‘Filling the Emptiness’ by Andrew Lansdown

Introduction

Launch Speech by Nicholas Hasluck

INTRODUCTION

I wanted to write a poem. For various reasons, this desire took hold of me when I was in my mid-teens. I never thought about being “a poet”. It never occurred to me that I could be published. In fact, I wasn’t expecting readers, excepting one or two people close to me. I simply wanted to write a poem. And after I had written (what I thought was) one, I wanted to write another. In fact, my desire to write poems drove me back to school, then on to university, to study English literature.

I am now much older, but nothing much has changed. I still love poetry and I still pressingly want to write poems. This collection, Filling the Emptiness, is the latest fruit of that want. It contains mainly poems written in recent years. And although I wrote them one by one with little thought for their relationship to one another, and although they explore a variety of subjects and express a variety of emotions in a variety of forms, I think they sit well together between the covers of this book. I like the tenuous way they nudge one another as they fill the emptiness of the pages that fill the emptiness between the covers.

Underlying my desire to write poems is a love of the English language, the muscle and majesty of it when arranged through the skilful use of metaphor, alliteration, parallelism, rhyme, consonant rhyme, cadence, meter, syllabic meter, understatement, allusion, anacoluthon, zeugma, synaesthesia, incremental repetition, meaningful ambiguity, set structure, intuitive lineation, and other poetic devices. I never tire of the power and beauty with which words can clothe and communicate thoughts and emotions. I am constantly striving for the oh! and ah! of poetry—the just-look! and the just-so! of it.

I devote a significant part of my life to the actual task of writing. I write and rewrite until I feel that a given poem is right. And while the writing of a poem is often tedious and taxing, requiring determination and perseverance, it is nonetheless an enjoyable and rewarding undertaking. There is considerable satisfaction in working with a nascent idea or sentiment or image, and in the process discovering associated ones, so that a poem started as one thing becomes incredibly something other, something stronger and better, or else it splits into several independent but interrelated poems. And the greatest satisfaction of all is the moment a poem I have been working on needs no more work and assumes its final form as if it had always been this—the moment it is ready to face the world alone, bearing my name but otherwise independent of me. Amazing, really.

I struggled to write this Introduction. I rarely talk much—in writing or in person—about my poetry. What to say without sounding pretentious or trite? Why risk ruining good poems by talking about them? For if they really are “good”, shouldn’t they talk for themselves?

To break the impasse, my editors, Dennis Haskell and Jean Kent, suggested a number of subjects for me to write about: “Why your interest in Japan and when did that start? Your Christianity? Your poems about family and how you avoid sentimentality in them? Your frequent writing of short poems? Your strong focus on imagery? These are the sorts of things that make an Intro interesting …”

So, following my editors’ lead, I will offer a little background to this collection by dealing briefly and in turn with the topics they suggested.

Concerning Japan: Setting aside boyhood dreams of ninja and samurai, my interest in Japan was aroused by poetry. It was the discovery of haiku that did it. At the time (1974/5), I was already moving towards writing imagist and nature poems, so I found the idea of haiku very appealing. I began reading (in translation) haiku by the great Japanese masters. And while my primary interest was in the poetry, the poems themselves, along with the translators’ explanatory notes, began to educate me about ancient Japan.

Decades later, in 2011, I had an opportunity to travel to Japan with my wife, Susan. Since then, we have returned to Japan, mostly to Kyoto and the Kansai region, half a dozen times. These visits have fuelled my fascination with Japan—its people, its religions, its culture, its history, its literature, its architecture, its flora and fauna—and have inspired hundreds of poems, many of them in the traditional Japanese forms of haiku and tanka.

Concerning Christianity: As a boy, I learnt that Jesus loves me and I began to love him back. I have never stopped. In my early twenties, I read a statement by C. S. Lewis that summed up my experience, then and to this day: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’ I hope my poetry reflects this.

Nonetheless, my poetry is for everyone, not specifically for Christians. Most of my poems do not directly address or express Christian matters, and none of them presupposes that the reader is a Christian or requires the reader to endorse a Christian worldview. My poems are communications from the heart through art to my fellow human beings. They express our shared humanity and deal with our common loves, joys, sorrows and fears.

When I read Basho’s haiku, I am aware of their Buddhist underpinning, but I am not offended by it. Indeed, I am keen to learn about Buddhism and interested to see how Buddhist teaching plays out in Basho’s life and art. And although I believe that Buddhism is mistaken in its evaluations and solutions, I share as a Christian its sorrow over the suffering and transience of life on Earth. I assume those readers who do not share my worldview will nonetheless respond to my poetry in the same way that I respond to Basho’s.

