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poetry
Pomelo Brown tolla oboutthe relotion$ip
between her
poetry
ond
populor
cul''lure.
I think more and more that what I'm
starting to do with those smaller poems
is trying to move towards a vocabu-
lary. Once we had ideas and then tried
to find the vocabulary. Now I'm more
interested in the vocabulary and find-
ing the ideas to fit that. It's as if I'm
located where I'm writing but the other
location is in the act, in the writing.
Has it got to do with defamiliarisation, ls
it reclaiming wordsT
No, I think it's not reclaiming but has
more to do with the process I use when
I'm writing poetry. It's a little bit like
chronic constipation. You're chopped
up with fragments or little squat com-
binations of stanzas, and every now
and then you're relieved of a few lines.
It's not a reclamatioin, you
just
let a few little lines go now and then
and they form into something. I don't
mean that in any sense it's the same as
the old act of self-expression.
What causes words to become constipated
in the
first
place?
I don't know really. If you're working
in slightty minimal form, which is what
I do,I think I know why I do that. I like
to think I'm slyly disrupting literary
authority
-
it's not so sly in some of
them. That cultural authority that's as-
signed to individual works of great-
ness. I've always been suspicious of
that, or incredulous. High Poetry. That
kind of monumental writing, the canon.
My style articulates that suspicion. My
style is reluctant. I defer meaning rather
than amplify it. I don't like the rhap-
sodic, unless it's ironic. That's alsowhy
the poems are little, lots of little darting
things.
The self-expression thing seems
to still be important. I find it amazing.
I practised it myself as a feminist, and
ABR
.
45
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