Toby Fitch is a poet, editor, teacher, and host. They have released eight books of poetry, recently published are Sydney Spleen and Where the Sky had Hung Before, as well as a poem in Red Room Poetry’s new anthology, A Line in the Sand. They are the current poetry editor of Overland, additionally serving as a guest judge for the publication’s annual Judith Wright Poetry Prize. They lecture in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and they are the host of the monthly poetry nights at Sappho Books Café & Bar in Glebe. I met with Fitch backstage at the Carriageworks just before the Sydney Writers’ Festival event for Red Room’s new anthology.
Date- Friday, May 24, 2024
Location- Carriageworks
I’ll start with my questions about your 2021 poetry collection, Sydney Spleen. There’s an obvious centering of Sydney and Australia more broadly in your poems – you mention Camperdown cemetery and the national budget – and I was wondering how important representing the Sydney and Australian experience is to your work?
It was very important. In my work, I’m writing a lot more specifically about situating things in certain places and writing more autobiographically. More politically, too, not that things that I have done in the past aren’t political. I’m not so interested in depicting the Australian way of life; I’m more so critiquing colonial capitalism in this book and capitalism on a global scale.
I definitely got that. Especially with the poems that are making fun of ScoMo’s tweets like Captain’s Cull. That’s one of my favourites. Even more so when I found out how you wrote that.
I haven’t received much feedback from that one. It takes the Oulipo constraint of N+7 which is a noun, and you go seven further forward in the dictionary, but I was very loose with it. I generally used an internet generator so I could see the next fifteen nouns when I picked a key noun from the quotes that I was amassing from ScoMo and collaged them into a poem. I would change the noun in the poem to what seemed like the most interesting one in the list of fifteen possible nouns ahead of it in the dictionary generator. So, the nouns are all moving around in lines to resonate with each other and zing.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the playfulness, especially of the calligrammes – your shape poems – and the ones where you use Oulipo.
The book was actually a failed project in some ways; not the book being a failure itself, but it was initially a failed approach because I’d done that approach with Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations which I turned into my third book, Bloomin’ Notions. All of those are written backwards through Rimbaud’s prose poems and homophonically or otherwise translated. I tried to do that with this book and Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen from a previous era of high capitalism and that wasn’t working. So, I had to think differently. I went more with his splénétique; the mood of melancholia that is just there in urban and contemporary life. I’m writing through that and using that as a mode in all the poems.
It was many years that I was writing this book, while I was writing other books at the same time that were even more playful than this or less serious, maybe, but I was putting poems aside in a folder called Sydney Spleen. Poems that were more critical, poems that were more rant-y, poems that were more political. I was putting them in that folder and then Covid happened and the urgency for this book took on a new role. While I was working multiple casual jobs before I had a full-time, paid-salary job, and there was homeschooling to deal with and heaps of casual labour, but I just decided I couldn’t not address the things I was thinking through during those first two lockdowns. I was writing into the night and the book came together with a lot of new poems and all the poems in the folder and stopped being a failed project.
The book became a lot more complex; I’d agree with that. I think the way you reworked Baudelaire’s poems was interesting, following the bones but still creating something unique.
That brings me to another question about my favourite poem, which was the final one, Morning Walks in a Time of Plague. I imagine that was taken from your experience with Covid. Could you talk about how that came about?
So, that poem is about twenty to thirty pages at the end of the book; it’s the fourth section, but it’s just one poem. It’s numbered fragments from one to twenty-five and it’s like my diary from that first lockdown. It covers autumn going into winter – and so Winter is Coming in that particular poem. My partner and I didn’t have much to do. We had our two kids at home, and we had to entertain them, and I don’t know if they quite got homeschooling happening by then. So, to occupy ourselves we went on our one walk a day that we were, I don’t know, legally or socially allowed to do. It started out with going up to the local park with our dog, Minky. She’s in the poem, too. Minky has since died, but she’s been in a number of my poems.
We would take her for a walk to the local park and then the police tape wrapped up all the play gear, so we went, “why don’t we go to our favourite place?” Which is actually the Camperdown cemetery. We just went there every day. While I was there, I would be writing down what I was looking at because things were changing. You could hear all the birds in a new way. They congregated at Camperdown cemetery, a lot more than usual because there was no traffic or planes to scare them out of that area. There was an atmosphere of that, as well as all the surrounding death in the world.
