Emerging Writers Series: Lia Dewey Morgan
“We are powerful, and we should not doubt that. It is a very austere time with much to overcome, especially as someone dedicated with great love to what is essentially unpaid labour. It’s a horrible way to think about it, yet we are forced to because of the state of things. It won’t always be this way, though, and things will rebalance as the disciplines continue to learn how to integrate each other, blur together, and develop new ways of thinking and being. While poetry can certainly be technologically sophisticated and rely on lofty academic depth, it can also be lighter than air and nestled in the chest. So long as we are here, poetry will continue!”
The eagle-eyed of you will have hopefully spotted the inclusion of Lia Dewey Morgan’s beautiful debut collection of poetry, Bath Songs, on my ‘best reads’ list of 2022.
Lia’s collection stood out to me for its empowering rawness, which speaks not only to her direct experience as a trans woman but is also threaded throughout with disarmingly simple prose that strikes directly at the heart of human longing. Her influences also include Japanese forms haiku and tanka (another reason I’m a fan) - for that reason alone Bath Songs is well worth tracking down.
And Lia reassures me, her debut really was just the beginning!
In this truly decadent interview, Lia took the time to share with me her inspirations, creative philosophies, journey to publication and what’s next in her literary endeavours.
I tend to start these interviews with a similar question to help readers learn more about you! Could you tell us a little about your journey to becoming a writer and what inspired you to start writing?
Growing up, writing was always present. My mum is an avid reader, and my grandma has written several novels and a memoir. I also strongly associate writing with music, as my grandfather was a composer. There was always music and lyrics around the house, and creativity was deeply valued. I fervently carried a sketchbook with me, filled quickly with poems as I went through a rocky first puberty.
Back then, I listened to a lot of rap music like Outkast and MF DOOM, so when I came across spoken word poets like Saul Williams – it was probably the first time I had a breakthrough that I wanted to be a poet. I got really involved in Eora/Sydney’s open mic community, like Mersey Sound Collective, where I shared the stage with incredibly talented poets like Omar Musa and Candy Royalle.
Anyway, that was my first dip into the nourishing waters of poetry. Since then, I’ve always been involved in some way, but it hasn’t always been the focus of my creative practice - just something that carried on in the background. For a while, I wanted to be a photographer, so I went to art school and learned lots about it - in the end, I was probably more interested in the theory surrounding the practice.
After some travelling, I took history units and became more interested in research-driven artistic practices, with more of an emphasis on writing. This all became, I guess, a sort of fertile ground as I then went through a big crisis of self and started gender transition. During preparations for a grad show in 2018, I had a breakthrough of sorts, and suddenly it seemed quite obvious to me that I had been avoiding my fate as a poet - much in the same way I had been avoiding my femininity, actually!
Since then, I’ve felt pretty resolute that I want to pursue being a writer, and I have found my poetic toolkit is helpful in professional contexts such as grant writing, editing or writing copy.
Bath Songs (published by No More Poetry, Feb. 2022) is such a vivid, evocative read that really tugs at all of the reader's senses. Can you talk us through some of your inspiration for the collection?
Thank you for those kind words!
Put simply, the book chronicles the first few years of my transition. The book's three sections are chronologically arranged, and each has a distinct voice of its own. The first part, as mentioned above, began as a series of poems for my grad show work, where (I always feel wild saying this) I used 9/11 archival materials to explore my own collision and eruption of transition. I was a kid when 9/11 happened, so it greatly impacted me. I’m a big believer in the power of collectively witnessing and unpacking trauma and how emotions are imbued in the landscape, so many of these poems work from that sort of vantage.
There was this huge groundswell of reading theory in my life, and I think I was barely holding on to my sense of self. Brian Kuan Wood puts it well in We are the Weather when he says of artists, “…as this person develops strange superpowers just to find expansive solutions for constant contractions in time and space, an internalised instability emerges as pure psychosis.”
It was all pretty heady, and in the end, I was really burnt out. I found this book of Japanese women’s verse and turned away from theory to catch my breath. I spent a lot of time walking my local river, the Maribyrnong, in silence, just trying to process and regulate after so much change. It was a good time to start writing haiku and eventually tanka, and the discipline of the form really helped. I became fixated on Japanese verse and read most of Monash’s collection of translations. The translator Makoto Ueda and poetess Akiko Yosano are two particular favourites from this time.
Fittingly, I realised in retrospect how impactful Japanese culture had been for my sense of gender, as I’d exchanged to Japan as a teenager. That being said, I was also a lot more aware of Japan’s imperial presence and smothering conformity, and wanted to pursue a more critical understanding. Tanka seemed to offer this, with its less well-known vantage on the conflicted subjects of Japanese femininity breaking social taboo, which I related to a trans woman. As I muddled through my first queer romances, tanka presented a means to savour and reflect on intimacy and my emerging self-hood.
