Flinders Island Day 3: Exploring the Island's Edges

Fotheringate Beach, with the Stzrelecki National Park in the background

Today’s main goal is to find a prehistoric shark tooth. There’s a location on the island known for these. We take the long route there.

We cover a lot of the island today.

First up is Trousers Point – an oddly named cove alongside the island’s national park in the south-west. Legend has it that the area got its name from a crate of trousers that washed up ashore from one of the many shipwrecks the island is known for. The other potentially apocryphal story is that a survivor of a different shipwreck made it to the beach sans pants.

I think this is Mount Chappell Island in the far distance

Red-necked wallabies graze along the roadside as our car winds through the bush; they dart back a few metres and watch from behind trees while we pass. As we alight from the car and explore the beach, a beautiful secluded cove in the shadow of Stzrelecki National Park’s towering granite mountain, Green Rosellas chirrup over our heads. We follow a bushwalk to the other side of the point, sandy paths of faded pink sand surrounded by windswept beach shrubbery – a gentle slope that overlooks rocky outcrops in the sea, a nice photo opportunity interrupted by occasional tiny clouds of sea spray that float down around us.

After this we head to Cameron Inlet on the eastern side of the island. The biodiversity on Flinders Island is incredibly diverse for such a relatively small place – so much of the island is filled with completely different environments. We drive along salt-encrusted sand roads surrounded by lagoons and black cockatoos sighted for the first time since we got here. This area is also filled with Australian Shelducks, goose-like relatives of ducks with sunburst-orange necks. Eventually, after wondering how far this remote drive will take us, we arrive at a small clearing and pick out path through to the inlet’s beach.

Cameron Inlet

More than anywhere else, this feels like another planet. The grey sand whips around us in tendrils of mist as fearsome winds sweep across the sea and roar in our ears. Bobo is armed with earphones today to cut down on the overwhelm and he helps as we begin our search. The lagoon is vast enough for us not to see the other side and so it looks just like the sea. The sand is riddled with shells and prehistoric remnants that have been carried up to the beach from millions of years ago. It’s renowned for shark teeth – obsidian-like artefacts from Megalodons. We search for as long as we can manage in the freakish weather and Nicole finds something long and tooth-like with a strange texture and weight. Is it a shark tooth? We’re not sure.

Next stop is Lady Barren where we take in a nice lunch at the Furneaux Tavern, a lively pub that overlooks the collection of islands to the south – Little Green Island, Dog Island, Vansitartt Island, and in the distance, the large mass of Cape Barren Island. Cape Barren Island is the only other island in the Furneaux Group (aside from Flinders) that has a permanent human population; something like 90 or so people, an Aboriginal community who care for this island and the more remote Clarke Island underneath it.

The bar room inside is filled with locals who seemed to have been bussed in by two vans for a quick lunchtime swill. They’re all gone by the time we finish lunch in the bistro area and I take Bobo into the main area to see a pilot whale skeleton suspended above the bar, a cigar glued between its teeth. The bartender tells me it’s a Flinders Island Flathead but then admits that’s just what they like to tell visitors – about 35 years ago a pod of these whales became beached in the area. Nicole shows this bartender, Maxy, her treasure from Cameron Inlet. Maxy suggests it’s most likely a prehistoric whale bone. It’s definitely something fossilised.

The Furneaux Museum at Emita. Only open from January to May.

The last part of our day is spent back on the eastern side of the island. We navigate our way through the coastal settlement of Emita, briefly visit Allports Beach, and set down at the neighbouring area of Wybalenna. I hop out of the car and walk several hundred metres to the chapel – a building nearly 200 years old and a remnant of the island’s dark history.

As I approach this chapel, I notice hundreds of bones dotted alongside the road in the short grass, all bleached white by the cold Bass sun and the island’s relentless winds. I see a skull and later spot a long hind leg – Wallaby remains; a traditional food.

