Mark Tredinnick is an Australian poet, teacher, and essayist who has won major prizes including the Montreal International Poetry Prize, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, Ron Petty Prize, Newcastle Poetry Prize, and Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Recently, he won the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) at the 2020 Australia Day Honors for his service to literature and education. 

His widely published works of poetry and prose include A Beginner’s Guide, Walking Underwater, A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, and The Blue Plateau. Fire Diary won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award in 2011 while The Blue Plateau won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010. He was a lawyer and book publisher before losing his way into poetry. 

Chikodi Olasode: Can you tell us what informed your sojourn into poetry? 

Mark Tredinnick: I came to poetry late, having begun it very early. I never wasn’t reading poetry, and my heart knew what it was for. But no one I knew had me believe poetry was a life you could live, so I went to university and studied other things, and I went to work, and I professed different things—the law and the book publishing. My first poem was not published till I was over forty, although by then I had four or five books of prose and many essays in the world. You could say I served a long apprenticeship.

Structure and form matter to me, and always did, especially the kinds nature makes, and architecture and women and men and children. And language. Ten years after university finished, after a couple of years in law and eight in book publishing, I was in my early thirties, and it felt like I was letting too much of my life slip past. So, I began to turn my attention to writing, but prose at first. I wrote essays and a work that still feels like my favorite child, The Blue Plateau. It was not till about 2004 that my first finished, full-grown poems began to get written and published.

Although I’d loved and read poetry all along, I stumbled into writing it. I had to be tripped up, it seems. It happened in the course of my doctoral work—an ecocritical exploration of nature writing, in particular North American nature writing. I was looking at prose, but I realized it was the lyric dimen­sion of writing like James Galvin’s and Laurie Kutchins’s, Barry Lopez’s and Terry Tempest Williams’s and Peter Matthiessen’s that did most of the work of catching the lyric of places. It was also true that a number of the writers in this genre write poetry, too. I needed to decide if I studied nature poetry or just prose. I decided to touch on poetry, and that sent me off to learn what poetry is and how you fashion it—prosody, craft, meter, form. From that intense apprenticeship, my own poems, which had been writing themselves without knowing what form to take and how to end, began to arrive and stay. One was “Ubirr Rock,” a villanelle, which in my mind is my first published poem. It shortlisted for one of our big Australian prizes, the ABR (now the Peter Porter), and that listing convinced me I could write poems, so I pushed on. 

It had also dawned on me that to make poetry one had to live poetically. Poetry is a way of seeing, and it is a way of being, and it is only after that a way of saying the world. And I’ve lived my life in poetry ever since, as awkwardly as the next person, but like a bird that’s found its habitat at last.

Since 2005, I have published eight or nine books of poetry, including five full collections. Trouble is that in those long stretches of time when life will not allow one to live and see and say poetically, because one has to earn a living or fight for one’s living or one’s children’s freedom, I don’t feel fully alive. Sometimes I think I took too long to come to poetry, that I might have written better had I known earlier how to begin; other times, I know for sure I arrived exactly when I was meant to, having learned what it means to love and lose—marriages, one’s livelihood, one’s way, for a time oneself—and what life costs and how it goes for others. I think one writes better when one has lost one’s way and found it again. Poetry is an old, old craft, and it takes a long time to learn it. It’s a slow craft, a prac­tice of slow living, a deeper speaking, and it’s right to serve a long initiation.

Olasode: Tell us about those who influ­enced your writings greatly.

Tredinnick: I recently wrote an answer to this question in an interview I did with Stylus. I let myself answer this question fully, and the list of writers and artists and thinkers and teachers and friends and musicians is long. It is a whole complex ecology of intercon­nection.

I’d like to add here that my partner Jodie Williams inspires me daily with her courage and spirit and beauty and the care she takes of me. There are some poems in A Gathered Distance, my last book, that acknowledge her and the happiness she’s brought to my days; there are more poems for her in my book Walking Underwater. In particular, the poem “The Godwit,” written for Jodie on her fiftieth birthday. 

