Mark Pirie, New Zealand poet, publisher of HeadworX,  and co-founder of the journal JAAM (Just Another Art Movement), tells Stylus how he sees it.

 Interview: Patricia Prime

When did you first pick up a pen and paper and write poetry?

I first started getting interested in words when I was about 17 or 18. I started writing rap lyrics and song lyrics. I was keen do something like hip-hop or rock and was attracted to the idea of lyrics portraying a message and staying true to realism as opposed to escapism and innocent or naive thoughts on life. My rock lyrics though were different to my rap lyrics. They were more surreal. I think eventually these were collected as a little stapled book called Informing the Tabula Rasa that was presented to my father for his birthday back in 1992. He wasn't sure what to do with it as I remember, and who could blame him. I must've seemed very troubled to him - a lot of angry, adolescent ravings in that collection. Maybe I will publish it when I'm famous under the title: Worst Poems, a selection of Mark Pirie's worst poems selected by the Author, and then include within it pages of highly wrought and earnest notes detailing all the obscure references in the poems. But seriously, my main influences back then came from listening to rappers like Ice Cube, Paris and Ice T and also to rock groups/performers like the Rollins Band, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix. I was never very interested in 'academic' poetry back then, more the pop culture and bohemian drug element. And, although my poetry has changed since I first began writing, I think that early influence of hard-core realism (gleaned from gangster rap) and the anger of rock/metal music has stayed with me throughout.

Did you have a particular mentor, or mentors, when you first began writing?

Early on, I did take my poems to various poets/lecturers for comment. While a student at Victoria University (Wellington) I took Harry Ricketts' undergraduate course on Modern Poetry and I think Harry inspired me a great deal with his lectures and talks on poetry. Through Harry I was introduced to a wide range of modern poets like Roger McGough, Fleur Adcock, Edward Thomas, Adrienne Rich, Ted Hughes and others, particularly New Zealand poets like Elizabeth Smither, Louis Johnson, etc. Occasionally during the course, Harry would invite poets/people to read to us, such as Les Cleveland who discussed War poetry or a New Zealand poet like Dinah Hawken. Dinah Hawken I particularly admire. I have read her poetry for a long time now and never seem to grow tired of it. (I'd recommend her collection, Oh there you are Tui! New and Selected Poems - to me that is indispensable reading.) So, yes, Harry was an early mentor and literary guide in some respects.

Later in 1995, I submitted poems to Poetry NZ and soon struck up a friendship with the editor Alistair Paterson. Since then Alistair Paterson has given my work impressive coverage and support. Other people who have helped me have been poets like John O'Connor, who edited a lot my early work for Sudden Valley Press and gave me tough, critical advice at times. His advice has helped to strengthen a lot of my work and reduce an early tendency to waffle using redundant lines.

Who has most influenced or inspired your writing?

Early on I was mostly inspired by American poets like Charles Bukowski and Frank O'Hara and the postmodern anthology that came out in 1994, Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover. I guess like a lot of other young authors I was attracted to the bohemian pop culture work and most of that emerged from America in the 1950s and 1960s and has continued to develop now through some three generations of poets. A lot my own work, unlike many New Zealand poets, is urban and pop culture inspired.

However, as I have got older and grown as a person that early rebellious side to my poetry seems less important. The desire to be a kind of enfant terrible has vanished to some extent. Now I seem to be more interested in reading poets to learn more about the different techniques and skills they use. I've re-read English and UK poetry recently. Poets like Hugo Williams, Ian Hamilton, Simon Armitage, Susan Wicks, Craig Raine, Tom Paulin, and Peter Ackroyd are terrific writers I think. There are also lots of great poets I admire whom I had previously cast aside as dull and tired: poets like A E Housman and Lord Tennyson, for instance. They are marvellous poets. There is still a lot I can learn from these older poets I think.

Poetry influences aside - my other main influences have come from studying Theatre and Film. That happened while I was a student at Victoria. In particular my studies introduced me to cinematic technique and also the use of the dramatic monologue, e.g. that sense of speaking/writing in a character or another person's voice.

How would you describe your poetry to readers who perhaps have not read your work?

I would say it is comic, dark, lively, eclectic and very contemporary.

Shoot (1999) was your first book of poems - was it hard for you to get a handle on it?

