I feel I should say something about this at the outset. I write, because I’m a fan of those who I read. I want to be in their gang, and writing lets me tag along, like a tolerated runt. The fact that I write allows me to read, as an insider. I feel I stand in a relationship of confidentiality toward the poet and his or her work, and this encourages a reading that is more vertical, a listening in, like tip-toeing down a spiral staircase at night [when really your supposed to be in your bed]. Some poets I have been reading closely, over and over, again and again, for years. It took 10 years of reading Yeats before I started to gain a sense of incipience in his work. Whereas, if you read Plath, very quickly you gain a sense of the origin of the poem, because the distance it travels from conception to completion is so much less, is traversed so quickly, and is usually enacted right there in front of you, in wide-eyed surprise. If I didn’t write, I believe I would lose the sense of dialogue I have with various poets. I’m a painfully minor poet attempting to engage major themes, but this shortfall does not dismay me, as long as my efforts allow me to keep such excellent company.

A while back I was a student of Zen. Specifically, of Soto Zen, and a perplexed reader of Dogen. I practised, and still do, fitfully, Shikantaza, which is Japanese for ‘to just sit’. This simple instruction I soon realised, conceals a depth of nuance that gradually worked on my curiousity and determination. However, as I continued to practise, and to read, I became worried by a tension between Zen, and my writing poems. It is a tension that probably doesn’t exist in a practical way, as evinced by Basho, who was trained by a Soto Zen priest, and by Shinkichi Takahashi, for example, who was in fact a Zen monk as well as a poet, but the apparent conflict between the two in theory preoccupied me for a long time. Despite it’s literature, Zen characterises itself as a transmission of teaching outside of scriptures, and the experience that it points to is essentially beyond language. Now, being utterly enamoured of poems since the day I discovered Dylan Thomas, I am something of a Platonic Realist when it comes to language: what makes the word apple to be about the thing it denotes is the fact that it encodes the essence of the thing it refers to. Somewhere in the word apple is the essence of apple. In addition, I instinctively assent to Heidegger’s notion that language is an objective force with it’s own economy, and that we only speak insofar as we concur with it’s energies. These two features, the Platonic and the Heideggerian, are what, I think, allow for that sense of discovery that sometimes accompanies a poem’s ‘composition’. Now, the worry I had was that the practise of Zen would destroy my attempts to write poems, or at the very least undermine the faith in language that underpinned my attempts to write. On a basic materialist level, I worried about neurological consequences arising from the practise of Shikantaza, a ‘reprogramming’ towards silence. On the other hand, what Zen proffers as a reward is very tempting, and I am also somewhat of the belief that the self, in lower case, is a bloody nuisance at times and that it can obscure the view, the bigger picture. It is a conflict I have never been able to resolve, and one which ultimately has diminished my initial zeal for Zen. I have written about it intermittantly in my poetry, and the fruitfly emerged spontaneously as a miniscule sign of the poet’s necessary engagement in multiplicity. All poets are fruitflies, and hopefully prone to fortuitous mutation. So, that is the explanation, for what it’s worth. I’ve posted some of my poems below.

Micrography

In a splinter of glass
the shining
impersonality of light.

Go towards the light
fruitfly! Towards
the light!

Fruitfly, his
madness deepening
in the mirror.

Floor of the mind. Survivors
signal
through the Foraminifera.

Snowfall. Fat world
haunted
by famished clerks.

Blackbird. Peering
through his microscope,
making notes.

Snow-silence…angry
car-faces
drive past in the directlon I just came from.

There! My face reflected
in the glass
of a passing car!

Marshmallow slo-mo
dreamslide
towards a very hard tree!

How real the World
with its
hands of bone.

Leaf-storm! Laughing,
I shadow-box
dead trees.

I read the final
bone, and
try to make an answer.

Look at me, in
my Volkswagen
monster-mask!

My shadow
is
the evidence.

He tries to think microscopically,
to be free
of his own mass.

The point
hungers
towards ignition.

Creature. Out
of what?
From where?

Ego blooms,
like
a bruise.

Gather weapons,
and brood
on your restoration.

Frosty morning.
Cows
fart steam.

Silence…yet still this background fizz:
the effervesence
of mystical chemicals.