Q&A with Timmah Ball

Timmah Ball is a writer, editor, and zine maker of Ballardong Noongar heritage. In 2021 she published the chapbook Do Planners Dream of Electric Trees?  through Glom Press/ Arts House and has featured in a range of anthologies such as This All Come Back Now (UQP) and Best of Australian Poems 2022 (Australian Poetry).

You’re an award-winning non-fiction writer but also a well-known poet. Do you approach essays or reviews with a different mindset to your poetry?

Yes, absolutely. I think poetry feels limitless and much more exciting to work with, although it’s also a practice that I find intimidating and wouldn’t really describe myself as a poet just yet! Poetry feels like a place to play and experiment with ideas and language that essays can’t achieve; for a while I was trying to write experimental essays, but a friend pointed out that maybe they were poems or wanted to become something more like poetry.

I really loved this idea, and it has become a way for me to approach poetry, particularly when there is a theme or concept I want to work with and using the essay form feels didactic and restrictive. I love the way that poems can hint at things through imagery and suggest a meaning that is open to interpretation. I find that essays can become frustrating and tedious because they are so cerebral, and the writer is almost overthinking their analysis to the point of exhaustion for both them and the reader.

But it’s interesting that poems and poetry collections that I really admire contain a lot of material that I would almost describe as essayistic, or ironically the type of essay that I aspire to write and desperately want to read more of. I’m obsessed with Lucy Van’s The Open and felt that it did something really special with prose poetry that felt really evocative. I recently read Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries and found it exciting too. It made me want to approach poetry more like essays, so maybe I’m aiming for some sort of hybrid form.

Your poetry engages with race, power, class, history, art, and gender. How do you balance politics with lyricism?

I think about this all the time, and I often feel like the balance is off but maybe not even possible? I struggle with poetry that feels heavy handed around issues like race or feminism where it almost feels like the reader is being told off or forced to feel a certain emotion, and I’m hyper conscious that I’ve written things that fall into this category.  But at the same time, it’s critical that this body of poetry exists, be it protest poetry or even spoken word. For many people from minority communities, it has been the first and sometimes only platform to voice fears, dreams and essentially address everything that is wrong with the world.

I seek out lyricism in the surreal and am really drawn to poets like Jackie Wang, who uses dreams and uncanny imagery that is so vivid but also manages to talk about racial injustice and incarceration. In some ways poetry is probably the best medium to express social justice issues because it allows for abstraction and subtlety that forms like the essay often can’t manage. But maybe in the urgency to tell these stories it is easy to slip into a type of rhythm that feels more like a speech. I don’t think I’ve quite found the balance yet, but I often gravitate to using an absurdist approach to try and capture issues I’m grappling with. I think Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s recent collection My Dream Job did this brilliantly. I felt like I was on this strange and beautiful journey but could feel the range, discomfort and humour that comes from the experiences that brown, queer and working-class people endure under colonial capitalism.

You’ve spoken about how Western concepts of time and time-framing have shaped modern cities. How do these ideas influence your poetry, and what alternative perspectives on time do you think could help us thrive?

I’m really interested in how writing and particularly poetry can break down conventional tools that are used to shape and develop cities, so in a way poems become a new way of mapping future environments.  I think time is so interesting and a critical part of urban planning processes, but because it moves so quickly, we never have the time to notice it. But writing becomes an archive that stores history and things that have changed over time in urban spaces or were purposely erased. In the logic of urban development and city-making time is money, so it has to move at an exponential speed and we are never allowed to mark or engage with what has changed or what is happening around us. On a very minor scale poetry allows us to grieve these changes and bear witness to what is going on around us, be it the cycle of gentrification or the colossal impact of colonisation. It’s impossible to stop time, particularly within capitalist frameworks, but poetry creates a compelling alternative or counter-archive that captures everything we’re not meant to see.

I love the idea of creating a collection of poetry that becomes a speculative history of how cities have evolved but also seeks to mark out new pathways and ways of living in urban spaces.

Alison J Barton

Alison J Barton’s poetry is widely published in Australian and international literary journals. Her work has been recognised in numerous prizes and Best of Australian Poems over several years. She was the inaugural winner of the 2023 University of Cambridge First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, and was granted places in several other residencies around the world. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Not Telling, was published by Puncher & Wattmann. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Suburban Review.