically and without the driven idea of a determinative ending. (Apparently the word ‘kabuki’ derives from the verb ‘kabuku’, meaning ‘to lean’ or ‘to be out of the ordinary’. Very loosely, kabuki can be interpreted as ‘avant-garde’ or ‘bizarre’ artistic practice, and this sits well with several elements of Otherwise Occupied.  I think the cover image serves to push open, from the start, a potential reader's approach to the ideas, topics and methods that the poetry will venture. I love the play of black and white, of dense and open (no simple binaries); the splash of yellow from an oozy egghead, a mind matter rich and sticky as egg yolk. The sinuous pathways of thoughts shaking and snaking and waking up the mal skull. (A student saw the cover and said it reminded her of those largescale weaver’s nest sculptures that have been installed in the children’s play garden at places like Babylonstoren? Big ‘human nest’ habitats – simple and functional but wonderfully varied and innovative - designed by Porky Hefer and woven by his team.)

3. Your blurb is spot on:

In this serious, often playful, sometimes outrageous volume, Murray draws inspiration from contemporary women’s experimental poetics. The collection recognises female writers’ equivocal relation to forms of the linguistic avant-garde such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and brings embodiment and affective voicing back into the provocative equation. Yet, this is not a simple return to lyric intimacy. Murray inflects poetry’s familiar inner speech with the sounds and shapes of found materials and engaging cultural noise. In Otherwise Occupied, the seamlessness of the beautiful, expressive poem becomes otherwise under the innovative necessity of the page as an open field of multiple (mis)takes and (mis)givings. Here, a poem is a space of enactment, a process of thinking-writing and performative exploration: idea↔body, lyric↔language, innovative necessity↔enduring convention. And in the end: there is no subject outside language.

Please comment on how you see language poetry and also found poetry.

Let me give just a few sketchy (but I hope not caricatural) remarks.

Language poetry:

A great deal of critically-praised poetry (what Charles Bernstein once called ‘official verse culture’) has been premised rather formulaically on the lyric, even confessional impulse. A kind of narcissistic poetic selfie, some might say. The 1970s Language poets in the US were impatient with this. The journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E fostered a new kind of poetics located not in personal voicing but aligned with critical theory, a poststructural, deconstructively theorised awareness of the limits and possibilities of language as a signifying system that escapes meaning, rather than serving as an unproblematic conduit through which to channel polished little gems of sincere personal experience. Language poetry is notoriously dissensual, but versions of this poetics now inflect poetry that is variously called experimental or radical or avant-garde or postmodern, where there is the impulse to engage the possibilities of an abstracted linguistic system, deliberately breaking up received conventions of coherent self and sense and syntax and – by extension – political-ideological practice. You’ll see tactics such as disruptive form, typographical play, strange orthographies, polyphonic and even cacophonous voicing, deliberate typos, mistranslated words, visual-verbal ploys and concrete poetries, fragmentation, citation, argument, process-oriented work, in all an understanding of the page and the poem as a more projective space than lyric verse was accustomed to allow, with its emphasis on the poem as perfectly achieved, emotionally rich artefact. 

      This interest in a Language-focussed poetics has certainly enabled many new kinds of work to be created by female poets, but there has also been a sense that a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics, with the emphasis on cerebral abstraction and difficult intellection, has not always also respected questions of embodiment and power that some experimental female poets remain  interested in tackling, even while they want to work simultaneously with linguistic, semantic and conceptual disruption. So that has brought back into the uneasy equation the issue of voicing, affect, identity (even identity politics). 

      For my own experimentalisms, it’s not a matter of favouring either/or, but of mediating both/and. Rachel Blau DuPlessis puts it well. She writes of practising a poetics that works through rupture and rapture to bring abstraction into generative relation with experience. There are wonderful possibilities here for a poetic practice of the im/personal. I’m interested in the doubts of language, not only its confident, intimate, cultural assertions. I like to be waylaid by its twists, turns, slippages. The incoherences and messy incidentals of parole that unsettle received grammars, syntaxes, conventions. Just by the way: I do think that for the present collection my experimentalism has toned down a little and that is a good thing in the sense that the writing show innovation but it accepts the need to be accessible, rather than only a space of intellection.

