Speaker 1 00:00:10 Hello, and welcome to the special poetry edition of Freemantle press podcast. Today, we are recording in WAP in wa Jack Nora butcher. This is a place of many stories, and I would like to acknowledge our first story tellers along with Nora elders past present, and future always was always will be Aboriginal land. My name is Brian Bateman and I'm the author of, of memory and furniture and blue Ren. Both of which are published by Freemantle press. My guest is the author of paradise point of transmission. Andrew Sutherland. Andrew Sutherland is a queer pause, PL HIV writer and performance maker creating work that draws upon intercultural and queer critical theories and the viral instability of identity, pop culture, and the autobiographical self Andrew Sutherland. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 00:01:17 Hi Brian, how are you?
Speaker 1 00:01:18 I'm very well, thank you so excited and placed to be interviewing you today. Uh, I want to start by giving our list. There's a taste of your work and we've chosen the poem Sodom and Gamora.
Speaker 2 00:01:33 Sure. Okay. We throw these names around like any old thing, a city as behavior, as a lifestyle history of future doom. Actually, my friend told me the people of Sodo MUN Gamora were erased because they ravished angels. I was going to Google, but then got bored and decided to just roll with it. And oh, those tantalizing halos that we may know the perfect length of wing. They could almost be swans, but fuckable heaven as a host of fuckable swans, each hissing for oblivion is this divine look not behind. Be blind, be pillars of salt, be bare backed nations, such strange flesh. Sin is probably a failure of the imagination we do so often hurt people though. Sometimes I think I'd like to see myself vanish if only for a little while, maybe after douching. Sure. I think sodomy is great, but I don't think I've ever tried.
Speaker 2 00:02:28 GA Morri is a joke I should probably cut from this poem is a question that doesn't ever keep me up at night and I'm not saying I'm an angel, but would it be so surprising if I were to wake in feathers, I really got into cinema around the same time I fell into sex and in a Bleaker orgy had the clarity of mind to lean back and quote shallow to the fuck thick air. The reference was lost and all involved, but I still laughed and kept at it. This part's just to let you know, this is not a sex negative poem. And just to let you know, as far as I know, no angels were harmed while writing and also FYI I'm into suffering, not pity, unless later I want something from you. In which case salt pity will have to do. I want my fucking to be rough and also language like it was in the old days. Those days of being wild, those healthy on Genesis days. I want to try. So Agora, just you and I Goma. I know that sounds like another joke, but it belongs here anyway. I am deep and copious. Well watered and green. Fuck me like twin cities. Fuck me. Like utopia is coming. It's coming. Actually the only names from the Bible that still interest me are Salme and Judith. And isn't that funny? How it all comes to a head.
Speaker 1 00:03:46 Thank you, Andrew so much. I just love that poem. <laugh>
Speaker 2 00:03:50 Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:03:51 I believe this is a really important poem, both for this collection, which is very much focused on the materiality of the pause gay male body and for anyone who wants to read poetry that clearly articulates desire and the physical expression of that desire between gay male subjects. Andrew, can you tell us about the significance of this poem from your perspective?
Speaker 2 00:04:16 Yeah, I think because, you know, it does have this kind of probing and playful and quite ironic tone throughout it. It is a poem that in a lot of ways is really attempting to reject or make fun of, or unpick these ideas of punishment that I think are so embedded over HIV aids histories and the kind of more conservative view of what the aids crisis was speaking about, you know, HIV transmission, it can come off as very sex negative, actually, you know, it can come off as like, oh, you know, you're being punished for having sex or it's, um, even today HIV positive bodies, there's this assumption that like, well, you don't have sex anymore, you know, and I think that is something that I want to unpick. And, you know, I mean, it's textual in the poem, you just say it's not sex negative <laugh> um, yeah, so I think it was, it was one of the poems that I think I had the most fun writing writers, like hero Lindsay bird and like Shechen who use comedy and used that kind of, uh, ironic tone a lot through their poetry. I think I found a lot of permission from them
Speaker 1 00:05:24 In relation to that idea of writing queer focused poetry. What is the significance of writing a queer focused collection?
Speaker 2 00:05:35 So I think on the one hand, it's impossible not to when you yourself are a queer individual, but I think on the other hand, it is also something that you are intentionally trying to work on and to affect. And to me, I think that queer art making, um, across all forms is very much about trying to, in some ways, uh, shift the world sideways and to kind of reach across these great gaps between people. And I really think that's what the best poetry I have experienced has done, which is to take reality and be so specific in the author's experience and intention, but it takes reality and kind of moves it to the side. And I think that's really beautiful. It's a really transformative thing. I think also for me, something very, very queer in art making is this kind of collapse of what we think of as high art and low art.
