5 Questions with Lucy Van
Lucy Van is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne working on a monograph called ‘The Beginning of the Poem’. Her spoken-word EP in collaboration with Laila Sakini, Figures, was released by Purely Physical (UK). Her book, The Open, was published by Cordite Books in 2021.
No.1
Can you tell us how The Open came about? How does it sit in context with the rest of your work so far?
I have been really, really lucky with this book. From the beginning of thinking about it I had the support of Kent MacCarter at Cordite, who I feel so grateful to for being interested in my writing. I suppose in an indirect way this book came about from reviewing poetry books, because that’s what first connected me with Kent and Cordite. Reviewing poetry is something I love to do and wish I had more time to do now (I have one now that is now extremely late, months overdue, and I feel terrible about this).
As my good friend Autumn Royal said to me recently, describing—that is, simply saying what a poem or book of poems is—can be more difficult than writing a poem. We have some excellent reviewers of poetry in Australia (James Jiang springs to mind immediately), but reviewing is a form that is generally underappreciated and wrongly secondary given its importance in the art of bringing a work to its readers. Also, given how unstructured the process can be, opening onto a writing activity can be so playful and responsive to experiment.
This might seem a bit off-topic, but I think it’s a fair way to explain the long genesis of the work as one of connecting to poetry in Australia in a kind of practical/pragmatic way over the years. Another thing I should say is that I was so lucky to have Bella Li as the book’s editor. I cannot find words to explain how incredible it was to work with her—suffice to say that she is everything a writer could hope for in understanding the vision of a book. I am in awe of the force of her insight.
In terms of the way the book came about… I suppose in a very ordinary way! I had a few poems that I’d written over the years, and I had a structuring principle for this particular book. Over a course of time, I wrote more poems, changed the old ones, and with editing, threw out the structure, tried a new one, threw out poems, played with fragments, changed the title, and in the end found something displaced from the original intention that somehow (and this was something I didn’t expect) expressed the intention of an entirely different book I’ve been writing, which is a book of literary criticism called The Beginning of the Poem.
I have always felt lucky to have anyone’s interest in my poetry. But I guess I’ve always felt I was more a person who was more meant to write about poetry and not really write poetry themselves—my intention was to be a literary critic more than a poet. I don’t know why; this is just how I’ve always kind of leant.
At the same time, I’ve found it harder to write academic papers in recent years; harder to write basic prose, to be honest. Somewhere along the way poetry became increasingly viable to express the conjunctions of ideas I found that I couldn’t in an academic context… but the poetic material is often, perhaps weirdly, derived from the ordinary dry/experientially limited research driven processes.
No.2
In the book’s preface, you state very clearly that your poems are interested in thinking through ideas surrounding privacy and fences/borders, which to me points to the existential conundrums that come with being a settler-migrant in the so-called ‘west’: free yet displaced yet a beneficiary of colonial dispossession. How did conceiving of and writing the poems in The Open help with reconciling that, or at least in terms of making sense of that?
Yeah absolutely, I’m interested in ways that the idea of the human and human rights are constituted in relation to holding private property—how certain kinds of humans performing certain kinds of labour on certain kinds of land gain proprietary rights to that land (which underwrites enfranchisement), but other humans performing other kinds of labour on other kinds of land do not.
It seems so obvious, but the violence of this—let’s say that it begins with the so-called new world as Locke said, ‘in the beginning, all [the world] was America’—asymmetrical formula underwrites the modern colonial project, and this violence continues today in all our fundamental organising structures. It is so fundamental. I don’t know how to answer your question about the existential conundrum any better than what you said: to be a settler-migrant is both to benefit from (and perhaps inadvertently perpetuate) dispossession and exploitation and to continue to suffer exclusion, alienation, displacement. The doubleness of this is dissociating. I don’t think the situation can be reconciled: the position would precisely be to understand all this as irreconcilable.
No.3
How do you think you engage with decoloniality in your work?
Instinctively I feel it would be an error to answer this question directly. But let me say that I believe we are in trouble if we think we know what decolonisation is, what decolonisation would be or should do. So maybe the difficulty with this is in explaining what it means to engage with something that we fundamentally don’t know (yet), quite simply because its constitution is pure possibility, whether it is deferred or simply a process whose beginning is still under way.
