Australian author and poet Tim Sinclair speaks with Hypable about his new verse novel Run, making poetry cool, and more.
Sinclair has also recently released his riff on the standard dictionary. Re:reading the dictionary presents 26 poems – one for each letter of the alphabet – and allows Sinclair (as a self-described “dictionary geek”) to run wild.
Re:reading the dictionary is available as an e-book only, and can be purchased on indie retailer Tomey. As if you needed any more incentive, a current gives you 50% off if you Tweet about it.
For more about Reading Matters, read our recap of the conference, and our interview with author Gayle Forman, who was also in attendance. For an insight into the world of parkour, check out the trailer for Run below.
Tell us about your journey to become a writer.
Messy, convoluted, and frequently wandering off the track. Hey look, a mountain to climb! An occupational hazard of writing is that if you’re trying to build any sort of convincing world, you have to be a generalist. You have to be interested in everything. Makes it hard to focus, sometimes.
You are both a novelist and a poet – how do you approach these mediums differently?
The main difference is in the endurance. Writing a novel is hard. You have to persist like the bastard of all things persistent. You can’t let it go, and you have to exist, for a year or two or more, with this world precariously balanced on the inside of your head.
The difference with a poem is the sprint versus the marathon. You can get it all down in a single sitting. You can capture that flash you got behind your eyeballs that only burns bright for a minute. That being said, short has its own difficulties. There’s no room for slack in a poem.
Verse novels like ‘Run’ are contributing to a modernisation of the way poetry is viewed, and breaking down the conception that poetry is only about reading Keats alone in your bedroom. How do you feel about this?
I love it. If that’s truly true, I love it. I didn’t set out with any revolutionary agenda – with my first verse novel, Nine Hours North, I genuinely just wanted to tell the story in a way that made sense to me, and to the story – but I’ve realised since then that other people can view the form as challenging.
Since then I guess I’ve become a bit less naive, and a little more ‘political’ about this form. I hate the way poetry is seen as rarified and irrelevant, and if a book with all the narrative hooks of a prose novel can suck in a person who would otherwise never touch the stuff, then that to me is a victory.
What was your general experience of Reading Matters?
Sensational. I can’t thank the organisers enough for the thought they put into the program and the work they put in to keep it ticking over, and to looking out for all of us. I felt instantly included in this very warm, very welcoming community of YA writers.
And the audiences were incredible! I’m very happy indeed if the hundreds of librarians in the audience are representative of the people looking after the reading habits of today’s teenagers. So engaged, so switched on, so passionate about books and writing and ideas. Truly inspiring.
Speaking about ‘Run,’ you said at Reading Matters that to you, parkour was a sort of poetry. Can you expand on this?
The ‘what is poetry’ question never goes away, when you hang around poets. It’s this capacity to unsettle that gives poetry its power. It moves in ways that language isn’t supposed to. Poetry is hard to define but you know it when you see it, flowing between the cracks of the everyday.
Watching a skilled and dedicated traceur (parkour practitioner) move through a landscape as though every obstacle in the way were simply handholds to freedom is to realise that the rest of us are simply slow-stepping through life. Prosaic movers, compared to parkour’s poetry.
Let’s talk about ‘Re:reading the dictionary’ – why these 26 words and how did you narrow it down?
Random chance + sound + ignorance… I quite literally flipped through the dictionary until I came across a word that felt promising. Suggestive of something, in the most abstract of ways – the rhythm, or the way it sat on the page; some part of it that alluded to something else and set my mind wandering.
The whole book was an experiment, and behind the 26 final poems there are a lot of ‘failed words’, but I’m very happy with the final cut. Having the A-Z constraint was excellent, because there’s really no way you can defy that.
What is the easiest to write – the first line or the last line of a poem?
The first. Because it’s often the first thing to go in a redraft. It’s the starting point, it’s crucial, but it’s mostly only a warm up point to take you to the place where you find out what it is that you actually want to say. And then it’s done its job, and you can cut it in the redraft and not worry about it. I love editing. Love it.
To finish off, tell us 5 interesting facts about yourself.
1. I consider mochi to be the highest form of dough.
2. I do not suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.
3. Occasionally I have doubts about my dough-ranking system.
4. I’m proud of my Scottish heritage, but I canna stomach Irn-Bru.
5. I’m not sure that I should have told you that first thing.
More about ‘Run’:
Dee lives for parkour, and the alternate worlds he invents to escape his mundane life. He knows the city better than anyone-the hidden spaces at night, the views that no one else sees, from heights no one else can scale,. With parkour, he’s not running away. He’s free
But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. And soon Dee is running for his life, running for real.
Run is an unmissable, paranoid thriller – genre fiction meets literary verse novel.
More about Tim Sinclair:
You can find Tim on Twitter at @Tim_Sinclair. To find out more about Tim and his works, visit his website.
Run was published by Penguin Books Australia on 20 March 2013. It is available for purchase through Penguin, Amazon (for Kindle), and other assorted retailers.
Image: Courtesy of Tim Sinclair