An interview with cricket poet Nick Whittock

Nick Whittock is a Melbourne poet and cricketer. He plays for the Reds Cricket Club in Melbourne which has a colourful history to tell. See their web page at http://reds.cricketvictoria.com.au/redsorigins.html
I first came across Nick's work in 2008 through a mutual friend Paul Hardacre, an Australian poet and publisher with papertigermedia. Paul said he knew a guy who wrote lots of cricket poems and had done a book of them. I said, cool, tell me how to get in touch with him. I contacted Nick and got him to exchange cricket poetry books. I sent him my book Slips and he posted me his book covers (2004).

covers quickly became one of my favourite cricket books. I bought extra copies and sent them out to friends. It’s an unusual design, visually attractive, lots of photos of cricketers in fielding positions or lazing round on the field at various moments during a game, and the poems are mysterious and repay further reading. Written in contemporary style and idiom, they cover a wide ground: Australian opener Michael Slater’s thoughts when batting right through to a concrete poem on Jason Gillespie (see below) and an extended longer poem on Muralitharan’s unusual bowling action.

Later I contacted him again to use two of his poems for A Tingling Catch.
In the 2008/09 and 2009/10 seasons Nick toured the North and South Islands of New Zealand with the Reds Cricket Club. On each tour he played about 9 games against local club teams.

Last month I told Nick I was doing a blog and he sent me some of his new cricket poems and I asked to do an interview with him as well. Here’s the interview followed by a new series of Nick’s cricket poems.

Mark: When did you first start writing cricket poetry?

Nick: I moved to Melbourne in 2000. That was when it started. Yeah definitely. I'd written a fragment – something kinda sci-fi with astronauts n radars. It was rad but tiny and had no future. Until some cricket words replaced a number of key terms and everything fell into place and the fragment was suddenly 'about' something (it prophesied – accurately - Brian Lara's return to form in that summer's test series).

Mark: How do you compose your poems? Do you take a notebook to matches and Tests and compose during the match or do you mainly do your writing at home after the match has finished?

Nick: Yeah definitely. Variously. Sometimes I'll transcribe lines from the commentary or the ads during the coverage. If I'm watching a game live I barely write anything down – my involvement is far to concentrated. But I certainly gather concepts, visions and ideas. Form is very important in the construction of a poem. If I write cricket poetry it's less to do with subject matter than form. The forms of cricket and the syntax that organises them often underlies my poems. The most obvious example of this is a lot of scorecard poetry I've been building where the words / lines align on a scorecard and are distributed according to the scorecards' frames and the very particular flows of reading involved in reading a scorecard.

Mark: In 2004 you published a cricket poetry book called "covers". What kind of reception did you get from the poetry community and cricket fraternity? I gave a few copies of it to cricket poets in New Zealand and it went down well with them. Tell us about the book and how it came together, i.e. the interesting use of cricket images mixed in with the poems?

Nick: Yeah definitely. Covers was published through an imprint that the great online journal cordite had going for a little while – the imprint was called COD (Cordite on Demand). Davey Prater (cordite's editor) asked me if I'd like to do a book with them. Obviously I jumped at it. Davey was very active in encouraging me to construct something that wasn't just a book of poetry but an artefact of some beauty. I love those old cricket books full of old grainy black and white photographs of beings (cricketers) in weird distorted stances. I sifted through some books I had at hand and extracted images of cricketers on the ground, looking as though they were asleep or in various states of recent awakening. It's an obvious thing but I love how soporific cricket is – I think it’s often criticised for being boring. It’s possible these critics don't get just how intensely interestingly boring it is – the sleepiness, the way time passes, the dreaming that goes on. The pictures were some sort of reflection on this. And they allowed the creation of a different sort of flow (series of resonance) than just page and text would have. People I know who have read or seen covers tell me they like the way it looks n largely profess to being mystified by the content. Beyond that I don't really think it was ever 'received' – yet?

Mark: You play cricket yourself. Do you think being a cricketer is essential to writing cricket poetry and understanding the finer points of the game or can anyone write cricket poetry?

Nick: Yeah anyone can. I guess they just would be less likely too. Someone who doesn't play cricket would have a completely different understanding of the game – the finer points would be differently fine. I wonder if they would understand the constant failure a cricketer has to deal with.

This is important as it leads to the special emotional value that success at cricket holds – how momentous cricket’s events are and what it means to a cricketer when they manage to get things going their way. The profundity of cricket’s events might be lost on a non-cricketer, but they could always garner profundity from different sources and through observing other aspects of the rigmarole.

Mark: You run a blog "Ashes/Urn", has this encouraged interest in your cricket poetry. Or is it mainly a way for you to blog on cricket matches and events?

Nick: Yeah definitely. It gets me writing and the ideas that come up there and a lot of the lines too can end up in or informing poems. Posts about Michael Clarke get a lot of hits. I wonder what they make of it though. Yeah definitely it's handy to have the presence to refer people to when they express an interest. As much as blogging on matches it’s a way to invent or distort concepts and philosophies. I find it very free and experimental. It’s rigorously anti-rigour, but without being stupid or stupidly light.