Wybalenna is a place I’ve read about, and written about. At the end of the Black War, when Tasmania’s colonists finished their conflict with the Aboriginal Tasmanians in the 1830s, a line of convicts, settlers, and soldiers joined forces and swept across Tasmania’s rugged landscape – driving the last survivors of the Aboriginal people to the edge of the isle. The Aboriginal Tasmanians were then forcibly relocated to Flinders Island and ‘settled’ at the Wybalenna Mission. Conditions were miserable, and over 100 of these survivors perished in just two years.

Wybalenna Mission Chapel

Today, the chapel and accompanying buildings stand as a testament to both Indigenous spirit and colonial cruelty. The island’s Blonde Wombats watch from nearby tussocks as we walk in reflection, darting into their burrows if we get too close.

One thing I’ve noticed among the residents in the last three days is an underlying respect for Indigenous culture and a willingness to acknowledge the atrocities of the past. Tasmania’s Aboriginal lineage is perhaps no stronger than here in Flinders Island and the other islands of the Furneaux Group.

We drive back to Whitemark, scaring a pheasant off the road at one point. The customary one-finger wave seems like a game of chicken – which car will crack and wave first? I challenge Nicole to not give the wave first but she is reluctant to seem rude to the other drivers. Some of them seem to wait to the absolute last millisecond to lift their hand in greeting as they drive past. Eventually, Nicole proudly points out that she waved second to one of the drivers.

We stop by a cluster of turkeys once again and call to them out our windows. They cluck and gobble, the patriarch’s tail spreading out in pomp.

Convenience Store at Lady Barren

I'm not sure what this thing is. I told Bobo it was a sea mango. I probably shouldn't have picked it up.

Flinders Island Day 2: Out and About

There’s a custom on the island where all drivers wave at each other. It also extends to pedestrians but seems friendlier when drivers all lift one or two fingers from their steering wheel in greeting. We make a game of it – Nicole will count down from three and then all of us will wave at the same time. We’re probably a little too enthusiastic for the even-paced laconics of the island but it’s a nice tradition; a sign of community in a bottle realm where all people could feasibly know each other.

Being without network coverage or a GPS throws us back twenty years into a world of driving with more active executive function. Signs matter. Maps matter. Taking a wrong term requires critical thinking skills and a marriage counsellor.

Thankfully it doesn’t matter too much as our plans are fluid and we have one singular goal – to see the island.

We accidentally head south instead of north and find ourselves at Lady Barren, the second largest of the island’s settlements. We walk along an empty beach, sifting for shells amongst cuttlebones the size of footballs. So many cuttlebones and all so massive.

One of the highlights of Flinders Island is the unique wildlife. Most of the human-inhabited parts of the island are quiet, idyllic farmland – filled with cows, sheep, and the occasional pony. Filtering in and out of this agricultural environment are Cape Barren Geese. These large stocky-legged native geese are the rarest geese in the world, a bird almost driven to extinction in the 1950s but a species that continues to thrive on Flinders Island and its close neighbour Cape Barren Island. They are plump-grey with fluoro-lime bills, expressively honking if confronted.

The Bass Strait Wombat, known locally as the 'Blonde Wombat'

Today is also our first sighting of the island’s Blonde Wombats, a subspecies of the Common Wombat once found throughout the Bass Strait Islands but now restricted to Flinders. It is unbearably cute, and the rolling paddocks make for a charming backdrop when dotted with these floofy, lightly-toned, plush-toy-like marsupials.

We also see many birds I’ve never seen before – Firetail Finches, New Holland Honeyeaters, Sooty Oystercatchers, Pied Oystercatchers, magnificent Caspian Terns. There are also feral peacocks and more of the large feral turkeys, which hang about in packs, their tails fanning out as they gobble aggressively in response to our turkey calls.

It’s fair to say we see far more wildlife then we do people.

