Writers across Aotearoa remember the poet and fiction writer Geoff Cochrane, whose sudden loss is immense to our literary landscape and to the people who knew and loved him.
Geoff Cochrane wrote poetry, novels and short stories. He published 22 books and in 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award, and in 2014 was made an Arts Laureate. To get a sense of the shape of Geoff Cochrane, here is a fragment from Damien Wilkins’ introduction to a vivid and insightful interview with Geoff in 2003:
“He smokes roll-your-owns throughout the interview, spreading a piece of newspaper on his lap to catch the spilled tobacco.
The clipped stylishness of his writing is also evident in his talk. He speaks in full sentences and with such care that you sometimes think he’s reading from something. What he’s reading from is, of course, his own mind—a place you feel he’s lived in to an extent that makes our own mental habitations begin to seem transient, a bit half-hearted. Another way of putting it might be to observe that Geoff owns his ideas while we only seem to rent ours. His conversation has the range of a voracious reader and the depth of some voracious living. He is a provocative commentator on both activities.
Still, perhaps his most arresting statements come when he is considering writing, its folly and its power. It’s difficult to think of another New Zealand writer who could formulate the following notion: ‘Whatever one writes is conditional. And it’s probably sweeter and more replete for being conditional—is it not?’ The Cochrane tone is one of the great pleasures in our literature—and somehow sweeter (to borrow his word) for appearing not to be part of that literature.”
I only met Geoff once, which is awfully regretful now. I programmed him for a festival and discovered that he didn’t use email so all of our correspondence was done by post. His letters arrived in bright blue ink with the kind of curving, tenuous handwriting that makes you instantly curious. I was charmed. Even then it was rare to get handwritten things and something about it made me feel that here was the real deal. I read more and more of Geoff’s work and learned that he absolutely was. Whenever I catch a glimpse of a choppy ocean I think of his “wind-minced sea”, from this devastating and beautiful poem.
Below are tributes to the great Geoff Cochrane. I received so many messages that I couldn’t contain them all here. Some writers were too bereft to put down words, which says it all, really.
Kirsten McDougall, writer and former publicist at VUP (now Te Herenga Waka University Press), Geoff’s publisher:
I was Geoff’s publicist at VUP. He always liked to call me that – “my publicist”. Though it was hard getting Geoff any publicity for his perfectly chiselled slim volumes. He wasn’t a hot young thing or a venerated old thing; his work was widely ignored by those who give out prizes and seats at festivals. But he was always so grateful for anything I did for him.
He didn’t have an email so we worked via the post. I sent him physical copies of reviews, invitations to our annual party, questions about his work. He replied via post, or sometimes popped into the office with a New World chocolate cake.
In 2014, the Arts Foundation awarded Geoff a laureate. For someone on a benefit in a council flat, the $50k that came with it was a veritable jackpot. I accompanied Geoff to Auckland along with his publisher (“my publisher”), Fergus Barrowman. On stage he looked like an ancient jockey, tiny in his brand new Farmers straight leg jeans, beanie, polar fleece and Bata Bullets, but still quick as a whip.
He wrote in a letter to me that year: “I’ve always felt that I stood at the end of too long a queue ever to get my turn. But what could be sweeter than being able to call oneself a laureate?”
Vale dear Geoff, laureate, true artist.
James Brown, poet:
Each year on the poetry writing course I convene, I ask students to bring a poem by a favourite poet, and every few years someone will bring a poem by Geoff Cochrane. Everyone reading local poetry has, or should have, a Geoff Cochrane moment, a blissful book in which they discover his compressed, “courtly” (as Damian Wilkins once described Geoff’s writing) poetry mined from his singularly Wellington life, past and present. For most of that life Geoff was a full-time writer, something many writers fantasise about but secretly know they could never sustain.
I ran into Geoff a bit when he lived in Berhampore when I cycled past his flat and I visited him a few times. Inside, the writing life was laid bare – a typewriter on a small desk in a spartan lounge. Only a few books (he made good use of the public library). Geoff said he’d moved in seven years ago thinking he’d just be there a week. He offered me a cup of tea. My request for milk flustered him. He might have some. We approached the fridge. It was the emptiest fridge I’ve ever seen – a pottle of pot noodles and something that might once have been milk, which I declined. He was intense, committed, thoughtful, isolated and, in his own way, courageous.
