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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

An Interview with James K. Baxter

page 356

An Interview with James K. Baxter

(Conducted by John Weir)

Why do you write poetry?

Well, that’s a question people often ask and the answer would have to be pretty subconscious. You’d know, you write poems yourself, you see . . . Perhaps a solitary adolescence. You talk to an imaginary companion – that would be the psychological cause: to fill that solitude with another voice – two people, yourself and yourself as poet. There was an Irishman who said his writing was a conversation between the older man and the younger man inside himself. Artists populate their solitude. That’s one answer. But why? Really it would differ from time to time and one wouldn’t be sure of the reasons.

Now in Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry you wrote ‘I don’t advocate that we should all put on sackcloth and ashes but I think it reasonable and necessary that poetry should contain moral truth, and that every poet should be a prophet according to his lights.’ You wrote that twenty years ago. Has your position changed in any way?

In some ways. I think there was a touch of subconscious arrogance in my attitude at that time – again quite natural – a certain crudity. One can’t inject a moral message into a poem, and a prophet is not a prophet because he chooses to be but because God makes him one. I mean was Jeremiah a poet or was he a prophet? Well, primarily prophet, I think. You see he didn’t say ‘Well, I’ll write a poem.’ A poem is a freer, more personal thing perhaps. It’s not a message to the world at large. Not quite.

You would agree then with Fairburn when he said ‘The man who sets out with a message is quite likely to be a maniac of some kind.’?

Yes, he’s quite likely to be. He may, of course, have a message to give, but this is not so common. Again it’s this matter of bringing light to the Gentiles: that in actual fact the Gentiles may be the source of one’s light – one’s friends, the people one meets. I’ve said in the Church often ‘Go out and learn from the atheists and agnostics. Don’t assume necessarily that you have some great thing to carry to them.’ What might be brought would be just intellectual furniture: the authenticity would come from parts of one’s own experience revealed. I think . . . well, poetry is often experience revealed. Yes.

page 357

Is the poet in any way committed to save society?

I think everyone is committed to save themselves and society together. I mean to keep spiritual life in themselves and in society as person whether they’re poet or not. But the poet is a man who holds up a mirror to what is happening. It’s the truthfulness of his mirror which is valuable – the moral element in the poem is in its truthfulness. Many people misunderstand this and think that one can just give a message, but the poem, I think, is a mirror. That’s the way it is.

Now art and propaganda are usually at cross-purposes. I think that you yourself have indicated that propaganda will work only if it is unconscious.

I think any propaganda is probably illicit in art because then the art is instrumental: it’s not just honest communication, to put it at its minimum. Now a Communist . . . you see the Marxist poets write bad poems because they’re propaganda. They’re wanting to prove something . . . But one has to say (and the same with the Christian poets when they are saying ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’ or start writing odes to St Joseph or something) there’s no point in this, because one is in just the same position as the man who says ‘I know nothing, I know nothing.’ I did say once ‘A Christian poet is in the same position as an agnostic one when he is writing.’ He is still dealing with an unknown life, unknown experience, trying to get it onto the page – a very subconscious process. He can’t put a public stamp on what he says.

Now then, when you use varieties of myth in your poems are you not going against your stated position of reflecting the world as it is?

Well, when you are dealing with the world you tend to see it as Chaos. Here is a scientist and he looks at the Chaos of the world, the multiple Chaos as it appears to the human mind – perhaps to the eye of God it is not Chaos at all, but to us it looks like Chaos – and he looks through his scientific lens and through that discipline he gives it an intellectual order. The poet does the same, I think, and the two – the scientific formula or the poem – are really equivalent. The poem is not more subjective: it’s just a different style. I think that’s the way it goes. And the myth is the form that the poet uses to crystallise experience.

In Pig Island Letters you said, ‘The poem is a plank / Laid over the lion’s den.’

Yes! One has to be pretty close to the fire, I think, pretty close to this position of Chaos. The nearer you are to it and can survive the better. One page 358 critic of my verse, a sympathetic critic, said that I was like a man who worked very close to the bull, a bullfighter. You almost get grazed by the horns. Perhaps you do. Perhaps the blood is helpful that goes into the poem. But this is just as man: one is not doing this as propagandist or anything like that.

Would that, perhaps, not make the poetry too personal?

Yes. There has to be some distance. The ‘I’ of the poem is not the autobiographical ‘I’; it is a dramatic ‘I’. The poem is a dramatic device which one uses. People mistake the capital ‘I’ of the poem (either the poet or the reader) for the personal ‘I’ – the ‘I’ that says ‘I think it’s a fine day . . .’ or ‘I love you . . .’, or something like that. No, that doesn’t make a poem: it’s a dramatic ‘I’. You see, I said once in a poem . . . I introduced the atheist self inside me and this became part of the poem. . . . If someone said, ‘You’re not an atheist, Jim . . .’ I’d say, ‘But for the sake of the poem I am.’ That layer of myself has to be represented dramatically. I think that’s right.

