No Rush- the intriguing world of Poet David Merritt

It’s a brisk spring day in Dunedin, and David Merritt sits on a bench by Rob Roy, flanked by Bonita boxes. His hair is grey, his face weathered, a woollen beanie warms his head. He’s self described as “creased and crinkled in all the wrong places but pleased”. He could be homeless, save for the selection of handprinted poetry books that sit next to him.
Constructed out of the “detritus of established publishing”, Merritt’s books replace the poor writing of the Jeffery Archers, the Reader’s Digests and the Mills and Boons of the world with beat poetry, hand stamped, photocopied and stuck back in place. He’s sold them at Market Day, and he’ll be showing them again during OUSA Art Week beginning Monday.
He’s been making poetry books now for almost three years, and has only recently gained recognition for his work, most notably from the Elam library. “I lived in a corner over there marked ‘bohemian poet’ all my life. And then, as soon as I put ten books in a used pizza box and sold them to the Elam library in Auckland, I left the corner marked ‘bohemian poet’ and suddenly travelled over to that corner of the room marked ‘curated visual artist making artist books’. The books are the fucking same. I thought, this is crazy. If I put them in a used pizza box they’re worth $20 each?”.
However, the public reception to the books has been mixed, falling in two clear camps. “Anybody my age fucking looks at me like what the fuck? And I get the stare through. Anybody half my age or younger is immediately, in most cases, engaging with them. I find it’s young people, with minds that have not been set, who are most open to seeing new things”.
His success is a long time coming. Merritt began his literary career as the editor of Auckland student newspaper Craccum in 1979. Back then, student media was “radical and antiestablishment”, although by the time Merritt was the editor, the golden age of student media had passed. “There was the peak of the Springbok tour in ‘81, and it’s just been a slow descent into conservatism ever since.”
After leaving Craccum, Meritt “got the sex, drugs and rock and roll bug”. He hit the road as a band manager, first in Auckland, and then in Christchurch with the record label Flying Nun. “It was only because I was sober - I was the only person that didn’t drink. I was three, four, five years older than most of the musicians, so you know, I was already like the old man”. But the music industry in the Eighties was a weird place. “It was very conservative, and we tried our hardest to break out of that conservatism. I had that for five years, but then I thought the music industry is bigger than me, at the end of the day, I cannot fight DD Smash, I cannot take on Dave Dobbyn and the Finn Brothers, and nor did I want to, really”.
During his time as band manager, Merritt had been unable to focus on his on creative outlets, although he had learnt to play the guitar “by osmosis”. So he left managing other people’s artistic and creative careers behind and focused on his own, becoming a bohemian poet in Dunedin. “In the Eighties in Dunedin it was easy to pick up work as a dishwasher, you know, the usual story, you have a day job and you do stuff in the evening as well. And I love Dunedin because it had a real collectivist spirit in the Eighties and Nineties”.
To Merritt, Dunedin’s art scene doesn’t pull punches, and as a result, Merritt believes that Dunedin has made him a better writer. “In Auckland the art scene is full of pretence and emperors parading around without clothes on and people are way too polite to say this person’s got no clothes on and their work is shit. In Dunedin, people aren’t that polite. If your work is shit, they’ll tell you. The career paths of professional artists in Auckland are quite different form the career paths of professional artists in Dunedin. There’s a great levelling process, there’s a great collective spirit that says, well, you’re good, but you’re not that good. Everyone’s good in their own funny way, so don’t get too up yourself and think you’re really great”.
Merritt now lives without electricity in a “a single car garage” with a chicken coop and veggie garden right outside. But it wasn’t always like that. Five years ago, Merritt cast aside consumerism and “went bush”. “I was working as a junior lecturer at AUT, and I was sleeping in my office. I pretty much went mad, I had a spectacular nervous break down. I realised I hadn’t had any dirt under my fingernails for ten years and I just felt my life was out of balance”. He found a piece of land where he could have a chicken coop and vege garden, and learned to leave his silverbeet alone. This more rustic approach to life translated to his poetry books. “I’d been a digital goober all my life, and I wanted something analogue about the book making process”.
Although Merritt may live bereft of a carbon footprint, he spent twenty years slaving over a hot computer and understands the importance of the Internet for writers. He may not have the Internet at home, but Merritt sees the value of it, especially to writers. He sees the Internet as changing the means of production, democratising publishing by removing the gatekeepers. “The web and the net are like punk rock. What punk rock did for music, the web and the net are now doing for writers. You no longer have to go through the evil publishing companies or the evil record companies, or Amazon or whatever”.
In a similar way, Merritt’s hard copy poetry books constructed from books “destined for landfall” also undermine the “evil publishing companies”. “The publishing industry is one of the most wasteful industries in the world. About 30 or 40% of everything that’s published ends up just pulped. I wanted to make my books out of the detritus of established publishing. And I wanted to pick the worst writers; the Jeffrey Archers, the Reader’s Digests, the Mills and Boons from the 1960s, the romance novels, the crap espionage books that get produced in bulk numbers every year”. But now he feels stuck and needs a new challenge. “The idea for me would be to make books, proper books with more poems in them. With pages that you could turn”.
Despite it all, Merritt has never been hungry for quick success. When he was a young poet, a friend of his had a frighteningly prophetic dream about him. “She says, I had a dream that you weren’t going to get successful until you were older, and that you were going to find success, not by writing for your own generation, but by writing for the generation of your own kids”. The dream’s message for Merritt was “don’t be in a hurry”, an idea that Merritt took on board. “I thought, you’re right, don’t be in such a hurry. Wait, just wait. Keep writing, don’t be in a hurry to publish, hoard your intellectual property”. And it’s this advice that Merritt wants to tell students. “I think that these days, young people just don’t have the role models for how they should go about careers that aren’t of the norm. But there’s not many role models that can say to the kids, look, don’t have a normal conventional career. Work your career and don’t be in a hurry”.

 
Posted 5:35am Monday 19th September 2011 by Critic.