Interview conducted by Patricia Prime via email in August, 2003.
[Go to poems]
Prime: What brought about your decision to leave New Zealand for Australia?
Oliver: I’d first visited Sydney at the close of 1978 on my way through to Crete. I stayed for a couple of weeks which included Christmas, and ended up in Hania, Crete for the New Year. This was my first trip overseas and I couldn’t speak for two weeks. The local vino soon took care of that! Two years later I returned to Auckland. That was around 1980. In 1986 I left, rather confusedly, for Sydney. My intention was to make some quick money as a voice over and return to NZ and buy a house after about two years. I never intended to get waylaid in Australia, and I still haven’t bought a house, alas, now well beyond my reach — but I’m still here, why? I don’t know — I feel about as home in Australia as I did in NZ — and as far as my restive spirit goes — that’s not very at home. Somehow, I always feel as though I should be somewhere else. A form I nostalgia, I suppose; a yearning for an Eden that doesn’t exist.
P: You tell readers you are a transtasman poet. What does this term mean to you?
O: This is a term borne out of isolation and one I coined to express several attitudes. Simply put — I telescoped (as I have explained elsewhere) the term, Trans-Tasman into one word in lower case, transtasman, much like, transatlantic. This invention seems to have generated a certain amount of interest. At one level the term suggests an anti-nationalistic stance, and a hybrid culture which has come out of, and belongs to, both countries — at least, as far as my own work is concerned. This is a poetic expression which comes of a dynamic experience of both countries without any partisan component to it. In fact, the precise coordinates of the transtasman grid are: Lat. 25°/50° South. Long. 145°/180° East. The term seems to upset a few indigents much in the way saying, ‘I don’t vote’ does. This is all to the Common Good as far as I am concerned.
P: You’ve lived in Australia for several years. Do you feel part of the Australian literary community?
O: Hardly, in fact — progressively, I feel wholly apart from any direct literary proceedings just as I feel apart from literary proceedings in NZ. The former comes from a non-participatory attitude, I suppose; I live a fairly isolated life as far as my writing and direct engagement with the literati is concerned, and the latter comes of being out of the country for about 16 years, effectively. My work is my banner, as it appears in literary journals and the books I publish. I do not belong to any one literary clique or school and detest such factions. Probably accounts for why I’ve never had any literary grant or funding in my life.
P: Have you been involved with the Queensland Poetry Festival?
O: Only in the Queensland ‘Subverse Festival’ as an invited guest and poet in 2000 — and, (as far as I could tell) as much a rabid gossip-fest as anything else. Pity.
P: What do you see as the major differences between New Zealand and Australian poetry?
O: I think NZ poetry still holds onto a ‘filigreed’ lyricism, for all its protestations of post-modernist posturing — the two countries are post-colonial settlements, and both possess equally recent histories of barbarities to the first nation peoples, share a colonial architecture, and similarly, raw environmental concerns because memory of the ruination of the natural habitat is more recent than European histories that have perhaps become comfortable historical chapters stacked into what we call centuries. We can still hear the musket cracks in our more recent times. However, given the information technologies and rapid advancement in communication — poetics, or modern poetics in both countries appears to be falling into a ‘complex sameness’ of expression. One can just as easily write ‘effectively’ about a gangland shooting in an American supermarket in Auckland as you can in Sydney, as you can in Mullimbimby or Dunedin — for that matter. Privacy doesn’t exist in language these days.
P: The poem sequence ‘Deadly Pollen’ unfolds slowly, building a narrative and taking time to enlarge on its ironies. I wonder if you see a final shape to your sequence?
O: Sequences to me suggest an open-ended view — as though one were looking simultaneously through both ends of the telescope at once. These things have their natural inhalation and exhalation, a breath-taking that empties out like a set of bellows soon enough. Poem cycles and sequences are micro-histories, journeys into an imagistic inscape as much for the reader as for the writer of them. I think the shape decides itself in the execution of the work.
P: Why did you choose the almost sonnet-like form for the poems in the sequence?
O: Not strictly the sonnet form — though I have written, and enjoy writing sonnets. There are about half dozen traditional sonnet structures in my most recent title, Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions (Greywacke Press, Sydney, 2003). These sequences, like — Islands of Wilderness - A Romance, and Deadly Pollen, and groupings of one or two other poems I published, often fall to somewhere between 11 and 14 lines. This is not intentional. This seems to be the natural run for each developed thought that belongs to each verbal unit — it’s just where the poem runs out, at its optimum point of compression.
P: Can you talk about imagery, form and structure in your poetry?
O: Let me put it this way:
DANGER, IMAGIST AT WORK (1)
(The poet seeks the higher ground from which
to make his faithless speculations.)
Twilight, a shell-thin moon, blue gulls
passing slowly under, the air rinsed, molecular.
White corpuscles brilliantly fleck a burlesque sky.
Though gravity binds us to the daily round
we are a species who would outbreed the stars.
As though there were infinite safety in numerology.
