Amelia Dale interviews Emily Stewart
Emily Stewart is a poet and editor. Her most recent book, Running time (Vagabond Press), the winner of the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award, is a long poem in four parts. It’s a poem that is many things, a love poem among them. It uses language with a deftness so well-honed it seems effortless, syntactically wild and yet incredibly poised. Stewart’s words work similarly in her other work, including Like (Bulky News Press), The Internet Blue (First Draft) and Australia’s Largest DIY (SOd Press), and her debut collection Knocks (Vagabond Press) which won the inaugural Noel Rowe Poetry Award. Stewart recently curated, with Eloise Grills, an issue of Cordite; is former Poetry Editor of Giramondo Press; and has just completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney. I first met Stewart at a poetry reading in Sydney, after she’d just moved from Melbourne; I met both poet and poetry at once. It’s been wonderful to call her a friend. This interview took place over email, with me in Nanjing, China, and Stewart on Wangal land.
5 Scenes and a Handful of Questions
1.
Several years ago, a student in a creative writing class told me about an encounter he had had at an art gallery; he had stood for some time observing an exhibit for which he could not find a mounted label—no details on artist, title, media, or year that the piece ‘came into being’. After a short search, he realised that it really was ‘just’ an unattended pile of dust and dirt and hair alongside a resting broom. Perhaps some gallery staff member had begun the sweep unprepared for such a significant pile of visitor detritus, and had wandered off in search of a brush and dustpan.
2.
It reminds me of another scene, in Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know: curator Nancy visits the studio of a ceramics artist whose forthcoming show she will be hosting at her gallery. She and her assistant marvel at the ‘realness’ of a hamburger wrapper on the floor. ‘Oh, that wrapper is real’, the artist says. He likes to throw a few ‘real’ things into every exhibition to ‘cast a glow over the plaster objects’ and to really ‘bump it all up a notch’. Nancy then picks up a coffee mug emblazoned with the face of a cat and the words I’ve got Cat-titude. ‘This is mine’, she says. ‘You got it from the staff kitchen.’ ‘No, I made that’, he says.
3.
Another scene—this time, it’s me in 2012, wandering around the Tate. Damien Hirst’s cabinets—cigarettes, pills, gems—leave me cold. The dead animals suspended in liquids annoy me. The diamond-crusted skull makes me regret paying for a ticket.
4.
Another film, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off: the character of Cameron is absorbed by Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The young girl at the centre of the painting looks directly out of the frame, facing the viewer squarely. No other figures are facing in this same direction, with most facing the waters of the River Seine. A series of increasing close-ups alternately zoom in on Cameron’s face/eyes and those of the painted girl, the latter’s augmented fuzziness, eventually disappearing in a mash of paint colour, reflects Cameron’s own sense of self.
5.
Me again, a little further back in time. An exhibition at the Getty of paintings and sculptures by Jean-Léon Gérôme. I remember the shock of rounding a corner to come face-to-face with Truth coming from the well armed with her whip to chastise mankind. I was not in a good headspace at the time and this painting presented itself as if a mirror; as if that intake of breath might fuel the most horrible scream.
*
Five scenes that cannot, of course, speak to the capaciousness of ‘art’ as a whole, limited as they are in terms of location (‘the gallery’) and form (painting, sculpture). But I have recalled these scenes frequently over the years whenever prompted to consider ‘encounters with’ or ‘thinking about’ art. Each brings to mind the following questions:
· What makes (an) art ‘work’?
· What draws us (individually, collectively) to particular works of art?
· Can art exist without an audience; without someone to experience it?
· How might we—as artist and/or audience—understand matters of intention, reception, consensus, affect?
· What might emerge from/through our engagement with art?
And I have often pondered how a poem might provide an ideal—open, expansive, vital—space to explore these questions, not merely ekphrastically, but philosophically, spatially, sonically, architecturally, affectively, and so on.
Happily, this issue of Rabbit exhibits the generous and multi-dimensional plains extended by poetry for grappling with these questions, too. Certainly, each of the poets in this issue contends with that final question, using poetry’s unique and multi-faceted toolkit in their efforts to do so. These poems—and additional content—prompt us to ponder what poetry can do with/for/around/about/out of/beside/after/before/at the same time as/in response to/because of/in combination, collaboration or collision with/in spite of/against/in excess of and/or as art.
I am immensely grateful to all those who contributed to the making of this issue—to Amelia, AJ, Jeanine, Chris, Tracy and the Bowen Street Press team. Special thanks go to guest poetry editors Angela Gardner and Leah Muddle—thank you both for sharing with me your ongoing and lively online dialogue on art and poetry. It is also a pleasure to be able to include a selection of collages by poet, and long-time supporter of Rabbit, Michael Farrell.
This interview originally appeared in Rabbit 36: Art.
Amelia Dale: Running time came out of your Doctorate of Creative Arts. Could you talk more about what that project involved and how it fed into your writing of Running time? What did the process of writing Running time involve?
Emily Stewart: Running time challenged my own internal script as a ‘slow’ writer. I wanted to produce one more poem for the purposes of my doctorate, but that one poem quickly became more substantial. I drafted it over the period of the second Sydney lockdown last year, writing a section a day, so it came together over two months or so. A thorough scroll through my Notes app kickstarted things initially, too. Once I locked into the voice the momentum pulled me along with it.
My creative doctorate looked at, in part, the Western lineage of women walking. The cornerstone of the research was Lisa Robertson’s poem Seven Walks, which was drafted across the millennial turn in response to her own walks around a rapidly globalising Vancouver. I was interested in my own resonant response to this poem, twenty years on from the period in which she wrote it, as well as what I describe as mediumistic exchanges within the text that channel a collective of walking women across time. In the poem Robertson pursues an updated version of the solitary walker figure, one more aligned with a phrase I came across recently in Fanny Howe’s writing, the solidaire solitaire. That paradox or negative capability or tautology or fallacy rang true to my own alive feeling that’s generated by these twin acts, walking and writing.
