Dr. Paul Monk on Poetry, Science, and The Classics

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In this podcast, Dr Paul Monk and Nick Fabbri discuss the relationship between poetry, science, and the classics, and how these subjects inform Paul’s poetry, and what it means to live poetically. This conversation includes readings of a number of Paul’s poems from Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess, The Three Graces, and Wine on the Flames. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilisation in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China. 

Full transcript below

Dr. Paul Monk

Poetry, Science and the Classics
Nick Fabbri with Paul Monk
Queenscliff, Victoria - 14 September 2023

Nick: Welcome to Bloom, a conversations podcast which has been on hiatus for a few years. Listeners of the podcast, as it once was, will be delighted to know that we'll be speaking this evening with Dr Paul Monk, a long-time friend and guest on this podcast, in his capacity as a writer and a poet. Tonight, we'll be speaking about poetry, science and the classics, and the way in which Paul sees these three subjects as interwoven in his poetry. So, welcome back, Paul, and thanks for joining us.

Paul: Thanks, Nick. It's great to be talking with you and great to be talking about poetry, which is the greatest love of my life, of the various areas of interest that I have and areas in which I write.

Nick: Wonderful. Many listeners of this podcast have remarked to me about how much they enjoy your reflections on meaning, poetry, literature and love, and also the wide-ranging way you're able to cover subjects as diverse as science, history, the classics and biology. So, it should be very enjoyable this evening to hear those seemingly divergent topics crystallised in a couple of poems you've written recently. So, without further ado, if you'd like to take us away with a poem from your recent work of poetry called Wine on the Flames.

Paul: Wine on the Flames, which I've chosen to kick off with a poem called ‘Autumn Leaves’.

Autumn Leaves

This morning, as I took my walk,

My thoughts were all of you,

Of how it seems we've reached a fork,

Between the false and true,

The autumn gold, upon the ground,

The aura in the air,

Seemed redolent of what we've found;

Or may find if we dare.

For dare we must, in tilted time,

Which draws us down the hill,

Away from summits lovers climb

If young and fertile still.

We found each other late, my love,

And fall is where we're thrown,

Fulfillment seems behind, above

What's left for us to own.

And yet, I claim, the fallen gold

That’s scattered at our feet,

Symbolises wealth untold

And intimacy sweet.

For all these autumn leaves that lie

Around us as we live,

Are poetries for you that I

Composed and can now give,

Not only episodically,

As if ephemeral,

But growing sempiternally,

Down times unfathomed well.

The nearest time can still be new,

Perhaps this coming spring:

Sublime communion, me and you,

With all that that might bring,

But what my morning walk foretold,

As destined to abide,

Is what we too can now enfold,

Our wondrous love inside:

A peerless book of poetry,

Red Ochre, from the heart,

Addressed to you and wrought by me -

The whole of life as art.

Nick: Thanks, Paul. That was a wonderful recitation. Perhaps we can begin by talking a bit about why you call this current work of poetry Wine on the Flames.

Paul: Yeah, the phrase comes from the final lines of Homer's Iliad, where Hector, the great Trojan hero, has been killed by Achilles and is being cremated in Troy, after his body's been retrieved by King Priam, his father. I chose that as the title chiefly, let me say, because I'll be 67 in a few months and I've been ill quite a lot over the last 20 years and I feel as though I'm entering the final phase of my life, and so what I seek to craft in this emerging book - which has some 70 poems written already, but we'll have many more before it's finished - is a rounded sense of what it means to live and finally die poetically. So, that's where the title of the book comes from.

Nick: And, obviously with reference in that final stanza to the peerless book of poetry, Red Ochre, which is also a book you've recently written.

Paul: Yes, indeed. Red Ochre is a book of 380 poems, written over the last couple of years, in an intense burst of creativity, and it's a vast symphonic structure. I really - I think it's the finest book I've written so far, and it's illustrated, or it's being illustrated, and it's due to be published soon. It'll certainly be published, I would expect, before Wine on the Flames is finished, much less published, and they will form, those two, a trio with the book published last year, The Three Graces, which has 300 poems in it. So, you can see that in recent years, although I have been doing other things, I've been really immersed in writing poetry, and I have found it immensely fulfilling.

Nick: So, listeners will be delighted to know that we'll be featuring poems this evening from all each three of those texts, Wine on the Flames, Red Ochre and The Three Graces, as we explore the different topics of poetry, science and the classics. But before we progress with more poetry, what prompted you - what moved you to write that very first poem you read, ‘Autumn Leaves’? It recalled to me, I think it was Keats’s poem ‘Ode to Autumn’, in which he sort of, you know, speaks almost romantically to the season of autumn, the changing of the colours and, you know, the way in which the seasons impact the food we eat and how we feel, you know, romantically as well, but could you speak a little bit about that poem you just recited?

Paul: Yeah, I mean, the short answer to your question is, I was out walking on an autumn morning, and the ground in the street, the paving in the area I live in, was just covered in these golden leaves that had fallen from the trees, and there were still a good many golden leaves on the trees and it was quite beautiful to behold, and as I walked along, I was just struck by some of the thoughts that surfaced finally in the poem.

But whereas Keats wrote an ode to autumn addressing the season, you know, in the way that quite a few poets have addressed abstract or inanimate things, he wrote a famous ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, for example - this poem and all the poems, frankly, that I've been writing are directly addressed to a person, to a woman, with whom, as the poem makes fairly plain, I've been involved in a complex romantic relationship. So I drew upon the significance of the colour of the leaves, the time of year, the nature of autumn, and the possibilities of spring, in giving expression to how I felt we were placed in terms of where our relationship was at and what its possibilities were.

Nick: I remarked earlier that Keats wrote ‘Ode to Autumn’ and how, when you read your poem, I found myself thinking of other poems, memories and experiences that I'd had, which related to the poem, like when my delightfully eccentric year eleven teacher first recited ‘Ode to Autumn’ twice in the literature class, and how he had strewn brown and gold, red hued autumn leaves across our table, putting on a spread of seasonal figs and other autumnal produce, and how he played his own violin, Vivaldi's ‘Autumn’ from The Four Seasons. But let's pause and ask, you know, what is poetry such that it can recall so many kinds of feelings and memories and references to other poets and poems and literary works in my mind? What's going on?

Paul: I think that's a very good question, and I need hardly say that as a practicing poet, I often reflect on that, and I would say in the briefest compass, poetry is the intentional use of language to capture meaning musically and vividly. So, most of the time we speak in pragmatic and often a relatively debased prose. We communicate about basic things, factual things, moods, without pausing to try and articulate it musically or beautifully or memorably.

Poets do that, and what's happened historically and in all cultures is that poetry initially in non-literate cultures and all cultures, is something memorised by bards and recited around fires or, you know, homes or halls to people and it captures the spirit of who they are, and it stirs their wider sense of what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of that particular culture or tribe or whatever.

Then, the question arises, well, if you're writing poetry now, how do we do that? Because on the one hand, you've got this massive burden in a way, of past achievement in a literate culture. It's there, it weighs on you, it's complex, it's rich. How can you rise to that standard? Where do you find yourself in all of that? Who do you compare yourself with? What are you trying to achieve? What beauty can you create that nobody else has created before and that won't sound just like a cliché? That intimidates, I think, a lot of people.

And let me frankly say, in my youth, I wanted to write poetry. Nobody taught me how to write poetry ad I did suffer from that anxiety. I thought, you know, I know poetry is written by Shakespeare, by Keats, by Tennyson and whatever, but first of all, they were a long way away and way back in the past and their poetry is all in books, I don't know anybody who writes poetry. How would I go about this?

It took me years of reading and experience and practice before I wrote poems that I thought, I think these are good actually, and it took longer before I was interacting with women in particular who wanted poetry from me and who urged me on and liked what I wrote for them. So, whereas many poets - and Keats was a very famous example - wrote brilliant poetry when they were very young, and he died when he was only 25, or Rimbaud wrote all of his great poetry before the age of 20 and didn't write any more poetry and died when he was about 30.

I have lived much longer than any of them. I'm only writing poetry in my sixties that I would say really stacks up, it's good poetry and that's not because it took me all that time simply to work at poetry, I did many other things in between, but now my greatest passion is the poetry I'm writing. But let me just recap by saying that poetry, in its essence, has always been an effort to capture vividly, meaningfully and musically what it means to be human and what our experiences as individuals or as groups are really about.

Nick: It sort of begs the question though, doesn't it, about whether music is in fact a deeper language or a deeper meaning making vehicle for humans, right?

Paul: Well, a deeper emotional experience, perhaps, but not meaning making, because music as such doesn't have meaning. It stirs our feelings, but what it can do - precisely because it doesn't have assigned meaning; it's not semantic the way language is - is it can be more universally shared and understood because it stirs human emotions and moods. Whereas poetry is generally specific to a language, it's hard to translate it and get the same impact, or it can be more time constricted, right, it's about a particular place or time, or even it's about the personal experience of somebody who expresses it beautifully, but it doesn't relate to everybody, but music tends to, and all around the world people listen to Mozart and Beethoven.

Nick: Yeah, but I suppose the musical aspects of - the musical dimensions of poetry like iambic pentameter, or when you might be reading Latin or something and they had dithyrambs and other kinds of beats and inflections and things on the language, even if you didn't understand what was being said or the meaning that was being rendered, you could, in a way, still relate to the musicality of the poem.

