Ender Başkan: a note on Two Hundred Million Musketeers
Ender Başkan reflects on Two Hundred Million Musketeers (1 November 2025), a debut collection by an award-winning poet that explores the complexities of new parenthood and family life, and anxieties about the future his children will grow up in.
I returned to writing poems when our first child was learning to talk. Language, sounds and words were fun again. We sung each other to sleep. Mumbo jumbo and jibber-jabber filled our home. I’d published a novel and thought the best bits were where I was riffing like that – freewheeling. I found joy transgressing language codes and rules, writing dadaist postcards and letters and leaving madcap voice messages for my friends. Elegant long sentences were eluding me. We were being broken open. I was not making sense, common sense, but I was connecting to some sensibility that felt true to me. The child’s world away from the tyranny of capitalist logic. It was lockdown in Melbourne and I picked up an old novel manuscript I’d spent five years working on to see if I could salvage it. I couldn’t.
Around this time my friend and teacher Ania Walwicz passed away and I spent a couple of weeks between jobs packing up her apartment. We used to meet up regularly and our chats would start with discussion of the latest big atrocity, political fiasco or bureaucratic nightmare. Eventually we would talk about writing. Poets, like kids, like animals, know when something’s off. She was a great poet and sifting through and studying her books and papers I got to be with her inner world. Reflecting on her poet’s life I asked myself what my practice and work could look like.
As a new parent I was struggling to get to my desk. To write I believed I had to accumulate time but really what I had to accumulate was language. So writing became inseparable from language, anywhere anytime, bits and pieces. As I hung the laundry or pushed the pram I was writing, jotting a word here, a line there, voice memos, no big ideas just fabric. The poem would sneak up on me and open up like a horizon.
One night late at the bookshop my colleague Justin picked up a David Attenborough book and read aloud a line I remember as two hundred million years, beneath here and that got me worked up, not only in the poetic sense of geological time and the compression of rock and mud I’d been reading about in books with my kids, but the rhythm of that phrase. For the rest of the night I was playing with it – two hundred million years / cheers / fears / beers / weirs… At home Sophie got involved and conjured ‘two hundred million musketeers!’ Yes! I yelled. It’s in the last poem of the collection and I chose it as the title of the book.
Elegant long sentences were eluding me. We were being broken open.