I feel decolonisation cannot be simply the removal or negation of coloniality, but rather more the thinkability of something new, or to put it another way, a capacity to begin in some not (pre)determined way. The point then is that the process of decolonisation opens to errancy and something unassimilable to any current system, its voices utterly unpredictable. And so we can’t recognise what it is from the vantage point of the present.
I think of Hannah Arendt’s identification of the capacity to begin as the ultimate freedom. Thus, each new birth represents something ungovernable and chaotic, and therefore something hated by totalitarianism, which, as she writes, needs terror ‘lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world’.
No.4
As I was reading The Open, another thing really stood out for me, which was this map of inheritance you were seemingly trying to draw. Inheritance vis-â-vis personal, familial and cultural histories, sometimes evinced through psycho-geography. They are somewhat like a haunting in the book. Can you speak more to this?
I love the idea of mapping you raise, which in its fragility fits the liquidating approach to terrain and territory in the book. I guess, in terms of inheritance more specifically, perhaps this was not something I intentionally set out to do, though I can see how this reading might be made. I don’t feel that this notion of inheritance is particularly unique to me or my work, any more than it would be for another writer’s book.
At the same time, it is possible I’m being protective of a process that I don’t feel ready to expose. But now that I’m speaking of this public/private distinction, I feel in this book I was more curious about the idea of privacy and wanted to play with the parameters of that, the borders we often automatically erect around our private lives (as if we could ever protect the innocent). For instance, I wanted to use real names, not in any act or sense of un-protection, but precisely to expose the error in thinking my private life could give rise to any kind of ownership of or ‘rightful’ claim to another person. So maybe everyone in there—in the map of inheritance, as you say—is there in order to carry out a process of dis-inheriting… to reject the ownership that naming claims, and to consider other ways to love.
No.5
There is this sense of your being in conversation with other people’s work in your book, such as when you refer to writers such as [Julia] Kristeva, [David] Malouf and [Anne] Carson, among others. How do you interact with what you read? And how do you then interpolate influences into your work?
Well, I guess reading is a certain way of life, and for better or worse it is always how I have lived. I would love for this to mean that I understand the more difficult authors that I read but sadly, no—I just blindly love certain voices on the page, obviously for so many different reasons, yet at the same time oblivious to those reasons. I don’t know what to say about influences or interpolation, other than I guess one great thing about poetry is that you don’t have to justify the way you draw from secondary material in the same way you do in other forms of writing.
I think it was Donald Winnicott who came up with this potent little analogy when he set about describing the reading experience: he likened it to the experience of being with a mother. ‘I can think of no better description of the mother’ is how he suddenly concluded his little disquisition on reading. Or at least I think it was Winnicott; maybe it was Melanie Klein. I’m very sorry, I often misremember (and then cannot re-find; I’ve tried and failed to find the original quote here) what I read, which is maybe apropos to this question? If I am in conversation with any literary interlocutors, well I’m afraid I can be a terrible listener, so the conversation is going to be weird—prone to senile lapses of attention and memory—and so mistakes and misquotations are bound to happen.
Maybe I find private pleasure in these kinds of errors; now that I think of it, the book is really based on what could be called ‘bad’ or’disordered’ reading. The point is that my reading is probably some kind of wish to reinstate my mother’s hold. Something I haven’t said yet is that tennis is a major structuring principle of The Open. The etymological origin of tennis is tenez (French)—a command to the other player to ‘hold’. I think this is what reading both demands and delivers (sort of): the strong, subtle hold of the mother.
Going back to your question about decoloniality, I think it would be a mistake to assume that some literature—even the canonical literature evidently complicit in colonial violence—ought to be excised from the collective imagination. I hope this doesn’t sound mindlessly regressive; here I’m taking my cue from my hero, Edward Said, who became dismayed at how his contrapuntal readings of Austen, Conrad, etc. were taken up by subsequent scholars in increasingly reductive ways, [such as in] the blunt interpretations and applications of his work in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.
More than writing, reading seems to me to be the way for holding onto something that [has] happened in language. Reading therefore allows us to continue to return to that linguistic event; sometimes it can be a generative return. The genius of Said was the method he refined for opening these texts to other discourses or worlds—the act of return exposing the text to a reading experience that was radically new. The point was never to close these books for their ideologically suspect positions and tacit (or even not so tacit) endorsements, but to continue to find new ways to read them, and new arrangements of thought to expose them to. Perhaps this is the hope for reading: more than to comprehend (a possessive stance), to break through, to open.
