A Man with a Mission

For the twelfth anniversary of Baxter’s death, Father Eugene O’Sullivan, of the Catholic chaplaincy at Auckland University, organised a memorial poetry reading and exhibition. The reading itself was a memorable, slightly incongruous affair involving perhaps 60 people—nuns, elderly flower children, academics, potters, poets and painters. I recall the American writer Bill Millett arriving with poet-critic Iain Sharp, both wearing white shirts, black trousers, jackets and shoes, looking every bit like the Blues Brothers.^*

page 132

At one point during the Newman Hall reading, Bill Millett stood up and recounted how Baxter, in his last days, had worked at Millett’s Psychedelic Poster Shop in Mt Eden Road. Millet remembered Baxter as ‘a hopeless worker with useless hands . . . he couldn’t do anything with them’. As the story goes, the job didn’t last long and the poet’s life only a little longer.

*

‘You don’t enter a Tradition the way you get on a bus waiting for your number to be called. It requires deeper and subtler affinities.’ (Georges Rouault)

*

Like the Newman Hall reading, theses notes might themselves be a kind of ‘wake’. It would be interesting to see who, 20 years after Baxter’s death, would turn up at such a function: a random assortment of poets (the young, the in-love and the defeated-in-love), depending on who’s available, who’s in town at the time.

Millet’s off-sider at the Newman Hall function, Iain Sharp, published three books of verse in the early to mid 1980s. Sharp’s poems, like those of Bill Manhire, provide an interesting, off-key counterpoint to Baxter’s tune, a mischievous gloss. Both Sharp and Manhire usually incorporate a central talking/feeling/seeing poet-persona within the work—only theirs is a Pierrot-like clown mutation of the Poet with a capital P. They set out to sabotage the reader’s expectations instead of confronting the reader head on. They play the Disappearing or Invisible Man to Baxter’s Omnipresent Man. Of all the conversations with Baxter’s shade at this imaginary wake, Manhire’s and Sharp’s are the most oblique and the most amusing.

How to relax in this world,
that’s the real question . . .

(‘The Real Question’, Iain Sharp, 1985)