English

Maree Arrow, Birrong Girls High School, contacted Deb in June, 2001, seeking her comments on her own poetry. Most of what is below comes from Deb’s as yet unpublished book called Taking Off...

General questions

FAQs on specific poems:

'mouth to mouth'

'Dapto dressing up'

'shells'

'The Scribe’s Daughter'

'The prince'

In your introduction to mouth to mouth you describe your creations as if they are fabrics or art wearables. Why?

I wanted to convey a sense of the poem as a made object, a ‘composition’.

When I was a child I thought I would grow up to be an artist – I wanted to be. I was a compulsive maker of pictures: drawings, designs, paintings, floral decorations, sculptures made from found objects and from clay dug out of the creek bed. Later I experimented with textiles and with printmaking. These days my visual arts practise is entirely ceramic sculpture.

So, the creative process is the engine that drives my life, it’s just that over time I’ve become more and more inclined to make my pictures, to tell my stories, with words.

Do you think students reading the poems set for study would have a good understanding of you as a poet?

I think I’m one of many writers and teachers who find it both interesting and disappointing that, whereas it is considered reasonable to expect students to read a whole novel or a whole play an object of study, to read more than seven poems from a small book of poems is deemed to be excessive.

Having said that, I think the choice of poems selected from mouth to mouth for study is very good.

They are accessible I think, in their language and at the same time concern themselves with ideas to do with love, social justice etc., which are still central to me, and important to the students too.

Why did you call the collection mouth to mouth?

When you’ve just put together a collection of your work for publication, you need to choose a title for it that in some way represents the themes of the entire collection.

At the same time, if you’re choosing a title from something within the collection, it must be a strong enough poem to bear the weight, the attention, that being the title poem will bring to it. The poem “mouth to mouth” fulfilled those criteria for me.

In several of the set poems you seem to be exploring types of pain. Would you talk to this, please?

William Carlos Williams, an American poet of the last century, is quoted as saying that “poetry is a machine for making meaning”. Of course it is much more too, but those words go some way, I think, towards describing one of my motivations for beginning to write.

The poems in “mouth to mouth” represent the first 15 years of my work, which began when I was 19 and had just moved away from my family and the place where I was born. By then I had already seen and experienced a good deal of pain and injustice. So much of it seemed incomprehensible to me that I felt compelled to wring some meaning or understanding from it.

At that time I met people like the poet/songwriter John Broomhall and various American teachers who were over here to work and avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. They introduced me to the lyrics of people like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Pete Seeger, the poetry of Pablo Neruda too. So, I realized then that not only did the things that mattered to me matter to other people, but that it was possible to write about them – beautifully, movingly! I wanted/want to do that.

What sort of poems do you like reading?

That’s a big question. I read a lot of poetry, and I’m in the extremely fortunate and privileged position of being able to count many of this country’s best poets among my friends. I go to hear them read when I can, and I recommend that you do this when you can (The NSW Writers Centre at Rozelle publishes a newsletter with info on this) because after you’ve heard a poet read their work you can hear their voice in your head then when you approach the work on the page. It helps to bring the work alive. You can get hooked on listening to poetry. The ABC’s Radio National has an excellent poetry program every Saturday arvo after the 2pm news it’s called “Poetica”.

I admire the work of Joanne Burns, Brook Emery, Peter Skrzynecki, Jill Jones, Keri Glastonbury amongst the Sydney poets; Ron Pretty from Wollongong; Fay Zwicky from Western Australia; Lauren Williams from Melbourne, and Mark O’Flynn amongst my friends in the Blue Mountains.

I love the passion of the South American and Russian poets – contemporary American poets such as Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds as well as the whole traditional Japanese aesthetic of the spirit discovering itself amongst the things of this world.

The following material is all from Deb Westbury’s book Taking Off... (a classroom guide to reading, writing and thinking about poetry). Since Deb’s poems were first set for the HSC, in 1998, she began talking to school students about her poetry and about poetry in general. Taking Off... contains answers to commonly asked questions on the poems set for study. Deb has the copyright on this as yet unpublished book, but has given NSW HSC Online permission to reproduce the following.

