Open Page with Judith Beveridge

Why do you write? I feel deeply alive when I am being creative, despite the frustrations. I love the challenge of trying to find the right words and turning language into song. Are you a vivid dreamer? Some of my dream landscapes have been both the most exquisitely beautiful and the most terrifying places I have ever seen. But mostly my dreams are common anxiety ones about snakes and being naked in public. Where are you happiest? At home with my husband, Stephen Edgar, and with our dog, Bandit, sitting on the couch reading, talking, or watching a police drama. And I’m very happy after an afternoon nap. What is your favourite word? I love most words unconditionally and without favour for their sound rather than their meanings. I adore the sonic resonances a poem can set up. Which human quality do you most admire? Equanimity. Courage. There can never be enough compassion in the world. Praise. Gratitude. Spaciousness in heart and mind. Honesty. Patience. It’s hard to pick one. Where would you like to have been born? In a world where no animal of any kind ever suffers cruelty. What is your favourite book? The anthology I am constantly compiling in my head. It contains all my favourite poems. And your favourite literary hero and heroine? Yudhisthira from The Mahabharata. Cordelia from King Lear. What, if anything, impedes your writing? The sheer difficulty of the art form. Good poems are hard to write, and the time they take difficult to find. Teaching also impedes my writing. The way I get myself out of a rut is to feed my imagination with books of all sorts, mainly poetry and non-fiction. How old were you when your first book appeared? Thirty-one, but I swear I only looked twenty-nine. Of which of your books are you fondest? My second book, Accidental Grace (1996), because it demanded the most effort. I hope to be fondest of the book I write when I’m in my mid-eighties and am at last without any self-centred ambition. In a phrase, how would you characterise your work? I would like it to be both meditative and dynamic, imagistic and musical, and above all artistically sublime. But I’m happy if I can just keep improving and learning new things. Who is your favourite author? I’m always going back to Rilke, Robert Frost, Philip Levine, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Emily Dickinson. How do you regard publishers? I have only dealt with small or independent publishers, and have found them very supportive, thoroughly devoted to what they do under trying financial circumstances. I am disappointed with the larger publishing houses that won’t publish poetry. It seems to me to be a failure of vision. What do you think of the state of criticism? I wish we had critics reviewing books who weren’t writers or academics but who were simply passionate readers involved in various walks of life. At present, criticism seems a mixed bag. Some reviewers are terrific, others seem to merely describe rather than come to grips adequately with what they are reviewing. If you had your time over again, would you choose to be a writer? It is inconceivable for me to imagine being me and not writing. But if I came back with a different psycho-spiritual make-up, I’d like to be a physicist who could unravel some of the physical mysteries of the universe. What do you think of writers’ festivals? I like them because of the social element, but I don’t like the way writers can become celebrities or stars. I believe the writing should always be the focus, not the writer – and festivals should never just serve the publishers. I can’t see why festivals only invite writers who have recently published. Do you feel artists are valued in our society? As a rule, no. But if you look at the sorts of things that are valued by our society, you wonder if you’d really want the validation. Most artists are constantly smelling the wolf’s breath coming through the floorboards, so when you hear about the large sums paid out to television stars and sportspeople, it does rankle. What are you working on now? I’m writing a new book of poems about which I’d like to remain tight-lipped. Judith Beveridge latest poetry publications are Devadatta’s Poems and Hook and Eye, which has just been published by George Braziller for the US market. She is the poetry editor for Meanjin.

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