No, it wasn't hard for me. I guess I wrote a whole bunch of poems at the time (1995-1996) while studying film that exploited cinematic technique, camera angles and the idea of shooting in sequences. Eventually, after a while, I became excited when I found I had enough cinematic poems to put together a lively and innovative first book. The book then became based around my underlying notion and knowledge of the big screen. A lot of critics and readers liked the book's cinematic take on life and art, and how your own life can seem a bit like a movie at times. They rather enjoyed the satire and its comic connection between those two elements: real life and screen life.

When do you realize a series of poems is actually a book?

Sometimes I start with an idea or a word and find poems that fit round that idea, theme or word and produce a book that way. Maybe I tend to produce books that have a metaphor and a shape to them like a concept rock album of sorts.

I fell in love with the work of Louise Glück, the American poet, very early on. She had a strong sense of what a book should be, and it definitely wasn't a random collection of poems. She believed in the book being shaped around an idea/metaphor or particular theme rather than a gathering together of recent poems. Her collection, The First Five Books (Carcanet) is a fine example of her practise. The New Zealand poets Stephen Oliver and Bill Sewell are others who have worked along similar lines when producing a collection. (See Oliver's Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000 or Sewell's Solo Flight or Erebus and Ballad of Fifty-one collections.) That concept of the collection being little more than just a series of poems collected from a number of years is common enough in poetry but is not very interesting to me. I would like my books to be wholly individual and varied, a further progression on themes I have been developing over a period of time and which will eventually make up a distinctive oeuvre in sum total. Shoot is my movie-based book, Reading the Will is my epigrammatic and blackly satirical book, Dumber is my lament for the 'dumbing-down' of culture, and The Blues is my rock-influenced book, and so on. My most recent collection Bullet Poems (currently in preparation) links back to the concept of shooting with words (first glimpsed in some of the movie poems contained in Shoot). So there is a natural progression in my work.

When you created JAAM, was it something you did for fun, as a service to the poetry community, or both?

It was first started by a group of like-minded and energetic people at Victoria University in 1995. Writers like Helen Rickerby, Paul Wolffram, Ingrid Horrocks, Scott Kendrick and Anne-Marie Clarke. We had as our aim/vision to produce an outlet that would publish and promote young writers. Each issue would be like a musical jam session. At the beginning it was done mostly for fun but then in its second year when submissions began to grow I realised that JAAM could become a national and even international journal and should not be confined solely to young writers. There was also a growing need to support some of the more marginalised older writers out there too. So it was done for fun to begin with but it has now taken on a greater responsibility and professionalism in that it services the wider poetry community as a whole.

Why do you place so much emphasis on publishing young writers?

When JAAM first began it was supposed to be around for 10 years (21 issues) in order to publish and promote a new wave of younger writers. Eventually, that concept culminated in my 1998 anthology, The Next Wave - the idea of which had been largely suggested to me by Alistair Paterson. That new generation concept seemed an important issue at the time. There were all these new voices breaking out and I felt the need to capture some of that energy in JAAM. For me, the mid-'90s was an exciting time to be writing. Before this explosion of new voices, New Zealand poetry seemed very dull and tired. However, since that need has now been fulfilled, I still think the idea of giving space to new and younger writers is an important one. It's very hard for new writers to be published in established journals for instance without having connections through the writing courses that have burgeoned round the country in recent years.

If a poem is good it can be timeless whether written by a young person or an older person. What "dates" a poem?

I think that's true. I noticed when choosing poems for my UK Salt book recently, I dropped a lot the poems that I had written with a direct pop culture reference and which were otherwise reliant on the reader getting the joke or pop culture reference etc. in order to understand the poem. I think that reliance on fashion, trends, and pop culture references to films, bands, albums, etc. can be damaging to a poem in the end. It all gives it a certain ephemeral flavour. Although having said that Frank O'Hara's New York poems have weathered very well indeed. They are almost always reliant on the reader getting the reference and the joke. Sometimes that type of name-dropping can be annoying. Readers can feel excluded unless they share the same knowledge as the writer. I feel that a bit when reading the New Zealand poet James Brown's work. I like his work a lot but every now and then get frustrated at the in jokes. Brown is a brilliant poet but does suffer when his cleverness becomes excluding of the reader. I would recommend his books though. He is one of the New Zealand poets that are currently worth reading. Nick Ascroft and David Eggleton are other New Zealand poets who also fall into that trap of cleverness but are still highly recommended. They are - all three of them - among the liveliest of the poets currently writing in New Zealand.

Describe how and to what degree JAAM may have been responsible for shaping the course of young New Zealander's writing over the past decade.