Since mouth to mouth was first published in 1990 I have read the various reviews and interpretations of its poems with interest and sometimes astonishment. Various readers have found meaning and allusion in my poems that were never intended or that I was completely ignorant of – for example, a recent intelligent reader found the myth of Vulcan and Haephestus imbedded in The prince. This interpretation, now that it has been pointed out, makes complete sense to me, even though I was not consciously referring to it when I wrote “The prince”.

What I have said about poems from mouth to mouth in response to various specific questions are merely statements about what I intended to convey when the poems were written. If anything here causes readers to abandon or invalidate their own responses I would feel that I had done a great disservice to poetry.

What is written here about the intentions and impetus for individual poems is meant to add to the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the work rather than to displace the reader’s own responses and interpretations which are perfectly valid because they are theirs.

What is the “tide of red” referring to in the first section of the poem?

The use of the colour red here is meant to trigger for the reader/listener common associations such as blood, heat, violence, passion, fire, communism and, even war in general.

Joining “red” and “tide” is meant to convey the movement of war/invasion as an inexorable force (like the natural movements of the oceans) which affects everything in its wake, coming and going.

What is meant by “distance and the end / of pain and the ocean / still out of sight”?

This is to remind us that for the refugees, escaping from the war in their homeland was only the first step towards safety. To escape frequently meant exposure to a whole series of further dangers such as robbery, rape and murder by pirates and/or the usual perils of exposure to the elements sea; exposure, dehydration, starvation, drowning, being eaten by sharks.

There is, at the end of such a journey, no guarantee of survival or sanctuary for the refugee either - even the precise destination is uncertain “...the end / of...the ocean / still out of sight”.

What does the line “coaxing you back to life” say about the condition of the refugee who reaches land on a beach in the Philippines?

The man who told me this story explained that after he had escaped the war in his country, and after the pirates had attacked his boat that he had been thrown into the sea. He said he had no memory of anything then until he had found himself on a beach somewhere. By then he was so close to death that he wasn't sure whether he was dead or alive. He had already suffered so much that he didn't know whether he wanted to live or die. His lips and throat were so badly affected by the sun and sea, that he could not take in the nourishment that would enable him to survive. So the action of the Filipino villager who fed the coconut milk through the straw directly into the refugee's mouth had the effect of gently leading - “coaxing” the shipwrecked man away from death and closer to life.

What is meant by “transportation, life / to the vast refugee camp / of the Antipodes”?

The words “transportation” “life” are meant to create an echo in the reader's mind of Australia's colonial history, when “transportation” for “the term of his/her natural life” was a harsh sentence of punishment handed down on prisoners by the British criminal “justice” system.

It could be said that the many first settlers who came as convicts and involuntarily to Australia were “refugees” in a sense, from an unjust political/judicial system in Britain.

Since these first “refugees” came to Australia from Britain others have followed, fleeing war and injustice in Europe, and more recently, in South East Asia and the Middle East. The phrase “refugee camp” should underscore the idea that all non-indigenous people in this country are in a sense foreigners, and the way we tend to stick together in largely homogenous social/cultural groups is almost a metaphor for the refugee camp. “Antipodes” was a term commonly used in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to emphasise the great distance of Australia (and New Zealand) from what was regarded then as the centre of civilisation and the “known world”. Therefore part of the terror and harshness of “transportation” for “life” was the idea of banishment to the “ends of the earth”.

Who do the terms “dispossessed” and “empire builders” refer to and what is the significance of this in relation to what the students are learning?

Put very simply: people go to war because they want what other people have. Now whether it is land, minerals, precious stones, cheap labour or water that the aggressors want, the result for the victim is the same - dispossession. The powerful (in material/physical terms) triumph over the weak - generally because they posses superior technology of some kind. Sometimes this process of possession and dispossession takes place on a very large scale, as it did in recent centuries, when countries such as Spain, Holland (The Netherlands), England and France set about war, invasion and colonisation of other peoples as a means of creating powerful empires. This is called Imperialism, and history shows us that these rises and falls in the fortunes of groups of people can be cyclical. The dispossessed resolve to be the conquerors rather than the conquered in future and to this end learn, from their experience and from watching the enemy, the knowledge and technology to do so. The people of Cambodia and Vietnam, defeated by the more sophisticated technologies of China and the West, have since applied themselves to learning how to use those technologies, such as advanced engineering and computer science, to their own advantage.

