As people always say in interviews, I have been lucky in many ways. First and foremost, in not being outstanding at anything. Mediocre at school, at everything except smiling, I scraped through Matric by the finest film on my teeth. So there was no danger of my going into Honours English, so commonly a graveyard of writerly talent. (This may be an exaggeration, as I’ve noticed in recent years that a few Honours English graduates actually did survive, Helen Garner, Beverley Farmer, and Andrew Taylor among them, but young writers surely need a certain puppyish vanity which the critical schools briskly put down in favour of conformity.) Once I built a poem around the seed-line, ‘I never had much talent as a kid.’ I’ll stick with that.

Oh, there were stars around in those days. I was envious of the visible talents displayed by Ray Mathew and Randolph Stow, Robert Hughes and Bruce Dawe – all males you will notice, for women didn’t earn guernseys easily in the 1950s. But now I am as happy as a tortoise that I didn’t burn out my themes or lock up my style early. The papery world still lay all before me; though I have never been much of a one for hope, Bertrand Russell having confirmed me in an articulate despair early on. A gloomy foundation can be very good for cheerfulness. The pearl forms around grit.

Ah yes, and there are a couple of other ways at least in which I see myself as having grown up lucky. There is the fact that my father was a journalist and a jack-of-all-trades. He could write, paint, draw, cut woodblocks, build boats, construct model planes, build houses … in fact he built the only two houses he was ever to own, having hung in there for as long as possible in rented places; property tends to catch up with people in the end. Anyway, he was a cheerful little workaholic, but not so good at any one thing as to crush my brother, Robin, and myself out of it. So I could go on to write, Robin to paint, and latterly to write fiction. The journalist in Dad helped us to realise that we should be interested in everything – and stick at nothing for too long. My concentration is minimal, but I’m a great sprinter over seven-and-a-half metres.

Again, Dad was away in Burma, India, the Middle East, and the whole musée imaginaire for four years during the War. As he didn’t even get home leave, I had no Oedipal battles to fight; he returned in 1945 as a sort of glorified brother. Easy company. No sweat. All this was hard on Mum, but great for us boys. We inherited from his sister, our doting aunt Violante, a whole lurid oral history of the family as Highland cutthroats, adventurers in plaid. I suppose we tried to be Jacobites, but without the Catholicism.

As I go on writing, I’m more and more inclined to think of poetry as a sacred or magical art. Indeed, some version or other of the mystical dimension of experience keeps flooding in from hither or yon, so that one main line in my poetry which I had always thought of as psychomachia or as psychological exploration gets to look a lot more like religious enquiry. Poems like ‘Introspection’, ‘The Shape-Changer’, and ‘Mind’ are shuffling over a bit and making room for poems called ‘Whether There is Terrorism in Heaven’ and ‘God’. Mind you, the latter is a dramatic monologue spoken by God the Father, so the enterprise is not without hubris; I wrote it on a plane flying out of Hobart. It is a well-known fact that anyone flying over Tasmania thinks that he or she is God; it’s all probably to do with apples. After all, apples, Eden, and the lost earthly paradise (which, on good days, is also Australia) are central themes of mine, most obviously in the quasi-feminist poem, ‘Genesis’. An interesting thing struck me recently about that poem; art historian Viv Gaston commented at a reading that my poem was at heart a recension of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’. Beaut, I thought, I’ve always loved that ode. And anyway, all modern poetry can be seen as a succession of variations on Keats’s odes.

Let me hasten to say that most of my tastes in the arts are elitist. What I go for are poetry, painting, and the classic-romantic composers from Mozart to Messiaen; and the kinds of novel which I can read as versions of modernist intensity, modernist comedy. In Australia that means writers as different as White, Stead, Mathers, and Elizabeth Jolley. All my interest in popular culture runs to sport; playing it, watching it, or merely viewing it in the dim aspic of television. This is not quite true, of course, but it will do as a political platform for the arts.

When I’m writing, the kind of thing I am particularly interested in is mixing modes or breaking up decorum. My only novel, Splinters, was labelled by one reviewer ‘lairy’ and ‘smart-arsed’; I wanted it to be a sort of staggering anthology of ocker aphorisms. Then, I have written a little book entirely composed of subversive epigrams: in this, the influence of the university, so often dulling to the imagination, proved as nourishing as potting mix. Abstractions and epigrams grow quite luxuriously on campus.

Going out along another generic borderline, I have a volume of prose poems shortly coming out from PostNeo Press. Strangely enough, it seems that I introduced the prose poem to Australian writing. I forget how it happened: mingled influence of St John Perse and Virginia Woolf, it may have been. All that doesn’t matter a hoot now, but trying to cope with the form remains an imaginative challenge. How can I battle against its inherent frigidity? The important thing to ask ourselves is this: what dichotomy runs at right angles to the one I’m deciding about at the moment?

