Essays

Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world?

In the heat of this unfolding crisis, vice-chancellors accidentally reveal the underlying logics of the spreadsheet. Budgets must be reduced, savings must be made; they tell us this as they consult the spreadsheet that surrounds them like a moat. The spreadsheet contains hard data, raw data, objective truths, they say. The numbers don’t lie. But the document is as much an operation of judgement as it is one of fiscal analysis; the spreadsheet obscures as much as it reveals.

The heroes of Australian culture have tended not to come from within the academy. It is conventional to bemoan this fact as evidence of our backwardness, and at worst, it can inspire amongst some intellectuals a facile loathing for Australia’s ‘ordinariness’. But I’d like to think this state of affairs might have a more constructive result as well: that Australian intellectuals might be able to take up their traditional role as gadflies, like Socrates or Zhuangzi, without inviting much more opprobrium than they receive as a matter of course.

How’s the writing going? Robbie would ask, sometimes, on the way home, and I would smile and tell him, Not bad, though as the days wore on I would imagine that pathetic, half-sketched character who was not me but who closely resembled me lying on his half-sketched bed holding his half-sketched head and that voice in my head would call me useless, a failure and, while, mostly, on the surface, I would remain enthusiastic, jovial, quietly, underneath, I had begun to occupy a space close to mental paralysis because I did not know how to tell Robbie that I did not know how to build the world that Oliver required – although, after a while, I would simply say that the writing wasn’t going, or that I did not know. Give yourself time, Robbie said, and just relax! But deep down I couldn’t relax because without the trains and without writing I knew, or I told myself, that I wasn’t anyone or anything at all.

A good writer will stay curious, exploratory, immersed in a creative space that is ever redefining itself. A good reader will find affection in deviants, to the wonderment of speculative fiction that offers liberation from the pedantic approach: Is it science fiction? Or fantasy? Or horror?

For years, my emotional needs have been tended to by people on the internet who do not know me.

This post will be the first of many. I do not know it at the time but this form of sharing on social media becomes one of the central ways I learn about my body, and sex, and how to communicate. What I thought were experiences unique to me quickly reveal themselves to be widespread.

‘The plague archive that interests me most combines the factual and the fictional, the historical and the contemporary. Reading the stories of Australia’s early twentieth-century plague outbreak gives us insight into the emotional experience of an epidemic. Further, reading the plague archive in the contemporary moment shows that the emotional consequences of an epidemic do not stop with the abeyance of the disease. The impact of the epidemic continues, and is reworked and understood in new ways as the archive is reread.’

I walked with the knowledge that inside the present-day city are many times and layers, and that writing is a way of drawing them out. A novel and a department store, a hair net, a square of corduroy fabric in a catalogue, and a photograph of women at their desks in a drafting room form a constellation within this wider network.

The day Jack was born, the hospital had begun to disallow visitors to the maternity wards and, in the following week, all face-to-face postnatal health visits and healthcare checks would be cancelled or transferred to online consultations. Covid-19 had been seeding in the UK for weeks already, and by mid-March, the models suggested that infections were doubling every two to four days. Contact tracing and community testing had been abandoned the week that Jack was born because of ‘widespread community transmission.’ Tens of thousands of people were being infected every single day.