Cultural Storytellers - Tim Jones

By Renee Liang

The NZ poetry ‘scene’, as you might expect, is small. It’s also friendly and largely non-competitive – I’d like to think this is largely to do with the lovely nature of people who become poets, but it could also be that poetry is (even in comparison to the rest of the performing arts) something you do for love and not for the squillions you make reading poetry on a pub stage on a weekday night. Or competing in a slam after hours and hours of painstaking rehearsal.

But I digress. As I said, the poetry scene is small and friendly, and in more recent years, transformed by the internet. Poetry groups like Tuesday Poem are clusters of poets who regularly post poems, comment on others, and form a social hub for what is for most a solitary activity.

I belong to Tuesday Poem, as does Wellington poet Tim Jones. Over the last three or so years, Tim and I have become familiar with each other’s writing and egged each other on with comments and emails. And so, when Tim mentioned he was on a book launch tour of his latest collection Men Briefly Explained, I was keen to ask him a few questions…

I've been trying to work men out for ages. Can they really be Briefly Explained?

Well, it has been suggested that the title of this collection would be more accurate if you dropped the "n" off "Men" - so perhaps the collection should be titled 'Me Briefly Explained'. I even thought of including a poem called 'Middle Class, Middle Aged, Heterosexual White Males Briefly Explained', which would go like this:

but let's not talk about us

darling

let's talk about me

I think we can all be glad that I left this poem out.

On a slightly more serious note, though, and accepting that one should be very careful about making generalisations: do men do the things they do (good and bad) because of nature or nurture? That debate underlies quite a few of the poems in the book, even if it isn't overt in many of them.

What makes you write?

There are a number of possible answers to this question. One is that I got encouragement from my high school teachers about my first attempts to write; another is that I get antsy when I go for more than a couple of weeks without writing - and, let me tell you, you don't want to see me when I get antsy - but, probably more than anything else, it's the thing I love doing that I'm good at doing.

I love music, but I have the musical talent of a bag of cement; I love walking in the bush, but the high-pressure environment of competitive bush-walking is no longer for me; and I love writing. When a poem comes out just right, or a story comes together, there is no better feeling. The hard part these days is finding the space and making the time to write.

Why do you write poetry?

Poetry was the first form of creative writing I tried my hand at - my earlier school essays, particularly the one on Captain Cook with an accompanying illustration which made him look like Marlon Brando on a particularly bad day, don't really count. As I mentioned above, I got good reactions to my high-school attempts at poetry, which gave me a lot of encouragement to keep going.

So it's partly that I got an early sense that this was something I had the potential to do well at, and partly because it's the closest I'll ever come to making music. Also, there are some ideas that, when I have them, feel like a poem rather than a story - so that's the form I attempt to embody them in.

Your previous collection of poetry is titled All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens. Which is more important - rugby or poetry?

The title All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens was a craven attempt to come up with a book title which married together the three things that New Zealanders seem willing to buy books about - although there are, oddly enough, a couple of poems about rugby in there.

I'm actually a cricket and football (soccer) fan first and foremost - so rugby comes next after those sports in my affections. And poetry is definitely more important than rugby, although I must confess that, between approximately 9pm and 11pm on Sunday 23rd October 2011, I watched the Rugby World Cup Final rather than the Poetry World Cup Final.

How do you go about constructing a new collection - do you start with a central theme, or do you let the work gradually find its own shape?

My previous two collections, Boat People and All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens, had themed sections within them, but didn't have an overall theme, whereas all the poems in Men Briefly Explained are at least tangentially related to the theme of how men behave - in particular, the relationships between boys and their fathers, and between men and women. But I didn't start out with this theme - it was just that, a year or so after I completed the manuscript of All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens, I noticed that many of the poems I was writing were about men and masculinity. "This could make a good theme for a collection," I thought...

What inspired this particular collection of poetry?

