Few writers have gifted the
New Zealand poetry community to the degree Bill Manhire has -- not just in the
richness of the poetry and essays he has published and the anthologies he has
edited, but in the extra curricular activities he undertakes (and has
undertaken) as mentor, teacher, commentator, panelist, tweeter (consistently
comes up with useful links), reviewer, interviewer, and all-round promoter of
New Zealand poetry.
Bill's work has been
acknowledged in the numerous awards: winner of the New Zealand Book Award four
times, and the Poetry Category in 2006 for Lifted. He has received the Prime
Minister's Award for Poetry, is an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate, was
the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate, was an Antarctica New Zealand Arts
Fellow, and a Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow in Menton, France.
Bill was born in
Invercargill in 1946, and grew up in the Deep South, where his father was a
publican. Bill studied at the University of Otago and University College
London, and recently retired as the founding director of The International
Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria.
Last year saw the
publication of Selected
Poems, a collection that I reviewed for The New Zealand Herald (Victoria
University Press). The book itself is elegant -- lovingly produced, with an
exquisite cover featuring Ralph Hotere's portrait of Bill. You get the very
best of Bill when you enter the book - poems spanning decades of writing, poems
that reflect his characteristic wit along with his sideway entries into the
world. His poems often hold a little moment that you step into, and even though
they may be stitched together with a handful of words, you feel compelled to
linger ('The Lid Slides Back,' 'Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas,' 'It Is
Nearly Summer,' 'Girl Reading'). Other poems tackle grand subjects without
subsiding into melodrama, cliché or sentimentality. Instead they return to
the age-old comfort of rhyme and repetition, with the agile lines building (and
building) with musical finesse, and soft lines of traction hinting at the
deposits -- emotional, political or philosophical ('Hotel Emergencies,' 'Erebus
Voices,' '1950s'). These are poems that stick to you, that become part of your
daily routine. Perhaps, it is because they hark back to the joy of being read
to, some kind of magical incantation that can be short or long, but that always
draws you in and leads you back out into the ordinary extraordinariness of a
moment, or of the world ('The Ladder,' 'Kevin').
Bill kindly agreed to
answer some questions for Poetry Shelf:
Did your childhood
shape you as a poet? I loved the analogy you made between the tree-hut and
writing on Poetry Box – like a tree hut, you say, it is good if there is room
to get in, and maybe even sleepover.
Well, the best hut my
brother and I built was an urban one - in the abandoned lift shaft of the old
Carlton Hotel in Dunedin, which was out the back of the Crown, where we
lived. The location was like a bombsite – there'd been a fire; there was
lots of dead concrete, mangled steel, desperate vegetation. All that remained
of the Carlton, really, was the brick lift shaft, still climbing up the side of
the Grand Hotel. I suppose it was a lift shaft. We built several floors in
there. It was a bit dark and pointless, though it felt like a triumph as we did
it. It's all redeveloped now – part of the Southern Cross.
If I think about that, it
begins to look emblematic – setting down a pattern. Building your house in an
abandoned house – as if you needed the past in order to make something new. All
things fall and are built again, as Mr Yeats said, and a lot of poems are built
in the ruins of older ones – Eliot's The Waste Land would be
the great example.
Making huts involves making
and shaping – getting things to fit – as I think I said on Poetry Box. But, in
building a hut, you're also copying adult ways of managing the world, which is
what you do as a beginning writer.
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