SEAN WEST

Sean is an emerging poet currently completing his BFA in Creative Writing at QUT. His work has previously appeared in Voiceworks, Slink Chunk Press and Freezeray Poetry (US), as well as several local zines. He interns for Ruckus Slam Brisbane and Ruckus Youth, where he helps young writers like himself create and perform their work.

All-Stars is Sean's fifth appearance in PASTEL.

You're a child of the Brisbane borderlands, being a big smoke commuter from the bays of Redland City. How might you suggest your work reflects your relationship with the shire's bayside suburban character?

A lot of my best work is tied to water and images of the ocean. I’ve had a very complex and fraught relationship with the ocean all my life. Family reunions were spent at bayside parks. We were annual regulars at the bayside Christmas carols down the road from my house as a kid. As teenagers, North Stradbroke Island was our escape. I think a lot of my writing has an undertone of escapism to it, which comes from my ties to the suburbs and the Redlands. There’s too much going on here and never enough.

Somewhere on the commute between seaside and city skyline, you've bedazzled yourself in festival culture - your kaleidoscopic fashion fits right in to the PASTEL wardrobe; it's been a visually quenching experience watching your dress sense evolve with every PASTEL Live Launch. How has super-coloured festival culture changed you as an artist, and perhaps as an individual?

It turned me inside out. About a year ago, all I wanted to do was write about death and remove myself from every poem. I turned my nose up to confessional and elegiac styles and just wanted each poem to be an objective representation of death or grief. Festival fashion shocked my system and gave my work the splashes of colour, feeling and positivity it sincerely needed. I got a bit carried away with this aesthetic earlier this year though, when I got lost in trying to sound as dazzling and flashy as possible. So fashion pushed me in another direction and pushed me too hard to a certain extreme. It’s been a fun challenge to reel it back in and pare it down again. So now I can keep the colour and feeling and cut away the frilly bits that are too distracting.

Intimacy and the primal instincts are recurring themes in your work; your original submission to PASTEL, 'Eat it Too', told the story of an animalistic curiosity in the grotesque, by way of ingesting human flesh. Similarly, your piece, 'Pomegranate' in Issue Two, makes bold references to a regretful sexual experience, and 'Pink Shag' is as erotic as your work could get. What is it about these carnal instincts that fascinates you?

I think there’s something about the low-brow tug of erotic poetry that keeps drawing me back in. I’ve never actually been taught how to write a sex poem, so there might be a sense of rebellion and danger in it too. Love poems are culturally acceptable and get the tick of approval, but sex poems aren’t as widely loved or accepted. Unless they’re intentionally satiric, I think there’s a genuine cultural cringe surrounding them. It’s always fun to lower the brow and get beastly with myself.

Do you find a particular comfort in communicating your sensuality through the written word?

My introduction to poetry came through love poems I wrote to girls in primary school then later throughout high school. More often than not the girls were impressed with the poems but not so much with me. There was a strange comfort in that and it set me up for rejection later in life. My skin grew thicker and thicker and my poems grew better. Then putting sex into those poems was kind of like my own bizarre form of sex ed. We weren’t taught a whole awful lot about sex at school, so my poems grew out of an intuition and curiosity for the unknown. I was never one to hide my poetry from others either, so I probably felt sharing my sensuality with others through the written word could open me up to new experiences and I believe it did.

PASPals may not know that you take great inspiration from artwork on exhibition, in crafting your writing. How would you describe your relationship with art? Have you experienced a piece being too 'big' or too complex to distil into a piece of poetry?

I’ve always been caught between art and poetry. All throughout high school, visual art and English were my two favourite subjects. After I graduated, I was determined to go off to uni and study both of them equally. English ended up winning the battle and I settled for an art history minor. That certainly kept my interest alive, since I always found studying and analysing art so much more fun than actually creating it myself. This really informed my ekphrastic poetry style before I even knew what ekphrastic poetry was. I get such a kick out of wandering through art galleries and responding to the works around me. Then going home and refining them and distilling the clutter is an extra joy. Now I’m particularly finding pleasure in responding with a cheeky or antagonistic slant to the work itself, to play fight with the piece and humanise it in a way.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the thematic or physical scope of an artwork. I suppose the most daunting thing is the worry of appropriation or misinterpretation. Occasionally I might feel a little distressed that I’m not seeing the big picture or I’m skimming over some cultural significance or I just don’t get it. But I think the term “appropriation” has garnered such a negative connotation in recent years. Some of the best art is all about appropriating meaning. That’s really what ekphrasis is all about, not only extending the meaning of a piece of art, but twisting it and making it one’s own.

