Poets’ Night In

The weekend of the 4th and 5th of April was to have seen a gathering of poets at Matahiwi marae in Hawkes Bay, where David Eggleton, current New Zealand Poet Laureate, would receive his laureate’s tokotoko, carved by Jacob Scott. Like most public gatherings at present, this couldn’t happen, though it will, later in the year.

Not doing something creates an opportunity to do something else in its stead and over the next few weeks we are featuring poetry to mark the weekend we couldn’t have. We begin with poems by David and the fellow poets he invited to join him at Matahiwi: Michael O’Leary, Jenny Powell and Kay McKenzie Cooke.

Then, from next week, there will be poems by former Poets’ Laureate: Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Ian Wedde, Vincent O’Sullivan and Brian Turner, in solidarity with David, fellow poets, and friends of poetry everywhere.

Laureate readings began as part of the programme for the Te Mata Poet Laureate, and Bill Manhire started these with a reading in the Barrel Room at Te Mata Estate.

Poets’ Night Out has been part of the Matahiwi weekend since 2014 and has become a fixture in the cultural calendar of Hawkes Bay. Given present circumstances, it seemed appropriate to adjust that banner to Poets’ Night In for the first selection of poetry.

Poet, teacher and horse racing enthusiast, Marty Smith, has been an essential part of all our Laureate visits to Hawkes Bay, both at Matahiwi and as MC for Poets’ Night Out. So, let’s imagine we have a seat at the Havelock North Function Centre and Marty is about to introduce the evening of poetry.


Peter Ireland

---

Tēnā koutou, Tēnā koutou, Tēnā koutou katoa

Here in Hawkes Bay, where I am, it’s warm and bright; so still you can hear all the notes in tūī’s song, and even the thrushes and starlings. It was like this last Saturday, a day to welcome a Poet Laureate onto Matahiwi marae to receive a tokotoko. Early autumn, still unseasonably warm, the sun still in the leaves in the carpark where people would get out of their cars, come to hear David and his guests read for Poets’ Night Out. That day is still coming, whenever when, and may it be such weather again.

It’s very quiet. You can see a long way from here. There are no cars on the road that goes across from Bayview to Napier; there are no planes at the airport, not even parked. There’s this enormous silence, so still you could hear things growing. And into this come the poems, some known, some freshly grown and picked in these strange times, by David and his guests, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Michael O’Leary, and Jenny Powell. They have put them together for our celebration, Poets’ Night In.

Cheering on from the balconies to tautoko David are Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither, Cilla McQueen, Michele Leggott, Ian Wedde, Vincent O’Sullivan and Brian Turner.

It’s quiet enough to hear all the notes in these songs. May they be like cats’ eyes, glowing in the dark, watching over, and watching out.

Please join me in celebrating our Poet Laureate, David Eggleton. David, we’re all clapping.

The Archaic Order

Inside a fubsy dream,
bees treasure summer,
its gorse and bloom entanglements,
its gravid hush before the storm,
in lilac or violet flexure of irises.

Daylight is burnished by bird wings,
by the lazy ripple of the wind.
Crickets hop about as spiders abseil,
flies waft to hie themselves hither and yon,
a hedgehog rambles beneath brambles while tabby cats yawn.

A sunshower trips the light fantastic,
with pitch contour shifting upwards,
to be fainter and fainter, and away,
leaving rooftops drenched in raindrop finery,
so the hydrangea-headed suburb shines.

Sargeson Towers

The Sargeson offers NZ contemporary design with 2 six-level towers...The Sargeson presents the ultimate lifestyle of convenience in the heart of Takapuna...

