Sort Of Serious

Poet David Stavanger has a laugh that begs to be kept company; big and generous, straight from the belly. It suits him. Despite being an award-winning poet and much-lauded staple on the spoken word circuit, Stavanger is without pretension. “I have written some shit,” he laughs. “But my writing actually was shit.” Unconfirmed shittiness aside, Stavanger’s gothic spoken word alter-ego, Ghostboy, has been making waves in the Brisbane poetry scene for a decade and Stavanger has been instrumental in raising the profile of poetry in the Sunshine State. He’s now releasing his full-length collection of poetry, The Special, a work that’s nabbed him the Arts Queensland Award.

In his previous life Stavanger was a psychologist, a dalliance with “normal” life that still informs his work. “I lost faith,” he says on abandoning conventional income-making. “I was burning out… I lapsed; I just lapsed into becoming a poet, which is an even bigger wank of a profession.”

It’s refreshing to talk to an artist who could get away with at least a small amount of ego, but who eschews navel-gazing. “People think I’m really intense,” he says in faux-dramatic tones, “but my least favourite quality in artists is earnestness. I just can’t handle it. So [The Special] is not an earnest book at all. It lets you come at it on your own terms. Look, I used to work a lot with emergency services – if you’re dealing with a road crash where there’s been a decapitation you still need to be able to laugh at it.”

Stavanger’s book is filled with gallows humour, an “absurdist, dark, document” of his own peculiar take on life, a “view from both sides of the couch”. In an uncharacteristic but very brief esoteric moment, Stavanger says the work is a metaphor, literally, of therapy but also of life itself. “We’re always in therapy,” he laughs again. “That’s kind of what life is.”

While the gothic upstart informs Stavanger’s writing, he says The Special is a long way from a Ghostboy set. “I’ve tried [before] to divorce David from Ghostboy. But I’ve got his name tattooed in runes on my head so it’s a bit hard. Although a kid told me,” he laughs, “That there is no rune equivalent for the letter ‘y’, so it says ‘Ghost-bo’. I was a bit shattered by that for about five minutes.”

He seems to have few expectations. Stavanger, typically, laughs and says, “Someone reviewed it the other day and basically said that it’s the worst book of poetry ever released. I love reading things like that because it tells you that you’re provoking a response. But the thing is, I’ve been writing for the last nine years; it’s a chance for me to find out what my voice is without sunglasses, without makeup. I can still sleep at night if people don’t like my work. I’m never going to be a lapsed writer.”

30 Aug, Queensland Poetry Festival, UQP