Festschrift
1 A Broken Song
the saddest story
I’ve ever heard
or not
a poet who spoke
himself into
silence
blank pages
spaces between
words
the voiceless language
present
in all poems
it wasn’t me
it wasn’t
me
an olive grove
exhaling scent
at dusk
the moiety of sun
inside an
orange
lord ocean
in his seaweed
crown
2 A Generation Back
hand me that magazine
to fold in half
to swat a fly
and opening the pages
youthful names
stand forth like satyrs
tumultuously erect
in stanza after stanza
black as ink
enjoining not to mourn
lost love
lost eloquence
or firm and veiny
ducts of spring
in leaf and limb
flung chair
and glass that shattered on the floor
echoing for decades
excrescences and
evanescences
afloat like smoke
3
The bloke Mitchell threw the chair at was Roger Nutsford, who ran a sort of head shop in Karangahape Road. The Vietnam poem he was reading was Robert Bly’s ‘The Teeth Mother Naked at Last’. Mitchell's principal objection seems to have been to someone wasting his time (and everyone else's) by reading aloud verse not his own.
A closer look at Bly’s text indicates some similarities with Mitchell's My Lai poems, about which he might have been sensitive. I’m sure there’s no question of plagiarism in either direction. A version of ‘Teeth Mother’ was first published by City Lights in San Francisco in 1970. My introduction to Mitchell’s work was ‘kingseat/my song’ in the 1970 NZUSA Arts Festival Yearbook. Even a casual reading of that poem suggests why he took these matters personally.
Mitchell needn’t have worried. The didactic plod of Bly’s lines
Artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end.
800 steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls.
The six-hour infant puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep
out the light.
But the room explodes,
the children explode.
Blood leaps on the vegetable walls.
offers nothing like Mitchell's intuitive poetic intensity
she
holds a hand over each dark eye
in turn
&
children burn.
Succinct and distinctive, this expresses what many poets were trying to say then but were hindered by the indignation Mitchell was able to use so skilfully to fuel his fire. The pity of it is that children still burn.
A closer look at Bly’s text indicates some similarities with Mitchell's My Lai poems, about which he might have been sensitive. I’m sure there’s no question of plagiarism in either direction. A version of ‘Teeth Mother’ was first published by City Lights in San Francisco in 1970. My introduction to Mitchell’s work was ‘kingseat/my song’ in the 1970 NZUSA Arts Festival Yearbook. Even a casual reading of that poem suggests why he took these matters personally.
Mitchell needn’t have worried. The didactic plod of Bly’s lines
Artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end.
800 steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls.
The six-hour infant puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep
out the light.
But the room explodes,
the children explode.
Blood leaps on the vegetable walls.
offers nothing like Mitchell's intuitive poetic intensity
she
holds a hand over each dark eye
in turn
&
children burn.
Succinct and distinctive, this expresses what many poets were trying to say then but were hindered by the indignation Mitchell was able to use so skilfully to fuel his fire. The pity of it is that children still burn.
Tony Beyer is a New Zealander whose poetry and prose have appeared in local and international magazines for several decades. His next book is Great South Road & South Side, two long poems, due from Puriri Press, Auckland, in 2013. He has recently become an inhabitant of West Auckland.
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