- Published on
James Walton: "Poetry must have been bottled up there somewhere
and got released ..."
By Catherine Watson
I WAS idly browsing The Footy Almanac, when Wonthaggi caught my eye. There, amongst learned analyses of various football codes and games, was a poem High on the Lowdown in Wonthaggi by James Walton.
Now living in Wonthaggi, James is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, is widely published in anthologies and has won or been shortlisted for multiple prestigious poetry prizes, national and international.
Given that this week marks National Poetry Day, a celebration of all things poetical, it seemed a fitting occasion to ask James to explain some of the mysteries of his arcane and much misunderstood art.
Bass Coast Post: When did you realise you were a poet?
James Walton: I wrote the first lines of a poem in 1970 and didn’t write creatively again until late 2013 when I tuned 60 years of age. I finished that poem for a workshop with Mark Tredinnick who told me I, “demanded a lot of the reader but it was worth the journey”.
I suppose that was the moment, along with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald placing a poem in the then Saturday Spectrum in May 2014, and then a number of placings in local and international poetry competitions in quite rapid succession.
It must have all been bottled up there somewhere and got released nearing retirement.
Post: What makes a poem – rhyme, rhythm, subject, or something else?
James: It’s the something else that sets it off. A place, a passing sight, an observation, a memory, an image out of the blue, out of or in context. I don’t think there’s a chronology that fits it like a narrative in a novel or the particular context of a short story. A poem I wrote about Anne Boleyn started in my head when a blue wren landed on my boot while I was sitting on the back porch having a cup of tea!
Rhyme is something best left to the old masters, it is extremely difficult to do well and few mastered it. Rhythm however can be found in the beat that helps create the movement and feeling, in the direct sense like Banjo Paterson or the free verse of modern writing where lyric and pace even remove the need for punctuation.
Sometimes it’s a little like being in a movie at the same time as watching it. The extent to which the reader feels involved and present, well that’s the mystery of the something else.
MORE POETRY EVENTS
Sat, Oct 3, 11am-noon
National Poetry Day: Wonthaggi Library. Join local guest poet and writer Meryl Tobin, who will talk about her latest book and share her thoughts on poetry. Share your favourite poem or one of your own. Register at Myli.
Post: How much of your poetry comes from listening to people?
James: I will pick up on things, events in friends’ lives can end up in pieces I write from a third person narrative hopefully. Sometimes I’ll include a conversational anecdote, like my young neighbour many years ago who won the 30-kilo potato stitching and bagging contest at Thorpdale while she was eight months pregnant. That just had to go in a poem!
Post: What’s the genesis of High on the Low Down in Wonthaggi?
James: Passing some kids playing in the street I was swept back to those school holidays spending hours on three goals in, when those days seemed to be painted on a canvas lasting forever, the way time seemed to slow to the game and kept it going all day. The primary school still had those metal paintings on the old cyclone wire fence of the nationalities going there, painted by the children themselves. It’s a mixture of memoir, conversation, action, and joy in being there/here. Needing to jump that high is indicative of a generation passing too, from a world where many things persevere as they were. The players and the brush strokes change, yet so much remains as it has been. Although next time, I’d just hand the ball back, probably!
Post: Can you enjoy a poem without fully understanding it?
James: I think poetry can be intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, even political. It’s as much about what it invokes/evokes as it is about anything else. People will understand things in different ways, often related to what they’ve experienced or the sense of things words bring to them.
There are certainly poems I don’t necessarily get on the first or subsequent reading, but they’ll still knock me for six in wonder and appreciation. Some by an old friend I still don’t understand but I know and feel I am in the presence of something outstanding.
Post: What can poetry do that prose can’t?
James: Poetry writes a book in a page of less words. A poem compresses language into a thought structure of image and word. Whole chapters are composed in a few lines; entities come and go in verses or free prose where the structure and word choice is used to create a volume of thought and consequence. Often a poem is like a song, and hence the similarity of lyric in each format – a song will capture a particular time and a feeling for you and when you hear it you are taken immediately there. A poem can conjure in the same way, something familiar for you, in the spirit of time and place. It can also open a whole new world where your thoughts may crystallise, that déjà vu of having been there.
Post: What’s one poem you wish you had written?
James: Any line by Shakespeare. Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden. Four beautiful rhyming stanzas, so simple, so succinct, so perfect. If I couldn’t have that then Clancy of the Overflow, Banjo Paterson, the way you can hear the hoof beat of the words, in the controlled scenic language.
Kilcunda, in the centre of October
By James Walton
the sun is saying summer
two mothers and toddlers
separated by exposed reef
shake a day’s experience
one is reading Faulkner
the other Austen under shade
we’re spread thin
as ducks holding on dawn
the membrane stretched
taut elastic pegged to places
how a body still wants flight
the trestle bridge is exposed
tide out as far as it goes
the bull kelp collapsed
all rolled dragon pieces
an old surfer ties up flippers
squints into his helloes and byes
he’s had that dance with colours
where the water never lies
way out on the graphite
a fisher takes her chances
there is a lull of wave
you could be here tomorrow
like a note left in a pocket
gone through the washing
but the laughter comes in
deep down an undiscovered thing
where the lead runs smudging
writing, but I want to live forever