Mike Johnson
was born in Christchurch. After graduating from Canterbury University he went
overseas for nine years, teaching English in Germany, Spain and North
Africa. He returned to New Zealand in 1980 and moved to Waiheke Island in
1982, where he has lived ever since with his family. His many books, ranging
from collections of poetry and translations through novels to a graphic novel,
include The Palanquin Ropes (Voice Press, 1983), Lear – The
Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon (Hard Echo Press, 1986), Dumb
Show (Longacre Press, 1996), Treasure Hunt (AUP,
1996), The Vertical Harp: poems of Li He (Titus, 2006), Travesty (Titus,
2010). Mike was co-winner of the 1981 John Cowie Reed Memorial Competition
with The Palanquin Ropes; a finalist in the 1986 New Zealand Book
Awards for the novel Lear, and has held both the University of
Canterbury Ursula Bethell Fellowship and the University of Auckland Literary
Fellowship.
Mike Johnson is the
most underrated of all living New Zealand authors. Sometimes gothic, sometimes
lyrical, sometimes both at once, his output over the past three decades has
been extraordinary. Yet much of his fiction and most of his poetry has slipped
by, barely reviewed...
(Iain Sharp, New Zealand Herald)
Let’s begin with an early
poem that remained unfinished until recently. It seems to capture that
mysterious, magical quality to life and art that has haunted me from the start.
A touch of fantasy, a feel for the beauty of the lyric, and ah, the drudgery of
trance.
stone by stone by stone
we are the builders, our
secrets go into the stone
with our blood and breath
and our mortal history
the sun on our backs, the
dust in our eyes, smoke in our throats
gods with greywacke faces
looking down at us from the sky
the fist of the earth
pushing up from below
we are the builders
our hardships are well
documented, stamped and archived,
we scratch our names in
granite dawns while the carnival goes past
fluttering dragons, planets
tethered to a string, balloons full of stars
that go pop when children
laugh too loud, galaxies of firecrackers
embedded in the night with
slurry and trowel
to the gods we were taught
we do obeisance in the style
of the times, obedient to
the will that raises a hand
or lets it fall, lifts or
breaks the stone we roll like a sun
through the heavens, a
great thundering sound
heard through all the
eleven realms, putting on notice
the evil that undoes the
world
we are the builders, we
never rest, we go on building
night after night, phantom
cities of blossom and rain,
stone pools with leaves
floating in the heart of the light-angel
courtyards with voices,
floating in the slender arms of young
grieving mothers – with
steady tread and sure hands,
with our secret alphabet,
our coded whispers, balconies and cornices appear,
highways and alleyways and
mirrors that stand so high
they can sing to each other
across time
we are the builders, our
secrets go into the stone, carve creation,
blocks of sleep stacked on
quivering eyelids, the waking drudgery
of trance, aiming the
bridge for the far shore, glittering islands
in cracked hands, creviced
fingers, we haul, stone by stone by stone
the walls we build for the
city
At
some point I stopped being so precious about the way the words came out. I
wanted poetry less intensely mediated and minimal, but more spontaneous,
slapping down chunks of language the way, after a storm, the sky will slap down
chunks of light on the Coromandel. Much more fun. Unpublished.
Silk Screen
an
old silk love, it crossed mountains and deserts, lakes and forests
until
nothing was left but a gas station and an upturned tank spinning
on
its turret in the sand like a kid’s toy after the party
the
way the colours adhere, the paper, floating orange oblongs, trendy mauve
triangles, so sixties, packed with silk-cut nostalgia and home-baked buns,
milk
with cream on top, telephones two cents a call – feel it
in
the texture, the way it feels you back when
you feel it, tastes your tongue
when
you lick the seal, makes it something personal you might have heard on
the
wireless while remedies were cooking
no
renegade gloom, no palace of mirrors; no fate nor destiny nouns
no
rats in the bolts, the caravan makes its way to the city of gold
in
matt finish, a little hairy with dream-patches attached
through
the opened fan, through the silk screen peacocks, glimpse ice melt
the
face of the beloved recalled from curious times, through wars,
the feasts, the discarded rooms – imprint
How
to write political poetry? I haven’t solved the problem, but sometimes it seems
we poets merely fiddle while the world burns, decorate atrocities with fine
words and finer sentiments. The outrage remains, and the loose sonnet form
again proves its worth.
