David Mitchell

David Mitchell (10 January 1940 – 21 June 2011) was a New Zealand poet, teacher and cricketer. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a well-known performance poet in New Zealand, and in 1980 he founded the weekly event "Poetry Live" which continues to run in Auckland . His iconic poetry collection Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby sold well and was a critical success, and his poems have been included in several New Zealand anthologies and journals. A collection of his poems titled Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell was published in 2010, shortly before his death.

Early life Mitchell was born in Wellington in 1940. He was the son of David Eric Mitchell, a deckhand and former stoker from Sydney, and Rossetta Cousins, a Scottish domestic servant. It received a 'Commended' award in the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Chan wrote of the book that "it was a huge critical success almost immediately, but it lost money copiously". The book had ink drawings by New Zealand artist Pat Hanly, who was a friend of Mitchell's. with the support of a grant from the New Zealand State Literary Fund. David Eggleton, writing in the New Zealand Listener, called Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby "one of the best-known and bestselling poetry books [in New Zealand] of the early 1970s, a collection that seemed to capture or encapsulate a particular political and cultural moment". Journalist Hamesh Wyatt said it "was bought and read by people who did not usually buy or read poetry".

In 1975, Mitchell received the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, which allowed him to spend time working in Menton, France in 1976. Although he wrote a number of poems during his time in Menton, and Poetry New Zealand (vol 5, 1982), edited by Frank McKay.

In 1980, Mitchell founded the weekly event "Poetry Live" in Auckland. and is New Zealand's longest-running open mic event. Mitchell's friend and fellow poet Iain Sharp later said: "[Mitchell] told me once that he was embarrassed about not producing a new book after he returned from being the 1976 Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton. Setting up Poetry Live was his alternative — a way of giving something back to local literature."

In 2002, Mitchell graduated from the Victoria University of Wellington with a Bachelor of Arts. He had resumed his studies in the early 1980s but due to health and financial issues the degree took time to complete. Reviewer Terry Locke said that Mitchell's poem "gasometer/ponsonby" was "probably my favourite poem in the book", and noted that Mitchell was "the one person who has both written a poem about cricket in this book and has had a poem written about him, i.e. Ron Riddell's "Poet & Cricketer"".

In April 2010, Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell was published by the Auckland University Press, edited by Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts.

Personal life While Mitchell was in London in 1963, he met 18-year-old Elsebeth Nielsen, a Danish au pair who later became a fashion model. They married that August, after Nielsen became pregnant, and had a daughter Sara in March 1964. The marriage was a difficult one and she left him in December 1966 and returned to Denmark for a year and a half. There were two more attempts at reconciliation before they separated for good around 1969. Mitchell later had another daughter, Genevieve.