Speaker 2 00:06:39 And I think that's quite integral to my collection as well. You know, I'm of this kind of particular generation or school of queerness where we really found ourselves through particular, low art signifies, you know, like, like Buffy is a big one, um, which has been kind of ruined now in hindsight by everything around it. But in terms of, as a teenager, like growing up with kind of cult TV with horror movies with sci-fi, I think we could really find ourselves in that. And so I really enjoy as an art maker bringing, you know, academia or bringing the cannon or bringing the classics down to play in the dirt with, with queer things, you know, and I think that's really, really exciting.
Speaker 1 00:07:18 I love the way you go from fanfic and Buffy the vampire Slayer to Julia Christava and Beck. Again, the poems are rich in cultural references, and I think you've explained very well what queerness does to cultural references, but I'm just wondering what are these specific references and why are they important to you?
Speaker 2 00:07:43 Chris Davis is quite funny because I think for quite a long time in my theater practice, more so I'd been quite aware that I'd been working the kind of way that she writes about horror without ever actually having read any of her work. I was just like, oh, I know that I'm doing that. And I think it was in the editing portion of this collection. I was working with Tracy Ryan, and I was like, Tracy, I should probably actually read Julia CTE and make sure that I, I know that I'm doing what I think I'm doing. And I did. And I found it very affirming and maybe a little bit boring because I, I feel like I'd already I'd embodied so much of what she was writing about one thing that was very impactful. I think in the development of what's now, the collection was through 2020 kind of around the same time that I came out very publicly, kind of as a PO individual.
Speaker 2 00:08:35 I also was reading viral dramaturges, which is about, uh, HIV aids in performance in the 21st century. And it's kind of a, an academic anthology and it's edited by, uh, Alison Campbell and Dirk GIIN. And it really just fired off so much in terms of my practice and my processes. And it inspired quite a number of the poems in the collection. It's kind of how I came to academics like Tim Dean and Elizabeth Freeman who are quoted and referenced in the collection. And then at the same time, I was also really, really getting back into like star Trek and like dune and all of these sci-fi things from my childhood, basically because I, I grew up on this kind of sci-fi, but then returning to it as an adult, you would kind of see these incredibly strange and incredibly queer concepts that filter into the book, like these ideas of inherited memory that filter through June or the kind of, um, yeah. Transformative potential of these things. I dunno. I just get very excited by
Speaker 1 00:09:40 It. I'm so glad you do because it's been reflected so wonderfully in the collection. So how does history and memory in relation to aids shape current attitudes to people who are at PL L H HIV, do you hope your poetry counteract some of today's prevailing attitudes to the disease?
Speaker 2 00:10:03 When I was diagnosed HIV positive at the end of 2014 in Singapore, most of my cultural touchstones, I think of HIV were one very white, but also of the aids crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. And so even though I intellectually knew that it was not fatal, um, all of my kind of emotional and cultural kind of memories of it were of death. And I think that's indicative also of a gap in memory and a cultural gap, which is that actually younger queer people don't know about it, or what they know about it is of death. There is access to things like preexposure prophylaxis and so on. But I think, you know, in that there is also a kind of forgetting potentially like it, it's not a problem anymore. And even though, you know, it may not be fatal. It's still a kind of chronic illness that is lifelong and socially, you know, it affects so many parts of your life and also legally it affects many parts of your life in terms of where you're allowed to live in the world in terms of discrimination and stigma, all those things.
Speaker 2 00:11:21 I don't know what my poetry can do in terms of prevailing attitudes. I think it's really risky to try and think of your own writing or your, your, your poetry in particular as being, uh, activist, because all I can speak to is my own experience and my own experience, um, is so particular and so specific. I'm gonna be honest. I am really curious and maybe parts of me are scared to know what other PO people might take from the collection and think of the collection. I'm really excited about that too. I really love meeting other PO people and actually just talking through the differences in our experiences. I think like that's a really, really amazing thing, too. It's not just about the similarities in what we've gone through, but actually the real, the real diversity of experience of, of this illness.
Speaker 1 00:12:13 Your book seems to be an example of how poetry can transform your sense of self, as well as the society in which we live. It seems to suggest poetry can be an act of empowerment and rebellion. Do you agree with that?
Speaker 2 00:12:30 Yes <laugh> yeah, I do. I do think so. I think in terms of my own personal growth as a human being, as a person living with HIV, there were a lot of stages and phases in the way that I interacted with the illness in terms of the privacy of the body. Yeah. As I said earlier, you know, there was kind of this moment in 2020 that coincided with the COVID pandemic, where I felt something kind of snap in me a little bit. And I kind of looked back at the creative practice that I had had over the last several years and thought, wow, everything that I have written and everything that I have made being re positive was so integral and so embodied in everything that I had done, but it was just never really stated. And I thought like, what a shame? Why can't I just specifically point to the things that I'm talking about? I think empowerment and rebellion. They're very big words. Aren't they,
Speaker 1 00:13:34 They are big words, but I think the way you have tackled your public and private persona in this collection is about empowerment and rebellion. And the other people will experience that when they read the collection as well. I want to know how has your own relationship to the disease changed as a result of writing this collection?
