‘The trick of standing upright here’ 1

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 39, 1 January 2006, Page 73

Kim Hill

‘The trick of standing upright here’ 1

When I arrived in New Zealand from England at the age of fourteen, I lost my bearings for a while. As a reader, my internal world had been signposted by the words I’d ingested all my life. (I was a bookish child, for reasons more to do with social ineptitude than genuine love of literature, at least to begin with.) There was continuity between the environment I lived in, and the words I was familiar with: one reinforced the other.

So, although I can’t remember ever learning Housman, I’d been to Wenlock Edge when ‘the wood’s in trouble’ and ‘His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves’. I don’t think I ever much liked Wordsworth, but I’d been to Tintern Abbey, and seen where the daffodils might have been in the Lake District. When Shakespeare spoke of Shrewsbury (where I was born), and Ludlow (where I went riding), and Bedford (where my godfather lived), it gave me a sense of belonging. I see this in retrospect, of course. At the time it was like the weather, unremarkable.

But once in New Zealand, so much that I was familiar with seemed utterly redundant, especially in the sixth form at Otorohanga College. Our English teacher spent the year force-feeding us, chapter by painful chapter, a textbook describing in deadly fashion the historical categories of poetry: Elizabethan, Metaphysical, and so on. As I recall, no complete examples of the actual poems were studied, and certainly no New Zealand work was included.

The following year, I spent the seventh form at Stratford High School, in a town which, with every street sign,

taunted me with the impossibility of transplant: we lived in Regan Street. So, having no bearings, I clung to what at least used to be familiar. I went to university and studied French, German, European art history, medieval Europe, as if trying to transport myself off the bit of the planet I found myself on. But in addition, fortunately, I took a paper of New Zealand literature, and hoovered it up. It really did seem to be the only thing that made much sense at that point, as my mediocre grades in practically everything else testify. Naturally enough, I found a melancholy resonance in Curnow’s ‘Not I, some child born in a marvellous year, I Will learn the trick of standing upright here’ —given that I felt on all-fours for most of the time. And I put my own meaning into Baxter’s ‘But I remember the bay that never was, I And stand like stone, and cannot turn away.’ In trying not to ‘dream of Sussex downs’, I’d found a whole bunch of people who shared my very own ‘interesting failure to adapt on islands’.

Enough of that—and I’ve diversified, in an adaptive way, since then. But the point is that it was poetry, portable and plastic, rather than New Zealand novels or history, that helped me feel, if not at home, then at least less of a ‘stranger in a strange land’. And it was poetry that gave me a route to a whole lot of other things necessary in order to live here. It was, in effect, a ‘Main Trunk Line’. For this, I’d like to thank poet-interpreters like the curators of this exhibition, Jenny Bomholdt and Greg O’Brien, who have done so much to deepen the cultural pile of New Zealand.

Turnbull Library Record 39 (2006), 73-74

References 1 Kim Hill was the guest speaker at the opening of the poetry exhibition ‘Main Trunk Lines: New Zealand Poetry’. The exhibition ran from 21 July to 30 October 2005 in the National Library Gallery, and was based on the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library. It was curated by Jenny Bomholdt and Greg O’Brien. The address has been slightly edited for publication. The quotation of the title is from Allen Curnow’s poem, ‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch’.