[Transcript of a Tape-recording of Baxter Reading and Commenting on his Poetry]

. . . This is one, it’s an anthology piece perhaps, but I’ll read it anyway, ‘Wild Bees’. I did have it in stressed hexameters when I was fifteen or sixteen; then I worked it over again when I was a little older, and so on – a rough thing first and then working it into shape from something clumsy. And I think the form, as many of my forms at that time, came from Louis MacNeice. I’m not particularly inventive in technical forms.

[Reads ‘Wild Bees’, CP 82]

Now some would say ‘why loss’? Well, Adam comes out of paradise. He falls. In some sense we all recapitulate that in our lives; in some symbolic sense. But page 508 better to just abide the fate than to make a second fall and forget you’d ever fallen, I think. Much better. So loss is perhaps of value because it’s true and there is a certain value in truth even if it’s painful. More than a certain value, because I think that without truth people go insane.

Now this one, ‘The Cold Hub’, this is a little closer to being a varsity poem. It’s also a Buddhist poem if you’d like to call it that, since I call myself a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Marxist, a Pentecostal – you know, quite a number of things – a Maori Franciscan. In other words, I have a personality, like other people. It’s quite normal to have eighteen personalities, probably all of you have. Don’t let the psychiatrist tell you that this is not so. Houdini, you might know, the escapologist, who used to get out of iron boxes underwater and so on – he was famous for it, and I think he died when he didn’t get out of the iron box on that occasion. And ‘Nada’ is the word St John of the Cross uses, nothing, the gap. Also the Buddhists who want to move into this void – the bright void. Not the other void which is the rubbish dump which we all live in, but the bright void, a nothing at the centre of oneself.

[Reads ‘The Cold Hub’, CP 256]

That would be a free verse thing as they call it. I wouldn’t say necessarily ‘free verse’ – it has its own rhythm. I don’t know what constitutes a poem. D.H. Lawrence wrote some beautiful free verse. It has a very definite organic pattern and rhythm. It has its pattern but it hasn’t got the rules of the game. It’s not a ‘rules of the game’ poem – like football or chess – where you make the rules and sometimes some of the fun comes from breaking them occasionally, but the pattern comes from keeping a particular set of rules. If you scored under your own goalposts it wouldn’t work, would it? You have to have the game – it’s arbitrary, but it’s necessary. Then you get a special pattern coming out.

[Reads ‘At Rotorua’, CP 228]

Now I rather like that poem, particularly ‘those / Demons of lucre and great boredom / The living cannot exorcise’. Of course I was in that tourist paradise – that helped at the time – where we are selling our grandmother’s bones for a dollar, you know. Giving chunks of the country for money in one form or another – anything can be sold is the theory. Well, it produces great boredom, great pain, a heavy weight on the soul. I found that going into the Maori graveyards where the steam vents rose up among the tombs, I had some peace there among the dead, possibly because the dead are very poor. The poorest of all people are the dead – they haven’t even got their bodies, eh? Poverty does give peace. Nowadays, perhaps, I’d be a bit more cheerful. Perhaps I’d say, certainly, man cannot exorcise; no living man can; but perhaps God will give us the power to remove them. I’d now tend to take that view. But I honestly page 509 think that we don’t have to go on selling our grandmother’s bones for a dollar until the world ends. It is possible to get past this.

Now here is a memory of a dear friend of mine, a barman, whom I mention in another place, in one of the ‘Pig Island Letters’. [‘Look at the simple caption of success’, CP 282]. He had a hydatids cyst under one of his lungs as big as a football, he told me; but they did drain it. This came from sleeping among dogs in a farmhouse, but no doubt it was worth it – he loved the dogs. He’s a very friendly man. And I’m remembering this occasion.

[Reads ‘Fitz Drives Home the Spigot’, CP 375]

That, of course, is a hate poem. It is a hate of the urbanisation of that process – the desire to see it all crumble and explode – and very suitable, I might say, since if one sees the souls and bodies of one’s neighbours being massacred by a certain pattern – to hate it is reasonable!

Now some ‘Jerusalem Sonnets’ here, which are the more recent ones. I’ll try and pick one that I like particularly. Yes, this is about what one should say to the young. My son happens to be a Buddhist and so I put it to him. I say, ‘Don’t tell them what to do, let them tell you; since their spirituality is ten times greater than yours. You should be learning from them.’

[Reads ‘Many may think it out of date’, CP 458]

Here’s one for Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, a pioneer among the Maoris there; and I have a conversation with her, her picture on the wall.

[Reads ‘Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, did you come here’, CP 460]

I mention in the next poem a Japanese image of a man, a Japanese crucifix, rather delicate. I had a big one in the house in Auckland there. I’m lamenting the fact that I’m not back there – a sort of the temptation – you know, like the one in T.S. Eliot, the flowering apple tree that he sees in the first window of the stair. If only I could be at peace there – it’s like the earthly paradise, you know; some sexual elements in it, but more the paradise.

[Reads ‘It is not possible to sleep’, CP 461]

Get up and get moving is sort of the moral of the poem. Still people have their feelings. Not every man is happy to do what he does.

This is one which is a bit formal; sort of pious perhaps, but not too bad. At the end I say ‘Brother Ass’ – that’s me actually, rather than my body. And ‘Him’ is the Lord who is sitting on my back and who seems a bit heavy.

page 510

[Reads ‘Brother Ass, Brother Ass, you are full of fancies’, CP 472]

The last two or the second last two in the book I like best, I think, of the ones I’ve written for a while anyway. This one says ‘Colin, you can tell my words are crippled now’. [CP 473]. Rather terrifying to lose control over your own actions. Then a more simple one of the thief on the Cross.

