We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
`“MINDING HIS OWN POETRY COMPOSING BUSINESS – A Biography of Peter Olds” by Roger Hickin ( Cold Hub Press, $NZ42:50)
Roger Hickin is much to be applauded for his interest in New Zealand writers and poets who have too often been ignored. In 2020 and 2022 he gave us A Roderick Finlayson Reader and Roderick Finlayson – A Man From Another World [both of which were reviewed on this blog]. Now he turns to the poet Peter Olds (born 1944 – died 2023 ) who was finally regarded by some as “the Laureate of the Marginalised”. Once again, Hickin is very thorough in his research. He has read all of Olds’ poems, read the letters and diaries Olds had written, interviewed as many people as possible who knew Olds, and got in touch with the publishers who distributed Olds’ work. A bonus is the photos [not too many of them] of Olds and some of those who knew him. Before I go too far however, I have to admit that Olds never was one of my favourite New Zealand poets. To put in simply, I found much of his work to be simplistic, sometimes self-pity, and sometimes angry without a cause. But then even I have to admit that he did write at least some good poems so who am I to be condemning him?
Some history. Peter Olds came from a Methodist family. His father was a Methodist lay preacher. The family moved from one place to another. At first they lived in Christchurch. Later they moved to Milton. Young Peter hated going to school and it seems he might have had dyslexia. When the family moved to Dunedin, he began to do well at school – and over the years Dunedin tended to be the place he liked most. The family moved to Auckland and Peter had to go to Seddon Tech. in the city. Again he hated the place as in those days (the 1950’s) there was much fighting and thuggery among the schoolboys. When he left school he picked up some jobs, but he became a sort of “bodgey” as was then the term. He spent a week in jail for stealing a car. At about the same time, he found his first real girlfriend who called herself Cathy… and ironically, years later when he was in his sixties, he ran into her again and thought she [now calling herself Katy] would be his permanent girlfriend, but it didn’t last. In his life he went though many women but never settled down with any of them. Back in Dunedin he stole another car. But he was growing up a bit. By the early sixties he was influenced by the Rolling Stones and read Kerouac’s On The Road and dug the Beat Poets.
The first real poet he met was young Hilary Baxter, daughter of James K. Baxter. He was greatly influenced by the poetry of Baxter and Dylan Thomas. So now in his early twenties he wrote his first real poem The Road Is Getting Bumpty. He was also able to write a short play called Loose Boards and Seagulls which was produced at Patric Carey’s Globe Theatre in Dunedin. But he was hampered by his life-long depression and when he tried to write a second play he could not finish it. He needed a psychologist’s help and spent some time in Cherry Farm. But at the same time he proved to be a very good draftsman when it came to drawing and creating images to promote plays for the Globe. He saw James K. Baxter as his guru, so when he moved to Auckland, where he was to be helped by another psychiatrist, he at the same time dossed at Boyle Crescent where Baxter held court with young people. The address was sometimes raided by police looking for illicit drugs He took to cannabis and other drugs for a while and became a Christian… sort of. But he was on probation for a while and he wrote a poem called On Probation which ran “I, their shiftless longhaired masterpiece / edge toward the courthouse / to face the animal of nightmares. / Eyes, handcuffs and tons / of incriminating files follow our man / who fears even / to pause to light a cigarette / in the light of a dumb lamppost…” All of which may be a little too grandiose for a young poet.
The influence of his Methodist father was long gone. By this stage he had a long affair with a girl called Janice Sturm, commonly known as “Yancy”. He followed Baxter to the Jerusalem commune with his girlfriend where other lost souls went but gradually he became disenchanted with Baxter. He rememberd Yancy would be lying “on a mattress on the floor reading romance books, smoking and sucking on bottles of Phensedyl” while he sat at his desk “bashing on my newly acquired second-hand typewriter – a poem, probably about cats, or our mad relationship, psychiatric hospitals and pills.” “Crap! ” was her verdict to everything he wrote. He regarded her as his “greatest critic.”
By now he was depending on Valium and sometimes Mandrax to keep himself going. Then came the death of Baxter, about whom he wrote in detail. He went to the tangi and wrote this poem: “I walked slowly up the brown dry / track to your grave & held it / high over your head, and someone in red hair / & weeping jeans ran from the bushes, screaming / “He’s caught Hemi’s cock”. You should / have seen the size of it, mate… / We ate well that night, listening / to the ducks fly over the flat green water.”
When he broke off with “Yancy” his next girlfriend was Lorene. And all the while he had to find jobs to keep himself alive. He remembered the biting cold weather in the Dunedin winter and he wrote “snoring through grey-sleet storms - / storms that drive the beaten / to bottle and pool-table bar / to lean on the shoulder / of a black-haired girl…”… and then Lorene was gone and his next girlfriend was Lynn with whom he said he had blown “all the seriousness out of me & put me on the track of Lady Lust…”
He kept on writing, and in psychological matters he was greatly helped by Dr. Maureen Bell. It was at that time that he wrote poems about his condition, writing “Tonight , walking home / hunched and greasy from chips and beer, / old dreams rose and grumbled behind me. / I ran the last block in fear. / Pausing on the steps near home / I saw the victorious moon rise beyond / dark North East Valley: / The sky clear, cool and pale / Earth black from long afternoon rains.” This at first sounds like a man who is confident… but the poem goes on to tell us that “In my room , I wade through rubbish / three feet deep looking for a pen and paper.”
