James Stanwix: In your first stanza from the poem “How to embrace a Quenda”, the persona’s reason for drawing back from trying to photograph the quenda is framed in terms of avoiding further habitat trespass or injury to that animal. Being a poet who at times takes a non-human as subject – picturing that subject in words – how do you think about poetry-created images as different to camera-created ones? 

[Lisa Collyer]: Ooh, I like that. 

It sounds a little bit Susan Sontag On photography, which I love that book, right? 

How’s it different? 

I think a lot of it’s the same, isn’t it? 

You know, you’re framing, you’re sort of stilling an image. 

It’s a representation. 

It’s a pure construction… so there’s that aspect.   

I hope that poetry transcends the the literal experience through metaphorical representation, imagery… as opposed to photography which is supposedly meant to capture what is there, like ‘here’s a picture of the quenda’, whereas I feel like the poem is trying to capture the emotion of holding that quenda – but also the idea of my impact, the human impact. 

So I’m hoping it captures the emotion and conflict, but also transcends the experience into something else, which I don’t think shows in the first stanza, but happens later on. 

[Hannah Reynolds]: I think a big part of the problem that Sontag, for example, had with photography is that it claims to be literal. And I don’t think poetry ever claims to be literal in the same sense. 

[Lisa Collyer]: That is true, we don’t pretend. 

[Hannah Reynolds]: I was also thinking about this idea of how to write about an animal subject without possessing it. 

And I think that is a question that’s relevant to the question of photography also – because a photograph is kind of a physical possession in obviously a way that writing isn’t – but you do still have to negotiate that, particularly when you’re writing about non-human subjects. 

[Lisa Collyer]: I hear you and I totally agree and I think that is a problem a lot with eco-poetry especially… trying to give the non-human ‘human’ qualities, trying to anthropomorphise, particularly with the quenda because it’s a wild animal.

Poetry is a form of that appropriation. What you’re saying is the opposite, isn’t it? 

How do I not do that? I don’t know if I’m successful. 

Holding an injured animal, I thought of the predator-proof fence, which is at the back of my suburb. 

That is where they relocated 43 quendas. 

I was thinking of that fence as the arms and that’s sort of a distance that you don’t think of: cold steel or metal as nurturing. So it’s also disrupting that nurture kind of concept.

But actually, perhaps distance to that animal is actually better for them – us not encroaching on their habitat, us staying away, them being contained so they can get on with their own life. 

I guess it’s that idea of embracing wildlife as you nurture them. 

And I think the best way is to not go near them. It’s to stay out of it. 

And yes, I totally feel like we are the problem. Without doubt. 

[James Stanwix]: My second question asks a little bit about eco-poetry. I was reading an article by Jake Goetz in the journal Australian Literary Studies about eco-poetry written by settlers. He talked about the creation of uncertainty as a tool used by poets to engage with stolen land without contributing to the “mythscape” – Jeanine Leane’s concept of the mythscape. 

Your poem’s title suggests that it is going to be a guide. But, reading it, I didn’t feel like it was kind of thrusting any rules onto its reader. 

How do you think about uncertainty when you’re writing, and whether it’s something you’re trying to generate, particularly in eco-poetry?

[Lisa Collyer]: You can’t think of eco-poetry without thinking of colonial possession because it’s part of the game. 

And I even think of introduced species like rabbits, which might inhabit a quenda burrow as part of that ongoing colonisation, right? 

How do I think about uncertainty? 

I definitely think about it more so […] with eco-poems, because I’m grappling with my own impact. 

I think a lot of times we think of gardens, for example, as aesthetic, and they are. 

They’re aesthetic, and we think of it in relation to humans – particularly colonial settler humans – because it’s our version, we’re not using it to be productive, for example. 

And I definitely didn’t know with this poem. 

I was meant to go away to Dunsborough and have a fun time, and then it turned tragic.

I held a quenda for an hour and then it got put down – and it’s like, ‘yay, I’m more miserable than I was, but I’m glad it’s out of pain’.

I just let it sit with me for a while, and for me poetry is about making connections – and when I went walking in that bushland, I saw this round fence and I thought, that’s like an embrace, so it’s connections. 

So I guess I’m using the poetic process and the reflection process, and the percolation that happens a long time before you write anything, to figure out what might be a good embrace rather than a bad embrace. 

[Hannah Reynolds]: I was wondering about the religious references in the poem; the reference to the “sanctum” and “last rites”. 

I think that speaks to what you were saying earlier about [the] transformative quality to poetry which allows us to take ordinary events in our lives and heighten them or bring something different out. 

I thought the religious references were interesting images to use because it gave the scene a sort of atemporal feeling to me. 

But then it’s balanced in that same stanza with the reference to the metronome and the human and animal heartbeats syncing, which is obviously a very embodied kind of thing. 

I think there’s a lot of this going on where one image is countered by its opposite.  

I was wondering if you could speak to that balancing of this atemporal quality of poetry, which is historically very lauded as bringing up the events of everyday life, and then this other quality to it, which is grounding. 

[Lisa Collyer]: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that. 

It’s interesting, because that is something that I do think about a lot. 

I’m a lapsed Catholic and now I consider myself an atheist.  

But at the same time there are certain aspects to religion that have qualities that are nice, like ritual and community and this idea of transcendence.  Which is what I’m exploring a little bit, but at the same time then bringing it back to earth. 

And I feel like that is a tension in all of my poetry. 

I don’t want to be so rigid in my thinking, and be ‘everything’s all grounded in reality’, because what do I know?  

I guess that’s a human sort of grappling. 

It’s part of the human conditioning to be sort of coupling between those two or contrasting between those two. 

At the end of the day, it’s a quenda, it got bit, and it’s been euthanised. 

And this is happening all the time. 

But at the same time, even though we don’t have a right to as colonial settlers, we still have a connection to country, right? 

In some way. 

It might not be the same as First Nations’, but you still do connect to space and land and the flora and fauna within it. 

I think that’s it.

—–

How to embrace a quenda

The pursuit of photographing a quenda abated 

since cradling an injured marsupial on the Meelup Trail. 

Road wounds fragment habitat; 

suburban pets unleashed and prey upon.

A bandicoot playing possum was a portent.

Our heartbeats synced: a metronome of sanctum; 

the round ear faced my mouth, 

attuned to last rites.

An embrace can be delineated by a metal sanctuary; 

the susurrus of understorey: sword sedge 

on Quindalup dunes; 

a nose poke, scats, and a foraging pit. 

Bioturbation—in the arms of a predator proof fence; 

grizzly excavators tumble soil horizons; 

setting seeds face the sun: 

hints at digging in.