Not in narrow seas light fires of no return,
nor where blows the wind of fruitfulness,
but at dead low tide amongst brooding mangroves,
while the crab scuttles, the lone gull crarks,
and the mudflat poets gather buckets of cockles.
A plumb bob swung through an open portal
might leave us no wiser as to where we are,
but think of it as Auckland in the 1950s,
crossing the pitch and toss of the Waitemata
on a harbour ferry, to the fabled poverties
of the North Shore bohemians trying to survive
in Grog's Own Country when bliss it was to be alive,
under an overstory of mythic timber heights,
lately cut down and burnt to black stumps.
Thus a window opens in a villa's kauri heartwood,
and a hooting ruru eyes doubtfully the dawn.
Oh, for the days when every town had a fountain,
jetting coloured water, pinks and greens, like a dream
of what might yet be spouted in Takapuna, where
Keith Sinclair plays tea-chest bass, Smithyman's at the forge,
and in sackcloth and ashes McCahon sips bodgie's blood.
From Bruce Mason's navel, thespians wander and yarn,
stewing on the rhubarb of a play's first night.
Then the smoky green, countersunk, koru spiral,
sly mileage of a coastal steamer, a yacht groping a zephyr,
dense gloom, hidden light, Grafton Cemetery vapours,
volcanic caves glowing with spittle of worms.
A thousand city planning boo-boos owned up to;
that barge Glover sat in, poled by King Rex Fairburn,
shorewards to the tootle and fife of good old Sarge,
leading the way to jugs of gleaming Lemora,
and a sugar-sack full of withering lemons,
beneath a skull-white George Wilder moon.
In the Lounge Bar, ladies perch on the good chairs,
as if pubs might be shrines to higher thoughts;
in the public bar, blokes get soused on bowsers of booze,
swearing the longest word they know is corrugated-iron.
They howl, miaou, bark, bray; they yell hooray.
Outside, sparrows settle on toetoe plumes to peck away.
Enter the poet with face like a map of New Zealand,
A.R.D. Fairburn, all his china ducks lined in a row,
announcing free pot-shots on for young and old,
as the beer goes flat and the ashtrays stale.
Here's the New Zealand of how are you getting on,
here's the New Zealand of get out of it yah mongrel,
New Zealand of get stuffed, get a gorse bush up yah,
New Zealand of get back to from where you came,
get away and never darken our Customs Shed again.
Then Rex steps forth like a pukeko risen from manuka,
the alchemical man with gladiator sandals,
saying don't talk wet and pour us another one.
He's got an affinity with eels, with damsels and dragonflies,
launches into his riverrun of Finnegan's wakespeak,
claims he's lost his marbles, but most of them are in his mouth.
Like flagpole halyards whistling in the wind, sings Rex,
of the blab of the pave, the paper boy's call,
a wolf whistle from the railway station bookstall,
the blokes raising crown-and-anchor on tar-spotted canvas,
Maurice, Maurice and Maurice tapping typewriter keys,
ivory towers making hay bales into learned academese.
Bob Lowry's on the rocks with the Opononi dolphin;
R.N.Z.A.F. Mason makes his books into flying boats,
and skates them off the end of the Devonport Wharf.
Then hail crashes like a flail to clear muggy air,
for romantic North Shore's dead and gone,
it's with A.R.D. Fairburn in the graveyard,
and so is the Sarge, and all the Sons of Sarge,
and now only brand-new Sargeson Towers stand
as deluxe living for those with ready cash in hand.


David Eggleton

A Working Holiday in Wanaka     

(Lake Wanaka, 1938)

Attracted to the mirror of a solitary tree,
attached to the willow-weeping of stark branches,
we trial the angles of beginning.

Petals of sun graze on the drift of water
as singular cells of paper light

or

Weak sun-spill through summer’s parasol husk
dapples the lake’s gentle edge.

Gold tinged roam of hills
ripple and rise in a history of place

or

Mounds of tussock retreat
to the saffron shade of hills.

Mountains range in shy peaks

or

Mountains ruffle a pearl sky.


Through empty branches
a stillness of sky enters the lake

or

Sky enters lake
lake is sky.

Love’s Elevation                                                                          

(Rita Angus and Douglas Lilburn)

In him                                                                  you made landfall                       
anchored yourself                                  in his likeness
explored high country passes
                     surveyed the relief
                     of love’s elevation.


In his eyes
your glacial melt

In his hands
your jagged protection

In the shock of passion
a shift of fault lines.


Cartographers of the unsaid
both of you
reached the source                                               of a new edge.                       




