A few weeks ago I dined with Australian poet John Foulcher who is preparing for 6 months Australian Arts Council residency in Paris. The grant covers an apartment and some living expenses (and this year's applications close today! See Australia Council Literature Residencies).
As I had just returned from a month in that fabled city I could anticipate some of the Parisian experiences that might inform his work. So I wasn't far into Gail Jones' Dreams of Speaking when I realised that she too must have lived in Paris on such a scheme. However, although the novel is clearly geographically set in Paris, the crux of the work is the meeting of two cultures and, more tellingly, two persons who on the surface were very different but at heart very much in sympathy. Jones image of the strings of a piano vibrating when another piano is played nearby describes their relationship exactly.
I learnt much from the structure of the novel. Jones uses many small flashbacks worked into a bookending flashback. The story is centred on Mr Sakamoto. Around her meetings with and memories of him Alice, the protagonist, reevaluates her family and personal relationships, and her responses to her encounters in the world. Alice is writing about technology and Jones explores many of the ambiguities of modern life through her - mobile phones on remote mountain tops, the silence of internet cafes containing a cacophony of communication.
Not much of my Parisian experience has bubbled up in my own poetry yet. I think I am afraid that it has all been written before. There are so many literary greats and not-so-greats who have trodden those streets and byways already. Jones shows how it can be done from an Australian perspective, how being in a city but not part of it is still a valid base from which to write and how place flavours people and their intersections but doesn't need to overpower them.
No doubt John will come home soaked in new experiences and perceptions that will well up into new work in their own good time.
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