Emilie Collyer
white space
memories of mother hands cool on skin
soft love not for bruising
current steep reading words and stories
Goenpul woman Arrernte poet Gomeroi scholar
blistering epic daily humming histories
each story its own
ordinary love conversation
but common refrain mother to child:
‘be careful of white women’
[protest: I am not one of those: they are not me]
[hold the words: don’t spit: let them coat my gums]
melt the looking glass that has shaped this body
let ‘me’ slide from my tongue
writing that speaks into white space pages
an invitation are you listening
holding notes that have vibrated
in bones for centuries
what we inherit can be so quiet
it takes another voice to dial the volume up
reading stories to peel back
skin of the past
ordinary love conversation
my mother to me
‘be careful when crossing the street
driving a car walking on your own at night’
in our household
where three white girl women lived
we didn’t talk about power
and bodies
actions of ancestors that moulded
where we stepped
no mention of
[raised to be kind but—]
[is silence violent or merely careless]
talk was sports bodies
‘I saw Evonne Goolagong play!’
‘Isn’t she brilliant—Cathy Freeman!’
no need to be schooled about
how women might— harm—
to stay safe from— bodies like—
writing is re-writing
an invitation are you listening
how to trace the imprints of
this ordinary body
This poem was first published in Cordite Poetry Review Issue 101: NO THEME 10 May 2021 and was commended in the Melbourne Poets Union 26th International Poetry Competition 2020
Emilie Collyer lives on Wurundjeri land where she writes poetry, prose and performance. Her poetry book Do you have anything less domestic? is published in 2022 by Vagabond Press. Award-winning plays include Contest, Dream Home and The Good Girl. Emilie is a PhD candidate at RMIT, researching feminist creative practice.
Questions for Emilie Collyer
Why write poetry ?
I fell into poetry via playwriting which I fell into via acting.
A play of mine won the George Fairfax prize many years ago and was produced at the Castlemaine State Festival. A director (who I would go on to work with) saw the play and commented on my poetic writing. It lit something inside me. I had never seen myself as a poet. I started attending spoken word events and writing poetry, first to perform and then to publish. I also write fiction and non-fiction. Poetry is a wonderful form because it is so challenging to write. I can experiment with every poem: what it looks like on the page; how I compose the poem; what techniques I use.
Poetry is a form that can grapple with ambiguity and betweenness.
It elides definition. It makes me exercise my writing muscles: how I use words, syntax, breath, sound, and shape. It is a complete – and open - art form.
Are you inspired by works that you return to time and time again?
“The Monkey’s Mask” by Dorothy Porter and f”or colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf is “ by Ntozake Shange are two very important works for me.
They changed how I saw what poetic writing could do. I return to them often as a writer, reader, and educator.
I read a lot of contemporary poetry, especially by Australian poets. I draw on visual art a lot. I often go to art exhibitions and take notes as I wander, similarly, I love watching dance. Art forms that don’t use spoken / written language as their primary mode are incredibly inspiring to me as a poet.
I am drawn to visual art that combines beauty with strangeness such as Gregory Crewdson’s photography and Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting.
Why does your poetry take the physical form that it does ?
In each poem, I am trying to capture, render or utter something that is difficult to frame or express.
It might be an emotional state. It might be a social observation.
It is, usually, a way to account for being in the world: bodily, imaginatively, politically, spatially. Poetry traces the act of being a human. I often work with contradictions and tensions.
I usually write a first draft intuitively and quickly, as the idea strikes or as I take a moment and try to unfold it. Then I will return to the poem and examine its physical shape on the page, its form, its rhythm, the use of line breaks, and stanza patterns. How are these all working to support the idea? Or, indeed, to work against it as another form of tension? Sometimes I work with a structured form (such as a sonnet or sestina) as the restriction can deepen the intensity of expression.
Why do you employ many (white) spaces between words?
The space can be many things. Sometimes it acts as a breath, a way for writer and reader to pause or to feel slightly ‘out of breath’.
Spaces can also act as a way to indicate silence or difficulty.
