Margaret Bradstock writes both poetry and fiction, and has recently developed an interest in writing detective fiction. Her poetry has been widely published and includes contributions to overseas journals and a book titled Flight of Koalas. Margaret has also written biographical material and has published critical work. She lives in Sydney and teaches at the University of New South Wales. Barbara Bursill interviewed her at Sydney in September 1995.
When did you first begin to write poetry?
At five years of age I won my first award.
That's the story with most of the poets I've been interviewing.
Some poets, no. Jill Jones didn't start till awfully late in life, and she just went ahead like wildfire, so it was obviously waiting there all her life.
Who or what has had the greatest influence on your poetry?
Earlier I would have to say T S Eliot and W H Auden. I think Auden was my hero.
Those were the days when it was male poets not women poets and W H Auden really struck me, because of the irony, the humour in the poetry,
and I suppose for a long time I was utilising similar styles. I don't know whether anybody influences me today. I think I just do what I want to do.
Why do you write poetry?
Because I have to. It's obviously not at all remunerative –$12 here, $20 there.
I write when something is really bugging me. If a daughter's overseas and I'm missing her, something starts building up until the poem has
to be written. This means, I suppose, I write a lot less than a lot of poets I know.
Poets like Jill and Vera Newsom sit down every day and write. I can't do that. I steal time.
I'll be editing a book or doing some dull thing and I'll sneak time to do the poem that's bothering me.
How do you write?
Many drafts. I suppose what I do to start off with is just get a sheet of paper, possibly a first line or an important line that has suggested itself
and then I'll jot down lots of other images, other possible lines, jot down everything, and just let the mind run loose. Then after that
I'll start popping a few things into a stanza and another stanza.
Your poem, "Vous, ou la mort", revisits the old fairy-tale in a non-traditional way.
Yes. Not so much fairytale or folktale as the medieval knights legends
because I did my first thesis on Malory's Morte d'Arthur so a lot of that imagery was in my head.
"Vous, ou la morte" was the motto written on the shield of the chivalric knight of the middle ages, kneeling before his
lady. I based the scene on a situation in the French Prose Lancelot where Lancelot is imprisoned and goes mad for love of Guinevere,
writing all about his love on the prison walls.
The "knight androgynous" seems to rely on the mirror for a sense of identity.
Yes, I'd have to agree with that. I don't know that
I had that in mind.
The mirror may come from Chrétien de Troyes' Le Chevalier au Charrette (The Knight of the Cart), in which a very young Lancelot is in the
first throes of courtly love for Guineviere, and I think one of the items of hers he ponders on is a mirror. Alternatively, or as well, the La Dame à Licorne
tapestries, now in the Cluney Museum, of the same period, depict the lady gazing into a mirror. Anyway, the point is that the knight has lost his/her lady –
instead of conforming to the old ideal of a ladylove, she's broken the mirror and fled from the expected image.
The androgynous knight
seems to suffer from the same sense of imprisonment as that felt by the princess in the tower.
Yes, definitely.
Is this due, in a sense, to the act of 'sitting on the fence?'
What do you mean sitting on the fence?
Being androgynous.
Is that sitting on the fence?
Well, that's my idea, because the knight is neither male or female, but androgynous.
It's because the knight is female playing the male part. I think I see that as going out on a limb. (Laughter).
As a woman and a poet, does the image of the mirror hold any special significance for you?
I don't think so. In fact as a result of this interview I may well write a poem on what I think about mirrors these days. I have images of going into
Grace Brothers at Macquarie Centre and suddenly seeing myself in a mirror and fleeing (laughter) because I'm not the person these days that I used to be,
the person that looked pretty good in mirrors, and I don't like mirrors much
anymore. I think I avoid them. When buying clothes it's the quickest way to save money – look in the mirror.
How accessible can lesbian poetry be for readers with little understanding of female homosexuality?
If they're prepared to make an imaginative leap and see it as simply another form of relationship, then it should be very accessible. I suppose it depends on their
own reactions. If they're homophobic, perhaps, they're never going to be able to get into it but if they can simply say, okay, this person is relating to a woman
instead of a man then it should be easy.
What motivated the writing of the poem "Lady Jane at the Carrington"?
I was having trouble in my relationship and so I was having an affair with this other person to shore me up for a while. The person I was having an affair with
wasn't at all an answer to any of the problems. In fact, she was a very flashy, showy sort of person who didn't give much from inside, so that's what
I'm saying there – "Your restless flame ... burns brightly on the outside" – and it's implying that the inside's a bit empty.
