It’s always good to catch up with poet Geoff Goodfellow. He’s been touring Tasmania
this week, visiting local schools and the prison, talking poetry.
‘You’re becoming a local, Geoff…. ’
‘Well I find that when I go into the schools, the year nine’s—they won’t know me—but
the year ten’s, they’ll remember me from last year, come and say hello, ask how I’m
going.’
‘Do they give any trouble?’
He laughs. ‘Nah…. I don’t let ’em.’
He says it’s easy building a rapport with the students. He’s direct and blunt, speaks in a
manner they’re not used to from someone with an authoritative role within a school
environment. And once he has their attention, his message is always the same.
‘Concentrate on your studies, don’t waste your time here—or mine—cos it’s the only
way you’ll get ahead.’
His words resonate and I ask if he’s read any Margaret Drabble.
‘Can’t say I have.’
I mention her 2000 novel The Peppered Moth, wherein Dabble’s school-teacher
character Miss Heald implores her students of the necessity of ‘deferring pleasure’.
“Work hard now, she said to her young people, and reap the rewards later. Do not grab
the instant….”
Geoff nods, says he has pretty much the same message for the students he deals with.
‘I tell them their school work’s important. That they have to set themselves a time
frame, picture where they’d like to be in ten years time. In my day it was enough to
finish matriculation but nowadays even a BA won’t guarantee you an interesting career.
You might need a Masters, even more. You might be in your mid-twenties – or later –
before you find yourself with a job you enjoy.’
……….
So what does a poet read for pleasure?
‘Poetry of course, but novels too,’ Geoff replies. ‘I came across a copy of an old Carson
McCullers novel recently’—(perhaps The Heart is a Lonely Hunter?)— ‘read the first
page and decided, that’s for me so I bought it.’
He says he wouldn’t do it the disservice of glancing only casually at it, but would take
the book home, sit down and give it his undivided attention … From his reading of the
first page, the book deserved it.
Geoff’s website biography describes his writing as often providing ‘… a public voice for
those living close to the margins and who are generally under-represented in
contemporary literature,’ which perhaps explains his interest in the award of the 2018
Man Booker Prize last year, won by Anna Burns with her novel Milkman. (In an article
entitled ‘The story of Anna Burns shows how working-class talent is going to waste’,
Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore argues that the creative industries now belong to
the wealthy and their offspring. ‘Who else can afford to be a poet, or make music the
way they want to, or make art that a big collector doesn’t want?’)
‘I was listening to the morning news late last year and heard Milkman had won the
Booker overnight,’ Geoff recalls. Later in the day he was on the phone to his daughter
Grace who mentioned in passing she’d gone and for the first time bought a book
online.
‘Oh, what book is that?’ Geoff enquired.
‘Milkman, by Anna Burns’, Grace replied.
‘Oh, that’s just won the Booker Prize,’ he said.
‘No it hasn’t, though it’s on the shortlist.’
‘No no no, it’s won overnight,’ Geoff insisted. ‘Listen,’ he added, ‘once you’ve finished
the book, how about letting me borrow it?’
‘Sure.’
A week passed. Geoff asked how Milkman was going.
‘Oh I haven’t started it yet, I’m reading something else at the moment.’
Another week passed. ‘How’s Milkman?’
‘Just begun.’
Another week. ‘Milkman?’
‘Oh, I haven’t read very far yet….’
Yet another week. ‘How’s Milkman going?’
‘Still reading…. ’
When eventually he got his hands on the book, Geoff found it hard to settle into. ‘I read
to page 11 and thought, this is tough. I gave it another go and reached page 27 before
I put it down again, thinking, I don’t want to waste my time reading this. But I told
myself not to give up so easily and continued with it—though it wasn’t till I reached
around 150 pages that I began to pick up the rhythm and intonations of her voice….
That’s when I started to think, this is good.’
‘I’m glad I persevered!’
……………
Geoff mentions meeting Ken Kesey – author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – at
an Adelaide Writers Festival in the early eighties, and how that developed into
friendship and an offer to stay with Kesey in the US. ‘I was on the bill in Adelaide, so
was Ken. I sensed his interest when he heard me read and he later came up and asked
for a copy of my book. ‘I’ll give you one of my own tomorrow,’ Kesey added.
Geoff had heard of Kesey, said yeah – that’d be good. They met up the following day
and got talking. ‘When I hear others reading, they could be from anywhere. When I
hear you read, I recognise I’m listening to an Australian’, Kesey confided. He said to
look him up if ever got to the States.
Geoff says it wasn’t time for him to be heading overseas—to begin with, he didn’t have
the money—but eighteen months later circumstances had changed and he rang Kesey
to see if the offer still stood. Before long, he found himself in Kesey’s expansive
Eugene, Oregon home.
Among their many conversations about poetry and music – a Kesey quote is ‘The
Greatful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn’t pay homage to the God
that all the other religions pay homage to.’ – the possibility of a Goodfellow poetry
reading in Eugene was floated.
‘Not being a local, you might find it difficult getting an audience,’ Kesey mused.
‘I’ll get by,’ Geoff insisted.
‘How?’
‘Well, I’ll visit radio stations, put posters up around the place. I’ve done all this before.’
‘It might work if we did a reading together,’ Kesey mused, ‘but the things is…. I’d only
do it on one condition, that it’s free for people to come and listen. This is my town, I
don’t want to be ripping people off. But we could take our books and sell them.’
‘And we did,’ Geoff concluded. ‘It was great!’