Heather Taylor-Johnson

Heather Taylor-Johnson

Wether it’s the death of a friend or another death in custody or the quickening death of our coral reefs, writing poetry about what’s heavy on my mind doesn’t cleanse the hurt and frustration for me, but it assists me in moving forward. I began practicing the ‘personal as political’ when I started to write about living with chronic illness, working through my own issues while advocating for a large group of people who make up what Arthur Frank calls our Remission Society. The power to speak beyond myself was not only detrimental to my emotional well-being at the time, but it gave me a sense of purpose, ‘purpose’ being something every artist questions at some point in their professional lives, if not all through their professional lives. I’ve since embraced the concept of purpose to include speaking against tyranny, sexism, guns and environmental rapists – being American-Australian, I have a lot to consider. I wrote "Man & Man, Man & Ape, Ape & Ape & Women" in response to JM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, a book that champions a rejection of capitalism, which is essentially, seemingly, impossible. Even books and art play a role in capitalism, even the writer and the artist, so how can we begin to imagine what our world would look like without it? This poem does not offer that view, rather it focuses on the absurdity of our obsession with it. Prioritising our connection to nature and to one another, however, is a good place to begin if we want to move beyond it.