Eyeglass in Gaza
the
camera will ferret out that telling detail
and
linger there, lapping up the mind
the
tree bends to the weight of the wind
the
wind follows the bend of the sky
the
little girl kneels to pick up a shiny thing
which
turns into a frag bomb which explodes
and
takes her apart bit by flying bit, holes in the world,
holes
in the flesh, holes in the air, holes in the body and blood
with
ice-cream petaled pink or gun-metal grey, the camera
will
linger on telling detail, an empty shoe,
perhaps
the
scribble of shrapnel on the wall, while the tree
bends
to the weight of the wind and the camera
shifts focus: give us a wide-shot, the
wind
following
the bend of the sky
I’ve
a collection of largely unpublished poems of my childhood and Canterbury
upbringing, nearly all unpublished. I found this one is a dusty corner of the
mind and scrubbed it up for the occasion.
my father was a shoulder
my father
was a shoulder
bent
to the wheels the
gods spin
every time
they dream – there was milk in the cup
and the
taste of sunshine upon the tongue of morning
but in the
end it killed him
my mother
made lots of paper children out
of the discarded wings
she
collected in the yard while she was waiting
for the heat to fade or
the floods to come
or a life
to come by drawn by a peacock carriage
or
some word
from my
father
but in the
end it killed her
my
father
his face
mutilated by work
his shoulder turned to granite
his hands to greywake
a mere
scoop of clay, filled
with the
milk of the early star while her shadows are still cool
filled the
cup, rang the till
with
assiduous movements magic enough
to warm the hunger which swells
like a bean seed with all
its rage and glory
after the rain
then
he held me
upside down, to give me
the feel of it
the
inverted
the inverted bowl of the
sky
across which sparrows skip like flung
stones
held me there, till I got used to it, seeing the
world that way
Writing
from observing nature is as old as poetry. At the same we await the judgements
of nature. I enjoy this kind of focus, traditional as it may be. The question
being, how to capture the little moments of everyday experience of we who love
to be astonished, and astonish. A new poem that feels old, as if I wrote it a
long time ago.
the damselfly
the
white root bleeds from where the spade
bit
too deep, root-fibre snapping – the runic syllables of digging,
the
heavy shout of the spade, a fierce rhyme
rather
than a casual prosody
with
its ‘terse occupation’, made for cutting and severing,
turning
a single worm into two strangers
it’s
all a big panic down there on insect street –
nature’s
wit, the fantail, has a thing or two to say about the this and that
and
the here and there of avian gossip,
and
look, here comes the damselfly,
nature’s
psychopomp from the order Ondonata,
with
iridescent wings that shimmer in and out of existence,
first
felt as fluttery halo,
invisible
elliptic, Doppler effect in surround-sound
till
it lands, biplane-wings, on the tip of a ponga
setting
up surveillance, looking out at the world through
a
multi-facetted emerald glaze
in
which the white root bleeds red
and
the sound of the spade reverberates across the eleven worlds
its
curt mantra
pray
for a good report
My
most anthologised poem, from the volume Treasure Hunt published by AUP (1995).
Thought I had to include this because it seems it is much admired.
Be
glad there's still a morepork or two left
to
make the night eerie - standing in the kitchen, hands slick
with
soapy water, I look out the window
as
one of these shy owls lands on a manuka branch
and
stares in at me with her big, brown
unblinking
eyes. I ask, "What are you doing, bird,
out
and about before twilight, and you must know
this
is the Kingdom of Claws."
"I
am here with a message,"
the
bird said, "I carry an omen on my wings."
"What
is it?" I ask, quickly drying my hands.
"Just
this," said the bird and flew away.
You
must find the bird. You must
lower
yourself into the disillusioned depths of her prescient eyes,
you
must hold her in your hands without claws
you must lift her sleeping wings
and
read
in the feathered pattern of moon and
cloud
the
riddle of her flight.
I’ve
always loved what is called the ‘new physics’, the science of the quantum field.
Amazing discoveries have taken place in the last few years, summarised as M
Theory, which posits a multiverse existing in eleven dimensions. For a bit of
humour, I combined this most rarefied of theories with the most sordid of
behind the shed sex, seeking absurdities and illuminations.
Margery and the Multiverse: being a
most rude and irreverent musing on M Theory
Margery
Razorblade and the back-room bosons slip
behind
the big gig in the sky
where
Margery drops her drawers and the hubble
sees
all they way up the pink giggle of creation
to
where the god particle may be found
what
a revelation! Behind those gauzy pink folds
of
super galaxies, the slipping and sliding, colliding
and
riding of flushed membranes and
the
coy veils of time
the
bosons cracked the singularity big time this time
and
had themselves a right Big Bang Bam
discovering
ten dimensions of pleasure that mingle and tingle
giving
off sparks and larks and eventually quarks –
floating
in a vast eleventh… before the bell rang
Oh, her ragged her breath and owl
eyes
the promise of love on a hot morning
of the world
where there was nothing but the hard
excitation of energies
and the coming in out of form, the
coming in and out of form, the coming
the
truth can now be told: the big bang was no lone wank
no
perturbation in the void, but one of an infinity of gang-bangs
and
clangs and jiggily jogs
happening
behind every bike-shed in every possible universe
with
multi-Margery Razorblades
(where
Asymmetry puts-out, or it doesn’t)
Oh, her ragged her breath
on a hot morning of the world
where there hard excitation of
energies
coming in out of form, the coming in
and out of form,
the coming
And
sometimes it’s just about having fun. Word fun. Homily fun. Could I write a
poem entirely composed, almost, of common clichés – just do it! And if a
little darkness creeps in here and there, it’s only because it’s getting late.
