The Ballad of Joe Taihape by Glenn Colquhoun and Perverse Verse by Michael Gould

Writers who self-publish do themselves a favour by regarding themselves less as writers who distribute their own work, and more as publishers who supply their own copy. It’s tempting for independent (self-)publishers to try and short cut the gatekeeper. But there’s a catch: good publishers pull together teams of designers, editors, and print specialists who together turn good manuscripts into great books. Self-publishers need to be careful not to throw the expert baby out with the gatekeeper bathwater.

Two new poetry books, Perverse Verse by Michael Gould and The Ballad of Joe Taihape by Glenn Colquhoun, sail close to these self-publishing headwinds. They’re both authored in an appealing and populist style but in very different ways. Perverse Verse is a fast read that’s both easy and rewarding. Short, punchy and with genuine belly laughs. I particularly liked ‘Revenge’, which ends:

They say revenge is a dish that’s best served cold
But my freezer’s full, and I’m getting old

There are many of these kinds of rhyming couplets in Gould’s book. They play like punchlines, and I can imagine them being performed as a solid stand-up routine. He’s got great material: build-ups that move faster than you’re quite ready for, and punchlines that land, sometimes with a crash and sometimes with a thud (which is fine: it’s poetry after all). There is hard-won and entertaining misanthropy in these pages, such as in ‘Curses’: ‘As for babies, let them get rabies!’

It takes guts to drop a line as cheap as that. Again, it’s the stuff of stand-up, not just because of the bawdy pessimism, but because it uses the common stand-up technique of rooting everything in the author’s lived experience. It’s part comedy, part memoir. Of course, stand-up holds no monopoly over the art of personality. Somewhere right now there’s a slam happening in which a poet is spitting their first person into a mic. Like:

I’m two or three people: the person you see
and the person I want to be, or
maybe the person you want me to be

Maybe many of us feel this way, though we don’t put it in a book. Maybe we politely process those feelings internally, like good little analysands. Michael Gould makes it quite clear: he’s lived enough and seen enough not to care. I’m sure he’s only teasing. He’s good company. Sketchy at times, but always entertaining. Sardonic and proud and entertaining and easy as a bag of MallowPuffs.

In my experience, this kind of writing is a rarity in Aotearoa poetry. It’s light verse with dark humour, and while we thrive on the latter, we seldom do well with the former. Do we have any poets deliberately out for a laugh? Allen Curnow had a run at it with Whim Wham, but that was all political parody, and more sarcastic than funny. Sam Hunt once ended a poem with the line ‘The words you use you choose and use with such alacrity it leaves me absolutely fucked’, which is closer to Gould’s wry mindset, but Gould’s just not that upset. Bill Manhire’s childhood reminiscence ‘1950s’ is good doggerel (he said so himself once), and that’s possibly as close as it gets.

Gould’s reminiscences are the cynical reflections of a happy man. Imagine Charles Bukowski fathered a lovechild with Pam Ayres. I can imagine these tales being shared around the drinks table.

The story of my life is rather boring
unless you consider the youthful whoring
truth is life is complex
that’s why I liked that kind of sex
the simplicity of it
more than compensated the duplicity

There are plenty of points on which an editor might push back (there goes that gatekeeper again), such as nearly-not-quite rhymes and the occasional stumble in metre. But that’s just me. These poems are all very clear and concise, like literary snacks that give pause for thought topped off with a decent chuckle. Perfect afternoon-drinking reading.

Glenn Colquhoun’s The Ballad of Joe Taihape is an altogether different sort of book, although possibly suitable for similar bite-sized reading occasions. Colquhoun is one of our great balladeers and has explored oral traditions in both English and te reo Māori in depth in books such as Myths and Legends of the Ancient Pākehā and Ngā Wāhine E Toru / Three Women. His performance piece and book North South – in collaboration with artist Nigel Brown – is a kind of revisionist creation myth of Aotearoa combining pūrākau atua with Celtic legends.

