Five minutes with Kevin Ireland

Kevin Ireland (‘Self-portrait in a straw hat’, oil on canvas, 500mm x 600) tells us he’s always been lazy. That explains his meagre output of sixteen collections of poetry, five works of non-fiction, a collection of short stories (Sleeping with the Angels), three novels (Blowing My Top, The Man Who Never Lived and The Craymore Affair), an opera libretto (The Snow Queen, published by the BBC and translated into French) and a book on the New Zealand novel (The New Zealand Collection). Did we mention the paintings? His writing career began when, in the 1950s, he became part of Frank Sargeson’s “pressure cooker school of writing” in a Takapuna shed. “In the evenings we would drink Lemora wine,” he has recalled, “and people like Keith Sinclair, Kendrick Smithyman, Janet Frame and Maurice Duggan would drop in every night of the week. It was a wonderful, stimulating, exciting time, an oasis of common sense and literary excitement in the dull and conventional environment of the 1950s.”

He has described his life in his memoirs Under the Bridge & Over the Moon (1998), which won a Montana prize, and Backwards to Forwards (2002). He also has a National Book Award for Poetry, a Scholarship in Letters, the 1990 Commemoration Medal and an OBE for services to literature. In 2000 he was made a Doctor of Literature by Massey University. He is a former National President of PEN and a member and the current deputy-chair of the Sargeson Trust. In 2004 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for poetry. He’s our Billy Collins and should be New Zealand’s poet laureate.

Why do you write poetry?

“I’ve never been able to find a plausible reason for sticking with an art so demanding and so odd. I’ve tried in several poems to explain this curious compulsion for constructing word-shapes on paper. For instance, I’ve described how it simply happened to be perfect weather for writing, or how it turned out just to be round-up time in the pastures of the mind. I think this is about as close as it’s possible to get without being dishonest or absurdly high-falutin.”

You have written a book about fishing. Do you often write poems in your head while you’re fishing and, if so, do you have to write them down immediately?

“No. I’ve never written a poem in my head while fishing. The total experience of being on a river or lake unconditionally consumes every minute spent there. I work at poems in a similar way, by giving my entire time to them while sitting down at a desk. There may be a bit of doodling, but there’s no lying around or lolling about. Useful ‘starters’ for poems are more likely to suggest themselves when the mind is completely disengaged — for instance, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, or when walking the dog. I seldom take notes, because I find that the words start freezing up before I’ve managed to get them all down. The general notion of a starter, toyed about with in the head, is usually enough to go on. Only on rare occasions have I dreamed up a whole poem then simply tipped it out onto a page. The real art in poetry is to make careful revision look as though it’s as natural as a chance remark.”

The winner of a recent New Zealand poetry competition was a typographically left-right justified column of impenetrable text. By what definition it is a poem and not prose is unclear. The judge voted a much more coherent poem the second runner-up and raved about the winner, claiming the poet hadn’t put a foot wrong. Is incomprehensibility the main criterion for the success of a poem for the publishers of NZ poetry nowadays?

“There are no set definitions. Like the song says ‘anything goes’ — though as the song also goes on to point out, there happen to be certain things that can provide a special buzz, and obviously incomprehensible texts are a stunning turn-on for some people. They have little interest and no excitements as far as I’m concerned, and some amuse me as examples of smug drivel, but they don’t alarm or bother me, and I certainly don’t think that incomprehensibility is a ‘main criterion’ for winning a competition or for getting published here or anywhere else. It’s just that on the day this poem fell into a sympathetic judge’s hands. All prizes have a large element of a lucky dip about them. Winners should always take the money and run. No one should ever believe in them.”

You’ve worked as a sub-editor, both here and in Britain on big papers like The Times. Do you miss ‘Fleet Street’, and what do you think of APN’s ‘experiment’ to outsource sub-editing on its New Zealand newspapers to Pagemasters, which is owned by the company’s competitors, with the loss of around 70 sub-editors’ jobs?

“Fleet Street doesn’t exist any longer. The papers have gone and the whole bizarre Dickensian set-up with them. The miracle is that they lasted there so long. I got out just in time. What’s happening here with job cuts is what’s been going on just about everywhere else as newspapers have changed from being providers of hard news and political views to daily magazines of colour pictures decorated by shallow texts about murders, abductions, teenage drivers, dogs, fashions, personalities, entertainment, health issues, etc. Getting rid of the people who once maintained editorial standards is just another part of a certain-death process.”

In your poem Wasted Days (from Airports and Other Wasted Days) you say “...every wasted day accrues/in pleasure” and “I think of things/not done as buried treasure”. What’s your secret: meditation, deep breathing, the accumulated wisdom of age, or have you always felt this way?

“I’ve always been lazy. Anyone who writes poetry has too much time on their hands. Writing novels is a sure sign of an idle mind. I have no idea how I’ve managed to publish more than two dozen books and a huge bundle of miscellaneous meanderings and articles. If it wasn’t for my indolence there would have been heaps more.”

In On Getting Old (Four Winds Press), you write: “I’m working harder than ever before, not just because I am absorbed in my work, but because, as I grow older, it is becoming more of a task to get the shambling words down on paper.” Do you have any tips for those who are struggling under the weight of an increasing workload?

“I’d advise anyone suffering from an increasing workload to buck up and stop whingeing. It’s like sex or drinking — someone has to do it, so try to get on with it cheerfully.”

Your poem A Different Country looks at first temptingly into New Zealand’s past before ending on a slightly sour note (“In fact,/everything would have been fine/but for the measly morality/and the greyness, with every poor/bastard toeing the line.”) Has New Zealand society generally improved or worsened since those days, and how?

“It’s managed to do both. We may have once had a lot more time to do a lot less in, but we went about things with determination and social generosity. For those of us who did not conform to the exacting public standards of the 1950s, being out of step had its moments of excitement, good fellowship and great fun — pleasures that no longer derive to the same extent from that source, though I’m sure they have not diminished in general. We were a snooping, puritan, bitter pack at our worst and an obliging, larrikin, egalitarian mob when the going was good. We’ve lost a bit of that classless and independent streak along with the conformist excesses, but at least we’re fairly relaxed about it. I enjoy life here and now, and I prefer the country we’ve now made, in spite of some criticisms. I think things are better than they ever were — and I’m absolutely certain they’re far better than the alternative.”

If NZBC readers only read one book of poetry, which book should it be?

“Quite naturally, the latest. It’s called Airports and Other Wasted Days and it’s still hot off the press. And let me take this opportunity to remind the nation that 50 or 60 years ago every citizen actually would have had a public duty to buy a copy of it. I don’t think we should let our civic standards slip. Besides, there’s a wonderful cover illustration by Malcolm Evans, so the book will look good just left lying about on the table.”

Xtra’s official response

“We recently added another layer of spam protection to our network. To put it in simple terms this works on a range of triggers that are matched against mail servers or internet address ranges known to be a source of spam. It then defers attempts to send mail to us from these sources if certain triggers are hit. This is considered international best practice and is used by leading Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the world.

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“We have now eased the settings on this anti-spam platform and will continue to fine tune it over coming weeks. This will help to prevent legitimate emails being delayed.

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