Bellow is a lovely write up of me, by my friend Chloe Higgins. Thank you Chloe for offering to interview me and for representing me and my writing so well!
This interview first appeared in
Tertangala: UOW's Student Magazine: The F-Word (2013)
“Who do you write
for?”
A couple of days earlier, I had sent Rhiannon a list of more
than 15 questions. She sent me her response shortly after. It totalled over
2,000 words.
As we walked through Wollongong’s Botanical Gardens, I
realised a question had been missing.
“For myself,” she answered.
Three things came to mind.
The first was an earlier conversation with Rhiannon. I had
asked where she got her inspiration. Her response came in the form of a short
story about a man and his goat.
There was once a man who regularly came into the butchers
where Rhiannon previously worked. Each time, the man told her the same story: his
goat was driving him mad. So he tied it up. He got it under control.
At first, she dismissed the story as idle chat. But the man
kept coming into the butchers. And he kept telling her the same story. He had a
goat. It was driving him mad. So he tied it up.
Eventually, when she didn’t know what else to do with the
man’s story, she made it into a poem.
A Retiree and Goat
for alex
First
appeared, in an earlier version, Seeking the Sun: Australian Poetry 2012.
1
Combat in our
final years, assembling the fence. Spying
the goat
contriving, flaunting her power,
to expose
frailty,
kicking up her heels.
Watching wearily,
tomorrow I will toil
with fence posts
and wire.
2
Watching from the
window she remembers a time
when I was
attentive to other passions. Snagged on a nail
yellow dress
slipping
off pearly shoulders.
A time when
fencing could wait, just to
touch breast,
navel, thigh.
3
Retirement meant
more time embracing our passions.
Time that we
dreamed of. We found novels, movies,
individual lounge
chairs.
I fight with the goat.
The second thing that came to mind was another earlier
exchange we had. I had asked which of her poems was her favourite.
“Demokratizmi,” she
said.
I asked her what it meant.
She told me the title is Georgian for democracy. The poem
was written in response to an imprint created by Gela Samsonidse. She explained
that the imprint was Gela’s attempt to express his identity and explore
language. He starts by writing words in Georgian script, and then scribbles
over them until he can longer make out the words.
Rhiannon wrote Demokratizmi
by looking at the imprint, allowing words to flood her mind, and then cutting
out words until she was left with the small number that make up the poem. She
never did decipher the actual words that Gela wrote.
I re-read the poem.
Demokratizmi
after an imprint by Gela Samsonidse
First appeared South Coast Writers Centre
website, July 2012.
დემოკრატიზმი
(democracy) drums,
chanting from the people
mouths widen,
marching
mi
to the ballot box,
curving in a crescendo
climaxing in October 28, 1990
striking the floor, blood
(სისხლი) blood shed on canvas.
I asked her if she showed Gela the poem. She said she
hadn’t. He wouldn’t like it, she explained. He doesn’t like his artworks to be
made political.
I asked her how she felt about people misinterpreting her
poems and she laughed.
“I misinterpret people’s poems all the time.”
We continued walking through the gardens.
I reminded her of the two stories she had shared and repeated
her answer to the question of who she
writes for, back to her, in the form of a question.
“So you write for yourself?”
She laughed softly, “Yeah, I guess…”
When we finished walking through
the gardens and parted ways, I re-read over her responses to the questions I
emailed her. When asked why she
writes, her desire to create comes through strongly.
“I
love the feeling I get when I know that I have written something half good. I
feel like I have really achieved something. Having a creative outlet has been
really important for me, particularly while I was doing my honours research
last year. I can’t dance, paint or sing, so writing is the only form of
creative expression that I get a real buzz from.”
She
went on to talk about her process.
“Often
the words appear in more of a trickle than a splash. But, there is always
something that stimulates and inspires me, like a painting, a piece of writing,
an event, my surroundings, or a combination of these things.”
A
sense of silence and space came through strongly.
“I
need a lot of time to write. I have to be able to slow down and forget about
work and uni for a bit. It is kind of like a meditation, once I am calm, I can
devote myself to pondering over the ideas that have been bouncing around my
mind. I always have ideas for a poem. I pick ideas up from work, uni and
everyday life, but it is not until I am able to remove myself from these things
that I can concentrate on one image.”
Rhiannon’s
responses seemed only to further the idea that she is a woman who very much
writes for the other, cares for the other, wants to observe and understand the
other.
One
of her poems in particular, Café Rosso,
paints a picture not just of women with windswept hair, lovers leaning across
tables, cocky men and stout women waiting to pay, but of a woman, sitting in
the background, immersed in observing and understanding what is going on in the
world around her.
Café Rosso
First appeared Sotto, August-September 2012.
grey thunders
Bowral skies
two women with
windswept hair
warming over
cannelloni, their cappuccinos cupped.
Lovers lean
across tables, faces almost touch;
Order seafood - Grigliato Misto,
white wine.
Big men, cocky as sunshine yellow parrots,
chucking back macchiatos; riffling
work schedules,
envy every casual diner.
Waitresses flitting across the
room,
enjoying sweet meringue aromas,
the delicate perfumes
of stout women waiting to pay.
The
poem speaks loudly of the quote Rhiannon has posted at the top of her blog
homepage:
To be a poet one needs the six P’s – the pencil,
the paper, the perception, the passion, the persistence and the unshakable
persuasion that the poem is in fact possible and attainable. - Grace Perry
The
third thing that came to mind when Rhiannon said she writes for herself was a
quote by George Steiner.
“There is language, there is art, because there is the
other.”
I mention the quote to her and she shrugs, “I guess I have
never really thought about it before.”
Rhiannon Hall was a café poet
with Australian Poetry and has been published in Seeking the Sun: Australian Poetry 2012, Sotto, the UOW LitSoc Zine,
Tertangala, Unfolding (an art exhibition catalogue) and on the South Coast
Writers Centre's website.
An Interview by Chloe Higgins.