I'm clearly using less the mirror and more the cigarette flame there as an objective correlative but the mirror is obviously part of the flashiness too,
it's reflective. She liked to watch her own image in mirrors.
Is your poem "Mirror City" about the New Zealand writer Janet Frame?
Oh yes, definitely.
The poem seems to be influenced by Plath.
I wouldn't say it's influenced by her, but it definitely uses that image of the bell-jar.
What do you find interesting about Janet Frame?
I think I've probably been to see her movie or perhaps I've just read An Angel at My Table or both, and she's a writer whom I greatly respect but I
felt very agonised for her because she is such a shy person. It must have been just after I'd seen the movie, and she seems to be such a shy person who is
writing brilliantly but is not in touch with life. I may say I wrote that poem after one or two glasses of wine (laughter) and the group I took it to
told me I should drink more often because it just fell out like that. It's one of the few that just fell out without much work at all.
The speaker of the poem observes the duality of mirrors; "I like ... / my mirrors to reflect / what I have seen."
Yes, because her mirrors are mirrors of the mind, aren't they, and I suppose I'm asking for something much more literal. The reference is to The Envoy
from Mirror City, of course.
Your poem "The Hairdressing Ceremony", is part of a sequence of six poems about China.
It's about two turn-of-the-century Chinese women in a silk factory, in a lesbian relationship. This fascinated me because I discovered at a certain point
that around 1920, in Shunde County, the silk factories became an escape from patriarchal society, for young girls. They were also a place where fathers who couldn't
afford a dowry dumped their daughters. A lot of the women just lived together in a celibate way for the whole of their lives, but a few of them did form lesbian
relationships. I discovered this at one of the lectures on China that I went to, and I thought that's interesting, and then I managed to track down a fictional
book on it. So using that I came up with an imaginary sequence of six poems of what happened to two particular women.
The poem starts with "Your Face in the Mirror".
This is the fourth poem in the sequence and instead of having marriages between the women, or a binding vow to the silk factory, they had the hairdressing
ceremony as a signification. One woman is talking to the other and watching her face in the mirror as her hair is dressed for the ceremony.
One of the characters is described as "second mother".
That's the one doing the hair. That's a third character. The lover's speaking to the one having her hair done in the commitment ceremony and the second mother
is simply the person within the institution who performs the ceremony by dressing the hair.
What are "the symbols of double happiness / red and gold"?
Wealth and health. The idea is that at a marriage ceremony you give good-luck money and you hope that people will have these three things, wealth, health
and a long life. This is full of doom here because one of the lovers dies in the silk factory with the Japanese invasion a few poems later,
so I'm foreshadowing that poem.
The mirror comes into this poem because the commitment ceremony is the braiding of the hair?
Yes, so the one having her hair done is looking into a mirror like you do when you go to the hairdressers. And the other is looking over her shoulder.
This hair is actually to be worn up, rather than braided, as an indication of reaching womanhood.
It's a lovely poem. It's beautiful.
The "river's muddled delta" is quite complex, and possibly fairly inaccessible to the reader. It goes back to the fictional book in which one character came
from a provincial part of China and escaped from a place where they fished for their livelihood so she's seeing these more sophisticated symbols in terms of her past.
The "muddied" aspect of it means that the future is unclear so maybe it's still accessible even though readers don't know the whole of it.
What was the book you used?
It's Woman of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyami.
It has been suggested that "post-modernism" will be seen as a Baroque manifestation and women's writing as the major movement of the late twentieth century?
A baroque manifestation – what do you mean by that?
Relating post-modernism to the idea of baroque means that it's old-fashioned and it's not going to be seen as something lasting.
That's what I'm hoping. (Laughter) I hate all these movements. I teach the text and I just want all these movements and -isms to go away, so if that's true it
would be lovely. Certainly there is a great burgeoning of women's writing. I was reading something very recently about the immense number of women writers
who've come up in the last decade or so.
In the past, in Australia, women poets have suffered discrimination especially in the area of anthologies. What do you think is the current standing of
women poets in this country?
Well it's certainly better. I think there's still discrimination in regard to publishing, there's still log rolling for the boys.
