ALAN FYFE is a Jewish Australian poet whose award-winning collection G-d, Sleep, and Chaos turns fracture into survival and song. 

In this interview with Virginia Blackney, he reflects on the sustaining power of poetry to weave chaos, doubt, and beauty together.

In the collection, Fyfe confronts fracture and doubt with tenderness and defiance, weaving elegy, love, and survival into a poetics that refuses despair. 

Emerging in a world increasingly defined by political, ecological, and personal rupture, the book acts as both mirror and counterpoint, wrestling with disorder, spirituality, and vulnerability while insisting on the possibility of survival and meaning making. 

Fyfe’s work feels urgent now because it bridges the intimate and the universal: the restless nights of the body, the fractures of society, the vast uncertainty of belief. 

Based in Boorloo, on the unceded country of the Noongar nation, Fyfe writes as a Jewish Australian author attuned to how place informs identity and language. 

By giving shape to chaos through poetry, he reminds us of the sustaining power to hold contradictions, to question, and to carve beauty out of turbulence.

Virginia Blackney: Congratulations on winning WA Premier’s Book of the Year and Poetry Book of the Year and receiving commendation in Victoria. 

Has the reception to G-d, Sleep, and Chaos surprised or affirmed you in ways you did not expect?

Alan Fyfe: Yes it has surprised me. 

I did a soft launch of the book (before it was generally available) at The Marritree in Witchcliffe, which is such an idyllic place – it felt euphoric at the time. 

But, immediately afterwards, I went into a deep depression for a few days. 

Writing books is hard work, and the reception of poetry in particular is a liminal phenomenon. 

You never know if the work is going to be accepted or fall off a cliff and drift away to nowhere. 

I know some great writers as friends, but I’m not much of a networker in terms of the press or the industry. 

That stuff gives me the ick a little, as much as I understand it’s a reality for writers in the 2020s, so it never felt assured that G-d, Sleep, and Chaos would even get noticed. 

I’m certainly not complaining about the validation though, and I’m doubly not complaining about the prizes. 

I’m very aware of how many writers out there are struggling for income and exposure, and they’d all love this to happen to them.

In other ways, it feels like the climax of a lot of hard work. 

I wrote a novel first, which came near this kind of recognition several times but never quite hit it. 

It’s good for my partner, Jasmina, too – she backed me 100 per cent in this ridiculous venture of working on a literary career. 

It’s good for my writer friends who supported me and believed there was something special there. 

Many people who produce good books do so from an ecosystem of support.

I’m glad they’re validated in this too.

VB: Can you take us back to the genesis of this work, when did the first seeds of this book take root, and what compelled you to shape them into poetry?

AF: I was trying to write a poem about the 2018 massacre at the L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where an antisemitic guy opened up fire on the congregants who’d gathered for a service. 

He killed 11 people. 

It was hard to deal with and hard to look away from at the same time. 

There’s something especially ugly about attacks on people while they’re gathered together in worship, like the attack on the Al Nour Mosque in Christchurch, or the attacks on black churches in the US. 

There’s a big difference between poems that occur to you whole and poems that you’re trying to write. 

One of the best poems in the book took about 45 minutes, but After Pittsburgh took six months of rewrites. When I had it together, though, the central prose poetry cycle of the book came together – I had a style and an idea established.

Then I did a workshop with my friend, Lucy Dougan, where we did a close reading of Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay. 

Going through the parts of that very long poem, and talking about how it fitted together as a whole, gave me a lot of ideas about how to finalise and arrange the material for G-d, Sleep, and Chaos. 

A poetry book can be a bit of a ride from one end to the other, like a long poem in itself, so that was how I designed the book – a feeling and a set of themes that meets itself by the end. 

VB: The title G-d, Sleep, and Chaos immediately suggests a tension between the sacred, the everyday, and the unruly. How do these ideas intersect across the collection?

AF: I guess I feel a natural intersection between those ideas. 

Maybe not everyone does but, y’know, if you read the Torah, it’s wild. 

Like it’d be the most censored book if it wasn’t a religious text; I think most religious texts would. 