Mark: Tell me about your new Clara poems and how they came about?

Nick: Michael Farrell [an Australian poet] suggested the scope of my project (poetry solely about cricket) was too broad and that I should try only writing poetry about Michael Clarke. So I did. At that time Clarke came with Lara Bingle, a combo that immediately adds a third element - Brian Lara. So when I was writing about Clarke I was also writing about Lara, and Lara was either Lara or Lara or, actually, Lara was always both Lara and Lara. Given the resonance across all these names I began to feel that the distinction between Clarke and Lara was a bit arbitrary so I took Clar and Lara and made Clara. Brian Lara's middle name is Charles so you see his name written like this B. C. Lara. So Clara became this monstrous amalgamation of forms and started sweeping up the entire cricketing world. It became some kind of motivating force – a figure of pure desire or something. When Clarke and Lara split I took that view that it was a split as in the way a cell multiplies by dividing. Clara proliferated.

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NICK WHITTOCK

Clara Poems

mj clarke

lb bingle

bc lara

i should be licking you i mean

you walk real quick

our paths wouldnt mind intersecting wing attacks

positioned according to a rules no trouble

executing the pass scale models tins tin n tans le tan

tinting queens park savannah

coconuts yr arms straight balls long

dlf post goalsre nailed teamsre buried cherries

in my beer teamsre buried cherries in my beard

sigh to in i remember the code look good late

if ya could share m licks a throw supremo i could lap on til it dissolves ve

been seein chins

like all reflexs explained in chins wing attacks a

cute chin motivates a possession upshots a goal the

let let me lick yr chin chin sigh to in n umpires result

9pm she gets home smashed n sticks the cane end of a cricket bat in her beak

its as though the tubes made to take it applying code she remembers

the array of dandelions in the outfield n schemes

during the subsequent 20 overs hondas

blush chins intercept beer chins intercept beards

in the morning riding her small bike

through albert park she feels used by middle park

in the library she meets someone from the library they

pass comment on her coat n beak n works worthwhile 

claras beak places a weed on the civilian jaw

deep mid wkt she toots

shes polished

the yellow bands on her tigers

theyre catchin rodins eyes theyre scratchin

at 1^st slip he thinks of chins lines of cunts every

blades n eye the fields ponds the take itself

cannot be recalled yet its glory adds as

reconstructions add

careful to avoid the witchety grubs

for fear of coppin

flu clara

s foot long beak tootles n sucks the outfield

suckin down th

e occasional weed clar

as hairs unconscious the air fills with

grains she slides to her left collects the pill

n reverses its trajectory but still flatter

claras

claras hot

claras god

claras bergson

dadas is comeback

rocks monroe

claras choosing

claras the planets n the stars

claras chooses chance

claras neat little bundle of desire

claras decent indecent

claras replicants

the prohibitions get to me

claras speyside

claras islay

claras never gonna trick an old goon like me

claras a husband out by repetition

claras hadlee

claras lillee

claras brett lee

claras moonee valley

claras leeward

claras islands

claras country

claras trails coke odour

claras peas

claras stout

claras a husband out bye repetition

ah tried to be prince o m own land but lacked a people so claras

claras dairymaid

claras proust

claras lvd by proust

claras beer

claras drinking

claras prince

claras people

claras don bradman

claras trails coke odour

claras heart

claras the heart of the country

claras dog

claras cat

claras bear

claras fish                     ing

claras oppen

claras opening

claras spreading

claras field

ah tried to be prince o m own land but lacked a people so claras

claras clara

claras clara

claras clara

claras clara

claras hot

claras difference itself

claras dairymaid

claras prince

claras rain

rains wind

sandwichs sandcastle

claras uncles

claras grandpa

claras daughter claras daughter nucleire identical

claras dissolved

claras real milk

claras real cow

claras ray

claras rising ground

claras beak

claras name is prince

claras hot scotch

claras mulga bill

claras engaged in war against winter

claras changes

claras climate

b b b b b b claras

takes 2 batters to make a single

claras valley

claras mighty

claras soft

claras begas

claras waggas

claras clara clara

claras suns

claras the heart of the country

claras heart

claras matter

claras michael douglas

claras Kathleen turner

claras beard

claras drinking

claras beard

claras fishing

claras 23 lamby clarkeys

claras drome

claras hemulen

claras golden drome

claras grey drome

claras slazenger

claras gray nicolls

claras le mans

claras official pasta

fixie gangsre the aviators

claras the aviators

claras clara riding

wouldntve thought buddhad be one to give anyone out

claras critical

claras dork

claras fewer greys

claras dark

claras lady

claras n all

Poems © Nick Whittock


Covers by Nick Whittock (COD: Melbourne, 2004)



Nick Whittock's poem 'Dizzy Gillespie' about former
Australian bowler Jason Gillespie, who once scored a Test double century
at No. 9 against Bangladesh batting as the night watchman.



Thanks Nick

Covers can be ordered from Nick. His email is nwhittock@hotmail.com

See also my blog post "Mark Pirie's Slips - cricket poetry"

Interview © Mark Pirie 2010