I'm not sure I remember any more, and I'm also not sure whether
'choosing' would be quite the right way of putting it. It's just
something I started doing when I was still at school, experimentally,
and I seem to have got to the stage now where I can accept some of the
things I've written as finished. In general there's something
speculative about certain types of poetry that appeals to me. Not that I
actually believe that there's anything specific to poetry as opposed to
other forms: if I suddenly became able to write prose I'd certainly not
exclude doing so. In the first instance poetry appeals because it's
short, and even though recently the things I've been writing are getting
longer, there are many aspects of prose or dramatic writing that would
be completely beyond me.

James Stinks (and so does Chuck) - that's an unusual title. What made
you choose it?

I wanted the title to be a sentence. The titles of most books are
noun-based: a book's a thing, so the tendency is to name it with the
part of speech that applies to things. Using a sentence struck me as
interestingly different, and I like this one for the idea of stinking.

The book is divided into a number of titled sections. Was it
conceived as a whole, or did it come together from discrete parts?

No, it wasn't conceived as a whole: it's just a collection of some of
the poems I've written over the last ten years or so. There are other
poems that could have been in the book but aren't, and poems that are in
the book that needn't be: nothing's essential.

You've lived in Paris for a while. Was any of the book written while
living there? Has living in a non-English speaking country affected your
writing?

There are a couple of poems which were suggested to me directly and
indirectly by experiences I had in France. But a lot of the book is also
grounded in my life in Australia. There are poems about Sydney, the
Central Coast, the Snowy Mountains, Central Australia and so on. I
certainly like the experience of being surrounded by an unfamiliar
language, and it was interesting to observe the shifts and
accommodations I gradually found myself making in order to use French in
situations. But I don't think living overseas has had any direct
linguistic effect beyond the stimulation of a new environment.

One preoccupation of the poems in your book seems to be with the
'nuts and bolts' of language: semantics, reference and so on. How does
your interest in linguistics influence your writing?

It's true that I do have a general interest in language : how can you
not? But I don't think I had those things you mention in mind
especially. Perhaps you're responding to the conceptual side of the
poems? I do see the poems as being ideas first and language second,
whatever that means.

The style of your poetry is quite individual. How do you see your
writing relating to that of your contemporaries?

I'm not sure. I'd find it hard to talk about their work in general
terms. I've always been suspicious of the language we use to describe
literature, since I hope that no two readers react to a poem or to a
writer in the same way, even though schools and trends obviously do
exist. Probably the strongest relation I have to my contemporaries is
through those who've been good enough to publish me. If Mike Brennan for
example hadn't published me in various things he edited over a number of
years I probably wouldn't be having a book published now. I admire the
altruism of people like Mike or David Musgrave who are not only poets
themselves, but also committed to the work of their contemporaries.

What made you choose Puncher & Wattmann for the publication of your
first book (we happen to know that several publishers were pleading with
you)?

Well, no one was pleading with me. The book was first finished in about
1999, and it was accepted by Paper Bark. Bob Adamson had given me a lot
of encouragement over the years, ever since he and J.S. Harry had
accepted a poem for publication in Ulitarra years ago. So the manuscript
spent a couple of years in the works at Paper Bark, but when they went
down the tube it had nowhere to go. A couple of years later David
Musgrave somehow got to hear of it and decided he liked it enough to
publish it.

This collection already contains poems which were written some time
ago. What are you working on now, and in which direction is your work
heading?

I'm not sure my work has an inherent direction, or certainly not one
that I'm trying to give it. Writing's a very uncertain thing for me, and
one of the things I like about poetry in particular is the way that it's
never really clear whether what you've written is good or not. My work
has been getting longer over the years, and perhaps also more rhetorical
or theatrical or something like that - more speech-based. But that
mightn't last.

There seems to be an obvious influence in your work of some of the
recent American poets, without your work being identifiably
"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Ey". Which poets have helped shaped your work? In
Australian poetry, if there is such a thing, whose is your work closest
to or most influenced by?

I don't really know what Language Poetry is supposed to be. I imagine
you might be able to see something in my work that resembles poets often
claimed as antecedents of the Language movement -Zukofsky and Olson, for
instance. I also went through a phase where I was really taken with
Michael Palmer. But I'd say on the whole that my interest in these sorts
of people is actually just an interest in what you might think of as
hermetic impulses in twentieth century poetry - I'd include Ashbery in
there too - and it's now a lot more focused on European and British than
American writers. The people I like the most now would be people like
Celan, Geoffrey Hill, Esther Tellermann, the early Yves Bonnefoy, and so
on. In the past though I've probably been influenced by classical
writers like Seneca or the early Greek lyric poets. Of Australian
writers, people like Robert Harris, Robert Gray and Gig Ryan have really
made an impression on me. Music though might have been something I've
thought about more than poetry, especially from the formal point of
view.