A reviewer of my last collection, Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000 (HeadworX, 2001), curiously pointed out that one or two of my poems suggested an imagist approach and that these were as good as anything T.E. Hulme ever wrote. My response, having never really thought of it in those terms, was to write an ‘imagist’ poem, which is a delightful exercise in compression and irony. I like the heightened effect, epiphany, and vision, and enjoy reading those writers who illustrate such elevations. From St. John of the Cross, to Auden. An original image is the pictographic representation of a new perception — when it passes into thought it becomes history. Points of revelation do exist. And structure has much to do with the containment and preservation of poetic execution. I wonder how many poets today can pull off the writing of a Ballad in the manner that Baxter did. Few, if any, I suspect. A working knowledge of traditional form and structure is an exercise in expansion, not an end in itself.
P: Do you use poetry as a kind of political act, a kind of subversive strategy through which your readers should be arrested and even assaulted?
O: I see nothing wrong with rhetoric — though not of the Howl/Ginsberg kind. Too high camp by half, my dear! Such rhetoric seems to work better within the American vernacular, and seems to go well with wagon trains somehow — you can see it in Hart Crane, too — but when we attempt to use it, the effect is rather stultified in a 19th century way. I think it has a lot to do with colloquial speech patterns which come naturally to the American rhythmic drawl — they didn’t have to struggle through Victoriana — with us its cut glass accents and old brocade. With the Americans there’s the smell of burnt hickory about it. Anyhow, for a while, and especially in the writing of the poem sequence, The Still Watches, I was attempting to engage directly with ‘the noise of the world’. So many of the themes in that work deal with the political conflagrations of the era, etc. Darkness made visible.
P: What do you think you learned – or learned about yourself – from working in Paris, Vienna, London, Greece and Israel?
O: You learn what anybody else learns who has similar experiences for the first time — you wish to be accepted, and for a time, you may make a small life for yourself within somebody else’s orbit — before you move on — or are forced to move on. I found I could write anywhere — seems an odd thing to say, I suppose — but knowing that, to me at least lessens the threat of becoming ‘too guarded’ about the whole process — my poetic constitution appears fairly robust. Nevertheless, you are in travelling still chasing down something elusive, or that doesn’t exist beyond the realms of fantasy. A little like the ancient Irish bards seeking out the glass Island, or the hollow and floating island...
P: Did it open your mind to other cultures, and did it help you to put your own experiences into perspective?
O: Yes, I found that folk are as vulnerable as I am. That people know as much or as little as I do. The ‘charge’ comes in the exchange, shared curiosity about each other, and each other’s sensitivities, losses.
P: Did you turn to broadcasting to make your views more accessible?
O: No, if anything I wanted activities removed from literary groups — I first found myself in broadcasting with live ‘broadcast to school’ on Radio NZ, National Radio (Wellington) around about 1969, then presented by Fiona Kidman. I believe she was at that time getting up at 5am to write her novels. Broadcasting was more an activity I drifted into, really. I was good at it. I found that, for a time in the 70s this was an easy way to get around NZ and a quick way to make money without trying — from station to station. I worked in various capacities as copywriter, newsreader, journalist, voice over, occasional announcer and broadcaster with both state and private radio in Wellington, Dunedin, Auckland, Whangarei. Sort of thing you did easily in your youth, something of an adventure — and yet, the writing side of it — I always kept apart. I lived a dichotomized existence. It worked for a while and allowed to me get money to travel. Ultimately, I gave it away because I couldn’t handle the bullshit of free lance voice work though I was for a while, considered one of the best half dozen voices in NZ. I learnt a few vocal skills. Endless repetition hones timing.
P: Why have you turned to CDs to showcase your poetry?
O: The recording you are referring to is called, King Hit - Selected Readings. I’ve read a number of my poems to original music by Matt Ottley, a very gifted musician and composer here in Australia. Also a highly regarded picture book illustrator — the same Matt Ottley who illustrated my recent book, Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions. This project has taken some four years to complete. And this is exactly how I wish, or had always intended to use my voice... ever since as a secondary schoolboy having listened to the recordings of Dylan Thomas, and Richard Burton, and a number of others. Of course, you could not use the same stentorian method now... but to record my voice in this fashion is something I had always intended to achieve. And this project is the result. King Hit is more than just a so called, ‘spoken-word’ recording — the work contains jazz, opera, rock, modern classical, instrumental, modes of expression. There is voice without music and with music. A true collaboration, in other words, and a showcase of talent from two artists who work well together. The next battle is to get the thing released — and that is now where I am with the work. Difficult when you consider that you’re up against rampant commercialism... and so the story continues...
P: Have you written for the stage or screen?
No — though I am haunted by the wish to write a stage play, or play for television... I started out reading all the plays of G.B. Shaw, a certain amount of Shakespeare, through to Fry, Pinter, Osborne, Miller, Potter, Beckett, Yeats, Joe Orton, Eliot, Stoppard, etc, I remember being deeply impressed when I first read Pirandello’s The Man With The Flower In His Mouth, however, though haven’t pursued the more recent dramaturges, I must confess... I’d like to think there’s a play in there somewhere...
P: What feels different to you about your new book, ‘Ballads, Satire & Salt – A Book of Diversions’?