Concerning family and sentimentality: I write primarily about the many things I love, and the greatest loves of my life are the members of my family. Poems about my children, for example, abound in my earlier poetry collections. In this collection, it is my grandchildren’s turn.

It is difficult to avoid sentimentality when writing about children, especially when they are your children and grandchildren. But the first step to avoiding it is to understand that it must be avoided if a poem is to “work”. Ironically, sentimentality saps emotion from a poem. It makes a poem self-absorbed, and so it shuts readers out—or, at the very least, does not welcome them in. It pre-empts readers’ own emotional responses and leaves no room for their involvement.

I am somewhat at a loss to explain how I manage to avoid sentimentality in my own poetry. I know I can spot it and that I will rework a poem-in-progress to eliminate it. What else? I think the use of understatement and direct statement play a part, as does the desire for simplicity and subtlety. In fact, these qualities and approaches apply to all expression of strong emotion in poetry, whether feelings of joy at the cuteness of a child, feelings of grief at the death of a brother, or feelings of love after intimacies with a wife.

Whatever else it is, poetry is the language of emotion. It makes us feel things, not just think things. And it achieves this in large part through allusion and reservation. Essentially, the emotional appeal of a poem arises from the emotional restraint of the poet. The greater the emotional control in the poem, the greater the emotional impact on the reader. It’s a paradox. To communicate emotion through poetry, the poet must not be emotive.

Concerning short poems: I write many more short poems than long ones. I love the distillation of thought, sentiment and image that can be achieved in a short poem. I love the challenge of writing something concisely and precisely to fit in a few lines. My early introduction to Japanese and imagist poetry played a big part in my preoccupation with short poems.

I write many poems in the classical Japanese forms of haiku and tanka. Although it is not the common practice for those writing haiku and tanka in English today, I observe the traditional syllabic structure of these poems: 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5-7-5 syllables each for haiku; and 31 syllables arranged in five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables each for tanka. I have found that aiming for this set-syllable arrangement helps me creatively, forcing me to think and re-think my syntax and word choice until I have a pleasingly cadenced arrangement of three (for haiku) or five (for tanka) balanced phrases, giving each line its own integrity. Also, I have found working to the traditional syllabic structures stops my haiku and tanka from looking and sounding “choppy”.

Yet I have, in a sense, made longer poems of many haiku and tanka by arranging them in sets—sets, or suites of 2 to 12 tanka and 3 to 13 haiku. Each set is arranged under a single heading, and is comprised of poems that have a common theme or subject or mood or location. I number each haiku or tanka in a set so that readers will not mistake them for stanzas of a longer poem. The sets are not sequences as the poems do not depend on each other and can be arranged in any order. Rather, they complement each other and together make something bigger than their individual selves.

I began arranging my haiku and tanka in sets for two reasons. The first is that I had too many haiku and tanka to publish individually, and the second is that the literary magazines that were publishing my work did not like giving over a page to a three-line or a five-line poem. Many years after I began this practice, I learnt that Buson had done it with haiku and Shiki had done it with tanka.

Concerning imagery: Imagery in poetry enables readers to see familiar things in a new light. It projects vivid pictures into the mind without the aid of the eyes.

I write imagist poems, poems that exist for an image or are dominated by an image. I also write poems that employ imagery, poems that have images woven into them. And I create this imagery, these images, in two ways—through precise description in concrete language or through credible comparison in simile or metaphor.

I like both methods, but the one I like most is metaphor. When I see something I like, I find myself wondering, What is it like? (Although the question is often more instinctive and intuitive than conscious and deliberate.) And it is always a pleasure when, sometimes immediately and other times months later, I experience a moment of insight and a correspondence occurs to me.

Of course, for a metaphor to be effective, it must be both plausible and original. Readers must simultaneously believe it and be surprised by it. Their response should be both “Why didn’t I see that before?” and “I could never have thought of that myself!”

In my view, metaphor is one of the most important devices available to a poet.

Finally, I wish to express my deep gratitude to my editors, Dennis Haskell and Jean Kent, for their kind encouragements and astute criticisms.

I also wish to express my thanks to the Publications Manager of Western Australian Poets Publishing, Gary De Piazzi, for bearing with me as I made various changes, even during layout, to the manuscript.

Andrew Lansdown

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ANDREW LANSDOWN LAUNCH

(Nicholas Hasluck’s remarks at State Library of WA on 9/2/25)

We are here to celebrate the launch of Andrew Lansdown’s latest book of poetry Filling the Emptiness from WA Poets Publishing. I have known Andrew as a friend and fellow poet for many years. I am therefore pleased indeed to have been offered the opportunity to launch the book and to say a few words about his work.

