Laureate discovers

Wellington poet Bill Manhire is profiled in The Age as a man who quite  accidentally fell upon letters, who secretly wrote at school until he read Walt Whitman in his final year at school. Manhire is in Australia this week at the Adelaide Readers’ and Writers’ Week. New Zealand’s first poet laureate and director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, Wellington, Manhire says he will just sit down and scribble words for several pages. “Suddenly you just bump into this very strange phrase that you couldn’t have anticipated and that is charged with all sorts of resonance, so you chase on after what that phrase suggests and suddenly you are in the territory of what you don’t know; that unmapped space,” he says.