Ask to use material, get more information or tell us about an item
Poet, pamphleteer, private printer, pagan and pretender to a throne, Count Potocki de Montalk is probably NZ’s greatest eccentric. He was at the centre of the most extraordinary obscenity trial of the century and since the 30s his mediaeval dress has made him a distinctive figure. He is one of our last links with the first serious NZ poets.
Potocki is not widely known in this country . He has lived abroad and this is his first trip home in 50 years. He was born in Auckland , the grandson of a Polish aristocrat who emigrated to NZ in the late 1800s. At 80 he is living in a student hostel writing his life story in Polish, learning Maori and completing a thesis in Latin.
Potocki participates with Gary McCormick in a school of architecture orientation programme in which he talks about the hostility faced by poets when he was young. Potocki is a prolific printer, mostly of his own work and the old hand press housed in the original buildings of Victoria University has been well used since his arrival. He is shown printing a poem he wrote at the age of 17 about a Maori warrior.
It is because of his close friendship with poets such as A R D Fairburn that Potocki is now the subject of biographers of that period. Flamboyant, even then, he brought a measure of wit, sophistication and romance to cultural bareness and social Puritanism of the country, qualities which Fairburn found exciting and important to his view of himself as an artist . It was some poems Potocki wrote about Fairburn’s amorous adventures which lead to the most extraordinary obscenity trial of the century and which changed the course of his life as peace loving and romantic poet. Potocki talks about the trial at the Old Bailey which resulted in him getting six months in Wormwood Scrubs prison. The sentence outraged the literary world.