Let me add these thoughts. Birds are the best poets. Trees make the best chamber music. Children are children, but they are also sometimes Yoda and Mira and Hildegard of Bingen com­bined. The writers—both poets and prose writers—whose works, if not always their lives, have influenced me come from most continents and many languages on earth: from China, Chile, Spain, Japan, Persia, India, Canada, Cornwall, Scotland, England, Wyoming, Afghanistan, Kenya, Alaska, Arnhem Land, Russia, Sydney, Alice Springs, Tasmania, Poland, Tibet, and Siberia. In my last year of school, I stud­ied Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Keats, along with Shakespeare, and what I learned in their writing (the mys­ticism, the wildness, the poise, the craft) you can still find in my work. When I was in my teens and beginning to write, James Tulip, a friend from our church, who also taught literature at Sydney University, looked at some early work and suggested I read the Australian poet Robert Gray and the imagist William Carlos Williams. What I learned from those writers was to speak in the idiom of my place and times, and to lodge all abstractions in images and things, and I’m grateful to Jim Tulip for leading me so gently to those lessons, which shaped me. Late on, James Galvin intro­duced me to Charles Wright’s poems, and there I learned how freeing form could be, at a time when form was what I needed to understand. As friends and guides, Barry Lopez and Jane Hirshfield have shaped me more than they realize. In the last decade, my work has been discovered in China, and I have come under the influence of writers like Du Fu and Li Bai and contemporary poets—Jidi Majia, in particular. But lately, too, it’s dawned on me how white my read­ing’s been. It shows in any list I make of how my poetry was shaped, and it shows on my desk and bookshelves. To live in the dominant culture, inside privilege, is, one realizes (but with luck not too late) like living in lockdown and mistaking it for the world. I don’t believe any of us are determined fully or defined by our cultural identities, our color or gender or class. Poetry is a prac­tice in all cultures of counterpointing stereotype and transcending identity and tribe. Deeper than identity is the Self, and that is where literature needs to send its tap root. 

Olasode: In an interview with with Julie Perrin in Dumbo Feathers, you explained that poetry answers the onto­logical crisis and profound loneliness of our time and place. Tell us why you think poetry gives meaning to our ever-busy lives.

Tredinnick: Human beings are lan­guaging animals. Our capacity to make meaning and transact our lives in words defines us as a species. We are, in other words, in and through language. Each of us and all of us. When our language is wealthy and wholesome and compas­sionate and wise and full of earth, we are too. When it is not, when it is mea­gre and nasty, like, say Donald Trump’s, so are we; when it is exploitive, when it is shallow, when it is cliched, so are we. Poetry is, at its best, language in its highest form, in its deepest, most musi­cal, its profoundest and most generous, form. It follows that when we—individ­ually and at large—live our lives under the influence of poetry and poetic language, we live lives more likely to be generous and discerning, lyrical and reverential, clear of head and serious of heart. 

When society at large, and each of us in it, are doing poetry and doing it well, we are bearing out our humanity in its fullest and proudest and deepest and wisest. When we live in cant and banter and cliché and chit chat, as we mostly do, that aspect of our being that is not witnessed or held by such slight discourses, is not nourished. When dis­course is toxic, our lives are poisoned, our hearts dismayed. We are trauma­tized. In many parts of the world, most people, it sometimes seems to me, live in a kind of PTSD, induced by the failure of the language that prevails. The flight of values is the flight of poetry from our lives. The crisis of loneliness is the inad­equacy of the language in which we try to tell ourselves who we are and what is asked of us. 

Poetry is a deeper speaking, and with­out it in our lives and ears and mouths, our speech is shallow, and our lives are plastic. Poetry is for soul-making, said Keats. Let’s just say we still have souls. Poetry is for selving. Let’s just say we still have selves. Our souls shrink and our selves grow shrill without poetry in the language that fashions meaning for us in our daily lives. 

Poetry, in other words, has an account to make of each human life and all human lives. It, alone, catches and does justice to Being, to what it is like to live in the terror and beauty and horror and ecstasy. We are lonely for where we are, writes Tim Lilburn. Poetry helps us cope.

