Interview with Glenn Colquhoun & Roger Steele
on Linda Clarke's “Nine to Noon” show on National Radio
Linda Clark: Let’s talk about poetry. New Zealanders buy poetry, which is kind of suprising because overseas the literary magazines are frequently debating the place of poetry in modern life, or more often, how to get people over their ‘poemophobia’ as one commentator called it. I’m sure a lot of you have suffered from that. Maybe it was one too many dull poems at school, or anxiety about looking dumb because you don’t immediately get it, but have no fear; one of the country’s most accessible poets is here: Glenn Colquhoun. His first book The Art of Walking Upright won a Montana Book Award. He’s published two others since, and Roger Steele is here too. He publishes poetry in this country, including Glenn’s work. Gentlemen, good morning.
Glenn Colquhoun: Hi.
LC: Let’s talk to you first, Glenn. This perception that poetry has to be pointy-headed and hard to fathom, where do you think that comes from?
GC: It’s a good question really. I think because some poetry is like that. I mean the difficulty has been for me, whenever you talk about poetry, it has such a huge range and there’s poetry that at one end of the range tells stories and they’re usually, you know, fairly accessible to people. At the other end of the range there’s poems as an art form that plays with the medium, which tells the story which is language itself, and words, the same way painters play with paint and texture. And those poems are as legitimate as any other poem but once you start playing with language and looking at the nature of meaning, some people who dig down deep, they can find that exhilarating but for other people it’s unnecessary and it blurs meaning and meaning is what’s important to them.
LC: Well for many readers you need a kind of code to get into those poems, don’t you?
GC: Exactly. Well, that’s what I love about poetry though, because it’s all a code. It never really says exactly what it’s about. It always sort of talks out of the corner of its mouth in a sense, and that’s what’s beautiful about poetry and that’s what draws us to it when it works, but when it doesn’t work for us it’s the same thing that alienates us. You know, we fall in love with the thing that we rail against when it doesn’t work for us. If it wasn’t for code and for hiding and for the slight revelation there probably wouldn’t be poetry. So it’s sort of like if it works for you, it’s the same thing that you enjoy as if it doesn’t work for you, it becomes a thing that you hate and resent.
LC: Roger Steele, those more obtuse poets, do they turn people off?
Roger Steele: I think they often do. As you say, people want a code to understand it and it’s a pity that a poem needs to be explained. It’s better that people are sufficiently intrigued by it to want to read it again and again and the good poems, in a way, reveal up their meaning the more you look at them, but you have to want to in the first place. If you listen to a Country & Western song or something, it’s all there pouring out on the sleeve and you know exactly what they’re saying and you don’t necessarily want to listen to it again and again, but a good poem, yeah, is worth reading two or three times. But many times poets speak only to other poets and that’s what’s been different about Glenn, is that he’s reached out way beyond the normal audience of poetry.
LC: So you accept that for a lot of poetry is kind of for the ‘in’ set?
RS: If you go to a lot poetry café-type gatherings which are great fun but nonetheless nine-tenths of the audience is other poets that are just listening to each other’s work and then waiting for their turn to read.
LC: In an ever-decreasing circle presumably?
RS: I don’t think so. I think Glenn for instance, his recent book Playing God is I think the second-biggest selling book of poetry ever in New Zealand, and it’s reached out to doctors, to nurses, to people that have been patients in hospital, to people who work in hospitals, to people who counsel, so it’s reached out to a huge audience. It’s sold well over 6000 copies which is more than ten times the average sale of a New Zealand poetry book.
LC: Wow, so the average poetry book in New Zealand sells just a couple of hundred copies?
RS: Well, it could be anything from a hundred to a thousand, but yeah, very, very few poets get beyond that figure.
LC: Who buys poetry?
RS: Everybody ... all people that go into bookshops, you know, have one or two books of poetry in their shelves, but nine-tenths of poetry is bought at events, at readings, when poets do tours and that sort of thing, and most poets are regional. They have an audience, whether it’s in Otago or on the West Coast or in Rotorua so ...
LC: So that’s because their audience has probably heard them read do you think?
RS: Yeah, well, that’s the wonderful thing about New Zealand is that you can get to hear writers read and Glenn has been marvelous going out touring on his own initiative and in tours organised by the Book Council, but that’s the exception really, and yeah, all to often poetry is confined to universities and to late night cafés.
LC: Do more men or more women read poetry?
RS: Oh I’d say it’s about 60-40 but you know, men are very partial to poetry. If you touch any man over the age of 30 or 40 he can normally recite you a poem he learnt at school, and everybody remembers the poetry they learned as children, nursery rhymes. Songs are just a form of poetry.
LC: Well yeah, that’s a matter of definition isn’t it really? Maybe we need to define poetry a little narrowly?
