Donald Long: a young New Zealand poet

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33875, 21 June 1975, Page 12

Donald Long: a young New Zealand poet

( By

DENISE WALLER)

I eaching the deaf is perhaps a job as far from the practice of writing poetry as one could find, but a Taylors Mistake poet, Donald Long, has managed to combine both activities.

Twenty-five-year-old Don Long is married with a young son, and although he trained last year to teach the deaf, he considers poetry his real career. At present he is on leave from his teaching to work on a documentary series for TV2 called “Encounter.” Bom in Walla Walla, Washington, he did not come to New Zealand until he was 13. He is a member of an old Pacific family which includes the Australian poet. Filson. Don Long’s work is relatively unrecognised in New Zealand as most of his poems are published overseas. “New Zealand is on the dark side of the literary moon as far as poetry is concerned,” he says. "But the young poets of today are being more widely recognised overseas.” Don Long is both a writer and a publisher, and as the latter he edits one of New Zealand’s six literary magazines, “Edge,” which devotes some space to overseas poets’ work. This, he says, arouses the interest of poets from the other side of the world who seek the New Zealand magazines to find their own work. They, in return, will publish New Zealand poems, and as a result many young poets from this country have gained more recognition overseas than some of the older poets. Don Long writes literary columns for several papers in New Zealand, the United States and Australia. With Witi Ihimaera he is editing an anthology of modem Maori writing to be published next year. James K. Baxter, ip his pamphlet, “Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry',”

tended to divide poets into two groups: the pre-1930s with the “schizophrenia of the New Zealander who could not distinguish himself from his grandfather” and those who became known in the 30s and 40s who were “truly inhabiting the country.” But in the late 1960 s and early 1970 s a third major group of New Zealand poets emerged, and it seems that Don Long belongs to this group. Don Long became better known in Christchurch recently when he won an international American award in poetry. The award was divided into three categories: passage to self, passage to nature, and passage to space. His entry “Only the Warehouse” won the “passage to space” category. Mr Long says that it is impossible to be a full-time poet in New Zealand because of the lack of an income to live on. Overseas poets In Canada and the United States there is an open schools programme which enables poets to make a living in their career. The schools have poets in residence who lecture in poetry. In Christchurch, he says, the Canterbury Education Board is interested in establishing an adviser and research teacher in New Zealand poetry who would service schools. the Teachers’ College and the University of Canterbury. “This has to be agreed on first in principle. Then it has to go to the Minister of Education, the Treasury, and the Department of Education, and then assigned a priority—so it might be quite a way off,” said Mr Long. The Bums Fellowship in

New Zealand, which enables writers to study for a y ear at Otago University, is the only award similar to those in the United States, and Mr Long hopes to apply for it.

In his poetry Don Long says there are three basic things he is trying to combine. The first two are the technique and the image, in which he largely served an apprenticeship with his first book of poetry, “Borrow Pit,” and the third is the poet-as-camera image. The first stanza of a recent poem, “At Smoke,” incorporates this camera image with the words: "The clouds wait high up along the hills; Here beside the river the trees turn back from home. My small fire tastes its dry wood: The water I have carried up in a canvas sack Splatters from the pot. It is a time to sit And look at lost things.” The poems Don ‘ Long likes best are those written in plain language so that anyone can read them and know what the poet is talking about. “Poems which are surreal and abstract are just too difficult to be understood by the average person, and are too hard to get into.” Influence Living at Taylor’s Mistake has influenced Mr Long’s poetry. He says he could not bear to live in the city or out on the Canterbury Plains. For him Taylor’s Mistake is a place for something else, something full of half-remembered things. Don Long feels that his poetry will be to New Zealand what Taylor’s Mistake has been to Christchurch.