Ian Wedde
Genji Monogatari, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2010) 60 pp., $14.95. At Trotsky’s Funeral, Mark Young (Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2010) 44 pp., $45.00. the allegrezza ficcione, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2006, 2007, 2008) 80 pp., $14.95
Genji Monogatari, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2010) 60 pp., $14.95. At Trotsky’s Funeral, Mark Young (Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2010) 44 pp., $45.00. the allegrezza ficcione, Mark Young (Rockhampton: Otoliths, 2006, 2007, 2008) 80 pp., $14.95
I first heard rather than read Mark Young’s poetry in the 1960s at Barry Lett Galleries and at the Wynyard Tavern in Auckland, where I was a student and had aspirations to be a poet. What was immediately striking about his poems then, and remains so now, was a quality of displacement. There seemed to be three sources of this displacement. The voice I heard (and the texts I later read) had a deliberating, impersonal quality, in marked (so to speak) contrast to the jongleur or troubadour voice of Dave Mitchell, who often performed with Young. Then, the language itself, in its internal (pronouns, subject/object relations, point-of-view) and external (line endings and enjambement, syllabic weight, visual scoring) exercised a persistently sceptical and frugal sense of affect. And finally, the references, even when local in terms of a scenography, seemed most often to have been mediated by distant influences and references – LeRoi Jones (‘Gonna roll the bones’): Black / gamin / disdains all games / of chance, Robert Duncan (‘The Tigers’): Within the tiger / reels a turmoil / of desires, William Carlos Williams (‘The intention’) (i) The intention is / that I / refurbish / the room – French poets (Verlaine), artists (Magritte), and jazz musicians (most often Miles Davis).
To these effects one might add Young’s enjoyment, and deployment, of arcane words and concepts; in one poem, whose title I will footnote because of its length, he riffs across the following: belvedere, syzygny, xiphoid, ylang ylang, widdershins, giaour, anthropophagi, lucubration, pleonastic, adespota – pretty much for the hell and pleasure of it (ii) However this, like a certain asperity in Young’s tone, is less a measure of displacement than a trace of aloof character, a kind of impersonal personality – a placement or presence marked by its adroit discretion.
What this added up to could be described as negative romanticism: subjectivity identified by being uninterested in winning sympathy or affection; meaning declaring itself to be uninterested in conclusions, especially transcendent ones; a presence revealed in its preference for distorted mirror-images over face-to-face disclosure; an honest preference for sleight-of-hand over ‘honesty’; and, most importantly, the poet’s liking for fictions, unreliable science, a certain droll impassivity, a relish of coat-trailing narrative, a love of the playfully esoteric.
For reasons that should and no doubt will remain his business and not ours, Young – or rather his poems – pretty much disappeared for the better part of thirty years after he left New Zealand to live in Australia in 1969, and especially between 1975 and 1999; an interlude of displacement that in its way seems entirely consistent – albeit extreme – with the strategies of the poems that had appeared through the 1960s and early ’70s. When Young’s poems began to appear again, they did so in force, through the immaterial (and thus displaced) medium of the blog, with none of the fetishistic intimacy of the book-object (I have a copy of Dave Mitchell’s Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby besplattered with lipstick-kisses by an unidentified woman); but also through a quick-fire succession of books: sixteen between 1999 and 2010.
However, these books, whose very profligacy should alert us, refuse to be singular (or fetishistic) in various ways, their individuality displaced by variations, repetitions, rearrangements, and reprises of poems or approaches to them. The strategies deployed here soon recall those displacements of the 1960s, but with much greater derangement of mainstream poetics. The name Borges soon appears, albeit with its own small variant, in ‘For Jorge of Burgos’, the accreditation bestowed by Borges’ familiar, Umberto Eco. (iii) Borges had earlier appeared as the patron of a title devolved from The Right Foot of the Giant (1999), ‘A Bestiary for Borges – poems 1959–1974’. Not surprisingly, Young’s taste for the Borgesian ficcione – that deadpan miniature fusing formal fiction, story-telling and parable – manifests itself frequently. the allegrezza ficcione (2004 et seq), nominally a prose work interspersed with poems as asides or in the form of ‘translations’ from within the book’s narrative of esoteric textual research, tells the story of a young Italian scholar’s quest for his ancestor’s historical and textual traces in the years before Marco Polo’s account of the Silk Road.