Jenny Powell

Image: Craig Cumming

Jenny Powell is a Dunedin poet. Her most recent collection is "South D Poet Lorikeet" (Cold Hub Press, 2017). She is currently researching and writing poems based on New Zealand artist, Rita Angus.

Brown Purple Haze

The brown purple haze
Hung over old Sydney town
The surrounding bushes blaze

Breathing its dragon breath
The fiery red Rainbow Serpent
Brought destruction and death

All down the line of land
Central and South coast burned
Also too the areas inland

The first-nation people
Knew to move on when the fires
Covered the skies brown purple

Then the others came
With their guns and convicts and plans
To build towns and cities that remain

In the same place with millions
Of people: buildings, railways and
Roads from which you can’t just move on

So the fires and the beds still burn
A billion animals and several people consumed
No one knows when it is their turn

The whole nation may yet go walkabout
My brother, his family, my cousins and the rest
Australia my be beset by eternal drought

The lucky country has lost its bet
There is a price to pay for driving people over the edge
So the brown purple haze of guilt has yet

To expunge the memories of dream-timers
Whose loved-ones were driven over cliffs
Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide & Perth
Great icons of Western Kultur & birth
Yet, the brown purple haze is upon their brain
To recognise the memories of dream-timers

With Serah at St Heliers

(for Serah Fesolai)

Sitting together, two old friends
A gentle breeze in the air, we
Talked, with Rangitoto behind
Swaying trees on the beach front.

Like the trees we were at ease
As the evening sun’s last light
Shadowed the darkening sea
Which shimmered along the small

Waves breaking onto the beach
As buses stopped at regular
Intervals near the table we ate
From, perhaps to remind us

We both had come from difficult,
Poverty stricken backgrounds;
To gently tell us how special it
Is for the two of us to be able

To experience the finer things
In life, a glass of wine, a bowl
Of seafood chowder, and a plate
Of whitebait fritters, in such beautiful

Surroundings. Remembering my
Time in Auckland last year when,
Like two children who had discovered
The giant’s house, you would

Visit me nearly daily in Westmere
Saying it was almost like the time
We shared a house together in
Mt Albert all those years ago.

So, take this poem as the poem
I have always meant to write to you

Alofa – Michael



Michael O’Leary

Image: Dave Johnson

Michael O’Leary lives on the Kapiti Coast. His writing includes five novels, non-fiction publications, a book of his artwork, and ten volumes of poetry: including a selected poems, "Toku Tinihanga"; collected railway poems "Main Trunk Lines; and Collected Poems": 1981-2016, all published by HeadworX.  His Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop imprint has published over 180 titles of New Zealand literary works (mainly poetry), and in 2019 celebrated 35 years of publishing.

warding off

Again today
the mid-afternoon flight
of two oyster catchers
zip-lining

pale, low cloud,
riding the grey light
in quick, flick-knife flight,
not missing a beat,

winging it, avid
for the ocean, their cries
sounding out
a kind of homesickness, or

a repeated one-note song
that is both a warning
and a warding off. I saw them
the same time

yesterday
– easy now
to remember particular
sightings and sounds

in these numbered days
of confinement.
And at night
I hear their calls,
perceiving
in each note
transmitted grief
emphasised

by the dark.
These birds always travel
in pairs, stick together,
insist not all is well.

glass paperweight

Friend, I hold your birthday present,
this glass paperweight,
and test its measure of sand
turned by fire to liquid then
to clear and solid containment. An entire world
I am able to hold in one hand, to look
inside and see an ocean frozen in motion

where indigo-and-dandelion cat’s eyes float
on candy-striped waves of periwinkle
and mint. Suspended
in the rounded space that such a snow globe
sphere allows, the artist’s trademark
flower flies with starfish wings — petals of a lily
worn to a skeleton of filigreed sunlight,

like the frayed remnant of a dress
in a coloured, Instagram photograph
yellowed with age, or leaked sunlight
from that day over fifty years ago now
when we both discovered
a common disregard for the shallow
and the popular and laughed at how easy

it would be to become friends for life, surely
sensing back then the possibility that all
could be weighed and kept, like the heat
from the fiery core of the globed planet
on which we both stood and turned and even now,
keep on standing, spinning under a golden,
lily-sky spent from the weight of sun.