Paul: Absolutely and it's always been a feature of poetry. In fact, Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet, wrote in a book called Poetry's Estate, about 70 years ago. He says, you know, if we were asked, having grown up immersed in our own folk song and folk poetry in the Orkneys - if we'd been asked, what is poetry, we would have said I suppose, well, it's a mixture of language and music, right? But we took it for granted. We were immersed in it. We didn't ask theoretical questions about it there, right? It was a thousand-year-old tradition, and it's the way we lived. But he's absolutely right, and you're right in what you say, and one of the things that makes poetry memorable is that it well, traditionally is musical - a lot of modern poetry is not - and by musical, it mostly means meter, right. And pentameters in English are the most natural, conversational, flowing form of poetry.

In other languages, that's not necessarily so. They're writing different meters and so when we try and translate poetry written in, say, hexameters from Latin or Greek, it's not easy to do, to write hexameters in English. But there are certainly variations and there are different kinds of poem and some poems rely not only on meter, but, of course, on rhyme and that also has a kind of music to it, the sound, right, and it can be rhyme, it can be assonance, it can be alliteration, it could be slant rhyme, subtle rhyme, and all of this adds to the sound and the musical kind of impact that it makes on the mind, even if somebody doesn't really understand what the poem's saying.

Nick: Wonderful. Perhaps we might hear another one of your poems to illustrate some of the things we've just been discussing.

Paul: Yeah. I'll read a short poem now called ‘You I Love’, and I've chosen this for two reasons. One is that it doesn't have rhyme or meter and I've just said a lot of modern poetry doesn't. It relies rather on the vividness of the language to ignite a mood and also, it is a love poem and I think I remarked earlier that the poetry that I write is addressed always to a ‘you’ - something we might come back to, where - and a human you, a very specific you, not an abstract one.

Nick: Not a sheep either.

Paul: No, it's not - certainly not a sheep, no, I'm not a Kiwi. We better not digress into Kiwi jokes. So, this is ‘You I Love’:

You I Love

You, I love in the very workings of language,

in the very existence of music,

in the very idea of human beauty,

of form, graceful gesture, art.

You, I love in your mysterious privacy,

insistent on a world of discretion,

insistent on your prerogative of mask,

always succinct and lapidary as Word.

Yes, you I love as Word become flesh,

as she who should be desired,

with a passion generative of ceremony,

generative of memory, of poetry.

Nick: What struck me is that there are a number of religious or Biblical references coursing throughout that poem.

Paul: Yes, there are. There are a number of hints that there's almost a metaphysics or a theology behind the poem, but a heterodox one, right. Notably, I refer to the beloved as the Word.

Nick: Capital.

Paul: Capital W, right, and say that she is always succinct, and lapidary as the Word.

Nick: What does lapidary mean? Is it sort of - is it like carved out of stone or something, or the detailed - it can be detailed?

Paul: Yes, it's - how would you say - almost you would say rounded and smooth like a stone, you know, and it's a kind of synonym of succinct as well, right. Somebody who speaks in a lapidary way doesn't ramble on. But the thing that I noticed as I read that poem, which I hadn't drawn attention to before reciting it, is that while it doesn't have meter or rhyme, it does have repetition, right.

So, the first stanza begins, you I love, the second repeats, you I love, with different things following it and then the third reaffirms that saying, yes, you I love, right. So, that kind of repetition is another feature of poetry. It seems to me that repetition is one way to drive home the central message of a poem in the same way that in a speech, if it's rhetorically sophisticated, there will be repetition. A theme keeps being repeated in order that it really becomes embedded in the consciousness, the awareness, the memory of the audience.

Nick: And what sort of poetic tradition would you situate this kind of poetry in? You know, would it be sort of more akin to maybe the modernists or something like that or...?

Paul: Yeah, I would say it is. I mean, one of perhaps the unusual features of the way I approach poetry is, because I wasn't taught how to write poetry by anybody, I had to make it up for myself and experiment. I don't now, in my mature years, write poetry modelled on that of anybody else. I have found ways to express myself and I have found it easier and easier to say what I'm trying to say, and occasionally I do, as an instance, write a poem which like, as I said, a great deal of 20th century poetry or modern poetry, bucks the long traditions of rhyme and meter.

But there's a very fine book by Timothy Steele, an American poet and professor of literature, published about 30 years ago called Missing Measures, in which he says that there's a problem with this in general - not with every specific poem - in that the idea that poetry is something more than meter is fair enough. The idea that it's something other than meter is problematic, right. And what I find, I have to say, when I read a lot of modern and contemporary poetry, is that it often lacks these features and not only that, because it lacks those musical characteristics and because it's trying to compensate by intensity of feeling or language, I frankly often find it unintelligible. I think, ‘What is this person trying to say?’  And I would certainly say, in my case, I intend in every poem I write, that if you pay attention to the poem, it's perfectly clear what I'm saying. It's not disorderly, it's not association of ideas, it's not free association.

Nick: It's suggestive of a more scientific or sort of rational approach to construction of the poetry, right?

Paul: Well, it probably springs from the fact that I do hold what I would call a scientific view of the world. I think that the sciences, systematic inquiry do furnish us an understanding of reality. But also I spent many years as an intelligence analyst, as a scholar of international affairs, as a consultant in applied cognitive science, and those were all disciplines or professional roles in which I had to be clear about what I thought and what the evidence for my beliefs was. So, I suppose that has helped to shape me as a poet, right. I don't flee from clarity in poetry. I seek to crystallise, as beautifully and meaningfully as I can, in poetry what precisely I feel.

Nick: And yet, I'm reminded of an interview with Mary Oliver, a famous American poet with Krista Tippett in her On Being podcast, and Mary was reflecting on the fact that in her older age - and she recorded this podcast a couple of years before she passed away - she used to write much more longer and kind of - I don't know, you know, poems, which were not necessarily adherent to the kind of formalism that you've described, but they were sort of like more detailed and fuller and more fleshed out, and then she noted in her later years that she sort of - sometimes it was sufficient to almost gesture at or say a couple of lines and, you know, get the meaning across because - I remember the line, she said that's enough, it's said - she said what she needed to say in a couple of like, one or two standards, just like this You I Love poem, right. And I remember the poem she was talking about. It was something about walking on a beach or something and it was this almost like haiku like simplicity of impression, romantic impression, emotional impressionism in which the meaning or the feeling of the poem is communicated between writer or creator and the reader, you know, and it strikes me that this You I Love poem is kind of more in that form of succinct communication of meaning without needing to have an exhaustive catalogue or a catalogue or formalistic kind of...

Paul: Yes, and without what might be called extravagant or formalistic rhetoric, where I go into cliches about why I love you, but rather I just had this sense that I do love you, I do love her, and for these precise reasons, because she is very articulate, very intelligent, right, and language is a great part of how we relate.

Nick: Hard boiled meaning is sufficient almost for the poem to stand alone, right.

Paul: As compared with a short, crisp poem like ‘You I Love’, there are other poems, of which I'll share one now, which are more like emotive exclamations. They're more a celebratory mood and less of, as it were, a reflection or a statement, and this one's called ‘Round a Dancing Star’, and what I would say in this case is that we've talked about music and we might come back to that theme and a question of meter in poetry and so on, but this poem, like the previous one, doesn't depend on that really, and certainly not on rhyme, but on vividness of feeling conveyed in language. So, let's go with that one.

Round a Dancing Star

We're the rarefied embodiment, you know -

You know because you're way ahead of me;

Rarefied by all the means we use

To keep the thing romantically, mysterious;

Embodiment because you're sensual -

Of soma, animated by transcendent love.

I never thought you'd call, but when you did,

These two flying years of poetry

Opened up from blooming secrecy

As my imagination soared beyond

All councils of discretion or dismissal -

Engulfed, intoxicated, fascinated.

We have circled round each other's minds,

Stalked each other in the labyrinths

Of the world, of Ka and signifiers,

Of the subtle nuances of courtship,

Of the primal dance of sex and death,

Of the deeper, Dasein sense of time.

For you I cannot speak, but as for me,

These two Julian journeys round the Sun

Have rendered me a chastened astronaut,

They've reworked all I ever knew or thought,

So radically that how it was begun

Now seems the seed of all that set me free.

Oh, happy anniversary, my love!

Oh, happy day when you called from afar,

Alighting, like the gentlest kind of bird,

Upon the outer window of my bourn,

Awakening your chosen jaded poet

To lead him round and round a dancing star.

Nick: And what prompted you to write that poem?

Paul: Oh, when she called me on the second anniversary of our first conversation and, you know, without necessarily getting to the strictly personal, one thing, as I think you know from our prior conversations, I always loved about her is the sound of her voice. She speaks beautifully.

Nick: So, it's interesting listening to that poem as a sort of an exclamation of a feeling that you had towards your lover and had built up over a period of time. Comparing it to the previous poem, ‘You I Love’, which was a statement of sort of certainty and, I guess I suppose, feeling and obviously the emotional resonances of the first poem, ‘Autumn Leaves’, but having listened to three of your selected poems, it'd be great if we could revisit some of those broader themes about the nature of poetry, in particular, its relationship to human meaning, communication and civilisation.

