| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| JUDITH RODRIGUEZ edges awkwardly down the footpath, supported by a briar cane and buoyed by self-deprecating humor. Arthritis has afflicted her so severely she has found herself “hanging against walls”. “I’m going to get a new knee”, she explains over black coffee beneath the awnings of a favorite haunt in High Street, Armadale, “possibly in a few weeks”. She holds the cane aloft briefly as if to swat a passer-by. “What a wonderful stick. (But) I’m not going to go on using it. I want knees.” Judith Catherine Rodriguez is a much-published, award-winning poet and linocut artist. A former poetry editor of Meanjin and editor of the Penguin Australian Poetry series, she teaches writing at Deakin University. She is also matron of the Victorian Writers’ Centre in Fitzroy, and has a well-deserved reputation for generosity towards young writers and poets. When I mistakenly refer to her role with the writers’ centre as madam, instead of matron, she says drily: “`Madam’ I wouldn’t have been hard on in my 20s, because it has a degree of jaunt. But no, I’m the matron. It’s not a brothel, after all.” At 63, she clearly relishes her role as mentor to younger writers. She regales you with talk of their successes. She seeks to enthuse first-year students by having them read poetry. “What comes through the poetry is passion,” she says. Rodriguez counsels fledgling writers to find their own passion, “and if you are fond of the wholeness of things, you will want a form that fits”. She has an imaginative way of describing the creative process: “I think the idea of pulling wool from the inside of a ball”, she says, “pulling it out. Hoping it will come continuously and never break …” A Perth-born, Brisbane-reared “foreignplaceaholic”, she first left Australia on a scholarship to Cambridge in 1960. This year, she is looking forwards to teaching Australian literature in Madras for some months. Rodriguez has been active for several years in the international writers’ advocacy organisation PEN, and is now vice-president of its Melbourne centre. “Whenever we hear that a Turkish journalist has been killed – not all that rare a happening – or an Egyptian editor has been endangered or shot at, we’re asked to send off faxes to the Government, the Police Minister over there or whatever. These things do have an effect, as Amnesty and PEN both know … Even in this country, people get penalised. Journalists who conceal their sources. We’ve had to publicise that …” Rodriguez once described herself in a poem as “exultant, inharmonious, full of trouble …” This morning she wears a crisp, white top; finding refuge from the mid-morning heat beneath the broad brim of a green, straw hat. “Every year I try for a new hat, and I don’t always get a new one.” The hat is all you see when she occasionally looks down and speaks directly to the small tape recorder on the table between us. Our conversation starts with a fleeting look at poems dealing with her family, her relationship with her husband, the poet and writer Tom Shapcott, and, finally, herself. I ask her about some lines in her poem About This Woman, from the collection Water Life (1972-1975): “About this woman:/ wears no ring …” Judith Rodriguez says she quite liked her first wedding ring but lost it in some wash basin or other. The substitute went “down some drain, too”. She wonders if the loss might have reflected discontent at the time. So the fact that she has not one but three gold bands on her left hand might suggest satisfaction with her lot these days. One used to belong to a son who outgrew it. Another reminds her of a painting by the German master Hans Holbein. She bargained for the third with a shopkeeper in Korea. The pale green of the jade stone suggested to her the color of a swimming pool lit up by a car’s headlights at night. Or of green eyes perhaps? “Some sort of disease like that,” says the poet whose maiden name was Green. “green-eyed and could not give them to her children …” “Ah, I look at my children across a table and they all have these South American or Jewish brown eyes,” she says. Rodriguez’s first husband, Fabio, hails from Colombia. He is father of her four children. “It’s quite an infection. I mean, brown eyes are, I think, dominant. I’ve offered them a prize for the first grandchild with green eyes. Yes, yes.” Her mother, Dora, read her nursery rhymes and fairytales and encouraged her to write. Her maiden name was Spigl. She “left being Jewish”, as Rodriguez puts it. “In my mother’s family/,” she once wrote, “We have no ancestors/ only the long silence/ between pogroms.” Her father, Gerald Green, came from a farming family in Northamptonshire and worked as a manager for Electrolux in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, and, “fortunately for my schooling”, Brisbane – home to writers as diverse as Gwen Harwood, David Malouf, Thea Astley and Kevin Hart. Rodriguez is still close to Malouf, and spent a lot of time with him during his years in Italy. Rodriguez is twice married but still a loner. Her second husband, Shapcott, also comes from Queensland, from the town of Ipswich. With him, Rodriguez has enjoyed a “second fruiting”, as she has put it in another poem. Shapcott is also a noted writer, who has held prominent positions including executive director of the National Book Council, and chairman of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. “Oh yes”, Rodriguez concedes, “(there is) tremendous competitiveness … I’m the one who gets discontented. I like doing things on my own. I’m a terrible loner and perhaps it also has something to do with being a woman during my lifetime. I suppose I have to keep proving I don’t need anybody. That’s hard on Tom.” Yet at this point in her life, despite the wonky knees, Rodriguez, matron of the arts, radiates a sense of purpose. She certainly believes that poetry has a vivid future, despite the withdrawal of major publishers in recent years, and is encouraged by the vigor of smaller publishers such as Five Island Press in Wollongong, or Interactive Poets on the Net. “It’s a long time from the day that Evan Jones said, `if there are six books of poetry published this year in Australia, it’s probably five too many’. I think he wrote that in 1959. “Poetry has the big reply,” she says, from beneath that broad, green straw hat. “Read history and poetry comes back. It’s an illusion that it ever goes away … It’s almost indelible.” CV: Judith Rodriguez Born: Perth, 1936, moves to Brisbane in early childhood. Education: Honors degree at the University of Queensland, 1958; masters degree at Cambridge, 1962. Career: Teaches literature at La Trobe University, 1969-85; poetry editor, Meanjin, 1979-82; edits the Penguin Australian Poetry series, 1989-97; lecturer at Victoria College, now Deakin University. Lives: in Melbourne with second husband, writer and poet Tom Shapcott. The Age, 08-Jan-2000 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 