Speaker 2 00:14:02 Something that I like to imagine, or that I like to think about is the continuous choreography of the viral processes that happen inside my body. So there's this constant multiplication, which is the viral process of HIV. And there's also this constant suppression, which is from the antiretroviral medication that I'm taking. So there is this like constant movement that is going on inside me. And I think it's really exciting to consider, you know, it can't be seen. It can't even be felt actually it can only be imagined untangling this narrative from the trauma or the event of, uh, transmission and diagnosis. Um, and actually trying to, to use the creative work, to think about what it is to live continuously, what it is to live with to imagine that like, okay, my body is me and my body is also me and the HIV. And I think the book, you know, kind of half does that, I think the first, the first section of the book is very much about the event. Um, and then hopefully it attempts to move forward into other ideas.
Speaker 1 00:15:19 Yes, you're a performance maker and a poet. Can you tell us how the multiple strands of your career work in parallel?
Speaker 2 00:15:29 I dunno. I feel like they've fed each other as I've developed both. And I think there's a lot of crossover. So there are, um, poems in the collection, uh, like there's one called Gogan, which was effectively the, the journal that I kept as an actor while I was performing in a, in a show called Medusa. And it was a very kind of physically and kind of emotionally challenging show and a, and a kind of poem that I'm quite proud of. There's a poem called Salme, which, um, actually became part of the text for a performance that I created at the start of this year called Salme Delta. And the other way, there's a poem called leak, which reflects on the Chinese hopping vampire, the junk shoe, which I had collaboratively with a Singaporean artist, created a work called Juhi for theater a couple of years earlier. I think as most artists who work across multiple forms, do you just keep coming back to the same ideas and the same signifiers and the same personal touchstones, and they just keep evolving in different, in different forms.
Speaker 1 00:16:37 I'd like to move on, uh, for our audience, as you know, Freemantle press works extensively with new and emerging writers and poets. So I wanted to include a section for them that you could respond to. And I'd like to ask as a poet, you rewarded Overlands fair Australia poetry prize in 2017 with a runner up in the Gwen Howard poetry prize in 2022 and placed third in far Tom Collins prize in 21. How does this sort of recognition help your career?
Speaker 2 00:17:14 I've had started writing poetry, um, as a very personal response to, you know, very emotional, subjective things in my life, but the Overland fair Australia, this is probably not a very relatable story, but it was the, the first time that I had ever actually submitted poem for publication anywhere. And I think it was just the first time that I actually looked at something that I'd written and thought, oh, this is pretty good. And then it won this prize. Right. Um, which is both amazing, but also a bit of a double edged sword because I had no real knowledge of poetry or, or the scene or that kind of thing. And you know, it kind of sets you up in your mind, you'd be like, oh, I guess every time I write a poem, you get a $5,000 prize, which is not the case, because then I had to, um, really learn a harder way about what kind of like publication rejection and also publication, um, regular payment was actually like, so it was actually a very humbling experience, a very delayed humbling experience.
Speaker 2 00:18:17 The fair Australia prize kind of sets you up in your mind. You'd be like, oh, I guess every time I write a poem, you get a $5,000 prize, which is not the case, because then I had to, um, really learn a harder way about publication rejection, and also publication. Regular payment was actually like, so it was actually a very humbling experience, a very delayed humbling experience, the fair Australia prize. But I think that there is a real kickstart that you can get from that. I wouldn't say you can ever rely on a hope for it, but I think, you know, it, it does make you feel good. It also does help connect you to other people. I think that maybe people who might not have been aware of your writing sometimes reach out, um, the Gwen Howard prize this year was really lovely because I think a few people that I would not otherwise have met have kind of reached out and contacted me about that poem. And that is really wonderful.
Speaker 1 00:19:17 Andrew, I'd like to thank you so much for being here. It's been such an interesting and marvelous insight into your motivations and writing practices. Congratulations on the publication of paradise point of transmission, which award-winning poet Traci Ryan says is a remarkable first book, which marks your appearance on the poetic horizon with a fire and energy that will linger long after the first reading.
Speaker 2 00:19:45 Thank you for having Libro
Speaker 1 00:19:48 Listeners. You can buy Andrew's book in all good bookstores and
[email protected] AU. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the Freemantle press podcast on your favorite app. I'm bro Bateman. And I look forward to catching up with you next time as we explore the wonderful world of west Australian poets and their poetry.