Paul: There's a big debate, as many of our listeners will be aware these days, about AI. You know: Can we develop strong AI, artificial intelligence with consciousness, and one of the great tests, it was always said, as to whether AI was human was, could it write a sonnet? Well, AI can now write sonnets. You know, Chat GPT can write sonnets. You ask it to write a Shakespearean sonnet and it'll do it, right, but the point is that the machine has no sense of meaning in doing that. It's just going through a formula, right. It's been fed all Shakespeare's sonnets and it says, well that's the kind of thing, so let's crunch up one that resembles that, right? Whereas when a human being writes a poem, if they're any good, the poem has meaning for them as well as, one hopes, for readers, right? It's not just a formula crunched out according to an algorithm.

Nick: …an algorithm. Programming.

Paul: If it lands as that, written by a person, then it lands as rather sterile, rather dull, rather cliched, right, but there's a really fundamental issue here. One of the barriers to machines ever becoming conscious, human, feeling things - and this is, of course, at play in the famous film Blade Runner, replicants, are they really human - is the question of meaning tied also to memory, and what we've gradually discovered in the neurosciences and philosophy of mind is that what distinguishes a living creature and above all, a human creature with the unusual brains that we have, is what they call the Umwelt, the felt reality within which the creature is immersed.

So, a brain is not an abstract thing, it's not a computer. It's embodied intelligence. It's connectedness to, awareness of, feeling about, meaning in an environment. So, poetry quintessentially is exactly that. When poetry, either for the author of the poem or for an audience with which it's shared and recited, or for readers in their privacy, really brings them alive, it's because it brings alive for them a deepened sense of that Umwelt, the world of meaning in which, to use the Biblical phrase, they live and move and have their being. That won't happen for an AI because it doesn't have an Umwelt, alright?

So, poetry is, as it were, about the Umwelt and for that reason, of course, it will differ for each individual poet, for each language community within which poetry is written and remembered or read and across time, alright, but if, on the other hand, as is true, I would say for me and we'll talk further about this shortly you live in a world of literature in which the poetry of many cultures over thousands of years is actually available and you've read it, you have it in your library, as I do, then in a sense, that is your Umwelt, right.

Nick: It's an expansive one.

Paul: Yeah. The question then becomes, can you share that with anybody else, because if you can't, then when you write poetry, it might be very meaningful to you, but it's somehow you just talking to yourself. If you're going to address somebody else or some other selves, it needs also to be meaningful to them, and language is fundamentally, as Wittgenstein insisted, not a private thing, right, however much it may seem to be at times. It is about communication with others. It's about reference or connection with other minds in a shared Umwelt.

Nick: And that's where this notion of the addressable you becomes, I think, you know, really poignant. You know, who are we actually addressing? Who are we seeking that connection with, in the poetry or the writing for that matter?

Paul: Yes. I mean, you use a phrase there that runs very deep, and Paul Celan - survivor of the death camps in the Second World War, Jewish, who finally committed suicide in Paris, unable to go on - said at one point, in one of his own pieces, that poetry is perhaps a search for an addressable you, somebody who will actually understand, you know, who it's meaningful for you to address. Whereas his sense after Auschwitz, as it were, after the Holocaust, was well, who can you talk to about this?

Nick: Who would understand?

Paul: Having been through this, it's - you know, and it was for that very reason that Theodor Adorno famously said, ‘After Auschwitz, there can't be poetry’. But of course there is, because not everybody lived through that. There are other Umwelts, not everybody lived through the Holocaust, horrific as it was.

Nick: Indeed, and even those who didn't live through it, directly or even indirectly, you know, is related to those who did, we can all have flashes of recognition, right, in the import of what's being communicated across a whole range of contexts. It's not - it sort of exists in more like an optative sort of dreamlike or imaginative state of empathy, right, to connect to a subject matter. You don't have to have direct or lived experience of something to understand it in some way.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, to use almost a trivial example - it's not trivial, but it's not on the scale of the Holocaust - but famously, in 74 AD at Masada, the last Jewish Zealots who had held out against the Romans, knowing that they were about to be overwhelmed by the legions, committed mass suicide. This is a dramatic incident in history. Can I write poetry about that? None of them did. Is it an insult to their memory to turn it into poetry? I don't think so.

Although poetry can sometimes trivialise things as prose can, but those who remember it, who see it as a reference point, see it as meaningful and poetry is about capturing meaning in a memorable, vivid, perhaps musical way. I should add, speaking of music, you know, and music as such, that it is a remarkable phenomenon and it does overlap with language and produce poetry, but it was the great anthropologist who died only a decade ago, Claude Levi-Strauss, at the age of 100 - you know, a bit like Henry Kissinger, who's still alive at 100 - and Claude Levi-Strauss made the memorable remark, ‘Musique c’est la mystere supreme de l’homme.’ (Music is the supreme mystery of humanity).

What is music? Where does it come from, right? One could dwell on that, but it would be a digression from the central theme of poetry. The point being that with regard to music and I would say with poetry, it does us credit if we're sufficiently fascinated by these phenomena to stop and say, actually, don't take them for granted, they're extraordinary. You know, and there are other things which that's true.

I mean, mathematics is absolutely extraordinary. Where does that come from? Where is its mapping onto the universe? So, the thing about that is that this is all in play. This is all at stake when we're immersed in poetry, when we're seeking to be poetic, not frivolous, not just writing limericks or something, but really capturing stuff, and you said earlier that this question of an addressable you is at stake and absolutely that's true in my poetry. It consistently addresses a very specific person and that's partly because I have an extraordinary muse who wants poetry and who understands. My consistent experience has been that there's nothing that I can refer to, there's no turn of phrase I can use that she doesn't understand.

Nick: Which surely enhances the dynamic and the experience of both of you.

Paul: It does. It's really - you know, to me, it's absolutely extraordinary and at times people say to me, you keep saying she's completely extraordinary, which I think she is as a muse, but these friends will say to me, but you're the one writing the poetry, you're the one who's really extraordinary, and I think, yes, but it's a two-way street. I would not be writing these poems addressed to a very addressable you who understands it, if it wasn't this particular person. It's not true of every person, by any means.

Nick: No, indeed and, you know, you often use the term muse to describe this relationship with this person and others as well who have inspired poetry. What is the experience or the feeling of a muse like this idea of inspiration, this sort of almost like, you know, Holy Ghost sort of coming into you and animating you and getting you to write and think and feel and be in different ways that you haven't before? What's it like to any person, let alone a poet?

Paul: Well, there's a very long tradition, certainly in Western poetry, of evoking the Muse. I mean, Homer famously begins the Odyssey by saying,

‘Sing to me Muse, of the man of twists and turns, the man driven time and again off course, after he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.’

Right? That's the Fagles translation, at least. And Virgil begins the Aeneid, echoing the Odyssey quite self-consciously and talking about Aeneas and his escape from Troy. What is the Muse to those ancient poets? Well, the Greeks of course had a whole cluster of muses, and they believed that these were the spirits that inspired creative arts. And why would they embody that sense of inspiration in muses, in deities? Well, because they needed a story to explain something that was deeply mysterious.

For all that, I, as I said, have a scientific worldview and I don't believe that there are disembodied spirits and occult entities like that, and I'm not certain that they literally believed that necessarily and Virgil almost certainly didn't. It was a poetic trope that he used. But nevertheless, when I feel moved to write a poem, I cannot explicitly tell myself or anybody else where the specifics of the poem come from. The poem arises. It's either there or it's not. I can't just sit down and say, well, alright, let's write a poem about X, and then a poem happens, or you crank it out mechanically. You could do that perhaps, but it's uninspired and...

Nick: It feels like a labour or something...

Paul: Yeah, but I don't have a disembodied source of inspiration, you know, a mysterious deity or sprite. I have a living, breathing human woman who is highly literate, extraordinarily articulate, loves poetry and wants poetry from me. That's what I mean by a muse and Virgil didn't have such an inspiration. I don't know about Homer. We don't know a lot about him, right, but I think they when Virgil spoke of a muse and Dante, when he talks about Beatrice - I mean, he didn't know Beatrice. She was a model for him of beauty, of femininity, but he didn't have a relationship with her. She didn't ask him to write any poetry. In fact, she died quite young, but she was, in a sense, his muse or the figuration or his musical inspiration, let's say.

So, I feel very privileged in knowing that tradition and having in my life a very real incarnate muse, and that's whom I address in the poems. But there's a philosophical perception around this as well for me, and that is Martin Buber wrote a famous book called I and Thou, about the whole question of the communicative relationship, the ethical relationship between two human beings, two conscious beings.

A lot of work has gone into this relationship in trying to work out, so who are we for one another? What's really happening here? You know, what is generating the poetry? Why would I write poetry for this particular person, and why so much and why so strongly felt? So, I keep coming back to this question of the addressable you and the whole idea of the mind of another, the sensibility of another, the meaning of what I'm saying, the weighing and weighting of each word, and it's a fabulous experience, it's a deeply humanising experience.

Nick: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that you had a scientific world view and somehow that informed your poetry. Could you unpack it a little bit more for us? I mean, isn't science and the scientific method sort of incompatible with poetry and feeling and emotion? Isn't science typically, you know, impersonal and rational and devoid of emotion and feeling?

