Issue 4: Jonathan Battista
“And as we argue over the / meaning of eucalypts that / grieve over eleven daubs of / paint”
~ The River Nile, Van Diemen's Land, from Mr Glover's farm 1837 by Jonathan Battista
Your poem "The River Nile, Van Diemen's Land, from Mr Glover's farm 1837" takes its title and subject matter from a colonial painting by John Glover. Can you tell us more about your inspiration behind the piece?
I was looking out my office window one morning at a wonderfully angular gum tree, and I recalled a fragment of memory from many years ago of being told that early colonial artists would paint gum trees incorrectly. They would get the geometry of the branches wrong, and in particular didn't capture the way gums strain toward the sky. I started doing some research on this and quickly came across the John Glover painting, as well as some essays both critical and in defense of the work.
The gums in the painting, especially those in the foreground, certainly don't look like the tree outside my window. But the thing that really unsettled me was the way that the First Nations owners of this land were represented as almost featureless smears of paint, which echoes the dehumanisation of First Nations people under colonialism. This inspired me to write the poem in response to both Glover's painting and the critical analysis of it.
The piece is quite experimental, with the poem laid over a fragment of an essay on linguistic influence. What did this structure allow you to achieve? Is experimentation an important part of your creative process?
I've always been enamoured with palimpsests as a metaphor for the inescapability of memory and history, and given the subject matter of the poem this form seemed an obvious choice.
Layering the text in this way allowed me to play with the contrast between intellectual traditions, with the 'under-text' representing an analytical and purportedly objective approach to deconstructing and explaining reality, while the main text brings subjectivity and emotion to the fore. I used to work in academia so writing the 'under-text' was a fun way to brush off the decade-old cobwebs of that writing style.
The palimpsest also serves a metaphorical purpose, to my mind it speaks to the echoes of memory and the implicit influences that structure our thought. Finally, it represents the experience of living in a colonised land, where colonial cultural narratives are superimposed on First Nations history.
Experimentation with new structures and creative restraints is a key part of my process. Following a recent period where I was experimenting with various mathematically-based restraints, my next foray is going to be exploring different poetic forms, starting with the sestina.
You mention you were an “accidental finalist” in the Australian Poetry Slam. What do you enjoy about slam poetry?
I'm not a particularly experienced slam poet, but I do enjoy performing my pieces for a live audience. I enjoy public speaking in general, as I find the interaction with the audience energises me and puts me into this incredible flow state.
I also love the way the poem mutates in the performance, with variations in tone of voice and prosody bringing out unexpected elements of the work. I remember reading a piece that was intended to be quite serious and being surprised at one point to hear laughter from the audience, and afterwards when I revisit the piece I could see the humour in it that I hadn't previously realised was there. It's a fascinating way to learn more about your own work.
Which writers or poets do you find yourself returning to? Who is at the top of your reading list at the moment?
I revisit Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter about once a year; it's an incredible melding of narrative and poetic forms that perfectly captures the experience of grief. In that vein, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky is another favourite piece of long form poetry.
Lately I have tended to be drawn toward short-form work, with Nadia Rhook and Raymond Antrobus on high rotation. I'm also slowly chipping away at the Penguin Book of Oulipo, and plan to finally get around to reading Dubliners over the holiday break.
Jonathan Battista is an author and poet, the winner of the inaugural Alethia Literary Quarterly prose poetry award, and an accidental finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam. He lives on Dharug and Gundungurra Country in the Blue Mountains with his wife and son.