Does this not lead to contradictions within the same poem – to two voices speaking?

It mightn’t be – it might be ten voices. That one with Mother Mary Joseph Aubert. Well, she would represent part of my own mind – perhaps the rather housewife figure of the Church speaking – very much a pakeha figure, of course. But I’m speaking on behalf of something else – the Maori pa, perhaps, or the rather multiple world of experience. Of course there are contradictions – that is the drama. Men just live in contradictions: that’s the nature of man.

You announce yourself as a Catholic poet.

Yes.

What effect does this have on your verse?

Well, a man is a Catholic because he believes. He is a poet because he has a particular gift and function and also way of approaching things. If he says ‘I am going to tell the world they should be Catholics’, this would be absurd. But if he says ‘I am a Catholic poet . . .’ I think the practice of one’s religion has a very subtle effect on the way one thinks. I think that Catholic art – Christian art I’d rather say – at its best is wounded art. There is blood in it; you know, the wounds of the person are present in it. It’s close to the Crucifixion. It’s not Apollonian: it’s more Dionysiac.

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Do you regard this as bringing you closer to the world as it is – this view of the poem as a mirror of reality?

Well, I did. I sometimes call myself an ex-poet. It’s a joke in a way. At times I write poems, but perhaps I don’t give them a top priority. At a certain point for one’s own personal benefit one may have to smash the mirror. I remember when I was coming off the grog – it was in third-stage alcoholism – and I was writing some very, very good poems, I knew, which were of a negative, death-seeking kind (there were one or two that were really good, ‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’ I think, is one of them) but I realised that if I came off the grog and made a change in my life-style then my poetic mirrors would be shattered. And it did happen. For three or four years I was writing bad verse. I couldn’t write good verse because I was recovering, because I was reforming my life. But I think the life morally has to have priority over the work. Old Yeats said, you know, ‘Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.’ Well, alright, he was joking, I think. These things are never quite as severe or opposite as that.

In his review of Pig Island Letters Charles Brasch claimed that you wrote ‘phrases, not poems’ and regretted the diffusion of your poetic powers. How do you regard the role of aestheticism in art?

Well, Brasch himself would be an Apollonian poet, you see, and ‘Pig Island Letters’, that actual sequence, is more Dionysiac – the blood-from-thewound type-of-thing. There is a certain breakdown of form that occurs, but there is an advantage in spontaneity, I think, and in authenticity. I wanted that: just someone speaking authentically. There are other poems in that same volume though which are quite formal in their construction – the ‘Henley Pub’ poem, for example, has a highly formal construction, like, as I’ve said, a straitjacket to contain the experiences of the manic-depressive, or something like that. Again a joke – one has to joke all the time. I think that when you get near to this chaotic centre it’s best expressed in jokes often, and the poems may be jokes – quite serious jokes.

Does this mean that you find a place for aestheticism in your late poems?

Well, aestheticism . . . aesthetics is necessary: to have a form, a way of approaching things. One needs the form. When one begins to idolise the form or the artistic experience . . . this is where the danger comes in, a sort of idolatry. I don’t like that. It can happen so readily in our culture. Whereas actually the experiences of a poet or of another man are just the same: it’s just that the poet articulates them. That’s the difference.

page 360

The poems that you once wrote in the grand manner – ‘Wild Bees’, ‘Rocket Show’, ‘The Fallen House’, for example – how do you regard them now?

With regret and envy of another self who could make those formal structures so well. I think I did make them well, you see. I couldn’t do it now – my life-style has changed. Perhaps some of my brain-cells have gone that were there then. It’s possible. But I’d make use of the ones I’ve got. You get cunning. You learn to use the gaps in experience and develop new styles to cope with a different situation. Nevertheless, these very formal poems are rather circular: they’re closed in on themselves in a way, the perfect round, this kind of thing. I prefer one that is like a house with all its doors open. Anything could happen, you know.

Do you consider that the freedom of your late poems (I’m thinking of, for example, Pig Island Letters and Jerusalem Sonnets) reflects your life-style?

It does up to a point. Pig Island Letters – I thought ‘That book will break the critics’ teeth.’ I felt happy about it. The critics had sometimes annoyed me. It was not my reason for writing the poems, but it was a subsidiary thought. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll throw it into the jaw of that dog . . .’ and then he clamps his jaws on it and he finds he gets broken teeth, because it’s made of rock, you understand me. It had some solidity. But the ‘Jerusalem’ poems are different. They are more uneven. I’m not concerned with their quality, only with saying something. And some of them, I think are good; and some of them are not good. This doesn’t worry me.