A pack of feral turkeys

We travel to the northern end of the island to Killiecrankie, a place of wild and breathtaking coastlines and multiple historical shipwrecks. We visit a local, an elderly woman married to one of the descendants of the first Europeans to settle the area – a fishing family originally from South Australia. More than 100 years ago, their boat was damaged ashore and they were forced to set up home. They discovered they liked the area so much that they would remain permanently, even after their boat was repaired. Anyway – the local woman specialises in Killiecrankie Diamonds, the colloquially-named topaz that can be found along the beaches in this area. Nicole hires some pans and a small shovel and takes to some of the known areas, sifting through the bracken rockpools and finding all manner of tiny treasures, but probably no topaz.

It’s bittersweet as Bobo is a curmudgeonly mix of under- and overstimulated by this point. It rains on and off all day, and it’s an annoying rain picked up by the wind so that it hits you sideways. It’s also cold and very windy, and Bobo has to sit in the car a lot as we travel from place to place. His patience wears out and he hits tantrum-town in Killiecrankie. He’s crankie in Killiecrankie.

Eventually when he calms and after Nicole has returned the equipment to the lady and found some topaz she likes, we travel a little further north to Palana – a rural settlement at one of the island’s two northernmost tips. There’s a certain awe in looking out into the misty horizon of the Bass Strait, knowing that Australia is somewhere there in the distance. In between us and the unseen mainland are the Sisters – two smaller islands once inhabited by the farmers who eventually settled in Palana.

We return to our base at Island Quarters in Whitemark and shelter in our room away from the wind and sea spray cold.

Cape Barren Goose

With Goslings

Sea-bitten mooring from years gone by

A house in Palana

Stone hut in Killiecrankie

Flinders Island Day 1: Launceston Launchpad

The first thing you should know about going to Flinders Island is that it isn’t a direct route. This means we get up at 3am. This means Bobo is so excited that he doesn’t even wake up grumpy at this time and he doesn’t go back to sleep as we drive in to the airport. It means we fly to Launceston and then have some time to kill while we wait for the flight to the island.

We catch a taxi from Launceston airport and the taxi driver offers to take us to Cataract Gorge to give us something to do. He’s a 40 year old Indian guy with a neat beard and a black turban on. He gives us his business card so we can call him when we’re done… it’s Bobo's first time in a taxi and afterwards he confusingly keeps asking when the doctor is coming back to pick us up. It takes us a little while to realise he means the taxi driver.

Nope.

Cataract Gorge is beautiful but I was almost have a heart attack watching Bobo and Nicole float above my head on a 50 year old chairlift without seatbelts. On the other side, the Bobo is entranced by the many peacocks and starts getting amongst it, twirling around alongside one resplendent male as it puts on a show with its giant fan of feathers. Nicole starts filming, however, the Bobo gets a little too close to the bird and it shrieks and starts running at him – scaring him to tears. We later show the footage over lunch and he laughs himself silly.

We return to Launceston airport and make our way to the huge shed to the side of the airport that houses Sharp Airlines. These are chartered flights who specialise in trips back and forth to Flinders and King Islands; small planes that can fit up to about 12 people on them.

I try not to think about it.

Meanwhile, as we sit in the waiting room with the other 7 passengers, Bobo acts out the plane crashing and exploding!

It starts raining as get on the plane. The flight has been brought forward due to the unclement weather. As I stand over Bobo, frantically trying to get his seatbelt as tight as possible while the pilot politely waits for me to have us both buckled in, I sense the serious tone our fearless captain takes. He explains all the safety rules and then his co-pilot comes over to run Nicole and I through some extra rules due to our seats being adjacent to the emergency exits.

Tiny plane.

(Later, when we disembark, the pilot is suddenly relaxed and ten tims friendlier. I don’t appreciate the difference in demeanour. Was he worried at the trip’s beginning?)

As we fly into the grey fog that closes in on Launceston, I find myself nervously watching the captain a few seats ahead of us. His dials and readouts look like gibberish to me. All numbers and switches and nothing approaching a user-friendly interface. His hands grip the yoke and I’m struggling to understand what the function of the front window is – all we can see is the pure white of dense cloud. We’re kilometres above the ground, all we can hear is the fever-pitch chainsaw roar of the propellers, and we can’t see shit. How the fuck does someone steer a machine full of people through that? I just don’t understand it.