Male poets tend to see some fine young male poet and help promote him and make it easy for him. So to that extent it's still not easy for women poets,
but I think increasingly in anthologies there's an attempt to make it 50/50. Two anthologies come to mind, Parachute of Blue, just published by Round
Table, for example – I think they managed almost 50% women. I'm involved in editing the next one, and at a certain stage we noticed (we chose them all blind)
that some of the men had given themselves female pseudonyms, which is interesting. We noticed we had not quite half women and there was a bit of oh-dearing,
and we redressed the balance somewhat, so from that point of view I think there is an attempt to make it 50/50. On the other hand I don't know what you
do if you find you're getting more poetry from men than from women, and after that you've got the problems – have you included enough multicultural writers,
have you included enough Tasmanians, and that's harder.
You've written about Ada Cambridge. Was she the focus of your Ph.D. thesis?
Not at all. My Master's degree, Honours Masters, was on Malory's Mort d' Arthur, and then my Ph.D. was this fairly long and deadly thing
about medieval romance and hagiographical elements.
"Don't ask me about my thesis" Margaret Bradstock.
Yes, that sort of thing. I finally got it together by whacking Malory's Mort d' Arthur back into it because I was working with romances that were,
I suppose, the medieval equivalent of Mills & Boon. It was a bit hard to get carried away by them. Mort d' Arthur is a prose romance, but it's good.
So why did you get involved with Ada Cambridge?
With the burgeoning of women's studies around here, I was teaching twentieth century women writers, and then I started teaching colonial women writers
and she was one of the people I was teaching. I was very excited by her book Unspoken Thoughts, and thought, why don't we get that republished?
I tried very hard. I took it to Hale & Ironmonger and they said no, no it's not going to sell. Then of course somebody else, Patricia Barton, got it into print,
which was great, but Dale Spender heard that I'd been talking to Hale & Ironmonger about it and so she invited us out to dinner and said, would you write a biography.
I'll always say yes first and then figure out later how I'm going to do it. So I didn't know a great deal about Ada Cambridge when I started, but by the
time we'd finished, I did.
Do you think feminism today in Australia is as strong as it was in the seventies?
It's different because in the seventies people were fighting to establish themselves. These days what you've got is the daughters of feminists;
they're today's feminists, and they have no need to fight for all these things, they've got a lot of rights and some of them I suppose tend to say let's not be
so aggro about all this, it's not necessary. Though I also notice with my classes of girls here – I teach a lot of women-only courses simply because I've
enjoyed reading them more, women in the colonial period, for example, and because of that you get very few boys in the class – and the girls really open up in that
situation. They're very strong. They may well belong to a world that isn't fighting for their rights but they know what their rights are.
What do you think is meant by the term Australian poetry?
That would have meant different meanings at different times. Earlier on it meant you had to have wattle and gum trees and kangaroos hopping around,
very much the Henry Lawson type of poetry. Today Australian poetry means to me simply poetry written in Australia, and if you get published as an Australian
poet in an overseas journal I don't know that you could pick much difference. I think one poem of mine that was chosen for an American magazine was
about getting back after a holiday in Italy.
Are you currently preparing anything for publication?
I don't think I ever prepare books of poetry. I just tend to write what I want to, what I need to at a certain point. Then I think, hey, there's enough there,
perhaps I should try and flog it somewhere. What I'm writing very much now is detective fiction for the Artemis anthologies, which are published in Melbourne.
I quite enjoy doing that. It's a totally separate thing from poetry. I wouldn't call it great art, but it's terrific fun to do. I don't think I'm a very
powerful prose writer, so it's a good opportunity for me to hone my skills. So I'm preparing that for publication. I want to get together all those stories
that I've had published, and a few more, and try to produce a manuscript and say to a publisher, would you like this whole collection?
Do you think that poetry has a responsibility to society?
In what regard?
Poetry has always been seen as "high" art so do you think the poet who publishes has a certain responsibility?
Do you mean a moral obligation?
No, I don't mean moral obligation. Where do you think poetry fits within society?
I suppose there are many different kinds of poets and I suppose most of them have this calling, this need to get it out and onto paper.
I sometimes think there are some who just like to write a pretty little description that the Herald might take. Maybe that's unfair of me, maybe
they feel the same calling to write that particular little description, but I personally like to feel the depth, the urgency behind the poem.
Would you call your poetry personal?
Yes, I try to make it accessible, more "universal" if we're allowed to use that word anymore. I try to express it in such a way that other people can feel what
I've felt, see what I'm on about, but it's definitely personal in that I'm giving them my heart on paper.
The idea of a poet writing something but then going further and having it published, is that a desire to share your experience?
With me it is. I think most poets, very much, want to see their poetry out there. It's like your child. You don't keep it at home, you send it out into the world.
Barbara Bursall is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales and is
conducting research into the use of the mirror image in Australian women's poetry.