Answering the call

Larry Schwartz

The basis of Kevin Hart’s art as a poet is his craft as a wordsmith. Larry Schwartz reports. IT MAY be a few words, a rhythm or what he describes as “almost sometimes a perfume”. When Kevin Hart receives signals such as these, he knows a poem is imminent and retreats to the silence of his high- ceilinged study. Cleared of books and other distractions, the sturdy old desk that faces a disused fireplace supports a crucifix. Editor of the `Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse’, Hart believes vigilant attentiveness to the sound and imagery that are the beginnings of a poem is “almost like a spiritual discipline”. “I think poetry tries to name something which people find unnameable,” he says. “The kind of poetry that I like to read and would like to write stretches out into the impossible and the unknown, and tries to combine it with the possible and the known.” The cover of his latest book, a “new and selected”, features accolades from American literary figures hailing him as “one of the finest poets writing English today” (Charles Simic) and “one of the major living poets” (Harold Bloom). Hart, 40, concedes he has had a bigger impact overseas even though he has won 10 Australian poetry prizes in the past 20 years and was recognised by his peers here from early in his career. A quietly- spoken, bespectacled academic, he is associate professor of English and director of comparative literature and cultural studies at Monash University. He lives in inner Melbourne with wife, Rita, a children’s book publisher; two year-old daughter, Sarah; and a feisty tortoise- shell cat, Fanny, which playfully bares sharp teeth and claws. Born in a small English village in Essex, he grew up in blue-collar east London. He was 11 when the family came to Brisbane as “10-quid migrants” rather than face the bleak prospect of unemployment at home when his father seemed certain to lose a job at the local gasworks. Author of five collections of poetry, a book on an early mentor A. D. Hope and translations from the French and Italian, he writes a lean, lyrical verse in various poetic forms that prompted Les Murray to marvel way back in the late 1970s at his ability to build a poem “not by an agglomeration of happy accidents and vague gestures . . . but firmly, architecturally”. This, the elder poet pronounced, was “the mark of a stayer, one who has made the choice between the vocation of artist and adventurer”. To learn something of his commitment, turn to page 63 of the new collection and you will find a poem ending with the line “a hand upon my lover”. Called `Sunlight in a Room’, the last word was “shoulder” when first published in the early 1980s. For years, it irked him. Something was wrong with the poem. But what? It was not until preparing the new selection that he realised and made the change. “It was like some shudder went through the whole poem. Momentarily. And it was improved. It just went on to a completely new level.” Hart believes technical facility is eventually absorbed “in the muscles and the bones”. “I am a kind of obsessive craftsman,” says. Hart. “My mother was a dressmaker and I have inherited something . . . I go through many, many drafts. I like to think that the art won’t go ahead if one doesn’t keep working away at the craft . . .” Bookshelves in the room where he works are stacked with poetry, philosophy and theology (from Ashberry to Heidegger and Kung). A convert to Roman Catholicism in his 20s, he remembers his early impressions of the role of the church. “I didn’t feel any attachment to England or Englishness, and the Church of England is a national church that embodies English values,” he said. It seemed to him then that, in a divided society in which he identified strongly with the British Labour Party, the Church of England was with “the other side” of a class divide that imposed rigid limits on what a lad such as he might achieve. A poor performer, he was placed in a school where, he says, the best outcome for England was war “so it could get rid of you”. Had he remained, he would have left school early, done an apprenticeship and become a butcher (you could bring home meat, his mother said) or pastry chef. Instead, he went to faraway Brisbane, a city that then seemed off the map. He was a pale boy overwhelmed by bright light in a lush, exotic, sensuous place where he sought refuge in the coolness of a library. “When I was a kid in England, I was thought to be far below average mentally. I didn’t have what it takes. Going to Brisbane, in high school I went from the bottom of the class to the top in a most extraordinary fashion that my parents never got over. Somehow I blossomed imaginatively.” Intrigued in mid-teens by slim volumes of European poetry, he would come to poets such as Holub, Prevert or Ungaretti before finding a kinship with the likes of A. D. Hope, who inspired him during undergraduate studies at the Australian National University. Although he says he no longer reads reviews, he values praise received from people whose work he admires. Robert Adamson and Gwen Harwood had written to congratulate him on the new book. Asked about his ties to Australia, he has said that he likes writing poems in a country where David Campbell, John Shaw Nielson, Kenneth Slessor and Francis Webb have lived and written. He has little patience with the judgment of people who themselves have written little of note. “Reviews are often written with the author in mind. That is fatal. They either have a go at you for spite or jealousy or they are trying to grease up for some favor. Both of which are odious. When you are writing a review it should be cast for the person who has a limited amount of money and . . . wants to know which book he or she should buy.” To Hart, there is a sense of transcending the individual personality both in reading and writing poems. “My feeling when I read a poem is that it is a conversation with someone unknown, in large part unknowable. That what most attracts me to poetry is not the surface personality of the poet, interesting as that may be, but something beyond that.” In reading and writing poems, he finds a strong sense “of being called to by someone or something, of being identified, the sense that the poem is coming from some region which is prior to one’s personality”. THE SUNDAY AGE, 16-Apr-1995