Tag: Keith Lyons

Keith Lyons in conversation with Keith Westwater

There is something quietly paradoxical about Keith Westwater, a writer shaped as much by military discipline as by imagination. His journey begins in the structured world of the army and unfolds decades later into a distinctive poetic voice grounded in place, memory, and observation. He’s in dialogue about a life shaped by experience and reflection.

 Joining the army at the age of 15 years must have been a key point in your life. How do you think that experience shaped you both as a person and later as a writer?

I will partly answer that with a poem. First though, some context: In 1964, I joined the NZ Army’s boy entrants’ scheme with 140 classmates. We marched-in to Waiouru military camp and as I had just turned 15, I was the third youngest in our cohort. This meant, because we couldn’t graduate until we turned 18, I had to spend three full years as a Regular Force Cadet. All of us were moulded by the military in ways we would never forget. We still get together in class reunions and ‘swing the light shades’ with stories from those days. In 2004, for our 40th anniversary get-together, I published a booklet which recorded a lot of our more memorable recollections. One piece was a poem which I crafted from answers by my classmates to the question ‘What were the best and worst parts of being a Regular Force Cadet?’ It captures how we were all shaped as people by that experience:

The best and the worst of it
 
Learning how to march and swear
Church parades and mess fatigues
 
Isolation and feelings of loneliness
The long-term friendships made
 
Having to shave every day
Standards by which I have lived the rest of my life
 
Rigid enforcement of petty rules
The effect discipline has had on our lives
 
My best friend cutting his wrists
The unsurpassed esprit-de-corps
 
Wearing BDs without underpants
Foundations for coping with life’s challenges
 
A lack of female company
Being part of a family of brothers
 
Time spent in the bush
The lack of time for one’s self
 
Doing change parades on CB
Getting into trouble and not getting caught
 
Barrellings from senior class pricks
Trust and faith in your mates
 
Fish and chips on Sunday afternoons –
It wasn’t such a bad place

Note: 
BDs were a serge blouse and trouser uniform worn in winter months (short for ‘Battle Dress’).

CB is ‘confined to barracks’ which was a form of military punishment involving lots of physical and menial tasks, given for everything from dress or drill faults, and a 'dirty' rifle to disobeying an order or if your hair was too long.

The army also helped tremendously in shaping me as a writer. It is probably not generally known, but the NZ Army (and probably all armies spawned by the British military) place great store on education for their officers and soldiers. In fact, there is an army corps, the Royal New Zealand Army Education Corps, into which I was to graduate from Cadets, that is tasked with some of this work. When I was a Regular Force Cadet, I was able to continue my secondary school journey and so was introduced in my School Certificate and University Entrance English classes to poets of current interest in the New Zealand curriculum. These included the New Zealanders Baxter, Glover, and Fairburn and also the British (anti) war poets. Re-reading Naming of Parts (Henry Reed) still brings a wry smile.

After graduating from RF Cadets and as a young officer, I was taught how to write logically and in an arcane military style, which abounds (as you might imagine) with rules and regulations, but it was a great foundation for learning how to craft compositions that develop arguments.

Discipline and structure are central to military life. Do you see any parallels between military training and the discipline required for writing poetry?

Other than getting up early and ordering the day, making sure you gather as much information as possible before making decisions, and planning things out before starting, not really (though, when I come to think of it, sometimes good poems happen without planning). Also, there are parallels between the amount of polishing we had to do in the Army and the constant polishing that some poems seem to need.

 What was it about Writing the Landscape” course at Victoria University of Wellington, or that moment in your life, that sparked something lasting for you?

I wrote briefly about this recently in my latest book, Sing to me of home Selected Poems (The Cuba Press) due for release in October, 2026:

I came late to the writing of poetry [I was in my mid-fifties]. Like many others, my interest in poems began in school. In 1969, in my last year of undergraduate studies at Canterbury University, I was fortunate to have Mervyn Thompson as a poetry lecturer. I got a bad case of the tingles when, from the stage of the old town site’s Great Hall, he orated old ballads like The Twa Corbies and Sir Patrick Spens, to hundreds of English I students. I still have the foolscap-sized book of Narrative Poems (which includes these ballads) that the English department gave us as a resource.

I attempted in those days to write poems in the angsty, poor imitation of T.S. Eliot style that young would-be poets did. (Some of these works – their genesis now unrecognisable through countless and more informed revisions – have ended up in this volume!) It wasn’t until decades later, when I was in my mid-fifties, that I picked up my pen again. I have my wife to blame for this. At the time, she was about to engage on some major post-graduate study, and I think she wanted me out from under her feet. As you do in this country, she phoned one of New Zealand’s best-known authors, Dame Fiona Kidman (whom she didn’t know), and asked her for advice on how a husband could be taught to write poems.