Is there not, then, a necessary conflict between moralism and art?

I think there is. But a moralist often has fear. Now the thing is, as Maritain said, ‘The prudence of the bourgeoisie and the prudence of the artist are different.’ They both have their prudence. But they’re always in conflict. And the moralist tends to be exercising the prudence of the bourgeoisie. He may say ‘We don’t want our kids to read this . . .’ or something like that – that’s a crude moralist, I know. Or he may demand a message. And the poet says ‘To hell with your message and your children; I am writing to communicate truthfully, and truth can be terrible.’ That is his morality. Truth can be terrible, but I’ll speak truthfully. It is necessary that some voices should simply say what they think they know.

This is the role of the poet as prophet?

Yes. Truth, perhaps is prophetic in the sense that it will reveal relationships between man and man and possibly between man and God, you see. It will do page 361 this. But – I think this is the point – the prophet will not be troubled whether his poem is good or not; but the poet will be troubled whether his poem is good or not. And one can’t make a poem prophetic. Rimbaud’s Season in Hell happens to be a prophetic work, but I don’t think he designed it as such; it was very subconscious. It was rather the place it occupied in French culture and literature. It was not recognised at the time as being valuable.

You seek, then, a form of truth through your art?

Always, yes, I think truth has been predominant. I’ve sometimes said, you know, men are truth-people, women are love-people. We have to learn from one another. But some men are love-people, some women are truth-people. Perhaps that’s why there are more heavy, strong, male artists – because they are truth-people. But . . . I’m not discriminating against women or anything: I’m just saying that’s possible.

Now it has been predicted for us that the truth will set us free . . .

Mmmm.

. . . but the truth will also scandalise. Are people sometimes scandalised by what you regard as truth?

Yes, that’s right. When Gautama Buddha Sakyamuni went out and took his robe from the bodies of the dead – the yellow robe – and said, ‘The ego is a hole in the ground; it is a gap . . .’ people would be scandalised, wouldn’t they! And when he held up a flower for half an hour and said nothing, people would be scandalised, wouldn’t they! You see? But this was truth. Truth is hard to put a name to, isn’t it? And they want a name, and they want a fixed position because they want their own fixed identity which does not exist. I think that before God a man is a hole in the ground. Yeah.

Vulgarity in poetry sometimes shocks people too . . .

There has always been vulgarity; it’s a normal part of folk literature. It’s only because we are living in the ruins of the Victorian culture that we are so worried about the matter. Our position is confused, I think. Also the urban culture tends to cultivate the obscene. A folk culture, a country culture, a village culture does not have this in the same way. There are dimensions we’ve lost.

Have you found a folk dimension existing in New Zealand poetry?

It can be found. You have to dig under seven layers of concrete to find it: page 362 a little bit of it in Fairburn, a bit in Glover. I think in some of my own work. There would be other places, too. The attempt to find the ballad – but this is so hard for urban man. You see he hasn’t got a community. To make ballads you have to have communities. You’d find the folk culture in Maori songs, I’m sure. Well, talking of vulgarity, a woman makes songs for the shearers to sing. They’re extremely vulgar – from our point of view perhaps obscene. This is an upright woman. She’s making songs for the shearers to sing in Maori. There’s nothing peculiar about this in the Maori culture. They’d say ‘That’s fine!’, you see. Does this mean a failure in morality? Not at all! No!

You once wrote an article entitled ‘Why Writers Stop Writing’. In this you stated that Christianity would supply both the framework and the tensions necessary for a man to continue writing poetry. In your present situation do you still manage to write?

Well, I do write, yes, from time to time, when I have leisure and when there seems some imperative reason. Sometimes my poems are instrumental, that is to say ‘Ballad of the Stonegut Sugar Works’ . . . it is like a Marxist poem. Nevertheless it is true of its kind, I think. And the ‘Ballad of the Junkies and the Fuzz’ – again it is social poetry to some extent, poetry of community perhaps. I would not be so desperately concerned with how well the poem is made as I once would have been. ‘Why Writers Stop Writing’ – well, to apply this Christian plaster to the social boil, I don’t see it that way now. I think rather ‘We are men and have to learn to love one another and speak the truth.’ Perhaps I’m more concerned with the Church Invisible . . . charitas, the love present in each man’s heart which will bring him to Heaven and to God and join him to his fellow men. But this is not a doctrinal matter any longer. Perhaps at that time I thought doctrine would heal more than it does heal.

Perhaps the fundamental weakness of poetry of social criticism is that it tends to propagandise and doesn’t contain the tensions necessary for good poetry.

