Welcome

From Bill Lennox’s introduction to Shape-shifter:

When I first worked with Hone Tuwhare, setting up public and educational readings in Auckland and Tai Tokerau, he used to refer me to academic reviewers who had said generous things about his work. As New Zealand’s first major poet who hasn’t had to overcome or deny a university education, he’s had an odd relationship with critics and academics. Some, mainly writers themselves, are old mates. But it took others years to acknowledge and admire what Hone was up to.

In 1975 a reviewer wrote of his “oratorical success.” Tuwhare was “picking his way between rhetoric and throw-away idiom,” had “fine sensual detail” but was often “too slack verbally.”

Perhaps it took Bill Manhire in the book Dirty Silences to provide a legitimate analysis. He described Tuwhare’s “code-switching effects ... He can sound within the space of a couple of lines as if he’s both at church and down at the pub.”

By 1988 Apirana Taylor could explain that Tuwhare “makes the language itself a celebration” and that “there is a serious note behind the gut tickling.”

The most intense and entirely successful Tuwhare reading I’ve heard was at Auckland University in the late eighties. Hone had been doing a busy round of schools – unpredictable and hard work. While we waited for the university reading Hone had a couple of pies and three cups of tea in silence. This was the performer’s preparation.

There were about 80, mainly English honours students, crammed into a small tiered room. Albert Wendt introduced “one of the large figures in the literature of your country” and Hone relaxed into a powerfully intimate display of his words in the air. His velvety gravel voice sorted through simple, known lines: “I know you stop only to talk/ not to the cruel metalled road/ but to a stone ... a solitary ... stone.”

Lines that he often just let flow were today held with a rising inflection that made one listener sob: “... people who are also looking for something more ... real, more ... permanent ... maybe, than dying.” In this close space Hone refreshed lines that were almost too well known, gave them what he often called “due weight.&r Without the need to project his voice, some lines came as a vigorous stage whisper: “... and on the sand-hill/ wry wind fluting/ the bleached ... bones ... marrowless.” The conclusion to ‘Rain’ was unsentimental, adamant: “But if I/ should not hear/ smell or feel or see/ you/ you would still/ define me/ disperse me/ wash over me/ rain.”

The general reader (of whom Hone has more than most New Zealand poets) and many critics have always understood what Hone was telling us. ‘No Ordinary Sun’, ‘To a Mäori figure cast in bronze outside the Chief Post Office’, ‘Auckland’ and ‘Monologue’ became anthems. Who cares about an analysis of their style? ‘The Old Place’ and ‘Child coming home in the rain from the Store’ recall our own treasures.

Hone gets a kick out of literary recognition but he gets even more out of interest and appreciation from working people. He had struggles in the welding shop in the early days but was inspired by his Scots mate’s pleasure in Monologue. He still reads it with a Scottish accent (after checking first that there are no real Scots in the audience).

Hone recalls that when he read a new poem to a Berlin barmaid “She was so chuffed I got a free beer.” In a 1980 review Robin Healey said Tuwhare was “simply and vividly in touch with non-human life” and “showed respect for pace, movement and the surfaces of ordinary life.”

At his live readings Hone reads a relatively narrow selection of poems. He likes to rehearse them in advance, to decide on “the particular phrasing ... the vocal sense ... lifting the words off the page.” The more intimate poems are heard on selected occasions. Some works, mainly those written primarily for political protest, he once said were not really ‘poems’ and he reads them only on request. A school student once requested ‘Making a Fist of it’. It’s not a poem he chooses to read (although he does the Afrikaans voice with scary conviction) and he couldn’t find the page. The student offered her crumpled and annotated copy of Mihi. Hone studied it. “Looks like a race book ... notes all over it ... corrections are they?”

And as he reads you feel that he‘s still pondering his choice of words. Usually he‘s revelling in an unusual usage, but once (while reading Tangi) he went back over a poem: ”I think there’s a bad line in there – ‘green pathos’ – bullshit.”

It’s not unusual for Hone to send a draft of a new poem to friends, just to see what they think. Or he’ll read it down the phone, perhaps to hear for himself how it sounds. Often these test runs are on his non-literary friends. He just likes to hear poems, even if they are written by others. Once he phoned me and the first sound I heard was the marvellous Tuwhare voice reading back to me a poem I’d written and sent him. Improved it no end. If you haven’t heard Tuwhare reading his poems, try to find Gaylene Preston’s excellent 1996 film portrait. You’ll hear him sing there too.

Hone’s vocalising somehow releases the other senses at work in his poems. He tells young writers to employ all of the five senses, “Then, if you get it right another sense comes into play.” Because his poems seethe with taste and smell, I often enjoy Hone’s visual, painterly angles.

I’ve always thought that ‘Hotere’ is one of Hone’s finest works. It is considered yet passionate, descriptive and respectful. The poem ends with a tribute to Ralph Hotere’s “superb orange/ circle on a purple thought-base” on the cover of Tuwhare’s 1970 volume, Come Rain Hail: “I shake my head and say: hell, what/ is this thing called love/ Like, I’m euchred, man. I’m eclipsed?"

From a poster inside my front door, a life-size head of Tuwhare peers the length of my home. It’s a poster for Jim Moriarty’s production of Hone’s play, On Ilkla Moor b’ aht at. Hone is wearing his snazzy cravat. He often squints at me, trying to work out what the hell I’m doing out there. Mostly, though, he’s saying, “Whatever you’re up to, good on ya mate. Bewdifull.” Good on ya, yisself, mate. Arohanui.

~ Bill Lennox