Poet, scholar and translator: Meet Assoc Prof Stuart Cooke

This month’s Researcher Profile features Associate Professor Stuart Cooke from the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, and Creative Arts Research Institute. Stuart is a poet and non-fiction writer, a scholar of literary studies and the environmental humanities, and a translator of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian and Latin American poets. We asked Stuart about how he became a researcher, what he’s currently working on and what advice he has for new researchers.

What path led you to becoming a researcher? 

I wanted to be in a place where learning and enquiry were valued for their diversity, originality and surprise rather than for their commercial value

I don’t think I decided that I wanted to be an academic until I submitted my PhD dissertation. Until then, I’d just focused on being a writer. When I finished my undergraduate degree, an honours year sounded like a great opportunity to get advice and support from an experienced author. After I finished honours, I went into the ‘real world’ and worked in all kinds of different jobs, where I quickly realised that getting a PhD scholarship to write about poetry was a pretty good deal. Towards the very end of my PhD, it started to become clear that so much of what interested me about contemporary literature and culture was incubated and protected in universities. Most of the world seemed to have been colonised by a single imperative: sell, sell, sell! I wanted to be in a place where learning and enquiry were valued for their diversity, originality and surprise rather than for their commercial value. From there, I quickly set my sights on an academic career.

What sparked your passion for your research area?

I’m a writer of poetry and nonfiction, a translator of poetry from Portuguese and Spanish, and as a scholar I work at the intersections of literary studies and the environmental humanities. Almost all of these diverse modes of writing and enquiry originated from the same, original thrill, which was related to how literature—be it poetry or prose—can sing places to life, so that the experience of reading or writing can completely transform one’s relationship to a landscape, a city, an ecosystem. As I became more interested in Australia’s history and environment, I came to see literature—and poetry in particular—as something akin to a form of magic wherein what we ignore or destroy on this continent can speak back, and in that speaking can demand of us more compassion, a more sophisticated moral compass, and a much, much bigger imagination. My interests have broadened considerably in the years since, but whether I’m working with critical theory, or with a Portuguese author, or in a forest somewhere in Latin America, I still live with a profound faith that only poetry will save us.

Can you tell us a bit about the projects you are currently working on?

I’m in a bit of a frontier zone between one project and another at the moment, so I feel both unmoored and excited. I am about to publish a collection of essays about poetry, ecology and translation, which consolidates many of my preoccupations from the past decade. I’m also in the final stages of a semi-autobiographical book about late pop icon Michael Jackson, which is somewhat tangential from my main research areas but is nevertheless something that I’ve always wanted to write.

After that, I will turn to focus on a project about Gondwanaland. I’ve been developing it slowly for a while now, but I expect that it will grow considerably in the years to come. I’m interested in recovering the Gondwanan connections between the Australian, Antarctic and South American continents, and in using these as a form of conceptual ‘bridge’ between three of the world’s largest, most important, and most imperilled ecosystems, the Amazon Rainforest, Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef. This is not just a project about geology or biology, however, but also to do with the poetics of abundance and complexity—or, how to articulate the tremendous extravagance of a tropical rainforest or coral reef on the one hand, while evoking their tremendous fragility and precarity on the other? There are modes and styles of writing more common in Latin America than in English-language literatures that I hope will be of great benefit in attempting to answer this question.

Do you have any advice for researchers just starting out?

Little is more powerful than good planning. Map out where you are and what’s important to you, then develop short-, medium- and long-term plans to help you chart a course between your various commitments.

Don’t just write plans and then forget about them; check on them regularly to make adjustments and to recall your most important goals. Academic life is sprawling and complicated, and it’s too easy to get distracted by pressing, daily demands and responsibilities, as well as opportunities in areas that aren’t necessarily helpful for your research. But I find it’s easier to accept these many distractions, and to be a good colleague and citizen, if I feel like I’m staying in touch with my priorities, and have plans for balancing shorter-term commitments with longer-term goals. I’d also recommend this as an approach to research itself: it’s so crucial to find the right balance between research opportunities (funding, fellowships, conferences, etc) and what you actually want to do. It’s possible to watch months, even whole years, go by in which you’ve done nothing but write applications, wait in airports and deliver papers. Of course, these can be tremendously important and inspiring activities—minus the airports—but the challenge is to know when to say ‘no’ so that you can focus on doing research. That research might be slower, lonelier, and much less exciting in the short-term, but which in the long-term is going to nourish much more of your soul.