Bernadette Hall, poet:
I’ve just opened an email from Chris Price and found this sad news. That beautiful brilliant “bad boy” I have loved for so many years. His heart as big and tender as; his mind as sharp and capacious as; his poetry out of this world. We’d toddle arm in arm down to the Victoria Café any time I was in Wellington. We’d talk up a storm, laughing ourselves silly. He’d be talking far too loudly. I’d be breathing in nicotine along with his erudition, his out-of-this-world vocabulary, his fancy footwork on the highwire of comedy. He really got my work, prose and poetry. And I adored his. Twice I got him down to do readings in Canterbury even though he swore he didn’t have enough acceleration to get out of Wellington. He fell in love with the smokers’ balcony outside his room in the Christchurch YMCA. He put red laces in his sneakers, he took risks, his confessions, his hesitations, were charismatic, cinematic. I first met him in his essay ‘The Flooded Steps’ published in 1995 by VUP. I knew straight off he was crucial if I was to be a writer. It was his “voice”. I flew to Wellington. Had made a lunch date. How would I recognise him? He recognised me, “You look younger than your photo”. And so we started off, laughing, friends for life. His “voice” remaining now in a box of letters. Rest in peace, dear friend.
Gregory O’Brien, writer and artist:
Geoff was one of Wellington’s great pedestrians, on his regular trajectory town-wards, by foot. Going at speed across the Lyall Bay / Kilbirnie flatlands. Thinking with his eyes. A very particular gait, to match a writerly manner that was entirely his own. If you had to think of some literary coordinates, maybe Geoff would stand and fall somewhere between Basho and Roberto Bolano. As a poet, he gathered the most passionate of readers/followers. He was loved.
Carl Shuker, writer:
He was Semtex
There’s a story about Geoff in his drinking days that a novelist told me. At the time this novelist was a little boy in his pyjamas. He remembers Geoff being over at his house late at night and his father, a poet, showing Geoff a new poem he’d written. Geoff read the poem carefully, then held the page up carefully before the poet and the little boy, and with both hands tore the page in two.
It captures something of Geoff’s darkness, his impossible expectations and his streak of mean that in sobriety became some huge frustrated and amused zen. That streak of threat kept him vivid and strong and essential through decades of writing. He was so demanding – it was innate – so unpredictable, so dangerous. He had an aura around him. You didn’t know what he would do or say next but you had to know.
Would he break your heart, make you chuckle or tear you a new one – one never quite knew. So it was always exciting to read where he was at next, exciting even to run into him on his endless fabled walks. Which I did often through many phases of life leaving then coming back to Wellington. Once, harried and befathered, outside Jaycar Electronics, carrying my four-year-old daughter on my hip with her hand inside my shirt plucking my chest hairs one by one, I saw him, even felt him coming, his small wizened, intensely electrically lived-in body moving like a small storm up the false flat of Adelaide Road. He had this way of creating a moment of meeting that elided everything else, a calm where all our antennae raised as one and you never knew what would come out of his mouth, or his work.
Out of this small encounter came a poem he dedicated to me, which I can’t tell you and never told him how much it meant. I knew something was going on on that hot, plucked day. It was in the calm and furious simmer in his watery blue eyes.
Among other things he was New Zealand’s great gay writer hiding in plain sight. Or was he? Perhaps he was just polymorphously perverse in a wing-clipped society as all the great ones are, or complexly bi. The clues are throughout the writing, and a thesis could be written about all the encounters in the writing and the restraints, real or imagined, he felt on this being part of his identity. Or perhaps his identity was too much, too big and strange, to be reduced to such a small label.
Some of the writing I love is about drinking, the amazing conversations between lost geniuses screwed to the margins and the banquettes of awful pubs debating metaphysics to the point of falling over. But also his fearful rapture in the feeling of falling as the gin comes on. Geoff on gin was such a rapture to read.
I ran into him once outside his regular café when he was sober and the central library was still open. Walking through the town after years away in Japan and it was the same. The sense of a calm and furious moment. “Geoff? How are you?” “Carl. I’m the same.” Some other bullshit. At the end, though, as he readied himself to leave, and I didn’t want him to, he smiled, calmly, full of a storm, and he leaned in and just before he left in my laughter, he said, “How do you spell Semtex?”
And then he was gone, again.
Anne Kennedy, writer
“I don’t fear death, but I do fear cremation.” The last words in Geoff’s last book, Chosen. Angular, funny, a bit scary – actually, freeze-your-blood scary. That was Geoff, his life and work. The lines keep coming, as they always will: His high, almost-romantic rhetoric, as in his iconic The Sea the Landsman Knows – “that dark heave of menace / You pilot your sleeping skipper through”. His essence-of-people – “How do spell psychosis? he might ask” (Robin). His Wellington; he so loved Wellington and showed it to us – Lambton Quay is “an edifice packed with architectural clout / of a scrolly, antique kind” (Things are not as they were).
Geoff grew up two streets from us, was friends with my brother, and, as it was back then, everyone was in each other’s houses. (At his house: six kids and a kind, over-busy mum.) I remember him holding court in the living room. His blue-eyed panorama, the Oscar Wilde-like repartee. The term “wise beyond his years” was made for Geoff. He was a fantastic mimic, famous for his Eccles. Even then, it was voice.
“I’ve been alive for aeons. / I’ve been alive for a very long time” (Bad Foot).
I can’t believe he isn’t. The landsman has gone to the “wind-minced sea”. Vale, brilliant, hilarious, serious, one-off Geoff Cochrane.
