BMP5 nzpoetsonline |
BMP5 nzpoetsonline |
Mark Young New Zealand Born Hokitika, 1941. First poems published in the NZ Listener in 1959. Published widely both in New Zealand & Australia through the sixties & first half of the seventies, but then drifted away from writing. A request for permission to include my work in the anthology Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems, 1960-1975 prompted me to start looking at it again. Out of this has come The right foot of the giant, a selection of poems published by Bumper Books in 1999, & the initial stimulus to start writing once more. Recent work has appeared in Jacket, brief, Poetry NZ, Another Sun & is to appear in sidereality & Big Bridge early next year. Have lived in Sydney since December 1969. |
WITH BASHO ON THE FRONT PORCH furuike ya kawazu tobikonu mizu no oto Basho Mitsuo Light rain, & the sounds that come with it. Drops leaking from leaf to leaf or sizzling on the high voltage lines that run behind the house. Chordal structure of two tones of cicada noise above the deeper sound that is rainwater trickling into a drain across the road. A single frog. "Pumpkins" he said. " I'd have to include something like that since it's autumn, & seasonal ciphers are expected of a haijin, a haiku poet like myself. & even these simple events that now surround us have a continuity I am not allowed - unless, of course, I'm writing with someone else, trading verses back & forth like in that poem by Gregory Corso about poets hitchhiking on the highway. Hokku, haikai, haiku -- they're all the same with their restrictions & constrictions. I've turned into an incidental poet, have become a travel writer who uses poems instead of photographs." A pause as he lit the cigarette I'd given him. "Each time I put brush to paper I am confronted by that old head / heart conundrum. The head knows how to use one or two lines to sketch the surroundings, then puncture them with an observation that occurs at right angles to everything else around. It's the Zen thing, the A-ha effect; & I am good at it & comfortable with both form & style. But the heart still dreams of poems that have no formal structure, that are / full of music, that burst forth with the energy of the down pour that came through here an hour ago." Then he laughed." Enough of this fanciful talk. I'd better go & judge that haiku competition that brought me over here in he first place." & set off down the path, moving quietly, without disturbing anything. The frog croaks again Staff in the traveler's hand mizu no oto The sound of water THIS TIME THE HEART IS ELECTRONIC MUSIC I lie on my side on the examination couch, left arm stretched upwards, a mirror image of the Statue of Liberty but without her drapes & torch. Instead I am covered with electrodes, attached to various portions of my upper torso. By straining my neck slightly I can watch the monitor; &, as the nurse moves the greased roller ball across my chest, I see the valves of my heart opening & closing, opening & closing, like kissing fish. Then the ECG kicks in. It becomes a multimedia show, sound waves displayed across the bottom of the screen like subtitles to a foreign movie & a solid bass line that tells me I am well enough to dance to it. THE POEM ABOUT THE POEM came so easily I could not wait to start / the poem. & yet, ironically, it was this eagerness to get on with it that made the starting difficult. I thought I knew the journey, knew how the poem would shape & show itself. Instead found almost nothing, a few pieces of past so brittle that they crumbled as the mind alighted on them. & in this absence of obvious landmarks realised that most of our life is not momentous, is instead made up of a series of minor moments that dart back & forth between each other, underpinning & overlaying, being added to until each series achieves a momentum of its own, a thread worn smooth by time where I, impatient, had hoped to find a knotted cord, a message stick.. |
