Our new Poet Laureate has plenty to say – about colonisation among other things – but believes in taking readers with him in the waka.
One day when Robert Sullivan was a 10-year-old at Onehunga Primary School, he lay down in the grass outside the classroom and looked up at the clouds. Write a poem about what you see in the clouds, instructed the teacher, who might have been a genius. The future Poet Laureate saw an alligator. An alligator?
He was, and is, an adventurer of the mind. That is the first poem he wrote. That is the first time he played with words on paper, which could be as good a definition as any of what poetry is, really.
I asked what he was like as a child. He says he was “kind of introverted. I think so. I was a bit of a book worm. I preferred going to the library. I suffered team sports.”
He preferred badminton, which is batting about a fluttered thing with deceptive lightness. Which might be another definition of what a poem could be.
I guessed he might also have been fanciful and whimsical. He was happy with that.
When he was a kid he thought he could fly, he says. He would jump from a stone wall and flap his arms wildly.
He didn’t hurt himself because the stone wall “wasn’t very high”. He is fanciful and whimsical, but he’s not silly.
One day he is going to attempt to reconstruct his alligator poem.
“I think I’ve added another level to it. Because I think I was actually lying in the grass hunting the alligator.” Did he get it or did it get him? “I think I didn’t fire. So, yeah, it just glided by.”
Being anointed the Poet Laureate – if you like flights of fancy, and both of us do – might be like being given wings. The National Library of NZ award provides him with funding of $120,000 (before tax) over three years to promote “the value of reading and writing poetry” – he will be kept busy – and to publish a new collection. “It’s pretty cool. It’s awesome. I’m sort of astonished, actually.” He is. He went on being astonished. “Yeah, it’s amazing. Oh my god!”
He is still fanciful and capable of whimsy. He likes to put an occasional joke inside a poem. Here’s one, from his 2010 collection Shout Ha! to the Sky, in which is a poem “set to the tune of Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”. With a refrain: “you say potato and I say kumara, you say g’day, and I say tēnā koe, potato, kumara, g’day, tēnā koe, let’s call the whole thing off”. That’s funny. “You’ve got to show people you’re alive.”
Mythological weight
In just about everything you read about him he is described as an “important” poet. Does he know what that means? “I’m not sure. What do you think it means?” We agree neither of us has the foggiest idea.
Does he strut about declaiming: “I’m a very important poet”? “I’d get so much shit at home if I ever did that! Oh my god.”
He believes in the magic of poetry. As is traditional with our poet laureates, he will be gifted a tokotoko, a walking stick. His will be engraved to represent his whakapapa, which is Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu and Irish (his paternal grandfather emigrated from Galway). The tokotoku is a symbol of status. It may also be a sort of a magic wand. The tokotoko is “just the force of actually being something that’s quite magical, this idea of the laureateship in physical form”.
Does he know yet what it means to be the Poet Laureate? “Well, it hooks up with the idea of poetry being one of the oldest art forms. It gets back to sort of mythological stuff with Orpheus [who in Greek mythology was a famous poet] and that kind of Western heritage of poetry. You know, the laurel wreath and … that kind of mythological weight.
“What I really like is that it touches on something that is from before we were all so-called civilised people. Poetry has this sort of wild energy; [there’s] this ancientness to our art form that we can’t even explain as poets. We need poems at weddings and funerals and births and we don’t know why. But we just do it.”
A poem, he says, needs to be “a message in a bottle of some sort, that carries”.
He once said his poems are a sort of persona. “I do literally use persona in my poetry. I’ve written in the voice of Captain Cook. I’ve written in the voice of Maui. I’ve written in the voice of a giant kauri snail.
“I think that, just like in fiction, poetry is a form of creative writing and the ‘I’ isn’t necessarily the same as the person who’s writing it. There’s always a speaker, and that speaker comes from a context. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your context. You can write from a context and write with passion.”
At times that persona is more extroverted than he is. “Totally. Yeah, gosh. I’ve used lines like, ‘This is where the wild things are.’” This is how much of a wild thing he was: when he started doing performance poetry he used to take his mum. His mum! That’s pretty wild, all right. “She wanted to come. She wanted to see what I was up to – I think she did.”
One thing you can’t teach
He’s an associate professor who teaches poetry at Massey University’s Wellington campus and he’s the Poet Laureate, so I asked him, slightly trepidatiously, because I thought he might think it a silly question – where do poems come from?
