In this episode, Dr. Paul Monk features a selection of poems from his recent anthology, Love on the Road of Life. This collection is dedicated to his lifelong companion, Claudia Alvarez, and celebrates their deep, 20-year relationship lived largely across continents. Paul credits Claudia with having been the catalyst for him embracing his identity as "a writer and a poet".
Key discussion points include:
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The Poetic Vocation: Monk shares the preface to his anthology, framing the work as a story of their relationship and a "thank-you note" to Claudia for convincing him to abandon being a businessman and step into his authentic self as a writer and a poet.
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Literary Context: The discussion opens with a quote from William Waters on the lyric address, setting the stage for poetry as "intimate conversation".
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The Frodo Moniker: Poems reflect on his childhood, shaped by Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which led Claudia to affectionately dub him "Frodo Baggins".
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Childhood Influences: Early work recalls pivotal moments, including receiving a biography of Stalin on his 12th birthday and his "reckless" 1975 manifesto for self-actualisation upon dropping out of law school.
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Volcanic Texts and Mortality: Philosophical poems draw on the ruined library of Philodemus of Gadara beneath Vesuvius to question the endurance of his own work and contemplate mortality.
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The Alma Mahler Pitch: Reciting "Our Ringstrasse moment," Monk recounts Claudia's bold declaration that she is "Alma Mahler" and that he is destined for greatness, likening their struggle to a Mahler tragedy that finds its way to companionship.
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Existential Therapy: Poems like "Shrovetide" and "Finding the Clearing" are "tributes to what we've accomplished," reflecting the emotional and psychological difficulties of building intimacy and overcoming their "mutually tortured gaze".
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Geological Metaphor: Using travel as a catalyst for verse, poems employ complex metaphors, such as linking their distance and union to the tectonic collision of continents (Silurian) and the Panama Canal linking oceans.
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Victory of Love over Pain: The anthology includes poems written during his metastatic melanoma diagnosis, with "The Secret Key" suggesting his defiance of poor prognoses was due to Claudia's love.
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The Poetic End: The poem "Percy Bysshe Shelley" serves as a tribute and a declaration of his identity as a Romantic poet, celebrating the living of a "poetic life".
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
