EDITORIAL - Poetry will always find clear voice

WHEN I consider poetry, two names come to mind - Doug Frykberg and Kevin Barry.
They were English teachers at Hastings Boys' High School in the 1970s who attempted to instil in their students an understanding of, and love for, this literary art.
Mr Frykberg could have been a bohemian with his long white hair, but instead was the Head of Department - a stern giant of a man with plates for hands which he used for maximum expression.
He introduced us to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's seven-part epic, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Much time was also spent on World War I poets - Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, I remember - and American Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken.
Mr Barry was a former First XV coach, who had mentored Bruce Robertson, the All Black centre throughout my time at secondary school. He was short, a disciplinarian and mildly eccentric.
On one occasion he reprimanded a student outside his classroom with a stream of swear words. When he stepped back inside he remarked, knowing we had heard, "You sometimes have to speak to people in their own language."
His interest was in the sonnet - Shakespeare's mostly, although Wordsworth and others were covered. Homework was always rote learning of 14 lines, and by next day you knew better than not to have memorised them.
But he also introduced a foreign concept - New Zealand poetry!
It was that School Certificate year, more than any other in my life, that poetry ran through my veins. There was no escaping it.
In the years that followed, poetry and I parted company. The closest I came to it was a winter night at Vidals to coincide with a Sam Hunt visit - although in all honesty the grape and girls figured larger in the thinking than the venerable Bard. Which probably gave me a lot in common with Sam and many other poets.
While it was an art form I rarely considered, I always admired those who could recite, effortlessly, stanzas from various poems, or indeed a complete poem or poems.
Only once can I remember doing so myself - at a friend's wedding when I had forgotten to bring a present. The poem, I said, was my gift.
Let's kiss and kiss again
and then again a score
and on to a hundred
and from there to a thousand
to a million
and then exhausted
Let's kiss like we first began.
The wedding couple were not fooled, and I received from them on my wedding day a beautifully framed copy of the poem with the words "as recited by Grant once upon a wedding when all thoughts were on Shelly".
In recent years, while looking for creative inspiration, even self-improvement, strange things have happened.
I have found myself printing from the internet Dennis Glover's The Magpies - it is pinned to my computer desk - my return to it possibly spurred by constant attacks from on high while biking the Tukituki Valley.
Suddenly the storytelling within the poem was so much clearer, not to mention understanding of the "Quardle ardle oodle ardle wardle doodle" Glover spoke of.
Then later something took me back to Frost's The Road Not Taken, and the knowledge that a poem can mean different things to different people. For me, it was inspirational.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Where did that interest come from? What would Mr Barry think of me having become a writer - of sorts?
My grammar could never reach his exacting standards. But I would hope to escape his trademark inked-out page with weird acronyms in the columns - which, when worked out, had a slang or swear word in them.
It is an unfortunate fact that I was, ultimately, a disappointment to him. I know that, because on my final day at school we had the following conversation.
"Harding, are you going to get a bursary?"
"I don't think so, Sir."
"That's because you've buggerised round for the last two years," he spluttered.
"Yes, Sir."
Suddenly calm, he said, "Where are you going next year?"
"Victoria, Sir."
Then with an extended hand he offered his best wishes. That was the last time I saw Kevin Barry, who died not too many years later.
On Montana Poetry Day I dedicate the following 14 lines to him in the hope that he might think his time was not entirely wasted.
Rounded Education
Rugby man through and through
Full of Shakespeare, Wordsworth - even Glover
A maker of All Blacks
Full of lyric, rhyme, iambic pentameter
At Uni we sang for Brucey's Stradey score
The urgent word with its stern command - Akina!
How would you have marked?
Surely no red ink - FBU!
We drank when he aided Hika the hooker from Ngongotaha
Poetry in that try - and scorer's name
No ordinary AB - BJ Robertson
Innovative, creative, rhythmic, free-spirit - Legend
Mr Barry - educator of boys
A Barbarian - sonnet at his core