Mark Tredinnick

Dr Mark Tredinnick won the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011 and the Cardiff International Poetry Prize in 2012. A distinctly Australian poet but also a poet of the world, Tredinnick has been described as 'one of our great poets of place—not just of geographic place, but of the spiritual and moral landscapes as well—a Whitmanesque Emily Dickinson of the southern hemisphere.' Tredinnick's 'artlessly beautiful poetry' has won for him in recent years, as well as the international prizes, a number of major Australian awards—The Blake and Newcastle Prizes, among them, and a Premier's Literature Prize (for Fire Diary). His poems 'work elegantly and intimately over a huge terrain.' Tredinnick's poetry is poetry of witness: small moments, epiphanies, weather, birds, children, the divine comedy of everyday life, the ‘beautiful struggle, the ordinary trouble’ we find ourselves in, the beauty and peril of the natural world.

"I am a fool for places," Tredinnick has written, "and for the vulgar, semantic music of sentences. I have grown deeply attached to the physicality and mystery of landforms and language. To the country people inhabit—and which sometimes inhabits them—and to the words people use to speak their truths and falsehoods."

Tredinnick also says: "We need words and country more than we seem to remember; our futures may depend, now more than ever, on how well we use and how healthy we keep them both. Because I believe this, and because I cannot help it, my work often wanders the syntax of places and it tries the ecology of sentences; I want to hear and I’d like to say what the land seems to know—about us, I mean, and about itself and time and how we might use well what little we have."

Tredinnick's poetry explores ‘ancient themes—especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape’, Sir Andrew Motion has written. Tredinnick's concern to divine both language and landscape and the way they interact led to his doctoral work on nature writing, completed in 2003, at the University of Western Sydney. Although he hasn't pursued an academic career, Tredinnick could be understood, in and beyond his poetry, as an ecocritic. He has written and spoken widely and often on Henry David Thoreau's theme: “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” His doctorate Writing the Wild: Place, Prose, and the Ecological Imagination became his second book, The Land’s Wild Music (2004), and with Professor Kate Rigby, he cofounded the Australian chapter of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. His poetry and nature writing have been the focus of doctoral work and scholarship, in particular in China, where ecocriticism is a strong emergent field of academic work.

Along with his volumes of poetry— Bluewren Cantos (2013), Fire Diary (2010), The Lyrebird (2011), and The Road South (spoken word CD, 2008)— Tredinnick's thirteen books include the landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau (2009), four books on the writing craft, including, The Little Red Writing Book (2006), and Australian Love Poems, which he edited in 2013.

A bilingual (Chinese/English) selection of his poems (The Lyrebird) is due out late in 2014, along with his third collection of poems, Body Copy. He is working on a memoir of a reading life, Reading Slowly at the End of Time (2015).

Mark Tredinnick

Tredinnick no longer lives with his family along the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney. He spends much of his time teaching and consulting in the city. Although his daily writing practice is poetry ("poetry is most of what I write now; it is how I live", he has said), Tredinnick continues to write essays, criticism, reviews, and other prose, from his desk in a cowshed outside Bowral. He spent a long writing apprenticeship in prose, and published several prose books and hundreds of essays, before his first poems were published in the early 2005. As well as poetry workshops, Tredinnick teaches literary journalism, creative writing, and creative nonfiction at the University of Sydney, and he has three times been a judge of the NSW Premier's Prize in the nonfiction category, Douglas Stewart Prize. Tredinnick's work, The Blue Plateau, an extended lyric essay on the life of one place on earth, won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award the same year. Novelist Tony Birch nominated it as the one book he would give to anyone coming to Australia; 'it captures,' he said, 'what belonging to this antipodean place means and has meant through time.’ Drawing on his writing guides—The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Green Grammar Book and (with Geoff Whyte) The Little Black Book of Business Writing—Tredinnick also works with organisations in the government, education and private sectors to help them write with economy and grace. Tredinnick's poetry and essays are widely anthologised and published in journals, blogs and newspapers, in Australia and internationally. and it has appeared in journals including Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry, Contrappasso, Eureka Street, Island, Isotope, Magma, Mascara, Meanjin, New Welsh Review, Orion, PAN, Poetry London, The Scotsman, Southerly, Wet Ink, The Wonderbook of Poetry, and World Literature Today. For nearly twenty years, Tredinnick has taught and lectured poetry, creative nonfiction, grammar, nature writing, and composition at universities (chiefly the University of Sydney). He has been a guest of many literary and poetry festivals around the world, including the Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Oxford, and Ubud Festivals, and the Ottawa Poetry Festival (VerseFest). He has spent teaching residencies at the Universities of Alaska, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, the University of Aberystwyth and the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.