The title Filling the Emptiness is intriguing, because Andrew has been so prolific since his first book was published in the 1970s that it might seem to a newcomer to the poetry scene that the emptiness, if any, had been filled already. His book Abundance: New and Selected Poems lists 14 previous poetry titles plus various works of fiction and non-fiction. But the reality is that one must never think in numerical terms when approaching the work of a dedicated poet. Like most poets, Andrew is constantly striving to see familiar things in a new light or to reveal connections that aren’t usually perceived. From which it follows, that a poet’s cornucopia is constantly changing shape and can never be entirely filled.

This emerges early on in Andrew’s title poem Filling the Emptiness in which the structure of a bamboo, the external beauty of it, the presence of its inner nodes or compartments, is used to suggest the ever-plentiful nature of the stories, real or imagined, that lie within. His poem, in the Japanese 5-line tanka form, is presented to us in short sections, each of which, in a suggestive tone, points to hidden layers of meaning.

——— i

— Even a bamboo
— can only take emptiness
— in little doses …
— in the stem the nodes divide
— the void into compartments.

——— ii

— A white wafer
— hidden in the dark hollow
— of the bamboo—
— a summons to communion
— with the one who put it there. 

——— iii

— Empty lockets
— are locked in the bamboo stem
— at every node—
— saw them free and fill them up
— with portraits of ones you love.

I will have more to say in a moment about Andrew’s use of the cryptic Japanese tanka and haiku forms because these are used by him to great advantage throughout the book as a means of picturing familiar things in a new way.

 Before I do so, however, let me remind you, as I remind myself, that in a first encounter with a friend’s book one is often drawn immediately to poems touching on shared experiences. Music, for example. Taylor Swift and Beyonce may be names to conjure with in the music world these days but, sotto voce, I have to confess that personally I’m an unreconstructed jazz buff. I treasure vivid memories of visiting Preservation Hall in New Orleans and other iconic venues in Crescent City.

I was therefore drawn immediately to Andrew’s comical poem Them Shoes in which he describes raucous party-time revellers in Bourbon Street, New Orleans, beset by trumpet, trombone and tuba, boys tap-dancing for tips, until he is suddenly accosted by yet another denizen of the old French Quarter in New Orleans, a grifter with an alligator grin who points to Andrew’s unremarkable walkers and says: ‘Where’d you get them shoes?’ The poem continues in this way:

— Having hooked me, he reels me in with his spiel:
— ‘I could tell you where you got them shoes.’

— It’s a lurk, a rort, a trick, but how does it work?
— I think of a shoe shop in my far off homeland.

— ‘Yeah?’ I say, knowing he can’t possibly know,
— Yet knowing, too, he impossibly does. “Where?’

— ‘First,’ he says, ‘you gotta pay for a shine
— if I can tell you where you got them shoes.’

— ‘Ten bucks,’ he says, when I ask how much.
— I agree and ask, grinning: ‘Tell me where, then?’

— He pulls a rag from his pants back pocket
— and drops to one knee on the pavement.

— Straight-off straight-faced he says: ‘You got them shoes
— On your feet, and your feets on Bourbon Street.’

— As he lifts my shod foot onto his knee,
— laughter and one-leggedness unsteady me.

— Then to the rhythm of his buffing,
— in a mix of southern drawl and black jive,

— he jibes. ‘You ain’t payin’ for the shine, 
— You is payin’ for the education.’

— Even the price of the Louisiana Purchase
— wouldn’t suffice to pay for my elation! 

I am reminded by this picture of the rough and ready jazz scene that another poet well-known to us all, Philip Larkin, was a jazz buff. This emerges from his poem about the great trad jazz clarinettist Sydney Bechet, in which the poet says ‘that note you can hold, narrowing and rising, shakes like New Orleans reflected in the water … Oh, play that thing … On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes. My Crescent City is where your speech alone is understood.’

This brief digression brings me back to my earlier remarks about seeing familiar things in a new light and the way in which short but cryptic forms of verse, and graphic images, as in Andrew’s bamboo poem, can be used to evoke layers of meaning and veiled connections which aren’t immediately obvious.

In a short poem called Days Philip Larkins put the question: Where can we live but days? He then says: Ah, solving that question / brings the priest and the doctor / in their long coats / running over the fields.

With a few brief words and the use of a graphic image, the notion of simply living in the mundane workaday realities of daily life is suddenly transformed, as the poet links the scene to intimations of mortality and the presence of crucial concerns, including medical needs and religious faith.

