Q&A with Jos Glencross
“Purge the dictionary; that stuff is esoteric.”
~ ‘Knuckle-Dragging Queer’ by Jos Glencross
Your experimental poem 'Knuckle-Dragging Queer' deconstructs and transforms a transcript of George Christiansen's speech on Safe Schools. What sparked the idea for this piece and how did it come together?
I was inspired in part by Chrysanthemum Tran's blackout poem ‘On Using the Trans Panic Defence.’ I found her words extremely poignant and knew that I wanted to create something to capture a similar energy but in an Australian setting. I liked the idea of turning someone's homophobic, transphobic rhetoric against them and I knew that I wanted to use something the George Christensen had said, I just wasn't sure what that might be yet.
An ex-boyfriend of mine from a few years ago used to have an "ironic" electoral poster board of George Christensen in his college bedroom. During this time, I really struggled with my identity as a queer person, and the presence of that poster board exacerbated my uncertainty. So, when I stumbled across George Christensen's speech on Safe Schools, I knew that this was the text I had to use.
I transcribed the video myself and then played around in Word with a highlighter, finding all the really interesting turns of phrase that Christensen uses throughout. From there, it was almost like a puzzle - trying to find which phrases had edges that would match other phrases - and once all the words had clicked together, the final form of ‘Knuckle-Dragging Queer’ had taken shape.
Is experimentation with form and language an important part of your writing practice?
Experimentation is definitely important to me. I really enjoy researching different forms of poetry and trying them out in my own work; finding out what makes a certain form resonate and incorporating it into the way I think about poetry in general. I find that the more and more I learn about poetry, the less and less I know about poetry at all, and I love that so much.
I also just love words in general. Finding interesting words that I haven't heard before and researching their etymology is the way I come up with of a lot my ideas. Looking into etymologies is kind of like looking through someones strange and convoluted family tree. And once you know the legacy of a word, trying to capture its rich history on a page in a few lines of poetry or prose is one of my favourite things.
Your poem ‘Red Bark’ was recently published online at Blue Bottle Journal. When did you first begin writing and submitting poetry and why?
I began writing poetry when I was in primary school as part of a volunteer community project to create poetry for the re-opening of the local lagoon (which also happened to allow me to skip afternoon AFL practice, which definitely had nothing to do with the reason I volunteered). Before this project, I had always thought of myself as a maths and science kid, and hadn't really considered the possibilities of creative writing outside of my miniature, hand-folded paper rewrites of the Animorphs books where I was the main character. After the lagoon project, I started playing with words more and wrote some sporadic angsty teen poems throughout my school days.
I started looking at writing more seriously after I took an elective course in poetry in my second year of a science degree. This elective changed the course of my university education as I realised that while I loved science, what I really loved was words. I changed into an arts degree and started working on more passion pieces, both for class and for myself.
Despite this, I didn't start submitting poetry until the beginning of this year because the idea that I could never really occurred to me. I knew from my lectures and tutorials that the assignments we were submitting were preparing us for publication opportunities, but I never felt that my work was polished enough to submit. But at the start of the year, a good friend of mine had their first poem published and it gave me an "Aha!" moment and inspired me to try submitting some work of my own. And then ‘Red Bark’ was published, and then ‘Knuckle-Dragging Queer’ was published, and I'm eager to find out what I might publish next.
Who are some writers or poets you admire?
There are so many amazing writers that I really admire and it's hard to narrow it down to just a few, but recently I've been reading the works of Chrysanthemum Tran, Melissa Lucashenko, Benjamin Law and Ellen van Neervan and I would highly recommend their work to anyone looking for insightful and poignant poetry and prose.
Jos Glencross is a queer writer, born and raised on the suburban streets of Meanjin (Brisbane). They love to play with words and aim to bend the rules until they break. Jos believes in embracing mediocrity and flourishing despite it and aspires to adopt several dozen cats throughout her lifetime.