[Reads ‘I am dying now because I do not die’, CP 473]

I think I’ll read a couple from the Jerusalem Daybook actually. There are one or two here that are alright. It’s a rather rough-hewn style that I use – I call it ‘old rope’. It’s unrhymed couplets that I’ve got strung together here. It seems to work alright actually, or I think it does. Here’s one called ‘The Holy Neighbours’ [CP 499]. It’s an objection to the Pharisees. It’s a joke poem, but rather a grim one. If you live in a Church, if you’re a Church member, you always find some of the Pharisees around – you may love them but you don’t want actually to be executed by them! It’s a distressing fact if you yourself are a humanist.

Now another one, ‘The Problem of Keeping Dogs’. I like this one. I think it’s a good poem. I speak of God as ‘the homicidal Father’ – this is a delusion that religious people get at times. It’s really a poem about anger, but it’s a joke poem also – I like to get some humour in a good poem. It livens it up.

[Reads ‘The Problem of Keeping Dogs’, CP 502]

Now I enjoyed writing that – it gives me pleasure. I prefer poems that give me pleasure, whether or not they give others pleasure. This ‘Shit, fleas, wet, cold, birds, dogs, pain, love’ – there was a memory of Paradise Lost there. I knew Milton had gone, ‘Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong’ just for the fun of it. He had done that with a line – it is effective.

So I suppose I am still a literary man. You might say ‘Oh, he’s not a literary man; he just writes documentary stuff.’ No, it’s not documentary stuff – it’s just a different type of poem.

Here’s one about the workers. I prayed there for six months, ‘Lord, send me workers – they’d look after one another; they’d play cards and laugh; they’d get off drugs; the schizophrenes would recover; they’d go for a swim in the river – but they did not work.’ And I thought ‘Man, everything is happening except work.’ Anyone who came would say ‘It’s hopeless! They’re not working’, because in our . . . culture we say work is the only thing and that’s why we go crazy.

But the workers came and then it became like a public works camp – it became a Kiwi job! This one isn’t quite fair because two weeks later the workers began to mellow and stop being so obsessive in their activities. But page 511 it was normalcy that arrived. Rehabilitation would, I suppose, be the word people use – the most hideous word in the language. It implies that people can reform one another, which is impossible – only God can reform any of us, me or you. He’s doing it, I hope, to me – it’s a very necessary job. Hopefully you too! Here is ‘The Workers’.

[Reads ‘The Workers’, CP 504]

I’ll read another one here that I’ve written fairly recently. It’s probably not a poem but it could be, you know. I wanted a Maori friend of mine to put it into Maori. Perhaps I don’t write poems – I just write down words – that’s prosaic – I just write down words – that’s possible. Sometimes they form rhythmical patterns. This is called ‘Song to the Lord God’. [CP 572]

It’s a simple enough theology. It’s Pauline theology. Well, somebody might like to toss the ball back to me to ask a question or two. And I’m going to indulge in my drug because otherwise, you see, I might go mad. Man, I’ve been smoking these since I was six. I have a fear that next month I might have lung cancer. I’m weak; I get addicted. Dangerous drugs. Marihuana’s dangerous too – you can get three nights in jail for using it. [At this point the transcript appears to omit other remarks about drugs.]

. . . Icarus is the spirituality that flies high and then comes down – the junkie spirituality. Trying to get a pure love attitude – to live by love and nothing else. It flies up; it’s real; but then it comes down and dies – Crash!

[Reads ‘Song of the Sea Nymphs at the Death of Icarus’, CP 5]

Yes, it’s that spirituality which all people have – the tragic spirituality of the young. When it goes you can’t write like that. You see that it’s different from the one about keeping dogs – the brain is older, the sensibility has gone – thank God! It would drive you crazy, drove me to the pubs for ten years. Then you say you’ve got half the brain working and you do better with it.

People say ‘Where can we get a theology of the Creation?’ It’s in the poems. Poems are statements of a theology of the Creation. You have a Creation; the Lord God made it and dwells in the Creation. He both made it, is beyond it, and is inside it. Look at the Hebrew Psalms – they’re a theology of the Creation.

The Maoris know this. They are the theological geniuses of the country. They have a theology of immanence, a theology of the Holy Spirit, the most delicate theology of sexuality. But we’ve been getting around with the holy boulders of the moral law on our backs, then broken down into other rocks of some Determinist kind.

I don’t know how old I was, but it’s a bit poem. It’s a half-poem. Anger poems are half-poems. They’re not a celebration; they are an objection to page 512 something. Protest poetry is half-poetry.

[Reads ‘In Praise of the Taniwha’, CP 513]

I am not an oracle, brother, but a poem is an oracle. Simply because what it is saying is a sacred statement. If it’s not so it will be a bad poem. Poems have to be true. So the poet can do many things; but if he tells lies he can’t write poems. [He can] get drunk every day of the week, sleep with his neighbour’s wife, but if he goes and chases the dollar note I don’t think he can write poems – because the dollar note, as it’s used commonly, happens to be a lie. It is not used as something people share with one another, but as the chief God of the country. It’s a nothing that people pretend is a something. If you chase the dollar note or respectability or the School Cert. Exam – I don’t think you can write poems. That’s why it’s hard to write poems – if you have an idolatrous view of education. If you come to read books and talk to your friends – that’s okay. But if you’re saying education is my God you can’t write poems.

1972 (696)