I want you to think about it, she saidThese lines, from Mike Johnson’s eighth book of poems, Ladder without Rungs (2019), seem to me to provide an excellent point of entry to his poetry to date.
I am, he said
it’s not helping, she said
The major themes declared themselves as early as his first book, The Palanquin Ropes (1983), and have remained consistent throughout. There’s an interest in spareness, in the kind of short, pithy verses, we associate with Zen Buddhism or the Sufi poet Rumi. There’s also a strong sense of humour, as we can see in this abrupt and yet so-very-believable dialogue between a man and a woman.
The immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday are at the heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visible world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches which surround him in his longtime home-base, Waiheke Island.
Waiheke seems to act as a kind of analogue to Neruda’s Isla Negra for Mike. Its location, off the shores of New Zealand’s most populous city, Auckland, and yet its comparative isolation from the pressures of metropolitan life, have combined to make it an admirable microcosm for the type of writing he wants to do.
There’s a close social circle of family, neighbours and friends to chronicle – but there are also the follies of the tourists to marvel at – above all, though, there’s the sheer physical beauty of the place.
This is brilliantly expressed in the small book of short, three-line verses, Two Lines and a Garden, accompanied by drawings by Mike’s partner, Leila Lees, which he published in 2017:
after everything,or, perhaps even more appositely:
I still want to write love songs
and hear the tides of rain on the aluminium roof
mountain, beach, and valley, sky and stoneMike began his writing career as a poet, back in the early 1980s, before the success of his first novel Lear: The Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon in 1986 redefined him in the eyes of the majority of readers as a novelist first and foremost.
these are conversations of our art
in the garden, snails come and go
That’s never been how he sees it, though. Like many New Zealand writers, Mike can switch from one medium to the other with admirable ease. Reading back over the whole sweep of his published poetry, the 13 collections he’s published since 1983, any desire we might feel to pigeonhole him as a prose writer who also writes poetry seems impossible to sustain.
As you’ll see from the selections included below, Mike began as he meant to go on. There’s no excess wordage in a Mike Johnson poem: there is, however, a consolidation of themes and ideas from poem to poem. It’s as if the same ideas, about our smallness in face of the universe we inhabit, the need to steward our environment, and the imperative to feel empathy for the downtrodden and beleaguered, must be stated and restated in the hopes that they might, one day, actually be heard.
There’s no way that a selection such as this can replace the experience of reading his original books in their entirety. Only a collected poems could do that, but even then the physical beauty of so many of the books as artefacts – those illustrated by his partner, artist and writer Leila Lees, in particular – could not really be reproduced.
Those designs and layouts have grown more ambitious and more tactile over the years. The colourful geometric shapes of To Beatrice Where We Cross The Line (2014) have morphed into the wonderful flip book absurdities of his 2021 book of nonsense rhymes “for the young at heart,” Flippity Fluppity Flop, written in collaboration with the inimitable Daniela Gast.
It’s hard to argue that this represents a change or new development in his writing, though, when you look back on the strong physicality of such early books as From a Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984) and Standing Wave (1985), both printed by Warwick Jordan on his handpress at Hard Echo Press.
Both as a novelist and a poet, Mike has never really formed part of a group or a movement. He’s marched to his own drum, followed his own path. If, however, I were to look for analogues for his poetry, I think I’d probably start the search well outside New Zealand, with a writer such as Ursula K. Le Guin, who shares both his taste for Zen koans and his genre fluidity.
Only in silence the word,These lines, included as a quote at the beginning of her Earthsea series, sound rather like Mike’s:
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.
for the fish, no notion of rainMuch though I’ve always loved that short verse of Le Guin’s, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t give preference to Mike’s. I find fascinating his notion of a house without its ‘troubling’ household gods, whether you defne them in terms of the classical lares et penates or something closer to home.
for the birds, no sharp stars
in the houses, no troubling gods
There’s also something of other Eastward-leaning poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder there, too. And, of course, Pablo Neruda, as I mentioned above. Rather than pursuing the influence game further, though, suffice it to say that in forty years of writing Mike Johnson has built up a formidable corpus of poetry: abstract, intimate, politically engagée, environmental, romantic, narrative, humorous – not to mention translations and children’s verses.
I despair of doing justice to all these aspects of his work in this selection of 128 poems out of approximately 950. Nevertheless, I feel confident that there should be something here to fit every taste.
More to the point, though, I hope that this book will have the effect of directing readers back to its sources: those original collections – some aesthetic marvels, others more conventional slim volumes of verse – but all of them carefully considered and curated works of art.
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(5-12/12/22)
“Introduction.” In Mike Johson: Selected Poems. Waiheke, Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2023. 11-15.
[1039 wds]
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