Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa on poetry, Sydney Writers' Festival 2022

This was a thrilling session between three poets: Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa in conversation with Evelyn Araluen, who asked searching questions about their beautiful new poetry collections, Beneba Clarke’s How Decent Folk Behave and Musa’s Killernova. It was a stellar panel! Araluen’s first book of poems, Dropbear, had just won the 2022 Stella Award.

Araluen opened by asking when these books were written? Where were they at when they wrote them?

Beneba Clarke said she wrote her book in 2019 and 2020. Because most of the poems were for her weekly poetry gig at The Saturday Paper, it’s the most time-specific work she’s ever written.

Araluen said it reads like an annotation of this period – and in a sense we’re still in that moment, but also not.

Writing the last poem – ‘fire moves faster, for 2020, the year that was’ – made Beneba Clarke realise just how much has changed: fires, US election, dancing in the streets, #schoolstrike4climate.

Musa said Killernova started as a dark night of the soul, when he realised he hated what he was supposed to love: writing and performing. And he so identified with his work at the time that he felt he hated himself. He was adrift.

So he returned to his family’s homeland, Borneo, where he found amazing wonders – but also the horrors of environmental destruction.

While he was there he started to realise he needed a new way of expressing himself. He saw a lot of dance in Borneo and thought it might have been dance. But says he’s not a good dancer.

Then he went to a place deep in the jungle where punk rock stars and activists live. Their main medium, their main way of communicating, is woodcut. Musa developed a rapport with one of the local punk rockers, Eric, so he decided to do a woodcut workshop with him.

Eric told him: Write what you feel.

This made Musa realise he’d spent so much time staring at masculinity and violence in his work - and now he wanted to carve something beautiful, something he loves: clouded leopards. He’d never seen one – but he loves them.

But he still felt a bit weird with just imagery, so he added two lines of poetry to it - and his new way of creating was seeded. These lines are in Killernova alongside his clouded leopard woodcut.

Playing around with woodcuts brought back Musa’s playfulness and childlike joy – he’d lost his enjoyment in his art-making process, got too serous.

You need to be playful, Musa said, even if you’re looking at darkness.

Beneba Clarke has also worked with images, having illustrated three kids’ books. Like Musa, she said she has to reinvent the wheel with each new project. In a way, she laughed, this is a publisher’s worst nightmare – because they want you to do the same thing over and over.

Musa concurred. He said it was very unusual to be able to get his book published – its form (illustrated poetry) and shape (square) don’t fit the regular mould. His praised his publisher at Penguin, Nikki Christer, who came up with the idea of woodcuts and poetry, which he’d just been chucking on Instagram. He described his book as ‘a user friendly interface with a complicated operating system’ – like an iPhone.

Musa felt a lot of imposter syndrome with publishing his woodcuts because he’d learnt to carve on the ground in the jungle from punk rockers!

Working on the poems in this book upended his whole way of creating art and writing. Previously, he’d seen art-making as solitary – and to do it he had to destroy himself, sacrifice his brain, his liver, his heart, his life, to write. To make art.

Whereas this new book is about self-generation, self-regeneration in the face of darkness.

Before, he wrote drunk. Edited drunk.

This is the first book he’s done sober.

The people who taught him are all about collaboration – and they don’t sign their names. And a lot of Musa’s work is collaborative - but his name is the only name on the cover of Killernova. And so, he said uncomfortably, he’s complicit in the market model.

Beneba Clarke said that working for The Saturday Paper and having a deadline (they sent her the idea on Tuesday and her weekly poem had to be in on Thursday) put pressure on her – and it also made her look at things from all angles, because of her new weekly newspaper readership. She hadn’t done that before.

It meant she published quickly and got feedback quickly. For example, the day after her poem about the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse was published, a survivor of Catholic Church abuse contacted her.

The speed of publication and the wide, diverse audience forced her to ask: ‘If I have one take on this issue, what is it? Not necessarily my take, but it is the take I think is the least harmful and most ethical.’

Musa said his book has three loose movements:

1. The Australasian archipelago, which has lots of his family history. This focuses on Borneo, which is seen as cultural backwater in Malaysia, as valuable only for extraction of resources.

2. Australia and bushfires.

3. Lockdown, Canberra. Shut in his flat wishing he could be back in Borneo swimming with turtles.

He put the Borneo section first – melting borders, archipelagos, islands, islands as bodies – even though most Australians are not interested in Asia.

Araluen asked him to read his poem ‘Laksa’. Musa said it was an argument for multiculturalism. But it’s not just about that. It’s also about exploitative fishing, the labour of migrant workers. Eating laksa you’re complicit in exploitation.

He said his woodcut making feels very connected to his Borneo family and art making, and has brought a lot of joy. He’s so happy to have had it in his life over the past ten years. It’s also his way of trying to interact with the tradition of protest posters.

Araluen asked Beneba Clarke to read her poem ‘something sure’.

Beneba Clarke said hope is a really important thing. Her book’s title – How Decent Folk Behave – is taken from this poem, written about the death of Hannah Clarke, who, with her three children, was set on fire and murdered by her partner in 2020.

How can you write about this with hope? She decided to write a letter to her son. She said for certain poems, she’s writing to testify. Here’s how ‘something sure’ opens, followed by the section from which the book’s title comes:

 sit down here now baby,
stop that fidgeting

listen big,
and understand
…
i know you’re young,

and i taught you well
how decent folk behave

but if the time comes,
every woman is your mama,
when it come to saving

like if she on the street
and he smell like  trouble:
…
will you call it out,
or call it in now baby,

trust your gut,
and use your head

As these fragments attest, this is a lightning bolt of a poem.

Beneba Clarke said some things she tried to keep out of and just write them, like the burning of Notre Dame. At that moment, the symbolism seemed to speak for itself.

But some days she just wanted to write about spring, as in the poem called ‘October’, which is literally about stopping. 

Both Beneba Clarke and Musa are also spoken word poets. Musa said the function of spoken word poetry is often evangelical, so it’s a weird dance to confront the audience while also mobilising and motivating them.

Beneba Clarke said all her poems are made to be read out loud, so that dictates the form. It’s almost like making a musical score. It is a score: three spaces here, so you’re taking a longer breath.

Musa said making a poem is usually about finding the right word or vessel for an emotional or psychological risk. ‘I conceive of poems visually first. So if I’m experiencing writer’s block I go to a gallery.’

Next up, another fascinating session and my last Sydney Writers’ Fest blog for 2022: Paying Attention, guest curated by Fiona Murphy, with El Gibbs, Fiona Wright, Hannah Diviney and Michelle Law. Stay tuned …