Robert Burns Fellow ‘more than a poet’

Mr James K. Baxter, the 1966 Robert Burns Fellow, describes himself as a writer and not just a poet. He also is, or as been an anti-anti-Communist, a sponge, a teacher a sceptic, a postman, a Roman Catholic, a hard worker and a man with a strong tendency to think in analogies and metaphors.

‘I’m not just a poet, although the best writing I have done is verse. I’ve written plays, a couple of short stories and articles in which I was not just shooting my mouth off. I like to feel I have more than one horse in the field because verse tends to be narrow. My best verse is like a liqueur. A good poem may affect three hundred people at the most, but the effect will be considerable. Short stories are more like wine. They are taken in more quantity by more people. An article would be like beer. It’s shallower. It might affect three thousand but the butter is spread thinner.’

Mr Baxter believes a poet should not be embroiled in politics or education and the like. ‘These are quite different disciplines. Poetry should deal with the whole story of life, not just its facets. This might seem quite useless to someone trained in a discipline, like a mathematician, a scientist. But most people start off with life for them being like canned meat. A poet should get his meat on the hoof and treat it himself,’ he said.

‘A reader might reject a poem by me, but ten years later he might page 3 appreciate it. It was that way with Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. What about Shakespeare writing to please an audience? He wrote on more than one level. If you wrote on the literal level only it would be reportage, if on the symbolic it would be like a dream.’ He described a poem he wrote for the Commonwealth Arts Festival about a lonely shepherd who was drinking by himself in his hut when he was visited by a lake goddess. He shot and killed her and was himself killed when the elements arose against him. ‘It was not just a fantasy but also about how many New Zealanders treat their own country.’

Vietnam is the only public issue on his mind. ‘I’ve stuck my neck out about this but I am not a Communist. I’m anti the big wave of anti-Communism and yellow peril fear that’s coming from the top and not the grass roots.There’s a lot of irrational fear and stupid circular thinking. You don’t get anywhere by sticking labels on things, like Communist, Tory, Catholic, poet, journalist.’

Mr Baxter said he became a writer partly through imitation and partly through his home environment. His father was keen on the Romantic poets, he said, and he started much as some musicians who came from musical families. He had a book of verse published when he was a youth of seventeen living in Dunedin. But he admits that precocity as a writer can have its disadvantages, ‘just like it can for an athlete.’

‘In February I will start working on a five-day week basis but I can’t just sit down and write a poem. I’ll work hard – I’ve become used to it over the past twenty years.’

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