Nice morning for it, Vince - O'Sullivan wins top poetry prize

Vincent O'Sullivan

Vincent O'Sullivan is in the mood to yodel.

The news today that his most recent collection, Nice Morning For It, Adam, has won the poetry section of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards has been "a very pleasant surprise".

The collection, full of darkly sardonic musings on time, death, idealism, gods and various other metaphysical matters, beat out C K Stead's The Red Tram and Murray Edmond's Fool Moon for the $5000 prize, and is now in the running for the Deutz Medal for Fiction at Monday's awards ceremony in Wellington.

But O'Sullivan is not a man to crow about his achievements - of more immediate inspiration to him is the view from his hotel window in the Tirol in Germany, where he is attending a conference on "new literature".

"I'm sitting here looking out at mountains and feeling I should be doing yodelling lessons."

Of course prizes are nice to have, he muses.

"You publish a book and usually it's like dropping a stone into a well; it's nice to occasionally hear something back."

In fact, since he burst onto the New Zealand literary scene in 1965 with his incendiary first collection, Our Burning Time, the poet/novelist/short story writer/critic/playwright/editor has garnered most of Australasia's top literary awards and sundry other plaudits, including being made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2000.

Seeing You Asked (1998) won the Best Book of the Year Poetry Award at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

In the same year, his novel, Believes to the Bright Coast, was runner up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction.

Lucky Table was shortlisted in the poetry section of the 2001 Montana NZ Book Awards, while his biography of John Mulgan, Long Journey to the Border, was a finalist in last year's awards.

However prizes are not what motivates O'Sullivan - nor most artists, he believes.

"There's always an element of the lucky dip about it," he says self-deprecatingly.

"Some judges you appeal to, others you don't."

Still sporting the trademark floppy fringe that cut such swathe through the New Zealand literary scene in the 1960s, O'Sullivan, who turns 68 this year, also downplays his own prolific and varied output.

"When you're approaching old codger status, it always looks as though you've been quite busy."

Although his writing career may look like it's been a glittering upward trajectory all the way, he says it's been "more ups and downs than a smooth ride".

"There have been books that have not had a great critical reception, so you can't take it for granted."

He says all writers get discouraged from time to time.

"But you keep going because some new thing catches your interest and you think 'I'd quite like to have a go at that'.

"And while it's nice on mornings like this when you hear you've got some award, most of the time that isn't in your mind....

"Most of being a writer is just sheer plod really.

"You've no idea if it's going to interest other people or not, so there's an element where you just persist out of a kind of cussedness."

He professes to having "sort of drifted" into a literary career, after getting sidetracked from a law degree.

"If I had stuck with that, perhaps I could afford to actually live here in the Tirol rather than just visit!"

While he admires those "admirably driven people" with a real sense of vocation, he says he would be lying if he claimed he couldn't live without writing.

"I'm always surprised; often I didn't know I had a particular interest until I find myself doing something."

His parents were not dismayed by his decision to become a poet.

"There are worse things I could have been I could have been a National voter, which would have shocked them a lot more!"

Aside from sporadic fellowships and residencies, O'Sullivan has mainly paid the bills with university teaching.

A graduate from the universities of Auckland (1959) and Oxford (1962), he lectured in English at Victoria University (1963-66) and (after several months in Greece) the University of Waikato (1968-78).

In 1988 he resumed his academic career as professor of English at Victoria, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor.

He says he is feels "lucky" to have had a job like that, and life in the ivory tower was mostly very congenial.

But there were times when he felt he was "rubbing against the grain".

He has been quoted as saying that "one gets tired of just talking about literary things in a literary way".

"It has always been very important to have friends who really matter to me who are totally outside the literary world.

"Sometimes the last thing you want is to start talking about what exciting developments there are in the sonnet form."

Many of his poems are barbed with sly digs at the academic world: "Anyone who wouldn't rather talk with a good atlas/ than read a friend's new novel isn't owning up" (Taking in the world).

"At the end of the day, you're still part of an institution, and that can be tiresome at times," he says.

"There's no doubt that if there's a particular sin of academe, it's vanity.

"At times the absolute certainty one's colleagues have about all sorts of things can be a bit disconcerting because your main business as a writer is you're always trying to steer your way through uncertainties.

"If you're not doing that, then you're not trying to do something new as a writer."

As he puts it in the poem for which the collection is named, "exactitude, like tulips, comes at a price", as the gardener/God wields his "fearsome secateurs" in warning.

Sometimes universities are so busy pinning down what's been done, they miss what's happening now.

Labels like "colonial" and "post-colonial" are oddly enough not usually at the forefront of his mind when he writes.

"It all starts to sound a bit old hat after a number of years -- other people may place me where they like, but it's not a notion that's ever in my head when I'm writing."

Writers can't be too precious about what people read into their writing, he says.

"It's bit like having a child: people might say, 'what an ugly child', or 'what a beautiful child', but it's beyond your control.

"By publishing something, you've handed people the right to make their own judgements or assessments.

"You've set yourself up for the odd belting -- like going into the wrong sort of bar in the 1960s.

"If you got into trouble it was your own fault."

Not that he would have done anything of the kind.

"I heard of such things happening."

The healthiest thing about New Zealand poetry at the moment is its diversity, he says.

"Occasionally academics want to call the shots, as if a literature should develop according to the lines they think they have laid down, but I don't agree.

"We've had some great books come out this year, by a number of good and interesting poets, who have nothing in common, except geography."

- NZPA