He didn’t think it a silly question. “Well, a poem always has an emotional centre, and ideally, it has an image,” he said. “And an image is, and I’m borrowing another poet’s definition, emotional and intellectual, complex in an instance of time. And the intellectual is, you know, that kind of rational level, but you’ve got have the emotion. So there’s got to be a subconsciousness to the text.”
He says you can teach people how to write a poem but you can’t teach what he called the “spark”. That bit has to be innate.
I risked another question on the elusive nature of poetry – where do poets come from? “They come from a community. It’s the same with a poet. You can write your poems, but you’ve got to have people who listen to you and share in the poetry. I don’t believe in the isolated poet in the garret.” No, you’ve got to get people to row that waka.
He writes about colonisation. He doesn’t set out to confront for the sake of it. “But I still need to say stuff and not get people’s backs up.” Why not get people’s backs up? “We’re all here to have a good time. And I really believe that’s a pearl of wisdom.”
He got it from his dad. If you attempt to goad him into an argument, he just says, “We’re all here to have a good time.” His definition of a good time? “Peace.” He is a softly spoken poet with a genial disposition.
Sullivan left Auckland University with a masters (with first-class honours) in English in 2006 and gained a PhD in 2015. He has a diploma in library and information studies and a diploma in teaching. He’s brainy. He wasn’t always brainy – at least, he thought he was thick. Until he was seven, he grew up in Newmarket and went to Newmarket Primary School, where he was, he says, near the bottom of the class and one of the very few Māori. Then he and his family moved to Onehunga where his new school was much more multicultural and he went from being “one of the so-called dumbest kids at school to being the smartest kid at school. I know it’s just all perception.”
His father, Bob, was a publican who had the Carlton Club Hotel on the corner of Khyber Pass Rd and Broadway. His mum, Maryann, was a stalwart of Auckland and Māori tennis who organised junior tournaments.
He sent a picture of himself as a baby. He was so cute. But not quite cute enough. The photo was taken for a baby contest his mum entered him in. His sister won. He came third. He told me this story with barely any bitterness at all. He is the eldest but, as mentioned – just to rub salt into a very old wound – not the cutest of his three siblings.
He lives in Ōamaru, where he moved because he wanted a quieter life than the one he had in Auckland. But also because he is on a sort of quest: he wanted to explore the place that provided the pieces of his father’s side, the Kāi Tahu part of his whakapapa. To contemplate it, really. Just as he likes to go to the botanical gardens to contemplate the plants and feed the ducks. He doesn’t know why he has embarked on this particular expedition. “Heck. It’s a sort of mystery to me. I think I hark back a lot to whakapapa. I call it a sort of mystery. And, you know, I don’t like to mystify. I think you’ve got to make sense at some kind of level.”
In other words, it’s like a poem, which can be magical and mystical but also rooted in some basis of reality.
He has a partner, Angelina, who manages the plant nursery at Puketeraki Marae in Karitane. They have just celebrated the first year of their meeting. They climbed Mt Watkin/Hikaroroa because that’s where they met. She was leading a seed gathering expedition and gathered a poet. They sing waiata together, which is sweet. “I just knew she was really special.”
Perhaps they will get married. “I’d like Angelina to know the answer to that first!”
He has two adult children with his former wife, writer and poet Anne Kennedy.
Here’s one of his poems, from his 2009 collection, Cassino: City of Martyrs.
Singing through the flashes and tracer
fire
singing through the bombs and roaring propellers
singing for the Shermans crossing the Bailey bridges
singing the Māori Battalion song
singing of the farms and the whānau
singing out praise for their country
singing like Orpheus so the rocks and trees followed them from home
His grandfather and three of his grand-uncles fought in Italy in World War II. Only two, including his grandfather, came back.
We have both been to Cassino. We have both stood on the railway station platform there. On February 17, 1944, the 28th Māori Battalion captured the station at midnight. They were forced to retreat when the supporting tanks failed to get through. By the following day, 128 of the 200 Maori Bāttalion men involved were dead.
I was there in 2004 for the 60th commemoration with the veterans, who had been drawn from a ballot, including soldiers from the battalion. When I stood on that platform, there was a haka. A commuter train came through and stopped. The commuters stood up and clapped.
Later, the bus carrying the vets drove through the tiny town. A boy stood to attention and saluted. He looked to be about the same age as that 10-year-old boy who lay down on the grass, looked up at a cloud, saw an alligator, wrote a poem about it and went on to become the Poet Laureate.