By Yong Shu Hoong

If you're trying to look beyond veteran Australian poets – the likes of Les Murray and Robert Adamson, for example – in search for bright young sparks in the poetry scene Down Under, Jaya Savige would be a notable name on the list.

Born in Sydney in 1978, he grew up on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland. Still in his 30s, he has already published two poetry collections: Latecomers (2005), which snagged the Kenneth Slessor Award and Thomas Shapcott Prize, and Surface to Air (2011), which was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the West Australian Premier's Prize for Poetry.

In 2009, Savige started his PhD in English at the University of Cambridge, Christ's College, on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. The Poetry Editor for The Australian newspaper, he currently lives in London, where he lectures at New College of the Humanities that was founded by the philosopher, A.C. Grayling. His chapbook, Maze Bright, was published earlier this year by Vagabond Press as part of its Rare Object Series.

1. What are you reading right now?
For better or worse, my reading right now is almost entirely determined by my work as a lecturer, editor, reviewer and, last but by no means least, an interminable PhD candidate. I'm currently reviewing a new centenary edition of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, plus several other works of Thomasania. The Fitzroy Tavern (Thomas's bohemian London bar of choice in the 1930s) happens to be about a block and a half from the college I teach at in London, so I've been enjoying reading some of the Collected Poems there.

For the PhD, I'm immersed in the notebooks, drafts, typescripts, placards and page proofs for James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – so, down the rabbit hole of the 63-volume James Joyce Archive – as well as other manuscript material, transcriptions, the primary texts (of course) and mountains of criticism. Specifically, this fortnight I'm reading reproductions of three of Joyce's notebooks – the first contains the earliest extant drafts of the 'Proteus' and 'Sirens' episodes in Ulysses, while the others are notes Joyce used for episode II.1 of Finnegans Wake. Critical works open on my desk right now include Tzvetan Todorov's The Poetics of Prose and Thomas Vargish's The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction.

Poetry-wise (apart from Thomas) I'm reading Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems by Martin Harrison, the Sydney-based poet and scholar who passed away in September. When I'm not reading any of the above, I'm probably reading poetry submissions for the newspaper.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
Right now I feel a bit like Mr Casaubon, the grim old autodidact in George Eliot's Middlemarch, who predictably dies before finishing the thing he's been working on forever.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm the Filipino pop songstress, Jaya.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
If I ever find myself identifying with other authors, it is usually only partially; an image or turn of phrase or biographical detail can prompt a sense of identification, but I invariably then encounter some aspect of their work or life that I cannot identify with at all.

For instance, I've been thinking a fair bit lately about the Australian writer Jack Lindsay (1900–1990), who moved from Brisbane to the UK in his mid-20s, had a passion for classical literature and also found himself in the bohemian bars in Fitzrovia in the 1930s alongside Thomas and Augustus John, Nina Hamnet, etc. I can identify superficially with some of Lindsay's expatriate biography and interests, but I cannot identify whatsoever with his upbringing among artists and literati, nor his animosity towards the work of Joyce and Lawrence (very different writers, of course).

With that caveat, I'll be a good sport and name a living author, David Malouf (b. 1934), because he has written the landscapes of my youth (south-east Queensland and the islands of Moreton Bay) into literature, in both poetry and prose; he has an abiding interest in classical as well as modern and contemporary literature; and he spent time living in the UK and Europe before returning to Australia (which, incidentally, Lindsay never did).

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Sure, like all writers I experience periods of creative impasse. But for me, the term "writer's block" doesn't really do justice to the broad spectrum of resistance encountered ordinarily – at the lexical, syntactical, formal or even social, political or unconscious levels – in the activity of writing a poem. Resistance and silence are a poet's daily bread; both play constitutive roles in poetry. Poets invite resistance; we exert greater pressure on language than usual because we are drawn to the sparks, the semantic heat that results from the friction of words moving through the world and amongst each other.

Put another way, I think poetry is a way of encountering resistance everywhere in language. If that resistance accumulates to a point where one's writing grinds to a halt for a period, I don't necessarily think it's a negative thing. No writer's time is taken up entirely with writing; reading and thinking about poetry are just as crucial. I'd be much more worried about ever suffering serious reader's block. If I couldn't bring myself to read poetry at all for a substantial period of time, that would cause me concern.

