A new issue of Hecate has arrived in the mail featuring poems by Gina Mercer, Jan Dean, Angela Costi, Dael Allison, Helen Hagemann, Maria Christoforatos, pio, Helen Cerne and Jena Woodhouse. There’s a special feature focussing on Women’s Suffrage with articles by Audrey Oldfield, Ann Nugent, John McCulloch and Lenore Coltheart, articles and essays including Chilla Bulbeck’s ‘Schemes and Dreams: Young Australians Imagine Their Future’ and Helen Johnson’s ‘A Fugitive Moment of Grace: Life Story, Migration and Vietnamese-Caledonian Women’ … cartoons by Debbie Harman Qadri, and an interview with Anna Couani.
Interviewed by Anne Brewster, Couani’s conversation is largely technical (first person narrative, the cyclical structure of much of her work, her growing interest in narrative and narrative effects) but interspersed with interesting diversions along the way, the difficulty of finishing her book Western Horizon, for instance.
Couani: ‘… it’s a linear kind of a thing, like a Ukiyo-e painting. I could have finished any time, and I would have liked to write it indefinitely but that didn’t happen because Ivor Indyk decided to stop publishing it in Heat. He was getting quite a lot of negative feedback about it, and decided to stop it. And anyway, it wasn’t working very well as a serial in his publication because it wasn’t coming out frequently enough.’
Anne Brewster: What kind of negative feedback?
AC: That it wasn’t a novel, didn’t have any characters, didn’t have plot, and it was too left-wing.
AB: So why do you think it produces that kind of reaction? Is it a combination of its formal inventiveness and political views?
AC: Yes, views/ideological position, unconventionality. Both. Because there are people with the same ideological position as me who hate the writing, and there are other people who are right-wingers who quite like the writing but hate my views.
AB: Why do you think people have such a block about reading experimental work?
AC: I think it’s lack of familiarity. The strange thing about my work is that it is used by a lot of creative writing and English teachers in universities. I’ve been surprised to learn that someone studied it here and someone studied it there. I think also if it is placed in the context of poetry, it would be more understandable. I think for people who just like to read novels, it’s perplexing. It’s not entertaining in the same way. But if you read it as fictocritical work, it’s not so strange. I think it is a precurser to fictocritical work. But another thing is that my soulmates in writing are and were writing stuff that is often ‘stranger’ than my work. There’s a whole alternative tradition that most people are unaware of. There are experimental poets and prose writers like Gilbert Sorrentino, Sherril Jaffe, Michael Brownstein, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Ken Bolton, Robbe Grillet, Kris Hemensley, Walter Billeter, Mary Fallon, all those German writers (I read some of them in translation), there are too many to list. The vocabulary of the alternative tradition, I guess you could call it postmodern, is disrupted text, shifting register, confused chronology, switching from first to third person, multiple viewpoints, you name it. Just as conventional naturalistic writers use character and plot.’
