Mary McCallum reports once more on the Writers on Mondays readings - this time with with Mr Geoff Cochrane. It's fantastic to read such eloquent write-ups when you can't be there yourself. Thank you very much Mary:

To show I am not just a sensationalist when it comes to reporting on poetry readings, here is a report on this week’s Writers on Monday session at Wellington City Gallery where the writer in question not only didn’t fall down but is proud of the fact that he’s past all that (for entirely different reasons). Geoff Cochrane was the poet and as he said himself ‘before I was a famous poet I was a famous drunk.’ That was a long time ago – a year or so before Cochrane’s first mainstream publication with VUP in 1992 but recurring in his work since.

Not a drop of alcohol
in eleven years,
but still I dream
the same old shame,
the same old prideful shame.

Cochrane isn’t known for his public appearances and he said he’d gone back through his five poetry books and any number of other publications to choose what to read this time – the lines above included. At one stage he noted with apparent exasperation that he hadn’t picked his ‘Mount Rushmores’ and he’d woken at 3.30 am regretting it but felt he was stuck with them. Here’s another one that made the cut with the sort of lines poet James Brown described today as ‘chewy’ and that author Damien Wilkins once called ‘a whole world, rendered in lines at once compressed and open, mysterious and approachable’:

Spindrift Sunday
There are, of course, the children
as rowdy as dwarves,
a beloved wife whose hair
smells of graphite and sebum.
But you leave the sodden lawn
and burdened hollyhocks
to drive into the country.
You know a man who butchers cars
in a disused abattoir.
Poplars. Idle signals. Silent bells.
Leaving is like arriving.
The town ends in dandelions and silos;
the rain drifts in like seed.

Laconically chewing the fat with poet James Brown, Cochrane gave the lunchtime audience some delicious tit-bits. He explained how he taught himself to write – taking apart the work of good poets like Eliot accompanied by a flask of gin. Regarding his penchant for shorter poems he retorted that if you couldn’t have brevity in poetry when could you? And apparently confessional poetry isn’t what you do when you’re the eldest son of a Catholic family living in Levin. Cochrane quoted Martin Amis on the various complicated pleasures we derive from reading and how they are akin to the pleasures we derive from writing. And then there was that question Cochrane’s been asked recently about how he could be regarded as a literary ‘outsider’ when he’s published by a university press (not sure he answered that one or that it mattered).

At the end of the hour, poets in the audience like Jenny Bornholdt and Dinah Hawken had questions of their own to pose – technical stuff about vocabulary and that sort of thing – and Brown looked like he’d only just got started. Clearly some writers attract keen interest from other writers and Cochrane’s one of those. He’s certainly a perplexing mix of the enigmatic and the frank with poetry that repays reading for exactly those reasons. His latest collection 84-484 (VUP) is in bookshops now.

Links

There's some online poetry of Geoff's available on the NZETC website here.

And there's a 2003 interview by Damien Wilkins here.

Many thanks again Mary.