So, the poem takes on a lot of those themes. Because in the cemetery I read more about the cemetery, I got to know the cemetery a lot better. We’ve got all these interesting potential stories and figures that have been buried in the cemetery with the juxtaposition of present Covid pandemic death that’s going on at the same time. So, yeah, that was a very autobiographical poem and I quite enjoyed writing it.
I quite enjoyed reading it, too. There was one passage that I highlighted because it felt at once private and brave to exhibit, but also relatable in a fascinating way. It’s section 4, on page 83, the one about your family on the four-way seesaw. That section, particularly in the end with the moment between you and your partner, Frankie, and how that beautiful moment still had a thought of, “what if there’s somebody watching?” Positions the reader in a really interesting place. It was a very empathetic moment, but we as the reader were also the voyeurs?
It was actually that last paragraph in section 4 that took a lot of work. It came later in the writing from memory. I remember trying to negotiate how I would represent my partner without offending her, which is natural and you gotta be a bit careful about how you write people into your poems that are your family and your friends. But that’s genuinely what happened; we had a little intimate moment on top of the four-way seesaw while the kids were yelling at us to rock back and forward. But when you were walking around the street; people you’d walk past you’d be like, okay you’re one of the only other people out on the street, so it’s unusual to run into people. Everyone’s a little bit anxious and worried about getting sick, but also the general surveillance of everything that was going on with police and the government enforcing lockdown made everyone really wary. So, I think I was trying to represent a few things there.
My next question is about a passage in New Phantasmagorics (pg. 4-6), on the second page. I’ll just read it out:
“…Today
it’s those pedestrian crossing bleeps,
the same ones Billie Eilish sampled from Sydney
for her Bad Guy song, trapping them like some insect
in the most commercial of ambers.”
I was wondering if you think there’s a point where borrowing from your life or your environment becomes tasteless as an artist?
I’m sure it can. I’m not sure that that was tasteless. I was kinda just making fun of the fact that it’s literally that (imitates sound “dew-do-do-do-do”), taken from the Sydney pedestrian crossing lights. It’s actually used as a sample in her song which I found a fascinating kind of collision of international music, culture, art, and pop music, and the local area where I was living and where I still live. It was also a collision with commercial interests. I’m interested in using things like that in poems and so I liked how it was used in a song, but I was also thinking about the commercial aspect. It’s a very sardonic or sarcastic moment in the poem. A lot of that poem is tongue-in-cheek or scathingly sarcastic, so I hope it comes across in that way. What do you mean about…?
As I read it, it felt a bit critical. I remember when the news came out that she used that sound and it was exciting. I think because the rest of the poem was so sardonic—.
Yeah, you couldn’t not read it as a type of critique.
Right, but I can see that there’s a respect to it as well. That’s what I was saying before about how it matches your ethic in the book.
Yeah, it’s one of those poems that’s kind of a rant, a collage, and a critique in every sentence. And, I guess, that overall tone I was trying to create of melancholia or nihilism that people have under capitalism and colonial capitalism led me to playing into that and taking pot shots at the same time.
When I came to the Notes and I realised how some of your poems are directly related to your influences like Sean Bonney, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire, I got curious if you had any special intentions in writing your poems in direct relation to your inspirations?
Sometimes it’s about just finding something to write through and around. Those things can offer ways into a poem or a form that I could play with, to experiment with. Sometimes I like the cut of their jibs; I like what they’re talking about in their poems and thinking through and I might want to do my own version. I might be thinking of something that’s happening in the world at that moment and I’m looking for that kind of inspiration in the literary ecosphere and the lineage that I consider myself part of. A part of that is also acknowledging those forebears, but also taking them in a new direction.
Onto the next topic: The monthly Sappho poetry readings, where you host four professional poets and ten open mic participants at the bookstore in Glebe. I just want to say I really love them and enjoy going to hear both from published poets and amateurs. As the host, what benefits would you say the event provides for the community of writers and readers?
Every month there are new people there and so many different groups of people that come to Sappho. So, you’ve got your students from various universities like UTS and Sydney coming along, there’s other poets, friends of poets, other friends and other writers that come along, there are just lovers of poetry that come along and there are also a lot of people who are trying out poetry and they hear about these events and Sappho, and they come along. I don’t really promote it. I just create a Facebook event and the bookshop puts it on their website, but it’s become a known event, a Sydney institution for poetry. So, it creates a space for lots of different communities to interact. Publishers come along too because they’re interested or helping to represent their poets.
