10 words or less – sum up the experience.

Damn Good Television  

You began your residency with the idea to create 100 poems under 10 themes. Tell us about how and why your project evolved during the residency, and where the work is at now.  

My initial idea was inspired by a desire to delve deeply into 10 different concepts. Almost like making 10 concept albums of poetry. What happened in the end is that I just invested my energy into writing prolifically across a range of themes and tangents as they came to me. I don’t know how many I wrote, hundreds, and in the process I got everything I had wanted to explore out of my system.  

In the process of doing that, threads and unifying principles began to reveal themselves. And I was able to slowly connect the dots and organise the best poems into collections. In the end, the result was Damn Good Television: a collection of poems organised into 7 ‘Seasons’. The work explores the interaction of a rainbow snake with a television in the desert. I chose 7 for the colours of the rainbow and the colors of a technicolor glitch. Each season has a colour allocated to it, and each season is still its own unique concept being explored…though they are all connected. Damn Good Television is currently a completed first draft for a book of poetry that I will be entering the editing and publishing process with over the next year.  

How did you know when a poem or short story was finished? 

It was easy enough to know when a poem was finished as I was aiming at one-page poems for the most part. What was tricky was that, as I started creating the book, I was able to see the threads and the overall story being told. As such, with all my poems up on the HOTA wall, I re-wrote entire collections or ‘seasons’ after seeing them all together and identifying what the overall work needed. I rewrote at least 3 seasons completely in my final week of writing.  

 You spent a lot of your writing time outside in the HOTA Parklands during your residency. Tell us about how the location influenced your process or the body of work. 

Being able to get out of the studio and walk around the HOTA grounds by the Nerang River was a beautiful part of the residency. I’d often go out there to clear my head, daydream, think about the overall story, and sit myself on a park bench if an idea came knocking. Poems are whiny like that. But connecting to Place and the Country I was working on for the duration of this work was very important to me.  

 What’s next for the work, and for you?  

Next is the editing! I’m sure that will be a joyous adventure of minutiae details and left brain’s time to shine. Then working on the creative design for the book and eventually releasing it! Following the conclusion of the ArtKeeper residency, my band Selve is heading overseas for another big and exciting project that I can’t talk about yet, but we will be talking about it lots soon!

Images & video by ArtKeeper Storyteller in residence Lachlan Woods.