Hone Tuwhare
Feature
O, yes, indeedy
by Denis Welch
Hope they like fishheads in heaven. Hone Tuwhare’s headed that way
Of all the major New Zealand poets, few are associated so intensely with the public performance of their poems as Hone Tuwhare. In our time, perhaps only Sam Hunt’s name comes to mind as readily. The rest seem more at home on the page than on the stage. Tuwhare, however, was a showman, a shameless performer with a strong streak of music-hall entertainer in him. With his sultry pout and his soulful eyes, I’m surprised he never actually did a live striptease. He was the Gypsy Rose Lee of New Zealand poetry.
In fact, when I think of him performing, he’s not reciting a poem but singing a song. I can see him now in the café at Rawene five years ago, on that memorable tour he made of Northland at the age of 79. He’d said his poems to the crowd, and could have retired for the evening, but the urge to sing overtook him, like a motor-mower overtaking a Morris Minor, and with a sly smile he launched into “Who’s Sorry Now?”
Who’s sorry now?
Who’s sorry now?
Whose heart is aching
for breaking each vow?
His whole body positively sidled into the song. It would be going too far to say he moved in time to the music, but his hips swayed discernibly and he made vague hula-like motions from side to side with his arms. His voice cracked as he crooned. He wrung so much emotion out of the trite lyrics that they virtually dripped on the floor. It was pure poetry in motion.
Then there was the other Hone, the fiery polemicist whose anger could shake the rafters. On another occasion during that tour, he’d sat through a musical rendition of his famous anti-nuclear-testing poem “No Ordinary Sun”. Perfectly well intentioned, the singer treated it as a sad, yearning ballad. Declaring that it was a protest poem, not a “sweet nature study”, Tuwhare got to his feet and recited it almost in a rage, punching the words out as if he was in the front line of a demo.
His poems performed on the printed page, too – more and more so as the years passed. His final collection, lip-smackingly titled Oooooo……!!!, is a typesetter’s nightmare, jumping about in bursts of wild punctuation, dashes and capitals clashing with exclamation marks, like a series of head-on collisions between William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
These poems – testaments, all, in Tuwhare’s phrase, to the “helplessness of the tyrant flesh” – throb with an intense physicality. They lick, suck, thrust, fart, slurp and drool. Some of them are virtually sexual acts in themselves. Cunnilingus certainly gets as good an outing here as you’ll see anywhere in English literature.
No subject was off limits to Hone. Piles. Wind. Bodily fluids. Much of his subject material in the latter years was drawn from the digestive tract. “I’m a fishhead man,” he told me once, with the air of one expressing a profound religious belief, and confirmed it in my sight by devouring a huge plateful of them at dinner one night. His poems are seafood for the soul.
Above all, they celebrate life. Run the last words of many of them together and you get the idea: Yea! O YEA! yup!!! O...YEA!!! Gotcha! O, yes, indeedy! O! YEA! O! Yea!!! Very Sexy!!! Bring it on, Man! GO!! GO!! Mmmmmm...O! & O! O! Mmmmm....e e e e – yes. Oooooo!
Locating Tuwhare in the big picture of New Zealand poetry is not easy. He fits no school or style of writing except his own. It would be fair to call him unique. He grew up with no books in the house except the Bible. He was our first genuine working-class poet, the first Maori to have a book of poems published in English. He won critical plaudits but seems to be missing from literary surveys that try to detect patterns in this nation’s poetical development.
Though brought up speaking Maori in his early childhood, in Kaikohe and Avondale, he lost it “around the age of seven” and relied thereafter on the 19th-century Williams dictionary for Maori meaning and usage. He liked to claim that his mother’s ancestry stretched back to Kupe (his Ngapuhi hapu was Ngati Korokoro), but he also had Pakeha blood in him through his great-grandfather John Havelock Anderson, or Anihana, an early European settler at Utakura, who, Hone boasted, married a half-sister of the great Maori spiritual leader Aperahama Taonui.
But Tuwhare never made special claims for himself or his poetry by virtue of being Maori, or indeed by being a boilermaker who had spent many years of his life in the railways workshops. What was the fuss about that? he’d ask. A poet’s a poet for all that. And he was, through and through. The idea that he lived alone in his last few years is absurd: for company, there was always a muse or two at swim in his head or perched on his shoulder.
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