Tim Upperton

Interview 2012.

Do you know what you want to ask me?

Usually I just art by asking you who you are, and it goes from there. Tim, who are you? I’m Tim, and I’m a PhD student at Massey University, and a writer and reviewer, and a father.

Have you always been these things? No, I haven’t always been a father, and I’ve been a writer since about… first publication was about ten r twelve years ago, I’ve sort of been a writer part time ever since then, and more and more as times progressed, so a lot more now that I used to be. 

What have you published so far? I have one book of poems out, called A House On Fire, which is available at book shops, and I’m about a third of my way through another one, and I try to publish as I go, so I send poems away to magazines, periodicals, and try to get them published, and when I have enough I put them together as a book. I’ve just put an e-book together in the last couple of weeks, which is on my website, I’ve got a new website called aspiredword. If you type that into google you’ll get it, aspiredword.com

Did JD from the library do that? She did! And do you know what she charged me for that? A book of poems. I gave her my book and she gave me a website.

What a good sort. She is. 

Look at you having a web presence. Who would’ve thought it?

So what are your plans with your book and beyond? Really, to write another book, and then another book, that’ about as far as I think along those lines. Is to write more and publish more, and try and find more time for writing. So if I can fins ways and means of doing that I grab them, like doing the Ph D. 

So that’s what your time is committed to these days? Yea, it’s like a job. Its what I wake up each morning to do is to write. It’s the first time in my life that that’s the case. 

What have you learned so far through your writing? I’d have to say not very much. I don’t think of writers being any smarter than anyone else, and I don’t really think that writing and intelligence have much relation to each other. I’ve known people who are very smart who can’t write, and people who can write who aren’t really all that smart. 

Whenever I read something there’s always at least some small insight within it. Yes I agree with that, but where does that come from? Where does the insight come from? Does it come from the person who wrote it? Or did they arrange language in the way that produced insight? 

I’ve found insight in your poems before, and it didn’t come from me. Well it came from the poem. 

Sonnet

Fuck your simile. Fuck your elegy for.
Fuck your homily, your extended metaphor.
Fuck your metonymy.
Fuck your exquisite language economy.
Fuck your metre, your keeping time.
Fuck your free verse. Fuck your rhyme.
Fuck your Elizabethan men in doublets.
Fuck their wheedling come-to-bed couplets.
Fuck your turn after the octave.
Fuck whoever poetry’s meant to save.
Fuck the avant-garde. Fuck tradition.
Fuck your slightly foxed first edition.
Fuck your sonnet about wanting to fuck Tiffany.
Fuck your totally unexpected epiphany.

Poem by Tim Upperton (obviously).

But it’s your poem. Well yea, but all I did really was arrange some words on a page right? And you try to arrange them in ways that please you, and you hope they will please other people. But the insights really they end up happening by accident, you end up saying something you never knew you were going to say. And it’s not even something you really know, it’s what’s ended up on a line on a page. I’ve had lots of poems like that. 

So you’ve found insight in your own poems? I have when people have pointed it out to me. They’ve derived some meaning from the poem which I didn’t think about, I wasn’t conscious of when I wrote it. And sometimes it might be a bad reading of the poem, but other times they’ve seen something that I wasn’t really aware of when I wrote it. And that’s language, its just language doing that, its got nothing really to do with me. So yea, poetry, it’s an art that involves language doesn’t it. And the language is quite separate from the person producing the language. 

You’re still in control of it. You can say it the other way around, language can control you, language is through you onto the page. I’m not really sure who’s in charge. I bet its like that when you’re writing a song, I bet there are times when your not sure quite what’s in charge. Whether it’s you or just a melody that’s starting to assert itself. 

I guess language and music are just tools to create with. But isn’t it more interesting when it does something you didn’t expect it to do? That’s what’s I think anyway. If a poem ends up surprising me, then it will probably surprise other people as well. But if it doesn’t surprise me, it probably wont surprise other people. You know?

Fair point. And you do read a lot of poems that are working entirely within what you already know. They might do it really well, but they don’t offer any new insight or any surprise at all. The moment you start reading, you’re kind of in tune with it, you know what it’s going to say. I don’t want to write that.

Do you have any ‘man I wish I was them’ writers? Ooo, maybe not ‘I wish I was them’, but there are some I really admire.

Who? In New Zealand there are quite a few. A lot of younger poets in New Zealand. People like Anna Jackson, a poet in Wellington. Aleksandra Lane, she’s a newish poet in Wellington. Helen Lendorf here, you know Helen.

I love Helen. Yep. **** orpit, she’s my supervisor up at Massey and she’s a poet. Probably the main, pre-eminent one for me in New Zealand would be Bill Manhire, which is, I think a lot of people who write in New Zealand would offer him as their guiding light in a way. But there are many other, Greg O’brien, Jenny Bornholdt, lots of writers for such a small country, lots of interesting writers.

I feel bad not knowing their work. If you named people in the music scene I wouldn’t know who you meant either. 

So your work is up on your blog and in bookstores? Yep, Bruce McKenzine has my book, Whilcols did but I’m not sure if they still do. Yea and on my blog, I put poems up there. There’s a new one every day on the blog. Yea and magazines, Listener…

Will you take your new book on tour? Well I know writers are doing that, and it really works. You know, they sell a lot more books, and have a lot of fun. I think I will do it. I didn’t really do that last time, I just launched it and that was that. But yea to go up and down the country, that would be fun. 

And wild! Maybe not wild. But it would be fun. 

Anything else? I got nothing.