Paul: Yes, in a sense it is and as I believe I marked earlier, I spent much of my life as an analyst sifting, you know, myth and fiction out for fact, for reality, and that's really what science is about, the human sciences as well as the natural sciences. So, it isn't a matter of blending the two in some sentimental way, as if there's no real difference. So, let me be quite precise about what I mean.

If I'm asking myself: ‘What is so? What is the case? What is fact?’, I'm in the world of scientific inquiry. But if I want to say: ‘How do I feel about that fact, that reality, that truth?’, then I'm in the world of poetry, of feeling. And most people have great difficulty giving articulate expression to what they feel, and in order to close the gap between what they feel and their capacity to express it, most people will fall back upon what somebody else has written or sings. Right?

This is why we have so much music in our society, endless outpouring of folk songs and pop songs, which in many respects cover much the same ground because everybody has much the same experiences, but the nuances, the capacity of a great artist to express things or to create music that stirs the feelings that, you know…Let me digress briefly to say there was a concert the Rolling Stones gave in Havana, a decade or so ago, and there'd never been a rock concert in Castro's Cuba. This was the first time it had happened, and they had an enormous crowd, and when the first chords started to be played by Keith Richards and the others for their famous song ‘Gimme Shelter’, the whole crowd started to dance to it.

They knew these chords. It's part of a culture, even though they must presumably have heard it on radios and records and so on, and even little children. My favourite scene in the whole video of this concert is a little fellow who can't be more than four or five years old, hanging onto a fence, way back in the crowd, and he's got his eyes closed and he's dancing to this music. It's amazing to watch. That's music. That's what it does, but it's other people who create the music, perform the music, and the mass of humanity respond. They say, yeah, that'll do well, right. What the poet is trying to do is do that for himself. Right.

So, where does science and poetry come together? Well, if you're a person who is serious about knowledge and reason, which I am, and if you work in those professional fields, you will have, it's fair to say, a greater than usual range of experiences. You'll encounter enigmas, problems, challenges, realities. This is so. Right? How do you deal with that? Do you remain mute, or do you find some way to create meaning in that context, without turning your face away from reality?

Similarly, I seek to bring the same sense of reality and honesty to my personal encounters. I don't want illusions. I want to find and generate meaning in terms of what is so, what's authentically, possible, or maybe not possible and not write sentimental fluff. Right? But I can be playful and I'd like to share a little poem, a very playful poem that I wrote some time ago, which is informed by scientific microbiology and the ancient history of life on earth.

It's not make believe, it's not a fable in that sense and yet theme of the poem, as listeners will gather, is about how important it is to be able to exchange information, to communicate. So, it's about how cells. Life on Earth begins with single celled organisms, 3.8 billion years ago, and for 2 billion years, there's nothing but prokaryotes, which are bacteria that reproduce themselves by cloning, by just splitting. Only after a couple of billion years of that do eukaryotic cells emerge and eukaryotic cells are much more complex and they can exchange genetic information, and this is the foundation of sexual reproduction and the enormous variation that it brings with it.

My little poem, ‘We Karyotes’, reflects on what difference does it make being eukaryotic rather than prokaryotic, and it's whimsical. It goes as follows.

We Karyotes

How would life be?

Would it still be erotic

had it made you and me

simply prokaryotic?

Not very, I'd say.

Endless self-replication.

No cellular play

To exchange information.

So, second my motion

As life bobs and floats

On the Archaean ocean

We’re eukaryotes.

Will you carry oats,

 If they come from me,

As we play wild motes

On a billionaire spree?

I'd love some from eu

If eu sent them my way

To refresh and renew

My own DNA.

So, what we see there is taking what is indubitably scientific biology, knowledge of cellular biology and playing, juggling with it. Right?

Nick: Yeah, but also talking about it in expressive, you know, linguistic ways, of the kinds you sort of have recited earlier in this interview and the poems you write about, things like love and emotion and feeling, but it's sort of describing - I mean, you could imagine a scientific thesis being written about that precise subject and that precise question, you know, but you've, I think, quite almost like, uniquely, really, in the poetry that I've read, done it for a scientifical process.

The other thing that sort of struck me about that poem is just the sense of Deep Time in which you're operating and thinking as a sentient creature. You know, this idea of cellular evolution over billions of years and the fact that our hominid ancestors have only been around for 300,000 years or so and really, all of recorded history has sort of occurred in the last 7000-odd years on the sort of the end of the last ice age and just how sort of disorienting that is as a phenomenon in terms of placing ourselves in Deep Time, seeing humanity and all of the expression that's writ large in poetry and literature and the arts and music as this kind of supernova or efflorescence really in the grand universal scheme of billions and billions of years.

Paul: Yeah, look, I agree. I think you've pointed me in the right direction here, in terms of summing this up. The realities that the sciences have opened up to us are so extraordinary and so rich and so detailed that, rather than impoverishing our inherited traditions, they have given us this immense field to play in, to understand, to grow into and in fact, the next poem I'd like to share takes up precisely that theme. It's called ‘Our Cosmology’, and its central theme is look all around the world, in any culture, whichever one it was, you know: Māori culture, Australian Aboriginal culture, Aztec culture, Greek, Latin, Persian, whatever, Chinese. Everybody, because they're human, looks up at the night sky and they see what stars can be perceived with the naked eye and they make up stories about it. They have their rudimentary astronomy and sometimes navigate by stars and so on, to be sure, but all that they can work with are the stars the naked eye can see - until telescopes were invented.

Nick: Hubble, James Webb.

Paul: Well, much earlier than that. Right?! Galileo! And once you magnify what the eye can see and of course, we've magnified to extraordinary extent…I mean, Galileo would understand what we've done with the James Webb telescope, but he would be gobsmacked by the capacity to do that.

Nick: I'm reading his manuscripts on Twitter the other day when he was describing the Moon, because he'd for the first time really seen it under close observation and it's amazing to see the human experience of this totally hitherto undiscovered phenomenon. You know, like he was the first person to do that and in the same way that we discover new realms and territories and sort of, you know, the capacities of human experience and feeling based on just new phenomena which we have not been able to access previously.

Paul: And so, the question becomes, for a poet or a story writer, how can we respond to those astonishing realities. Right? Well, we give it our best shot and the following poem called ‘Our Cosmology’ makes the relatively simple point that what we have available to us to make up stories about is vastly richer and more expansive than anything available to previous cultures, including our own, and that doesn't mean we junk previous stories. We can appreciate those stories, what they are, but we don't have to settle for cliches based on those we can expand, right, and it turns that then into a love poem based on exactly that perception.

It goes as follows:

Our Cosmology

Our world, of course, is post Copernican.

We don't believe the stars above revolve

Around this gleaming Earth as if appointed

by some primal deity of night.

Nor are you and I astrologers,

Indulging in the love of constellations

Or in the fables of the zodiac.

For us, such things are merely Rorschach tests.

Take the legend of Orion's belt,

The shield on his right arm, his gleaming sword.

We know, we'd say that what they called the Hunter

In days of old’s an optical illusion,

A story woven in the eyes of those

Who, lacking telescopes, could not discern

Or lacking astrophysics, analyse

The supergiant stars, the clouds of gas

Which constitute, beyond the ken of legend,

The truth of Rigel, Betelgeuse and Saiph

Or the bright blue stars the naked eye

Misreads as one, upon Orion's blade.

Such legendaria are very ancient.

Depictions of the stars within Lascaux

Already show us Taurus with his eye

The bright red giant star Aldebaran,

And scholarship has now laid bare the roots

Of such astrology across the globe,

From ancient Sumer to the Chinese world,

Among the Māori and Wiradjuri.

You and I could wander among these

As soon as read our Greek and Roman tales,

Treating all alike as the chromatic

Scale, in our palette of mythopoeia.

I rather think, instead, that we are free

To roam beyond the circumpolar stars

And, in our minds’ strong telescopic eyes,

Explore the Milky Way and go beyond,

In scope, in vision and our story making,

All the hoary cliches of the past;

To see ourselves as cosmic journeyers

And more than that, as galaxies unknown.

Looking outward, with my James Webb eyes,

I think myself not Earth alone and blue,

But the genius of the Milky Way.

While you, so close and yet so very far

Are the galaxy Andromeda.

I do not know myself in depth, it's true.

Yet feeling I am bounded in my spiral,

Look abroad for company and you

Loom on my horizon, unexampled

Of all the astral clusters near at hand,

Alluring in your evident abundance,

As full of worlds as ever I am deemed.

I then become enraptured when it seems

That our two gloried cataracts of stars

Are moving not in Ptolemaic cycles

Around this and some distant Second Earth,

But towards - how marvellous to say! –

Each other and with such majestic grace

That, within a calculable time,

Our shining bodies are on course to blend.

Could that be so, the ecstasy of all

Our many hundred billion glowing suns

Would sing, throughout the multiverse, of joy

More stunning than the whole of ancient legend.

Is that not so, Andromeda my love,

Whose depths and riches fully equal mine,

Whose avid course is nonetheless inscribed,

In contemporary mathematics,

As coming for me at four hundred thousand

Kilometres per hour, so three billion

Years from now, you will only be

Half a million light years from the Earth.

By then, you'll cover, in my world's night sky,

An area that to the naked eye

Will measure twice the size of my hand's palm,

Or forty times the width of my full Moon.