Kay McKenzie Cooke

Image: Kate Cooke

Kay McKenzie Cooke lives in Dunedin. Her fourth poetry collection is being published by The Cuba Press and at this point is scheduled for release in June 2020.

Two Mosques, Christchurch

This previously unpublished commemorative poem was written in the wake of the terrorist attacks that took place at the Al Noor Mosque and at the Linwood Islamic Centre, in Christchurch on Friday March 15, 2019, in which 51 people were killed.

Two Mosques, Christchurch

The poem writes the gunman invisible:
a him who hates so much is indefensible.
Scrupulous, they followed their beliefs to peace
he chose to deny and scythe with brutal lies.
Their blood unfurls as that of martyrs,
though they never wanted their altars.
All that's impure, he brought with a smirk;
he will be forever cobwebbed by the dark,
his darkness sawn out of rocks in his head.
But they will bloom forever, each one dead,
as the nation mourns and mountains crack.
Sad days amid rainbow petals, freshened stems,
a tide of grief that will never leave the path,
that winds with so many threads and colours.
He wanted ammunition; they bade him welcome.
He wanted crime; they gave him forgiveness.
He wanted erasure to fill the hole in his soul.
They barely sought to acknowledge him at all,
but only as a shooter who rose in a jabber,
and blind with loathing pulled the trigger.
Let them be a mass of flowers,
that are vessels of keening spirits.
Let them be a mass of flowers,
bunched and wrinkled and handwritten.
Let them be a mass of flowers,
like the remains of a maze trampled down.
Let them be a mass of flowers,
like a storm system stirring the ground.
Let them be a mass of flowers,
like a compass and a journey.
Let them be a mass of flowers,
that winds from mosque to mosque,
and then around the city, dusted with pollen and history.

David Eggleton

Ode to Weary Dunlop

I used to amble, I used to ankle, I'd hopscotch along.
I'd bop, I'd diddly-bop, I'd pad, I'd percolate through the throng.
In the disco, in the bistro, I'd get on shanks' pony,
and traipse it all night long.
And now it's the hesitation waltz, the blind bat foxtrot,
the yearning saunter, the excuse me after dark.
The shamble shanks, the slow bandy legs,
the disconsolate gesture is no walk in the park.
I can no longer yomp across shifting sands
as a riptide tugs quick at my heels,
I'm on the wagon, I'm on the shelf,
I'm looking forward to meals on wheels.
But to tramp and never tire of it,
breathing in jungle's penumbra at dusk,
like that colossus of rutted roads,
that Australian in his slouch hat,
with his remnant of juggernaut army,
that life-saving surgeon in charge
with his wry grin and his sloping brim.
To walk and never tire of it,
as Weary Dunlop never did,
his guidance an airstrip
in the jungle of the mind.
And so I stagger after never-weary Weary,
who had sandals made of old tyres,
and carried that scorched earth smell of War,
drifting our way with the whirring
of propellers and flying boat drone.
There were the Japs, and the other chaps,
up on the screen, with bayonets waved around,
P.O.W. camp barbed wire, David Niven with his frown.
Those feature flicks we watched agog,
before we played it out again on the rifle range
abandoned at the back of the Air Force base,
the sky dead calm with that heat haze,
as men went past in jeeps and sun-baked khaki.
When black and white ran in reverse,
divers burst out of the water backward,
arcing through air onto the springboard
of an amazingly blue swimming pool.
So here's to us now, soft tyres around the waist,
afloat on the vast white sarcophagi of cruise ships,
backpedalling through Asia in the slack season,
looking for the old Burma Railway
and finding the well-paved boulevard.
Things have changed for the better,
gone the forced march, the flogged march,
the sack race march, the dead march,
across an acreage of broken pedestals,
tireless as the ghost of Weary Dunlop,
whose men once shuffled forward
with the sad wallow of tyres gone flat.