Bobo is beyond excited but towards the end of the half hour flight he falls asleep. The seatbelt is basically a sash around his waist so he starts flopping to the side, and I’m forced to reach across and hold his head up. Nothing will wake him at this point. Nicole and I take turns holding him up as the plane hits air pockets and tilts this way and that. He doesn’t even wake up when we suddenly hit the ground and miraculously land unharmed. Unbelievable.

Sharp Airlines operate out of Launceston and Melbourne. They charter flights to Flinders and King Islands in the Bass Strait.

We alight from the plane, Bobo is awake again, and the person from the car hire is there to meet us at Flinders’ tiny one-room airport. He explains that the reason we hadn’t had any confirmation from the car company is because the previous owner threw in the towel last week and that he – Norm – was now taking over. It takes a bit of going back-and-forth to figure out what we owe him and then he shows us to the car, apologising for some of its quirks – including a door where the window can’t be wound down past a certain point. He shows me where he’s had to use his island ingenuity to repair the door – rigging up a two-button system (the normal window control plus a second button randomly fixed into the side panel of the door at thigh height). He starts explaining to me how we can wind the window down without losing the glass inside the door and I stop him – it’s an incredibly cold and windy environment compared to Penrith, we are more than happy to avoid winding the window down.

Island resourcefulness

He shows us the booster seat for Bobo but tells us he has no chance of being able to install it – bids us a merry farewell and leaves us to figure out how to get the seat in place.

Nicole manages it and off we drive.

There’s no phone reception on the island and the maps don’t really represent the nuances of the island’s various roads. It’s easy to figure things out though as every turn and junction comes with signage. Five minutes after driving through the Flinders’ countryside, observing Shetland ponies, hovering muttonbirds, thickset cattle, and a mob of feral turkeys (that’s regular turkeys, not the smaller bush turkeys you’re likely to see in Australia – the island has a feral turkey problem for some reason). It’s beautiful and very different to anywhere else I’ve ever been.

We reach the island’s largest (main) settlement, Whitemark. Approximately 300 people live here – about a third of the island’s permanent residents. There’s a grocery store, a nice pub, a post office, a flash museum, a chemist, and that’s about it.

 

One of at least two public phones on the island.

The main street of Whitemark. Pub is on the left - this is the Interstate Hotel, one of two pubs on the island.

Calamari at the Interstate Hotel.

Aurora HSC Seminars: 2024

ADVANCED ENGLISH: A digital copy of the Textual Conversations: Hag-Seed and Tempest Module A PowerPoint from the presentation today can be found here:

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ADVANCED ENGLISH: A digital copy of the Texts and Human Experiences: Merchant of Venice Common Module PowerPoint from the presentation today can be found here:

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STANDARD ENGLISH: A digital copy of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Module B PowerPoint from the presentation today can be found here:

• Presentation

 

Teaching History - Beginner Teachers Session with Jonathan Dallimore

A little while ago I had the pleasure of presenting at the HTA Beginner Teachers Conference. One of the highlights of doing something like this is that it then means I get watch Jonathan Dallimore share his insights into historical thinking. This time around, Jonathan Dallimore's session started with a primary source, introduced with very little context, and the prompt for beginner teachers to read and discuss with the person next to them... what is this source? What do we think of this extract? What can we deduce? 

As some answers were tentatively offered, Dallimore made the point that our lack of orientation and potential confusion was perhaps a reflection of how our students feel when a source is placed in front of him. 

The source transpired to be part of a letter from Dallimore's grandfather, written in 1943, in World War II Germany. The issue is that students often don't have this background knowledge when they look at a source; as History teachers we fall into the trap of looking at sources in isolation, which is contrary to what historians actually do. A historian has a purpose for looking at a source and they know the context of what they're looking at... in fact, more often than not, context is what they start with. 

