[Poetry 1964]

I had prepared a solemn Introduction to this book; and then, looking it over, decided to burn it. It flared up very quickly, for it was a wet June night in Wellington, and I had a heavy fire on.

The poems in this book are none of them very complicated. Some are ballads. They are also reasonably polite in their language. I chose the plainest poems so as not to add a weight to the back of anyone who feels already like an overloaded carthorse, waiting for the day when he (or she) can leave school and get a job, and read as little as possible for a change. I chose mainly polite ones for the sake of the teachers, who are quite often very polite people. Some of the best poems I happen to have written are more complicated and less polite. You will find them in other published books of mine.

These peaceful, melancholy poems of mine are like hand-grenades. They are loaded with the few things I happen to actually know. If I try to write about something I don’t know, the result is a half-poem, with the shape of a poem but with no explosive charge inside it, an empty hand-grenade. This can happen very easily. Many of the poems in the school anthologies are like that. It is a great pity.

One has to have somebody in mind when one writes a poem. A friend perhaps; or somebody imaginary to whom nothing has to be explained. I have in mind an old Dalmatian butcher with whom I worked for a year and a half in the city abattoirs. After many years on the chain, his hands were seamed with fine scars from the times when the knife had slipped. He could read a little, enough to follow the horses. A poem that he could not understand at all would have something wrong with it; and if he could understand it, it wouldn’t matter that a university man could not make head of tail of it. Education is a disadvantage for writing poems.

I have noticed that a good many Maori people seem able to make poems without much difficulty – a good action song, for example, or a poem aboutpage 676 someone who has died. This is probably because they have not taken literature seriously. The idea of literature is a great barrier when one wants to write poems. Literature means the books that please other people. They clog the mind and stop it from working. I have not read any literature for a long time now.

It is best to use as few tricks as possible. The dead tricks petrify the language of a poem, and conceal the meaning which should be revealed by the words. I remember the beginning of a poem I wrote when I was seven years old:

O Ocean in thy rocky bed
The starry fishes swim about.
There coral rocks are strewn around
Like some great temple on the ground . . .

When I was fifteen or so, I jazzed it up a bit. The new version ran like this:

Fishes like stars that swim
Within the dark abyss
Where charmed, unsought by cherubim,
Sea’s coral temple is:
Come from your cold sea bed
To billows overhead . . .

The second version would go into an anthology, because it is polished and musical; but the first may have been the best. It had some kind of peculiar knowledge about the sea which is lost in the second version, in favour of imaginary cherubim.

People often talk about Beauty in connection with poems; but not often the people who write poems. Beauty is a by-product of poetry, I think. Certainly poems are not like vases of cut flowers which people can put on the mantelpiece and call beautiful. A good poem is more like a kumara dug up out of the ground. It has to make sense to the whole person, not to part of him or her, as a science formula or most of the pop songs do. A good poem makes life worth living.

People talk about New Zealand poetry too, but I doubt if there is any such thing, unless they mean simply that some people have written good poems in this country.

Poems come out of the chaos inside people, which the ordered world around us has no use for. This chaos cannot be house-trained like a dog or a cat. It is permanent and painful. It cannot be understood by the use of a formula. A man who writes poems makes it serve him by serving it. The same impulse that makes somebody smash the windows of a telephone kiosk can lie behind a good poem; but in the first case he does not understand why he ispage 677 doing it, and in the second he has the beginning of an inkling. The unusable parts of oneself are used in the poem. One has to abandon all ready-made answers in order to go into the dark place where the poem begins.

It is a terrible thing to be a man or a woman, because one needs answers, and there are none in the books. The problem is to become wholly alive. Sometimes to read a poem, or look at a picture, or hear a song sung, may provide the beginning of an answer; but more often, to write the poem, paint the picture, or sing the song oneself, and preferably in company.

1964 (321)