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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Poet Returns to Home Town

page 1

Poet Returns to Home Town

James K. Baxter, the 1966 Robert Burns Fellow, waved a cigar in the air, ‘I’m back to home base in Dunedin. I was born here, went to school and varsity here, and now I’m back – not to say that this is the finish, that I will end here– I’m only about halfway through.’

Mr Baxter moved into one of the University of Otago houses with his family yesterday, where he will remain for a year under the Fellowship – the highest literary award in New Zealand. Sitting in the lounge at his new home in Cumberland Street, he talked yesterday morning on subjects ranging from why he worked in Wellington as a postman, to the war in Vietnam.

Discoursing on why he left his job with the Education Department in Wellington, he said: ‘I think of working at a job as selling yourself. At different jobs you sell yourself in different degrees. When you are teaching, you sell just about all you have and have nothing else left for yourself. In a job where you use your hands and your head to some extent, such as a postman’s job, you don’t sell yourself completely. It’s not a matter of being mean, but you have to have something for yourself. Here, on the Fellowship, I am selling nothing. I will produce some lectures which may be published, I will work on the memoirs of my grandfather, John Macmillan Brown, and possibly produce some poetry, but this is unpredictable.’

Of his poetry he said: ‘To be able to write at all, there must be some sort of tension. The tension that taps my unconscious is that produced between my point of view and the status quo. In my case at the moment, I have accommodated the status quo, but I have in return a feeling of independence. You have got to get wise about how much you give in to the status quo. You might think something looks all right, plunge into it and find you are in a dead patch. My poetry is unpredictable. I can’t get up in the morning and say, “Today I am going to write a poem” – well I can, but it will be a bad one. Poems just happen as a result of tension or crises, and there are always crises when you have a family.’

On New Zealand poetry: ‘It’s much more down to earth these days. page 2 Around the turn of the century it was way up in the stratosphere. It was a verbal game. Now it’s down to earth. Some kind of barrier has been broken. Domestic situations that people understand are subjects for poems. It is less sharp or shrill and almost tends to be too ordinary.’ As far as the trend of poetry was concerned, he said, ‘Anything could happen – the world could break out in boils.’

When asked about his opinion on Vietnam he lit another cigar and said: ‘If the war in Vietnam was a political question, it wouldn’t worry me. Politically I’m neither left nor right although some people would say I was left because if I was in a union I would be a militant unionist.

‘Vietnam is important because it seems that some people are accidentally having to destroy something valuable. This valuable thing could be a person or a village community. It is something that cannot be replaced. It is like laying a lawn and hacking out the prize rose bush; only a million times more important. I see the weapons being used as being ideal for destroying civilians and not being strictly for military use.’

How did he feel about living so close to the university? ‘Very good. I have a nice house and will just have to walk around the corner to my office.’

And if any aspiring poets come to his door clutching verse? He laughed: ‘I’ve got a trapdoor for them. Down to the basement with the coal.’

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