There's a delicate line that needs to be walked here. There's a need to teach the facts and have students be able to recall these but, also, there's a need to have "an understanding of how historical knowledge is attained, its relationship to evidence, and the way in which historians arbitrate between competing or contradictory claims." (Peter Lee, Teaching History). History should be hard because it's not a 'natural' way of thinking - if students don't find it hard, then it's not focused enough on historical thinking. Dallimore zooms in on this and highlights some key elements of subject History. As we spiral into a world of politicised history wars and ongoing discussion, argumentation, and pseudohistoricising of conspiracies, Dallimore points out our responsibility as teachers to set students up to be able to navigate this violently contested space with appropriately disciplined and critical historical thinking. So yes, this involves providing some degree of context when students look at sources.

Dallimore boils down our role as History teachers as essentially being about the following:

• Historical Confidence and Agility
• Build students' substantive knowledge - provide meaningful data required to make sense of an issue (EG. 17 dictatorships in Europe by 1939 - this fact is meaningful because it raises important questions, EG. Why did this happen at this point in time?).
• Disciplinary knowledge - facilitate an understanding of key disciplinary concepts (EG. Causation, significance)
• Procedural knowledge - teaching the skills needed to 'do' history (EG. Communication in essay form, undertake historical research). 
  

Sources fit in all of the above strands of History teaching- we need sources to build our substantive knowledge but also to help us answer questions. Sources work in a variety of ways within a subject History context:

• Stimulus - to start a discussion
  
• Illustration - to provide an example of something
• Investigative - in an analytical sense, testing a source'sreliability and how/why they've been created.
  
• Construction - using evidence to describe, argue, etc.
• Extension - to research and add layers to what's being discussed.

To keep the balance, each of the above should come into our source analysis. To get to a point where we are taking this robust approach to sources, Dallimore highlighted the importance of choosing your moments - deep source work doesn't have to happen all the time; we have a syllabus with a range of elements that need to be taught but you have a year to teach them so there's no need to focus on all of them all of the time. One topic might focus on chronology and key terms/concepts, another might bring in contestability and analysis and use of sources. The next topic might then shift to significance and communication, with continuing analysis/use of sources. The final topic for the year could then look at perspective/empathy alongside continuing communication and significance. Other skills that might come into play in the following year are change and continuity and causation. Or perhaps they would work better in the first year and you could swap some of the skills around - it's a flexible approach.

The subtext here is that there should be room to interpret the syllabus in accordance with our professional judgement - and we're lucky in the sense that our current syllabus allows for this.

Source analysis in the context of a classroom can be approached in regard to three strands of pedagogy:

• Asking questions
• Finding and analysing meaningful data
• Communicating, sharing and challenging stories and arguments. 

Each of these elements are worked through in three stages - for example, establishing what asking questions looks like, guiding student negotiation in asking questions, and then guiding student creation of their own questions.

As usual with all of the Dallimore sessions I've watched, this was a thought-provoking seminar that helped me to rethink how I do things in the classroom. Great professional learning does this... it lets you watch a subject-expert who speaks the shared language of your subject area. In the course of this discussion, we learn new concepts within this shared language, and we re-energise ourselves as subject-area experts for our students. If I want to get better as a History teacher then I'll watch experienced and passionate History teachers talking about History. That's what this day was... I'm not a Beginner History Teacher; I was in attendance as a presenter in another session, but I'm thankful that I got to tag along and watch this session. Sessions like this aren't just for beginners. 

Interview with Eileen Chong

Eileen Chong is a familiar name for many English teachers since a suite of poetry from her collection Burning Rice was included in the NSW Year 12 Prescribed Texts list. One of these poems is also featured in the syllabus as part of a study on Contemporary Asian-Australian Poets, however, Chong is so much more than this. With her poetry spanning the remote corners of the human condition - from highly personal journeys into the inner psyche to sharply-observed forays into broader discourse - it's always fascinating to get an insight into her processes and methods. Beyond Burning Rice, Chong's poetry collections also include Peony, Painting Red Orchids, Rainforest, Dark Matter, A Thousand Crimson Blooms, and her upcoming 2025 release We Speak of Flowers.