The answer was that I should enrol in one of the courses at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). My interest piqued, I did as I was told and in 2003 found myself in a class of 15 or so students undertaking a course entitled Writing the Landscape. As I had majored in Geography back in the day, I thought it might hold my attention and provide an easier bridge to learning the craft. The paper was tutored by Dinah Hawken, an IIML graduate and established poet with a growing reputation. Dinah’s expertise soon had us scratching out fair to middling pieces and learning about the forms and devices that a writer should have available in their toolkit. She also taught us how to read poetry out loud and provide critiques of our efforts to one another in ways that were ‘safe’ and didn’t bruise our fledgling-writer personas.

Before the 2000s, had writing been quietly present in your life?

Writing had always been a part of the requirements of my work life so writing poetry and creative non-fiction gave me a more enjoyable set of challenges. In a way, it took me back to the best part of being at school — ‘doing’ a subject I really enjoyed.

When you look back at your earliest published pieces, what do you notice about the writer you were then?

I think I was probably a bit cautious to start with and employed a limited set of tools in the range available to a poet. As I learnt more, I grew more confident, experimented more and worked out what appealed and seemed to work for me.

 How would you describe your poetic voice today, and how did you come to recognise it as your own?

It’s hard for me to describe, but the following words are in the mix — eclecticism (in both content and form), accessibility, past and place, memories, social comment, satire and parody, imaginative writing. The more I wrote, the more my pool of poetry seemed to fill with these flavours.

Was there a particular poem, publication, feedback or award that gave you confidence you were on the right path?

In 2011, Interactive Publications (IP), the publisher of Tongues of Ash, which was my first full-length collection of poems, awarded it the ‘best first book prize’ for that year, which both surprised and delighted me. The judges had this to say about the work, which certainly gave me the impetus to continue scribbling:

‘[It is] poetry that reflects beautifully on time and place and its effect on the human spirit. The joy of reading Westwater’s poetry is his obvious skill as a manipulator of language, delving into the reverent, the morose, the gleeful and the humorous without falter. He is fearless in his subject matter and confident in his use of words. The poetry is a true escape from the reader’s present world, a tour in the realms of the imagination.’

As someone whose writing journey began later than many, did you feel a different kind of urgency or clarity about your voice?

Not consciously. There may have been more to draw from in my well as a consequence, so maybe poems were queuing up to be written rather than me trying to write as much as I could.

How does landscape shape your writing — not just as scenery, but as identity?

I remember when we were in Dinah Hawken’s class, there was one session when Bill Manhire stood in for her. He started off by making what could have been taken as derogatory comments about ‘nature’ poetry, which I’m sure were designed to provoke us into questioning our choice of subject matter. I think that poems that are purely descriptive of scenery, or elements of nature (and early on I was guilty of writing a few of these), are weaker than those that include a person’s voice or memories in the scene. The former are more likely to be awe and beauty verses worthy of tourist brochures; the latter are tied to identity and provide the reader with the opportunity to bring their own memories and imagination to bear. If Wordsworth’s field of daffodils hadn’t had him wandering about the poem lonely as a cloud, it probably wouldn’t be remembered today.

How have the different places you have lived shaped you?

Enormously. Tongues of Ash gives testament to that. It includes a map I drew of New Zealand that shows the places that are referenced in the book’s poems (see below) — there are many and I have lived in or near most and visited the others. While in the army, I was posted to Singapore for two years, but funnily enough, that period of time, while hugely broadening my experience and knowledge of different Asian cultures and place, has yet to spawn any poetry.

How has your academic background and work experience influenced how you observe and describe landscape?

My academic studies in geography have had a significant influence on my landscape writing. I have previously described the discipline as an enigmatic amalgam of subjects. Some unkindly question geography’s parentage, likening it to a jackdaw that picks the twigs out of other disciplines to build its own nest. I am happy that it borrows topic areas from which it fashions its own lens. For that reason, my poems often address or include references to elements of geographic studies — rocks, weather, beaches, to name a few. I once wrote a poem based on the geomorphological cycle of mountain-building (The love of rocks and water). It included lines that referred to ice as being the ‘hard, cold sister of water’. A critic (whom I’m certain was ignorant of how mountains are made, then over millennia are eroded into the sea only to be uplifted by earth’s forces and fashioned again as mountains) wrote a rather scathing review of it. I think he was using a personification yardstick on the poem, without questioning whether that form of critique (now over 100 years old) was appropriate today.

In what way has completing university writing courses helped, in ways that self-directed writing might not have?

Like with most university study, it provided the meat and bones, the breadth and width, the self-reflection and questioning, the positioning on continuums of knowledge, the variety of approaches that can be selected from and applied, the shades of colour, and the tools, techniques and methodologies available to the writer. Without the courses, I would have been a naïf poet, confined and defined by what I didn’t know I didn’t know. 

What does your writing process look like now? Are you disciplined and scheduled, or intuitive and responsive to inspiration?

I think all of these, depending on what is needed for where the writing is at.

Do poems begin with an image, a line, a memory, or something else entirely?