However, though consisting mostly of pages whose appearance is of prose, the book is best understood within the span of Young’s poetic output. The ancestral Allegrezza, who it appears may have been involved in the history by which the Mahayana Sutras came to China – ‘the Kingdom of Wei – (or were interrupted in their journey), makes a ghostly appearance in the ‘Introit’ section of At Trotsky’s Funeral (2010);[iv] and again, this time named in full as Umberto Allegrezza, in ‘[fragment]’.[v] These sections of the book both appear as ‘prose’ pages, but read (along with others) as integral to the poetics of the book, which opens with a short poem of three couplets (A Philosophy of Ficciones). The formal purpose of this arrangement is to render an already aphoristic sentence even more precisely focused:
However, though consisting mostly of pages whose appearance is of prose, the book is best understood within the span of Young’s poetic output. The ancestral Allegrezza, who it appears may have been involved in the history by which the Mahayana Sutras came to China – ‘the Kingdom of Wei – (or were interrupted in their journey), makes a ghostly appearance in the ‘Introit’ section of At Trotsky’s Funeral (2010);[iv] and again, this time named in full as Umberto Allegrezza, in ‘[fragment]’.[v] These sections of the book both appear as ‘prose’ pages, but read (along with others) as integral to the poetics of the book, which opens with a short poem of three couplets (A Philosophy of Ficciones). The formal purpose of this arrangement is to render an already aphoristic sentence even more precisely focused:
The history of
history is one
of spaces, some
empty, some filled,
but every one ready
to be re-written.
As if by reverse inference, the ‘prose’ sections that appear in At Trotsky’s Funeral seem to have been designed that way so as to extend or release rather than coil and tension the effect of the words – not just their lexical meaning, but the meaning conveyed in their energy – its latency or disclosure; in this, they seem no less formally deliberate than the ‘poems’.
Genji Monogatari (2010), which appears as fifty-four pages of poetry (as short lines running down the page), in fact reverses the charges on prose embedded as poetry. It takes not only its book title but even its individual poem titles from the eleventh-century Japanese (Heian period) novel sometimes called The Tale of Genji. Composed by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in chapters or instalments whose titles are the same as Young’s poem titles, the Genji has sometimes been described as the world’s first novel and even as the first modern novel. The poems that Young has suspended from the novel’s chapter-headings may seem at first to have little or no connection to the narrative matter of the original prose. They operate, rather, like fragmented commentaries overheard while reading the novel, whose proximity to the matter at hand is only occasionally germane, as if the conscious mind, occupied with reading or with a train of thought hidden from the page, at once overhears and edits the wild track into which it strays or veers as prompted by accidental, fleeting contacts between the incidental and the primary.
Even within each poem, or under each chapter heading, the purchase of the visible or audible language skids across diverse occasions and meanings. The sense is of an almost entirely displaced (invisible, inaudible) text – that of the historical novel – which enters the consciousness of the poet and subsequently of the reader (or listener) from time to time, sometimes in the person of (or as a reference to) the sexy princeling Genji, sometimes as the pronoun ‘she’, sometimes in the form of a clue to the text’s originating methodology (‘Interactive searching/ of the Japanese texts …’), sometimes in a phrase that seems to slide in from the novel (‘She unshawls her koto.’).
In some respects this recalls the slidey, laterally displaced ‘meaning’ generated by John Ashbery, to take the most obvious example, for instance in a poem such as ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, nominally fixed in reference to a particular work of art, but digressing across opportunities provided by the language not its programmed object. Still, the more apposite comparison remains Borges, and the better model is the ficcione that Young develops with such aplomb and wit through his many variations on what might best be called displaced poetry or a poetics of displacement.
Given his own geographically displaced base in Rockhampton, Queensland, located 600 kilometres north of Brisbane — a location almost perversely off the beaten track — Young also defies clichéd assumptions about the metropolitanism of his diverse interests. Entering the digital archives of the internet with as much sang-froid as his hero Allegrezza did the deserts of Afghanistan, exploiting its possibilities for generating the kinds of fictions that will have more truth in them than most honest testament, and redistributing the results through his Otoliths publishing, blog, and website networks, Young has become a veritable Antipodean Borges.
(i) From Mark Young, Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959–2008. San Francisco & St. Helena: Meritage Press, 2008. Early poems reprinted from The right foot of the giant. Wellington: Bumper Books, 1999.
(ii) ‘There are words of which I am enamoured but shall never get to use, save all together, in one poem’
(iii) ‘For Jorge of Burgos’, in Mark Young, At Trotsky’s Funeral’ (2010), p. 9.
(iii) ‘For Jorge of Burgos’, in Mark Young, At Trotsky’s Funeral’ (2010), p. 9.
(iv) pp. 23-4
(v) p. 32
Novelist, poet and critic IAN WEDDE has recently shifted from Wellington to Auckland. His new novel The Catastrophe will be published by Victoria University Press in 2011.
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