A message that carries

Our new Poet Laureate has plenty to say – about colonisation among other things – but believes in taking readers with him in the waka.

- BY MICHELE HEWITSON

One day when Robert Sullivan was a 10-year-old at Onehunga Primary School, he lay down in the grass outside the classroom and looked up at the clouds. Write a poem about what you see in the clouds, instructed the teacher, who might have been a genius. The future Poet Laureate saw an alligator. An alligator?

He was, and is, an adventurer of the mind. That is the first poem he wrote. That is the first time he played with words on paper, which could be as good a definition as any of what poetry is, really.

I asked what he was like as a child. He says he was “kind of introverted. I think so. I was a bit of a book worm. I preferred going to the library. I suffered team sports.”

He preferred badminton, which is batting about a fluttered thing with deceptive lightness. Which might be another definition of what a poem could be.

I guessed he might also have been fanciful and whimsical. He was happy with that.

When he was a kid he thought he could fly, he says. He would jump from a stone wall and flap his arms wildly.

He didn't hurt himself because the stone wall “wasn't very high”. He is fanciful and whimsical, but he’s not silly.

One day he is going to attempt to reconstruct his alligator poem.

"I think I've added another level to it. Because I think I was actually lying in the grass hunting the alligator." Did he get it or did it get him? "I think I didn't fire. So, yeah, it just glided by."

Being anointed the Poet Laureate – if you like flights of fancy, and both of us do - might be like being given wings. The National Library of NZ award provides him with funding of $120,000 (before tax) over three years to promote “the value of reading and writing poetry” - he will be kept busy - and to publish a new collection. “It’s pretty cool. It’s awesome. I’m sort of astonished, actually.” He is. He went on being astonished. “Yeah, it’s amazing. Oh my god!”