When I started my doctoral research I had already begun a practice of walking that felt intrinsically connected to the writing I was producing. Well, I say ‘practice’ but it was nothing as self-conscious as that. Even now I have the impulse to skirt or dodge that word, in part because walking is ordinary, everyday, practised in a real sense by many of us in all sorts of ways. There’s nothing really ‘special’ about my walking, I guess is what I’m getting at. I just leave the house, ramble for a bit, pay attention—or not—listen to music or a podcast—sometimes. And I take photos, on my phone, which again is a pretty ubiquitous practice for many people!
Anyway, what I want to say is that the doctorate didn’t bring me closer to the essential mystery of how these co-constitutive practices—walking, writing, photography—act on each other, though of course there’s many theories about this. But it helped me build and learn to trust in a process. Walking and photography are simple and pleasurable activities that sustain me and make it possible to write. It’s this process that I try to tend to and cultivate now, beyond any particular poem, book, work or outcome that might rise from it.
AD: There’s been discussion of your work, particularly Knocks, in relation to Arielle Greenberg’s category of the ‘Gurlesque’. What do you think of this?
ES: My first book Knocks gathered poems that were mostly written in my early to mid-twenties, and came out towards the end of that decade. I wasn’t aware of Greenberg’s work when I was writing these poems, and there’s a great mix of modes and approaches within the book. I think that Greenberg’s term refers to a kind of third-wave feminist poetics that reinvigorated the subversions of subjectivity, that performatively invoked femme aesthetics and used techniques like irony and kind of abject or grotesque descriptive practices… it occurs to me that it was the TV show Girls era… I was a young woman growing up, so I can see how that book fitted the bill. Supposing that I’m roughly on the right track I’d say that I’m a friend to that girl/gurl but we are not the same. Is the ‘gurlesque’ still a thing?
AD: What is a thing? I guess literary-theoretical and aesthetic frameworks and categories are on one hand, embedded in the time of their devising (and that’s especially the case if they’re focused putting a name to contemporary trends) but they can also move beyond the immediate geographical and temporal situation of their naming, if they are potent enough and look forwards and backwards... Anyway, moving on from ‘grrls’ but continuing this thinking about time and past work, and your body of work, how do you see the overarching shape of your oeuvre across time? Do you see your poetic writing as all being part of the same project or thing, or do you see it having distinct formal/chronological/thematic groupings?
ES: I see my practice as being in a constantly evolving state. Actually, reading Elena Gomez’s review of my pdf ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’ in the last issue, which you commissioned for SOd, made me realise that that text sent me down the rabbit hole of my doctoral project and the work I’ve produced subsequently. It was a good reminder to me that my interest in everyday vernacular forms and modes of life—be they the shareable medium of the pdf, or a photo of the verge or bitumen, has really been the enlivening focal point of my poetry since that time. I’m currently producing collages for example, using the photographic material that influenced the writing of Running time, so it’s like a cross-medium conversation now that is taking place iteratively back and forth between text and image.
AD: Apart from Lisa Robertson, what other writers and poets were on your mind when you were writing Running time?
ES: I was rereading a lot of Rae Armantrout, which influenced Running time’s lineation. Her poems are these perfectly-engineered mobile structures that can soar anywhere. You start out one of her poems and have no idea where it will land up. I found the imaginative reach of her work generative, as well as her formal strategies, how the poems twist off a single word or phrase.
I also found my way back to the lyric ‘I’ at some point. I was reading Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart; Etel Adnan’s Time and The Arab Apocalypse; Fanny Howe’s essays. For several years up to Running time I’d been developing poems that I thought of as scores, poems that invited a wider range of reading possibilities, designed for two or more voices. These poems follow a syncopated logic, sometimes reflecting the elliptical way meaning is produced as words pass back and forth between people, and sometimes the rise and fall of language as produced in a busy room of people in conversation. These experiments haven’t been entirely successful yet, but they have been interesting to make—some examples include ‘On Pause / Windswept’, published recently in an issue of Southerly edited by Kate Lilley and Melissa Hardie. Another example is the poem ‘New Year’s Eve Eve’, which was published in an issue of Minarets (NZ) edited by Pam Brown, and subsequently in Best of Australian Poems 2021, edited by Toby Fitch and Ellen van Neerven.
So I thought I had left the lyric mode behind but I came back round to it, not consciously—but what I loved in all those writers was the subjectivities that the ‘I’ could intensify. It’s such a capacious structure, and once I fell into it again, it felt like the missing ingredient.
AD: Yes, it seems to me that Running time feels like a natural progression for your work: a long form with a clear ‘I’. Reading your past work, even that written in a choral register, it seems to me that there is an ‘I’ there still, even if it’s just out of view… I guess another way to say this is that your work has a distinctive voice, personality and perspective (including when it is choral) and that perhaps Running time brings this more clearly into view. How do you see the relationship between the ‘you’ doing the writing and the ‘I’ of Running time?
ES: That’s very interesting, perhaps that’s why I reached an impasse with those choral pieces. This question takes me into psychoanalytic territory. I just went back to a book that made a strong impression on me when I first read it, which is Christopher Bollas’s Being a Character. Something he puts forth is the notion of the day’s dream. He writes: ‘I think we can say that sometimes an individual lives a day in a particularly meaningful way, and that the lived experiences form a psychic tapestry that is dreamlike, to the extent that we may call it the day’s dream’. The ‘I’ is the part of me that can elaborate on the day’s dream, who can remember and describe it. That makes Running time a collaboration between the me writing and that ‘I’—between two layers of self.