What is the significance of the student's living conditions as described in the first stanza of section iii?

Some of the answer to this question was alluded to in an earlier reference here to “refugee camps”, that is, that it is human nature, generally speaking, to take comfort in the familiar and habitual. Therefore it is not uncommon for us, in finding ourselves in a new place, to recreate the conditions of the place that we most recently experienced, even if the last place or circumstances were less than ideal. A lot has been written about this phenomena, especially in regard to domestic architecture in this country.

Some of the aspects of life in a refugee camp such as lack of food and utensils, the crowded living conditions and a shortage of resources that necessitate orderly cooperative behaviour like sharing and queuing, are also common to communal living in most parts of the world. It is logical then, that finding themselves a long way from home, these new settlers in a strange and possibly hostile place set about creating the conditions of living that they were most recently familiar with.

What are the “shared walls” and the singing in the last stanza?

Placed as it is, directly after the portrayal of sharing and cooperative living in the preceding stanza, the emphasis on the isolation of the narrator in the “middle cell” underscores a contrast between these ways of living and raises questions about the perceived advantages of both. Generally speaking in contemporary western culture the agreed ideals are for rights of individual over communal interests and the right/or need for individual privacy. However, the sound of voices singing next door reminds the narrator that walls preserve isolation as well as privacy.

How did you come to write this poem?

It was written in the mid-eighties, when I was teaching adult literacy at the Dapto College of Technical and Further Education. I taught a few evening classes which meant that I drove there as dusk was blurring the harsh outlines of human settlement into something gentler that emphasised the outlines of trees and escarpment.

There had been a popular Australian TV. program in the 1970's which made fun of Wollongong and Dapto in particular. Partly because my grandmother was born there, and also because I like to find beauty were it is not always obvious, this poem represents my attempt to see the beauty of Dapto.

What comparison is being made in this poem?

The landscape is a metaphor for a woman, not necessarily young any more, who is dressing up for a night on the town. As is the nature of metaphors, the woman too, represents Dapto, a place that before white settlement, before industrialisation, (mining, logging etc) would have been natural and unspoiled. The poem implies that, although in some ways the natural beauty of Dapto/the woman has been spoiled by misuse and/or harsh treatment, it is still beautiful in its own way.

What colours are referred to in the poem and how are they significant?

The colours referred to are turquoise, peacock blue and “the colour of aubergines” - deep purple. The night that I made the first notes for this poem the sky and the escarpment were exactly as I describe them in this poem.

It was after the line “she wants to wear short skirts” leapt spontaneously into these notes that I realised there was a woman in the poem - a woman who liked to dress up in short skirts and occasionally, in bright colours, and that the turquoise, peacock and the silver spangles were hers. The colour of the escarpment reminded me of bruises, that the woman who puts on a brave show of fancy clothes and makeup may be covering up injury or pain.

What is a “midden mound” referred to in the first stanza?

Midden mounds can be found in beaches, lakes, and coastal estuaries all over Australia, where our indigenous people over many thousands of years have camped and gathered shellfish.

What is being referred to in the lines “exposing you to all that / then” in the second stanza?

This stanza describes that spirit of adventure and curiosity that leads children to explore the world, regardless of inconveniences like the sharp edges of oyster shells and periwinkles. For the curious child all the shapes and colours of the rock platform are wondrous, and her/his openness to nature and life's possibilities is symbolised by the wind tugging at her/his buttons.

In the third stanza, how are the retirees like shells?

The shell metaphor is developed in several ways in this stanza. firstly through the imagery of the dwellings of “fibro aluminium and canvas”. There is a sense too, in which the words “your working life / carried you this far out” is evoking the journey of a sea shell carried by the ocean tide, as well as a kind of passivity on the part of the retirees.

