Don’t get too attached to this way station.
It could be a cushion. It might be a cross.
You broke your back to get here and now
you want to stop? You think this is the top?
You think this is home, and friends, and dog
tail going thump thump thump? It’s not. It’s a trap.
Relax. The road is a flood where you, borne
up, are carried off your feet. Relax. Death
for you is sweet: the torrent is taking you way
out over the bar, to no return and who you are.
Harvey McQueen, poet, teacher, editor, 1934-2010.
I never met Harvey, but talked to him once on the phone, when he was looking – typically – for permission to publish another poet’s work in a new anthology of poems on gardens and gardening. He knew that I was close to Peter Hooper, and had contacted me to see if I knew who had the rights to a poem of his that he wanted to include. I happened to have the address of a next-of-kin, so was able to help. The Earth’s Deep Breathing: Garden Poems by New Zealand Poets duly appeared in 2007.
My first encounter with his work as an anthologist came when I was given a copy of the seminal 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, co-edited with Ian Wedde, and Margaret Orbell. She provided the Maori poetry with her own translations, plus a brilliant concise introduction to the Maori tradition that opened this unique collection. The fat 575 page paperback still looks striking today, with its red New Zealand Railways guards van parked up on a siding at Kaikoura (I think) gracing the cover – and the insert photo of an ancient railways’ points switch on the back.
Two working poets and the country’s leading scholar and translator of traditional Maori waiata had broken some completely new ground. Not only had they shifted the foundations from Allen Curnow’s pre-war generation of white males (with a smattering of women), to a include new voices such as Keri Hulme and Apirana Taylor, they had begun the conversation where it needed to begin – with Maori voices, hearking back to the early 1800s.
There were more women than ever, and a good number of babyboomer poets who would go on to justify their inclusion, some writing into the new millennium. But it was the decision to include Maori poetry that got up some people’s noses – including, famously, the contrarian critic C. K. Stead, who attacked with gusto in a Landfall review the whole idea of Maori poetry in translation belonging in an anthology of English poetry.
The editors were right: these poems belonged to the New Zealand English verse tradition as much as Maori and Pakeha now belonged to each other, and it was here, post-Baxter, that I got my first real exposure to the Maori tradition. I never got the chance to thank Harvey, or Margaret Orbell, for what they achieved; I have managed to tell Ian Wedde how grateful I am – so I think they are thanked in him.
Certainly, Margaret Orbell’s work in the Maori Department at the University of Canterbury paid rich dividends for me, when I was fortunate to be taught by two of her former pupils, Lyndsay Head and Jeanette King. Doctor Head supervised my thesis on Elsdon Best, which has led to book on his work appearing in the marketplace. We are all in debt to such profound ancestors who whose love for poetry, history, for scholarship itself – and the Maori language and its speakers – have helped to hold back the tide of linguistic oblivion that has been the fate of so many indigenous languages in the post-colonial era.
Harvey read and enjoyed my recent book of poems, Fly Boy, and said so in an entirely gratuitous and gracious review on his blog, Stoat Spring. I am delighted the book gave him pleasure; his whole approach to poetry, his enjoyment of it and his generosity in appreciation of the medium shine through in what he has to say:
http://stoatspring.blogspot.com/2010/11/fly-boy.html
Anthologists – good editors – are a generous and necessary bunch. Harvey has done us all proud. Even though I never met you, sir, I am going to miss you.
E te rangatira, e te kaituhituhi, kua wheturangitia i te rangi, haere ki to atua, moe mai, moe mai, moe mai ra! Chief, writer, a star shining in the heavens, go to your god, sleep, rest, sleep!
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 33 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 9 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about a picture per month.
The busiest day of the year was May 25th with 45 views. The most popular post that day was Tuesday Poem: Bach Life..
The top referring sites in 2010 were tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com, healthfitnesstherapy.com, obama-scandal-exposed.co.cc, mary-mccallum.blogspot.com, and hitztvshows.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for wordpress paparoa, poem on teeth, poem about teeth, paparoa wordpress, and the car by raymond carver.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Tuesday Poem: Bach Life. May 2010
7 comments
Tuesday Poem: teeth June 2010
3 comments
Tuesday Poem: Car troubles – for Raymond Carver. September 2010
2 comments
Tuesday Poem: How to recognise a psychopath in the catfood aisle August 2010
6 comments
New Zealand Poetry Day: He ruru mokemoke au. July 2010
10 comments
I used to be the man I was (but this is more comfortable…)
…now, here’s a confession, you know, the kind of
“I was a man who tried to make cabbage trees and taxis
stand in for his problems, and sorrows, the tax returns”, that
kind of bullshit. Now, I just rest easy: I say I am a taxi, $2 bucks
the flagfall, 50 cents a kilometre, anywhere, I’ll take you
anywhere you want to go, that’s poetry isn’t it, off to a place where
Amex is just fine? Tax? Nooo problem, I’m an IR 13 myself. Who needs
an accountant in this income bracket? No way, I’m kosher, Mr T. Kouka, prickly as a punk, with my falling leaves. Leaves? Shit no, they’re more
like spears, my hairs, good for fucking up rotary mowers when a big
Nor’wester plucks me bare, scatters my sabres right onto the lawn. Can’t
see why you get nostalgic once you leave such a beloved country – I don’t.
I don’t miss you one bit, mooning Kiwis, brooding poets, “Wish I was in
Wellington” – don’t make me laugh! If I was a taxi, a tax return, a cabbage
tree in Camden, you wouldn’t catch me sick for home. I’d put down
roots, so bugger that. You’re as bad as all those weeds who think that
a poem can change something, do something, be something more
than just a string of crazy words waiting to drop
off the end of a page
or a line
just like the one I fed you. Confessions? Boy-o-boy – you
want some kind
of priest?
DOWN IN THE MINES
(Traditional)
Come all you young fellows so young and so fine,
And seek not your fortune way down in the mine,
It’ll form as a habit and seep in your soul,
Till the stream of your blood turns as black as the coal.
Chorus:
For it’s dark as the dungeon, and damp as the dew,
The dangers are double and the pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines,
It’s as dark as the dungeon ‘way down in the mines.
There’s many a man that I’ve known in my day,
Who has lived just to labour his whole life away,
Like a fiend with his dope or a drunkard his wine,
A man would give all for the lure of the mine.
Chorus
I hope when I die and the ages shall roll,
That my body will blacken and turn into coal,
Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And I’ll pity those miners a’ diggin’ my bones.
Chorus
sonnet xiv.
A world of existence poised on the brink: Cuba
and Kennedy, my tarnished innocence. Wingie
McDonald was the first dead man I saw. They
called him that because he’d lost one arm: a
fall in the mine, a winch rope snapped in
the bush. Plenty of men in the town left bits
underground for the rats. Wingie was a
fielder for Blackball, down at the Domain.
We lay in the grass, bored in the sinking sun.
When Wingie fell over we thought he’d just
fainted, the team standing over him, all looking
down. Their faces got grimmer, they shooed us
away. A whisper went round the kids, “He’s dead!”
The first man I saw die, on Sunday, playing cricket.
Sonnet xxiii
In the house of my body I carry that river.
In the depths of my being I’m water. My
body’s the home of a wandering miner
too old to go down and too tired to go on.
When I stand on the world and look over
what’s living, what’s left, I’m the bridge
to the past and the road still unfolding.
Wheels and water, tracks and steam, all
the footprints beside the river, thousands
of hours spent double in blackness, a light
on my head to remind me I’m human. In
the shape of my bones I’m an NZR sleeper
and when my last shift comes, my Dog Watch
boys, lay me like coal by the sea at Karoro.
