Poetry Shelf Musings:

Posted: Tuesday Apr 09, 2024

Kay McKenzie Cooke – Give a Book Time

Poetry Shelf Musings: Kay McKenzie Cooke – Give a Book Time | NZ Poetry Shelf

In order to be true to yourself, it’s best to know who you are.

For someone like me, fascinated by quizzes on personality types, this pursuit is endless. I am well acquainted with my Myers Brigg type, my Eannegram number, my star sign, my Chinese zodiac sign and how compatible I am with other types. However, I’d argue that for me it is writing that really sorts me out. As a writer, I don’t think there’s any other choice but to be true to yourself. As you work at your writing, it’s working out you.

The 21st century writing world I am increasingly picturing is one that hums and bristles before me like a clip from a movie digitally mastered to teem with hordes of writers armed with outrageous writing nous. Majorly unsettling stuff, to be fair. I try not to keep on with the images, however, these cavalier beings equipped with slick writer profiles and a distaste for the semi-colon, riding in on the inky backs of fire-breathing dragons through a world that looks like a Bruegel painting and smells like duende, continue to manifest. I need to leave off drinking so much tea. I picture the turnover of Paper Plus paperback displays lit up like Vegas, spinning as fast as a Gore A&P Show’s Lucky Dip plastic windmill in a mean old easterly. In this nightmare of the imagining, a book that was a top seller in June, is binned by Christmas.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m not just imagining these things after all. Thank God for libraries where books go to never die. Little libraries, free ones, school ones and quirky ones. Books are survivors, whether back-catalogued, shared, borrowed, swapped, shelved, maligned, fondled, spurned, boxed, stored, sold, given away, returned, kept, forgotten or revered. Books will always find their readers. It may not happen overnight, but it will happen. Just give a book time.

Recently I went along to Dunedin’s annual 24 Hour Regent Book Sale. Bliss! An array of thousands of books laid out row upon tantalising row. What’s not to like? A balm for writers and an Aladdin’s cave for bookworms. A stadium-size book regatta afloat with books- ancient, old-old, old and new-ish - where a crush of hazy, right brainers high and dizzy on book dust, jostle each other in quiet, passive aggressive lean-ins for an old Dennis Wheatley or Judith Krantz. Or in my case, a Ruth Park. Yesss. Score!

The truth of who I really am in order to be true to myself, is proving to be an ongoing, lifelong quest. Luckily I’m still having fun finding out as I continue to write and forge my way through what throughout all seven decades of my life has never stopped being a terrifying, brave new world.

I draw upon my tīpuna, my ancestors, as a way of finding the truth of who I am and why I happen to be here in this particular place at this particular time in history. They ground me. From them I get that I am part of a whole and meaningful line of significance, a truth that emboldens me with a confidence I treasure.

I am painfully aware that no matter how much time passes, the world will keep on moving into the future. Faster than a bullet train. Faster than a Bugatti in the fast lane of an autobahn. My mokopuna are testament to that. I only need to turn my back for a minute and they’ve grown like something captured in a time lapse camera.

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua (I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past) is a whakataukī (proverb) that speaks to a Māori concept of time, where past, present and future are interwoven and life is an ongoing process underpinned by whakapapa, the ancestral line. I believe this and embrace it whole heartedly. It is how I remain true, not only to myself but also to my whakapapa, to my whānau, my family.

This art of remaining connected to a present that disappears into the past as fast as the future arrives, is a form of time management I struggle to perfect. Yet I wouldn’t be me, or true to myself, if I didn’t keep trying. The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne (Geoffrey Chaucer). How true.

Kay McKenzie Cooke

Kay McKenzie Cooke (Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu) lives and writes in Ōtepoti between the harbour and the beach. Her interests include reading, walking, baking and blogging. She is the author of four poetry collections and three novels. She is currently collecting poems for a fifth collection and just for the moment, fending off ideas for a fourth novel.