Part Two: An interview with Australian author, essayist and poet, Kathryn Pentecost

 

Janice:  Kathryn, I've just completed reading your Metamorphosis Poems 1980 - 2020. 

With poetry, I'll often skip one or two, and land where I  can give my whole, but I found with your poems that each spoke to me very directly.

I wanted to spend time sinking into the varied worlds you were exploring.

I chose to read a poem a day thus I have decided to choose just one poem to focus my questions on.  

Your title 'In the heat' reached not only out but surrounded me. 

'In the heat' appears to be born out of suburbia, as well as a more urban landscape, and the edges of elsewhere...can you expand on its themes for us...

Kathryn: 'In the heat' was written in 1989 when I had moved to St Mary's in the outer western suburbs of Sydney. It was one in a series of poems I wrote at that time.

St Marys was an alien landscape to me. I had previously lived close to the city of Sydney. The poem is the expression of the profound dislocation I felt at that time, as well as my attempt to capture something archetypal in relation to life in the Australian suburban context.

We were living in a fibro house built in the 1950s. I had previously lived in an old terrace house of the late 19th/ early 20th century. Everything about the environment of the western suburbs was 'foreign' to me.

The house had no air conditioning. We'd moved in a very hot summer.

I was pregnant. 

I had the idea then and after I had the baby that I needed to stay creatively engaged. I was extremely lonely in St Marys. By the time my daughter was 5 months old, I was very depressed. In a very (seemingly) impromptu decision and with almost no money, I left St Marys one Sunday for Katoomba...never to return again.

Janice: Can you expand on your 'attempt to capture something archetypal in relation to life in the Australian suburban context'.

Kathryn:  Australian life in suburbia can be isolating.  Or at least, this is my experience.

The suburbs are very different depending on your level of social and economic capital.

Moving to the poorer, outer western suburbs of Sydney in the late 1980's was like being consigned to a wasteland.

In the heat, the place was like a desert town, only with less rural charm.

 My impression, of course, is still subjective and arises from the contrast with the leafy suburb of my childhood on the lower north shore of Sydney, and the bustling inner-city suburbs of Newtown and Balmain.

A couple of years before moving to St Marys, a young woman called Anita Cobby had been violently attacked and murdered, after being kidnapped from near Blacktown railway station.

When I lived in St Marys, cars full of young men cruising the streets would remind me of this event. 

I also dreamt of assailants coming to the house. I often felt haunted during the months I lived at Anzac St, St Marys. Around the corner, a man set his marital home alight. This seemed further proof of the dangerous tone of the western suburbs… though it was my loneliness that added to my perception of life in the outer suburbs as alienation. 

The poem expresses the underlying emotional tension of that time, despite its subject matter being overtly about the physical conditions of a hot summer.

In the heat

In the heat, I’m wracked and tender,

Sirloin sun-burnt and barbeque brazen

Grazed by furnace blasts, a lasting impression

Of horizons glimmering, red dirt

And faded photographs.

In the heat I’m cracked and crazy

Drifting off to dreamtime, lazy

Maddened in this padded cell of insulwool

Grey-fibro hell,

Flat lemonade and stale conversation,

In the heat I’m dazed and bleeding,

Punch-drunk, putrid, coughing, seizing,

Victimised by thermos-demons,

Sensitised like blistering heathens.

In the heat I beg for mercy –

A reticent lemming in a coal-fire hearse,

I’m simmering slowly

Surely destined for death

Unless I can sense

Cube-water-cold-curing-wet-recompense.

© Kathryn Pentecost, 1989

http://bohemianpalaceofart.wordpress.com/