I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to ask Eileen Chong some questions about her work and she was very generous with her time and answers!

What first led you to poetry?

I've always enjoyed reading poetry, even from before I realised what poetry was. My first poetry, I suppose, was from the Bible. I attended Methodist and Anglican schools as a child in Singapore, and had always been drawn to Psalms and Proverbs as well as the Song of Songs. I remember asking a teacher why parts of the Bible were written in sentences and others in 'parts'--even at a very young age part of me discerned the difference in language between prose and poetry.

I studied Literatures in English and Linguistics as an undergraduate at university, and was a high school teacher for a number of years. I'd always loved reading and teaching poetry, but my tastes were quite conservative and tied to the canon. It wasn't until I started a Master of Letters at Sydney University and studied the craft of poetry under the tutelage of Judith Beveridge that I started to read more contemporary poetry across different cultures and also in translation. I started writing poetry around 2010, and had my first book of poems published in 2012 with Australian Poetry. 2025 will see my sixth collection of poems (and my tenth book in total), We Speak of Flowers, to be published with UQP.

 

Do you feel like your poetry has changed over those 6 collections?

Absolutely—my poems have changed across the 6 collections because I have changed as a person over the past 14 years. Of course my work must have retained some defining aspects of a poetic voice, but my concerns, interests and obsessions have evolved, doubled back, overlapped, expanded and/or changed, and the poems reflect that in themes and form. 

For example: my next collection, We Speak of Flowers, is a book-length poem in 101 numbered fragments to be read in any order (including sequentially). The book demanded to be written in this manner—the usual poetry collection of 50 poems or so was not the right container for this work.

I teach the poems from my first collection, Burning Rice, a fair bit in schools, and as the years pass, I gain more and more distance from those poems, to the point where I often wonder: who wrote them? I’m actually consistently surprised by the craft of those poems, by the density of and the compression of language, and feel like I could not write poems like those now, simply because I am not longer the same person and poet as then. 

At the same time, there are words and phrases I used in poems in my previous collections that I would no longer be comfortable using as my sociopolitical consciousness has grown over time and with age. Some of the ideas that gripped me so intensely at different times have also faded out of focus as I have moved on to different stages in life, and others have come to take their place.

I love that my work remains dynamic and in flux even after more than 14 years as a writer.  I would be bored if I were to do the same thing day in, day out, and that applies to my poetry as well. 

You mentioned Burning Rice as an ongoing bridge into schools; how does it feel having your poetry listed as one of the options for NSW students to study? Does it change your relationship with the text?

I don't write for any specific audience, but I am beyond thrilled that students are studying the poems in Burning Rice. I think it's a wonderful recognition to have my poems studied in schools. I was previously a high school teacher of English in Singapore, and know first hand how transformative literary texts in schools can be for students and what a great impact it can have on young minds, sometimes long after their schooling years.

To the best of my knowledge, Burning Rice is also the first single-author collection of poetry by an Asian Australian to be on the HSC syllabus. That is a great honour, and I certainly hope I won't be the last. Having my book on the syllabus has also helped me greatly in a financial sense as I am able to go to schools to speak on my work, which has provided an alternate source of income as I continue to try to make a living through my writing.

I think it is also important for students to be able to read contemporary poetry and to encounter the poet in the flesh, and to understand that creativity is a process that is constantly in-flux. I have absolutely loved being able to be back in classroom to speak on the craft of poetry and to teach my poems to students. I hope that the poems form an entryway into students thinking about migration, identity, multiculturalism, liminality and ultimately leads them to reading more contemporary poetry.

I like what you say about creativity being constantly in-flux. Do you find that the ongoing interaction between students and your poetry challenges the idea of the author being in control of the text?

Absolutely. I’ve often spoken about the creative process and how sometimes even the poet isn’t fully aware of what might be in the poem. I’ve always thought that the final stage in a poem’s creation takes place in the mind of a reader. It’s also refreshing to be in the classroom and have students respond to a work in ways that surprise me, but which are completely valid.