That's my philosophical answer. Otherwise: I find that physical activity usually helps to jolt me out of mental or creative stasis; surfing's my favourite thing to do (in fact, it prompted most of my poems as a teenager), but it's rare that I can do that (living in London), so I swim often; but simply walking, preferably without purpose, has helped me with specific blocks in the past. Likewise tea, art, music and travelling on over-ground trains.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Courageous ears; a sagacious nose; incandescent eyes and a risky tongue.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Psittacism.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
I have several poems committed to memory, plus the usual medley of "quashed quotatoes" as Joyce calls them. The most difficult piece I can recite is a roughly 100-line soliloquy of Lucifer's from Book II of Paradise Lost; Milton's syntax is devilishly tortuous.

As for advice from a writer, how about: "Do not expect applause." (W.S. Graham, 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons')

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
have a weird thing about sometimes having to shut the bedroom cupboards and drawers properly before going to sleep – as in, I have to get up out of bed to shut a drawer if I notice it slightly open. It's a silly compulsion that dates not to childhood, as you might expect, but to my late teens, when I had an earnest-enough epiphany concerning the half-open doors and drawers in the paintings of Dali, while reading Freud, and Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. I'd cobbled together some sort of phenomenology of sleeping places, in which the doors and drawers of any sleeping room loomed, as they do in Dali, like portals into an unruly unconscious that might spill out vividly into dreams and nightmares (mine have always been ultraviolent and harrowing). What a strange intellectualisation of the fear of the bogeyman that is. I find I still do it occasionally out of habit.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
I probably go to the theatre as often as the cinema, but in both cases genre is one of the least significant factors in determining what I'll see. My favourite films are those that have left me feeling ravished, intellectually, aesthetically and emotionally, both on first viewing and long after: Bergman's Persona, or Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, Malick's Days of Heaven, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pixar's WALL-E. So, films whose directors take a poetic approach to the medium. The film I most enjoyed at the cinema recently was Jonathan Glazer's lusciously ominous Under the Skin, which left me feeling the same way.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Recent favourite words include: saccades, moonroof, pamplemousse; from Finnegans Wake: aristotaller (one who reads only Aristotle); racecourseful (resourceful); clearobscure (chiaroscuro); astoneaged (astonished), and if I can add: "Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuon- nthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk" – the first of the 10 hundred-letter "thunderwords" in Finnegans Wake. An onomatopoeic description of the fall of the book's hero, HCE, it contains or alludes to the words for "thunder" in at least 10 languages, including Japanese (kaminari), Old Rumanian (tun) and Swedish (åska).

A word I've recoiled from recently is the verb "(to) shirtfront", lately transposed from the lexicon of Australian Rules Football into the discourse of political diplomacy by the current Prime Minister of Australia.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: yearn, dreamspace, zone.

To yearn, as all the great poets have shown
Is to forge a dreamspace in a no-parking zone.

(Dear Ed., I can understand "yearn" and "zone" –
But "dreamspace" in a rhyming couplet? C'mon!)

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
Nothing indispensable. I don't mind an Old Fashioned and a candle if I'm working at night.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
No preference ordinarily; though during a recent writing residency in Paris, I enjoyed writing regularly by candlelight from the hours of about 8pm to midnight or later, after rolling words and lines around during the day.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
How about Sappho, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Australian poet Martin Johnston (1947–1990). I'd ask Sappho to bring her lyre, Samuel his laudanum and Martin his Greek.

16. How did new people that you've met and new places that you've been over the past three years help to inspire your new poetry?
My most recent collection, Maze Bright, was inspired by conversation over several years with some good friends in Cambridge who work in the biological sciences (biochemistry, molecular biology, etc.). The average abstract of an article in a science periodical like Nature tends to be highly specialised and virtually impenetrable to the non-scientific reader, but these friends opened my eyes and ears to just how poetically rich such work can be.

The term "maze bright" was coined by developmental biologists and behavioural psychologists in the 1940s to describe laboratory rats proficient in maze navigation. (Later, in the 1980s, the term was used in HR to describe "attractive hires".) The poems don't presume to engage scientific discourse – rather they transpose some of the conceptual themes of the "maze-bright" rat scenario (and of genetics and epigenetics) into various contemporary cultural keys: the collection begins, for instance, with a song for Pac-Man ('パックマン Étude') who figures as my generation's maze-bound Minotaur.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
Wait, when did you say you needed this by?

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