Mike Johnson

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