David Eggleton

Isthmus

Sugar Town's rush hour fills choke points below
the biggest exclamation mark on death row,
concrete hypodermic lit by gamble fever,
the watchtower needle struck by weather.
Kite flying in forked lightning, ant trails,
skull headlands whose houses gleam gold teeth,
I nibble at the corners of dark cloud reef.
Woks singed over flames in food halls,
white pelts fur gutters after hail falls.
Forklifts carry pallets and engines growl,
off hot pavements steam plumes, thunder resounds.
Yellow petals tumble in memorial gardens,
a mānuka bud is a song in the city of sails.
The siren calliope serenades harbour mermaids,
anorexic spectres waver in door plate glass.
Lights a pimple rash on pinched neck of isthmus,
the container ship glides under blood orange moon.

David Eggleton

The Letter Zed

From zealot to ziggurat,
that zeitgeist, that zoetrope,
is Zealandia, son,
wear it on your lapel for your mother's sake.
Zugzwang ran the zoo,
and the zoo was an ark
for Zealandia and all who thrived there,
at the end of the alphabet,
knowing they were lucky last,
possessing the Anzac spirit and abundant lemon zest.
Even zambucks carrying a concussed player
zonked from the paddock,
zigzagged to the ambulance.
Those in Zephyrs and Zodiacs
bound down State Highway One,
heading home on a metal throne with rubber
tyres, knew they sat at the zenith.
Their zipped-up zippers shone,
their ziffs purred with satisfaction,
Zespri was their favourite sorbet.
Zowie! they went, zooming along,
catch the zeds from those over there.
We're zippy, but they are just zizz,
just z-listers in zombie droves.
Thataway, zanies chill, out of zone,
singing zip-a-dee-aye, zip-a-dee-eh,
zip-a-dee-doo-dah day, to zydeco.
They make zippo or zilch gestures,
they launch zingers from a phone,
each a zillionaire living on pure air,
till zapped by the self-same bug-zapper
that one day will zap
Zealandia back to zero.

David Eggleton

Len Lye's Wind Wand

Bendy baton, swizzle stick, swagger stick parade,
a pole vaulter's pole catapulted skyward,
performing spells at breezy dawn;
a spiral inside a clear glass marble,
a twister bearing the bob of a marker buoy.
Within its moist fog coat, the mountain is coy,
the bee rides the daisy flower back and forth.
Tall wand, a dowser's twitcher, down to earth,
curves to the gusts, inclines to the view,
floats with sphere, a bubble on air;
and then conducts an auction tender
between the mountain and the silver sea,
forest and bird, flax and river,
town and country, wave and whisper,
mountain white as Te Whiti's albatross feather.

David Eggleton

Taking a Line for a Walk: The Poetry of Peter Olds

(Text of a talk I gave at Noticing Peter Olds, an informal symposium on the poetry of Peter Olds, organised by Jacob Edmond, Jenny Powell and Anna Jackson, and the University of Otago English Department, and held on Friday 27 September, 2019 in the University of Otago Business School building.)

New Zealand poet Peter Olds, photographed in Dunedin, October 2014 by Grutness. [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

I want to argue that in the poetry of Peter Olds, any day is a good day for taking a line for a walk. As his numerous small publications over the years indicate, his poetry steadily accumulates day by day, made up of lines jotted down and going in and out of notebooks. These lines are the notations of a self-trained observer — gnostic gnawings on the bare bones of reality mayhap, but they always grounded in empirical observation, in tactile factuality. Whereas for some poets to make chin music is to offer a ruminative chewing on the cud of cliché at the pitch that flying insects enter the room, Olds resists falling into that trap by a certain alertness, a certain mental toughness, and by his hard graft of material fought for and processed in an attentive logic of sounds, as in the poem 'Bad Omakoroa' from the 2001 collection Music Therapy, published by the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, which opens:

            Walking past the place where Mrs D
            was smashed to death by a speeding car
            as she crossed the road to check her letterbox.
            A pheasant breaks loudly from
            the avocado, flies out of sight
            behind a hedge of feijoa.
             A blue heron circles the sky.
            Pukeko scatter from a vegetable plot.