O: Ballads is something of special project for me... Started in the early 80s, and involving traditional forms in a colloquial context — some of the hardest poems I’ve ever had to write! So the whole thing has accrued slowly over a couple of decades and is, I believe, a display of technical proficiency as far as poetic forms go... who knows how it will be received... I ‘feel’ that the timing is now right for this work... certainly, there is nothing more I can do with it and, at the risk of the damn thing becoming an albatross around my neck, I’ve decided to release it upon an unsuspecting public.
P: What do you feel about the influence of creative writing courses on young writers?
O: Well, they’ve already cloned ‘Dolly the Sheep’ — haven’t they... ?
P: Who has influenced your own writing?
O: For that, I’d refer you to an essay (in part) I published in JAAM 15. And in the recent interview on Word Riot [see Stephen Oliver interview with Will Roby]. Generally, those writers who are related, at least in my mind, with a heightened imagination and imagery — the bardic tradition that found its well spring in maybe ancient Irish texts like the Instructions of Cormac from around A.D. 250 through to R.S. Thomas — the last of the great bardic poets — the visionaries, in other words — who but R.S. could come up with a title for a final book of poetry called No Truce With The Furies. The Russian novelists and poets of the latter part of the 19th Century, Balsac, Geman Expressionism, The paintings of August Macke and Kandinsky and Klee, et al. Recently I’ve landed a copy of Ernesto Cardenal’s Cosmic Canticle — sent to me by the author himself — which I suspect will turn me sideways when I get a chance to read it...
P: Receiving coverage is the first hurdle for writers, but once that’s achieved, what do you expect from reviews?
O: Objectivity, and an honest assessment of the work, balance without bias.
P: How far do you feel your private life is impinged upon through publication of your poems?
O: Not so much by the publication, more by the actual writing of the poems I fear! No — I am one among many in a crowed upon the street — a man without a bridge in search of a river.
P: How do you know you are on to your next book?
O: When I’ve started writing a group or cycle of poems that I know will take me ‘into the heart of the matter’ at which point I can visualise a book continuing, and evolving from that platform. Then I can see the book, and I write toward it. Build the bridge.
P: Can you tell readers what you are going to work on next?
O: Completing a book of essays which would loosely come under the banner, ‘creative non-fiction’, and titled Talk, Chalk And Asphalt Days — a few of which can be found online at Thylazine (Archives) and on NZEPC under the essays & Interviews section.
Poems:
from Deadly Pollen
--
The day combustible as a
nightclub. Destruction works
in big, blunt gestures. An
explosion is no rediscovery, it’s
return without guide to the
deepest sink hole from whence
hell’s laughter issues. A
sucking into nothingness; void
behind the twin masks of
light and dark. Not repetition
but continuance. Pre-beginnings.
A precise point of death
qua death, not infinity but
limitlessness, pain’s spectrum.
--
Compression of bees,
shrub-shaped, in proton loops,
on cushioned air. Spring!
See the counter, its bright ticking
with fail-safe growth. Who put
it there? this tubular, tight package,
green and red wires running to
hidden terminals — watch the numerals
flick over, air fill with warmth,
this thing ready to go off at a season’s
notice, a bursting forth, flash
of filmic green and bloom
too quick to catch as we exit our
buildings in a rush to see it.
--
Scent makes the air visible,
seasonal; autumn lays its long
scaffolding of shadow under wood
smoke; winter smells of damp
brickwork; spring lifts the lid on
lighter smells — is something
between cleaning fluids or garden.
Only late at night true secrets
and scents are disclosed; summer
tightens. Scent is a map of an
ancient journey. The poem prints —
makes a seal of every season,
its message delivered and read.
– from Deadly Pollen (Word Riot Press, Middletown, NJ, 2003)
To The Floating Isles
Autumn is chequered as a flannel shirt. Folk here are at home in the river
valleys that make wide, swinging turns. The big rivers and the big
mountains. Look, Stranger, on these islands now nothing leaps to view but
goats if you get in close enough, (like) on a chopper-shoot out through
plateaux and orchilla lichens’ purpling terrain. A swirl of black and
white bobs and dapples over the high country’s oxidate palette. Monumental
river boulders piled up like hulks in a car wrecker’s yard.
Once the earth’s axis tilted and shifted, stretching the global latitudes
like a hair net. The Gods relocated to foreign regions, created a few
disordered landmasses along the way. Climates ran hot and cold. Tropical
fauna unfolded. Glaciers like herds of unicorn reared, and retreated. Any
God’s guess as to which way was up. The world, an undiscovered psychic
garden, lay in wait.
Not surprisingly, such sentiments are anathema to the ‘Rio Earth Summit’
repeat performances, the ‘Kyoto / Montreal Protocols’, the ‘World $ummit
On $ustainable Development’ (W$$D). “Our World Is Not For Sale”
enviro-activists fulminate against an immoveable corporate mind set, and
its insistence upon greed and greenwash.
Traceries may yet be found in bestiaries, compendiums on forgotten
mythologies and migrations. Like any act of faith discovery is mostly
guesswork.“I’d rather go to a country where melancholy means something
more than emptiness struggling with itself.” Dimly heard, Stranger, in
deepest sleep.
