The Mixtape: David Merritt's life in poetry

The poet's job description is "keep your eyes open, your heart alert and allow a little bit of serendipity in", David Merritt says.

Merritt lives off-grid in a remote North Island village. A one-man cottage industry, he publishes his poetry through Landroverfarm Press and travels throughout the country giving readings.

His journey to this point has been about as varied as it could be - tour manager, early adopter computer geek, sports subeditor and street poet.

It was while he was in the music business he realised that he wanted to make his own creative mark on the world, he tells RNZ's Music 101.

"By '86 I'm the tour manager for Herbs, because that's the most professional I can be in the country at that point, they were the most interesting, innovative big band.

"And I loved working with Herbs, but somewhere during that time with them, I kind of had an epiphany where I thought I don't want to work for other people's creativity anymore.

"I would rather work for my own creativity, and I knew I was going to be a writer. I knew that from a very early age."

He headed south to Dunedin and got involved in the burgeoning computer scene, he said.

"The computer had just come out, I got an email address at Otago Uni very early on, I saw desktop publishing.

"I got a Mac and my brother was involved with laser printing in Auckland. I just followed the computer thing, Moore's Law - I followed Moore's Law for 25 years."

He wound up lecturing "very geeky things" at AUT.

"I was working 18 hours a day. I was sleeping in my office, and I spent most of my life under fluoro lights.

"And I kept looking at my fingernails, thinking, 'oh, man, there's no dirt under my fingernails'."

It was, he said, an epiphany.

"You know your midlife crisis, your nervous breakdown, your epiphany moment. I've had a few of those - they come for a reason. Your life's out of balance. It's out of whack. It's not in a place where it's equal - there's been too much high tech and not enough dirt."

After a spell in Whanganui doing a "night-shift horror job" subbing the racing reports, he settled in remote Mangamahu - population 57.

"It has no store, nothing. It's just a rural farming community in the middle of nowhere between Hunterville and Whanganui, Ohakune and Martin, everything is 52km away.

"No cell phone coverage. There's no such thing as broadband internet... that's when I started to work out a method where I could manufacture and publish books of poems by candlelight."

He also wanted to live frugally.

"Part of the frugality was to try to grow as much of your own food as possible, get hens, watercress omelettes, stuff like that, became part of my diet. I looked healthier after a period in the middle of nowhere."

Then there's the "rural Gothic" aspect of country life, he said.

"You go 10 or 15km outside of any provincial, small New Zealand town, and you're in rural Gothic, where people are talking about gun calibres, there's dead animal carcasses draped over the handlebars of the quad bikes.

"Death is everywhere in the country. I was a townie. I had no idea."

The life suits him, he said, he's in good health - cataracts and a love of nicotine notwithstanding.

"I've been a chain smoker for 50 years. You find your vices and you stick to them. I think that's one of the secrets to life."

Poetry is his full-time gig now, he said, since he moved to Mangamahu and there is a New Zealand circuit which keeps him busy on the road.

"I was lucky to be at the beginning of the Zine Fest movement here in New Zealand.

"So, the Auckland Zine Fest started and then I had a reason to go from the wop wops to Auckland, and then Wellington and Christchurch and Dunedin, now there's seven or eight dotted around the country.

"So that's the circuit of sorts."

He has also made a living as a street poet in the past.

"I sat on a bench in K Road and Cuba Street and around the country manufacturing books in front of the hapless gaze of people, trying to flog them off to them.

"Some days you have good days. Some days like fishing, you have to enjoy the act of going fishing without the overlay of needing to catch fish."

He has, however, yet to venture overseas.

"I've rattled around New Zealand long enough now, because I was desperately afraid that I would lose whatever uniqueness I had as a New Zealand poet if I went overseas for any prolonged period of time. So, I haven't left.

"I'm awaiting my time overseas. I'm in one of the nicest places in the world. I've got not much reason to leave. And last time I checked the world seemed a foreboding and threatening and nasty place."

He has no regrets about the direction his life has taken.

"I think there's a lot of lot of pressure to succeed too early in life and to not make mistakes. But funnily enough, the job description says you are not going to succeed till you're older and you're going to make a lot of mistakes."

David Merritt chose:

• A recording of his poem How Death Works #3 - made with David Kilgour
• Look Blue Go Purple - Cactus Cat
• The Gordons - Spik and Span
• Great Unwashed - Born in the Wrong Time
• Tall Dwarfs - Turning Brown and Torn in Two
• Verlaines - Pyromaniac
• Doublehappys - Big Fat Elvis