Bill Manhire is writer, professor and New Zealand’s first inaugural poet laureate. He was also, until recently, the director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, centre for Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. In this interview he speaks about New Zealand’s evolving literary landscape and the poem featured in Griffith REVIEW 43, ‘Erebus voices‘, written for Sir Edmund Hillary to read at Scott Base, Antarctica to commemorate the passengers and crew who died in the 1979 Erebus disaster.

 
In your introduction to Mutes & Earthquakes (Victoria University Press, 1997) you make the case that writers need to stay open and ignorant, to write what they don’t know or else fall into a trap of replicating the same structures, voices and language as hundreds of other writers. Is that a lesson you had to learn through your own work over the years?