Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one of our favorite episodes from Schwartz Media's other podcast, Read This. The show features conversations with some of the smartest and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. Today, we're going to hear from Booker Prize winning author and poet Michael and Dacci. Michael Williams is the host of Read This, and he's with me now. Michael Williams, Hello again, old friend.
Hi Ruby.
So, the writer on this episode of Read This might be most famous for his novel The English Patient, which of course became the even more famous film. But I'm curious about when you first started reading his work.
I have been an on dutchy nerd for pretty much as long as I can remember being a reader, and so I was a bit star struck in his company for this interview. I reckon The first one of his I ever read was called In the Skin of a Lion and it's a story of kind of workers in nineteen thirties Toronto. There is no reason why my little nerdy self in the inner city Melbourne should have found it so resonant, and yet I did, and It's a book that I returned to every few years. It's just
this enduring masterpiece. And as a consequence of my love for that book, I'm a completist. I read his poetry and I read his fiction like so many others. As you said, the English Patient when it won the Booker became one of those books that everyonem obsessed about. But his other novels like Annal's Ghost or The Cat's Table or Warlight all great. I mean, the man is a genius, and.
You spoke to him about his latest poetry collection. But you also include something a little bit different in this episode as well, don't you.
Yes, we did go for a bit of a departure. Because episodes are relatively short, kind of twenty to thirty minutes. We normally don't ask writers to read from their own work, just because we can to get as much of the chat in there as we can. But when it comes to poetry, there's something a bit different. This collection called A Year of Last Things, and it's really beautiful, but it has a very distinctive kind of almost a note
of elegy. This is a book of poetry from a man later in his life, later in his career, and there's this kind of wonderful, melancholy rhythm to it, and the privilege of getting to hear him read from it really was kind of next level. I nerded out in a very big way.
Coming up in just a moment, Michael and Ducci is learning everything again.
A Year of Last Things is a stunning book. As I've explained, I was already well and truly in the tank for Michael Bondacci, but this one completely bowled me over. It's delicate and so so precise, and its meditations on memory, grief, and an emotional history spanning decades. At eighty on, Dharci speaks with the wisdom of his age, but with the enthusiasm of someone much younger, someone who's still deeply in
love with and energized by discovering his craft. For someone with such an illustrious career, awards at Accolades International, acclaim, even a breed of spider named after him, I was surprised that when our conversation began with me praising this latest gem of a book, Michael and Dauci was not only modest, but actually quite tentative about the response the collection might receive. So that's where I wanted to begin.
I would have hoped you would have the luxury of being through the nerves being racked at this point of your ridly career.
Yeah, I hoped I would be easier, you know. But it was a very different kind of book, more personal and more intimate and self studying to a certain extent. So, I mean, while that is always there in any book you write, whether it's a not or book of poems, I hadn't written a book of portray for about twenty years. I think that was a big problem.
I wanted to ask about that because it was handwriting. Was what ninety eight or thereabouts.
Yeah, But then I'd also written a book with a poet in it, in the book Divisadero, So I was like, had my poet as a kind of the understudy or something like that, and so be allowed me to kind of live aside another poet for a while, you know, in a novel.
So did a year of last things? Did you sit and write it as a book or does it represent twenty years of fragments and poems that you have corralled together into a book.
No, there were no fragments to depend on. But I think what happened was when I finished Warlight. And this tends to happen a lot with my books. If I finished a book like Warlight, where I felt I'd written as much as I knew about the novel, I realized I had to do something else, like it couldn't be another novel, you know, in the same way that when I finished another book of poems and I felt that was as far as I could go, then I had to try and write a novel, you know, and change forms.
So I just felt I really wanted to change the language, to change my language, I think, and it allowed me to kind of really leap into something I hadn't done for a long time, so really for about four years. But the beginning of COVID.
Is that the sequence for you generally, you know the mode or or the form that you want to work in, and then that takes you where it takes you, or do you do you have a kernel of a story or an idea that then finds its form.
