Notable Dunedin poetry presence
DUNEDIN poet John Dickson has been dead for just over a year. In July 2017 his life was celebrated at the Crown Hotel, with tributes from such Dunedin fabric as Alastair Galbraith and David Eggleton.
Nevertheless, perhaps because the poet spent his last decade in Christchurch swapping librarianship for undertaking, there has been no written testament to his passing to date.
John David Dickson was born in Milton, South Otago, in 1944, the younger of two brothers delivered some 15 years apart. His parents, Walter and Margaret, were, respectively, farm worker and music teacher. His mother died of cancer when he was 14.
He attended Southland Boys’ High School in Invercargill and the University of Otago in Dunedin, graduating from the latter with an arts degree majoring in English.
After graduation, Mr Dickson obtained library qualifications in Wellington and became a longstanding librarian of the Otago Polytechnic’s Bill Robertson Library until his redundancy in 2007. Thereafter, he worked both as a kitchenhand at Christchurch City’s Millennium Hotel and as a shareholding undertaker at Sydenham’s Heritage Funeral Services.
He was first and foremost a poet. Mr Dickson began writing poetry seriously as a teenager, at that time heavily influenced by the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the American T.S. Eliot and, later, the Brazillian Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Frenchmen Blaise Cendrars and Francis Ponge.
From early on, he read widely, for the duration of his life maintaining a strongly internationalist, panPacific, continental perspective on not only poetry, but also culture and his broader philosophical horizons.
A contemporary of poets Peter Olds, David Mitchell, Graham Lyndsay, Bill Manhire, Ian Wedde, Alan Loney and Alan Brunton, among others, in the late 1960s Mr Dickson coedited the literary journal
Morepork, and was part of a wave of thennew New Zealand poets experimenting with an American freeverse poetics associated with the Black Mountain School of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
He read the Beats too — Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder and Corso — as well as Spanishlanguage modern romantics like the Chilean Pablo Neruda and Peruvian Cesar Vallejo.
Later, he was influenced by the American philosopher poets Wallace Stevens and A.R. Ammons, whose poetics represented a working compromise between the intense selfreflexive introspection of language poetry and the romanticism of the Beats.
Mr Dickson also read philosophers Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre and Heidegger, among others, and developed a lifelong love of jazz music that features in many poems.
At its best, the writing of the 1970s exhibits an enlivened, rebellious, conversational voice in New Zealand poetry, one finally escaping the shadow of the Depression and World War 2. Gone were the formal rhyme schemes and metre of Yeats and Auden, Glover and Brasch; in their place, the new New Zealand poets sought to capture the natural lyricism of spoken language while at the same time endorsing the art of poetry as a means of addressing philosophical issues associated with meaning and being in the world.
Despite all this early activity, Mr Dickson’s first collection arrived relatively late in his writing career. What happened on the way to Oamaruwas
published by Untold Books in 1986.
In 1988 he was awarded the Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago and in 1997 a selection of work appeared in the Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English.
His next singlevolume collection, Sleeper, published by Auckland University Press in 1998, exhibited a far more seasoned voice than the poet who kicked off in the late 1950s. In 2000, he was writerinresidence at the University of Waikato. His last book, Mr
Hamilton, was published by Auckland University Press in 2016. There were also two audio recordings, butan (1991) and Plain Song (2009).
Until his departure to Christchurch in 2007, Mr Dickson was a notable presence on the Dunedin poetry scene. A marathon conversationalist, he would happily spend an hour and ahalf in the supermarket with a captured fellow poet discussing the ins and outs of anything from vacuum cleaning to literary theory.
He was a poet of Rattray St and the Exchange, and at one stage ran poetry readings in the Crown Hotel. He also delighted in the teachings of local qigong master Sonny Chin, formerly of Rattray St.
It is rumoured Mr Dickson in a state of youthful inebriation was once thrown down the stairs of a certain Rattray St premises, later becoming friends with the owner. If true, the story would fit well with his reputation for cheerful paradoxicality.
Other than poetry, the poet listed among his interests gardening, tai chi chuan, qigong, Shaolin kung fu, driving, house renovation, tobacco, wine, jazz music, film noir, and Jen.
His longtime love Jen Uren considered him a ‘‘dick’’ when they first met as teenagers, but in 1966 she was reacquainted with the adult specimen, now at university. They subsequently formed lives with other partners and families, rediscovering each other in 1985.
At that time, they kept separate residences while maintaining a relationship, with the poet living in Warrington and his partner in Dunedin. In 1990, five years into their relationship, Jen shifted to Christchurch, Mr Dickson following her 17 years afterwards to take up his new vocation as an undertaker.
In Christchurch, he wrote. In addition to the work that forms his last volume Mr Hamilton, he composed extensive, as yet unpublished, verse letters.
He also learnt Spanish, French and Greek, and translated work by the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca.
After being diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer, the poet recurrently came south to visit friends, and memorably read at the former Rugby Hotel (now the premises of Alastair Galbraith) in 2015. The late Roy Colbert described him as ‘‘reading with the voice and betweenpoem chatter of someone who knew the days were diminishing. Soft. Humble.’’
He continued to write until about three weeks before his death and also tried vainly, ironically, to sort out the complex muddle of his literary papers.
That task is now being carried on by his friend and literary executor, poet Ian Wedde.
Mr Dickson is survived by Jen, by his biological children Saul and Imogen, and by the poet’s other children, grandchildren and great grandchild Sanchia, Saul, Aaron, Jolie, Akika, Javaan, Cueba, Yukino, Sandro and Kaiser John.