OF POETS, BARROWS AND BROADCASTING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 57, 26 July 1940, Page 16

OF POETS, BARROWS AND BROADCASTING

Written for "The Listener" by

HELEN

SHAW

streets of London selling his poems from door to door at a penny a’ sheet. During the years of peace, we have only pushed barrows through our cities labelled pies, whitebait, or ice cream. Now there is another war. Paper for magazines and newspapers will be scarce. Money will be scarce. We must, some of us, wheel figurative barrows labelled poems, stories, philosophies; and expect little more than pennies or sixpences in return. Though it means that boot soles wear thin and there is little bread, it will also mean that there will be the coloured visions, the tussock-coloured visions of New Zealand poets for the rest of us to see by. In another age men peddled buttons laces and ribbons from village to village. As the pedlar of buttons was important to the village wives, so the pedlar of poems is now important to the people of cities, of towns and of farms. The poets and philosophers must be heard above the roar of aeroplanes, for I: the last war a poet tramped the each one, though he writes of a star or of an emotion that Homer or Blake also wrote of, has something different to say. His experience of the star is new and must not be lost. He must be heard -and here lies a second solution. Centuries ago there were troubadours who wandered from castle to castle, from country to country, singing poems of battle and of romances. Old --

men told tales round the fire and their sons in turn told the tales to their children, If the time comes when there is no more paper for the poet, he still has his voice and he has what the troubadours had not. He has the radio, which means that he need not tramp from town to town, from farm to farm after all. He can take his poems or his stories to the microphone and offer them there as the troubadour did when he knocked at a castle gate and sang his tales to the lord and lady, and to the cooks and gardeners, and to the pot boys and guards. If the young men have eager ideas let them be heard, not rarely but often. Perhaps there has never been a time when they have been more needed. If Allen Curnow and John Beaglehole and Denis Glover, Frank Sargeson, and A. R. D. Fairburn, and Helen Simpson are writing and have something to say we should be hearing them now, without delay, several times a week. Revive the troubadour. He is once again needed. Exchange his lute for a microphone, and he will again belong to the twentieth century. The broadcasting poet will travel further than a few slim volumes of verse. He must keep alive, and moving among the people, his own fierce beliefs in New Zealand earth, in New Zealand life. In the poet’s barrow or the poet’s broadcasting lies, perhaps, the strength and colour of the future.