I wish I had any of those, but I don't have those things. I didn't have any poems. I just decided I wanted to write poetry. I wanted to change my voice. You know. It's like another discovery of oneself. And I was very close to Wallight, but I just wanted to do something else. And so I've already spent about four years, three and a half years to four years trying to write a book of poems. I then
began to write these. You know, I felt very new poems and very personal poems about me at this point in my life as opposed to twenty years ago whenever it was. And so it wasn't a kind of archival book for me. I guess it's a rediscovery of myself, you know, in some kind of way. And I had characters like you know, the poet and one of the other books, and you know, a lot of happened for me in the last while, so I felt I could investigate all of that.
You know, returning to a film like poetry, is it like an actor returning to a role. I mean, do you have certain things that you knew for yourself when you sat down to write that first poem for this book where you said, I know this is where these are the muscles in my brain I need to exercise, or this is how open I need to be on the line. Did it come back to you or was it learning it afresh.
It was really learning everything again. I had no idea what the first line of poem was. Let alone you know the last line, you know, and of course rober Quidy has that line. If you know what the end of the poem is, you make that the first line of the poem. So you're not traveling towards something you already know. And I think that's a very important remarking made for me, that you begin the poem not having a clue where you're going. So that was why it
was a bit nerve wracking, I think as well. And I hadn't shown the poem any poems to anyone. I didn't really talk about the fact that I was writing poems, so it was this sort of secret sharer situation. But it was energizing, you know, in that that sense.
What's that relationship between not knowing where the poem's going it letting it be a process of discovery and writing poetry as so much of this book seems to me to be about memory, about revisiting things in the past and kind of excavating those and understanding them through poetry.
Except you know, there's a lot of fiction in here as well. I don't think this is an archive of what happened to me for the last fifteen years at all. And there's a poem in their definition, you know, which begains with looking at a Sanskrit dictionary and then just wanders around all the possible fictions that are in a Sanskrit dictionary, which was very exciting, you know. Coin washes about strange professions and so forth of a Sanskrit dictionary
with its verbs for holy obsessions. The name for an alcove of coin washers whose fingers glint all night with dark lead grains of soul. Here, root vowels take an accent at high altitudes, the way dictionaries speak over mountains, a single word to portray light from that distant village reflected in a cloud, or your lover's face lit by the moonlight on a stage. That poem ends with a sort of heartbreaking love form of loss. The ancient phrases
give you the coin of escape. That epithet for those who return to broken relationships repeatedly, will row you away from confusion or remain only for remembrance. This is how deep I was lost, my darling, And it wasn't even the fact that I was moving towards something that was had happened to me. It was the only place I could exit the poem, you know, And there were two or three places where I could have gone somewhere else
with the poem. And I think that kind of, you know, going back to Creeley, that was a kind of real excitement to find and guide the poem somewhere that I hadn't been before.
Well. I was looking at my copy of The Cat's Table again last night and thinking about the way in which you use fiction and memoir, and then I was thinking about the way that you used poetry and fiction here, and it seemed to me that you seem to find stories in unlikely places.
Yes, I mean, I think in some ways Cat's Table and this book are very similar. You know. It is like an autobiography of a life, and you know, the young boy getting on a ship and then by the end of the book he's you know, he's bearing on the BBC or something like that. Yeah, And I feel very close to book still, And in fact, some of the characters in that book turned up here with the
Barnabas and so forth. But it was like going back and saying, you know, but that book was about a ship, but this is, you know, a different kind of more intimate loss or discovery, you know. So I think that was a pleasure to return to that place. I feel very close to that book. And I mean a friend of mine wrote to me after the book came out and he said, you know, I always loved Running the Family, and I always wondered why the hell you didn't write your sequel to that book, And here it is.
I so love the way you talk about that relationship between writing and discovery. That there is clearly a real joy in letting it unfold and not operating on a schematic, not operating on a kind of any preconceived idea.
Right. I think that's that's very essential. I mean, that's not something I am conscious of, but obviously this is something that I'm I will enter a novel, whether it's Wallight or something else. We have no idea where it's going, you know, and rather like the crearly poem thing, the excitement is the discovery of the fiction much more than
getting it right. You can always go back and rewrite the damn book, you know, the act of writing the first draft and then writing the seventh draft, because I do a lot of drafts. It is really constantly exciting to me, you know, in removing something and or having to put something back in again. I began this book very naively and very innocently, you know, nakedly, I think, because I didn't know where I was going to go. So it has a lot of rediscovery as I'm writing.
