A Dye Hard Interview: Lee Beckworth: Poetry should be a way of avoiding commodification and superficiality

Lee Beckworth aka Lee Kwo was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1952/He started writing at 17 and completed a Degree at Deakin University in creative writing and Journalism in 1974/After travels in Europe he moved to Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Letters in literature and psychology at Melbourne University/ He has published five works of fiction and two books of poetry/ His interests in music and photography have been expressed through the band Kicks and an exhibition of collages and photography in 2016/

You are an artist, a writer and musician, but which medium do you consider the most important, or do they each carry the same weight?

Well for me they all contribute to each other and each has a period of time where my lifestyle is dominated by one or other of them respectively/I have made performance videos using original music and photo images and I have used art works as covers  for published books and collages/I wrote lyrics for bands I was playing with and usually remained active in all creative areas including sculpture and photography ...Read more

Who was Sinclair Beiles? and Off-ramp land in Rotterdam

Copies of Who was Sinclair Beiles? and Off-ramp along with various publications from Cold Turkey Press arrive at the office of Sea Urchin Editions, Rotterdam. Photo: Ben Schot

Many births

Writing, madness and anarchy

"Writing for (Artaud) wasn't a means of modifying or falsifying experience through the medium of language, it was the chace to communicate directly with his sense of outrage. It was a form of primal anarchy. If we all communicated without the selective process of language identifying with thought, the world would be reinvented."

"Madness is the perogative term that capitalism applies to vision."

"Literature died when it became a saleable commoditiy."

Jeremy Reed, Chasing Black Rainbows: a novel based on the life of Artaud, Peter Owen, 1994

Where else is there to go?

"But principally my theme is one I have explored in my own life and through the personae I have adopted in two previous novels, Isidore and When The Whip Comes Down, which is belief in the poet as one who changes the universe and risks everything by this undertaking. It is not a romantic ideal that the poetry sacrifices his life to madness, it is often the truth. Artaud savaged the status quo through the powers of his imagination, and this novel looks towards the creation of a world in which imagination becomes reality. Where else is there to go?"

Jeremy Reed, Chasing Black Rainbows: a novel based on the life of Artaud, Peter Owen,1994.

Poetry and anarchy

“There is in all poetry an essential contradiction. Poetry is pulverised multiplicity and it produces flames. And poetry, which restores order, first revives disorder, disorder with semblances ablaze; it causes appearances to clash in restoring them to a singular point: fire, gesture, blood, cry.

“To restore poetry and order to a world whose very existence is a threat to order, is to bring back war and the permanence of war; it is to bring in an enforced state of cruelty, to arouse a nameless anarchy, anarchy of things and appearances which awaken before sinking anew and melting into unity.”

Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus or, The Anarchist Crowned