Later in the stanza the image of the people “clustered like .... “ is to convey that tendency of most Australians, since colonisation at least, to live close together along the farthest edges of this huge continent. There is something of the ... “safety in numbers” tendency here, as if we are intimidated to some extent by what we imagine as the relative emptiness of our country's interior.

What is life like for the retirees?

Stanza four presents a picture of what a perpetual holiday can be like. Sometimes the pleasures of holiday life, like playing housie or cards, going to the club, having a barbeque with friends or going fishing, are no longer enjoyable when they become everyday activities.

After a lifetime in the city with jobs and commitments, some retirees find the perpetual holiday of retirement lonely and boring - the results of this unhappiness sometimes manifest as ill health, gambling and drinking problems as well as petty disputes with loved ones/neighbours etc.

What happens in the night?

Night is a time of rest and renewal for most creatures, including humans. When most of the distractions of daily life, including noises and activity , have receded, we are left with time for reflection. When we stop moving, sometimes we can feel the pain or illness in our body that we don't notice when we're busy. This can apply to spiritual and emotional suffering as well.

How has the person become like a shell?

When the creature inside of the shell has died, the shell is an empty thing, like a house without occupants, or a body without a spirit or soul.

In the case of the human being and his/her loss of spirit or soul, there are many ways that this loss can occur, especially over a whole lifetime. Some of these are explored in the poem. One example would be the loss or abandoning of meaningful work, and the failure or inability to recreate this in another context. Other examples would be the tendency to live in the past and in the future, rather than in the present, and finally, a failure to love.

Ultimately the body becomes a shell, when the actual life force inside of it leaves, and we are dead.

How did the scribe's daughter die?

The cause of the girl's death, like much about this story, is a mystery. When I read the article in the Sydney Morning Herald in early 1985 with the heading “Pillow of psalms the world's oldest book, says Egyptologist” it didn't say how the scribe's daughter had died. However the mystery surrounding her death and burial, as well as the discovery of the world's oldest book was, as a lover of books, absolutely fascinating for me. The poem itself grew out of my imaginative entering into the story, my wonderings about it. It is possible, for example, that she had a contagious disease, which is one possible reason for her having been buried in a pauper's grave, despite the fact that her family would have been wealthy. Another reason she may have been buried in this way is that, since she was twelve at the time of death, she could have been menstruating and therefore regarded as “unclean”. Perhaps she died as a result of a clash between adherents of the old, sun-worshipping Egyptian religion and those of the new Christian religion. Almost anything is possible.

What two causes could there be for the stains on the scribe's hands?

If one accepts that the book of psalms and his daughter were both the scribe's creations - both, in different ways, his labours of love - it is possible his hands were stained, not only with the ink that he used to write the book, but also with the blood of his daughter.

Why would he make a pillow of the book for his daughter?

Once again we cannot know the definitive answer to this, the poem only offers the poet's speculations based on the very few facts gleaned from the newspaper article that inspired the poem. However, bearing in mind that to write by hand a book 490 pages long would take a lot of work and dedication, indeed so much that it was probably truly “a labour of love” and that this “labour of love” was buried with his daughter. It is probably an indication of his great love for his daughter that he has dedicated the book to her in this way.

Another possibility is that the book and the daughter's death are in some way connected, that the scribe blames the book for his loss, so he buries the book to be rid of it. There are of course any number of other possibilities.

Why would the daughter have been singing songs / of prophesy, penitence and praise”?

The songs that are spoken of in this phrase are in fact a definition of what a psalm is. Proceeding from the assumption that the scribe who wrote down the psalms also loved his young daughter, I assumed he also shared them with her. If this was the case then it is likely that she learned to sing or recite them. The purpose of this image in the last stanza, of the father closing the lips of his daughter who used to sing the psalms is to make the girl more real to the reader and in so doing, emphasise the father's loss.

Why do you think the book of psalms was buried?

Again without the facts we can do no more than speculate about this.

Some of the possibilities I considered are that the scribe buried the book to keep it safe from those who might have wanted to steal or destroy it. Maybe the daughter had been killed, and the scribe's life too was in danger because of religious persecution. Perhaps the loss of his loved daughter made the scribe so discouraged and so distressed that he simply renounced everything, including the writing of books. Finally, even though it was an Egyptian rather than a Christian custom to bury precious objects with a corpse for use on “the other side” the scribe may have buried the book with his daughter for just this reason.