When I return, Michael discusses the physicality of writing poetry and reveals his one real weakness, illegible handwriting.
We'll be back in a minute.
I can't resist kicking off the second half of this episode with another reading from Michael Londacci, firstly because there are few pleasures more acute than hearing a poet read their work, but secondly because this poem, Last Things, gives the collection its name and beautifully captures the note of elegy that runs through the book.
Three Below Dante. I had been alone for weeks when we met There Below Dante, the three of us lounged in a poncion. I was writing a book about a dying man. Twenty years later, you were in a bed on Brunswick Avenue and I kissed your feet. Conny. One of my shy farewells it was your year of last Things,
but you were luminous within those final fires. Earlier, alone in that city, I had dreamed the statue falling brutal from its noble height, and the poet crawling through plaster, so near to where we met in that piazza those
years ago. Now we gather our days together, the countless meals, laughter and argument four of us at vicious Canaster, those small and essential faints, Marguerita's the dancing, and once drunk in a car on some island or other, all those small recalls of this and that before our walk a bus circus into the dark.
You mentioned before that when you were writing in this book, I think you were saying the poem definition was the one that you had in mind, that it became clear to you as you were writing it that this moment of grief and loss was the only way you could get out of the poem, that that was the natural culmination of the rest of kind of the work in there. Grief and loss play a huge part in this book. It is a book in no small way of those kind of themes and ideas, and in fact, in the
poem that gives the collection its name. Last Things there's the beautiful line when you're reflecting and I kissed your feet, Connie, one of my shy farewells, And it's a beautiful line. But in particular, one of the things that struck me is that it's one of your shy farewells. You know that these goodbyes are clearly, if not common, then at least lived again and again, right.
Yeah. I mean in fact that that was a very close friendship that Linda and I had with Leon and Connie Rooke, and we've not had known it for a long time, and then she died of cancer. So I mean, it was the kind of how do you It's more about the loss of that friendship within the four of us than anything else, and I just wanted to deal with that, But I also wanted to try and deal with it intimately, you know. And the only thing I think was that the last time I saw her, I
kissed her feet as a farewell. It's just very intimate in a way. I'm not quite sure how to say this, but there was a real need to celebrate that kind of friendship as well as a love story and something else.
You know, Also that idea that for the poet memory and Losser tied up with that communion between writing and being read that the showing of the energy to someone is is the act of loving them and remembering them. If they're gone, then it's a kind of unclosed circle.
Yeah. I didn't really think of all this as as an ellergy, but I mean, the element of energy is very central in this book. You know, even with someone you are still with, you know, it is a kind of a relief that when it's still with them, you know. And there work poems that were also fictional because I think that there's one point that takes place in a in a museum, and in fact it's not about any anybody I know, But it was just the idea that
I was told to go to the Triassic period. I had to go downstairs, and you know, it's suddenly that that became a that became a plot. But it seems very personal and so forth. But in an odd way, the landscape suggests a possibility.
One of the great joys of this book is about the role of language itself. I mean, you mentioned the exploration of the Sanskrit dictionary before, but even in a poem like Estuaries, where it's about language refusing to meet a reader. The poems, the form of poetry, the kind of interplay of language, is as much a theme of this book as it is a feature.
Yeah. The thing about poetry, especially after you we spent about fifteen years on novels, is it allows you that kind of quiet intricacy, you know, that can occur in describing a very simple moment that you're not concerned with plot or the advance of the story or the introduction and the character. It's very difficult to say, but I mean the pleasure of doing this book for me was
I felt very intimate in the act of writing. And we are writing a novel, who are dealing with you know, Act one should end pretty soon, or or this character had to go to Asia at some point, you know. And I mean, the novel allows you all kinds of little sideways and to side turns and so forth, but the poem can slow it down to just down to about three words, and that that is actually kind of wonderful, you.
Know, Given the ways in which characters recur or stories circle back in on themselves, do you return to earlier poems, earlier novels, or do you finish them and move on? Because you've already been surprised by that book.