It gives people a space to listen to poetry and to catch up with writers, see writers from interstate and writers they’ve never seen read live before and then all sorts of conversations flow from that. And the audience: ten people get to read their own poems in the open mic section, so they get to test out their work in front of other writers and that generates conversations and relationships and further communities.
That’s how I see it functioning. There have been some things, when I think back, that I’ve been doing or that the event has created organically that have created that space in a way because while it is not the hugest space in the world, it can fit about a hundred people, and it’s usually really packed. That can be quite intimidating to some, even poets, particularly poets sometimes. But I’ve never presented the event as some kind of hyped-up thing or never marketed the shit out of it. I try to be a non-factor in running the event; I introduce the night and the poets but with a modicum of fuss so that people can focus on the poetry and not about celebrity and marketing and commercialism. It’s really a grassroots event. I even sell the books for the poets, and I take no commission. They get all the profits and it’s a free event for everyone.
I discovered the event when my lecturers were like, “there’s this reading that happens every month. You all should come!” I hadn’t heard of it but now I come as often as I can.
It’s kind of magical how word-of-mouth can work. If it’s a good thing that you’re doing it will catch on. There were some changes I made, because I’ve been doing it for thirteen years now. When I first took over it was one poet that would read interminably, like thirty minutes or something. Then they would have to judge the open mic section and give out some sort of prize which, from my experience of going there more than thirteen years ago, I found quite uncomfortable: reading in the open section and then looking askance at other people and going, “why did you get the prize?”
I started running the events a bit by accident because I met the person who was running it. She didn’t want to do it anymore because she was commuting from the Blue Mountains and didn’t know many poets. She asked me to help her organise one of the events because I was bushy tailed and bright-eyed and then she was like, “can you do next month on your own?” and that’s how it worked. I just immediately made it more poets. Three minimum to begin with, then it was four main poets, and sometimes I’ve done events with ten to twenty poets. Not reading forever but sparring with one poem each or something like that. I took away the competition element of the open mic but retained the section because it’s a draw card; it brings people who are writing and want to share their work and it’s fun!
Absolutely! That makes me think of a talent show, though. I would’ve been paranoid reading in that.
Sappho has another open mic night which is more like a talent show because it’s open for whoever and whatever. This one I’m keeping in the very literary realm, even pushing it towards the experimental poetry realm with the Avant Gaga nights which are about half of the nights. But it’s not just experimental poems, they are poems that will challenge the audience in interesting ways. So, that can be highly political work or highly abstract work.
Onto your poem, Entanglement, which has been published in Red Room’s new anthology, A Line in the Sand. I visited the setting of Bedford and Probert in Newtown. I told my partner how odd and fascinating it was seeing the real behind the poem.
Yeah, I was on that other person’s roof. Mine’s two or three out and I can get quite easily across the rooftops to that particular house. That’s where I ended up and the bird was in that tree and I was trying to coax it out of the tree, and it just wouldn’t do it.
Did it actually fly into the train tracks?
Yeah! We could hear it get hit by the train head on. Its family was just down there on Bedford Street, and they were just devastated.
I imagine!
Because the signs had been put up all around the street so even though they were living in Lilyfield they had heard that it had come over Newtown way. I had seen the lost pet signs on the lampposts, then it just appeared in my back garden. I was like, “I can catch this bird, please stay here,” and then it just wouldn’t. So brutal!
In the foreword of A Line in the Sand, Ali Cobby Eckermann states that the anthology is a remedy against emotional slaughter and a counter to colonial violence. Could you elaborate on your own role in this incredible project and its intention to act as this remedy?
Wow. I’m not quite sure Entanglement contributes to that larger discourse which is really important. The book has a fantastic representation of First Nations poets and a much broader representation of different poets from different backgrounds. So, it’s a great anthology just for reading the diversity of Australian poetry.
The poem I have in there is a bit of an eco-poem in some ways in that it’s a personal narrative, an autobiographical story about a pet bird that landed in my back garden and that I’d seen on missing posters. The poem represents me trying to save the bird for its owners and it doesn’t go well. It’s veering towards the ecological in the sense that there’s the violence of the urban and some interesting entanglement between those things and the personal. But, yeah, that doesn’t contribute to that larger discourse in that way.