As I mentioned, I had the general theme in mind, but what inspired this particular collection was the incident behind the title poem, which begins:

My friend and I are talking to
the most attractive woman in the room.
My friend and I are talking at
the most attractive woman in the room.

and goes on to engage in a bit of sociobiology, comparing men to our ape cousins:

... We are gibbons
swinging through the trees. Chimps
waving sticks and bones. Gorillas
in the mountain forests,
beating our hairy chests
as the poacher Time takes aim.

The background is that I was in a room with a male friend and a group of women, and I had one of those little moments where I stepped outside what the two of us were, quite unconsciously, doing - competing to show off our mighty brainpower in front of an attractive woman - and thought "Hmmm - that's interesting - classic male ape display behaviour", and noted it down. Although it's important not to overdo the comparison, I do think that there's a lot the behaviour of other animal species can teach us about human behaviour.

Novelist, science fiction writer, short story writer, poet, editor and blogger - you wear many different hats (a man after my own heart!). And that's just the writing part of your life. How do you juggle different projects and do these roles add or take away from each other?

I don't find juggling the writing hats to be too difficult, because I tend to write one sort of thing for a while, then another sort of thing. I have barely written a poem since I completed the manuscript of Men Briefly Explained - when I have been writing, I've been writing short stories.

I have to admit though, that I have got a lot less writing done than I'd hoped in 2011 - a combination of other commitments, family developments, and saying "yes" to too many projects that are all worthwhile and enjoyable individually, but collectively soak up lots of time. I am looking forward to reclaiming my writing time once the book tour finishes.

You've worked with a number of independent publishers - first Headworx, and now Interactive Press. What is your experience of working in this way - is it more 'hands-on' for an author?

When Random House New Zealand agreed to publish my 2008 short story collection Transported, I was very pleased, but also nervous because I didn't know what it would be like to work with a big publisher. In fact, I found it was very much like working with an independent publisher. (I won't say "small publisher", because Interactive Press (IP) has a very active publishing programme.)

On the one hand, the Random House NZ people were lovely to work with and I never felt that I was being chewed up by a corporate machine; on the other hand, my fondly-imagined fleets of marketing people and publicists for my book never materialised, and the sort of book distribution problems which bedevil small publishing turn out to be not entirely absent from the bigger players' operations.

The key thing that has changed, even since my first book was published in 2001, is that marketing is more and more the responsibility of the author, not the publisher.

Where are you going on tour and how do you expect to be received?

Keith Westwater and I are going on tour to promote our respective new collections from IP, his Tongues of Ash and my Men Briefly Explained, and here is where we are going:

* Dunedin: Tuesday, 25 October, Circadian Rhythm Café, 72 St Andrew Street, 8pm

* Christchurch: Wednesday, 26 October, CPIT, Madras Street, 5:30pm

* Wellington: Thursday, 27 October, Wellington Central Library, 5:30 for 6pm

* Lower Hutt: Friday, 28 October, Rona Gallery/Bookshop, Eastbourne, 6pm

* Auckland: Tuesday 1 November, Poetry Live, Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Road, 8pm

This is my second book tour - Interactive Press organised a similar tour for Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry From New Zealand, which I co-edited with Mark Pirie, in 2009 - and based on that experience, I expect we will be well received. I have strong Dunedin connections, Keith has strong Christchurch connections, and Wellington and Lower Hutt are our respective stamping grounds.

The great unknown is how we will be received in Auckland! It's possible we will be driven out with blows and curses, but I know there are some lovely poetry people in Auckland, including the Poetry Live organisers, so I think we will be OK.

What's next?

I was awarded the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010, which was a great honour - but it was to help with the production of my next collection of short fiction. I have a whole lot of short story ideas, a bunch of half-finished stories, and several first drafts - when the tour's over, it’s time to knuckle down and get on with those stories.

**

About Tim Jones

Tim Jones is a poet and author of both science fiction and literary fiction who was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010. Among his recent books are short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008) and poetry anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press, 2009), co-edited with Mark Pirie. Voyagers won the “Best Collected Work” category in the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards.

Book tour details and more on Men Briefly Explained