Talking With Australian Poet π.O. About His Long-in-the-Making 'Heide'

Greek-Australian poet π.O. has been working on Heide, an epic, book-length poem about "history, painting, painters, patrons – the people who made modern art happen in Australia, and those who opposed it" for eight years, says Perth-based writer and interviewer Amy Lin for the Los Angeles Review of Books blog. From their conversation:

...How do you see the role of facts in the poetic mode, which is often thought of as antithetical to factual knowledge?

I learnt while I was writing “work poems” how facts were being used against workers. So I began to use them myself, in the service of “us” workers — I found you could use facts in a variety of ways, and in particular how a “fact” could be used as a “metaphor” or a “synecdoche” or “metonymy,” etc. So I began using them too.

This idea of a part standing in for a whole can be configured in another way, in that your poems sometimes stand in for Fitzroy, a suburb in Melbourne, Australia. Can you tell us about Fitzroy and its significance to your poetics?

Archemedes famously said, “Give me where I may stand and I will move the earth.” Fitzroy was where I stood. It didn’t feel like much being surrounded in it, as a child, but as time went on, it gave me strength, a background, a history, a style (or styles), and more importantly a different linguistic idea of the use and function of language.

Check out the full interview at BLARB.