Poet Spotlight – David Merritt

NZ’s renowned contrarian street poet gifted us his thoughts in a recent interview exclusively for Phantom Billstickers.

Howdy David!

Where are you and what are you up to?

Howdy back Phantom. Hello big world!

It seems to me that I am everywhere and nowhere, both at the same time.

In the course of answering this simple answer I’ve covered 4500 kms of NZ in a nondescript, white Mitsubishi L300 van, done a dozen or so readings and any number of roadside poetry attractions. It appears that I’ve finally grown up and am on a book promotion tour around this great nation of ours. The book is called BUNKERLAND and it is a collection of my writings covering the period from the mid eighties till now – where NZ went from a reasonably egalitarian, democratic socialist country into just another western shithole nation, a hut in the global village, its State-owned silverware long sold off to the voracious sharks of international capital.

Goodness!

Yes, this is clearly not the usual topic of conversation covered in the traditional slim volume of poetry churned out by the academic presses, but it’s becoming evident that as a contemporary poet, I walk a fine line now between the rights of expression, my personal rights to any number of second opinions about anything. Which is one of the many historical reasons why poets & writers / musicians / artists / journalists etc can face often quite severe repression and control by the State when the State turns nasty. As I’ve aged and hopefully matured, you can gain insights and perspectives just from watching the cycles of history. I’ve seen a lot over the years, some of it very troubling and now increasingly needing to be talked about.

Do you ever get tired of the constant travel? What helps you keep going?

Some people have drive, some people sit about. Life seems a curious combination of movements and staying still in a place, even for a short time. As a kid, our family moved constantly around the top half of the North Island and some of that stuck and embedded into my  later life. Touring is a matter of match fitness for me now, the annual Zinefest circuit I follow established a time and place schedule. Last year I tabled at 8 zinefests, for example, 4 in the space of 4 weekends.

And driving, under certain circumstances, is and can be a small joy. A time to sing and whistle, say things out loud to yourself – it’s a road trip with some scheduling. I’m on a very frugal journey trapped inside a society hell bent on debt and destination. 

In other words, I’m the slowest thing on SH1, the old dude in a nondescript white van cohort. Driving Land Rovers taught me good habits like never going too fast or having to use the brakes on corners. I’d spent 5 minutes getting up to 75kms and just staying at that speed, pulling over whenever things made appearances in the rear view mirror. I got good at avoiding the big utes and trucks, taking smaller, quieter (but longer) provincial highways and “scenic routes”.

Describe your typical day, if “typical” even applies.

As I get older I get up earlier in the morning, while it’s still dark and quiet.

I’ll light a fire and put the jug on. I still drink a lot of coffee and smoke a few cigarettes on my “typical” day at home. I warm the printers up, set some files to print. Do some weeding in the garden and spread mulches and seeds. Set more files up to print while collating, folding, trimming and stapling what’s just been printed. Remember to eat (anything). Repeat with printers until good stacks of things have been printed. Interact with inter webs. Fiddle with new poems. Back to the garden with printers again whirring in the background. Chop up Reader’s Digests and banana box cardboards. Stamp with Trodat alphabet set the poems titles. Weld glue sticks for a while. Make up poetry care packages of books for some shops and some poetry bricks for postage when next in town. Back to the garden or chopping firewood or collecting cow shits. 

On tour a typical day is different, and often I’ll start the day early, waking up in a layby or rest area and start looking for the nearest coffee / bakery. I’ll drive for an hour or two at a time, short hops between places and events. I’ll visit any Op shops that may have toast racks or RD’s or a good plaid shirt. On tour recently I’ve been collecting old Brother laser printers for the RAID print-shop back home. I do sleep, a few hours at night and maybe a grand dad nap mid afternoon. Sometimes I’m staying with friends and have to work in with them what’s happening that day. I’m always bloody busy with one thing and another. Some days I just park up in the sun and make books and think how lucky I am to be alive.

What role do you think poetry has in the times we’re living in?

We’re on the precipice of history, right now, going through an immense period of change, not much of which is very good. Empires are falling, the climate is burning, the AI will eat 50% of jobs before breakfast kind of stuff. Yet our cars get bigger, our consumption of things more voracious, our abilities to discourse and debate stifled or mediated by a very small number of Tech and media companies in cahoots with the Government.

Is poetry fact or fiction? Information or disinformation? In a time of post-modernist post truth, with widespread mistrust of the mass media, what is my job description? This is a moot point, one I’m very aware of all the time now.

Enshitification is now widespread, even in “literature”. It’s a bloody minefield, that’s what it is.

Anyway, time for a poem!

Do you still use technology like you once used to?

Yes and no. Social media is enshittified, like Microsoft and Adobe and Google and all the rest. The Fedaverse is where it’s at, just like Napster and Limewire was the bomb before Metallica shut that music file sharing down at the turn of the millennium. I’m now no fan of any algorithm, all the adverts drive me crazy and last time I checked Google was giving me a throttled dog-pile of corporate BS, similar to Wikipedia.

