Win a copy of The Conch Trumpet

Be in to win the new poetry collection from David Eggleton: The Conch Trumpet $25 www.otago.ac.nz/press/

David, your poems capture the essence of aspects of Kiwi life exceptionally well. How have you honed this talent over your career so far?

Thanks, Liam. The reason I capture Kiwi life as it's lived, I think, is simply that this is where I live and where I pretty much have always lived, so I'm writing from the inside out. I like what a reviewer in the Listener wrote a while back in a review about an earlier poetry collection: 'His heart can be heard beating for the first place where he'd like to live.' Poems are my way of expressing a passion for the communal experience of living here, in this green archipelago in the South Pacific.
I began, like most writers, secretly scribbling as a teenager about angsty disaffections, and soaking up all kinds of cultural influences - which tended to have import -license restrictions in those days, so they had a kind of rarity value and a sense of exoticism that has almost disappeared in the globalised, digital age.
But my memories of growing up here remain central to my poetry, and these memories are connected to sport and beaches, and then to the youthquakes of rock music and social activism. The disaffections of my adolescence got caught up in the madcap antics of disco cabaret and punk rock, as well as various other late twentieth century revolutionary movements in art and literature. My stamping ground was pubs and cafes and street corners, as much as university student unions and literary festivals. A lot of New Zealand's richest cultural seams are in its margins.
In my book, a poet is a cultural celebrator as well as a language calibrator. It's about discovering what Kiwi poet Kendrick Smithyman called 'a way of saying': I wanted to combine craft with sensibility, and to be able see and say things a little differently without losing contact with the community.
Roadkill
fleece fur feather
petrol fumes
hard rubber wheels
and leather

Ode to Coffee is written with significant insight into the pleasure and perils of coffee consumption. Do you work on one poem at a time or do you have a variety of poems under construction at any one time?

For me, writing a poem about some experience or happening always starts as a challenge: one which says, write me beautiful, or write me true. I like to swoop on characteristic New Zild speech, the terse or laconic or throwaway statement, then pick it up and then see how far I can run down the paddock with it before I have to off-load it, or kick for touch. The feelings and the meaning are embedded in the tone and all the musical cadences you can find in the language that you use. These days, though, we're all plugged-in to the 'churnalism' of the news feed and media mood-swing headlines... so we are less trustful of what words are saying and more ironic, more cynical about what gets told to us. The poet's job is to just deal with it, and make the moment sing.
In a way, all my poems, even if they are jolted into life by different epiphanies, different flashes of inspiration, are part of one long poem - the one epic voyage through life. It's all just one voice, one stream of consciousness, one person's impressions: as if I'm just shuffling and reshuffling a pack of cherished images, dealing them out and gathering them in again, as a kind of disguised or ventriloquised autobiography.
Ode to Coffee
for Larry Matthews
Even from the first sip,
Carousels of whirling cups start up,
And that rollercoaster loop-the-loop
Haunted Mansion fluttery bats feeling,
That Fun Mountain Climb blue ceiling sensation,
that whinny of hoof beats across the heart,
and you float through hysteric glamour on the liquid mean....cont...

In your book you include lines from Basil Dowling, Patricia Glensor and Denis Glover. What is a good way for older people to help young ones develop a passion for poetry?

Well, poets and poems that don't get talked about, or recited and read, get forgotten, so we keep them alive by supporting and believing in a literary culture specific to Aotearoa New Zealand. These are the ancestral voices; and this is the tradition that energises us.
Young people have always written poetry as an immediate and cost-effective form of self-expression. At its best, it's energetic and vital. You cannot kill off poetry: Shakespeare told us this, as did Hone Tuwhare. You might have schools of poetry arguing about the right way to write a poem until the cows come home, but the glorious freedom of the artform is that, really, anything goes. Your task as a poet is to prove you can energise words, make them sound as fresh as if you've just discovered or invented them, so we hear and see and feel anew. Own your own words, make them eclectic, goosebumpy, and give your stanzas some spin, some ramalama ding-dong. Deliver your imagery as if you are doing some pentecostal speaking in tongues: that's my motto. Percussive alliteration, rhyming structures, lurid costume jewellery similes, and metaphorical colours that clash: that's what a poem is - sometimes.
David Eggleton
The Conch Trumpet calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It sounds the signal to listen close, critically and ‘in alert reverie'. David Eggleton's reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphanic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific.
There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, of solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world - the thisness of things:
Cloud whispers brush daylight's ear;
fern question-marks form a bush encore;
forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs.
- from ‘Nor'wester Flying'
In this latest collection David Eggleton is court jester/philosopher/lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud.
Paperback, 170 x 225 mm, 124 pp, ISBN 978-1-877578-93-9, $25
February 2015
About David Eggleton:
David is a performance poet and writer. Part Polynesian, he grew up between Fiji and New Zealand. Eggleton's many awards include six times Book Reviewer of the Year in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, PEN Best First Book of Poetry, the Robert Burns Fellowship and, uniquely among New Zealand poets, he was London Time Out's Street Entertainer of the Year in 1985. He also writes non-fiction, has produced several documentaries, CDs and short films.
'David Eggleton plasters into poetry a New Zealand by turn cynical, lyrical, boring, fascinating, blind and insightful.' - Bede Scott, writing in Quote Unquote magazine, 1996
'His poetry is vital and contemporary, steeped in popular and postmodern culture. It offers a vision of New Zealand which is at once resolutely local and yet not quite recognisable or predictable - offers a vision of ourselves which defies expectation to surprise and charm.' - Louise O' Brien, Dominion Post, 2001
'Eggleton delivers poetry that is considered, pulsating with energy. It's alive on the page.' Mark Houlahan, Dominion Post, 2006
'David Eggleton's word-blasts feel like they come from further left-of-centre than anything else written in New Zealand ... It is endlessly imaginative, it's funny - plus intellectually rewarding.'