The weekend will be upon us in the blink of an eye, so I’m not going to leave it to the last minute this time to urge to you pop along to the Auckland Art Gallery on Saturday at 1pm. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be entertained and enlightened by the third instalment in the In Context series of chats and readings from NZ poets about the sixties.

This week we have Riemke Ensing and Kevin Ireland, in that order. Riemke is perfect for this sort of art/lit thing; her work is very visual thanks to her lifetime love of art. In the last few years she’s been appointed an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland (Faculty of Arts) and was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow in 2002. In her inspired mid-sixties now, she’s vibrant, funny and deliciously ascerbic and will be a great foil I reckon for Kevin Ireland’s gentleman’s club wit and geniality. Is he as cosy as he looks? Possibly a wolf in a moustache and panama actually; in the last few years he’s been a recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry, been given an honorary DLitt by Massey University and he’s just now putting together his 16th book of poems.

Last session (two weeks ago) we had the very cool Mark Young with an introduction by Barry Lett. Barry was an endearing if unaccustomed speaker (much like myself I like to think) who had lots of anecdotes from his days at the iconic gallery he started in his late teens which ended up housing some of the best artists of the times – McCahon, Hanley, Illingsworth to name a few. He told us of James K Baxter who used to use the gallery as his Auckland office and remembered the way he would work: he’d lean back in his chair staring at the ceiling intently, then smack down and start two-finger typing at a furious pace until he’d got the thought down on paper, when it would be back to the staring statue again.

Mark Young started off by ‘getting the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ out of the way’ – this had us all on the edge of our seats – he had a short poem for each vice that put everyone nicely in the picture. Oh yeah. But he settled into a formidable reading of his extensive body of work that left us all in no doubt that he’d been a prolific and serious poet throughout the sixties.

There were lots of stories as well – being picked up outside Mt Eden prison by Ralph Hotere in ‘whatever Toyota he was driving at the time’… Mark had been inside for six weeks for possession of LSD. I jotted madly:

… Six weeks of prison will leave
tadpoles in your tattered mind

… a nembutal haze in the place
where your mind used to be

Mark dedicated the reading to Barry’s partner at the gallery who Mark said saved his life on more than one occasion. Drugs slowly began to get the better of Mark, who had started the sixties like everyone else, ‘so innocently’. There’s more about this in the excellent NZEPC interview by Martin Edmond, but suffice to say, those bad times are now over, thanks mostly to his wife Lauren, and a fair few years later, Mark’s latest literary endeavour is now up and running. It’s an e-zine called Otoliths.

Here’s the poem Mark wrote that goes with that picture you’ve been wondering about at the top of this article. The art is by a NZ painter named Ross Ritchie, it’s called Thought II.

Your fallen Orpheus
for Ross Ritchie

The shadow
of the despairing man
seems longer than a
mile. He is
your fallen Orpheus,
stripped of his lute
& now more naked
than those women
in the foreground.

Movement of the wind
is memory
of movement
in the macrocarpa trees;
but they no longer
hear the music. What
was, what is. Em-
barrassment.

The other people
in the painting — the men
in evening dress, the
women undressed
for another kind
of evening — do not
concern themselves
with anything going on
behind. Untouched
by memory or shame
they spend their time
participating in an
empty orgy that
echoes out the
hunger of the age.

This moment, in the
gallery, I stand in
what must almost be
the same spot as
you stood in your studio
to cast the last
glance that
completes
the painting. The summit
of the background hill
has since lost
sight of you, & now
it is my time to turn
& leave the ground
your fallen Orpheus
walks upon.

Wellington, 1964.