I recently wrote that I have a propensity to think of myself as outcast. This self casting as the sore thumb or the ‘other’ doesn’t just arrive from nowhere. I grew up raised by aging hippie parents who did things their own way. My mother had very specific thoughts on god and good and love and they did not necessarily correspond with those of her parents or the wider society of the day. My father was completely unphased by what strangers thought of him while being completely fascinated by their stories. Frankly it was none of your business that he had long hair and a straggly beard but he was happy to talk about the social history of Lower Hutt bridges, the Tour de France, or the buffeting horrific world events that had brought you to live in a council flat in Berhampore.
The result was a relationship that lasted from the 1970’s till 2019 upon my father’s death or perhaps a little earlier as dementia eat him from the inside. They actually had their first date in the 1960’s as teens but true love doesn’t always follow a continuous river. It was a relationship which never included marriage. It was a relationship where my mother was the primary income earner and my father the primary child caregiver and household maintainer. This might seem more or less normal today, or at least not frighteningly abnormal, but in 1981 it had the effect a polygamous family might have on a community today. The result was being spat at and cursed by little old Greek Orthodox ladies on the street. The result was being eyed with suspicion by everyone at the Kindy gate. The result was standing in the Rongotai College gym changing rooms in 1993 while Stefanos told me I wasn’t a real person as I was a bastard.

I know for many people childhood and teens are a time when they yearn to be like everyone else. I never really had this. I always gravitated to the dark edges. The kids listening to heavy metal and playing “Magic The Gathering”. The kids wagging school and selling dope in the back fields of Kapiti secondary schools or lying on the stop bank at the end of the Wellington Airport runway. The kids who weren’t going to play nice, marry young, and forge careers in law or real estate. The kids who were certainly not trying out for the First 15. Some of them are dead. Then again so are some of the lawyers.  
I have ended up in middle age, tattooed, fat, hairy, in yeast splattered jeans, shoes without socks and completely unrepentant. Like my father I think that your story matters, your actions matter, how you look is unimportant.

Of course, my ‘other-ness’ is an inherently privileged one. I am white, male, straight, and lower middle class. I have been to university, and I even made it out with a degree and a bit. I can talk eloquently and politely to police when they stop me on the street, and I know that if things really fell apart for me I could always move back in with mum and never have to sleep under a bridge. All these things bounce around in my head as this year I try to become a poet. Is it even something one attempts? Surely one just writes a poem and then one is a poet? I think I am sure.

Back in 2021 Talia Marshall mused on if “Straight white men are an endangered species in New Zealand letters”. I am self-conscious that the last piece I wrote on here was all about Talia and now I am bloody bringing her up again but it’s because every time I read something by her it leaves me thinking, questioning, and slightly scorched. The same piece characterises Pākehā, lefty liberal Pākehā like me I suspect, as “crying over Māori”. Scorched, but thoughts provoked.  
The piece goes on to cast Bill Manhire as possibly being a druid priest which is probably better than Hera Lindsay Bird musing on his life expectancy at the end of a poem about dead poets and sex positions. Bill’s laconic nature makes it hard to know how he would feel about either from this vantage point. But I digress. I always digress.

Entering the lit world as a gen x straight white dude without an MA in creative writing is to burrow into alien territory. Everyone knows it. Both those within that world and those in “civilian land”. I recently told someone I went to a poetry reading and the kneejerk response was a horrified “why did you do THAT?”. The someone was my mother.
The number of journals and publishers geared not for me is significant and certainly people like me are rare at events. But do not misunderstand me. This is not some plaintive missive where I am calling for white dude emancipation. In almost every other facet of my life the world is geared for me. It isn’t a bad thing to experience some systemic friction. Anyway it feeds my own idea of other-ness.

I am also aware that this situation is a much needed correction to the generation before when boomer and pre boomer poets were mainly white, mainly straight and mainly dudes.
J C Sturm stopped writing for years as her own useless husband kept turning down her submissions. Every action has a reaction, physics laws also work with culture to a point.

I do love it when I come across awesome poets of my demographic. Michael Steven with his drug deals and thoughts regarding his father. Bill Nelson with his earthy land soaked descriptions. I feel like I need a third example but that is all I got.  
In Talia’s piece she muses that she needs to web stalk some prominent lit figures to ascertain their sexuality. I of course can see these dudes above are white (but they could totally be Māori for all I know) and that they are men, roughly my age. It is none of my business whose bones they want to jump. There is a certain irony that saying one is a poet immediately casts oneself as other in “civilian land” while being a white dude casts oneself as other in the lit world. This is clearly my happy place.

I’m attracted to the poetry of Geoff Cochrane because he lived and wrote about my world, South Wellington, Berhampore, Island Bay. He did it with an edge of darkness and a drench of Christian iconography which I love. And most importantly he did it as an ‘other’. I discovered Geoff after he died so there was never any risk of meeting one’s hero and having my mirage shattered. He certainly seemed to be the spectre at the feast sitting on the edge of the literary scene spurning the English departments and MA courses and saying, “if you want to write, go sit down and write, be prepared to fail”.  My last experience with English teaching and creative writing teaching was back in 1996 when my 6^th form English teacher couldn’t stand my dark teen creations where everyone died and occasionally cannibalised each other. I moved on to a degree in sociology and politics, the non-fiction world where reality was infinitely darker than anything my mind could conjure up. Three decades later and here I am venturing back into the literary world. It’s kind of fun.