I do move on from having written that persona or personality, but I always continue to change that. You know, I really do a lot of drafts, and I then try it on three or four people and I get the sense of it. I mean, I trust editors. I don't always agree with them, but I do trust them, and they will say, well, there's too much of this, and you modify or you clarify. The act of writing is such a pleasure. You know, it's exhausting, but you know you are really kind of inventing a story which you
didn't have. I have no idea what the plot is, and that happens a lot in these books, in the way that in the poem, Okay, I've got written four lines in this poem, and where's it going to go from here? And that sense of surprise and discovery in the poem is really a surprise and discovery of yourself, as opposed to you're not kind of putting on a play or a scene. You are really kind of intricately trying to know something about what you're trying to do right now.
Has that changed as you've gotten older as a writer or has that been a kind of constant.
It's been a constant. I mean, I think what's interesting to me was that the structure of the book became something very very important later on. That is, I'd written, say, but forty or fifty poems that made up the book, but not in that order, so I had to do something else. So the chronology is not a pattern. The chronology has to be altered so that you can reveal more so that for instance, in this book, And it was something I discovered that I've listed all the titles
on little index cards on a table. There's a lock poem the first poem, and there's a lock poem near the end, and then there was a lock poem somewhere in the middle. And I had no awareness of even the repetition of talking about locks. But suddenly, by placing them there, it became adding a you know, act one, Act two, three, you know, having that kind of effect of by going back, and that was the pattern kind of helped I think the readers were.
As me, and and that kind of sense of surprise that comes from the unlikely juxtaposition or the wilfully jarring transition, or the kind of elegant parallels. I mean, if I think right back to your first book, Coming through Slaughter, the ways in which you have written about music in general and jazz in particular, about that relationship between things, and that relationship between structure and play. Structure and play have a very intimate relationship in poetry, it seems to.
Me absolutely, you know, it's just reputation of one word will also everything you know, and that's real pleasure of writing that you can kind of you're like from mad scientist, you know, with a load of game, and no one can come in the door until you've got that balance or something you know, And writing a poem is very physical for me. The voice, a tone, the loudness of a word as a huge effect.
Do you read it loud as you write? Do you pace the room or is it? Is it all an interior thing?
It's very interior. I mean, I don't have to say it out loud. But there was a time when I was especially if it's a novel, because no one could beat my handwriting, and I'm a very slow typist. I would have to read the whole novel onto a tape recorder and someone would type it out. But even in that last act of fixing things. I was changing things around.
Your handwriting is so bad that you have to record it into a tape that people can transcribe it. Yes, I love that that it's wilfully obscure. The magic of the kind of the words that you create. The idea that on the page there in a form that only you can see seems kind of nice.
I know. And the handwriting is genuinely bad, so but you know that it gives me a last chance. You know, it's like a dress rehearsal, so you can, oh, we can know there's too much of that going on here and take it out.
Makes a lot of sense.
I just wanted to return to a year of last things and that idea of it being nerve wracking. And I'm curious about when you know a book is done, when you feel that sense of kind of confidence that you've achieved the things that you wanted to achieve with it, and you can put it aside and stop worrying.
I didn't stop worrying about this book until quite recently. I mean, I've written love poems before, I've written you know, other books that have that kind of closeness between people. But it was just more so. I think I don't know what it was, but it wasn't so much about the intimacy, but how you write about intimacy, you know, and there was a lot of that intimacy there in the book.
So in the interests of not kind of repeating yourself, in the interests of kind of being pushed to somewhere new, can we take that off the back of the year of last things? It has to be a novel. There, you're there kind of beavering away already.
No, I'm not beavering on a novel. Yeah, I think I want to wait a while, you know. I mean, yeah, who knows if there's a novel any you know. I mean usually I don't know if that there's a novel in me until I started writing the novel, you know. And then god, we'll just go somewhere on crash, you know, land on the second chapter, you know. So that's that's always a problem, whether it'll involve or not. And then there's a handwriting too.
Well, you know, that's going to make it harder for everyone. For what I'm extremely glad that you returned to poetry with the latest book. It's such a delight to read it and such a delight.
To talk to you today, you too, thank you for that.
Michael On Dutchi's latest book, A Year of Last Things, is available now, and if you want to hear him read those gorgeous poems, I highly recommend the audiobook.
Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with Robbie Arnott and Charlotte Wood. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.