A train of thought that is hard to express. A struggle with finding the right word. It can also be a way to visually ‘trace’ an idea or a mode of thinking, to leave spaces where images or other words might drift in or exist in a kind of ‘haunted’ sense.
In ‘white space’ the poem is grappling directly with this term as it exists on the page and also as a concept about my experience being a white person in Australia and the place of silences, gaps, and things that are difficult to say or get left unsaid.
The theme of this edition of A-OK is care. What does it mean to you to be care- less?
Written that way the word becomes complicated.
My immediate response to the word ‘careless’ is that it means to act without giving thought to how your actions may impact others, or even yourself. Breaking the word up with the hyphen, the word could mean to be less preoccupied with analysing actions intellectually and in fact, be more spontaneous, more driven by instinct.
Care can be an act of kindness and generosity. It can also become a way to perhaps control others or assert one way of doing things.
“White Space” refers specifically to care. Could you elaborate upon how we outsource our anxiety?
be careful when crossing the street
driving a car walking on your own at night
Those lines in the poem refer to phrases I recall being told as a young woman.
So they are about the ways in which we learn to take care of ourselves. The anxieties are perhaps ‘outsourced’ but they are also founded. Those actions (walking alone, crossing a street) while seemingly benign, can lead to harm.
However, more key to the lines in the poem is the context. I am writing about how, as a white person, the warnings from my mother were about keeping my body safe from things such as road accidents and the threat of male violence.
Whereas, for Indigenous young women, my presence as a white woman could also represent a source of harm. I was not brought up to be aware of this possibility. It is something of a shock.
The poem speaks to how we might look at a word like ‘care’ and complicate it. How, as we learn more about the world and our role in it, a neat definition dissolves. Taking care of ourselves and of others requires a complex approach and the ability to see the world through different prisms.
Do you think care is gendered?
I think caregiving has and still is something associated with the feminine, with female gender, with the role of women.
Women do the lion’s share of family and social care work in terms of looking after children, older people and sick people. I think it is terribly sad that boys and men might not think of being caring as a positive attribute.
However, I also think we can always broaden and complicate our definition of the word. Care can take many forms and noticing this, paying attention to small or unusual acts of care by any person certainly makes life richer.
Do you have any advice for writers or creative producers?
It is tricky to give advice as every person is so different.
Perhaps that is the advice. Your path and opportunities will be unique.
For me, learning patience has been important. Things may not unfold exactly as you think they should, but unexpected and brilliant opportunities may present themselves. I also think a combination of internal and external focus is helpful. The passion and dedication of working at a craft for a long time, and how this is sustaining in itself. Along with that, being an active member of your creative community. Supporting others, getting involved, keeping your eyes open, your heart open, your resources at the ready to be part of things bigger than yourself.
how would you advise someone to continue their creative work practice in the face of an overwhelming “right, normal” way of doing things ?
There isn’t a right or normal way to be a writer or creative practitioner.
Of course, you may have specific goals you want to achieve, and this may involve getting to understand the industry and your place in it. The arts industry can be tough.
But there is also flexibility and many ways to make a living or sustain a practice and the more creative you can be in how you do this, the more satisfying you will find things. If you can find a few trusted peers who provide mutual support that can really help buoy you through some of those external ups and downs.
Keep coming back to why you want to make work, and what matters to you in a deep sense. The practice itself and the ways in which you can draw on the work of others to stay energised and curious.
What is the publication of your writing that you are most proud of?
My first full collection of poetry “Do you have anything less domestic? “was published recently by Vagabond Press.
I am proud of this work as it took me a long time to put a collection together, to think I had enough poetry of quality to warrant it.
It is lovely and weird to have a book in the world.
There is a slight sense of looking back and wondering if I could or should have made it differently. But it is also a wonderful marker of time and poetic effort. I am extremely grateful to have a book out and for a publisher to have faith that my work will connect with readers.
You can buy the book at a few book shops such as Dymocks and Neighbourhood Books or direct from the publisher here: https://vagabondpress.net/collections/new-releases/products/emilie-collyer-do-you-have-anything-less-domestic
And another thing….
Thanks for the chance to think deeply and with care about these questions.
