<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>14:51 coughs er i'm sorry that goes on and on and on but in fact it's quite interesting i mean he talks like that around and about and in fact he's got lots of points very clearly in mind that he wants to make but it's a very elaborate er relaxed way of coming to them coughs and the poems are interesting in <.>relati relation to that way of behaving actually because sometimes they'll ramble and then surprise you but many other times they cut away all of that rambling talk and are much more er muscular as it were <,> anyway er <.>th the reason i put that reference to an issue of landfall up there is that because that's got a very long interview with hone tuwhare in it er which i happened to do laughs but in fact it's a very interesting document because <.>he <.>he he says quite a lot of interesting things and i think it's probably the most interesting er source of information about his writing other than reading the poems of course er tut and the interesting thing is that he'll always talk autobiographically as he <&>16:00 does there he's asked a question about <,> physical geography almost there and emotional links with it and he tells a tale about his own life er you ask him about a poem he won't make a literary critical answer he won't make the kind of comments that you're expected to make in english department essays instead he'll tell you about the year he wrote the poem er where he was living what the circumstances were that prompted the poem into being all of that kind of biographical context er but he won't talk about the elegant image in the third stanza or any of that kind of thing er so there's always the sense with him i think that the poetry and the life are one thing or they're opposite faces of a single coin er and they're not to be separated <,> er the one thing that seems to annoy him about his poetry er or the one LACK which he strongly feels in it is the absence of <&>17:00 work which reflects his life as a communist that sense of community er that he arrives at there that sense of place is one that he finds missing in his work and it seems to annoy him er tut he talks in biographical notes about himself as an activist as a maori as a member of THE working classes you know he uses the <.>w the term working classes in a marxist sense er and indeed he has written a lot of political poetry but most of his poetry is lyrical er and while he's proud of <.>i the poetry he feels that it somehow misrepresents the emphases and the interests of his life as a whole which have been political er tut now <.>y you'll have heard that he mentioned the er communist paper on the tape the editor of that newspaper er at the time was a poet you've read earlier in the course a poet called r a k <&>18:00 mason er so when er he was a very young man when he was serving this apprenticeship in the railway workshops hone tuwhare met another poet who was also a communist er he didn't find out for a long time that mason was a poet in fact when he speaks of mason he speaks always of mason's modesty mason didn't run round you know er with a cravat and long flowing hair saying i'm a poet or <.>any any of that sort of stuff er but when he did find out that mason was a poet he showed mason some of his own poems and mason read them and gave him advice so mason was a big figure to him and a helpful sort of mentor figure in his early years er he didn't carry on writing poetry hone tuwhare er though he did remain a firm member of the communist party er until nineteen fifty six when the soviet troops <&>19:00 went into hungary at which point he made a public er protest and resigned from the party <,> er at that time he was working at mangakino which <.>is was one of the hydro projects on the waikato river and he was married and he had a family and so forth and this is the time when he took up writing again so <.>he's he's thirty four years old when he begins to write seriously he's a sort of late starter really er and i think it's fair to say that er <,,> the sense of place the sense of belonging the sense of community that he talks about there um etymologically of course communism and community i assume are the <.>sa are more or less the same word er but he started to regain his sense of place through his writing through the act of writing it gave him a community of other writers it gave him a community of readers er tut and it gave <.>him he himself says a far <&>20:00 far stronger consciousness of himself as maori <,> er though one of the nice ironies when he talks about this in the interview <.>he he was er on this hydro project with <.>a with a fiction writer called noel hilliard whom some of you will have come across er hilliard er is pakeha but was busy working on short stories and eventually wrote that novel maori girl which some of you will know about er tuwhare is maori <.>so so voc let me get this right er hilliard <.>was was a pakeha was <.>busy busy writing texts that looked as if a maori had written them er tuwhare who was maori was busy writing lyrical poems that looked as if a pakeha had written them it was all very er curious inhales anyway his first book of poems called no ordinary sun which was er a poem within the book an antinuclear poem er that was published in nineteen sixty four and was promoted as and <&>21:00 truly was i think the first book of poems in english by a maori course there's a huge tradition of er maori poetry er <,> which er happens not to be in english er <,> r a k mason wrote a preface to this book no ordinary sun er and you'll <.