Collected Poems: 1981–2016

By Michael O'Leary

Excerpt from Introduction by Iain Sharp:

 

"Irishness, Maoritanga, proudly held working-class values, rock 'n' roll, buses, trains, ferries, Baudelaire – you'll find them all in this book. Moods vary from poem to poem, as you would expect from a lifetime's work. Inevitably, there are moments of sadness and a deep anger at social inequities underlies some of the satire. Yet what strikes me most when I leaf through Michael's collected poems is how often the tone is celebratory. What prompts Michael to write? I think he's driven by a need to pay homage to the people (whether pop stars, pals or partners), places and times he's loved. There's an inextinguishable joyousness at the heart of Michael's work that makes reading him an upbeat and uplifting experience."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael O'Leary
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223550228

Michael O'Leary

Michael O'Leary was on the founding team of Bain Capital’s social impact fund. Previously, he invested in consumer, industrial, and technology companies through Bain Capital’s private equity fund. He has served as an economic policy adviser in the United States Senate and on two presidential campaigns. Michael studied philosophy at Harvard College and earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives in New York.

Book preview

Collected Poems 1981-2016

Collected Poems: 1981–2016

Michael O'Leary

Published by Michael O'Leary, 2023.

COLLECTED POEMS 1981-2016

MICHAEL O’LEARY

Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop

Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop

Paekakariki

© Michael O'Leary 2017

Introduction © Iain Sharp 2017

Cover Image: Tricia Pink

Cover design: Mark Pirie

https://michaeloleary.wordpress.com

ISBN 978-0-473-38831-7

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of review, private research and criticism as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission from the copyright holder.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Iain Sharp

Michael O’leary By Michael O’leary

PART ONE

T.A.B. Ula Rasa

Rübesahl

Shake Speer’s Faith

The Destruction Myth

Walter Pater Stripped Bare By His Bachelors Even

Neo-Sticky Fingers

PART TWO

Kia Aroha

Kia Aroha – Rua

Kia Aroha – Toru

Kia Aroha – Wha

Kia Aroha – Rima

Kia Aroha – Ono

He Waiatanui Kia Aroha

In North East Valley

Mystery Look From the Eyes of Her

Scarf

Te Moemoea o Aroha

On The Death Of Your Mother

Us At The Funeral Of John Patrick Kennedy, 1994

PART THREE

Sonnet For A Child

Another Dream Of You, Too!

Reality Dreams

The Imaginin’ Of Megan

Fences Fall

The Mind Of My Lai Revisited

Sonnet For Victor O’Leary

Sonnet To Hilary Baxter

Irony And Impressionism In The Twenty-First Century

Hone Tuwhare: A Personal Memoir

Sarah

For Rowena

Spoken And Unspoken Love

Mortality Sonnet

Love Sonnet

Words Worth

Sonnet Of The Phd

Only a Poem

Sonnet To My Father

Saturday Night

Samoan Sonnet

Sonnet For A Marriage

Sonnet To Katrina

Tsunami Sonnet

Sonnet For Lyndy Mcintyre

Sonnet Written Upon Reading Selection 14 Of Dr. Johnson’s ‘The Ramber’

For that Moment

Passing Young’s Lane

Gulls At Paekakariki

Nigel Cox’s Body Becomes Its Own Holocaust Museum

How Typical Of You

A Sonnet For Malcolm Murchie On Turning Ninety

Dancing With Doktor D

Dining With Doktor D

Four Elizabethan Sonnets

Manchester United Vs Auckland 1967

Ping Pong Sonnet

Headlines Sonnet

A Sonnet To Ché Guevara*

Easter Sonnet: 1916-2016

As A Soldier

Songs

Farewell to the Hotel Paekakariki

The National Anthem Of Occussi-Ambeno

Mazeppa 4-4-Ost

The Doogan Super Spirit-Level

Satires

Poem Addressed to Poets

Literary Warfare

James Brown Writes It Down: Just Goes to Show a Blue Man Can Sing the Whites

Si, CK – a Rap!

South Sea Doggerel

I’m Cryin’ Mama

Not Fade Away

It is strange

A Ling

At the Shrynk

Christmas Surprise

PART FOUR

Meeting Te Rauparaha

Seacliff Amore

Waiata for Leanne

Shooting Star

Universal Mind

While Your Guitar Violently Wails

Nuclear Family — A Fragment

For My Father In Prison, 1965

To Cherryl

Kia Cherryl

To My Mother

Touch and Smell and Taste

To Litia

Across This Sky of Yours

Dark Knight

Untitled

Haiku Trio for St. Valentine’s Day

Revolution Song

Watching Ghosts

A Minor Transition: Platypus to Taniwha — 1974 to 1978

Make Love and War

Speculation

Fragile Network

Witches New Year

Flip Side of the Ballad of John and Yoko

The Last 48 Seconds of Kurt Cobain

Breaking Beyond

On the Tip of My Tongue

Poem to Your Grandmother

For Maria

Poem for Thijs

Hong Kong Handover

Bob Dylan, A Visitation

So Long Leonard Cohen… A Farewell

I am a Stone

Noa/Nothing I

To the S9 Track Gang

Elegy to Lester Bell (d. 9/9/99)

Dedikation to Graeme Collins – A Man of Our Times

Beware of Falling Hippies

Love Poem

Rolling Through Skies Clouds Both Beautiful and Threatening

Ebb and Flow

It’s Like a Sunday Night

Her Voice

Storm Warning

Tahana

Tahana

Russian Roulette

Black Russian Poem

Ring It!

