David Malouf

And you know, if you were given a wonderful city, I thought,

in those days, like London or St.

Petersburg or Paris, like Dante, Florence.

You were lucky until I actually realized, of course, which I had always known, that those cities which those writers pass on to us and which we accept as being, as they are presenting them, are really invented.

And so I had realized before I really started Jono that if I was going to write about a place called Brisbane, what I would be doing would be inventing it and only pretending to have been having it passed on to me as a second kind of city in Worth.

It could be made rather than just described.

And in doing that, of course, you are creating it for readers who've never been there, never seen it, but who, while they're reading the book, feel this is the city I'm in.

Oh, I think that's not true of any of the fiction.

But I think, poetry particularly, you look back on certain poems you wrote, and I wouldn't want them put in the collection that I am now preparing of poems that I want preserved.

They're either...

too clever, which I don't like, or they're satirical in what I think of now as a mean-spirited way.

And so those poems I don't want kept.

They'll still be there and available to people who want to see what was left out.

But I think, you know, towards the end of your time, especially with poetry, you want to yourself make the choice of the poems you think that are worth reading.

And that's not always accurate.

I mean, often, you know, readers will like poems that you yourself don't like anymore.

I think it is a lack of respect or patience any longer with a previous you who found it too easy to make superior judgments.

Oh, look, I think...

There was something that happened really in publishing 30 years ago now.

And it was that when somebody took a first book to a publisher, the publisher looked at it and if they decided to publish, they would tell the writer which niche market