Writing tanka became reflexive, such that there were literally hundreds of these little five-line notes on my phone (where I generally write, actually). Lockdown started, the mood shifted once more, and a period of quite austere reverence and solitude took shape. At that point, my mum, who lives interstate, was also diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer, so the rattle of grief in all its awesome terror opened me up to a renewed spirituality. After spending so much time in restrained little verse, I finally returned to poems in the Western tradition, and my poems began to stretch out ecstatically. I was especially excited by Mutsuo Takahashi’s Whitman-inspired gay erotic epic Ode about divine experiences while attending gloryholes and the poetry of mediaeval Goliards (wandering scholars) translated with flair by Helen Waddell.
What was your journey to publication like, and how did you find the complete experience with it being your debut collection?
I had known of Joshua and daniel, the co-founders of nomorepoetry, for a while through art communities. Then, in 2021, my dear friend Chunxiao Qu published Popcorn, porn of poetry with nomorepoetry, which I performed at the launch. I’d been making books in one form or another since I was a kid, selling zines at Sticky or making little digital publications, so it was a long-held dream to publish a book.
I started sorting through and organising my collections of poetry into a manuscript, drawing lines within my collection, I guess, as to what would and wouldn’t be included. It’s a really exciting place to be because you start to see the convergence of unexpected themes and little conversations happening between the poems. I then nervously let the manuscript go into the emails to nomorepoetry, and then I waited. There was this point where they had received the manuscript and given a positive response but not confirmed it was to be published - I swear this was about a month or two - where I needed to remind myself of my priorities! It’s great to be published, and I’d love to receive more of an audience, but at the end of the day, the most prominent joy of it all comes in the very private experience of finding and writing poems, whether or not they are read by others.
But it was published in the end! I was asked at nomorepoetry what sort of cover I could imagine. I immediately had this strong vision of the circle gradient, inspired by an origami paper I used to use as a child (I folded a lot!) We had a launch at an old church, and my mum visited - I grew up with her singing in churches, so it was a nice full circle for both of us. I tried to pick an extensive range of poets, evoking the sort of open mic nights I would attend when I started writing. It was a really beautiful night.
In the aftermath, I think quite a few new opportunities started to come my way as people recognised my commitment. At the place I’m at now with it, I’m very proud and, in a way, relieved to have that dream come true, but I also feel with distance that the collection is coloured by my early transition and doesn’t reflect where I am now.
My ambitions for poetry are much wider than my experience as a trans woman, and I’m hoping not to be typecast as someone who writes solely about her body or even queerness. Some poems in the book reflect that, but I think with the pink cover and sensuous title, it's easy for some to view it as ‘trans poetry’.
I’m always in awe of how poets pull their collections together to create the reading experience. How was this process for you - was it quite personal, or did your publisher have a lot of input here?
nomorepoetry were very trusting of my authorial intent, and while daniel did encourage a few changes here and there, the bulk of this structure I came to quite naturally alone.
The chronological clusters of poems and their formal distinctions, I guess, have their own logic that seems pretty obvious looking back. I still kind of write like this now; I tend to work in waves of fixation around certain topics and writing practices, as I described before. I will say I printed out all of the tanka in the second section and cut them into little pieces, then spent a few hours organising them into different themes, arranging them in a long chain, and seeing how each interrelates.
This is inspired by my understanding of Japanese verse, particularly collaboratives ‘linked poem’ practices like renga, where the organisation of sequential short poems is structured by a sort of game-like process.
Once this was all done, my mother and I worked over the phone (as we often do!) to edit the poems. She’ll ask, “What do you mean by that?” and I’ll answer, and then we’ll clarify further how to make that clear, whether it's unnecessary, and so forth. It’s important to have someone who understands where your coming from but doesn’t try to be too nice. I’m really lucky and grateful for her and how she’s helped me understand where my authentic voice is.
I’d love to learn more about your creative process and what creativity means to you as a poet. Do you have any creative philosophies that aid your writing?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think we’re living in very quantitative times. So much is determined by an endless array of numbers: quotas and budgets, surplus and profit, ranking and ratings, on it goes… Many creatives feel alienated by this, if not downright persecuted. I think this is because a lot of our practice relies on qualitative thinking, which in turn – for the moment – is thoroughly devalued.
Most of the arts sector – and, by extension, media, education, and others too – are not profitable. It seems like there’s never enough money to justify spending on something that has unquantifiable value. I think a lot of this comes back to age-old scientisms that claim quantitative research is superior because of its apparent objectivity. This was, arguably, the same set of beliefs that led white men around the globe to espouse their system as ‘civilisation’ whilst committing some of the most barbaric acts of violence in recorded history.
I don’t mean to be anti-science, but I think my point here is that we’re living in an age where many creative practices have been demeaned and deprived of their natural capacity to participate in world-building. That power has been gathered up in smaller and smaller hands, but I don’t think that’s sustainable. Most societies have lived with poetry as a fundamental component of reality, including European cultures, until only a few hundred years ago.
That is to say, we are powerful, and we should not doubt that. It is a very austere time with much to overcome, especially as someone dedicated with great love to what is essentially unpaid labour. It’s a horrible way to think about it, yet we are forced to because of the state of things. It won’t always be this way, though, and things will rebalance as the disciplines continue to learn how to integrate each other, blur together, and develop new ways of thinking and being. While poetry can certainly be technologically sophisticated and rely on lofty academic depth, it can also be lighter than air and nestled in the chest. So long as we are here, poetry will continue!