Peter Olds, rather like Seamus Heaney, digs with his pen. He digs into his own sensibility, he digs up memories and so digs the song of himself, and we dig it, too, as we read, finger-clicking figuratively along with him, digging that bop, that beat, that mysterious current of energy that flows through the ordinary made strange, or at least made curious, absurd, wry, droll, memorious, and recalled as through a glass, darkly.

The poem 'Butcher shop' in the booklet Reaching for the Baxters (published by the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop in 2007) begins:

            I'm in the Rhubarb Café drinking delicious English breakfast.
            This café's a converted butcher shop ...
    
            ...                             you can imagine blood splattering up
            the pretty white tiles ...
            [and so on, and then the poem twists mordantly]
    
            ...                                 ... Trini Lopez begins to
            shout 'If I had a hammer' as I walk out into the blinding sun and
            across the bridge to the spot where I last saw L, late one night

            just before Christmas ...
            ...                                 and we walked together down the length of
            Highgate shouting and yakking our heads off, and hating Christmas.
            And three weeks later they found her dead in someone's woodshed.

Like James Joyce in his novel Ulysses, Peter Olds is interested in what a single day may be capacious enough to hold, but whereas for Joyce June 16th, Bloomsday, became the day of days, holding all others in a mystical chalice or Grail, day incarnate and revelatory, Peter olds positions every day as superabundant, or at least full of promise, full of quicksilvery essence, oceanic existence.

Take virtually any poem for proof of this. Take 'Graveyard Beach, Omimi', published in Music Therapy:

            And thousands of sandflies hover over
            the smooth-worn cow dead in the rocks
            skin blackened by salt & sun, goose eggs
            laid in its bones, belly evaporated.
            Two other fresh-dead cows fallen over
            the cliff at night,
            legs broken, wedged in rocks.
            One plucked goose stiffened in the
            attitude of flight. Four ewes
            dead from giving birth in a creek-slit
            on the edge of the slippery shore.
            Three paradise ducks circle the sky,
            their high-pitched calls mingling
            with the sounds of thousands of sandflies.

Quite an apocalyptic vision, a modest apocalypse, perhaps, but its sentiments endorse those of John Betjeman in his poem 'Slough': '... swarm over death!'

And so — life, death, greed, humanity, poverty, gentrification, Methodism, bees, love, spirituality, medication, buses, trains, clapped-out pre-War Fords, and an immaculately restored white Oldsmobile Convertible with pink vinyl hood: these are some of the threads, some of the chains of coincidence, continuity and being that run through and animate the verses of Peter Olds, his personal vision rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.

Looking over the diary-like oeuvre, the  methodical corpus of this poet, it is inevitably now vast, a kind of moth-eaten musical brocade, to steal a line from Philip Larkin, embroidering on days where we live.

Poem titles give some idea of special days, through truly every day is special, even unique: 'Anzac Day in the Rooming House', 'Hiroshima day/ 11 am (for Yuri Matsuma)', 'A Cold August Night in the Captain Cook Tavern', 'Morning Picture of South Dunedin'.

Now, you may say such titles suggest a stasis, merely pictorial representations of one damned thing after another. But you would be wrong. Olds is a master of laconic comedy, offering us  delicate absurdist perceptions robustly expressed: childhood winter mornings in an antiquated Christchurch, a portrait of his father as 'a clergyman sitting up in bed ... rolling a racehorse cigarette', a glancing view of a dog described as ' a walking/ chucked-out bargain basement carpet'.

Bringing it all back home, nailing those thoughts, hunkered down in various attics, garrets, boarding houses, flats, Olds weaves a consciousness of the moment into a personal mythography, as in this from 'A plate of lamingtons' in You Fit the Description: the Selected Poems of Peter Olds, (Cold Hub Press, 2014):
    
            The smoke on the hill's from the crematorium,
            OK if you're into backyard fires and don't suffer delusions.
            You could have nightmares worrying about the future,
            who moves in next door,
            shall we sell the second car,
            you'll have to walk to work,
            jog off the cholesterol.
            You've got a job,
            you've got a cellphone,
            I've got a lamington —
            I must come again
            I must come again.