Poetry, in all the traditions across cul­ture and time, has done something else our prevailing discourses—academic, mercantile, political, social—fail these days to do. It remembers the earth in every phrase; it writes human lives as if they were, among other things, a manifestation of the natural world, as if they were species of place, kindred with country. Poetry—poetry in all tongues in all ages, if it’s any good—has always been a kind of spiritual ecology, a geo­phany, as Tim Robinson puts it. It helps us locate human meaning and articu­late human belonging, within the more than merely human world. It reminds us we are spiritual organisms, languag­ing, self-aware mammals. Even the word “human” comes from the Latin word for earth or soil. We are earthlings. For all of human history until very recently, to be human meant many things, but among them, to be part of an ecosystem, a participant in a place. Which meant that one lived in place, not just in time. Take away place from our sense of identity, of self, and one is always on one’s way out. To seek mean­ing in merely social, commercial, urban realms, is to come up very short. Poetry, on the other hand, will help a human make a meaning much larger than the merely human, a self much larger than an ego. It’ll place you again, land you somewhere that needs you and may just feed your senses and synapses with the kind of food that will satisfy a spiritual kind of hunger.

We’ve lost, in short, our kinship with country; poetry can help us find it again. This is a truth indigenous cul­tures in my home land, Australia, have never, even under the depredations of colonialism, lost touch with. 

One more thing: we have forgotten, for lots of reasons, how to live with an apt sense of awe—astonishment at the miracle this is we inhabit. We have forgotten, because prevailing discourse disparages such apprehension, how to draw meaning and delight from the forms of things (the colors and shapes and weights and scents and voices and textures of things); how to appreciate beauty and fashion it in the world. Poetry has body; it has form. It can take us back to ours, and to the forms we live among in the world. Not just the concepts and digits, but the shape and weight and topography of things. Poetry credits such data and gives it second life in language. It lets us know beauty again, our own and others.’ It reminds us how to live lyrically, grate­fully, lovingly, organically. It wilds us again. It worlds us. The idiom of poetry is love. Not sentiment, not ideology, not platitude, not theory, not stereo­type, not spin. The grammar of poetry is the grammar of the world within the world we think we know. 

Olasode: In your poem “Walking Underwater,” I connected with a keen sense of dislocation, displacement, and disconnection to place and land. Can you share that brief moment of detach­ment and alienation from yourself and place that is reflected in this poem?

Tredinnick: At the time I wrote the poem I was traveling in North America. Specifically, I was in Portland, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest. I was a long way from home, and I was missing my young children, and I was teaching myself, as you do in a new place, how the light went and how the weather rolled. It seemed to me a place that didn’t know how to stop raining, lovely though Oregon was; I was struck, too, by how, to my senses, afternoon began at breakfast and lasted till dusk. To my antipodean eye the light is low, and I felt a little dark in it. I was staying with a friend, though, a fellow poet Kim Stafford, to whom the poem is dedicat­ed. Kim had taken me on a long walk the day before, all the way up Eagle Creek, one of the tributaries of the great Columbia River, and the coun­try was dark green and unspeakably young and beautifully, and it rained all the time. So, in part, my poem’s title “Walking Underwater” is a joke, at my friend’s expense, about the weather in Portland. A sly tribute to a friendship and a piece of holy ground—a place made of rain. It’s a poem that reports the way our conversation—our talking underwater—went. But like all poems, “Walking Underwater” is not reducible to the moment it arose from. There is a lot more going on in it, as you discern, because there was a lot going on in the world and in me. A lot of displacement.

I was in Portland immediately after the earthquake and tsunami that struck the coast of northern Japan. The Fukushima tsunami of March 11, 2011. The whole earth had shifted as I flew. One of the plates on which the conti­nents float had subducted another, and the sea inundated Fukushima in a vast surge, and over ten thousand people were carried away. Such an episode of the restless, unfinished earth, is a tragedy for those caught up in it, and profoundly unsettling and saddening to witness. And so, my poem, written in the days that followed this reshap­ing of the earth’s surface and all the human loss that ensured, records this geomorphology, and carries my sad­ness and awe and tries to come, again, to terms with the suffering entailed in living mortal lives on an unfinished and febrile planet. The poem mourns and it makes prayer and it bears witness and it takes a poet on a walk with a friend to contemplate the nature of the human relationship with the land. 