The Ballad of Ryan O’Corky

Untitled

Skull

Ka Mate, Ka Mate, Ka Hore Ka Ora

Elegy for Diana Parsons

Five by Five

The Internal Soldier: (A Different Kind of Soldier’s Tale)

Mercedes

He waiata ki taku tuahine

Poem for Sandra Bell

Aotea Square — Centre of Culture

Kia Tahana – After Thirteen Years

Paneta Street

PART FIVE

Walking Beside Shadows in Soft Rain

Onehunga

Oscar Wilde Park*

Doomsblay*

From P.H.D. TO PhD

Another Round

Return Journey

After the Flood

History of a River

Train to Work Day

Rock and Cave

Torbay, Torbay, Torbay

Takapuna (Buy the Sea)

Torbay Revisited

Love is Compared to the Fast-Flowing Out-Going Tide of the Manukau

Manukau Harbour

Okahu Bay

Okahu

Otara — Have a Banana

30 Cent Inner City Fare

Morningside Station

Livin’ ina’ Aucklan’

Pakuranga Lemonade

To One of the Wild and Beautiful Rivers of our Land

Reflections on the Effect of the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour on the Mentality of the Kiwi

Bastion Point — Koha 22/5/88

From: Fantastic Modern Japanese Travelling Alphabetical Haiku

Dunedin Paraclete

Trolley Bus Dialectic

The Railway Line

Three Paekakariki Fragments

Foreshore in Black and White (Paekakariki 2004)*

Hāereere

Que Pasa New York, Statue of Liberty Said Come!

Down Through the Lampgrain

Southerners Crossing Amoré

It’s Not the Leaving of Wellington

Auckland Revisited

Dunedin, 2006

Songs of a Tokyo Greengrocer

Thursday Night at the Naval and Family

Moving Again — Overnight Train

The Earl’s Progress

A Penrose Pineapple

Remuera Dreamtime

6.15 Waiheke Ferry to Auckland, Wednesday 20 July, 1983

Way to Work, Way to Go!

The Craic, the Kai, and the Whiskey

Station to Station

Appendix to Station to Station

Disappearing Railroad Blues Sonnet

Track Gang & Shunters at Paekakariki

Self Deception

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Michael O’Leary

HeadworX

INTRODUCTION BY IAIN SHARP

In the early 1960s Michael O’Leary’s father and my own sometimes drank on Saturdays at the DB Hotel in Queen Street, Onehunga. They were not acquainted, but I like to think of the two of them nodding convivially to each other as they fetched their whiskies and beers from the bar. They had identical strategies with the sons they were supposedly looking after. Claiming just to be ducking in for a single quick refreshment, each would slip his boy a shilling for a milkshake in the dairy across the road from the pub, then disappear for a good hour or more. No matter how slowly Michael and I sipped through our straws, we would invariably be left with time to kill between the completion of our milkshakes and the re-emergence of our dads.

We would roam up and down Onehunga, peering into shops, none of which opened on Saturdays back then, bar the dairy. We would circumnavigate the DB Hotel's enormous carpark. And we would loiter in the lobby of the State Picture-house, inspecting posters and stills for current offerings until the manager shooed us away. The State specialised in lousy but respectable G-certificate family films with titles like Yukon Vengeance (thrills with the Northwest Mounted Police) and Caribbean Gold (blazing adventure as pirate kings clash).

I wish I could claim my friendship with Michael began when we were boys, but I was a shy and warily untrusting kid. During our Onehunga jaunts, I sometimes spied Michael from afar, but I kept my distance. Later, though, when we got to know each other, our proletarian ancestry (with household libraries consisting of Commando war comics, Best Bets and the Beatles Monthly) was an important part of our bond. The huge difference in our backgrounds, however, was that my parents survived to support me though university and beyond, but Michael's died when he was sixteen. From an early age he has had to make his own way in the world, relying on his wits and manual labour. During the hippie era most of Michael's friends could scuttle home for handouts or fridge raids when their experiments with impoverished Bohemianism were not going so well, but for Michael this was never an option.

Michael's poems reflect his life: hard-scrabble, insecure, generally skint, but buoyed up by laughter, love and carpe diem pleasures. Why does public transport feature so much in his writing? Because he's never been able to afford a car. True, if Michael had pursued money more ruthlessly, he would have amassed much more of it, but it was always the world of art and literature he sought to inhabit, not the world of commerce.

The first time I saw him as an adult was in early 1974 at an Auckland University seminar on Janet Frame, where the author's sister, June Gordon, was one of the speakers. Long-haired, barefoot and bedraggled, Michael came bounding in and greeted June with a big hug. I immediately formed the erroneous impression that he was Janet Frame's illegitimate son. I'm still inclined to think my mistake was merely literal. It has a kind of wonky metaphorical truth.