But if  Peter Olds is a bard of the modern urban alienated condition, where did it all begin? It began back when the word was God, and his voice palpable in a1940s Sunday School. It began when a girl asked Marlon Brando in the movie The Wild One as he revved up his motorcycle, where are you going? And he replied, 'Oh man, we just gonna go', echoing Jack Kerouac's On the Road: 'Where we going, man?''I don't know but we gotta go.' And so go became the watchword of the beat generation, reaching New Zealand and its 1950s bodgies and widgies, and reaching Peter Olds, too, as he recalled in his 2012 jukebox poem 'Love Me Do/1963':

            We helped the minister's wife cut layers
            of rotted cloth off drunks
            yellow-skinned with booze
            in the hostel shower ...
            we were 'The Boys',
            Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney imitators.
    
            At the slot of a coin on Ponsonby Road,
            Auckland turned on a needle.

That socio-cultural restlessness led him off the rails, too, as he wrote in 'On Probation' in Lady Moss Revived (Caveman Press, 1972):

            I their shiftless longhaired masterpiece
            edge towards the courthouse
            to face the animal of nightmares ...

These were the Elvis years, the Beatles years, the borstal years, the Dylan years, pop, hippies, psychedelics, the heart of the Sixties and out the other side, post-revolution, post Zabriskie Point, into R.D. Laing anti-psychiatry country, navel-gazing, boiled cabbage and rooming houses, sherry, port wine and roll-your-owns, and on into therapy, abstinence, Zen Buddhism — a relentless psychic cartography winding out of the beatified, beatnik self.

Peter Olds was one of Ginsberg's original angel-headed hipsters in this country, hopped up on Mandrax under the bright red neon HYDRA bacon factory sign that loomed over Ponsonby ridge at Three Lamps. In those days, poets had mana as figureheads of the counterculture, the spiritual children of William Blake, celebrating spontaneity of feeling and expression. Rejection of materialist values was a virtue and madness itself was considered a kind of holy state, a form of inner enlightenment. And yet the truth was always more complex. Peter Olds was there in slum landlord Spring Street, or in a doss house in Wellington Street, a crash pad in James K. Baxter's Boyle Crescent, and writing furiously, getting it all down day by day on paper, though days themselves were elastic back then and sometimes snapped back and even split into pieces.

There were the early phantasmagorias, compounded of amphetamine psychosis, delerium tremens and Visions of Johanna: words, words, words, the incurable itch leading to poet to commit pen to paper — all of a piece with the poet's quotidian routine, years ago today, when he shuttled like a yoyo between Auckland and Dunedin, thumb out looking for the ghost of a 1937 Ford with a V8 motor barrelling down the highway, and looking to catch a ride or a poem or both.

Even back then Olds was a flaneur, keenly observing, keenly noticing, while taking a line for a walk. As he wrote in 'In Auckland', published in 1972's Lady Moss Revived:

            Tonight I am walking to the point of your face.
            Climbing through another part of town,
            the boundaries of a large suburban shell —
            the junk-yard where the poverty-angels fade —
            where dark-skinned beer-lovers
            grab for the warmth of a dim pie-shop light,
            where the man seems to be going in circles,
            where each face beside me looks wild
                                    and driven from its home —
            lips kissing the sky of illusion goodbye
                                    into the crooked chimney tops —
    
            drunk for another day
            another dollar dead.

I'd like to finish with the first part of a poem which we could take as a kind of ongoing manifesto for this poet, one that emphasises a hunter-gatherer quest for experience, for epiphany, for spiritual sustenance. It's the start of a poem entitled 'Surfcasting instructions' which first appeared in the 2005 Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop booklet After Reaching for the Baxters, and the poem itself is dedicated to the late John Dickson, poet and legendary sidewinding raconteur.