The shape and structure of our galaxies

Will hold, throughout those same three billion years

And only pass a point of no return,

Computer simulations indicate,

Beyond the distant state, where gravitation

Will bend and buckle, all that still constrains

The total merger of our astral bodies

In pyrotechnics wholly without peer

In any tale that the astrologers,

Or magi on their solemn ziggurats,

Imagined in their most fantastic dreams,

And all will say that our unfolding story –

As the disks of our two galaxies

Embrace, with spiral arms, and go to bed,

On banks immense of many coloured blooms

To generate an offspring of blue stars -

Is and will remain the epic tale

Of love, for every future world to sing.

But we alone, Andromeda, and now

Live this self-making tale, as our poiesis.

That, at least, is how your worlded poet,

Gazing at you, through his telescope,

Imagines as our own cosmology -

Our well of inspiration and of hope.

Nick: That’s a really extraordinary poem. I think it's probably the most, you know, expansive, really, of all, you know, love poems I've read, actually and I consider myself a...

 Paul: Connoisseur?

Nick: No, just a passably literate person and someone who's read poetry, but I think what strikes me about it is that, you know, poets of yore, whether they're, you know, Catullus of two thousand or something years ago, or Shakespeare of a couple of hundred years ago,  simply didn't have access to a plane or a world in which, you know, the scientism or the scientific understanding of galaxies merging together and producing an offspring of new stars or new worlds could even be used as a kind of metaphor or trope or image of the kind of love and union that you feel with your muse.

You know, sort of in that sense, I think it opens up whole new vistas right, in terms of our poetic, emotional understanding of each other, but also of our scientific understanding of the world, and that's obviously in the most extreme sort of absolute level, right. Not everything has to be on that grand scale, but it's illustrative, right, of the kinds of things that are possible if we rise in our creative or artistic cultural proclivities as a human species. Right?

Paul: Absolutely and, you know, if given what we now know and, you know, it's not responsible to say that one doesn't know, even if one's very vague about it, about the cosmos, about these things that I've described, how vast it is, what our telescopes can perceive and analyse, what our astrophysics has made possible to grasp - if in the face of all of that one still just made up love poems based on the signs of the Zodiac and old myths, they would really be cliches. They might be very cleverly wrought, but they're passe, they're dwelling in the past.

Whereas, if you can pick up what is now the case and say, but in this I feel at home and I can play and I'm free and this is extraordinary, well then you're not being anti-scientific. You're saying I got the science, that's fine and I'm dancing with it, right, and that was the mood that struck me and of course, it's possible not only because I have a basic understanding of the science, but because there's clearly, as the poem spells out - there's a sense of exuberant and amazing freedom and passion in the relationship.

Nick: And not to sort of pour cold water on all our star crossed lovers and those who gaze at the moon and the sun - I think these things are still very potent images, and maybe they're passe or cliche, but they still do evoke, I think, very real feelings for people, and I think also for those who simply think of or consider their lovers in those feelings of simply being, you know, unfolded in each other's safe and secure and very physical and very real, very mortal arms in bed, for instance. You know, this - I think all kinds of modes of expression of feeling are very valid and real, but you're right, this is sort of a new and playful sort of horizon in which to express ourselves.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, certainly we can still read poems written in centuries past which do, as you say, refer to star crossed lovers and the Moon and all those things and find those poems very meaningful. We can still relate to them because we more or less know that they were written in a different world of reference, about the same feelings, but what the sciences make possible for us is, while having much the same feelings, to express ourselves in a whole new set of ways that weren't possible before.

In the same way that once literature starts, once ideas can be written down, people can play with language, with meaning, with memory, in a way that old traditions fundamentally can't, right, and one of the reasons why Homer is so extraordinary is it's pretty clear that he inherited these legends from old traditions. We don't have - we haven't found any, Ur-Homer written in, say, Linear B, in the Minoan script. We simply have handed down from roughly the 8th century BC and we don't have, of course, any manuscripts dating back that far, only traditions that's when it was written, in the first Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, those accounts of those legends, and they're remarkably powerful.

Which, of course, in part suggests that whoever Homer was, he was an extraordinary poet, but in all probability, he was also inheriting stories that had been refined in oral traditions over centuries and so inherited lots of tropes, and he had to possibly, you know - well, almost certainly, there were bards who recited some variant of what he ended up capturing, but equally likely is that he put his own mark on them in the same way that Shakespeare took stories from Holinshed or Plutarch and put his distinctive dramatic mark on them, and that we find his plays, his Italian plays, his Roman plays, historical plays of the kings of England more dramatic than the actual histories because the characters more articulate, the language is more vivid. That's what poetry does, that's what good drama does. That's what literature is for.

Nick: We've spoken about the new realms of meaning and expression that are available to us through the sciences in terms of astrophysics and astronomy and looking outwards, but I understand you have another poem about a way in which our understanding of biological organisms over hundreds of millions of years of evolution might also be quite helpful when thinking about love and connection and the nature of human consciousness.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. We were talking earlier about meaning, and I may or may not have remarked that in the great debate we're immersed in at the moment, about AI and its possibilities, and going back to Alan Turing in 1950, you know, with the famous Turing Test, the central debate - well, one of the central debates has been what would make a machine intelligence, a computer, an AI, human? What threshold would it have to cross in order to have a human kind of intelligence, and for a very long time, the belief of many people information sciences was, well it just needs more transistors, that the human brain is very complex, with 100 billion neurons all interconnected, we need something seriously complex, and once you get to that level complexity, it will be that intelligent.

Once, you know, Deep Blue famously beat Gary Kasparov and successive generations of AI have defeated human champions at a whole range of games and AI started to be able to generate, on request and quickly, poems which at least in form and to the undiscerning eye, even in content, were poems like Shakespeare's, people started to say, well, we're almost there, and whoa, where's this going to lead next. Right? But what they omitted, and what is a crucial threshold, and one that, as things stand, is by no means clear, that artificial intelligence will ever clear, is the sense of meaning - the sense of felt meaning, of what I said earlier was the Umwelt in which a living creature is immersed and a human embodied intelligence not least, and that's where poetry lives.

In the search to understand intelligence, you know, the sciences have delved in all sorts of directions and there's a very fine book by Philip Ball, published only last year called The Book of Minds, where he tries to pull this together, and this next poem comes from a passage in his book, which I was reading recently, where he talks about the very surprising intelligence of octopuses and he says, you wouldn't have thought that an octopus, which is so radically different from us, could be as intelligent as it appears octopi or octopuses are.

They can be cunning. They exhibit personality. They appear to collect things that they find interesting, not simply on a utilitarian basis. They can communicate, it seems, with human beings. They can solve puzzles. They're really quite remarkable creatures and I read this passage - and because I'm a poet and because I'm immersed in the relationship with the ‘you’ that I've been describing, I started to see humorous and in some ways striking analogies between an octopus with its intelligence and my beloved muse - and so I wrote a poem called ‘Cephalopoetiad’, which is my coinage and because octopuses are cephalopods, that is, their head and legs, just where the word comes from. This is a poem about that, right, and I think it's fairly self-explanatory, so I'll share it.

Cephalopoetiad

Cephalopods are notably intelligent.

They've demonstrated working memory,

they're known to engage in problem solving,

Exhibit cunning, personality.

Our evolutionary tree diverged

From the cephalopods in ancient times,

Six hundred million years ago, they say,

Long before the Cambrian explosion.

So, Peter Godfrey Smith, philosopher,

Is surely quite correct when he asserts

That they're the closest we have ever come

To alien intelligence as such.

They don't recoil from what is unfamiliar,

But welcome novelty just as it comes,

Engage in play without distinct agenda,

Hoard things not of use, but interest,

And yet their lives are brief, a year or two.

Nor are they social beings, it appears.

Idiosyncratic solitaire

Is how one might describe the game they play.

They do not bother parenting their young,

Who after hatching, must fend for themselves

And females, after basic copulation,

Are known to eat their smaller male lovers.

Yet they will reach out to and recognise

Human beings assessed for their affordance.

Even more spontaneously than dogs,

They'll talk with these elect, at their discretion.

Our philosophies of mind and body,

Increasingly unhelpful in our case,

Make no sense at all for octopuses

Whose proto-minds are on their tentacles.

These eight arms, extensions of the self,

If we assume a ‘self’ coordinates

Their singular dexterity as one,

Exhibit notable autonomy.

Godfrey Smith surmises that commands

May issue sometimes from the central brain

Inducing 'O' to pull itself together,

But commonly they each do their own things.

Superficially, this makes them strange,

I think you'll grant, if rather curious,

But as I read all this, I must confess

I thought of you as Lady Octopussy.

Forgive me, but you are intelligent,

And your formation was pre-Cambrian.

Moreover, you’re intrigued by novelty.

You love to play and keep a hoard of treasures.

The time we have for cephalopody

Is brief. It passes in the inky depths,

While what we hatch with little parenting

Must be times soon look out for itself.

Yet as your proprioceptive limbs touch mine,

Their proto-minds instinct with poetry,

I feel myself the True Cephalopod,

fulfilled across 600 million years.

Oh, eat me up then as our limbs entwine,

Let me be your octopus supreme.

Consume me, Lady Octopussy,

That's your master octopus's dream.

