Penname: Peter Le Baige [Contact] Real name: Peter Le Baige

Member Since: 05/09/11
Membership status: Administrator
Bio:
Raised by the sea, working in the city. As a child we lived in Bucklands Beach, now an east suburb of Auckland (then a ‘village’) 5 minutes walk from the sea, as my Dad was fond of saying. The water, the tides, the light on water are everywhere through whatever I write, it’s seeps through me to this day, like a tide under the night jetty, even though I am living in the dry interior city of Beijing, China.

For influences the early work of the German novelist and poet, Herman Hesse, were a realisation that words come of our interior, and can carry that interior with them. The works of Sam Hunt helped me to understand I need only write in the landscape and the language of the place where I lived. However, my bent to wander lead me to Chinese,Japanese, German and Greek poetry with Rainer Maria Rilke as my Opheus. The Lennon-McCartney song book, Bob Dylan, the twisted vowels, and spat out consonants of rock and roll forged an ambition in me to create a short lyric line, which I never managed, the pop line of a modern romantic. Now I’m content to simply write, as Jack Kerouac put in somewhat different words, what is on my mind in order to see that mind.