I’ve recently started to use a Linux box computer for book design, using abandonware Aldus Pagemaker (version 4.2!) from the pre-Adobe purchase days in the mid-90’s. I run the Macintosh operating system 8.6 under emulation! It’s a bit clunky but hey, last time I checked I also am a bit clunky. They say in technology that there is a bleeding, leading and trailing edge, much like on the wing on an aeroplane. At home I’m running a R.A.I.D (redundant array inexpensive devices) of older Brother HL53 printers (also a bit clunky) but which I can keep up with. I’m now much happier with old crap, it’s better made, more robust and critically still has the ability to be fixed or upgraded. Old Macbook Pro’s from 2012 are currently my sweet spot, much like a 1974 Landrover without the Meccano-like capabilities.

Technology in moderation is fine, like most things with an addictive grip in the background. It’s when we get out of balance with nature, it’s when we drift to the totally synthetic as opposed to the sometime or mostly organic. Everything is in the process of being digitised, including us at the moment. This digital hoohah as I like to call it, is everywhere, omnipotent from the cars we drive to the media we consume on a daily basis. We still haven’t quite cottoned onto the fact that we are gifting so much of ourselves away in one form or another.  It feels like a matrix of data-mining has become the norm.

Anyway, time for another poem.

What else are you up to? What pisses you off about the literary establishment?

Oh, recently I’ve been having some fun and games using various forms of AI to map out what I now call the NZ Literary “Blob”.  From investigations, it seems to consist of about 30 NGOs and a couple of the creative industries Government departments. These are mostly centered in and around Wellington and have been responsible for most of the narrative shaping and gate keeping that they do as a matter of course over the last 35 years.

There are a lot of professional organisations in New Zealand, purporting to help “literature” and “writers” in any manner, shape and form. On the surface this may appear to be true but when you scratch just below a thick layer of professional bullshit you’ll realise that the vast vast majority of these groups and NGOs serve only to perpetuate a powerful control over what happens in the literary field of the media / publishing landscape.

There are 11 bookshops that sell new books of NZ poetry in New Zealand for example. It’s a very, very small book retail niche at best. An average print run is a paltry 500 copies. These slim volumes choke the poetry space, published mostly by academic presses, highly subsidised, under-written and CNZ funded. The poets who write these slim volumes ad nausea make no money from poetry publishing because mostly their poetical output is a side hustle to an academic or other professional career as a tutor, lecturer, doctor, nudge unit psychologist etc etc.

Anyway, the literary Blob is like the Borg, assimilating what it can into a bland, chardonnay-swilling middle, run by well-meaning people that have no idea really. It’s like they are making it up as they go along but it always favours the conveyor belt running very efficiently from the creative writing courses to the academic presses to the literary festivals to the residencies and awards. 

Quite often (in fact always) this selection process, this gate-keeping, is done by a highly secretive cabal of writers and academic professionals, under the guise of “industry experts”. These secretive committees, often buried layers upon layers deep in NGO’s, well beyond public scrutiny or FOI requests, run our literary establishment. It’s a very top heavy structure, packed full of well paid professionals, people who don’t seem to have made the leap from the last century, let alone the last millennium, with both technology and ways of doing things. It’s also a denial of history, as if computers, the internet and digital printing and e-books were never invented yet and we all have to give 93% of our income to publishers and bookshops in order to be mass-produced (sic) and then measured by that curious metric as to our “success” as poets and writers.

Musicians long ago got rid of all the 92% middle people, simply by plugging a laptop into the interwebs and becoming both a recording studio and a record label. Their cost of production and distribution went through the floor and their global reach was suddenly ginormous. 

I’ve noticed this strange gentrification process now occurring inside of the Zinefests up and down the country. It’s like, “here come the curators”, we know what’s best, we’ll secure funding, a venue, organise the hierarchies and ensure that the people tabling are in safe, quiet, unemotional, anti-germ environments. I’m now signing three-page documents dictating the contents of zines to avoid offense to others and the public. It’s BS of course and part of the enshittification of everything that’s going on at the moment. Don’t get me started etc.

What’s the best unexpected encounter you’ve had in your travels lately?

I love meeting some of the books of mine that I made over a decade ago. There are a few of these scattered around the country in cafes and libraries and private collections. Recently I met some of my older books again in Oamaru, over 12 years later, and it was like meeting old friends again.

From your experience over the years, do you think NZ is becoming more receptive to poetry?

Yes. People are questioning what they know, what they think is truth and reality, a very blurred and grey area nowadays. Poetry has an important role at the best of times, to guide or show an audience along the way, to highlight and to examine events or feelings and to make observations. It’s a curious job description obviously and one that is evolving with time and our maturity as a nation. Presently the NZ arts and writing scene is in the vice-grip of the global culture war led by the academics and the well intentioned NGO’s. There’s fuck all wriggle room in their landscape for anything except the considered norm of the polished turds.

You’ve seen more of NZ than a lot of people. Most memorable spot for cheese and coffee is…

Hmmm. There are several I know of. Nelson and Motueka and Lyttelton and Dunedin markets are all good for cheeses and coffees (a staple of my non-cash proceeds / currencies of poetry). At the moment the best coffee in the country is a close tie between two small, boutique coffee roasters – Kush in Nelson and Kuku in Caversham, Dunedin, both of which are fantastically good. There are more, many more, who make a more than half decent coffee, just as there are a few who will make you a consistent cup of misery.

Keep up with David Merritt on Facebook at Landrover Farm Press and on Instagram @dm807169