It has often struck me that the decorum of Australian poetry is a bit like that of an old-fashioned officers’ mess: you can talk about anything except sex, politics, and religion. The safest thing to write about is the reflection of morning light on the surfaces of dams. Well, I have been writing occasional poems about politics for some time, but recently I decided to have a more extended bash at political themes. Once again, I decided to mix or warp the genres. So I chose the sonnet sequence, that zigzag, semi-vertebrate mode developed by Elizabethan poets to define the ways in which they did not have sex with their girlfriends, and attempted to use it to explore my political attitudes. I published ten of these in the first Meanjin for this year, and I am still quite pleased with the way the sonnet form can be used to contain vulgar jags of tone. Take sonnet eight, for instance:

Through a green, social afternoon
As to and fro the emptied bottles roll
This question rises, bleary, out of tune:
Can a fuckwit have an immortal soul?
When shall the vulgar court the lyrical
And bullshit fertilise the laurel crown?
When will cute images delight us all
With ratbag stylists going on the
          town?

Only when stories happen on a seam
Whose gist gets memorised from north
          to south,
Swimming through mythology like a
          dream:
The dingo with a baby in its mouth.
Fuckwit and smartarse, trendocrats and
          folk,
Nothing unites them like a dingo joke.

Ah, folklore, regionalism, and the idiolects, how much territory there still is to be won from all these. And from the interminable comedy of sex roles, traditional catchment area for fiction, but surely no less fertile for the poet.

The other night, I woke at 3 am with a line on my lips which I found, and still find, compelling: it is only pain that gives us the dignity not to see ourselves as merely comic. Yes, but we have to see ourselves in a comic light to have access to the only kind of earthly salvation. Comedy provides the rungs on the ladder of grace – and the cushion at the bottom. There is the ladder, standing against an old apple tree in the haunted garden of language; and the Banksia Men are lurking offstage. As that elegiac humourist of the bedroom, Milan Kundera, has complained, ‘You cannot escape from comedy. It goes everywhere with you, like the abyss.’ And I would certainly claim that my most seriously exploratory poems tend to be the most comic: whether in the manic dissection of ‘Introspection’ or in the bizarre linguistic dottiness which daubs ‘The Thing Itself’:

Were it not
that the undertaking is too mannered
(as gnostic as a shower of rabbits),

I would like to go right back,
devising a sentence
unlike any such creature in creation;

like nothing on this planet:
a structure full of brackets and
          cornices,
twigs, pediments, dadoes and haloes and
          nimbs,

full of nuts, butter and flowers!
sinewy, nerved,
capable of blotches or of waving hair.

I do like the process of writing out restlessness and transience, of articulating poems in which language can turn around and ask itself ‘Is anyone at home?’

But to speak merrily like this is to imply that one could live on scepticism and subversion alone. The capering statues of such dissent are always mounted on plinths of belief. My own belief-system is, of course, a mess. I am aware, on the one hand, of the passionate injunctions of the Life Force, but on the other I feel the wicked jokes of the Trickster God. Often, we seem to stagger through life’s torments with only jokes and epigrams to support us: and love, that desperate commodity. And then, suddenly, there are occasions when we find ourselves riding in on the green surf of the world.

There is a splendid play by Michael Gow, called Away. It focuses on two families, one of them Australian, the other from the north of England: the Australians have hope but no joy, the English, joy without hope. I believe it is our duty to manage joy. We were put on this earth to be joyous.

And then, oh dear, yes, there is the question of political belief. It is hard to muster much political enthusiasm in this time of a porridge-coloured federal Labor government, a grotesque time when the right-wing press expends its energies on crucifying the Liberal Party. But, even in this dry season, there is one idealistic project which I believe we could turn our enthusiasms to: we could start devoting Australia’s second two hundred years to advantaging the Aboriginal people as greatly as they were disadvantaged over the previous two hundred. After all, theirs are the ancestral spirits which could be said to give this continent a primal meaning.

Since we are powerless to do anything about the higher wickedness which casts its mock-rational shadow over our very existence – the parodic balance of nuclear power – and which has borrowed its mockery of reason from the abolished Devil, we should, I think, keep on doing as much as we can about Aboriginal land rights. To do so is one tribute of the spirit to the beautiful land in which we spin our texts. In the back corner of my mind, I keep associating this project with Wallace Stevens’ lines, ‘The honey of heaven may or may not come / But that of earth both comes and goes at once.’ I do not want to see all that honey leached away.