In this 1987 radio interview with Elizabeth Alley, poet Ruth Dallas talks about how she became a published poet, her philosophies about poetry, her service in the Second World War, her love of Chinese poet Po Chu-I, and her affinity for the Southland landscape and region. The photograph shows Dallas in 1987.

Ruth Dallas 

Well, I wrote children’s stories for a children’s page because I played a lot with the children in the neighbourhood. I was very interested in children and reading to them, and I wrote the stories for the page, as we called it, the Southland Times, or it was Southland News then, no longer exists, gave us a whole page, both sides, to fill, which was very encouraging. I wrote there from 12 years till 18 years. It was the only outlet I had, and I was in competition with other children who wrote very well, and we really lived for the page, and after I had left the children’s page, there was nowhere to send my work. I published some in the New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1936, 37, 38 ...

Elizabeth Alley 

Where Robin Hyde had published?

Ruth Dallas 

Yes, and Denis Glover, and other writers, and I used to look at their photographs and be very interested in the literary page.

Elizabeth Alley 

And did you at that stage think ‘I want to be like that, I want to be a writer?’

Ruth Dallas 

No, I can’t say that I was one of those people who wanted to be a writer. I just took writing naturally as some people take singing or drawing. I had won a poetry prize, and an Invercargill writer, F.W.G. Miller, came to my desk when I was in the army, and told me that I should take my poems to Monte Holcroft, and see whether it was worth continuing or what he thought of them. Monte Holcroft was then editor of the Southland Times, and he had a book page. So he said he thought the poems I was writing were as good as other young poets in New Zealand were writing, and that he’d liked to publish some in his page, which he did. That was 1946. And the following year, 1947, saw the introduction of Landfall, that provided the stage for New Zealand writers to exhibit their work. You know, poetry was regarded as something sissy in the environment in which I grew up. And although I’ve heard people laugh at this, when, with my first books of poetry, I actually covered them with brown paper so that it wouldn’t cause any comment when I was reading. So that’s how far we were from poetry. When I went to Holcroft and showed him the poems we thought it would be better for me to have a pen name. For one reason my father’s name was up in large letters on Dee Street as being the proprietor of a service station, and we didn’t want, I didn’t want this name ‘Mumford’, in my poems, really. I was very well known in Invercargill, we were very well-known family, and I thought a pen name, I’d be able to hide behind that, because of this sort of sissiness that was about poetry, you see. However, after Landfall began to publish, I saw that a lot of other young people were writing poetry too, and it wasn’t quite so peculiar. There was nobody who understood what I was doing, but I didn’t seem to miss it. When my first poems were published in Landfall, Basil Dowling wrote to me, to encourage me, and it was really rather marvelous to find that my work was valued. Here with three literary men – M.H. Holcroft, Basil Dowling and Charles Brasch – who thought my work was worthwhile, and I can’t tell you how encouraging that was.

Elizabeth Alley 

Reading about the fact that you faced the possibility of blindness when you were only 14 or 15, it became impossible to separate that fact from the visual impact of your own poetry. The fact that it seemed terribly important to you to capture the visual image on paper with great clarity and lucidity. Are those two facts related?

Ruth Dallas 

Well, I have a very clear mind and a very clear memory anyway, but really, there’s nothing like being threatened with losing your sight for making you appreciate what you can see. And then of course, the war came when I was 19. And, well I was engaged to be married at the time the war broke out, and my boyfriend went overseas like all the others, and that makes it very lonely for a person, you can’t carry on with the same social life, so you turn more to books and staying at home. When war broke out, all women were expected to pull their weight, to take over men’s jobs. If they didn’t, they were what we called ‘manpowered’ into work, and some of the jobs were very unattractive. Some of my friends were sent to jobs that scarred them for life because they were most unsuited. And I took on a job in the country, where I stayed for two years, but I found it really rather heavy, and I left it to go into the women’s army, I spent three years in the women’s army after that, but we were all expected, well the women were expected, to work in what was called essential work. The countryside, the landscape, and the people in the country did a tremendous lot for me. The people, I loved the people, and I loved the country, and they sort of got my life into proportion for me. I didn’t at any time set out to write poetry, that is something I’ve inherited from long distant ancestors. But writing of poetry, it’s like having the gift of a singing voice, you may have a good voice, but it’s useless unless it’s trained, and I wasn’t going to make anything of my poetry until I had further education, and this I got mainly in wartime, because I could see I needed more education, and I studied and read and sent away for books that I read was really what I needed, it was the same as training a singer’s voice, I was training my mind.