Gross, visceral, and (yes) transcendent things happen in ancient religious stories. 

They’re all over the place. 

So, I don’t really see it as a tension: more of a continuum. 

It’s like Heidegger’s idea of the threefold, the way we experience being as a known past, the certainty of death, and the unknown not-yet of the part in between now and death. 

Sleep is for dreaming and the subconscious. 

G-d is for the metaphysical and the unknown. 

Chaos is for the destructive and the self-destructive impulse. 

I’m trying to get at my own threefold and explore things that are our common experience of being present in the world. 

It seems to me that these things are always there in the human condition – even non-believers must have an unknown, maybe even more than believers who think they know some kind of answer to the unknown.

VB: Your work explores disorder and rupture alongside tenderness and insight. What role does poetry play in holding together chaos and meaning?

AF: Hah, poetry doesn’t hold things together. 

It doesn’t provide answers. 

When I teach poetry, I often compare a Mary Oliver poem, The Wild Geese, to a W.H. Auden poem, Musée des Beaux Arts. 

Both poems seem like wisdom statements about the smallness of humans in the world, but each comes to a completely different conclusion.

You can’t trust poets for answers because it’s about opening up meaning rather than defining it.

But that makes it a good tool to write about chaos. 

What is there to say about chaos in terms of philosophy or reportage if you can’t solve chaos? 

We’re left with the experience, with the emotion of it, with the immersion in it. 

That’s one job poetry can do well. 

Don’t get me wrong, poetry isn’t some master discipline. 

There are plenty of things poetry does badly, and being trustworthy is one of them. 

But there are some things poetry does better than other forms of language, and delving the indefinite is one of those things. 

In poetry, the centre cannot hold, and it usually gets annoying when poets try to force it to hold.

VB: How did your own lived experiences, as a Western Australian poet, inform the textures and landscapes of this book?

AF: My poetry has been described as hyper-localist, and I’m fine with that. 

I aimed at that. 

I was always impressed with the way Steinbeck wrote so specifically about the Dustbowl cultures he set his stories around, about the specificity of Ginsberg’s place writing. 

It brings outside readers into these worlds they’re unfamiliar with, and without apologising for it. 

If I’m delving the unresolved, then the experience of living all my life in WA is a prime example.

 It’s beautiful, it’s peaceful and mostly quiet here. 

But there are gaping problems. 

There are extreme disparities of wealth and wanting. 

We have the highest rate of methamphetamine use in the entire world. 

And there’s always the unavoidable fact that the whole thing is stolen from its true owners.

I was born here and feel like I don’t belong anywhere else – I write about not knowing what a poplar looks like because it’s a word in a book to me, not one of the trees I live with every day. 

Yet there’s that reality of a bloodstained invasion and deliberate genocide hanging over the entire landscape. 

It’s beauty and horror all at once, very much a chaotic set of feelings. 

VB: What guided your formal choices – the shape of the poems, their rhythms, the balance of narrative and lyric?

AF: Study and learning mostly. 

Writers shouldn’t ignore the study of poetics. 

Almost every young writer says they want to break the rules, which I completely support as a punk attitude, but that’s a defensive stance. 

I ask them what the rules are. 

How can you break the rules if you don’t know what they are? 

A bit of study and you’ll quickly find there aren’t really rules in the first place. 

Literature is always breaking then remaking itself. 

It’s just how literature functions, so any punk move is essentially following that rule of breaking and remaking, just the way much original punk music was classic rock’n’roll chord progressions speeded up with the feedback turned on.

I absolutely love prose poetry, which was properly formalised in the 19th century, and I used a lot of Charles Simic’s theories on it – a place where all the wildly divergent forms of writing come together. 

At the same time, I’d get bored doing a whole collection with one formal approach. 

Some poems demanded a different poetics to expose different colours, different scenes, different emotions. 

I like to test myself and see how far I can go with an experiment, or see if I can get across a hard formal structure. 

I’m hoping the reader doesn’t get bored too – I don’t want them to get too comfortable or complacent with a single approach before I’m finished with them.

