1957: Only That Your Words Will Live
June 14, 2019
By AHNZ
For Kevin Ireland, a J.K.Baxter poem (1957/58)
I approve Baxter’s anarchistic warning to his friend Kevin. Beware the praise of state, corrupt culture, New Zealand society. AKA- The Lion-headed incubus! It is correct to observe that the philosophers and poets whose words endure are the ones that the state finds a use for as propaganda.
Praise the state and your art will live, fame and fortune yours. This is not just the artist’s conundrum, it’s an Anarchist’s dilemma..
Friend, if you have strength to praise
The lion-headed incubus
That grips your life and mine within
Its strict Egyptian maze,
Expect no lessening of pain,
Easy bed among the lies
And coffeehouse adulteries,
Only that your words will live.Cut with ink of vitriol
These words upon a living brow-
I am by force of blood and star
One of the maimed immortals who
Tread a pathway to the fire
Where affliction makes them whole.– For Kevin Ireland (1957/8)
But Baxter’s false dichotomy stems from his own father’s lesson. “Fire” and “affliction,” Field Punishment No. 1, was the Baxter father and son’s example¹. And their fate. Affliction makes us whole? No! Big mistake! And not much of an alternative for Mr Ireland whose soul was in the balance.
Baxter said ‘We are maimed immortals, affliction makes us whole’
Roger Waters called it ”banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall’.
Jan Hellriegel sings, “And I’m warning you, warning you…Don’t you let it in, don’t you let it in…It’ll get you into trouble yes it will…It’s my sin”
Then how did this poem end? Did Kevin Ireland sell out or find another way?
Did he turn away from the advice and like Cypher in The Matrix embrace the Machine- the lion-headed incubus, The State?
He’s still alive (86yo next month) so I Facebook friended him a couple years ago to ask but have no reply. Ireland has an OBE and numerous government awards so I guess that means he didn’t like the poem!
—
1 Field Punishment No. 1- Now a film, this trailer sums it up well enough. Baxter did not have a good role model for a dad. The premise that fire and affliction and sin come from being authentic comes though loud and clear in JK’s advice to Kevin
Update: Ireland died in May 2023 without answering this question I’d been asking him for 6 years. He was a Facebook friend but that didn’t extend as far as replying to this. But perhaps he had already answered in his poem Questions That Must Be Answered…
The kind of question
that knocks at the door
and rattles the lock,
demanding a resolute answer
and never lifting a shoe
to shift its shadow off the step,
[…]
There are two ways
to answer a question like that.
The first is to stand on tiptoe
and look over its shoulder
and politely mention the queue
of doubts, pleas,
contentions and objections
it has attracted behind it.
[…]
The other is more devious.
You invite the question in,
offer it the best chair,
pour it a drink,
ask it to wait just a moment,
then quietly
you slip out the back door.
[Chicken.]
Ref. Fourteen Reasons for Writing (Hazard Press, 2001), © Kevin Ireland 2001, https://poetryarchive.org/
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