In the 2020 Australia Day Honours Tredinnick was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for "service to literature, and to education".[3]

Tredinnick, the grandson of Methodist minister, Wesley Tredinnick, the second of four sons of Bruce and Heather Tredinnick, was born in Epping, in suburban Sydney. He went to primary school at North Epping Public School and won a bursary to Barker College, Hornsby, an Anglican private school, where he completed his schooling in 1979. He took a double degree (with Honours) in Arts and Law at the University of Sydney University, majoring in history, and taking courses in philosophy, in addition to law. In the last year of his degree, Tredinnick worked part-time as a paralegal for Allen Allen & Hemsley, before accepting a clerkship with Mallesons Stephen Jaques, one of Sydney's leading law firms. Tredinnick worked as a solicitor with Mallesons for a year, before moving into book publishing, where he stayed for nearly a decade; he worked as an editor and publisher at Butterworths, Allen & Unwin and HarperCollins. Tredinnick says of those years: ‘they were part of my education as a writer, of course; I was learning what a sentence was; I was practising grammar and learning about design; I was learning what it took, the years and years sometimes, to make a book and to make it good enough to share.’ Tredinnick left the corporate world and began to write and teach writing (and some courses in leadership and organizational studies in Politics at the University of Sydney). It was from Katoomba and a small apartment in Lavender Bay that Tredinnick wrote and published his first poems and won his first prizes. Tredinnick also travelled North America and worked on his doctoral thesis, a study of nature writing and an attempt to retheorise the capacity of prose to represent landscapes and the more than merely human world—to 'catch the lyric of country', as he puts it. Tredinnick took his doctorate in 2003 and his thesis was published in 2005

Tredinnick's first book, an edited collection of nature writing essays from Australian and North America, A Place on Earth, came out in 2003 in Australia (2004 in the United States). After that came The Land's Wild Music in 2005; The Little Red Writing Book in 2006; The Little Green Grammar Book in 2008; Writing Well (an adaptation of The Little Red Writing Book for the international market) also in 2008); The Blue Plateau (2009 in Australia; 2010 in the United States); The Little Black Book of Business Writing (with Geoff Whyte) in 2010; Australia's Wild Weather in 2011.

Tredinnick's first collection of poems, The Road South, appeared as a spoken-word CD in 2008. His first volume of poems was Fire Diary, published in late 2010. That was followed by The Lyrebird, a chapbook, in 2011 and Bluewren Cantos in 2013.

Mark Tredinnick

Tredinnick's emergence as a poet was marked by a string of major Australian prizes, in particular the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Blake Poetry Prize in 2009. His work became better known outside Australia when he won the inaugural Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011 and the Cardiff Prize the next year. In Australia, he won the Newcastle Prize second time in 2011 and took out some significant literary prizes for his books: the Queensland Premier's Literary Prize 2010 for The Blue Plateau and the West Australian Premier's Prize 2011 for Fire Diary.

In 2013 he edited Australian Love Poems for a start-up literary press, Inkerman & Blunt. Pitt Street Poetry, who published his second volume of poems, Bluewren Cantos in December 2013, released a second edition of Fire Diary early the following year.

Tredinnick's works and days—the difficult dance between the silence of the desk, the higher frequencies of family life, the demands of earning a living to "finance the silence", as he puts it, and feed the family—are discussed in a long interview he gave to Perilous Adventures magazine in 2010, and are glossed in a number of his poems, in particular "Insolvency", "Eclogues", and "The Economics of Spring" (in Fire Diary).

