Michael Harlow

Michael Harlow has published eight books of poetry, including Giotto's Elephant (premio: a Finalist in the National Book Award for Poetry, 1991), Cassandra's Daughter (AUP, 2005, 2006), and most recently The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap (AUP, 2009).  The Associate and Poetry Editor at Landfall for some ten years, he has also been the Katherine Mansfield Fellow to Menton, France, and in 2004 the Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. Take A Risk, Trust Your Language, Make a Poem was awarded the PEN Best First Book of Prose (1986). His work has been translated into Greek, French, Spanish and German. He was the Burns Fellow for 2009, and the inaugural Caselberg Artist in Residence (Dunedin).  His most recent poetry collection The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap was a (premio) Finalist for the 2010 National Book Awards for Poetry. He has been awarded the University of Otago Wallace Writer in Residence for 2011/2012. He has a new collection of poetry forthcoming, The Company of Map Makers (2013) and also a Selected Poems from Cold Hub Press.  Michael Harlow lives and works as a writer, editor, and Jungian psychotherapist in Central Otago, Alexandra, New Zealand.

A field note on poetry

Poems that ask what it means, in the face of the absurdities and shadowy things thrown up by life, to ‘risk delight’;  and what that might mean when we are looking-out and listening-in for a language to say something about how mysterious we are to ourselves and to the world.

Poems that are lyric moments of recognition of what happens when we stand up and speak in front of ourselves and others; you could say a way of ‘being restoried’; a way of letting ‘words dream again’, so that making the ‘invisible, visible’ is at the heart of what the I call the ‘persistent imaginal’.  From this ‘the poem springs’.

And there are poems that come calling on and celebrate the ‘privilege of ordinary astonishments’--so that one day ‘a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution’ (an echo from the painter Cézanne).

Poems that acknowledge and reflect on how it is always that the ‘light lies down with the dark’, however various the shuffling  weathers of the heart turn up loss and death, time and memory, despair and delight; when 'forgetting is always about  remembering'. And on those occasions that poems return to that inevitable and archetypal mystérion, what is it ‘that love dares the self to do’?

A poetry that rests on and enacts the belief that we need to ‘see the sounds and hear the words’, so that despite every dark thing there is in the world, there will always be music, when ‘words sing’ poetry makes intimate everything that it touches (there is always the distinct possibility of romance', and more); naturally, poetry wants to go to the heart of the matter.

The nannies are coming

What do the tanks know, dreaming

at night under a full moon or the dark

of none?  Idle in their slots they design

parades.  Their devices are intact.

Swivel heads scattering birds, they live

off visions of coughing up shells; they purr

in earnest. As prams they are remodelled

for nestling under the Acropolis, patrolling

the esplanade in Barcelona.  Let it be said

they’ve caught on.  ‘The nannies are coming!’

They are moving into the backyards of our city.

They glow under the greatcoats of our generals,

making sudden invasions to the centre of our sleep.

They polish their treads under the dark inside

yards of iron. ‘We will eat them raw’, they say,

and lull themselves to a wakeful sleep: and

one by many they are counting people.

                                            Athens, Greece 1973

Today is the Piano’s Birthday

     Today is the piano’s birthday.  Yesterday it was found alone and forlorn in the garden.  Mother was not there, father was gone.  But today is the piano’s birthday. 

     Under the spinet tree the children touch it.  The piano’s foot-pedals hum.  Hurrah! shout the children.  The piano is on holiday.  They say Wake up and would you and we would, they sing the birthday song.  They strike the exact notes without looking, without looking the piano writes a song for the children.  And you can hear inside the song for the children you can hear plinking, planking, plonk you can hear how the piano conducts the children through a small wood of ivory; you can hear the music of running water.

     The children sing with their feet.  They bound up and down.  They pirouette.  They call to mother who is dreaming on the lawn, to father who is at the office polishng his machines.

     And now the piano falls into a dream.  The children listen.  From far off birds with the faces of women, birds with the faces of men fly into the garden.  They lie down.  They call to the children.  The children listen.  They lean into the falling darkness so much light buriend there.  They decide.  They say Look how we curl inside the piano’s birthday.  The children are the size of a crotchet.  They are the stories being played inside the piano’s birthday. They are listening...to mother wake on the lawn and touch the space around her...to father close the office door... And today is the piano’s birthday.

     If we listen...we can hear mother call them a small song waiting on air, we can hear father enter the house with the courage of his tenderness.  If we listen we can hear the one song the very first song the children sing, the one dream the very first dream the piano dreams...

     We can hear what we see...mother and father touch each other with wonder.

Talking at the Boundary

 John Clare, 13 July 1793-20 May 1864

Whopstraw man about the countryside

   In your own time ‘Peasant Poet’, Clare

Talking at the boundary; from Helpstone’s

   Centre, a day’s ramble you define

Earth’s curve. What wild ways you go, such

   Bright astonishments heart holds. Under

The sun’s arm you rise into the light; your

   Devotion to small things, each one a

World; speckled eggs, still warm in your

   Hands a nest of planets. All noise

Songs: to your country ear the ‘fern owl’s

   Cry that whews aloft.’