RS: I think Glenn would be better at the definition of poetry than I am.
GC: That’s not what you usually tell me, Roger. [Laughs]
LC: Well actually Glenn, I was hoping you could define poetry by reading us your poem, “In other words”.
RS: OK: “In other words, a poem is a way of knowing you are alive. As shocking as fish leaping out of deep water, as sharp as light stabbing through a row of trees, as bold as opening up your eyes during prayer, as simple as lying awake in the middle of the night, listening to the sound of people snoring. Every minute of every day of every life is a full library.”
LC: It’s a great poem. You are always described as an accessible poet. Do you work hard on that?
GC: [Laughs] It’s important to me that people connect to my poetry really. I guess you know, there’s a couple of principles for me that are important when I’m writing a poem. One is that I get to say what it is that I want to say, to express the thing I want to express, to recreate the moment or the thing I saw, and to do that with some sense of telling the truth about it which is a hugely nebulous concept. But the other thing is that I want people to connect to that, and I think what you were talking about before is ... I mean it’s one of the great questions of poetry, but I think whether a poem is obtuse and full of hidden references and illusion and yes, playing with language or whether it’s completely open and accessible, that they can both work for us, even when you don’t understand all the references in a poem, if the poem connects, if there’s enough in the poem to hear a voice, to say this person is telling us something that is real about living life, you don’t have to have an understanding of all the allusions but you get enough of the poem, enough of a connection to be drawn into that world and to follow the thread of the poem on a small journey it takes you to, and get off the bus at the other end. So it’s really about connection and people talk about accessibility, I think of it in terms of connection. What language do I use, how do I make the story, what allusion, what metaphor, what image do I make that connects me to your world?
LC: Well, you use very common language. I mean you’ve got poems in your book Playing God that... I mean you’re talking about hammers and spanners and screws. These are very everyday things.
GC: I used to write very obtuse poetry, you know, I did and very intense poetry and there came a distinct point in my career when my partner at the time said, “I can’t understand a word of this, write something that people can understand.” And that really was a turning point for me and I started again and this time I came at it from the angle of what would I want to listen to or what did the people around me ... I always say to myself I write for my sisters. My sisters are wonderful people in my life but they’re pretty good at pulling me down if I get, you know, ideas above my station. So, if I can write for my sisters, for my dad, for my family who ... where language is a thing for communication, if I can catch them, then I figure I can connect to most people.
LC: as Roger said, you are doing a lot of reading. Gone travelling around and reading, particularly reading in schools. Tell me about that.
GC: I just really enjoy it, I think partly because, you know, I’m a huge show-off and partly because I love the energy at high schools and primary schools.
LC: So how do the kids respond?
GC: Oh, overwhelmingly well, you know. If I kept getting beaten up, if it you know, inflicted too much pain on me, I wouldn’t be doing it. I’m not a masochist. I do it because essentially I enjoy it and I try to say yes where I can.
LC: Do they ... I mean there must be sort of to-and-fro between you and them?
GC: Yep.
LC: Do they get it?
GC: Yeah, most times, most times.
LC: If they don’t get it, do they tell you they don’t get it?
GC: Absolutely, yeah. They might not come out and say I don’t get it, although actually many of them will, more commonly than adults, but you’ll tell by their body language because in a sense even though they’re able to lie incredibly well, in another way they’re not able to lie, young people, and you can pick up pretty quickly if they’re bored. Plus they give you ideas for poetry, you know. And adolescence is that great engine of passion, you know, and what’s happening in their lives reminds me of what it was what it was like to be passionate about things and so in some ways I live a bit off that energy but also it’s like my sisters, I know if I can get the fourth form boys to listen, then I’m in. [Laughs] And in some ways that’s where I come from. I’d rather have those people listen to my poetry than anybody else but I think a good poem works for everybody, just about, really.
LC: Can you remember how you were introduced to poetry at school?
GC: I think just the standard ways, you know. We got to write poems as primary school kids and I think I wrote my first poem at about 11, about a mouse, and it was playful, it was about playing with language and it was usually rhyming. And then the standard texts in high school, and I fell in love with — and I’ve told this story a lot, with Ozymandias by Shelley at about 14 or 15 because it was that poem that finally ... it was like a ... I say to people it was like a quadratic equation. It had the same elegance, it was a code for a very simple statement. You could dilute the poem, distil the poem down into a sentence and I loved the code that went with it, the same pleasure of solving an elaborate equation into a single answer, I got that same pleasure from reading a poem and I don’t think those experiences are that much different.
LC: The sort of poems you write now, you started writing poetry relatively late. How old were you?
GC: About 28, 29.
LC: So what happened between discovering Shelley as a schoolboy and being 28 and 29?