Nick: Wonderful stuff, and so you demonstrated through those last three poems that poetry and sciences can be integrated and sort of harmoniously interwoven to sort of render new levels of meaning and also understanding about our world and our internal inscapes of our human psyches. But what of the classics and what of, I suppose, those more historical or traditional attempts at human making a sense of the world with the more limited technological and scientific understandings that we had of the world? So, I'm thinking of Biblical texts, you know, the ancient or the classical works of poetry, of literature and others. Do we sort of wholly discard them, or can they kind of become part of a poetic tapestry as well?

Paul: Yeah, well, I certainly feel them to be part of mine. I feel as though I'm connected through study, through awareness, through my library - I have a substantial library -with, I almost said, the whole of the human past, but that's too large a claim. There are considerable areas of the human past that I only have a vague understanding of. But if we're talking about the classics in the more restrictive sense of the Western classical tradition, which I'm more closely acquainted with, they're…I relate to that, but if it's to come alive, if it's to be incorporated into my poetry, I have to be able to feel not only that what another poet wrote is meaningful to me, but that I can see myself in the position of, say, a Catullus, you know, or even a Virgil in writing poetry or an Ovid.

You know, at one point - and let us say for audiences unfamiliar with these Latin poets - Ovid was a very famous and accomplished Latin poet in the era of Augustus, 2000 years ago, who got on the wrong side of Augustus and was exiled to the Black Sea for his pains and lived out his life there. He never got back to Rome, and he was at pains in exile and he wrote letters from where he was on the Black Sea which have come down to us, and in a poem a few years ago - less than that, a couple of years ago - I wrote as if I was Ovid and my muse, the same woman for whom I've written the poems I've been sharing this evening - was in Rome and I was on the Black Sea, but then I say, cheekily in the poem, you know, that's all very well, but let's imagine that Ovid had a mobile phone, as you and I do.

You know, wow, that transforms the situation, doesn't it, right? And so it was playful. I was identifying, in a sense, with Ovid, with his exile, with the distance between myself and my muse and thinking well - and she'd called me, you know, she says, ‘my Ovid’, is one of the ways she addresses me, which I love, it's an enormous compliment. So, there's a playful poem where I identify with a classical poet and with his work and with his situation, but then I tweak it, I play with it, I dance with it, right? I've got a mobile phone and we can exchange messages and talk to one another and all sorts of things.

But the poem I'd like to share, or the first of three that I'd like to share with regard to the classics, is a poem which stands close to the beginning of the forthcoming book, Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess, and it's called Sennacherib. And Sennacherib was not a poet. He was a King of Assyria, in 700 BC, and he made Nineveh the capital of the Assyrian empire and he rebuilt its walls. And he built, within it, an extraordinary palace, which he called the Unrivalled Palace, and it was certainly, in its day, exactly that.

Archaeologists have established that it was - if my memory serves me right - 280 meters by 410 meters in size. Just pause and think about that. That's a very large palace and multistorey, it's not as if this was a single story, and within that vast compound which itself was inside the massive walls that he built at Nineveh, he built what was actually the Hanging Gardens which, for most of the last two and a half thousand years, have been assumed to have been in Babylon. But very recent archaeologists established they were never in Babylon, they were in Nineveh. But Nineveh had been destroyed by the Babylonians and the Medes and Persians before those people who wrote about the Hanging Garden of Babylon even heard the story themselves and wrote things down.

So, that's an amazing discovery itself, talking about science and inquiry. But what I do in this poem is I appropriate that story and I begin with the voice of Sennacherib. I put myself in Sennacherib's position, where he's saying to his queen consort, the love of his life, I have done this for you, I have built this great city, this unrivalled palace this Hanging Garden for you, my love, right, and then, as you'll see in the poem, I turn that around towards the end and I say well, that's all romantic metaphor, what I'm saying is this book of poetry for you, this is what I've done and it will outlast Nineveh, which is long gone. Right? And it's more profound and more expansive in its own way than walls of stone.

So, that's appropriating the tradition and I'll read the poem, and we'll see how I do that.

Sennacherib

 Oh Tashmetu-sharrat, love of my life,

Look at how we built up Nineveh,

How high its walls now stand, astonishing

All who know its great antiquity:

An entrepot, these past six thousand years.

By we, I mean myself, as royalty.

My father, Sargon, and the conqueror

Tiglath Piliser, third of that great name,

My grandfather and a mighty king,

Built not Nineveh nor ruled from its precincts.

This has been my vision for the state.

Oh, Tashmetu-sharrat, for whom I build,

The fineness of whose features surely is

The work of Belet-ili, Mistress of

The gods, the Queen of Heaven, you, in truth,

More beautiful than any other woman,

Have moved my soul to this surpassing labour,

Harnessing the treasures of an empire,

Surpassing even Babylon in glory,

The crown of centuries, the seat of power.

Yet that is but the merest carapace,

The shell, the outer rim of what I built

For you, the living consort of my realm:

The Hanging Garden and Unrivalled Palace

Mirroring the act of Genesis,

The vast enclosure, splendid in conception,

By virtue of its scale and elevation,

Its winged bull colossi and its sphinxes,

Its scented timber doors, breathtaking murals;

But most of all, its vast and watered arbours,

Are all for you, while others merely marvel.

The winged bulls and sphinxes symbolise

Those aeons past, before the human epoch,

which we now, in Assyria, transcend.

We, exotic Queen of all I rule.

That's, of course, romantic metaphor.

The Nineveh of my imagining’s

Composed of all we've breathed to one another.

My Unrivalled Palace, with its Garden

Is the book of love I wrote for you.

Its scale and symmetry, its illustrations,

The villanelle at its erotic heart,

The temple poems binding its discursions,

The empire of its manifold allusions

Transcend the ruins of Sennacherib.

For who can live within his Hanging Garden,

Or on the lofty terraces he built,

Which Medes and Babylonians destroyed,

As wantonly as he'd sacked Babylon?

Whereas my verse for you will live for I.

Nick: I really love that poem, because it seems to me to chime with Percy Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’, with the famous image of the stone sculpture of a great king lost to the desert thousands of years later, concluding with the famous lines, ‘my name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Similarly, Red ochre and your poetry is a gift and testament to your beloved which outlasts the physicality of monuments and buildings. In the same way it echoes Horace's Ode III: 30 which begins, ‘I have crafted a monument more lasting than bronze, which will outlast the poet and endure through time.’ His poetry of course.

But putting that aside, you've also spoken about how this literary and poetic work, Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess mirrored the structure of the ruins of Sennacherib and Nineveh. Could you speak a bit about how you've structured the work and how form and the architecture of a poetic catalogue can inform and enhance?

Paul: Yes. I was writing poems hand over fist, because I was passionately in love and I was getting such wonderful feedback that I kept writing more poems and every other day I would get this request, write me a new poem, write me a poem about this, about that, can you write me a poem about pomegranates, can you write me a poem, and I'll read this one shortly about a ruined gate, you know, the Western gate. At that point, I said the Western gate of what and what city? I don't know, she said, I just have this image of a ruined Western gate. Can you write me a poem about that, you know, or pomegranates and a garden and a low stone wall, you know, and a sun, the sun setting behind it.

You know, these images would come to her, she'd throw them to me, and I'd write poems and so gradually what started as an image generated poetry and I thought to myself, is there any coherence to this? I wasn't sure where things were going in the relationship and so gradually I started to work towards a symmetrical structure, and what I ended up with - I stumbled on this, it's just an idea, really, when I'd written most of the poems. It was that if I took the longest poems in the cycle and put them at either end and then I worked inward with symmetrical sections of poems so that - you know, this is like a musical arrangement in a way, right - and then right in the centre of the book, I had a separate set of poems which could be called The Hanging Garden and it consisted mostly of poems about flowers, trees, gardens, right.

Nick: Just exquisite.

Paul: And then right in the centre of it, there would be a villanelle, a love poem, and I was able to arrange it that way and it meant moving poems around. So they weren't written in the sequence in which they're laid out, they were rearranged thematically and structurally so that we got this vast structure. So, there's a poem and, you know, an end point, which each have four poems in them and then there's a set of poems called The East Wall, which is ten poems, and then a symmetrical set of poems which have the same size poems, but in reverse order, going out, called The West Wall at the end. Then, between those, the East Wall and the West Wall, there are 20 sections, each with fifteen 12 line poems and one 30 line poem, and then between sections ten and eleven, right in the heart of the book, is The Hanging Garden which has 29 poems, and that's 14 poems, then the villanelle, then 14 more poems, which again vary in size, but they're arranged symmetrically and, you know, in opposite directions so that they're fully symmetrical with one another, mirroring one another in structure. So, that was - we talked about music earlier - that was like composing a symphony, right?

Nick: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: Just in ordering it that way.

Nick: Classical structure.

Paul: Yeah, and because it hadn't been conceived at the outset, the poems aren't written in order to fit into that structure. The poems were written to express what was happening, and feelings were tumbling over one another when I wrote the poems, and then I arranged them in this structure, and it nevertheless more or less not only has a structure, but tells a story and when you get towards the end, what the poet is saying to the other - we talked about the addressable you - is, without digressing too much into the story, much less the very personal aspect of it, for now is saying, ‘Look this has been an extraordinary process of communication, an extraordinary relationship, but by your account, you are actually attached to another man and you don't see yourself leaving him and I'm not prepared to go on, on that basis.’