I’d say it’s still related to that. But there’s other works you’d say that are more towards what Eckermann says in the Foreword?
Well the poems in the anthology by Bruce Pascoe, Omar Sakr, Eunice Andrada and others certainly speak more to colonial violence. A lot of my other poems, like in Sydney Spleen and in a manuscript I’m currently working on called Endlings, are in that vein too. And I write poems where I’m trying to be respectful of the land I’m on, the country I’m on. Recently I wrote a new poem, that hasn’t been published, about hiking up Kosciuszko. Through that experience of hiking to the peak with my partner and kids and the 13km walk that was tiring and interesting and beautiful and the different sort of landscape that we saw, I got to think about the country it’s on and what the mountain is traditionally named which is Kunama Namadgi. I thought more about how to represent these things in my poem and everything being living and part of time immemorial. The landscape took on a different look and had to be represented in a different way. So, the more I read and interact with poets that are writing about these things from lived cultural ancestral experience, the more I learn to write about these kinds of things in my own poetry.
I’ll keep an eye out for that one. I do have a question about Overland to switch to. What are the common characteristics in Overland’s “slush pile” and do you have any advice for potential submitters?
Ooh, tricky question. So, the slush pile is what is commonly referred to as all the many hundreds of thousands of submissions that a magazine or journal or competition will receive. When you’re going through the slush pile or the many submissions it can be arduous, but I have to say my work at Overland has been my favourite job of any that I’ve done. Even though, and this will be hard for people to hear, and might be a bit devastating, only 1% of submissions end up getting published at Overland; I’ve done the maths. When I do get to publish the poems I choose, it’s just a really wonderful experience when I see poets having those works published and the joy that they have in that and even working with them on improving those poems.
For some of those poets it might be their first time ever publishing a poem or it might be a stepping stone for them to be recognised by the broader literary communities. Also, judging the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets for the time I’ve been there, like 9 years. In the time I’ve been a guest judge and in previous years that competition has unearthed a lot of wonderful poets that have gone on to do amazing things. So, not to be responsible for those poets or take credit, but to recognise a poem that might not otherwise be recognised and then it gets up in the prize as a shortlisted poem or even a winner and then to see that poet publish a book and then two books and then to blossom has been a really joyful experience.
You asked about what advice I might have?
And what kind of themes or styles you run across in the slush pile?
I see a lot of poems that are trying to respond immediately to the world around them and big political events and often they’re held back by a very emotional response to something. Not that emotions are wrong, but it hasn’t formulated into a good poem yet. Or we receive many many many underdeveloped poems that are too direct in spelling out all their feelings and thoughts. There’re also the people that are writing poems like a shit post. To try to upset me as an editor.
Oh really?
People send things like that out of spite.
I really want to ask for an example…
I can’t.
Of course not!
But you can imagine. It’s usually laced with resentment and is trying to be pointed about something. But when you do that, it becomes a very niche sort of thing. I would consider it if it’s an interesting poem… but they’re rarely interesting poems.
They’re either resentful over not being selected previously or because they don’t like Overland and its politics.
Oh?
Yeah, so sometimes I’ll have actual right-wing poets or conservative poets submitting something that’s really racist or is just a really bad pot-shot at Overland as an organisation. And sometimes at me because they don’t like me. It’s clear.
I didn’t even imagine that. I’d known that you’d likely get some strays, but I’d thought they wouldn’t be so vicious. Anyway, what advice do you have for submitters besides, you know, being nice?
Oh, you don’t need to be nice. Keep it really simple in the submission, don’t explain your poems, don’t give me a huge, long spiel about how it came about or why they should be published and don’t inflate your author biography. Just simply give the titles and let the poetry speak for itself.
Read the journals that you’re submitting to. They all have their own aesthetic preferences and leanings towards certain kinds of poems or certain kinds of politics, because aesthetics are a kind of politics. So, read the work in the journal you’re sending to and have a think about that and which of your poems might suit. You don’t have to write toward it; if that helps then great, but sometimes that can be too constraining. Just write your best work and then pick the ones that you think suit the journal.
I think that’s great advice. And that’s all my questions! Thank you for the interview!
Great! Good questions.