It has helped shape the course of young New Zealand poetry to a certain degree but mainly by providing a valuable outlet for experimental and raw writing that wouldn't otherwise have been published. Its main achievement has been to help recognise a new generation of writers and promote them to the wider public, and in doing so give writers a certain freedom of expression. That is its aim, not to dictate what anyone should write or exclude writers, but to include writers as much as possible and give a comprehensive overview of the literary scene. In other words: to present a truer representation of the voices currently writing today.

Mark, you have had many poems published in Australia. You have been involved in the Queensland Poetry festival, and have published your poems on CD in Australia. What do you think are the primary differences between Australian and New Zealand poetry?

I think both poetries can be similar in a way in that we both share a Colonial past as well as a slangy, colloquial quality to our literature. But the main differences I suppose are the indigenous references: Aborigines in Australia and the Maori in New Zealand, and the landscape: the desert in Australia and the mountains and hills in New Zealand. There are also differences in fish and reptile species and insects that make our poetries quite distinctive and individual, despite sharing a similar Colonial past and tie with Britain.

It seems to me that Australians publish more poetry on the subjects of history, politics and contentious issues than New Zealanders do. What is your point of view in this regard?

I'm not sure that's true. In the last two years I have published several books though HeadworX that deal specifically with contentious issues: race relations in Bernard Gadd's Our Bay of Ensigns, political comment in Scott Kendrick's Rhyme before Reason, history and politics in Bill Sewell's The Ballad of Fifty-one, and the reconstruction of history in Terry Locke's Maketu, a sequence on the "Pakeha-Maori" trader, Philip Tapsell. So, no, I don't think that question is valid in my view.

Can you tell readers something about your publication of the anthology, The NeXt Wave (published when you were 23), and about the controversy surrounding your introduction to the volume. (I'm talking here about the exchange of letters in reply to the Pander review, in Pander 6/7.)

I think the Pander exchange was due to the claim that I was excluding a group of young, experimental writers in Auckland and that the book seemed non-welcoming of more extreme semiotic and postmodern trends. I don't think that was necessarily true. The book does include some experimental writers and near Dadaists like Jeanne Bernhardt. But I guess poets feel left out when an anthology materialises. I don't think any anthology in New Zealand has been greeted without a few brickbats directed at their editors. I think though most of The Pander claims about my book were a bit silly in retrospect. My reply explains the shortcomings and ignorance of that reviewer who incidentally didn't even sign his/her review. The review remains anonymous. Probably then, it is hardly worth worrying about.

There were also other scathing reviews by Andrew Johnston in Sport and Jane Stafford in Landfall. The Landfall review sparked several letters in my defence written by Alistair Paterson and Heather Murray. While no one enjoys receiving those types of reviews, I like to think that very few other books in the '90s were given as much critical attention and vehement opposition as was given to my anthology. A sign that what I was saying had some truth to it and was striking close to home for some critics. The main controversy surrounding my book was that I had identified a certain group of Wellington writers as seeking to control New Zealand literature as a whole and monopolise broadcasting, media and publication channels and ultimately dictate a certain style of writing over other forms of writing. But I think that whole critical attack has long since died down now. I'm far more concerned with publishing poets and writing poems at present rather than expressing my opinions on certain writers and their accompanying coteries.

How did you choose the poets for the anthology?

I basically had my thesis that focused on 'Generation X' and the differences between them and the Baby Boom generation and then went away to the libraries to read as many journals and books as I could find. I was looking mainly for work published and written by authors born between 1960 and the mid-1970s. But the birth date wasn't the overriding theme; there were other factors about technique, content and form to consider. Certainly older writers I included - I didn't know their age at the time - like John Dolan, John Pule or Bill Payne were definitely not 'Gen-X' in retrospect. But to me they conveyed that pioneering change in the content of New Zealand writing of the '90s - that franker and deadpan expression - and they did fit well with the overlying themes of the book. If I have any regrets about the selection, it is that a lot of the writing was uneven. I don't think they had yet realised their potential or were certain of where they were heading as writers. In the end there is a roughness to much of the writing but that energy and sense that something exciting was happening in New Zealand writing of the '90s is conveyed well in The NeXt Wave I feel.

What makes a good anthology?

I guess I think a good anthology is one that really shows a comprehensive cross-section of the voices writing in a particular country or literary climate at any given time. Some of my favourite anthologies have been books like Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry or the Bloodaxe anthology, The New Poetry. Both of these books succeed in giving a really good cross-section of the writing they are promoting and discussing. More recently I have just picked up Ishmael Reed's From Totems to Hip-hop, one of the first anthologies I've seen to include hip-hop lyrics. I included a few in The Next Wave, too. Reed's anthology has lyrics by Tupac Shakur and the Dead Presidents. Even more remarkable is to see them alongside great writers like T S Eliot and Marianne Moore!!