   Storyteller talking straight, names

Flourish like grass: Swordy Well, Sneap Green,

   Eastwell’s Boiling Spring; Salter’s Tree

That in you lived, world-inner-space,

   ‘Humming of future things that burns

The mind.’ Yours -- of course, a wounding

   Drive, a purity of heart; person and place

As you rightly say, Loves register.

   And, failed: ‘Blue devils’ rode you hard;

Like that other you most admired, ended

   Up in bedlam. You signed your name,

Clare: out of a terrible clarity given,

   You gave your word.

   Sought asylum from a world, its

Tormented sleep that wanted books to be

   ‘About’ and yours were not; that

Tore up trees, would titillate itself

   With ‘high life seen from below

Stairs.’ Too much seen from which

   There’s no retrieving, you say, a man

Whose daughter is the queen of England now

   Sitting on a stone heap on the way

To bugden without a farthing in his pocket.

   You may have seen the face of God;

Or staring back from the spoon-hollow

   Of a stream, that unspeakable shadow.

Saints are not made, they are chosen, Clare.

   And I am moved to say at risk these fell

Days of a century’s end where reason is on

   The make: for such ‘mad’ men as you

Measure must be taken; some small witness

   Given alongside those desperately sane,

Who nightly lie above their wives

   Planning devices so subtle

They eat children before they are born.

This is your birthday

He had always wanted to end up

as a constellation in the night sky.

Sending out all that starlight to cover

the earth.  To leave behind a map

of himself.  Better the dream to wake

to than the nightmare—and he was

worried that if he failed to love greatly,

he would fall early out of the picture.

That he would never catch hold of

the other one in himself.  Her words

now hurrying from one empty room

to another. Then, closing the door as

quietly as she entered his days, she said

the heart never lies more than it needs to.

Look behind you. This is your birthday. 

And you are always ten years old.

Bride with beautiful feet

                       

Under a sudden sunfall of bright

that strikes the dark in waiting,

we look to sing one pleasure or

another--trying to understand

the way we come to each other,

to let loose words in their looking,

whose language is telling what story,

ours; the right kind of adventure,

waiting for some goddess or other,

dear Sappho to arrive on a rill

of wind; to take your ease, to lean

back, to shout the world the right place

for love to come calling on the ‘wings

of pretty sparrows’.  In all the right

places, the right touch to take with great

style the pleasures of your company

Water in one hand fire in the other,

we sing you to make the far, more

near, and the more love’s longing--

some die without  it--but look: you

are as sunlight among flowers, such

a ‘bride with pretty feet’, we make

the air be music with your name.

A lovers’ quarrel

Something about how we live through

so many betrayals only to discover our

own, you said--trying to stay alive inside

the alphabet, and meet up with old friends

We were walking out of the park, your

hair on fire under a full fall of moon;

the flowering almond its bridal white

fading earlier than we remembered

I could hear, a leaf-fall of thought, one

of those moments when little is said

and always its meant to mean more

And you know words don’t do well

in loneliness; they don’t like to dwell

in the solitude of themselves.  And who

can blame them? I said, thinking that here

we were again inside a lovers’ quarrel

in a place we called the world.  Just then

I had in mind of the six chairs missing,

the one remaining, the last of the family:

its slat-back broken, the seat eating air

alone in the garden with the stone Buddha

under a cloak of ivy.  And I remembered

the map-maker’s secret wish that finally

the one map arrives, the four gates to the

future drawn to perfection.  It’s here you

say we find ourselves best by being lost

And that trying to climb into heaven

on your own will never do. Those tall dark

poplars, daughters of that wily old sun

god, we may need to keep in more than

mind.  Such leaf music we hear the voices

of anyone’s unborn children.  I can see

there is a tenderness to attend to, and now.

Canticle

This young boy and his sister

on their skipping way to school

and everywhere tossing shouts

of laughter into the air. In a shower

of light on the bright whitewash wall

of the Church of Saint Dionysia, they throw

their shadows.  They sign themselves

and their animal friends, letting words

talk to each other; they tell their dreams

They do no less than risk delight: despite

every dark thing there is in the world,

there will always be music. And they

wonder: what is the name of this song?

All about the world

Last week

my friend’s daughter Cassandra

asked me in a small voice of wonder,

if I wouldn’t mind could I tell her

all about the world?

                                               

                                                Today she

telephoned and said I’m going to tell you

about poetry, since they had been hearing

poetry at school. 

Uh huh, I said

Because I couldn’t think of anything else

to say, and besides it had been hard work

not telling her all about the world

 

                                                She said then

lowering her voice, letting me in on a big

one, Poetry is when words sing. I could

hear then that already she knew enough

of ‘all about the world’ to keep her singing

from time to time

And then she added,

since she was in that kind of a hurry,

About 100 years from now, trees

will be called very important people.

Cassandra’s Daughter

Cassy for short.

We’re discussing the colour green

and why.  And how last night

in her dreamtime a wooden-horse

appeared.  And look--how the wind

puts shivers in the water, shaking

the keys in their locks.

Only five years old, she is

already in love with how

one word wants another

with astonishing ease.