Joe Taihape continues Colquhoun’s interest in legend, creating a new hero out of familiar cultural references. The titular character, resplendent with back-slung-guitar, pounamu pendant and black singlet (itself a recognisable trope in Brown’s own work), traverses a range of significant moments of Aotearoa history in poetical, graphically illustrated ‘episodes’. There is rugby and Jesus. There is James Cook. There’s a bit about Chanuk Bair. There’s an Argonautical caper through the back blocks in a Holden Kingswood with golden sheepskins. And there’s a trip through Muriwai to the other side, where Taihape hangs out with some of the deceased – but defining – characters of our time.

Like North South, the new book is not so much a conventional poetry collection, but a cycle of poetical chapters, each of which is illustrated by a different artist, including Nigel Brown, Mat Tait, Deanna Gunn, Tim Bollinger, Lucy de Young Hakaria and Sophie Watson. It’s an innovative format. Every hi-gloss page boasts full production colour, with artwork extending to the edge of the page with no margins whatsoever, just fully saturated artwork. For the RRP of $30, there’s a lot of art to be had here. Some of the art is better, some worse (well, to me anyway), but overall it looks great and is very lavish, especially considering Colquhoun did it all off his own bat. That’s the advantage of independent publishing of this sort: you get the book you want.

The poetry is good fun: most is in a sort of lopsided iambic heptameter – the official meter of rollicking yarns, consisting in its purest form of seven iambs (14 syllables) per line, give or take, often with a pause at the end of every second line. That’s enough to really get a rhyme scheme rolling like the rhythm of riding a horse. So it’s as good as any for Joe Taihape, an adventurous man of war and rugby, who hustles sheep, recolonises empires, goes out stealing and consorts with spirits passed.

Where the mist goes slowly lifting up the valleys full of listening
Where the river cuts along beneath the snow
Cock your head towards the warbler with a sound like running water,
You’ll hear the voice of Joe Taihape go …

There are times when Colquhoun’s muscular grip on Kiwi vernacular pushes the rhyming scheme aside, momentarily disrupting the read. For instance, the first couplet in ‘Episode the First (in which Joe Taihape assists Jesus Christ along the Great South Road)’, ends with an additional iamb:

Jesus was a skinny first five-eighths and nothing showy
His mother watched wi’ bag a’ chips
him play for Papatoetoe

It’s hard to tell whether this is cute or clumsy: both hypotheses fit. And this kind of thing happens a lot. So if you’re a stickler for the rules of verse you’ll need to hang on tight to stay in the saddle. And this is only a slight example. There are times when things get quite out of kilter. But who cares? Colquhoun’s auto-legend of Joe Taihape is a joyous romp in the Kiwinese.

Joe Taihape, Joe Taihape, as a matter of a facty
If you’re doing nothing later drop on by
The sofa’s always comfy, here and there a little lumpy
Joe Taihape, Joe Taihape, kei te pai

It also appears that the book’s artists have done all the lettering (or used script fonts) and all of them make the poetry a little harder to access by frequently ignoring the line breaks – which are there for a reason, or should be. As a result, the poetry often gets pushed into the background. But there are times when the idiomatic lingo and the classical form all come together like the miracle of a #8 wire repair on some finely tuned bit of kit:

In Otāhuhu God took a piss
The girls all snuck a peek
And laughed to see him
Arse on tit
Outside the KFC

 

By Nelson Street Joe took his coat
‘twas all that he could do
By DB Jesus, parched of throat,
Sat down to drink a brew

These line breaks and emphases are messy (cute or clumsy?), primarily reflecting the natural speech of Colquhoun’s blokey narrator’s voice, and yet the classical metre holds its own even through the combination of te reo Māori and te reo Pākehā (a constant balance throughout the book), and this heady brew is all part of the fun.

Doesn’t matter anyway. Colquhoun is a seasoned trouper when it comes to Māori and Pākehā oral traditions, and he’s a widely experienced performer who can rock a stage with gusto, so I’m hoping that’s what he has in mind.