[…]

Elizabeth Alley 

Have you ever felt yourself to be seeking the same freedom in poetry that is to be found in music, freedom, but without any loss of the discipline that you bring to poetry?

Ruth Dallas 

When you can’t have freedom without discipline, it’s impossible. You have to have the discipline in the first place to depart from it. There are rules in poetry, even if they are only there to be broken, they are there, there is all the rules of metre and the technical composition of a poem. All that should be mastered first, so that you can depart from it, just as musicians have to master musical scales so that they can depart from them. I do get haunted by musical phrases or lines of poems, and in fact, some of my poems come accompanied by musical instruments. It sounds a little weird, but some poems suggest to me that I’ve played them on a descant recorder, or on a guitar, or various musical instruments come with the poems, the sounds of musical instruments come with the poems as though I were writing the songs and the music together.

Elizabeth Alley 

So you hear them in your head?

Ruth Dallas 

Yeah, oh, yes, I hear them in the head. I hear them on the page. When I’m reading, I always hear a poem, and I only recently found out that other people didn’t do that.

Elizabeth Alley 

And the landscape itself and its rhythms of change, that’s been important too, hasn’t it?

Ruth Dallas 

The landscape has been very important to me. My great grandparents came out here in 1850 and 1851. And I’m very grateful. I feel very grateful towards them that I was born here and my father and others were born here. I love New Zealand, I love the southern part of New Zealand because it’s meaningful to me. I know where my Swedish grandfather lived. He knew the Port of Bluff, he lived at Stewart Island for a while. One of my grandmothers lived at Port Chalmers for a while. Some other members of the family, one of my uncles by marriage was in the wreck of the Surat off the Catlins coast, when I go there, I know that he was on the ship that was wrecked there and the bosun’s whistle in the museum is off that wreck. The whole landscape has meaning for me, and even if I go to Christchurch, I know that my great grandfather walked over the Port Hills to get bread for his family, because there was a baker’s oven at the port before there was one in Christchurch. All that has meaning for me, and that is why I love the country, I think, but it’s also very beautiful.

Elizabeth Alley 

In 1961, Ruth Dallas published her second major poetry collection called The turning wheel, poems which signified a move away from the Southland landscape poems, to work that recognised a strong literary influence, and a response to Chinese poetry and to Buddhism.

Ruth Dallas 

When I read Po Chü-i’s poems, he was a writer, well legend has it that he would read his verses to a peasant woman, and if she didn’t understand the words, he would change them. He wanted other people to understand what he was saying. But that isn’t the only reason I liked Po Chü-i. I liked him because the way he used selected details to convey meaning, very much Chekov does in a short story. He would just use those details that conveyed his meaning. Also, those Chinese poets lived more like our life in New Zealand than the English poets, they lived in small, one-storied houses surrounded by cultivated fields. But there’s more to it than that, because poetry is really only the flower of a plant, and Po Chü-i’s poetry grew from his philosophy, and his philosophy was mainly Buddhist, and reading him took me back into reading Buddhism, and Buddhism took me back into reading about Indian philosophy, where Buddhism had come from in the first place. So, when you see a poem, you’re really only seeing a flower, or a fruit of a great plant that has roots under the soil and leaves. You could say that I was in the company of a fellow spirit who looked at life very much as I looked at life, and I was very happy in his company, but there are other Chinese poets that I admire, and one of the differences is that they don’t try to alter anything. They just leave things as they are.

Elizabeth Alley 

The poems of that Turning wheel period seemed to signify some disillusion, a sense of impermanence, they talked about the inevitability of suffering, that life on earth is just a stage in the growing state. These thoughts all seem to come from that Buddhist thinking, don’t they?