GC: Oh, High School I guess, yeah, it was.
LC: So what, High School turned you off?
GC: High School and then no, well, it’s not as easy to say high school turned me off. I mean that is probably too easy to say and I don’t want to trade in on that. We were just never encouraged. It wasn’t that we were beaten over the head for it but it was still the era where it was a good idea to get a haircut and a real job and not to risk — not to risk I think was the main thing, and poetry was a risk.
LC: Well, probably in that generation, our generation, poetry was a kind of ‘girly’ pursuit wasn’t it?
GC: Yeah, although I never really felt that. I guess I’ve probably been a bit of an old woman most of my life so I got used to that early on. It was just that you know, poetry and writing and young people is a fragile seed and it needs lots of nurturing. Left alone it will sprout but sporadically. We don’t, you know, it needs probably a little bit more encouragement than some of the other things we do at school and that wasn’t there. It wasn’t a discouragement, it was a lack of encouragement.
LC: So when you go to the schools these days, is that Glenn Colquhoun trying to encourage that in others?
GC: Absolutely, yeah, because you see, the kids, they’re hungering and thirsting for story and for inspiration. Like I say, they’re seedbeds of passion. You know, they’re just ... they’re waiting to be moved and you know, school might be enjoyable and it has its passionate moments but by and large it can be a bit mundane and so, you know, taking kids and saying you know what, it’s very good to learn these things and it’s fantastic to prepare for this but there are such things as exhilaration and sadness and joy and poetry is the study of them, and these are things that at the end of the day when you get old and crusty, these are the moments you’ll remember, and those moments are the things that poets write about.
LC: But why poetry and not you know, a movie script?
GC: Well, exactly, because I’m thick!
LC: [Laughs]
GC: Because you know, I met Libby who works in television and radio and people who write for that, they’re paid filthy money and I think why did I choose poetry, you know? Why didn’t I have someone smart come along and say, “write for movies, son”? But it’s because I still love the code really, at the end of the day I love the code and I love the beauty of saying just enough but not too much and you can get that in other forms of writing, absolutely, but I think for me, poetry — and I’m lazy — poems are inevitably short and I can fit them around my life. I could never hold lots of other things in my life if it weren’t.
LC: Roger Steele, is he being too modest? Is he lazy?
RS: He’s telling all sorts of stories. Right now he’s working on a film script.
GC: It’s finally dawned on me that’s where the real money is.
LC: Are you really? You’ve been outed, I’m afraid!
GC: That’s right.
RS: It’s absolutely not true. He’s made more money out of poetry than anybody ...
GC: [Laughs] It’s all an accident.
RS: He won the $60,000 prize, the Institute of Modern Letters prize the other day. He won the Montana Prize. He’s done very well out of poetry.
LC: Oh, and here we were, just about to get out the old tin and put the pennies in.
GC: [Laughs] I’ll be busking soon.
LC: I must interview more people with their publisher alongside.
RS: The other thing that he hasn’t said but he’s said indirectly, is that his big selling point is humour because even in his first book which is pretty heavy stuff about race relations and who we are, there’s a whole lot of funny poems in there as well. And he also manages to make some really good jokes about medicine in Playing God so it’s really ... he said people are hungering for passion and stuff like that but they’re also hungering for humour, especially adult audiences, and there’s never a Glenn Colquhoun reading when people aren’t laughing at every fourth or fifth poem, laughing with him.
LC: Because it doesn’t all have to be about nature and flowers and big ideas?
RS: Well, apart from the academic sorts who are often too obscure, other poets are too full of angst and Glenn doesn’t put his angst right out there, although his next book is going to be about love poems.
LC: Are you trying to encourage a bit of angst, are you?
RS: Well, I think it’s going to all come out in the love poems, but I’ve heard some of them and many, many of them do make you laugh but some of them do make you cry as well.
LC: So is angst ... where is the angst, Glenn?
GC: See, I think I’m terribly angst-ridden and writing the poem helps. The thing is, I set out to write angst-ridden poems but, you know, at the end of the day I’m a South Auckland boy and from a big family of inveterate teasers and I set out to write serious poems and I end up just laughing at myself and taking the piss out of myself and yeah, I think poems are a way of working that angst out and saying you know, take it easy, mate.
LC: Do you want to read us this poem with the fabulous title of “To the girl who stood behind me at the counter in the Whitcoulls store in Hamilton on Tuesday.”
GC: Absolutely.
LC: That’s really the title isn’t it? I’m not making it up.
GC: It’s actually “To the girl who stood beside me at the checkout counter at Whitcoulls bookstore.”
LC: Oh, I’m riddled with angst now that I got that wrong.
GC: That’s all right.
LC: Go on.