What’s going on in the poem, then, is simply the world—the earth transpir­ing the way it does and costing what it costs. The poem realizes, I think, that no one is ever truly safe in their life, because this is the earth and it is not done making all the scenery yet, as James Galvin has one of his characters put it in his novel, Fencing the Sky. The poem is conscious, too, of the disloca­tions war, mostly waged by tyrants and privileged nations, causes across the planet, the displacement of people from their homelands, the refugee crisis. The poem is also aware that to be a poet is to stand always somewhat outside your family, your people, your place, your times, in order to get the witnessing done, and because poets and artists, always refusing the party line, always questioning authority and conven­tional wisdom, are not easy folks to live with; that to be a poet is to be a hermit, a pilgrim, a traveler, an exile. When I look back now, I see what I didn’t real­ize then—personally, I was walking a threshold. This was a moment when my life was leaving one relationship, the one that had held me and almost defined me for ten years, and moving into solitude or another relationship, it was hard to say which. I was, in other words, a little outside myself, and out of sorts. 

The poem was, I suppose, an attempt to find consolation for a personal and a more existential dislocation—in friend­ship, in place, in weather, in rivers, in older wisdom than one’s own, in poetry itself, in language. I suppose, in a way, led by my friend, I carry my suffering, and others’ suffering, to the river, that ceaseless Self, that Book of Changes, and I find some calm there, some instruction in the art of living on when all seems lost and the seas are rising about you. 

Olasode: While reading to your daugh­ter in the poem, “What the Light Tells,” you said, “Start over, make a hearth, shape a living. Constellating all the points of light …” Are you advocating for human lives be lived to its fullest?

Tredinnick: I was thinking about how to put a life together again. How my girl might put hers together, and I mine, in the wake of a divorce that broke the constellation we all once were. I was playing in that poem with an idea a friend had given me: think of yourself, he said to me, as one star in a large and shapely constellation of all those who love you, and whom you love. Your life, if you see it that way, is large and bright, and way more robust than yours might feel on its own right now. I was thinking of how one might reimagine one’s life and oneself as a place, or a garden, or an ecology, or as in Steve’s metaphor, a pattern of stars: not one tree, not one animal, not one star, but a “family of things,” to use Mary Oliver’s beautiful phrase. It made me feel a whole lot more capable of my life, it made me feel hum­bler and grander at the same time. The self as a village, the self as a Milky Way. And I wanted that consolation for Lucy; I needed to feel, and for her to feel, she belonged to a constellation of love, and that though her days, like mine, might seem dark sometimes, and though her own particular star might forget now and then how to shine, the galaxy of affection that she is shone on, and her work was to have faith in that and, like me, to “shape a living constellating all the points of light.” One is already much more than one believes. One is the pattern of interrelated affections and ties that bind and tether you—that pattern, that fabric, that web is who one really is. This is what the light told me and what I wanted Lucy (whose name means “bearer of the light”) to know. 

Olasode: Poetry is a powerful feeling and as an emerging poet, there are times I write things that surprise me. Are there times you feel astonished by the content of your poem?

Tredinnick: That’s a lovely ques­tion. I have always loved these words of Norman Maclean: “All good things come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.” Poems arrive. You call them to you by making yourself ready to hear them and get them down, free of your own personal clichés and the commonplaces of your time and place. You earn the grace by learning the craft and applying it. And even then, most of what you set down will fail the inspiration that struck. Any worthy phrase you make, you make with help from beyond you—from the rest of who you are, from the place, from what the Romans used to call the Genies (minor deities who lived in the walls), from what the Greeks called the Muse, from what in Spanish they call Duende, from overheard conversations, from birdsong and light and music. That’s how it feels, anyway, and many other writers have put it this way. Most of the work of the poet, Seamus Heaney said, is to get out of their own way. And how you do that is by reading well and by listening closely to your language and asking more of it and of yourself. You get out of your way by learning meter and form and prosody. You get out or your way by making draft after draft. And how you get out of your way is unique to you, so that how you hear and transcribe what seemed to want you to say it is inimitable. 