Who are some of the writers that you’ve been influenced by - whose work is dominating your bookshelves that you think we should be exploring?
I’ve had so many different waves of influence throughout my life it’s hard to list any one for fear of negating another! I’ve also listed quite a few above, so I’ll not go over those again. An important book for me since I was a teenager was the Sufi classic The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar. In the Penguin translation, it's all written in elegant rhyming couplets that feel akin to something like Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s filled with allegories imparting wisdom to a series of birds, each with their own plight that withholds from finding god. Perhaps this inclined me toward quite a practical understanding of poetry, as Attar was a medicine man who used his words with purpose. I often read it out loud, to myself or with friends - stories about beggars being more divine than kings or the holy man’s moment of blasphemy. Lots of juicy paradoxes and moral dilemmas to consider! A few years ago, I got a hold of the newer Sholeh Wolpe translation, and it was great to read a less formally restrained translation that seemed less interested in aligning the texts with Western epics.
Despite not speaking another language, it's interesting how much of my thought about poetry begins with translation. The poetry moves from the poet’s lived experience to language, then onto the page to be read and misinterpreted - and only more (or less) with time. The translator’s role is an extension of this, and reading translation might help make this explicit: reading the original poem is the privilege of the poet who freshly wrote it. From that point, it grows into something else, its own organism, quite abject, really! As someone with so much access to information, I’ve been the great receiver of so many different practices; it's incredibly humbling and kind of overwhelming.
As I say this, I’m thinking of hip hop, how profoundly it impacted my worldview as a teenager, and inversely how distant I am from the lived experiences of those black creators. Acts like Outkast, MF DOOM and Missy Elliott were so integral to my love of language and my own literacy, and I think that developed in me an expectation that poetry wouldn’t always explain itself to me. Poetry was to be funky yet elusive, something that could only be deciphered with time.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to enjoy quite technical, theoretical writing to hone my poetic toolkit. Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s book Breathing: Chaos and Poetry was significant for me in tracing how global finance dominates language and finds its way into our bodies. I was also very taken by artist-writer James Bridle’s New Dark Age and its vision of a world where technology is by no means synonymous with progress. Another is The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, where they describe a position of being inside but not of the university. I might also mention David Graeber’s fascinating book Debt and how it breaks open the subject's misconceptions. Each of these is an example of a book that helps you push against the conventions of capitalism and reimagine the world around you as something richer and full of life.
Poetry can be so much more revealing of our inner worlds than other forms of writing. What advice would you give any other emerging poets uncertain about putting their work out there?
There are some very revealing erotic poems in my book, I guess, and maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I really haven’t experienced any adverse consequences from that.
At least amongst the audience poetry attracts, I think people want that radical intimacy through language. For the poet, there’s enough distance when the content is in language rather than image or video. There’s something quite special about what can be shared in the form. It provides the illusion of proximity for the audience while retaining sufficient security for the poet.
Those poems shared in Bath Songs represent tiny glimmers of fleeting moments of eroticism, and they don’t define me or what the moments following their creation might entail. We never write the perfect poem, and even monumental poems are flawed - perhaps especially so! Time keeps moving, and everything will one day be forgotten, so you might as well sing your heart out and see what others think.
And lastly, what’s next for you in terms of writing, can you tell us about anything you’re working on next and where readers can get their hands on Bath Songs?
It was definitely present in Bath Songs, but I’ve been curious about how subjectivity can stretch out and embrace more collective experiences for some time. I wrote a poem early last year about turning my body inside out to become a cave, and then a little later, a series of poems trying to describe the experience of crowds, malls, and other public forms. I also have an ongoing interest in urban bird populations and their chaotic relationship with the orders of architecture.
Most recently, I’ve been trying to come up with new methods to write with/from the archive, especially regarding the establishment of this colony in so-called Australia. With that comes a lot of reading and research to try and further ground myself in this country and, to put it plainly, figure out where the hell I am some more.
All these different themes push toward poetry that is more public than what I shared with Bath Songs, where my ego can fall into the shade a little to emphasise something larger than myself. In this way, I’ve been deeply moved by local writers Jennifer Maiden and П. O (Fitzroy: The Biography is unbelievable!), who, for me, bring imagination and vitality to the monotonous droll of this colony. I’ve also really enjoyed John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green’s delightful back-and-forth poetry, ART, and Natalie Harkins crucial collection Archival Poetics.
Bath Songs is an edition of 200, and more than half the copies had sold some months back, so I assume it will sell out soon, but in the precious meantime, readers can get a copy via nomorepoetry’s website or at select retailers. There are still a few available at Paperback Bookstore! Support small presses and small retailers!
Lia Dewey Morgan is a poet and writer living on stolen land in Narrm. She grapples with the continuity and chaos present in contemporary living, using poetry as a toolkit to pry open our muddled moment. Her first book, Bath Songs, was published with local press nomorepoetry.
Instagram: @ldm_9564
Elaine Chennatt is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
