The Monthly interviews New Zealand poet, Gail Ingram – Part 1 – Always the one with my head in a book

Do you have any early memories of being attracted to literature, writing or poetry?

I don’t have any memories of not reading; I was always the one with her head in a book. I loved fairytales – the rage of Rumpelstiltskin, the beauty of Cinderella’s untouchable gown, the bleak territory of Rapunzel’s prince – followed by the horse books – Jackie has a Pony, Follyfoot, Black Beauty. I didn’t have access to or wasn’t really introduced to ‘literature’, coming from a non-bookish family, but my mum and dad knew my birth mother had gone to university and they wanted that for me too so they bought heaps of books and I read and read and read.

Can you remember when you first started writing – generally – or  – poetry specifically?

I first started writing for myself at university, and it was poetry – an attempt to organise words to match that moment of churning and angst in those first intensely-felt adult friendships – to oust the wrongs! I had the same urge to get the words right as I do now, but none of the learning or understanding where that urge came from.

Did you get support at home?

I grew up in a small-town in New Zealand in the 1970s. Men in charge, farmers revered, rugby, racing and beer. I had a lovely life, riding ponies, skiing in winter and hours dreaming inside my head. I loved art, words, and the body and beauty of the high country we lived on the cusp of. But when I tried to pursue art at school, I wasn’t allowed as it wasn’t ‘useful’. Poetry? Never heard of it.

Did you get support at school?

I had two formative teachers. The first one encouraged me to learn languages by correspondence as it wasn’t a class option in the small school. Learning French, Latin and Japanese cemented my love of the English language and its grammar. Miss Peddar also taught the whole class how to play knucklebones. (Do you wanna game? You won’t win.) The second teacher, Mr Wallace, a few years later, introduced 16-year-old me to poetry. We studied both protest songs and Robert Frost. It was a revelation. I’ve never been good at remembering lines, but I can quote Robert Frost and Simon and Garfunkel.

Did you go on study literature or poetry at tertiary level?

When I left home, I went to live in Ōtautahi Christchurch, where I did my BA (‘Bugger-All’ as it’s dubbed here) majoring in Literature and Psychology. My favourite class was New Zealand Literature. It was 1984 and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People was nominated for The Booker Award. I’d never read anything like it. It was poetry juxtaposed with raw prose; the language was extraordinary in its roughness and beauty about our country, about Us.

The books we’d been brought up with in New Zealand were from England but this book was written by a West Coaster and it was about a Māori woman who loved literature and her Pākehā family of misfits, who now lived on this land, her beach. I carried The Bone People book around with me like a bible. It’s still my bible. I got my first ‘A’ writing an essay about the damaged characters. When The Bone People won The Booker, the first NZ book to do so, my friend and I danced on the street.

Reading about bashing from the bone people to here

the bashing is in poetry and

a dreamvoice    bellbird clear

so it takes a while to have clarity

about the damage   the damage

the dam age of whispersbehindhands no!

your reader knows    she knows

this story

there is no sound of parting lips

or coming from upstairs but she interprets

the silence of grunting

and the setting   also loud and clear

because she hears

here between the cabbage trees and desolate beaches

knows driftwood   drift

wood is good

for bashing    rememberthedream

a different kind of

not    fitting   in

it takes a while

to reform    re

form

a damaged man

a damaged woman

a damaged child

ragged holes together   can fill the

hollow   make anew

wholly

she will leave the beach

she will leave the bush

she will shoulder the pack

she will take to the city

from anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024)

Much later in 2016 when I’d already decided I’d be ‘wholly’ a poet and nothing but a poet, I did my Masters, majoring in poetry – once again learning by correspondence – but this time because the Government had cut funding to the Arts and our local university no longer offered the programme.