All this means that your best work is way better than you were capable of alone. You made yourself worthy of the help language could give you. You escaped the tendency of your own mind to foreclose, as Heaney says it, and you entered into a consciousness larger than your own. You became a place. You became the part of the place that knew how to listen and type. Sometimes that process comes easy and sometimes it comes hard. Some of my most apparently effortless work cost me days of labor; some of my better phrasings wrote themselves. There is no one right way. As with theory, so with practice.

Olasode: Many writers have ways they get inspired and things that inspire them. What are your magic moments? 

Tredinnick: Birds and natural epiph­anies inspire me. So do children, and love, and conversation and reading. Getting writing made has less to do with what I imbibe or what I burn or play or where I sit, than having enough unclaimed time to make a start. I’ve lacked that lately, and in the absence of time, no amount of my habitual commitment and determination and will power have helped. Deadlines help, under circumstances like these. In a busy life, and mine’s grown busy, I get done what is asked of me, and what is not urgent tends not to take shape, until it is. I write in fits and starts. When I write, I write more than I meant to, one piece inciting another, as if writing itself creates the right conditions for writing to happen. And then I don’t write, because the genies go on holidays or life or other work—like teaching and mentoring—take over. And I hate the not writing, because I start to feel I’ve lost the knack. Then, time opens up, and inspiration strikes, or a deadline falls, and I write—wherever I am on whatever I’ve got. I like the early morn­ing, and I don’t write well in company—at cafes, with a child or partner watch­ing me, or with music or television or chatter or dogs in the background. 

Necessity often gets me to the table, just in time, and then grace often turns up. Like this. A few weeks back, I set an alarm and woke at six, because I had a poem due that night—a commission. The days before when I might have written it, I took notes and worried a lot, and I did other things like caring for the children, and writing curriculum and preparing slides, and walking the dog, and marking papers, and spending time with the woman I love. So, the day had arrived, and I had in mind some thoughts and a theme and what I thought was my opening line, and an idea of form and a handful of birds and a sand dune and three other images. It was winter and the house was cold when I woke, and I hadn’t slept long enough, and the coffee wasn’t working yet. On my way to the desk, I looked out the window, and at that moment, in the half-light, an egret landed in the shallows of the lake, and it took me a full minute to realize my poem had arrived. And though I had not intended to write a poem that began with that bird, that was the poem I wrote, and the first stanza happened fast, and the last eight happened slowly, but by the end of the day I had a poem I was proud of. Already by the time I submitted it, I had taken it, a poem of eighty lines, though three edits. I’ve recast it a little since, and I’ll work on it a little more before it goes in my next book. But I know that poem would not have found me if the bird had not, and I know the bird found me because I got up at dawn, and I got up at dawn because poetry is work, too, and it must sometimes be done to schedule and so it was with this one, which is why I got up early to make a poem and the egret delivered it to me. Olasode: You teach various poetic forms and nurture students to identify the forms that best suits their voice and creativity. As a teacher, can you tell us of your methods or approaches in achiev­ing this?