Another thing that makes a good anthology is the editor's understanding of their subject. The best anthology of jazz poetry I've read is The Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. The editors really provide the reader with a sound introduction and awareness of the differing forms of jazz poetry, rather than presenting a narrow selection of what jazz poetry is and confining it to one or two strands.

An editor's obvious love for their subject can be another factor in making a good anthology. See for instance The Poetical Cat, edited by Felicity Bast. This book is by a cat lover for other cat lovers. It has been edited almost like a gift for all cat lovers to savour. I think that way of editing can be beneficial in making a good anthology, too.

What gave you the inspiration to create HeadworX?

I was always interested in publishing and after JAAM I had a taste for literary publishing that I thought could be continued in the form of a proper publishing house. Hence the emergence of HeadworX. Back then, I was inspired to a certain extent by small presses like the Caxton Press (in Christchurch, New Zealand), and that Romantic sense of what one can achieve from such humble beginnings. There's something quite heroic about small press publishing and having to take such a huge amount of risk on work that other publishers might be too timid to put out there. Most of our truly great work has been published by small presses I think, work that was so different to what everyone else was writing/publishing at the time has always been championed by the smaller presses. I guess I was attracted to that Romantic sense of freedom that small presses have at their disposal. That sense of maintaining my own freedom was very important to me rather than going to work for a commercial publisher and losing that sense of freedom and the dynamic energy and uniqueness that goes with it.

How did you make the transition from writer to publisher?

I don't think I've been strictly one or the other. When I was doing JAAM I was always both: a publisher and editor as well as a writer and poet.  So I don't think I have made the transition from writer to publisher. I have always done both roles.

How many books have you published in the HeadworX series?

I have published 25 books now - mainly of poetry. I have published a few fiction collections but find prose too time-consuming to edit. Plus I think fiction collections must be really good, otherwise I don't think they deserve the time invested by me on their editing and production.

In contrast, my poetry list has grown significantly of late - it has become easier to edit and produce I think. The more experienced you get, the more efficient you become.  More and more established poets are becoming added to the HeadworX list, people like David Howard, Bill Sewell, Terry Locke and Alistair Paterson, for instance. The list is becoming quite important in the context of New Zealand writing.

What criteria are you looking for among the poets you choose to publish in the series?

At the start I published mainly new or emerging poets and neglected poets - poets that I considered had been cast aside by the mainstream for whatever silly reason, e.g. style, use of rhyme and traditional methods, or not hip and young enough, etc. I think poetry should be above that style of publishing, that idea of publishing only people that can be cultivated as an exclusive in-group, and seen as presentable at flash literary parties/functions - that sort of thing.

That desire to republish and renew older poets is still a driving force behind HeadworX and will always be I suppose. How many people really believed in the excellence of the poetry written by Stephen Oliver, Riemke Ensing, L E Scott, Harvey McQueen, or Michael O'Leary before HeadworX produced substantial collections of their work? The worth of those retrospective editions can not be underestimated I think. I'm glad HeadworX has been able to recognise that excellence and assist poets like that along the way.

What do you see as the future of electronic literary publishing?

I don't know enough about this medium to comment but am interested in all areas of literary publishing. One thing I have been doing is assisting papertiger, the CD-ROM journal in Australia. Paul Hardacre and Brett Dionysius, the papertiger editors, have been doing some exciting things in Australia recently and deserve strong support. 

What future projects have you in mind?

I would like to put together a collection of my critical writings on New Zealand poets and poetry. Maybe a collection of my best reviews and essays could be useful for readers wanting a fresh take on contemporary New Zealand writing. Also, I have three more books of poetry completed that I would like to see out and then I think I will spend time researching a longer narrative poem on my grandfather. My grandfather died when I was about 3, so I don't know much about him and now that my mother has died I find it difficult to obtain information on him. I would like very much to recreate some of his life - a movie-type reconstruction of my grandfather seems a worthwhile project and challenge for me in the future. There is also an old ship diary by my Great Great grandfather William Clarke, an alcoholic who was confirmed on his deathbed. The diary that he kept on his voyage to New Zealand could make for an interesting poem some day. I would also like to edit a HeadworX anthology of all the writers I've published. It would be interesting to see the diversity of the poets I've published all collected in the one book.