What is meant by the description of the fathers as “Latin” in the first line of the poem?

This is a shorthand way of indicating that they come originally from the southern Mediterranean region of Europe, sharing common linguistic roots which became significant to the English language as well.

What are the fathers doing in the early part of the poem, and why is it unusual?

This poem was written when the poet was teaching at Warrawong in 1980-81. Although in most communities it is usually mothers and other female relations or caregivers who collect very young children from school, the schools in this area proved a slight exception. A number of factors may have been a reason for this. For example, afternoon shift at the nearby steelworks, where most of the male population worked, coincided with the end of the school day - hence it was convenient for the men to collect their children on their way home from work. Also it was not common for this generation of Europeans to drive cars, and most unusual for the women to do so. For this reason and for cultural reasons also, the women tended to stay close to home, while the business of the “outside” world was performed by men.

While all these are generalisations it is possible to generalise further that some men from a southern European background are less reserved than their Anglo counterparts and more inclined to be emotionally demonstrative and affectionate - in this case in relation to their children.

What purpose is served in the poem by the reference in the first verse to the “shoppers, conceited men” etc. “all humming along on their own asteroids?”

An understanding of this question, indeed of the whole poem, depends on a careful reading of the stories listed at the front of the poem. The last five lines of the first verse refer to The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery. In this book, a little prince, who is the only inhabitant of a tiny planet visits all his neighbouring planets or asteroids on his way to earth. While the inhabitant of each asteroid is different, each one could be said to represent an archetype. Not only does each archetype represent certain typical human character traits, the self-absorption and self-importance of each one is typical also.

Therefore this section of the poem is a metaphor for those aspects of humanity which are deluded, and ignorant about the universal truth, the transcendent and omnipotent power of Love.

What is the significance of the fish symbolism throughout the poem?

Since ancient times, in many cultures, including those of southern Europe, the fish has been a symbol of eternal life and rebirth. In some of these cultures the people's practices of religions were almost the opposite of the Christian religion which came to replace them. Goddesses rather than Gods were worshipped, sacred and spiritual authority was in the hands of women; priestesses rather than priests. The earth and nature were revered, rather than exploited or “conquered”

When Christianity replaced these ancient religions, it also appropriated some of their rights and symbols. In this way the fish came to symbolise the mystery in Christianity of the Holy Communion, which represents the sacrifice of Christ - his death and rebirth.

This symbolism is also echoed in the story of the Steadfast Tin Soldier and metaphorically in The Happy Prince.

What is the significance of the “women in black” who “are guardians of the mystery”?

In the ancient Goddess worshipping cultures, mentioned in answer to the previous question, it was women who were in charge of the sacred knowledge (as symbolised by the fish) and mysteries of their people. The Goddess generally had three aspects; the virgin (non-menstruating or unmarried young woman) the matron (woman in her child-bearing years) and the crone (a woman from menopause to old age). The crone aspect of the Goddess was regarded with great respect as a wise elder of her community. It is she who is represented by the “women in black”. Although Christianity replaced the three aspects of the Goddess with a God of three aspects - father, son and holy ghost - vestiges of the old Goddess religion still persist in some southern European cultures with the result that some women still exercise considerable power and influence in their families and communities.

It has been customary too, that they wear black clothes after the death of a husband, an indication of “crone” status regardless of age.

What is meant by the lines “tomorrow he will take his ballerina / and leap into the fire”?

When the poet was a child her own father working at the steelworks, witnessed a fellow worker fall into a furnace full of boiling metal. The worker was, of course, totally incinerated. While the reference here may not be to a literal death, it does refer to a kind of metamorphosis that occurs when something changes from one state to another. In this case a person, a man, is entering the state of marriage and “marriage” is to be interpreted in its broadest meaning here as sacred union, the archetypal union with the Divine/Love. And with every change of state there is a kind of death. It would be useful at this point to examine, in a reputable comprehensive dictionary, the entries for “alchemy” and “metamorphosis” since these concepts are at the core of the poem.

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