Argument ad homily – a cliché string rap poem
there’s talk of judder-bars
and speed bumps and over the humps
and take your lumps and man
the pumps, but
there’s
no sitting this one out, kiddo
no sleeping on the job
no handy foxhole
it’s make or break time
kill a commie for christ,
the devil take the hindermost
you’re on buddy, it’s
show-time in no-time
there’s no equality of the
sexes in the alphabet soup of war, sweetheart
where A is a hero and Z is
a whore, pretty is as pretty does, you’re nailed to the wall
when your number is called,
ground zero, you’ve gotta hand it to them,
whaddareya anyway? take it
like a man or be a girl, see if I care, a wing
and a prayer, you wouldn’t
know a Ragnarok if it jumped up and smacked you
in the face, pray for grace
and pass the ammunition, fire at will and
just keep on forking it
over until the guts fall out, the whole shebang
goes up in smoke and you
won’t see me for dust and small stones,
rattle your bones, Malloy, Fitzroy was here, and Jesus, and the
taxman,
who all scratched their
name in sand and scratched them out
pulled their heads in and
stuck their bums up for the bums rush
It’s tough titty for the
litter’s runt, kid,
shit sticks but you can’t
take it with you says simple Simon to the pieman
who pays the ferryman? who
knocks on the gate? who casts your fate, mate?
who falls asleep at the
wheel? Life? it’s a steal, keep it real
it’s your turn to deal
they say that things have
changed but I can’t see it, things have
always changed and
therefore always stayed the same, it’s just a game,
some old flame, oh you
heard the name, there’s nothing new under the sun
with the same old same old,
Tom’s a cold, winners and losers and
big time boozers,
ants rants and
smarty-pants, you can’t tell me it’s game over – the game ain’t over, buddy,
till the fat lady
ring-a-ling-dings
Other
times the poem fails to materialize and only fragment are flung clear.
Sometimes I think all my poems are just fragment. I’ve got zillions of these
fragments, bits with nowhere to go, no home in a larger framework, just raw
unturned thought that cannot sleep.
frags
in ancient china, it was
said
music has the power to melt
ice
wouldn’t that be nice
*
deep tissue massage
she elbowed open his chest
and he was able to breathe
his blood was able to
breathe
his words were able to
breathe
*
bees are dying
that is all you know and
all
you need to you
the frogs are dying
but then again you, you
already knew that
can you live in a world
with no bees and no frogs?
I suppose you can
(or you can try)
but then again
why would you?
A reflection on process, written in 1991, mangled up
for a poem in Treasure Hunt and here restored to it’s original minimalist
expression. I still like its rhythm and balance – needs to be read aloud, set
on the scales of voice.
between
there
is nothing between
the
word and the air
but
the muscled throat
between
the lyric and the body
but
bare skin, between love and love
but
the symbol
from
words
the
body comes, from body
words
backstend
something
rests on me
infinite
and gentle – I know
the
name
something
holds me in the empty air
with
perfect accord – I heard
the
word
I
pick up this and put down that
with
full and equal measure
to
each
with
nothing between
Another
reflection of process hiding in that 1991 ms. What can we do but be reminded of
Leigh Davis’s ‘What can we do but fade into history?’? That’s the line referred
to here but how the hell the reader would ever know is beyond me. At the same
time, there’s something here that touches the nerve centres of creativity. What
is the po-em anyway?
finding the line
I
found the line
I
was looking for
it's
just another
line
in
another poem
in
another book
shut
to the wall
page
facing page
line
facing line
in
one dark jostle
of
ink
and
I know this line
is
no line, but in the line of the eye
the
goosestep march into history
Precision, the quintessence of that guiding ethic.
refraction
the
world comes in
at
an angle
tangential
to the
thought
the
thought goes out
at
an angle
tangential
to the
world
This
has not been written down until now except in scribbled longhand, but I have
used it consistently over the years as a kind of prayer or incantation or
evocation before or after a reading. It is the offering of the work. It puts me
in the body for a performance. It offers up the flesh to the word, the word to
the flesh. Looks odd written out coldly like this. Looks better scribbled on the
back of a folder.
this
is my
body
this
is your
body
this
is
bo dy
shake shake shake