And so what was meant to be the last poem in the book called Martha Argerich is really saying, you've been an amazing muse, I feel as though I'm a grand piano and you're Martha Argerich and you've played the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto on me and it's an incredible experience, but it's done, it's over now, I'm moving on. But as I say, you know, in a coda to the book, it didn't pan out that way, because in fact, that situation changed, and so I've continued to write more poetry and most of the new poetry is in the emerging book, Wine On the Flames.

But I'd like to share a poem now which she asked me to write. I was saying how she will throw me ideas and ask me to write a poem. She simply asked me, would you write me a poem called ‘The Rare Few’, and I have to say, I'm quite certain this was because she sees the two of us as being rare birds. You know, we're both very literate, we're both creatures of language, we both love poetry, and so we dance with language and meaning, but it wasn't clear to me what else she imagined being in this poem.

As it happened, I had just at that point been reading Tennyson, and those of our listeners who are familiar with Tennyson's poetry will know one of his best-known poems and much loved is The Mort d’Arthur, The Death of King Arthur, and so I took that poem primarily, I would say, because it was at hand. I’d just read it and I wrote the following poem in which I take up that poem and the idea of the death of Arthur and the queenly figure on the barge, and then I turn it into a communication with the addressable you, with the woman and it's about our relationship as poet and muse and my eventual death.

So, this is ‘The Rare Few’.

In Tennyson's great lay of Arthur's death,

Sir Bedivere is bade to cast his brand Excalibur,

Which on a summer noon long since

When that the King was in his prime,

The Lady of the Lake had gifted him

Back into the mere from which it came.

You know the tale, and how the King declared

That from his death, wherever he was sung,

The history of that blade would be retold.

You'll know, therefore, that Bedivere recoiled

From hurling it beneath the winter moon,

So dazzled was he by its jewelled hilt.

Twice the knight defaulted from the task.

Twice the dying king rebuked his thane,

Who marvelled at the hilt so strangely chased,

Objecting that this precious storied thing,

Should, did he fulfill his lord's command,

Be thereby lost forever from the Earth.

What ails my king that he would cast away

That which ought be heirloom to the realm,

To be admired within a treasure house

And brought forth for display at jousts of arms?

Nine years the mystic maiden of the Lake

Laboured to refine the wondrous thing.

To which King Arthur, learning his deceit,

Rebuked him as unknightly, traitor hearted,

Lamenting, as he lay with mortal wounds,

‘Authority forgets a dying king.’

‘Get thee hence’, he charged Sir Bedivere,

And, if a third time you defy my will,

I'll rise in wrath and slay thee with my hands.’

So, spake the king, and Bedivere, ashamed,

Retrieved the gleaming blade from where it lay

And cast it, ruefully obedient,

Far across the surface of the Lake,

Where, lo, an arm in mystic samite clad,

Caught the whirling thing and brandished it

Thrice above the surface of the mere,

Then drew it under, whence it first had come.

This, the knight, at last, reported back.

At Arthur's bidding, Bedivere then bore

His master to the Lake, onto a barge,

Dark from stem to stern, and occupied

By three sombre queens with golden crowns,

Who, with one voice of agonised lament,

Unrivalled since the making of the world,

Took the stricken monarch from his hands,

Cradled him, and for his passing wept.

But then the tallest and the fairest Queen

Took his head and laid it on her lap,

Caressed his hands and called him by his name,

Shedding bitter tears at his estate.

On reading this, I paused to think of you

And my demise, whenever it shall come.

For you have been my Lady of the Lake.

For you, I took Excalibur in hand.

I grasped its beauteous hilt and, for your sake

Created Camelot with that bright brand,

Wrought a realm of scintillating story

For you, my Morning Star in all your glory.

Such were my reflections, as I read

The celebrated poem by Tennyson,

Several of the famous lines from which

Entered common use in after times,

And linger still as memes among the learned,

Like Arthur answering slowly from the barge.

But as my eyes were closing and the book,

The Poems of Tennyson, which my great aunt

Had cherished, as a school prize long ago,

Lay by my side, its reader's ribbon placed

Where that tall Queen had rested Arthur's head

Within her lap, lamenting his demise,

I dreamed that, years from now, our book of verse,

Carved out from the Western world of letters,

Red Ochre for the Lady of the Lake,

Will come to seem my own Excalibur,

Not as object, but as mystic gift

Which shall as I, your poet, pass away,

Be cast, though it be with severe misgivings,

Far out into those deep waters whence,

In distant days, by then quite drowned in legend,

You proffered it to me, with samite arm,

As if to say, ‘You are my troubadour.

Take this blade and with it write me songs!’

The rare few make their way to Camelot,

But rarer still are those whose destiny

Arises from the waters of the Lake,

As tempered and bejewelled as Arthur's sword,

As graced with love, as chased with ornament,

As singular and due to be returned

To one, the tallest of the sable muses,

Crowned with gold, who takes upon the barge

Her warrior, the wielder of her sword,

His labours all accomplished in her name,

His art and his fulfillment, one and same,

Her beauty, his conception of the word.

The few, the happy few, the rare and fated,

Those whom the muses whimsically select

Are surely those whose roundings at the last

Make clear to them that all they have created

Is gift and must by each of them, elect,

Be given back, once their high brief is passed.

I fell asleep with such thoughts on my mind.

I cannot swear the overlap is pure,

Between the famous legend and our case.

Yet what is that to us, in privacy,

Where bed is a barge and dreaming is the Lake,

Where you’re the Queen and it is for your sake

That this bejewelled Excalibur of ours

Was clasped in hand and deftly wielded

With passion, by your Anglo-Saxon bard,

Who, exercising all its fabled powers,

Marvelled, even so, at what it yielded,

With master strokes, whenever it was hard.

But if you're the queen, who's Bedivere,

In this conceit that I’m your dying Arthur?

Whoever, in performing obsequies,

In days to come, when I shall pass away,

Must cast Excalibur into the water

As yours, your gift - forever and a day.

Nick: It's quite an epic poem, isn't it?

Paul: You know, as I said, I think towards the beginning of our conversation, that I experienced it as a great privilege to have the access to the literature and the presence of this remarkable woman in my life that moves me to write these poems, and even if it were to be said by some severe critic that my poetry is not great poetry, leave aside whether that would happen or will happen, to live this way, to be able to capture my experience this way and share it with somebody who wants me to write and loves what I write, makes me feel fully alive, I have to say.

Nick: Living poetically.

Paul: Absolutely, and not at the expense of a grip on reality, but to the contrary.

Nick: That it's enhanced or augmented your feeling and sense of being alive and living poetically, even though, as you said earlier, you only regard yourself as having written really good poetry in the last decade or so.

Paul: Yes. Yes, I feel as though this particular person arose on my horizon, came to me wanting poetry from me, perceiving me as the kind of person who could write poetry for her of the kind that she wanted, at exactly the right time. You know, from a superficial point of view of mating and reproduction and conventional life, she arrived far too late in my life for that to be possible, but from the point of view of my writing poetry and experiencing a relationship poetically, she couldn't have timed it better, and she wasn't to know, it's just a coincidence. But it’s an extraordinary period in my life.

Nick: And I suppose because it arose at that particular stage of life where you’re past, you know, looking to start a family and all the sort of conventional things that people do when they're attracted to one another, it almost puts it on a different plane. It's a purely romantic, intellectual love. You know, you delight in the presence of the other rather than, you know, desiring them because of - everyone has hormones coursing through them. But the other thing to think about is, you know, had she come into your life earlier, when you're in your early thirties or late twenties, let's say, you probably wouldn't have been equipped in terms of your life experience, past poetic training or apprenticeship to be able to write the kind of poetry that you're writing now to the level that you're able to express yourself, right, so it's...

Paul: I don't think it's even a matter of probably. I think there's no question. I couldn't. I couldn't write - I didn't write good poetry, not to say very fine poetry when I was a younger man. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't - I felt very self-conscious about writing poetry at all in those days. I was also very immersed in much more prosaic studies of history and international affairs. The first time I was asked to write a poem for a competition, I thought, I don't think so, but the girl I was seeing at the time, a 19-year-old student of languages and linguistics, said to me, you know, you should, you're good with language.

As I remark in the introduction to The Three Graces, you know, when a lovely 19-year-old girl says to you, please write a poem, you'd have to be crazy to say no. But I had to think, well, okay, it's a sonnet writing competition, how do I write a sonnet? I think I may have told this story in a previous interview. So, I taught myself how to write a sonnet. I just read Shakespeare's sonnets and I thought I'd get the hang of it, and I wrote a sonnet, and it won the prize, for what it's worth. After that, I wrote sonnets for years and that was, in a sense, my apprenticeship in writing poetry at all.

Nick: And what would you say to people, you know, who perhaps aren't as literate or maybe naturally inclined to write poetry as you are, but who might want to give the kind of gift or legacy to their partners or their beloveds in some kind of poetic or artistic form? Should they just get started? Do you need to kind of do a couple of textbooks on the art or the style or the method of writing poetry? I think Stephen Fry had a wonderfully accessible book on this, but to those who would seek to crystallise their everyday experiences and also their feelings and their sense of being in the world, how can they do so? I mean, it's sort of intimidating when you read a poem like ‘The Rare Few’, and it's like, well I can't just whip that off on a Sunday afternoon. I might write something that's far more impressionistic and gestural and like an entry point.