Ruth Dallas 

Oh, yes, they do. The Turning wheel sequence was a sequence that was actually, I always felt, given to me in a time that I was passing through of great difficulty, and sometimes, poems can be therapeutic.

Elizabeth Alley 

One of the haikus reads ‘poems like alpine plants need hard conditions, outcrops without windbreaks.’

Ruth Dallas 

So they do. Poems do need hard conditions, and the more unhappy you are, the more likely, I think, a poet is to write poems. Once it gets nice and comfortable, like Wordsworth in his later days, he doesn’t get the poems.

Elizabeth Alley 

So you’d subscribe to the Denis Glover theory, of an artist or a writer always needing to have spent some time starving in a garret?

Ruth Dallas 

Well, most poets do find the world rather difficult. Things are painful, and they don’t fit in very well in any niches that other people seem to fit into, and as long as they’re unhappy, they’re likely to write about it like the pearl in the oyster. There is a great danger, I think, in being too comfortable.

Elizabeth Alley 

Have you felt that about yourself, that you haven’t fitted comfortably into any kind of niche?

Ruth Dallas 

Oh, yes, yes, I thought when I went into the women’s army, ‘now I’m going to be like everybody else, I’m in uniform, I look like everybody else.’ It wasn’t like that at all. I found it very difficult.

Elizabeth Alley 

And later on as a poet?

Ruth Dallas 

Well, I’ve never wanted to leave that part of society in which I grew up, which was ordinary people, even though they didn’t read poetry. I love them. I love the way they look after each other.

Elizabeth Alley 

In later poems, there’s been a noticeable emphasis on philosophy rather than the physical world and the human vision. Do you think that this is inevitable as your poetry continues, and as the poet grows older, that you do use poetry as a means of explaining some sort of underlying, underpinning philosophy that’s going on, and a rethinking and a re-evaluation of various of life’s processes?

Ruth Dallas 

Well, I don’t really have any control over my poetry, I only have control over what I feed my mind. And the poems as sort of an end product. But reading was, Buddhism changed my outlook on life, but I hesitate to say this, because there’s so much misunderstanding about it in New Zealand, and it sounds rather way out, but the part about Buddhism that interested me was the early part where the Buddha himself went out into the world, and saw a lame man, and a dead men, and all these other things that bother all of us throughout our lives, and how he came to some conclusion about how he could accept all that. Buddhism is a way of looking at the world. Once you’ve read it, it’s inclined to lengthen your view, and also, it teaches you to give up wanting things, and once you give up wanting things, you’re very much happier

Elizabeth Alley 

You talked at one stage, or you wrote at one stage, of crafting a poem like as if it comes from sun-whitened bone?

Ruth Dallas 

Yes, well, the sun whitened bone in that poem is the long line of bones that have been born and died before me. It goes a long way back, my poetry. We all go a long way back, we are only the children of our ancestors, and my poetic vein comes from a long, long way back, the bones are old, and they’re sun-whitened because they’ve been a long time out in the open, or it’s a long time since they were formed, and it’s because of all these genes or whatever that you have in you, that you’ve received from your ancestors, that I’m able to write at all. Somebody else has done the work before I was born, and I’ve just inherited something.

Elizabeth Alley 

In one of the poems that I took to be a poem about some of the problems that you face in writing you wrote, ‘In the evening I dine / With a few friends / And we discuss / Literary influences / The necessity to rid the mind / Of accumulated junk and to see clearly.’ Does that express fairly well what it is that happens, that you really have to get rid of all the other extraneous things and concentrate on that ...?

Ruth Dallas 

Well, one of the things you have to get rid of is other people’s ideas about poetry and just find out, this is my method anyway, to find out what I think about poetry, and what I want to say, and just, oh, get rid of all that literary junk you’ve read over the years and get the mind cleared, for a nice clear space so that you can get working again on a nice clear poem. If I managed to say in a poem something that someone else has felt, and they find on the page, that I’ve expressed something that they felt and were not able to express, that is a great satisfaction to me.