Again, all of the above. Sometimes, with revision and polishing, the first line or stanza becomes the last, or is culled altogether. It’s also being open to a poem that you didn’t know was coming when it knocks on the door. The advice to have something on hand (electronic, or a prehistoric writing tool) to record such moments is worth its weight in words. There is nothing worse than waking up in the morning having written something momentous in your sleep only to find it has vaporised when you wake up.

How much revision is involved in your work? At what point do you know a poem is finished?

For me, revision is very poem-dependent. Some poems are perfectly formed little objects at birth. Others sit and look at you with mournful dog-eyes demanding yet another walk in the field of revision. I think some poems are never ‘finished’.

Your professional life has centred on teaching, learning and development, and structured communication. How different is writing non-fiction or professional material compared to crafting poetry?

There really isn’t much difference. If you have a template for your writing and/or can make decisions regarding form, length, style, etc., it is then a matter of settling on a way into the writing and applying the craft tools appropriate to its type.

Do the two forms feed each other — or do you keep them completely separate? Does poetry offer something that professional writing cannot?

The forms can feed into each other, but it really depends on the writing’s aim and who the audience is. Sometimes a mix of poetry and prose works, at other times it can be off-putting. All forms of writing offer something that probably have a singularity of aptness for each form, but writers often experiment with that aptness and come up with hybrids. For example, My two boyhood memoirs, No one home (Makaro Press) and Home Base (The Cuba Press) are not written as traditional text-based works for this genre, but  are  structured more like scrapbooks of memories and include a variety of text and image-based objects — poems, short prose, photos, maps, drawings, diary entries, letters, quotations, etc.

 What has the journey to publication been like for you — particularly as someone balancing writing with a full career and family life?

I think I have been relatively lucky there. Firstly, my publication journey was relatively quick in terms of submissions made followed by acceptances. The work-life balance was not overly taxing either — our kids had left the nest (relatively speaking) and I was working from home with my own business by the time I set off on the ‘getting published’ yellow brick road. I was able to juggle work and down-time, chew gum and write at the same time.

Were there moments of rejection or doubt that tested your commitment? How did you respond?

Like all writers, I had a few submissions rejected along the way. I quickly learnt not to take it personally and quite often, poems that had been rejected by one journal would be picked up by another. My book-length collections have all been accepted on first submission, so I didn’t suffer angst there.

Do your interests feed your creative life in unexpected ways?

My other interests are pretty Kiwi-pedestrian — watching sport (mainly rugby and cricket), gardening, and trying to find the perfect white and red wines. I have written a couple of poems to do with sport, one of which I’ve included here. It was published by Mark Pirie in his blog, and a friend of mine, who had a career as an international cricket umpire, used it on occasion when speaking at sports dinners. Other than that, gardening and wine poetry lie largely untilled and uncorked:

Road cricket
 
Driving through town 
listening to the cricket
I saw a man
in the road’s grassy middle
about to thread a three-lane needle
with his body
 
glass, metal, flesh, blood
 
He danced ahead
like a batsman at the bowler’s end
just before the leather leaves
the bowler’s hand
then scuttled back
to bide another chance
 
walk, run, dive, swallow
 
You fool, I thought
you bloody bunny
as my own life’s risky runs
replayed for me right then
though I knew on his far crease
there was no-one looking out to call
 
YES! NO! WAIT! … sorry

How does visual art intersect with your writing?

I have always been interested in ekphrastic poetry (Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts being a particular favourite). Some of my poems have been inspired by or accompanied by relevant images. About 5 years ago, I started to experiment with composing digital art that used the imagery in a poem (a ‘painted poem’, if you like). The image below is my attempt at representing some of the imagery in WB Yeats’ The Second Coming (‘the widening gyre’, ‘blood-dimmed tide’, ‘a shape with lion body’, ‘rough beast’, ‘desert birds’). This composition was not created by AI and relevant licences and permissions were obtained for images used.

In turn, I used the Second Coming art piece as a springboard to writing a new poem commenting on the current American president and his shenanigans in the Middleeast. It is titled What rough beast? and it is the last poem in my upcoming collection, Sing to me of home.

If you could speak to your 15-year-old self, what advice would you give him?

I’m a little bit clueless here. I was press-ganged into the Army at 15 by a wicked stepmother and it was a reluctant move on my part; it was the only way I could see of continuing my schooling as I was going to be booted out of home regardless. I set a course as a boy soldier that would three years later lead me to university, with the Army sponsoring my study. In terms of advice — over sixty years on, and with hindsight, there is not much I can say to the boy to do things differently.

Is there something you wish you had known earlier about the writing life? What advice would you give aspiring writers in today, especially those who may begin their writing journey later in life?

I worked out early in my writing life that penning poetry as a full-time occupation in New Zealand was more likely to lead to penury than accumulation of even small mounds of money. Unless you aspire to being an academic in a university’s English faculty and thereby could pursue your poetry-penning as part of your job, or have other ‘means’, make sure you don’t stop your paid employment. On the other hand, there are New Zealand writers who have become successful writing in other genres.

 Finally, what continues to call you back to the page?

I need to scratch the itch.

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless Journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

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