A few months later I was walking to the student cafeteria with one of my English lit classmates, John Curry, when Michael, who had acted in plays with John, joined us. Our first conversation was about poetry. Michael showed John and me a poem he had just completed and I recognised in it an allusion to Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, a terrific but not especially renowned song from Dylan's 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.

Looking back, I take two things for this early encounter with Michael. One is that he's never written for a coterie; he's happy to share his poems with anyone who'll look or listen. The other is the profound impact of rock and pop lyrics on us baby boomers. Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Ray Davies, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie – they were our canon before we discovered Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron et al. Michael was, in 1974, a walking encyclopaedia of song lyrics – and he remains so today.

But he has long been a reader as well as a listener. For many years he has run secondhand book shops full of out-of-the-way fare. Even before he set up the first of these businesses, intellectual curiosity took him in quirky directions. One volume he introduced me to in the early days of our friendship was Dinner at Magny's, Robert Baldick's account of the fortnightly gatherings at Cafe Magny in Paris's Rue Mazet, where Flaubert, Saint-Beuve, Renan, Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers traded wisdom, gossip and witticisms. At various times, in Dunedin and Auckland, Michael has tried to create his own version of the Magny dinners, transforming through a stubborn imaginative effort the sorts of restaurants he could afford on a tight budget into haute cuisine and his ragamuffin cronies into the finest minds of the age. Part, at least, of Michael’s self- conception as a poet is a droll, raffish, dandified Parisian Romantic of the Second Empire. If he’s Janet Frame’s illegitimate son, he’s also Baudelaire’s bastard brother.

More important than the French tincture, though, are Michael’s Irish heritage and his immersion in Polynesian culture, jointly exemplified in his famous greeting Kia ora, begorrah! Michael has long been acutely aware of the Irish (as opposed to the English) literary tradition, especially rebel songs, Wilde, Joyce Beckett, Spike Milligan and the Pogues. By and large his writing practice has followed a Joycean model: challenging experimental fiction, yet relatively plain-speaking, emotionally direct poetry. Equally, Michael has recognised from his youth how much New Zealand depends on Maori and Pacific input for its vitality. He made the effort, years ago, to learn te reo Maori. The most significant relationships of his adult life have been with Polynesian women.

Irishness, Maoritanga, proudly held working-class values, rock ‘n’ roll, buses, trains, ferries, Baudelaire – you’ll find them all in this book. Moods vary from poem to poem, as you would expect from a lifetime’s work. Inevitably, there are moments of sadness and a deep anger at social inequities underlies some of the satire. Yet what strikes me most when I leaf through Michael’s collected poems is how often the tone is celebratory. What prompts Michael to write? I think he’s driven by a need to pay homage to the people (whether pop stars, pals or partners), places and times he’s loved. There’s an inextinguishable joyousness at the heart of Michael’s work that makes reading him an upbeat and uplifting experience.

Iain Sharp

Auckland, February 2017

MICHAEL O’LEARY BY MICHAEL O’LEARY

I was beamed down by the Mother-ship in October, the month of our Lady, 1950 the Year of the Tiger. As a Libran I am a well- balanced person who is continually being thrown off-balance. I chose Auckland as my birthplace (i.e. let down centre) because of its thunderstorms and movie theatres. I am at present touring the South Island in an attempt to contact my spaceship (the air is clearer). I have been in Dunedin six years waiting for a sign. I have so far only discovered an advanced colony of Aliens from the galaxy of Ōamaruvia but I’m still searching.

Thank you for being so polite.

PART ONE

T.A.B. ULA RASA AND OTHER BEST BETS

The Earl of Seacliff woodcut by Nigel Brown

T.A.B. Ula Rasa

Nga mohio o te tangata wairua

(the emergence of an Orakei Bastard)

Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Leonardo,

Illuminated Manuscripts, Raphael, David,

Manet, Monet, Modigliani, Picasso,

Duchamp, Rossetti — all these names meant nothing to the boy.

But as he walked through the large,

Forbidding double church doors he

Entered the world which emulated

The spirit of all the artists mentioned. In the shabby, fractured,

Flaking plaster statues and effigies

Surrounding the walls and altar

Of the suburban holy place he

Experienced the same grandeur and expectation inherent

In the approximation of the spirit

Which these artists fulfil in their

Task to bring their works of human

Suffering and joy into plastic manifestation. Every Sunday

The boy would be subjected not

Only to the dark vagaries and subtle

Hopes engendered by the canon

Of the Catholic Mass, but also his eye was given the comely

And inspirational beauty the aging,

Chipped artworks and icons presented.

As the morning sun shone through

Stained glass windows and the rays landed on the bloodstained

Open-handed Christ on the Cross

The magnificent sacrifice became

Embedded in the boy’s mind as

‘Artistic Vision’. Such dramatic and emblematic scenes

Held in the soul of the young boy

As he tried to make sense of his

World outside art and religion.

The struggle to comprehend the secular machinations

Of