I can’t pretend to be well-versed in the Japanese forms of 5-line tanka or 3-line haiku that Andrew uses to such advantage throughout the book. He touches on their provenance in his Introduction and it could be that he will tell us a little more about his liking for these forms this afternoon. Speaking for myself, however, and bearing in mind that poems do not always assert what they mean – because, as one poet put it, they should simply be – I greatly appreciate the way in which, so often, with a few short words and the use of graphic images, Andrew’s poems become an intriguing distillation of what he sees in the world around him, presenting, simultaneously, both the nature of the tangible object or event before him and the haunting feeling that what is being described brings with it an insight into other vistas.

Ezra Pound, one of the early imagist poets, described the process in this way: One is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective. In other words, the visual image sparks a thought, the thought becomes a personal rumination, a link that speaks not only to the poet but to like-minded observers. To my mind, there is something of this in a section of Andrew’s poem Kansai Blossoms:

— They should be sinking,
— petals sailing pond and sky,
— they should be sinking
— with the load placed on them by
— poets, priests and samurai.

Another example of a deeper meaning to be discovered in a tangible presence, pond or petal as the case may be, can be glimpsed in Andrew’s poem Of Bells and Bodies:

— If they are beaten,
— whether by clapper or pole,
— bullet or bludgeon …
— a bell will release its toll,
— a body will loose its soul.

In this case, we are drawn not only beyond the perception of a tangible object or event to the more ephemeral notion of a bell used in a ritual manner but also, for some readers, even further afield: to an echo of the haunting lines penned by the Christian cleric John Donne in which, having reminded us that ‘no man is an island, he went on to caution his audience: Do not send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

This brings me, in closing, to another central facet of Andrew’s work. He is deeply committed to the Christian faith, although, as he makes clear in the Introduction, his poems do not directly address such matters and none require the reader to endorse a Christian world view. His poems simply express a shared humanity and thus, not surprisingly, many of them are inspired by family values and affection, although he is well-aware of the need to avoid sentimentality.

In a chaotic and increasingly secular modern world in which religious faith is constantly changing shape, contested in some quarters, in decline in others, a stance of this kind is problematic. To be persuasive and secure an audience, poets influenced by their faith are obliged to speak obliquely or in a veiled fashion, as one finds in the works of another poet influenced by his faith, T.S Eliot whose widely-admired poems The Waste Land and Four Quartets are infused with allusions and veiled insights in the course of showing familiar things  in a new and at times a disturbing light.

The same might be said of Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going in which, in the course of a random visit to a deserted church, the poet draws upon the stillness of the scene, the presence of empty pews and antique emblems, to indicate the decline of what was once a revered centre of communal values, a poignant but insightful way of looking at familiar things.

 Andrew’s stance, as he describes it in the Introduction, his intention not to preach, but, rather, to reveal layers of meaning in a contemporary tone, is skilfully accomplished. It strikes me, as I ponder the nature of his achievement, that the short but suggestive forms of verse he employs prove useful as to this aspect of his work also. A few words, the creation of a graphic picture, with much more then suggested by the use of veiled language and allusions. We are reminded that a poem need not assert what it means. It should simply be. 

With this in mind, let me turn to some lines in his poem Walking Without Light: 

— We step out into darkness, setting off
— for our hut. The clouds have tucked
— the stars away for the night.
— Without windows to the south paddock,
— the farmhouse is black behind us.
— We step out into darkness. We never
— thought to leave a lantern burning
— to guide us home …

— We tread on and on, and at last
— we ask one another what we have been
— asking our hearts: How could it be
— this far? How could we be lost
— when we know the way so well?

Towards the end of the book, one finds a poem inspired by a visit to Hozen Temple at Osaka, Worship With Water. The poem opens in this way:

— In the temple yard
— an old man handpumps water
— from a covered well
— first for his own ablutions
— then for the god’s libations.

I could point to many other examples of the way in which Andrew uses the short forms centred on a graphic image to set in motion a chain of reflections, but time is against me, and in any event a picture of cleansing libations seems a good note to end on.

This is a beautifully presented book. The lay out, design and dust-jacket, with a front cover featuring one of Andrew’s photos from Japan, are all perfectly suited to the verse within. And as to the quality of the verse, I trust I have said enough to assure you that this is a book to be treasured by readers and fellow poets, all those who appreciate a skilful use of language, including, where necessary, the virtues of precision and restraint. With this in mind, and without further ado, let me now launch the book: a fine addition to Andrew’s extensive body of work.

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