Most of all, I really love watching the expressions and responses to my poems when I read them aloud in classrooms, before I explain any of the literary devices used, or even speak about possible interpretations. To witness a poem’s emotional effect on students is a true gift. To paraphrase Eliot, poetry can communicate meaning even before or beyond conscious understanding.

I have also written poems in response to being in the classroom—a kind of metatext about the creative process to try and articulate this interesting circularity. One such poem, ‘Making Sense’, from my last collection A Thousand Crimson Blooms, begins this way:

I tell my students:

poetry is a way to make sense

of what you fear.

And it ends with:

A girl at her desk begins a poem:

I dreamed everyone, even my own

mother, had forgotten my name—

Which comes first, the poet, the poem, or the reader? Perhaps they are all one and the same. 

I love that. I think we get too rigid sometimes about separating the author from the text and their audience. Why do you think poetry became your primary medium for expression?

As far back as I can recall, I have loved language—the science of it, the sounds of it, the craft of it. I majored in both Linguistics and Literatures in English as an undergraduate, but I had to choose one of the two for my Honours year. I very nearly chose Linguistics over Literature—I was particularly interested in neurolinguistics, pragmatics, and lexicography. But Literature won out and, though unknown to me at the time, it set me on a path that would eventually lead me to poetry as a profession.

Simply put, to me, poetry is the highest form of linguistic expression possible. It is the most varied, the most compressed, and the most encompassing of forms. What I love most of all about poetry is its capacity to move the spirit, its neverending mystery, and how a poem can renew and reinvent language in the smallest space imaginable. (Dove: ‘Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.’) 

I also love how poetry is a broad church, and how it aligns itself with every human experience and emotion in ways that other art forms might not be able to. As I grow older, not much surprises me, but poetry retains the power to astonish and revise my experience and existence. (Dickinson: ‘If I feel physically like the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’)

I often joke about how if I had a choice I would never have chosen to be a poet. It is likely one of the hardest careers to make a living from, because our capitalist society values it so little. (Wordsworth: ‘Poetry has never brought me enough money to buy shoestrings.’) Yet I feel like poetry has been a blessing to me and a calling I could not refuse. Many of my friends from childhood are at the stage of life where they are preoccupied with their careers and life paths, but very few can say that they have spent most of their time pursuing their passion. (Graves: ‘There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either.’) I can, hand on heart, say that I have, and I’m grateful for that, at the very least. 

It might seem that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ (Auden), but I believe that ‘a good poem helps to change the shape of the universe’ (Thomas). Above all, it reminds us of what it means to be human, and that there is power in it, that ‘poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth’ (Jordan), even if you ‘tell it slant’ (Dickinson again). Joy Harjo tells us that when you begin to listen to poetry, ‘you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.’ What other vocation allows you this? Only poetry does. 

You mention some great classic poets from years gone by. If you had to choose 3 great poets from the 19th, 20^th and 21^st centuries, who would you pick?

An impossible task, I’m going to cheat and pick two each. John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Li-Young Lee, Joy Harjo. I’m sure I’ll regret these choices in one way or another. There are so many poets worthy of reading, and not enough time in the world to do so. 

Thanks Eileen. Final question - what advice would you give to anyone wanting to write poetry?

Read poetry. Read non-fiction. Read fiction. Read widely and without prejudice. Read poetry aloud. Listen to its sounds, rhythms, cadences. Study the history of poetry, of forms, across cultures. Read poetry in translation. Read ancient poetry. Read contemporary poetry. Read craft books written by poets. Read interviews with poets. Keep reading, listening, feeling, thinking. See art. Watch plays and performances, attend music events. Walk, swim, sleep in nature. Travel, in person or on the page. Fall in and out of love. Connect with community. Live your life to its fullest. Fill your well, nourish your imagination, and feed your soul. That which spills over? That which cannot be contained? That is the beginning of your own poetry.

 

Visit Eileen Chong's website here.