            You need the agility of a spear-throwing warrior
            the feet of a high jumper

            and the deft hand of a pool-player.
            You need to run head first

            fearless into the frothing surf, and
            in an instant of non-thinking, cast your line —

            stop,
            swivel round like a shot-putter and bolt back

            into the tussock sandhill like Jack lovelock
            bony finger extended skyward off

            the running line,
            the line itself streaming over your shoulder

            out of the twelve-foot rod's hot bamboo tip
            the bait sinking fast down through beery foam
    
            to the crab-holed floor.

Chain Lightning

A new poem from Murihiku, the tail of the land.

Chain Lightning

I who was harlequin, left jewelled green
on tor bulwark in baroque eyelid dream
through solar rays absorbed down gilt crevice,
salamander by lightning flash, storm-pillaged,
stock-still when matagouri counts each thorn,
I feel the tohunga within, while piercings drum
forecasts of breath that blows this land warm,
and cobwebs shade where mokomoko dart
from those rays gorgon-headed geckos bask;
before heavy clouds race their dark backing
over tussock hairshirt with flagellant hail.
As whistle stones flute higher and higher,
the sleet tattoos dirt to a blind white eyeball.

David Eggleton

Tēnā koe David

David Eggleton. Image David Mckenzie

David Eggleton is Aotearoa New Zealand’s Poet Laureate for 2019-2021.

David began reciting his poetry at rock music gigs in the early 1980s and remains interested in presenting poetry across as many media as possible, keeping poetry live, relevant and vital.

His poetry has featured in murals, short films, on T-shirts, in shop window displays, written on pavements and included in art gallery exhibitions.

His first collection, South Pacific Sunrise, was co-winner of the PEN Best First Book of Poetry Award in 1987. His seventh collection, The Conch Trumpet, won the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

David received the Prime Minister's Award for Excellence in Poetry in 2016 and in 2018 Otago University Press published David’s eighth collection, Edgeland.

He edited Landfall between 2011 and 2018, and the free street arts magazine The Cafe Reader between 2014 and 2018. A noted arts reviewer, he has received the Reviewer of the Year Award six times at the New Zealand Book Awards.

David Eggleton has been described as a beatnik bop poet, performing with the perpetual motion of a jiver down at a rock and roll dance-hall on Saturday night. He has also been called a visible ghost-writer, an anonymous voice-over, a shape-shifting poet in the street — a freestyling surrealist and lyrical word-spinner rhyming to a rhythmic beat.

Of his own poetry, David has said it is ‘one long poem, describing the epic voyage of my life’ and that it ‘expresses my passion for the communal experience of living here, in this green archipelago in the South Pacific.’

Former Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen observed of David’s poetry that it is ‘informed with indigenous understanding and discerns the post-colonial legacy with a satirist’s sharp eye for humour and incongruity.’

David is of Rotuman, Tongan and Palagi descent. He lives in Otepoti/Dunedin.

Warming

Up here, seagulls float like kites on thermals.
Down there, a car canters like a racehorse
through pasture, towards Aramoana.
The giant wharf cranes of Port Chalmers
stand like steel giraffes in a story book,
and time is reluctant to turn the page.

A fishing boat’s wake is carving a V
in the freckled salty skin of the sea,
furrowing its calm green translucence,
until the sun squeezes juice from quarter
of a lemon onto the veiling, foam-white,
dissolved wings of a billion butterflies.
Pick up that foam, pick it up and drape it
across the dry riverbeds of the skies.

David Eggleton

Tokotoko Takes the Stage - From Jurassic Park to Jacinda' - ha!

Selina and Tusitala Kapura at an event to celebrate the life of mountaineer, adventurer and humanitarian, Sir Edmund Hillary, who was born 100 years ago on 20 July 1919.

At the event, Selina performed her new poem about Sir Ed called 'Hillary’s Step'. The poem is featured on an installation of the same name at Christchurch Airport.

Tokotoko takes the stage - from Jurassic Park to Jacinda' - ha!

L to R: Professor Neil Quigley,  University of Waikato Vice-Chancellor, Sam Neill, actor, writer, producer, director, and vineyard owner,  Tusitala Kapura, Selina's tokotoko,  Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Poet Laureate and Professor Clive Gilson, Chair of the Hillary Centenary Steering Committee.