>see so he was an important figure at that point as well you'll see on the sheet that i've sent around on the second side of it there's a poem there which is called ron mason er <,> and it's a tribute that hone tuwhare paid to r a k mason er when he died <,,> so he pays this tribute to the poet you're dead and so forth stanza four your granite words remain <,> which in fact isn't a bad description <.>of of the way mason's poems operate they're sort of tough stone like er chunks of language and then of course he makes the point that he himself has his own <&>22:00 work to attend to as a poet so towards the bottom of that first column he says to mason easy for you now man you've joined your literary ancestors whilst i have problems still in finding mine lost somewhere in the confusing swirl now thick now thin victoriana missionary fog hiding legalised <.>ramp land rape and gentleman thugs and so on so one poet is dead he makes his tribute and then he acknowledges the work that he himself has to do <,> er so it's interesting that he sets up this ancestry for himself this sense of community for himself er in the world <.>of of writers and writing er and that seems to compensate for that <,> lack of <,> rootedness that lack of place that was there in his early years <,> er i want to make some fairly specific comments now about the poetic qualities if i can call them those <&>23:00 of hone tuwhare's work and i want to start with the whole question of tone tone of voice er the kinds of noises that are made rather than the meanings tut and i want to come to it through one er anecdotal thing really one little story which he told me in this interview if you find the first page of the sheet there's a poem there called thine own hands have fashioned <,,> er now when tuwhare was working at mangakino er a policeman came and knocked on his door and the way he tells it he was <.>very he was a bit anxious he thought it was er someone coming after him because he was a wicked communist and all the rest of it but in fact the policeman er had come with the news that his father had died er and <.>what what he says he remembers of it is having no reaction at all not even noticing himself having <&>24:00 feelings er though it's clear from er what he says about his life that his father was crucially important to him in all sorts of ways especially as his mother was dead er <,> i think she died when he was three or four er so policeman comes your father's dead he has no reaction at all and then a day later he went and wrote this poem called thine own hands have fashioned er the odd thing about the poem is that it's a love poem for two voices er and it's based on the bible story of samson and delilah <,> so somehow his reaction to the death is to displace everything into this er biblical love tale <,,> you can see by the way how it makes sense when he says the king james bible was where i learnt my english er it's true <.>he you know his first poem is a retelling of a bible story really er and then he says after he'd written the poem tut the loss of his father hit him with er tut the sort of force that these things do hit you but he wrote the <&>25:00 poem first and it's very curious language <.>y you see how the first couple of stanzas go oh let the vain sun die with a peacock flourish so that i may rise from my labours and hasten to light up the dark tent that is delilah beloved thine hands are distraught winds waking the dead cymbalic reeds at the edge of the lake hear ye the sullen moan of yielding trees the forlorn sigh of tormented hills the liquid gasp of molten valleys i mean it's absurdly overwrought it seems to me especially from this distance in time er very big er formal biblical language i mean he uses the word ye rather than the word you and so forth <,> <.>remem remember this is a guy working on a dam project on waikato river these words don't seem to connect to the sort of life he's <&>26:00 living at all er but this was his first poem and he sent it off to the maori <.>magazine magazine er and it was accepted by them and than it was banned by the minister of maori affairs who stepped in because he didn't want er poems by er socialists and communists being printed with er taxpayers' money he was thought to be a dangerous subversive you know as if THIS poem which <.>is i mean if you read it forgetting about the fact of the death of the father <.>it's it's all sort of er <,> you know <,> well it sort of has sex on its mind it seems to me laughs that's basically what it's got on its mind and it's all sort of elaborate ways of pretending not to be about what it's about anyway er so it never got into print when it was written but <.>this this was his first poem and you notice er the hanging first lines of each stanza the lefthand margin on the first line is much further to the left than the rest <&>27:00 <.>that <.>that's that's something he simply copied off r a k mason you know remember mason's early poems have that same hanging margin er he <.>just he's just got the impression that that's how you write poems <&>27:10