Tredinnick's poetry often employs a long, stepped-down line. Poetry is an "architecture of utterance", he has said, "a sculpture of voice." And his poems, though informal in voice, present themselves as small geographies, places, language worlds both sonic and visual. Although his architectures resemble sometimes the sestets of Charles Wright, whose influence and kinship Tredinnick has acknowledged, unlike Wright, Tredinnick's syntax is often complex, his sentences long, "breathtakingly fluent" (as Sinead Morrissey has put it), deltaic. His poetry, though painstakingly made and precise, is expansive, pushing against the forms it employs. Commenting on the tension between minute details and grandiosity, Australian novelist Greg Day has called him a "failed minimalist." Bluewren Cantos, Mark's latest book of poetry, is praised as "A gentle mix of the sublime and the mundane, so that we are invited to let such dualisms be undone in us."[4] The critic Michelle Borzi finds that Tredinnick's "habit of relying on atmospheric image-making and self-intrusive references to impel the lines is a defining attribute of the poetry throughout Fire Diary."[5]

Tredinnick described his essays once as "half chat, half chant", and his poetic voice lies, similarly, between conversation and song. Informality is a key to his lyric. He has named poets John Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, and Seamus Heaney, Robert Gray, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright, as influences and teachers. He also cites Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy, and painters Van Gogh and Matisse. And the voices of lyric prose writers play in Tredinnick's poetry, as in his prose: Michael Ondaatje, Joan Didion, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, David Malouf, and Cormac McCarthy.

Talking specifically of Bluewren Cantos, poet and critic Jean Kent neatly summarises Tredinnick's poetics, including the way his work nearly always starts in place, but reaches out toward intimacy with a loved one, with the dead, with that which is most human in each of us.[6]

"Like the singing of birds, it all feels artlessly beautiful, but only because of the exceptional art, which keeps the music of what’s being said mesmerising. Behind the flowing lines and hypnotic melodies, there is as much control of the rhythm and counterpoint and harmony as there is in any of the compositions by Bach or Mozart or Debussy, composers who compete with all the real birds in Mark’s Wingecarribee landscape. Even before he began publishing poetry, Mark was renowned as a nature writer. His sensitivity to place and his ability to celebrate the Australian landscape are special joys in all his poems. Often, Mark’s poems begin with nature – but invariably the solitary presence of the poet reaches out to another person – often a loved person – or, in an intimate connection, to the reader. This is poetry like tightrope walking – a nonchalant, though thoughtful, ambling out into the world, which almost leads us into a transcendental state – only to be caught in a web of emotion and thought and connections to the daily reality of living. Tredinnick’s poems are also full of playful paradoxes and wry humour. His tone may be debonair, well-dressed and conscious of manners and historical allegiances, but for all the hypnotic oratory, his voice is both questing and self-deprecating, and the earth he walks over is emphatically today’s."[7]

Poet Anne Elvey has said that Tredinnick "Weaves the tropes of attentiveness to the other, mortality, and finitude, together with his wry humour, to tell a loving engagement with place, persons and otherkind. This is poetry as blessing. It is a poetics of witness."[8]

Books

Western Australian Premier's Book Award (winner, poetry), 2011: Fire Diary

Queensland Premier's Literary Awards (winner, nonfiction), 2010: The Blue Plateau

Prime Minister's Literary Awards (shortlisted), 2010: The Blue Plateau

ACT Book of the Year (shortlisted), 2010: The Blue Plateau

Alec Bolton (ACT Arts prize for unpublished manuscript) (highly commended), 2010: Fire Diary

Poetry

1st Prize

Ron Petty Poetry Prize, winner 2017: “Panic Very Softly, Love”

ACU Prize for Literature, winner 2016: “The Horse”

Cardiff International Poetry Prize, winner 2012: “Margaret River Sestets”

Montreal International Poetry Prize, winner 2011: “Walking Underwater”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, winner 2011: “The Wombat Vedas”

Blake Poetry Prize, winner 2008: “Have You Seen”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, winner 2007: “Eclogues”

Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, winner 2005: “The Child & Time”

2nd Prize

Newcastle Poetry Prize, second 2018: “The River Running Shallow”

ACU Prize for Literature, second 2013: “Light Years”

Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, runner up 2009: “Red Tulips”