GC: As I told Roger, every word is important in a poem. It cannot be changed. "To the girl who stood beside me at the checkout counter of Whitcoulls book store in Hamilton on Tuesday. For ten seconds I fell in love with you. The first second we met. You were buying recipes. The second second we turned, taking pieces of each other out of our eyes. The third second we held each other gently. Your skin was a small kitten playing with a curtain. The fourth second we kissed, front gates clicked against our fence. In the fifth second we married. Your dress was made of nikau palms. The sixth second we built a house beside a lake. It was never tidy and the grass was up to our knees. The seventh second we argued about toothpaste and poetry and who would put out the rubbish. The eighth second we grew fat and happy and laid on the ground after eating. Your stomach wriggled with a round child. In the ninth second we were old, in the same garden of the same house by the same lake, in the same love. The tenth second we said goodbye. Your hand flipped away from mine but seemed to me like something I could feel. We passed again beside each other without turning, as though we had somehow only met at the checkout counter of Whitcoulls book store in Hamilton on a faintly blue September Tuesday."
LC: That’s beautiful.
GC: I never met that girl. Yeah, it’s about, you know, it’s about falling in love with a person of the opposite sex but it’s really about ...
LC: You don’t have to explain it, no. It made sense. Can I just say that the girl will never know?
GC: That’s right, she will never know.
LC: That’s a little sad, isn’t it?
GC: Well, yes it is but it’s the moment of poetry and all moments of poetry are a little bit sad and a little bit happy and in the end you’ve just got to laugh at yourself and get on. You know, that’s the moment of poetry. Life is a little bit absurd and packed full with meaning and in the end you have a smile and you get on with it, you know, and those are the moments — it’s about falling in love with a girl but it’s really about falling in love with a flax bush and mowing the lawn and, you know, your nephew who gets a dollar every time you swear. It’s falling in love with all those small attempts at breaking out of the silence and the unknowing in the world, you know, and creating that place we do of endless courage that is laughter and joy ... and yeah.
LC: So that’s going to be in the new book of love poems, is it?
GC: No, it’s not.
LC: Oh please.
GC: well, the book of love poems is about falling in love with one person and being in love with them and then falling out of love with them and throwing things at them and then coming to terms with it and coming around. Love is much more fun to write about as a circle than as a falling in love poem.
RS: It will be available though. We’re going to make a poster of that poem and one of the great things is that even Whitcoulls love it. They’ve bought lots of Glenn’s books and are selling them and they are very keen naturally on him as a big selling author but also because he’s written about their store.
GC: Yeah, that’s right. ... I’m shameless.
LC: You are ... I’ve just worked it out, it’s product placement isn’t it?
GC: [Laughs]
LC: The next poem will be exactly that, to the girl who I spoke to on the Telecom ...
GC: Absolutely. I’ll mention Dick Hubbard or ...
LC: Exactly.
GC: Political parties, anybody, yep. Pay me and I’ll do it. [Laughs]
LC: Ah, shameless. This is very modern poetry isn’t it — the product placement poem.
GC: You see, Sonja Yelich has been doing it with National Radio and I thought what a wonderful idea and I was just like, you guys are paying.
LC: We even had to interview her on the basis of that, you see. There are many people who think that you might be the next Sam Hunt. Can there be such a thing?
GC: No, no. I’m one of those people who don’t ... I think everybody unique and different and you know, I love Sam Hunt and, you know, in some ways Sam is the one true poet writing in the country who’s lived his life the way he writes and look mate, I could never aspire to that. I love writing poetry in my own way and doing my own thing and if it connects in a different way — and they do, my poetry is very different — then I’m lucky. But if I, you know, if I fall out of love with people and if I fall out of love with the things I’m writing about, people, the fourth form boys will pick it up first and they’ll hunt me down and nobody will buy poems anymore so ...
LC: And then Roger Steele won’t be your friend?
GC: Absolutely. Oh, I think Roger would still be my friend. Roger tells me he’s not a real publisher and I tell him I’m not really a proper poet so that’s I think why we make a good team.
LC: Roger, do you want the last word? I suspect you very seldom get it, do you?
RS: Very seldom and never. And I don’t think I’ll get it today, but it’s true, we’re not really serious about it. We do have a lot of fun when we’re doing it and Glenn communicates that to his audience and it’s been great for poetry.
LC: Well, you’ve inspired all of us to get out there and read a poem. It’s been very nice having the two of you on the programme, Glenn Colquhoun and Roger Steele, his publisher. Glenn’s latest book is called Playing God. There’s a book called An Explanation of Poetry to My Father which is where the poem Glenn read a couple of moments ago, “In other words” comes from, and The Art of Walking Upright, they’re the three books out so far.