Carrie Tiffany, writer:
Reading Geoff Cochrane
When I was a child I had two dolls in a box. Each night I placed the dolls on the floor of the box and covered them with a sheet of black paper. Sometimes the dolls required reassurance. I told them that the day was finished in their country, that it was no longer time for speaking and that all of the world was asleep.
I meet these two New Zealanders. They are brainy and handsome; they live in an old worker’s cottage on the edge of Melbourne. There is a paua shell ashtray. There are postcards of Colin McCahon. Kia ora, they murmur, when they pick up the telephone. I’m there one day when a relative arrives off the plane from Wellington. An old cardboard suitcase is snapped open; cake from a teashop on Lambton Quay, jars of bubbled honey, custard powder in an orange packet. The soft comforts of home… I score a slim volume of Geoff Cochrane. It’s 2001 and this is how it begins.
It doesn’t happen instantly. The Irish hold the ground. You duke it out, those first few years, with the American poet Donald Hall. But Hypnic Jerks (2005) seals it for me. I think of you each time I’m hooked back from sleep. I think of you in your crummy pad – the few forks and knives shivering in their drawer when the bus stops outside. I think of the view from your flat; pines, drainage ditches, rugby posts like gallows, wooded hills, a soft drink plant, red leaves that bounce like crisps, rain that inks the road.
I read your lines and I make you up. I foist you onto the few Australian poets and readers of poetry that I know. I take you out to dinner. I take you to London. I do a number on you in an interview for the woman’s hour on the BBC. The doughy host looks over her glasses at me. She pronounces New Zealand so archly the face powder on her soft english cheeks lifts and talcs the air. I take you to Calgary, Mildura, Ubud, Leeds, Port Hedland. I take you to Auckland where I mention you to a bookish crowd in a hotel bar. One of the drinkers is your publisher. I leave.
I read your lines and I follow them like tracks. There you are walking down the long hill towards Antarctica, watching the shunted clouds, taking in the smell of gorse fires, the sky is the colour of wet salt. I learn not to clarify. The waxy eye of the Kowhai? She is not a bird; she is a tree with a yellow flower hanging limply penile. The poem is dead to me; the bird of my imagination forever tangled in its rhythms.
Your life is hectic, lonely, full of innocence and sin. Your books sit a-slant on the table next to my bed. The white covers are not weathering well. The dentist’s chair tilts and sinks, I think of you. The extractions, the full clearance, the needle’s spiteful sting. There is your knowledge of household paint, cigarette lighters, pencils, addiction.
You write and you walk. You walk to resist the abyss. You walk to the supermarket at the foot of Tinakori Hill. You walk Wellington’s ribboned pavements; you walk its harboured curve. You were walking before Sebald reached the Pacific and we sat in cafes discussing the flâneur. I sense you in my ankles at St Kilda as I hesitate on the kerb.
News comes. You have been seen in a shop. You are thin. I hear there are stacks of your manuscripts waiting for attention on your publisher’s floor. The thought of all those poems spooling out in front of you – hovering voluptuously on the brink of being read. In Vanilla Wine (2003) you say you have a readership of perhaps twenty-three people. I make them up too.
The world is full of people we will never know, sitting at home, coughing quietly in their countries. It can be hard to bear the thought of these people who will always be remote, never in relation.
When the day is finished in my country and I pull the black sheet over my face you are already in deep night. If I can’t sleep I’ll reach for you. Your poems have travelled across the sea from your island to mine in a kind of double movement – a silent athletics of writing and reading. I don’t believe the poems you make are a symptom of estrangement, but of over-feeling. Although, who am I to say? I made you up. But you started it Geoff Cochrane; you started it all those years ago when you sat down in your country and began to write.
(First Published in Griffith REVIEW 43: Pacific Highways (2014).)
Chris Tse, poet laureate:
Starship (version)
(after, and in memory of, Geoff Cochrane)
Geoff is dead
but some of us remain—
some might say stranded, some might say perched
in the life-long queue to transfer to
whatever comes next. There’s Geoff—speeding now
towards a reunion with Gareth and Chris and Peter.
And here—little bits of him on our shelves
and in the curious corners of our brains
where snatches of his lines rewrite themselves
until they are synapse and nerve.
Time grants us intervals—we jerk between
learning to be present and knowing presence
is too soft to last forever. Survival is
not allowing either to consume you.
“How far I’ve come.
How far I’ve been alive.”
Channel Hopping
By Geoff Cochrane, 2019 (originally published here on The Spinoff)
Stupa or Stuka?
Weet-Bix or Welsh rabbit?
Galactic aerodrome or Matchbox truck?
*
I’m young in my dreams, still young.
*
Beautiful Keanu’s wearing shades—
antique shades with iodine-coloured lenses.
*
I’m young in my dreams, still young,
and I still have some ink in my pen,
but one repents of wanting to be known.