3rd Prize

ACU Poetry Prize for Literature, third 2019: “October Morning After Rain”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, third 2013: “Two or Three Days in late October with Claude Debussy”

Shortlisted

ABR (now Peter Porter) Poetry Prize, short listed 2019: “Raven”

ACU Poetry Prize for Literature, shortlisted 2019: “The Blue Pasture”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2019: “The News”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2019: “Grace, and a Barking Owl”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2018: “The Reservoir”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2018: “Grief Wears a Body”

ACU Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2016: “Shred”

ACU Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2016: “End of Lonely Day”

ACU Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2014: “Weeding”

ACU Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2014: “Spring Snow, Reno”

ACU Poetry Prize for Literature, shortlisted 2013: “Faith”

ACU Poetry Prize for Literature, shortlisted 2013: “The Reader”

Montreal International Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2011: “The Kingfisher”

Blake Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2011: “At Home on a Sunday Trying to Find Nothing to Do”

ABR (now Peter Porter) Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2005: “Ubirr Rock”

Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2015: “The Propinquity of Snow”

Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2015: “What?”

Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2015: “The Propinquity of Snow”

Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2014: “Nightfishing”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2009: “Brisbane River Blues”

Blake Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2008: “Windflowers”

Newcastle Poetry Prize, shortlisted 2006: “Lake St Clair Cycle”

Longlisted

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, longlisted 2014: “Walking My Name Back Home”

University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, longlisted 2014: “That Day”

Montreal International Poetry Prize, longlisted 2011:"You Over There; Me here: A Whodunnit in Three Stanzas”

Montreal International Poetry Prize, longlisted 2011:"The Bay”

Montreal International Poetry Prize, longlisted 2011:"Sandhill Cranes”

Commended

Rosemary Dobson, commended 2010: “Rain in Eltham”

Blake Poetry Prize, highly commended 2008: “Paradise”  

Essays

Calibre Essay Prize (winner, 2007)

Wildcare Nature Writing Prize (winner, 2005)

For a comprehensive list of Tredinnick's work, see his entry in AustLit.

Collection

Poetry

·       A Gathered Distance, Birdfish Books, 2020

·       So Far, Birdfish Books, 2019

·       Egret in a Ploughed Field, Chinese University Press, 2017

·       Anthology: Gardening the Future: An Essay in Plants, Poetry and Image, TCL,      

·       The Lyrebird & Other Poems (2e), Ginninderra, 2017

·       Almost Everything I Know, Flying Island, 2015

·       Bluewren Cantos, Pitt Street Poetry, 2013

·       Fire Diary (2e), Pitt Street Poetry, 2014

·       Australian Love Poems 2013 (Ed), Inkerman & Blunt, 2013

·       The Lyrebird (Wagtail 106), Picaro, 2011

·        Fire Diary, Puncher & Wattmann, 2010

·       The Road South (CD), River Road, 2008

·       Prose

·       Australia’s Wild Weather, NLA, 2011

·       The Blue Plateau, UQP/Milkweed, 2009

·        The Land’s Wild Music, Trinity, 2005

·        A Place on Earth (Ed), UNSW/ U Nebraska, 2003/04

Books on Writing

·       The Little Black Book of Business Writing, New South, 2009 (With Geoff Whyte)

·       The Little Green Grammar Book, New South, 2008

·       The Little Red Writing Book, New South, 2006

Forthcoming

·        Walking Underwater (poems), Pitt Street Poetry, 2020

·       A Beginner’s Guide (poems), Recent Works, 2020

·        Catchments: One Hundred Poems (new and selected poems): World Literature (China); Milkweed (US) 2021

·       A Hundred Miles, As Ever, From Home (poems and paintings)

·       Reading Slowly at the End of Time (memoir of the reading life), New South, 2021

·       Collected Prose (World Literature, China; New South, Australia)

·       The Divide (prose and poetry)

CD

• The road south (CD). River Road. 2008.

List of poems

1. http://montrealprize.com/about-us/2011-competition/2011-montreal-prize-winner/
2. Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2012 – The Winners.
3. Western Australian Premier's Book Awards – 2010.

• Official website
• Profile at the Poetry Archive
• Profile at the Sydney Morning Herald