Claire
Orchard's debut poetry collection,
Cold Water Cure, will be published and launched at our Writers Week
publisher's party next week. Ahead of the launch, we asked Claire about her
collection and its 'main character' – Charles
Darwin.
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| Claire Orchard (photo by Grant Maiden) |
The central part of your
book draws its ideas from Charles Darwin’s diaries while on his long
exploratory trip on the Beagle, then following the publication of On the Origin
of Species. Darwin does offer some fantastic material for a writer (he was himself
a good writer), but what was the attraction of his life for you specifically?
From my first encounters
with Darwin’s writings it was obvious he was a man deeply committed to his many
research projects, one who was able to keep his mind open to new understandings,
however challenging they were to existing thinking. But for me as a writer the
primary attraction became exploring the parallels I detected between the life
he was leading in his society then and the one I’m leading now. Of course, he
was a gifted and ground-breaking scientist and I’m most definitely not. But he
was also a person who, like many of us, spent his down time working on his
marriage, on his relationships with friends and extended family, on writing
letters and playing games with his children. He was a very hands-on and engaged
parent to his – I get exhausted just thinking about this bit – ten children. He
does not at all fit the stereotype of a stern, distant Victorian family man. Charles
Darwin is a gigantic public figure; I wanted to get past those images of him as
Father of Evolutionary Biology and Challenger of the Myth of Creation, to find the
person that lived behind all that.
Not only do you cover his
scientific work, but his home life – the death of his eldest daughter, his
penchant for billiards – and his musings on the decision to marry: ‘a wife will
be a vast help in organising notes.' Did you end up liking Darwin? Does it
matter for the purposes of the project whether you like your subject or not?
Yes, the scientific work is
so much an integral part of the man it is inevitably present in many of the
poems but as you say, it is the family man and his home life – as billiards
enthusiast, as doting dad – that I particularly wanted to open up to view. In the
process I did grow to like him very much. It feels almost as if we’re
acquainted now, in some weird way. ‘Voyages’, the long poem sequence in which
Darwin speaks and a 21st century speaker responds, is the closest I managed
to get to holding a conversation with him. I’d got quite into it the idea of
knowing him personally at that point. Of course I knew I couldn’t actually pull
that off, but it was fun trying. I don’t believe you have to like your subject,
but I think there has to be something about them that fascinates or intrigues
you, something to sustain your interest. Much as I came to like and admire
Darwin, in some of the poems he is represented in a less than flattering light
and that’s as it should be – we’re none of us paragons of virtue and are all
products of our time and society.
What do you think a poetic
project of Darwin’s work and life might offer over a straight biographical
work?
One thing I think a poetic
project can offer is an imaginative (and by this I mean at least in part
inventive) interpretation of a life. In the case of this project that meant
employing biographic material in an attempt to consider, feel or experience
what it might have been like to be Charles Darwin at particular moments in his
life. Initially I was very concerned to not put words in Darwin’s mouth, but to
allow him to speak for himself, so many of the poems I wrote earlier in the
project integrate phrases lifted directly from his books and letters. The haiku,
for example, were found with the aid of a haiku-seeking computer programme my
brother kindly wrote for me, which I applied to an electronic text copy of On
the Origin of Species. Mind you, I did have to trawl through a lot of very gnarly
seventeen syllable phrases to unearth a few rare gems. However, as my research
progressed I decided I needed to have the confidence to speak for Darwin at
times or risk stalling the project. Very little is known, for instance, about
his personal reaction to the death of his daughter Annie, who died – most
likely of tuberculosis – aged ten. Darwin left very little written record of
his thoughts about Annie after her loss and, according to his other children,
he never spoke of her again, thus the poems concerning the traumatic aftermath
of this event are not informed by a primary source from that time in his life.
There are also poems from the points of view of Darwin’s contemporaries, whilst
in others the speaker is essentially me, looking back at his life from my perch
in the 21st century.
There are a lot of children
in your book – witnessing their sometimes crazy, hilarious minds – but also
wanting peace from them, to get on with your work, like Darwin. How did so many
children end up in your collection?
Yes, I often wonder how
Darwin managed his workload. He worked from home, and I’m sure must have found
it difficult on sunny days to resist the temptation to head outside and join
his children in the garden instead of once more hunkering down alone in his study,
chipping away at the riddles of life on earth. For myself, I find having other
people (also known as my family) milling around in, or near, my workspace (as
I’ve taken to designating the dinner table) is not generally conducive to
getting a lot done. Frankly, I believe the children in my poems just burrowed their
way in – they would not be denied! My own two children are grown now but when
I’m not writing I work at a primary school, so it feels inevitable and
appropriate that the people I spend a significant part of my day with will
occasionally infiltrate my poetry. Children often say the most outlandish
things in the most interesting ways and have a talent for coming up with the greatest,
most out-there ideas – perfect raw material for poetry.
Cold Water Cure will be available for purchase from March 10 at good bookstores and through VUP's online bookstore. p/b, $25.
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