VB: Did you have literary or philosophical influences while writing this book?

AF: Far too many to mention. 

A close reading would turn out bits of Freud, Tsiolkas, Simic, Kirkegaard, Plato, Kim Scott, Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, Keats, Virginia Woolf, Fay Zwicky, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Buber, Ned Kelly (he wrote), John Shaw Neilsen, Anne Carson, Gwen Harwood, Primo Levi, Adorno, Celan, always Emily Dickinson in all things, and so on. 

There are many influences from pop-culture and things like commercials and folk songs.

 One of my biggest influences are the poets I know personally though, who I see both in draft and published. 

So, Lucy Dougan, Lisa Collyer, and Madison Godfrey are WA poets who I work with and who I’m inspired by. 

Scott-Patrick Mitchell and I have a very close artistic relationship – we see and edit each other’s work all the time – that has been a vital exchange in my poetry. 

There’s a poem in my book which is after one of SPM’s poems, The Sleep Deprivation Diaries, from their collection, Clean. 

For me, The Sleep Deprivation Diaries captures a time and situation for Generation X as well as Ginsberg captured his own generation in Howl. 

It seems weird to say it because we rag on each other all the time as friends, just because we find it funny, but SPM’s poetry is one of my primary influences. 

VB: Winning both the WA Premier’s Book of the Year and Poetry Book of the Year is rare. What do you think readers are finding urgent or resonant in your work right now?

AF: That’s a hard question. I can’t answer for readers. 

I try to do the best job I can and what they think is up to them.

I can’t control things after it’s printed. 

In a real sense, it doesn’t belong to me anymore. 

I genuinely don’t know why now is this book’s time. 

I’m waiting for someone to tell me. 

I like to write in the absolute now, but not for the now. 

I’ve never liked poetry that aims at the zeitgeist and I find that a cheap way of getting attention. 

I want to be working against or in contrast to whatever the dominant tone is mostly.

This has kept me underground for many years, but lots of underground writers end up on the topsoil eventually. 

Who can predict the timing for that?

VB: What advice would you offer emerging WA poets who are grappling with their own “chaos” on the page?

AF: Practice. Do your 10,000 hours. 

Learn everything you can because learning is the only real defence against chaos. 

That’s if you need a defence against chaos – a bit of chaos can be welcome in the right circumstances. 

Either way, you should still learn. 

Be humble enough to keep going back to basics, don’t be self-defensively arrogant about your work because that gets you nowhere fast. 

Keep at the mountainous task until you become undeniable. 

And I’ll qualify the above by saying not everyone succeeds this way.

Some people do it through cliques and networks. 

That can work too, but it’ll never make your writing good. 

I’m saying this selfishly, because I want to read good writing. 

I will too, when you’ve applied all your effort and intellect to your poetry, I’ll be one of the people who buys it and recognises. 

And I’ll be the first to badmouth your work if you get there solely through networks too – I’ll be bored by it and completely unforgiving. 

Don’t waste the world’s paper resources on half-arsed efforts, and don’t waste my time. 

I’ll always give the benefit of the doubt to genuine effort, even if it’s not specifically my jam. 

Also, try to love something. 

It doesn’t need to be romantic love. 

Love your family, or love a snail, or love the way an afternoon feels when the temperature is exactly to your liking. 

You’ll go lots of places in your poetry, but you’ll only sustain your practice if you keep coming back to love. 

VB: If you could distil one line, image, or feeling from G-d, Sleep, and Chaos that you would like to stay with readers long after they put the book down, what would it be?

AF: I was talking to SPM about what would be the title of either of our collected works, if one of us dies and the other has to edit a collected works. 

It’s a bit grim, but good to feel like you get a say in that stuff. 

I picked a line from the poem Fruit for Rosa: “the miracle of the leaning tree”, which is about seeing the miraculous in the ordinary. 

G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is centred on finding gratitude in the middle of darkness, so that’s all. 

Just that image – a plum tree leaning in the sun and that being sacred and good and life affirming.

I feel like that’s enough.