Last week, Chris and I found ourselves, thanks to a work trip, at liberty to stroll about in the capital. Yes – gorgeous boutique hotel (The Bolton, yum), VIP tickets to the World of WearableArt Show (superlatives threaten to swamp me), and just enough time in the morning to stroll through Main Trunk Lines, the NZ poetry exhibition at the National Library. Had to pinch myself ...

Impossible to try and impart the feeling of seeing the history of NZ poetry, linked as it is with some of the best artists in the country, set out so … quietly and meticulously. I did a quick round, had a small consumer anxiety attack at the sheer scale of the thing, sat down for a minute to regroup, then set to.

It was like travelling really – the more you see the more you realise you have to see. So much cross-referencing of people and places, writers who were friend and inspiration to each other, who you didn't realise came from the same time and place in NZ and whose work must therefore be re-viewed with an eye to their common background … So many venerable names, finally being accurately placed in your personal history of your country’s literature. It's a relief but also a burden – I felt I must add at least a hundred and fifty titles to my ‘must read’ list. Sigh.

However, a few examples: James K Baxter, whose work I have never read and was frankly never going to, was revealed as someone I could possibly have had a good chat with over a whisky (or five, his alcoholism was well known and not pretty, but even so). In a Poetry Magazine supplement for Wellington Teachers College in 1964, (the year I was born) he wrote this:

I had prepared a solemn introduction to this book, and then, looking it over, decided to burn it. It flared up very quickly, for it was a wet June night in Wellington, and I had a heavy fire on …

Endearing, self-effacing, flippant, but an earnest and simple plea becomes apparent later in his (new) introduction: when attempting to write poetry it was important to him not to put on airs, not to read too much even … he thought of too much education as a hindrance and the implication was that it must just come out.

The idea of literature is a great barrier when one wants to write poems. The unusable parts of oneself are used in the poem. One has to abandon all the ready-made answers in order to go into the dark place where the poem begins.

I know – this is a man whose controversial life has been written about ad-infinitum, and there will be scholars who will no doubt snort at my naive musings, but the point is that from these snippets my interest was piqued, the wall was breached and I wanted to know more. This is invaluable.

Among the rare, printed gems (No Trouble by Len Lye, hand-printed by the Seizin Press in Majorca in 1930, for one) was the first edition of Landfall, March 1947. Accompanying information told of how Landfall had come about during conversations between the young Charles Brasch and Denis Glover of the Caxton Press, who was on leave from the Navy in London during World War II. Brasch said ‘the new journal must show that the country could stand on its own feet, and build up a body of NZ work’.

As an aside, Brasch later came back to NZ to establish the seminal literary journal, using, for almost twenty years, a certain desk which upon his retirement he gave to Janet Frame. She promptly sawed the legs off the desk to give a more comfortable working height, and set to work. A couple of years later, during a year-long absence in England, tenants in her house sawed the desk in half. Janet simply pushed the two halves back together and wrote on it like that for another twenty years, including the books To the Is-Land (1983), An Angel at my Table (1984), The Envoy from Mirror City (1985), and The Carpathians (1988). Janet even wrote a poem about it. The desk is now rehabilitated and comfortably enshrined at the IIML.

Then there’s the art, the art: Saskia Leek, John Reynolds (pictured is Watch this space courtesy of the Sue Crockford Gallery), Dennis O’Connor, Michael Shepherd, John Baxter, Michael Illingworth, Toss Woollaston, John Pule to name a few, all working with words and/or poetry. Personal favourite here was Bill Manhire’s malady/melody/my lady repetitive word pictures that were picked up by Ralph Hotere and made into hypnotic things of pure loveliness. There are poems on wallpaper, poems on beer coasters. Eileen Duggan's 'poetic' teapot, for art’s sake.

I loved a letter from Janet Frame to Frank Sargeson where she wrote of the purity of CK Stead’s poems. Don’t ask me to define purity, she said, but

they remind me of clean potatoes out of the garden; the earth is washed off them (and some readers like their earth on) but their skin is a beautiful texture, and you can make necklaces only with clean potatoes. I’ll have to read them again to find out if they’ve eyes – too many or too few.

One final point of (for me) educational note: various forms of the poem are explained in the exhibition – most I had at least heard of. But not the sestina. Very basically, you have to write six stanzas of six lines each, then a final three line stanza. But the end words of the first stanza have to be used at the end of every subsequent stanza, only mixed about in a specified format. Then, too, the same six words must also be used in the final three lines. Oh yeah. Apparently French troubadours came up with the idea so as to appear (and indeed be) ridiculously clever. This extraordinarily challenging form I saw with delight had been undertaken, with haunting success, by our own Andrew Johnson, ex-pat poet in Paris (the link is his blog). You gotta check it out.

What a huge body of work, what brilliant minds, extraordinary vision and talent this exhibition represents. So much interlacing of people and ideas in our country; a tangled web of art and word, and so much the better for having had two people, now, at the wild beginning of another century, with the will and expertise to try and lay it out somehow. Hats off to you, Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien – you’ve done us all proud. Go and see this important archive before the end of the month, if you can.

Also thanks as always to the NZ Book Council, whose instantly accessible biographies of our writers we are so lucky to have.

I’ll wrap this rave up with a poem called Wooden Houses, which tickled me, and which, in this mad blustery wind-tossed weather, is very topical:

Wooden houses never forget
they once were trees
and creak and give to the wind
under the eaves
remembering their leaves

Jean Alison 1947