Tredinnick: The pandemic forced me to learn how to teach online. It then occurred to me that I could run poetry masterclasses on Zoom and reach stu­dents around the world. I ran the first series of What the Light Tells in May and June of 2020, and I’ve just finished the second season. I have a sense that form is the cage a poem dances down: no form, no dance. Modernism was a turning away from form and formal­ism, but it turns out that a poem is an architecture of utterance, a sculpture of voice, and it’s hard to put the pres­sure on language that makes a poetic utterance poetic without constraining free utterance through some kind of design. Poetry is the sound of lan­guage organized in lines, writes James Longenbach. I teach form, rather than forms; I sample twenty-odd forms, from sijo to ghazal, as a way of encouraging poets to think and speak in lines and cadences. Rhythm and other species of speech music are a big deal too. Most of what we do via zoom in my masterclass is workshop new poems participants share, most written in response to prompts and as essays in form. I read poems very closely. Beyond that, classes are one part inspiration (provided by the poems I set and some thoughts I offer); one part craft (each week I teach a prosodic device); one part mentorship; and one part the mystery of what happens when a dozen people get together across the miles to talk and practice poetry. Two years ago, in China, I presented a paper, “The Six Gifts of Poetry,” and in each of the six weeks of the masterclass I share one of those gifts. The first is Freedom, the sixth is Justice. You’ll have to take the course to learn the others. 

Olasode: Poets work with language and meta-language when creating unique lines. I’m a particularly thrilled by the finesse with which your poems court nature. How do you achieve this syner­gy of language and meta-language?

Tredinnick: A poet brings a whole life (and for all I know, other lives and former lives and ancestral lives and future lives) to a poem. Each of us is a complex ecology. The poetry that rises from us speaks multitudes if I may riff on Walt Whitman. It is plural. One responds to moments and ideas and urgencies and problems and prompts and troubles and joys with all that one’s got. In a language that aims to overhear the music of the intelligence of things. One’s language hopes to have a clarity not too simple and a simplicity not too clear. You’ll tend to write your afflic­tions, affections, and addictions. And you’ll write about them with all that you are and most of what you know. What that means is that poetic utter­ance seems more poised, more sprung, more suggestive, more resonant than prose or chatter. I write birds because I love them, and I write nature because it’s natural, if you’ll excuse my putting it that way. I court nature, as you put it, because I believe that when we neglect the world beyond our human hearts and heads, we do justice neither to the world nor to ourselves. And when I write—nature, love, grief, philosophy, anything—what you hear is many voic­es and states of consciousness and many values and intelligences and experienc­es of life: you hear the King James Bible; you hear a cello; you hear an MBA; fatherhood; you hear geographies; you hear libraries; you hear childhood and scholarship and cricket and deserts; you hear grammar and you hear sandstone and you hear Latin and you hear rivers. If my poems have layers and textures and dimensions and reverb, it’s because they come from nearly everywhere at once. If I have things to say and thoughts to think and metaphors, it’s because I believe in saying and think­ing and being and likening. I believe in making beautiful sense. If there are sound worlds, it’s because I believe that no poem is right till its music is right; if there is rhythm, it’s because I believe with Eliot it is the most powerful force on earth and I love it as I love the birds.

Olasode: I love the way your poem “A Gathered Distance” is intricately woven. Can you shed some light on its beautiful crafting?

Tredinnick: In 2016 I was poet in res­idence at the Sydney Botanic Gardens. The poem is one of the works I made that year. At the time I lived in a small apartment whose large balcony looked south across a reach of the inner harbor to where the gardens lie, at the place where European settlement began on this land. Farm Cove, the settlers called it, and it had long been cultivated by the Eora people whose land it is. The poem speaks out what I could see of the gardens and what I knew of them by walking there and working with the people who curate them now; and it reflects on the idea of colonial gardens of that sort, where species from around this landmass and from every continent on earth are gathered, the gathered distances, to make a present tense. The poem also considers “how a garden hangs together” as a metaphor for how “one might cohere and carry on.” I drew on the wisdom of a complex, holy place, because it was there and because I had been asked to think freely and usefully about that place on the occasion of its two-hundredth birthday, and because I had a been asked to go without my children in the wake of a divorce, and my very being felt scattered. The poem is an attempt among many other things to understand trauma, starting but not ending with my own. To make chaos over into some kind of coherence. So, I write “Gather all your distances, and / father all your orphan fears; hold them / Near, as a father might, his chil­dren scattered now, / If only he could. Husband all the futures up from out of all the pasts. / And make a garden / of every sorrow you never will / Outgrow.”