Besides the poetical technicalities, who is Joe Taihape and why has Colquhoun gone to the effort of creating him? He’s a kind of an antipodean Zelig, a daggy Forest Gump who appears and reappears across time and space to hang out with some of the luminaries in our collective cultural pantheon. He’s like an amalgam of Barry Crump and a young Howard Morrison; a guitar-slinging, sheep-hustling, supernatural manifestation of Mulgan’s Johnson (pun intended: he’s nothing if not masculine). He hangs out with Jesus Christ on Great South Road, travels to the UK with James Cook, ascends Chanuk Bair, and goes to Muriwai to visit James Baxter and a host of other folks in the underworld, both famous and obscure.

Baxter seems an unusual reference to dwell upon, considering the documentation of sexual assault which he revealed with little remorse in his private letters. Colquhoun refers explicitly to both The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady and Lament for Barney Flanagan, and – leaving aside Baxter’s posthumously destroyed reputation – there are elements of both these works in Joe Taihape: troubled men struggling to reconcile the troubled soul with an uncaring world. Yeah? Right.

Baxter’s presence goes beyond the several explicit mentions. Early on, my mind went swiftly to ‘The Maori Jesus’, which begins

I saw the Maori Jesus
Walking on Wellington Harbour.
He wore blue dungarees,
His beard and hair were long.
His breath smelled of mussels and paraoa

However, where Baxter’s Jesus ends up the persecuted victim of a bigoted nation state, Jo Taihape thrives in his Mulganesque outsider’s role.

The cultural references are so dense and fly by so frequently, it pays to have a web browser open nearby. I’d never heard of William George Malone, nor Gilbert Blair, nor that Ataturk’s middle name was Kemal. And, having found out the basics through my own searches, I was surprised that Colquhoun has little to say about any of them, other than that they were there, and now, here: populating this graphic-poetic catalogue of Aotearoa cultural icons.

Nor does Taihape himself really exist as a person outside of the cultural milieu Colquhoun weaves around him. By contrast, Zelig and Forest Gump both have desperate and profound needs that fuel their strangely ultra-conformist personalities. In the proud Aotearoa masculine tradition, Joe Taihape just is. Colquhoun tells us almost nothing about the origins of the central character, other than

They say in Rangatikei (though the story’s far from pretty)
Joe crawled out of a gumboot fully formed
In Mangaweka bless ‘er an immaculate conceptor
Says the first she knew he bit her on the foot

If that last line has any cultural significance, it’s unknown to me. Ankle biter, maybe? Regardless, neither the gumboot nor the madonna return to the narrative. Taihape is a man with no family of origin, just a chosen family of famous and infamous names, with a bit of burglary and whoring thrown in the mix. He is a conduit for the good, the great and the dodgy. For all of that, I was hoping to bump into Ronald Hugh Morrieson in these pages.

I’ve focused here primarily on the poetry, which makes sense given that it’s a bloody great big poem and poetry is Glenn Colquhoun’s primary literary focus. But The Ballad of Joe Taihape is also – and equally – a comic, and I hope someone reviews it as such. In a way, it’s informed by the Dylan Horrocks meta comic set in Aotearoa – Hicksville – just as much as it is from any particular literary source.

Nigel Brown’s work is instantly recognisable in the prologue and epilogue. His blokey, muscular, outdoorsy imagery is a happy match for Joe Taihape. He also appears to have replaced his paint brushes with felt tips, which adds to the hand-made comic vibe. Mat Tait’s work on ‘Episode the First’ is a standout for its murky, high contrast figures parodying the 14 stations of the cross. This is visceral and bloody, just as a biblical story should be. And I love Sophie Watson’s sketchy, hand-drawn imagery in dreamy black-and-white for ‘Episode The Fifth: in which Joe Taihape Visits the Underworld’. She avoids facial detail – despite the plethora of famous identities in her episode – and focuses on landscapes, seascapes and cloudscapes, populated largely by silhouettes.  She’s also taken great care with hand lettering and of all the artists, Watson leaves the poetic lines most intact, so her chapter is also the most readable.

It’s easy to speculate that neither of these books would have been produced in conventional publishing channels. But that’s not necessarily problematic. Both Colquhoun and Gould have created exactly the books they wanted, and both of them are unique, innovative and free of the identity-saturated milieu of much contemporary poetry.