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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

[Baxter on his own Poetry]

[Baxter on his own Poetry]

The problem for me in the Forties and Fifties was to get rid of the mere echo language in my poems, the twists of phrase (and so of thought also) that belonged by right to Hardy or Yeats or Dylan Thomas or Louis MacNeice. I have been from the start a very imitative writer. Not a bad thing in itself,page 748 if one already has some deep particular experience for a particular poem to grow from – I am not inventive in the making of new stanza-forms, and so take them regularly from other people – but the habit is dangerous when the experience behind one’s own poem is weak or trivial.

In the final published version of the poem ‘Wild Bees’ the stanza-form is lifted from Louis MacNeice (a loose six-line stanza, like a bundle of faggots, with two rhyming lines tied round it like a cord) – but that poem was well founded in experience, and had gone already through several drafts, beginning with the crude version I wrote in stress hexameters when I was fifteen. But there are other poems, particularly those influenced by Yeats, in which the content itself was manufactured to fit the other man’s style. I think I have learnt to recognise and reject these. The temptation to write them is strongest when one is fiddling with words in a time of dryness.

At the same time, another man’s poem may act as the detonator to set off various land-mines of buried experience in oneself. I find Lawrence Durrell and Robert Lowell particularly helpful in this way – Durrell loosens up the chains of association, helping me to avoid heavy aphorisms about Time or God, and keep the eye on the invaluable sensory image; Lowell has helped me to use words as a straitjacket to contain the violent experiences of the manic- depressive cycle. Both have led me nearer to my own true subjects. Neither poet is a New Zealander.

Our people do not seem, even in any embryonic fashion, to regard local places or events as a focus for legend. As a result they must regard the private legend-making of our poets as an inexplicable cult, the kind of yoga performed for reasons of health on sunny mornings. This is a real privation. One lacks an audience because the audience lacks certain interior facilities that other races have regarded as part of the normal human equipment. I am reminded of the story of the Thai poet who was sent on a diplomatic mission to a southern province. His mission was unsuccessful; for he fell foul of the governor of the province by making unsuitable proposals to the governor’s wife. A few minutes before his execution he wrote his last poem – a satire, no doubt, on the governor, written with his bare toe in the dust of the execution ground. It is highly probable that the poem was memorised by his audience on the spot, and recited in the huts that night. One feels a certain nostalgia for the situation where such a close rapport between poet and audience was possible. The same man (wearing your clothes or mine) receiving shock treatment in a New Zealand mental hospital, would find the nurses and his fellow-inmates less open to the seed of private knowledge.

Two methods appeal to me, at the moment, according to the kind of poem I am making – a straitjacket of formal rhetoric, with full rhymes and references to Greek mythology, fathered by Robert Lowell, to deal with the experiences of those who habitually embrace red-hot stoves; or a loose hencoop, erected by rule-of-thumb bush carpentry, fathered by nobody,page 749 with half-rhymes and speech rhythms, to deal with what happens, or fails to happen, in the doldrums.

I learnt from Denis Glover long ago to leave out most adjectives. The sessions were conducted in the Gladstone Hotel, where Glover’s contemplative powers had their full flowering. I learnt from Louis Johnson that New Zealand and the continent of Europe are joined under water; and that women also can be people. This last discovery is one I am still pondering over.

There is a spot in the arena to which the fighting bull returns (a different spot for each bull) and from which he comes out more assured and formidable. For me it was once the beaches of the place I grew up in; then the pub; and latterly perhaps the hour of death which one looks forward to. If this spot is correctly located one can generally go on writing.

1965 (368)