SEPTEMBER 7 2019 LISTENER 49
Poet Laureate David Eggleton: “Everyone is
interested now in what poetry can do and what
it is saying.”chopped and changed and moved around.
I enjoy exploring that, the tension
between the individual and the society
individuals find themselves in.”E
ggleton’s reputation as a poet, art critic
and editor began, and in many ways
still exists, on the margins of New Zea-
land’s cultural life, a satiric poet delivering
his distinctive blend of the vernacular and
the lyrical, the hard-hitting and achingly
astute, from a street-level launchpad of
pubs and cafes, student unions and poetry
slams.
Born in Auckland in 1952, he spent
much of his early childhood in Fiji – his
mother was Rotuman and his father
Palagi, “so he had advantages of the colo-
nial mindset of the time and my mother
was taken up into that”.
He was nine when the family returned
to New Zealand, to Māngere East in
South Auckland. He left school early, and
dropped out of university. “There was a
disconnect between what I was hearingand what I was reading. I felt instinctively
it wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to
do. I saw in high culture you were sup-
posed to write this sort of poem and I
rejected that entirely.”
He published his own poetry broad-
sheets and forged a path as a performance
poet, combining the literary legacy of
James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare and Denis
Glover with the spirited idiom of popular
entertainers such as Billy T James and Fred
Dagg and the vernacular of the factory
floor and the workshed.
“They were attitudes that weren’t
really being expressed. They were beingmodified or domesticated, tamed down,
made anodyne. I was interested in that
more colourful side, learning a respect for
the vernacular, the Kiwi idiom.”
But this, he says, was at an “extreme
angle” to the mainstream literature of the
time. Poetry was like modernism, a rare-
fied concept with gatekeepers on patrol:
“This has remained fairly true.”
His poetry was rejected by the liter-
ary publications of the day: too raw, too
rough, too inappropriate. “But I kept
going with the same kind of attitude. Per-
haps my craft was becoming more refined,
but I still have the same underlying, not
antagonism but tensions in my approach
to living in this country.”
Those tensions, the rhythm, the sheer
insistence of his voice, have since won
him a raft of awards for poetry and art
criticism. He has made documentaries,
CDs and short films and written his-
tories of New Zealand rock music and
photography.
Now based in Dunedin, he was editor of
Landfall from 2009 to 2017 and co-editor
of the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His
seventh collection of poems, The Conch
Trumpet, won the Ockham New Zealand
Book Award for Poetry in 2016, the same
year he received the Prime Minister’s
Award for Excellence in Poetry.
Where once he stood on the mar-
gins, now, he says, “everyone considers
themselves a bit of an outsider. We are
clustering together in this strange new
world, thanks to technology and globalisa-
tion, but underlying that we still have this
strong iconography that represents the
spirit of this place, so there’s tremendous
tension going on with that globalisation.”
Within this strange new world, poetry
seems to be growing in importance, he
says. “You only have to notice the sheer
number of poets around, and people in
the arts generally. We have got to a situa-
tion where people trust poems more than
they trust the news – the authenticity
of the emotion in a poem speaks more
profoundly now than ever. Poetry went
through a bit of a lull in the early 2000s,
when it didn’t seem to have much to
say to ordinary people, but everyone is
interested now in what poetry can do and
what it is saying.” l“The things I write about
are very much related to
the way the nation haschopped and changed
and moved around. I
enjoy exploring that.”