Firstly, could you tell us how your work fits into the Australian literary scene?
Shit... O.K. ... Umm, well ... My stuff’s brilliant. I’ve been writing these poems about how good I am - how are they? Brilliant. I’m amazed I’m amazed I’m amazing. I wrote two hundred poems about how good I was, this was in about ‘74/75 and that was some examples of some poems then. That was important because that was a basic sense of identity to say one is one to say one is here and is an is and that ricocheted across the country that there was this mad poet saying he was brilliant fantastic and great. And I was because everyone else was boring and terrible and not everybody, there were about ten of us who were ... sexy. But the great thing about doing that was it liberated my I and because all of sudden I didn’t have to deal with the I ... and that meant I could then talk about the world that I lived in without having any kind of ego involved. In other words I could take my ego outside my writing and put it in a comfortable relationship to the rest of my life. So I didn’t have any problems about trying to be cool. I mean I was cool ...

What were the traditions that this work was coming from?
I never listened to a radio for music, I had a jukebox. 33 and a third revs per minute didn’t exist for me for a long time cause it was all 45 revs per minute. City living and language and the cutup society into cinema and sound units as determined by EMI or whoever were a large part of my construction - And my poetry reflects that. There’s a lot of sound bites taken out of reality and pastiche together into what you could call realism. When I came onto the scene everyone was mumbling. I didn’t have to scream much to sound like I was screaming. People couldn’t hear, and what they couldn’t hear was the assault of language on their ears not so much volume although volume was an element because volume for me is an element of language and most writers haven’t got any, and if they do they capitalise it but it doesn’t actually jump phonetically, it only jumps conceptually and so to me these are major problems.

My relationship to modernism is incredibly complex because modernism as practised in Australia does not allow for socio-economic realities. It pretends they don’t exist. Whereas all language has inbuilt in it socio-economic factors. By hearing a dialect you can tell from what area a person comes from on the map. And one of the elements of my writing and why I think it’s successful in terms of audiences is because it embodies the body ... I’m talking about the influences of people like Langston Hughes on my writing, or Sterling A. Brown and a lot of the black American writers. I just find its just magnificent what they’ve done with language yet modernism finds it really difficult to deal with them to talk about their writing in any sense, they don’t know how to put it together.

How has your performance work affected your written work or are they the same thing, how does one influence the other...?
They all influence each other. I write scripts for voices. And those scripts are arranged on the page like the page is a canvas. If you look at my stuff, my language jumping all over the place it’s stretching out language it’s minimising it, it’s rearranging it, it’s skipping along, it’s a living organism, it’s a living, a living force. And you’re invited to participate in it. People say it’s better to hear you well that’s fine, it’s better to hear Beethoven that go looking through all those little squiggles of it but that’s not really my problem. I write my scores, I write my scripts, I write my language, I write my constructions and I do them so that I take the signs and signifiers and signifieds all in one direction so hopefully you will get what I want you to experience and if you don’t or you get it within plus or minus that’s fine.

Your work seems to focus on marginal elements of the community: migrants, street people, is this a conscious decision?
It’s not conscious. They’re not marginal elements in my life. Where I grew up they are the elements of my life. And often people don’t realise that really I’m an urban poet before I’m a migrant poet or a performance poet or anything else. I’m an urban writer. I’m a poet from an urban setting. The orallity of a text is very important to me because that’s how I experience language. I lived in an environment in a shop with people coming in all the time that are talking a million languages and a million accents and a million things around me all the time. It’s a living and a powerful organism to me.

Perhaps you could talk about the importance of dialogue in your work & why you seem to transcribe the space in between languages ...

One of the sexy things about 24 Hours, my book, is that it is a book that is incredibly difficult if you’re only monolingual but only apparently so. Because the book starts off quite complicated with a lot of Greek, and builds up into a kind of proper English" if you like. And the great thing about that is that no language is privileged or no words of another language by the introduction of another alphabet. Everything is subsumed to the English-Australian alphabet. That puts every dialect, everything that is spoken, onto the same balance. Now, having put everything on an equal playing field which is the page, the flatness of the page, I show you the contours that are existing in it. You’re sitting in a coffeeshop and you’re hearing noises, you’re hearing sounds, some of which you can work out by the volume levels or the distances they are away from you or the context in which you find yourself gives it meaning but not necessarily the language per se. So the idea of translation disappears. That’s one of my great achievements, a person who is polylingual, does not need translation, there is no loss in translation. Because you, within yourself, go from one language to another, and you lost nothing. Whereas if you have to have someone filtering what’s being said, you always get error. That’s another thing about the book, I was trying to put into it bodies and voices and language that was not allowed and not admissible within the culture, the official language of literature. It’s not there.

What about the graphic nature of your work? The play between sounds and language, and text and graphic on the page?
24 Hours I wanted to do the whole book so beautifully, use the nature of page as canvas and really sprawl around and do some beautiful stuff with it, the only problem is, after I got up to 600 pages I thought, this book ain’t gonna happen. I mean how do you do a 2000 page book? It’s impossible. So I had to work within the restriction of only a couple of lines do a visual play, or within a single line like in the stretching of the language or playing with the language.

What about in your other poems, where does that visual element come from?
Well I’m a concrete poet, And I’ve always been excited by the visual format, I mean I'm a draftsman so laying out something with a bit of balance, and the visual elements of language are very important to me. I understand the assault on the linear nature of language and how revolutionary that is and I also understand how advertising co-opts that because of the nature of the canvas or the screen or the billboard or whatever, and I think what happens is, and this is strange, what happens is when you present people with a visual poem they all of a sudden become illiterate because they’re used to seeing a visual poem with a commodity attached to it, and once they’ve got that, the raison d’etre is understood, they can understand why the visual is done that way because its trying to sell a product, so they’re literate. As soon as you take the product away, and give them a visual poem, all of a sudden it’s "what’s this?" and they panic and they can’t read anymore.