Let's talk about "Red Lippy", your Issue Three submission, inspired by Anish Kapoor's Untitled 2006-7, currently a monolithic residential piece right here at GoMA. Kapoor offers an interpretation of his installation, saying:

‘Red is the colour of the interior of our bodies. The inside out … it’s an interest in the idea that the inside and the outside are equivalent to each other.’

As your work orbits the idea of the carnal internal being laid bare on the page, would you say "Red Lippy" agrees with Kapoor's interpretation?

I think so. When I wrote that poem, I was incredibly fascinated by the sheer size and feeling of the work in the gallery. I felt dwarfed by the mammoth round lip of the piece and the image of myself reflected and inverted in the throat of it. The spine of my poem is built on that unsettled feeling and imbalance of size and power. As the speaker, I kind of dangle there like her uvula. In that sense, I am both vulnerable and powerful. Vulnerable as a little pink flap of skin and powerful because with one touch, I’ll have her spewing her guts out.

It's been no time at all since you made your penultimate PASTEL appearance in Issue Four, but now you're back for another crack in All-Stars, with your piece, 'Sweet Ocean'. You've pressed 'pause' on exploring your sexual intimacies in favour of taking PASPals back to your beachside roots. You've invited us into your home - what resonance does the ocean have to the story you're telling in this piece?

This is a poem that’s taken many shapes and will continue to take many more. I think it forms the basis for my budding poetry collection. It’s about how my grandfather was lost at sea when my mother was sixteen, a very long time before I was born. In this piece, the ocean is a metaphor for intergenerational trauma, grief, longing, loss, and love. The fruit my speaker is prying open embodies my sense of identity, the fact that I share a name with a relative I never knew. I get a taste of the ocean in this poem but not a whole mouthful and I’m certainly not going swimming on a full stomach.

The opening line reads, "I knife my middle name". Is this symbol representing a rebellion against familial ties, or a 'curiosity' and 'hunger' for independence?

I don’t think of it as a rebellion against family. It’s definitely more of a curiosity and a hunger for things left unsaid for years and years. Maybe it’s a longing for answers to questions I’ve never been bold enough to ask. I don’t think there’s any big secrets or revelations waiting for me. But there’s a tie to this man, this distant relative that will always be attached to me. When I knife my middle name in this poem, I’m not out to harm anything or kill it. It’s already dead. This is just the autopsy.

Ocean imagery is often associated with rebirth. Is 'Sweet Ocean' a rebirth of your artistic personality? Might your appearance in All-Stars represent an all-new direction?

It definitely feels like a rebirth. Every poem sort of feels like a rebirth to me. This is just another way of saying what I’ve been trying to say for a long time. Maybe there’ll be more deep, confessional sorts of poems like this. Or maybe I’ll just keep writing about sex and fruit. Only time will tell.

In life after PASTEL, where can PASPals continue to enjoy your All-Star talent?

Come to Ruckus Brisbane or Ruckus Youth! I intern for both and love to see fresh new faces appear in the community and grow as artists, musicians, and general wild cats. Ruckus Slam is held at The Zoo on the third Wednesday night of every month and Ruckus Youth is usually held at Just Earth on the first Sunday afternoon of every month.

You’ll never see me more at home than on stage slamming my heart out or helping coordinate these events. There’s just nothing like it. Except maybe if it has something to do with PASTEL.

To enjoy Sean's All-Stars contribution, pick up a copy of PASTEL Magazine All-Stars at pastelthemagazine.bigcartel.com.

And head over to 4ZZZ.org.au/program/PAZZZTEL to catch Sean's debut on Zed Digital's PAZZZTEL, prezzzented by Phoebe & James.