Inside the alphabet now,

inside the lining of a word

she asks me as we sit

on the garden wall under

a plum-coloured sun: why

were you born at seven o’clock

that night?  I was a morning baby

my mum says, the best kind.

I was born with my eyes open,

you see?  Would you like to

hear me sing?  I can almost dance,

too.  Would you?  I can hear

that she knows, Priam’s daugher,

all her years to heaven--

that every word was once

a poem, isn’t it?

  The Company of Map Makers

           That oldest story mapping the world, the

           world-snake in the habit of swallowing its tail.

            

In the company of map makers you are one.

    When you lay out the world there are no

straight lines. There is only clamouring for it

    in occluded offices where high words plump

for the ‘straight and narrow’, and are bluster.

    The only rule that’s truly to itself is to turn

and follow the stories. And the stories inside

     them is what map makers do. To know how

mind’s thought feels its way through the dark,

     into the light. The way we lie down together

and wake apart.  One side-track then another is

     how to wander.  An art to make any quick

surprise a wonder. There is laughter buried there.

     And the astonishments of laughter to keep you

alive. To see what it feels like to follow earth’s

     curve the shape of what you imagine, and are

imagined by. To follow the air’s swirl of song;

     the hurrying water, to recall the ‘river of rivers’

running to the sea to lose itself a name, and then

     returning to take another.  In word-struck lines

of optic infatuation: you are ‘mapping the territory’

     to make the invisible, visible. To know how the

imposing impossible is possible, when it is like this:

     ‘The air is full of flying children’ wanting to be

everywhere at once. Trees are so musical they can’t

     help themselves scoring ‘harmonies of a heaven’.

And to know the turbulence of women, and then

     their quietude: to find a place to be, and being what

 is in us to attain. When you say there is no one thing

     naturally alone on either side of the great divide—

to map that, is no sophistical aside to say that you

     would like ‘to die with life’.  And to know today’s

map is  tomorrow the same, but always different. 

Longing for Harmonies, Lettre de Menton

Have you ever noticed?

     Always there’s a pair

of them together; ring-collar

     doves, even when they’re

flying switchback from tree

     to tree, daubs of colour

in a toss of light, you can’t

     tell which one is following

the other.  Have you listened

     to them singing their hearts

out under the parasols of trees?

     I swear you never know

when one song begins

     and the other one ends.

You might say--they have an

     arrangement:  one long song

     for two voices: they are calling

down the lost noises of the sun

     and clearly--this ‘magic study

of happiness that no one eludes’.

No problem, but not easy

This is the Green Man

He lives at the corner of Hello Street and Goodbye.

He lives in a house, Alchemy House.

When you stand close to him

He is surely a man, you can see that

Sometimes, even, he has a beard.

And there are times when you see him

From afar, say, from across the room

He is also a woman.

Now, she is the Green Woman.

This is the way it is.

Sometimes he is friendly

Always in a hurry to be singing.

Sometimes she is not unfriendly

She is full of lightness, and music.

And there are times when he is quite terrible

Full of fire, you had better watch out.

And sometimes she is quite bossy

Even wicked, be careful.

Which is the way it is.

And you know, sometimes even they go to war.

There is destruction all over the place.

And of course there are times

When they lie down in each other’s arms

And they touch each other again and again.

And this is the way it is:

No problem, but not easy.

The tram conductor’s blue cap

                     

for Christopher Middleton

     In the waking hours of the night, a bell-tongue claps him.  

He is the tram conductor. In retirement, his fingers are stubs, 

his legs brittle, the light pinches.  And he is waiting inside a blue 

     cap that is too small, and smaller still...

    When the bell rings and the air is ghosts; when the places

around him are wounded, when the moon’s cup is empty or full, 

he is the tram conductor--and he is sailing down the line. Look--

     how he sparks along the blue rails; behind his eyes electric

currents hum.  Hooh! he says and throws his hands at lampposts 

passing by, at the eyes of windows, at letter-boxes posting 

     themselves in the opposite direction.

     He is the tram conductor, and he inside a story that dreams 

him: in it there is a leather pouch the colour of old furniture,

inside that there are years; there are the bright holes of punched

     tickets, and the gobbling tongues of strangers; there are the 

small disturbances of wayward words... There is yes, this man 

in a blue cap, he is waving his arms, and we see and we hear...

     There is no wife waiting to climb out of the story to greet 

him, to rub the sleep from his eyes; there are no children in the 

darkness waiting to be born; at the foot of the stairs there are  

     no hands holding  other hands, there are no love-birds 

happy in their cages to be singing...

     But there is yes, a small eggshell voice that says step up step 

down, tickets please, madame if you smile I’ll eat you with my 

eyes, and please sir, your flies are open your flies...click, click..

     And we see: there is mother climbing out of the bedclothes,

she is calling out a name; there is father falling to the ground 

in a wreck of a place...And that black dog with a doll in its mouth 

     And why does my head hurt?  And my legs... Why are my 

words disappearing?  And finally we see: a man, he is waving 

his arms and he is shouting...and this bue cap flying now through 

     whirlwinds of air...