Paul: I think that the first imperative is to say, I'm not trying to be a great poet, I'm trying to express myself. That'll be fine for a start. Can I write something that I feel at least expresses what's there for me. Right? I think there's value in that. It's what we would call these days a mindful exercise. It's saying, I certainly feel something, and I'm a language animal. I speak, I read. Can I express myself? Can I find the words to express myself?

People will flounder around with it. Most people find that very difficult to do and, if they try and write a poem when they're not practiced, they'll write self-conscious poetry, they’ll imitate some poem that they think they know. They'll think they have to express it a certain way. They'll have forced rhyme. It won't be good poetry, but that's okay. It's better to try that and say, I'm not competing with anybody, I'm trying to be myself, and this can be private, I'm not competing, I'm not going to submit this to a journal. And in most cases, people will never get to the stage where they write poetry that might be published in a journal, but what they can do - what anybody, it seems to me, can do - is to say, I want to find the means to express myself, at a minimum to myself as a mindfulness exercise, to crystallise, capture, externalise.

Nick: To capture it, or to mine, or excavate that sort of vein of experiences that often pass us by.

Paul: After all, we all have a whole lot of experience, most of which flows past us, through us, over us. We don't ever quite register it. We don't turn it into, you know, coherent story. We do try and run some kind of narrative in our heads about our lives making sense, or how tragic our lives are, and that can be a misinterpretation as well. You know, so the exercise in just pausing and trying to distil into coherent words or expressive words, what is there for us.

It seems to be every bit as useful exercise as any ritual: a religious ritual, lighting a candle, saying a prayer, whatever it might be, or you know, going through a mantra. Try and write a poem. What one can also do is to say, well, if I'm trying to write poetry, I can at least read poets whose poetry is acknowledged as being good, it's published, and see, how do they do this. What feelings are they expressing? Do I relate to this poem? And don't feel obliged to feel that, oh, yes, you know, this is great poetry, and oh, I'm overwhelmed by it.

Because you might not be. You might read it and think, I don't understand it, I don't think that speaks my language. That's fine. Feel free, feel at ease, and just keep learning and working at expressing yourself, because you're creating yourself in that sense – your self. That is to say, your sense of yourself, your sense of who you are.

Nick: Autopoiesis.

Paul: It's autopoiesis, as I think we did say in an earlier conversation.

Nick: And what does autopoiesis mean to you, because I remember we've talked about it before, and I brought it up at an author's book launch at Glee Books in Sydney, and it was hosted by Annabel Crabb, and I remember when I used the word to ask a question about how it felt to sort of write an autobiographical work of making sense of one's own life, everyone laughed at me when I used the word autopoiesis because it was such a strange term, but I think it's quite poignant in this context.

Paul: Oh, autopoiesis literally means self-making.

Nick: Meaning making, right?

Paul: Yeah, meaning making and the best phenomenology of consciousness has it that autopoiesis - and they use the word, I haven't brought it into the discourse - autopoiesis is what life does from the cellular level up. There's something irreducibly mind like even about a simple cell, and something irreducibly cell like about even the most sophisticated mind and once we conceive things that way, we appreciate what life as such is, that it is about an experience of a world, however limited and primitive that may be or however sophisticated.

Creaturely life has an Umwelt, it has an orientation in a world, it seeks to place itself and move within that world, and literary creation is that being enacted and enhanced. So, when I'm writing poetry, that's what I'm doing, you know, and if somebody wants to understand Paul Monk, there's no way to do that, it seems to me, ultimately, other than to read my poetry and say, he draws on this range of reference, he has these central feelings, and he's expressed it this way. That's who he is.

Nick: You can even imagine an AI doing that, digesting all of your written works and then trying to write a poem in the style of Paul Monk.

Paul: Well, in the style of Paul Monk, or perhaps to be asked, as you might almost ask say ChatGPT now - feed all my poetry and my other writing into it and say, so give us analysis of Paul Monk's character. Could ChatGPT do that right now? I would say no. If you asked, it a simpler question, you know, about, you know, what range of writing has Monk done? Well, you've given them the answer, so it just spits out the answer. That's what machine intelligence is good at doing, quickly summing up stuff and say, whoop, that's the answer, I think.

But if you were to ask a poet…and this might be a good way to close out, because I'm about to share a final poem called ‘Beyond the Western Gate’ and it’s again a poem that my muse asked me to write, but all she did was say, will you write me a poem about a ruined gate and a western wall. I could have written a poem about the western wall at the Temple in Jerusalem, but what occurred to me was ancient Thebes and the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

So I wrote this poem, and it came to symbolise the very idea that we've been touching on in this last segment of the conversation, about what do you do with inherited tradition, with old stories, with myths, with earlier poets, and I was really delighted by way this poem came together when you consider that essentially a single thread had been touched on: write me a poem about a ruined wall on a western gate.

So, this is the poem, and you could think of the western gate as Western civilization and see as you listen to this, you might say to the listeners what it brings up to your consciousness and your poetic awareness within your Umwelt in terms of the imagery, the stories that the poem tells, because they won't be mine, but the poem might trigger what are yours and that's what literature does. In the same way that people, for two and a half thousand years have read The Odyssey and they can thrill to the adventures of Odysseus and all the dramatic mythological characters in the story. But people experience it differently and what they bring to it is each their own sense of life as a journey, of their lives as a journey, of the possibilities of enhancing their lives as journey, because the Odyssey is about journey.

So, ‘Beyond the Western Gate’:

Shall I find you by the Western Gate

Of Thebes in its antiquity, before

The tragedies that choral Aeschylus

And Sophocles, upon the Attic stage,

Burned into our common consciousness?

Shall I find you by the Western Gate,

Before the dawn, my gleaming Morning Star?

There, where poets know that sycamores,

The sukumuros of our secret god,

The groves that yield our figs and mulberries

Stand beside the road which Oedipus

Would take towards his motherlode of fate?

Within them, by the arbours of our love,

Eternities of longing and of growth.

Shall I find you by the Western Gate?

Oh, centuries, beloved Morning Star,

An epoch of the little wars of men

Have lapsed and still your faithful poet comes

To that grove of ripe divinity.

Though Alexander laid the Gate in ruins,

Did I not kneel and seek your sweet protection

Such that you, who seek a god yourself,

Astarte of the skies, whose gaze is hot,

Sent Phryne, your handmaiden, to declare

That what had fallen, she'd raise up again?

You spoke in the voice of the hetaera,

Raised into new form the Western Gate,

Stirring all the sons of Oedipus,

Like seeds of those green sycamores of yours,

To find among the ruins fruitful purpose.

Those seeds, upon your sweet auroral breath,

Will fall upon the earth, beyond the Gate,

More mystically than Delphic oracles,

Embodying your anti-Oedipal,

Your counter tragic wisdom, perfect goddess.

Stochastic is the floating fall of seeds,

A Markov chain of path dependent sowing

Of those uncertainties in which your poet sings,

Among which, Morning Star, he whirls and dances

Amidst your sacred trees beyond that Gate.

How could it be otherwise, in faith?

My hymns of praise for you and my laments

Are themselves the sukomoros seeds

Spilled within the sacred grove where I

Seek your eye, beyond the Western Gate.

O, let the best of them be dithyrambs,

The spur of ecstasies, before our dawn,

When transcendent dreams fall from your trees

And Dionysus worships at your feet

In song, beyond the ancient Western Gate.

Nick: Thank you, Paul. That was really, really wonderful as always, and thank you very much for the nine poems you've shared with us this evening. As we draw to a close in the interview, I'd like to open up the floor to you for any final closing remarks really about the topics we've covered today.

Paul: Well, I think I would just like to say in closing that we're taking advantage of a very 21st century technology, to be able to have these conversations and disseminate them, and I think it's a great privilege to be able to communicate in this way and to share with an unknown audience how I have become a poet, what poetry means to me, how it relates to what we would call the real world through science, how it relates to the classical tradition.

Above all perhaps, how it is that I feel singularly privileged to have, as I said earlier, a muse who is a very real, very personal, very tangible other. It's not - as has been the case with many poets - you know, a distant or alienated or uncaring muse or an abstract figure of desire and hope. You know, when Schubert, for example, wrote his famous piece ‘Death and the Maiden’, he'd been in love, he hadn't had love.

Beethoven wrote many sonatas inspired by the love for aristocratic women he couldn't get reciprocal love from. He never really was fulfilled, although there is a story that there was a woman, whose name we don't know, who he called the Immortal Beloved, but he certainly didn't have a fulfilled love, a companionate love, a marital love of a child. So, I feel very privileged by the high quality and intimacy of this poetic relationship.

Nick: And the love.

Paul: And the love. It's above all, the fact that my capacity to express these feelings, to enhance my Umwelt in this way, has been called upon, called out by this individual at her initiative.

Nick: Extraordinary. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for your time this evening, Paul; your insights and your reflections. You're an incredibly rare human, and I value you deeply, and I'm sure our listeners do as well for your, I think, almost singular kind of synthesis of just so much of human history and experience and expression. So, thank you very much.

Paul: Thank you.