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The country's inaugural poet laureate and director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, Bill Manhire, reckons poetry is NZ's best-kept secret. He chats with Mark Story ahead of his guest reading at HB Live Poets' Society on Monday

Is there something specific in your background that led you to poetry?

I had a mother who sang and made up stories. And she introduced me to folk tales - the Grimms in particular. That stuff is deep in my imagination. I've been lost in those scary forests ever since.

What's your primary role at the institute?

I'm the director, which sounds very grand. But I have three full-time writer-teacher colleagues who concentrate on our MA programme, while I lead the PhD programme which we established fairly recently.

The PhD is interesting because it brings creative and academic work together in quite exciting ways. In fact, the first novel written as part of our PhD is being published this week by Penguin: Laurence Fearnley's The Hut Builder. Sir Edmund Hillary has a "walk-on" part.

The institute has come under fire from those who believe the notion of teaching someone how to write is absurd.

I think writers always teach themselves. But you can have the help of a teacher, as you teach yourself - which speeds all those learning things up. For example, it's useful if someone tells you not to use too many adjectives that end in "-ing".

That sort of advice can save you a lot of time.

And it also helps to be in a workshop with other writers, because it brings you face to face with real but sympathetic readers. It sounds odd, but one of the hardest things to learn is to write with a genuine awareness of readers. A lot of novice writers make the mistake of talking into a vacuum.

Were you ever formally taught?

I studied poetry, of course. And I read and read and read. That's the most important way to learn to write it. If you don't read poetry, you'll never write it well. Film directors go to the movies. Great chefs eat out a lot.

I remember when I was a student, I went to monthly meetings of a poetry writing group. Its members included real writers like Charles Brasch and James K. Baxter.

We all had cyclostyled copies of each other's poems, and we read our poems aloud, and we all commented on them in detail. It wasn't a formal university class but in practice it was just like a creative writing workshop.

Poems seem to be getting shorter and shorter - could this spell the end of the strong Kiwi tradition of odes and balladry?

I think we've lost the old idea of poetry as the place where story-telling happens. I guess the novel and the film do that sort of thing much better.

I'm not sure that New Zealanders were ever much good at balladry, anyway - compared with Australia and the Henry Lawson tradition. In New Zealand, the place where something like the ballad survives is in the work of some of our brilliant songwriters - people like Don McGlashan.

Has the recession affected poetry?

Lack of money never affects poetry, because there's never been any money in it. My impression is that poetry in New Zealand has never been stronger.

That's the power of poetry.

Poets can say what they want to say. They don't have to make market compromises.

How would you describe the contemporary New Zealand poetry scene to a foreigner?

Rich, and various, and probably New Zealand's best kept secret. One good way to find it for people overseas is through the internet - through the website Best New Zealand Poems or the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre.

Or the big, new book called 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry, edited by Paula Green and Harry Ricketts. It's interesting that some of our most interesting new poets are Pasifika writers, people like Tusiata Avia and Karlo Mila.

What are its limitations - its depths?

Limitations? Probably the dangerous belief, still fairly widespread in New Zealand, that being sincere is all you need to be a poet.

I'm sure there are plenty of sincere rugby players out there but it's not sincerity that makes Richie McCaw a great loose forward.

Depths? A much greater range than there used to be.

A poet like Jenny Bornholdt shows you that, in poetry terms, it's just as interesting to be in a domestic space in a New Zealand suburb as to be standing on top of Mount Cook.

A poet like Brian Turner shows you the exact opposite. At last we can have both those extremes - and everything in between.

Major poets are seen by some as society's silent legislators. What piece of legislation has Bill Manhire played the biggest hand in?

I think all I could really lay claim to is making it okay for poets to have a sense of humour. I've always hated poetry that solemnly lectures the reader. I feel bored and patronised and sometimes stupid when poets pontificate without any variety of tone or perspective.

I find it interesting that poets like Allen Curnow and Denis Glover were great comic poets, but that they kept those poems separate from their so-called serious work.

Curnow even used a pseudonym: "Whim Wham".

I think poets ought to feel free to mix things up. I'm totally happy for poetry to be full of high seriousness from time to time; but I also want it to be able to live in the ordinary world where most of us lead our daily lives.