Some friends rallied to him, including Hone Tuwhare with whom he enjoyed fishing. Hone Tuwhare helped Olds get a Burns Fellowship which helped him to write poetry without being distracted over some months. And he had a new girlfriend, Elizabeth Webb, though their relationship lasted only one year. He took a job as a cleaner at the University Bookshop of which he wrote “I work nights at the University Bookshop: / Junior, Intermediate, Headman, Honorary Caretaker, / Master Cleaner. I work in every conceivable position / from toilets, Foreign Language to Herbal Cookery, / sometimes singing ‘Oh What a Beautiful Evening’ and / sometimes not. Mostly, just a race about like / Neal Cassady with an overstuffed vacuum / cleaner snarling on my tail….”
I have to give him points for being upset by the destruction of the Clutha Valley when the Clutha Dam was being built. He wrote almost like Wordsworth in his thoughts on the valley and its greenery. Every so often, he went back to his parents, dried-out and set drugs aside… but then he would go back to booze and pills. Out of curiosity he went back to what used to be Baxter’s Jerusalem, now tidied-up and with the hippies gone, about which he wrote a poem. “Much cleaner than I remembered it in 1970. A long time since the / drug squads and hygiene officers that once came poking around: / Mr Baxter sedated, the grass clipped neatly around his balls, old scars / healed over, the prickly path edges chopped back, the barefoot / tracks trimmed into lovely English-garden curves, bones and secrets / raked up never to be mentioned again…”
By 1986 it was two years since he needed medication. He settled near to Seacliff and for a while he lived in a hut which he had improved. This was near to what was once a psychiatric hospital but was now empty. By 1990 he was back on the booze. For a while he helped Bryan Harold and Michael O’Leary run a second-hand book shop in Dunedin. He had some operations on one eye, and for some years he wrote no poems. What he called “after a long illness” he started to write again, often turning to ideas that he had considered in notes years before. In publication he was now helped by Michael O’Leary who ran his own work shop. Olds was very bucked up when David Eggleton wrote a positive review of his poems in the Listener. Eggleton said that Olds was “a poet of delicate perceptions robustly expressed” and called him a “laureate of the marginalised”. Olds hoped that he could have published a collection of all his works, but the small publishers were collapsing and there never was a collection of all his works.
He wrote a poem about fishing reminding him of the death of Hone Tuwhare which reads in part “You need the agility of a spear-throwing warrior / the feet of a high-jumper / and the deft hand of a pool-player. / You need to run head first / fearless into the frothing surf, and / in an instant of non-thinking, cast your line…” He was also able to write a good poem about Baxter for all his sins saying “Who but a madman would kneel barefoot on a hard pavement / in the centre of the busiest business district in the land / and pray for money and friends a rosary dangling over his genitals…” And finally he was glad that his collection Under the Dundas Street Bridge was published. But towards the end his poems had a sense of despair as in his poem saying “God’s not real. / Purpose is not real. / Meaning is meaningless. / Life itself is unreal / ( on shaky ground) / I miss love (Do you have to be born / with it? – is it a talent?) / Art’s bullshit – neurotic! / - refined obsession.” But he had some unexpected admirers. After moving to Dunedin, Vincent O’Sullivan “admitted to having held a rather disdainful and incomplete view of Peter’s early ‘beat’ work [and ] enjoyed his occassion encounters with Peter, and found the poems in [the collection] You fit the description.”
Knowing that he was getting old, Peter Olds wrote “Most days now / I don’t feel like going out . / I’d rather just sit here / fixing old poems, / looking out the window / for inspiration / at the cloud and mist / drizzling down from the north. / I drag out the dregs / I couldn’t throw away / feeling there’s something there / I haven’t spotted yet, / waiting for the time when / my eye will be clearer / and less fogged by thoughts / of fame and failure.” For a very short time he got back to his first girlfriend [Kate] but it didn’t work out. By now he was an old man. He had a number of strokes and he was now often seen in a wheel-chair. He died at the age of 79.
Inevitably in reviewing this biography I have given you only a part of Peter Olds whole life and only a very few of his poems have been quoted. It is interesting that he was very unsure about reading his poems to an audience. He particularly did not like having poetry being mixed with music. On this I agree with him.
Foot note: Michael O’Leary, who published many of Olds poems, is my wife’s cousin. Bryan Harold, who worked in the same second-hand book shop in Dunedin, moved to Auckland and set up a second-hand book shop in Ponsonby, to which I often went to fill my shelves. But it closed up some years back. Pity.
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