Act Party leader David Seymour’s World Poetry Day video. Video / David Seymour
OPINION
Diana Wichtel reviews the Act leader’s latest attempt at verse.
David Seymour’s fluoro-clad twerking in the manner of one in the throes of gastric distress on Dancing with the Stars in 2018 revealed a man with an impressively high embarrassment threshold. It’s an increasingly useful quality ifyou want a career in politics in these frankly excruciating times.
Now he’s a poet. “We all know Crate Day is a great day,” he rhymed happily in 2021, declaring the day dedicated to drinking a whole crate of beer would, under Act, be a national holiday. Cin cin.
It’s less certain that World Poetry Day can survive his tribute to it this year, performed in a video in which he sports a bigly orange tie of Trumpian dimensions. The poem is in the form of doggerel so dogged you may lose the will to live. “For all the great work that you artists may do/ I’ve detected a skew in your political view,” he recites. “The beauty in much of your art remains hefty/ But I feel that I’m stuck in a room of old lefties.”
The poem calls to mind the work of 19th-century Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall, often declared the worst poet ever. His moving words about a failed assassination attempt on Queen Victoria: “For God He turned the ball aside/ Maclean aimed at her head/ And he felt very angry/ Because he didn’t shoot her dead.”
His epic, The Tay Bridge Disaster, tragic in every sense of the word, features the audacious rhyming of “confesses” with “buttresses.”
McGonagall was apparently a nice chap, undeterred when pelted by the populace with eggs and vegetables. You have to admire it. He built a career out of undentable self-belief, high ambition and a heroic lack of talent.
Seymour has taken his own knocks in the form of protests. Like McGonagall, he seems to thrive on it. His World Poetry Day verse contains a staggeringly simplistic summation of his moves on the Treaty of Waitangi: “Lefties cry ‘racist’ when I say we’re all equal/ You boo at apartheid but cheer at the sequel?”
He also says, “If I disagree I’ll defend your expression/ When lefties oppose speech though they call for suppression.” Hmmm. He wasn’t entirely supportive of the expression in a show, The Savage Coloniser, by award-winning poet Tusiata Avia. “The Government should withdraw the $107,280 in taxpayer money given to a racist stage show about murdering James Cook, his descendants, and ‘white men like [him] with pig hunting knives’, then apologise to the public for giving so much to racism in the first place,” he posted on social media.
David Seymour's twerking performance on Dancing with the Stars in 2018 showcased his impressively high embarrassment threshold.
It’s a poem. It tells a story, with characters. Some will find it shocking. Provocation has always been a part of the writer’s job description. The poem appeared in a Stuff article about Avia’s show. The Media Council declined to uphold complaints about it.
“If I disagree I’ll defend your expression” is a foundation principle Seymour extolls in his World Poetry Day offering. Avia’s poem is a test of that principle. She has written in reply. In “David Seymour and Me” she writes, of poems: “sometimes they like to make us feel/ sometimes they like to flip the script/and make us wonder:/ What would it be like if things were different?”
Speech and more speech. Seeing through another’s eyes. Flipping the script. Isn’t that how free expression is supposed to work?
Of all the manifestations of the current culture wars, duelling stanzas at high noon between politicians and poets is something you might not have predicted.
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