Philip Salom has published 12 books of poetry. Two books—The keeper of fish and Keeping Carter—were written through the heteronyms Alan Fish and M A Carter. The well mouth, or voices from the underworld, was a Sydney Morning Herald and an Adelaide Review Book of the Year. His next book is a trilogy of Sky poems, The well mouth and Alterworld—three imagined worlds, Heaven, Limbo and Life. Salom has twice won: the Commonwealth Poetry Book Prize in London, the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, and the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize. Most of his books have also been shortlisted and several have been re-printed. His two novels are Toccata and rain, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the WA Premier’s Prize for Fiction, and Playback, which won the WA Premier’s Prize for Fiction. He has been a guest writer/speaker in America, Canada, Britain, the Republics of Serbia and Macedonia, Italy, Singapore and New Zealand. In 2003 he won the Christopher Brennan Award for ‘poetry of sustained quality and distinction’.

Writing Though Heteronyms

How the Mask Reveals

This is less an academic paper than a free-wheeling reflection on my recent practice of creating heteronyms in poetry. In it I discuss issues of identity not in a psychological sense but as the voice of a lyric self/persona/mask through which poets ‘sign’ their poetic insights to readers. These voicing devices are manipulated by the poet, consciously and unconsciously, and by language more comprehensively, to reveal (but also obscure) aspects of the poet’s ‘self’. They are often read as genuine and ‘true’, when they are clearly constructions. A poet may well hide behind such agency. With this much ambiguity in linguistic presence, poetic voice is a teasing and distinctive pathway of knowing, both in the writing process/discovery of poems by the poet and in the interpretive reading of those works by an audience. My own work—and thus my discussion—explores the shifts and ambiguities that take place through the license I receive when writing through heteronyms which reveal (or seem to reveal) personalities and values distinctly different from my own.