Found poetry:

I’ll be briefer, here! The found poem is a notion of the early 20^thC avant gardes. Think Kurt Schwitter’s work. The inspirations of Cubist citation, collage aesthetics, Dadaist found objects. All manner of urban and cultural objects/detritus, overheard snippets; clippings, pastings, shreds of phrases, material from advertising, and lifted from supposedly unpoetic/non-poetic discursive contests… Resituated in the context of ‘a poem’, and the expectations of poetry… this kind of deliberate sampling or clutter invites ‘interpretation’ differently. It demands an otherwise kind of (re)reading. It destabilises the conventional expectation of poetic utterance as emanating from the confessional sincerity of the individual heart, soul, psychology. The found poem enables a poem to find intriguing encounters with the languages of everyday culture, or with a crazy panoply of different, contradictory, digressive discourses. It’s a form of poetic impersonality, a curious dis/claiming of authorship by the poet that disturbs the expectation of the coherent personal lyric subject and oversteps the bounded proprieties of poetic discourse. I find the found poem a compelling kind of vagrancy, a form of conditional utterance that disturbs the received conditions of speech. 

      This found element is relevant to the formation of poetic voice in a mediatised cultural context: there’s a blur between exterior ‘culture noise’ and the ventriloquy of a persistent if erratic “inner speech” as poet Denise Riley calls it. She explains that a poet’s inner speech “is no limpid stream of consciousness, crystalline from its uncontaminated source in Mind, but a sludgy thing, thickened with reiterated quotation, choked with the rubble of the overheard… crammed with slogans and jingles, with mutterings of remembered accusations, irrepressible puns, insistent spirits of ancient exchanges, monotonous citation, the embarrassing detritus of advertising, archaic injunctions from hymns, and the pastel snatchings of old song lyrics”. These are forms of odd ready-made, if you will, that a poet then gathers and sifts and selectively orchestrates into potent form.

4. You address intimate areas: motherhood, children, your past – how do see autobiographical poetry?

Does a poem ever relate unambiguously to the author’s experience? Can we assume directed, unmediated representation of life? Supposed authenticity of self should really be read as a writerly ploy or tactic. Others speak through a poet’s voicing, and not in some hubristic sense of vatic insight or superior comment, but as a more quotidian polyphony that signals the difficulties and im/possibilities of simply claiming self, distinction, identity and position. All is relational. Even if the ‘I’ implies a connection with the life of ‘the poet’ (whom many readers simply assume is also ‘the speaker’), this is not a straight line; we need to allow for assemblage and dissembling. The poem does not accumulate an archive of autobiographical fact. It works through suggestive imaginative gap, more than the assumed logical coherence of the Self. So the voice in a poem may carry extremely varied valence. I may be she, she may shape-shift, and the first-person poet may be beside herself in the third person, assuming the position of critical distance that has become an academic norm. A self may be otherwise; it may be other to itself, staging an occasion of error, with changes over time. 

      To return to elements of the found poem: ‘self’, ‘autobiography’, ‘confession’: these are messy, their reciprocities oblique. In a poem, you enter a mind field, and that is not only a poet’s personal mind, belonging to the individual’s interiority and intimate experience. It’s a cultural space, noisy, marked by sedimented habits, by excessive and vertiginously careening sweeps. There is no constant Self. There is containment and eruption. Balance and inelegance. A poem scavenges selvings and selvages from all of this, absorbs them into the interior mind graffiti of volatile selves, and inviting a reader to participate in elusive, often difficult process of meaning making. An experimental poem, even if on the surfaces it is not overtly formally innovative, may be a subtle reminder of the cacophonous, interruptive speech spaces of what is too easily thought of as the singular company of self-centred lyric expressivity.


5. I love your poem on Lady Gaga. What does she represent to you?

Well, it’s in fact only one in a series of experimental, unconventional poems on different kinds of influential women artists/writers. There’s another, for example, on fifteenth century feminist writer Christine de Pisan (author of The Book of the City of Ladies) in conversation with contemporary French queer rocker Chris, of Christine and the Queens! But back to Lady Gaga. I love her protean range of personae; her skills of pastiche and parody and appropriation. My poem is not a naive celebration of her radicalism or supposed subversiveness. But I admire her performance skills, her powerfully beautiful voicing. Her art refuses to essentialise some proper female appearance. She shape-shifts; is aggressively transgressive. She cites from other artists. She performs identity to the degree of externalising and making emphatically visible the culture’s damaging assumptions about femaleness. In Lady Gaga, we are obliged to see our own grotesqueries of bodies and beauty and binaries bizarrely made into a carnivalesque spectacle; estranged, newly de-formed ... various embodiments are dragged, to flout convention and flaunt apparently outrageous possibilities.

Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Performance Divides America

Shoutout to Lady Gaga’s stomach roll for showing girls

that you don’t need to have a perfect body to absolutely kill it;

love how Lady Gaga’s belly bag over her shorts
makes her seem more relatable;

6. Comment on the words (and the deconstruction of meaning) in the poem "Life support" – one of my favourites. 

Whew. Too much to say, really. Let me gesture. Again, this is another poem that works with found elements, but then transposes these to a sphere marked by the poetic, which a reader has been taught to associate with meaning and conventions of sense, even sensitivity. The piece insists on the performative interplay of visual and verbal signs. It works as a concrete poem, but also teasingly as a more conventional poem inviting interpretation at the level of deep meaning, even as the experiment also skitters across the surface of a normalised cultural zeitgeist, picking up random text, fluff, re-directing a reader to re-think a habitus in which self, life, identity are produced through the endless deferral and substitution of commodities, yes, but also shifting the view to the impossibility of ever utterly fixing linguistic referents. There are tensions between the settled and the utterly disruptive; between a ream of arbitrary signifiers which nevertheless seems to ‘want’ the attribution of meaning. The very placing of the ‘cushion’ shapes over the linguistic markers also introduces a deliberate perplexity in a space that can, at some level, seem susceptible to a banal legibility. (Life support? Enough. Let’s spare readers the critical theory.)

7. The title of your collection Otherwise Occupied resonates with Jeanne Goosen's volume Elders aan diens. Do you know her work?

Well, I know she’s a novelist, short story writer and poet. The author of Ons is nie almal so nie. That novel, translated into English as Not All of Us works so well with colloquial idiom, backed by sharp critique of the ordinary, of the dangerous nonsense of doxa and received truths. Her character voicing: well, there is the speaking out against institutionalised madness, and the counter-claim of othered, marginalised lives and truths. The voices debunk bullshit; give the lie to conventional pieties. When it comes to her poetry: I hadn’t known of her collection, no. It’s a marvellous serendipity, across Afrikaans and English, that our collections both envisage the poet as somehow ‘busy elsewhere’, not on call but necessarily and very busily engaged somewhere else, or with other things. The title of my own collection…there are so many angles. A poetry that is purposefully skew, slantwise, rather than paying obeisance to norms. A form of odd alternative other wise dom, with all the riffs possible, there, of difference and insight and stupidity coming into hopeful/hopeless play. Otherwise. Otherwise what? A threat? Hmm…more of an open-minded acknowledgement that a poem, in this collection, is a slippery creature, in relation both to received ideas of both lyric and experimental traditions. The words even hint at a very small room of her own, in which she is occupied otherwise with this strange but engaging body of work.

My mamma is bossies

uit haar een oog huil sy Puccini

uit die ander oog betig sy my

Snags kweel sy: Bedaar, my kind, bedaar

môore kry jy van soetpap en melk

My mamma is bossies

Ia sona molto felice, sing sy

en pak haar kaarte uit

Hoe mooi is sy nie

sy met haar hare soos pruimedante

my bossiesma met haar taai drome

en onverwagte uitgelatenheid.

My mamma is bossies 

Sy is dood nou

ingeweef in die familietapisserie

Sy jaag haar ganse strandlangs

met ’n dun swepie aan

Sy draai om, sien my 

my agterstevoorkind, sê sy

mag dit goed gaan met jou

Uit: Versindaba 2007, Marlise Joubert [samesteller], Protea Boekhuis, 2007

8. How do you see the literary scene in South Africa and the role of the critic? A very active Afrikaans scene versus a more subdued English canon. I sometimes feel that poets live in different worlds ...

Joan, I don’t know if I’m totally up to responding well here. I mean: Afrikaans literature: proportionally there is such a vast body of work that has established through a vibrant creative, critical, scholarly and publishing scene. It doesn’t look to Holland in the way it once did, and yet the literature still successfully sets up conversations with literatures and cultures from Europe, and elsewhere. When it comes to the idea of a ‘more subdued English canon’? I’m not convinced of that, actually. It depends if you insist on narrowing ‘English’ and of still believing in a canon. I’m more inclined to consider that South African English and inherited traditions have been wonderfully animated through contact with multiple elsewheres and diasporas, to the extent that boundaries of language and culture have blurred, as well as given rise to a vital online scene of literary commentary and publication. Certainly, literatures in ‘English’ in this country have grown more diverse, and old-style idea about literary and genre fiction have been eroded, as have outmoded models of cultural purity. For myself, as a writer, I’m not interested in holding to categories and separations (though, granted, for some these may still be strategically necessary). I am interested in the possibilities of translation; I value inspiration from many languages. That’s part of the experimental vitality, isn’t it, to be able to live in the protracted moment of ongoing change, and to see what can be made of this?

© Joan Hambidge