Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 39: 2011

Where Were You in ′62?

Where Were You in ′62?

My first day at School Publications
and they’re taking me up
to see Jim Baxter (as if
he’s a prisoner in isolation
or a local version
of the Mona Lisa). Jim’s in
his ‘rabbit-hutch of a room’
at the top of steep wooden steps,
where he’s visited by angels,
flocks of curious birds,
and the Muse of course—
off and on. We’ve known
each other since ′55
when he read me Barney Flanagan
in the pub. It made me
laugh and cry. (We’d had
six whiskies and Jim’s voice
was booming.) He asks me
if I’d help edit Numbers
and do I know a pommy poet
called George Barker? Jim
wants to reprint
as essay of his
entitled ‘Therefore
all poems are elegies’.
I explain I don’t know
any pommy poets, not
personally, as before I arrived
I lived on a park bench
and none of them left
page 189 their desks at the BBC
to visit me. And anyway,
I prefer the Yanks
and an ex-tennis player
called Pablo Neruda;
but I’ll drop George a letter
via Faber & Faber (Jim
and I both bow our heads)
seasoned with a little flattery
about ‘real feeling’
and how pommy poets
(other than himself
and Dylan) write
class-conscious crap
in stiff imabics
and though they’d a baton
up their bums. Jim
sniggers, and says,
‘That should do it.’ Then
he rambles on about
‘that Auckland mob
and the stranglehold
of their elitist vision’.
I’m going to like it
here at School Pubs
with Jim in the clouds
and Lou Johnson in the basement
and Alistair Campbell
being followed around
by Te Rauparaha’s ghost
like a terrible shadow.
I say goodbye to Jim
and head for my den.
There’s some daylight left
and this poem to begin
before we rush to The George
for an hour’s boozing.