That’s right! It doesn’t contain the conflict, the ineradicable conflict and contradiction of life at the centre of a man’s heart. We could genuinely say, ‘Perhaps this is the Cross, you see, buried in each man’s heart.’ A man’s life is always a contradiction. He has to accept it and, if he’s a poet, express it in his work . . . accept the pain of it and express it in his work. And then others say ‘This voice is authentic . . .’ you see, because it is the voice of their own contradiction. You find it in Karl Shapiro’s

Let the wind blow for many a man shall die.
Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart
Clumps in the breast with heavy stride.
page 363 The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart,
The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide.

This is a human man, you know. He’s there in the Islands – a soldier, a man, an American soldier, but just a man. A man grows old. He falls apart. This is a contradiction when we are also immortal, you see. There’s no resolution to it in this life.

Well, a fundamental anarchy seems to rest at the centre of your way of life. I’m thinking of your lines ‘The waves do not debase / Or drown what shares their fluid motion.’ Would you comment on this?

One may seem at times to be debased or drowned, but then one comes up again like the dolphin. Perhaps this is Grace, I don’t know. But I think that what is expressed there is the fundamental anarchy at the heart not of a way of life chosen but of life itself not chosen. It is there, anyway, at the heart of every man’s life. The horror of moving into that area of fundamental anarchy is the horror that the writer . . . because it’s like that tohu and bohu, the Chaos at the beginning of the world when the Holy Spirit moved on that Chaos. That Chaos is inside the human heart. We are in process of being created; we are not fully-formed creatures. And this anarchy is very painful to us, perhaps the most painful thing in the world – to know that one is a heap of Chaos being made into something.

And the poem civilises that Chaos?

It does not civilise it, but it gives it a form. It gets as near as possible. It has a great respect for this Chaos, this potential, and doesn’t try to mutilate it, and it tries to hold up a mirror to it. And then the poem has strength because it is true.

You were considered a very promising young New Zealand poet . . .

Oh, I know; yes.

What pressures did that create?

It does falsify things. Well, one ceases to be young. And what is the promise of? – the promise of something which others wish you to be. Well one’s life or one’s writing always turns out quite different from what either oneself or others wish or expect it to be. And then it’s good to be about five jumps ahead of the critics, you know (if one is talking in the style of a tradesman) . . . to be ten jumps ahead of them. Let them be behind picking up the pieces while you page 364 go and do something else. Then you’re in the clear ground, eh! Their view of the work does not give the work its quality: it either has that quality or lacks it. The critic doesn’t give the work its quality: often we think he does. (It’s like the teacher thinking he can instruct: all he can do is bring out what’s there already in the child.)

Some critics would think that you haven’t fulfilled that early promise and they look back, perhaps with regret, to the work of Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness and The Fallen House. They would seem to regret the kind of shift that your life and work have taken.

Ah well, old Yeats said ‘Now I must wither into the truth,’ and that is a statement of liberation, I think . . . to become oneself, an old man standing on the ground, in my case with bare feet – that may be ostentatious. But then if one speaks, perhaps it’s one’s own voice and not the echoes of other people any longer. They wanted this brocade, you know, again as Yeats said, ‘This brocade of old embroideries.’ Well, it was suitable at the time. Fairburn begins lush but then he hardens – the lush plant hardening into a strong stick, you know, to beat people with perhaps, or swing round his head, a shillelagh. One needs the shillelagh, eh! Truth is what I would consider important, not the way one appears in the eyes of other people.

Speaking of Fairburn . . . he thought of life as a search for meaning and wrote, ‘The more intensely we live the more intensely we are able to realise value . . .’, and he added, ‘It’s the great negative principles – eternity, death, silence – that constitute the mode of our awareness.’ Would you comment on this?

Yes. I think it was Edna O’Brien, the Irish novelist, who spoke of a stone wall in the ground. You know, here is this stone wall and it was built by the peasants. It is a symbol of their own life. It endures. They last longer than the life of a man, these boulders in the ground. They’re like tombstones, these stones, and they’re silent. And myself: I find that my own mind more and more gravitates towards this position of silence, death, eternity, whatever you like – the point of peace actually . . . rangimarie, the state of peace. To be there, in that gap! And the poems will come from there at times like water out of the rock.

On the other hand that need, that want, may lead you to refrain from writing?

Yes, yes, blessedly one might refrain from writing. That’s so. When I get to Heaven, if I ever do, the Lord would say, ‘You have spoken perhaps ten billion words during your life. Now that’s too many. Were they good words or bad words, were they true or false?’ I’d have to say, ‘Well, Lord, you gave page 365 me a voice, and you gave men a voice. You know they talk all the time. Most of them are false in some sense. It can’t be helped.’

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