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Asked to comment on how his new book of poetry, Shaken by Physics, compares to his first book, Sledgehammer, John MacKenzie says, “If the books were motorcycles, Sledgehammer would be a Harley Davidson, and Shaken by Physics would be a Japanese street bike. . . .It’s faster, and not as obviously aggressive.” In conversation, as in his poetry, John reaches for the arresting image, the image that shows equal parts intellect and anti-establishment swagger.
John cuts a fine figure in the Island’s literary community. He’s young, wise and street-wise. He works as a bar bouncer and a baker and he talks to “everybody,” when he talks at all. His voice is as hard and crumbled as red Island shale. He’s intensely serious, but quick to laugh—deeply and richly. He’s angry and tender. He’s as likely to be inspired by a pool hall as by a birch tree. And all of those contradictions find their way into his work.
The physics of his new book’s title come as much from the movement in his swagger as from the intellectual pursuit of conceptual physics. John’s poems begin where motion and emotion collide and spark, with all the metal and noise of a motorcycle. But why overtly address physics in poetry? “Poetry—all creative writing, really—is about accumulating detail,” John says. “How much more detailed can you get, than to get down to particles, particle physics?”
Since John doesn’t have the mathematical language terms for the physics he reads, he comes to terms with the ideas using the English language. “If I’m reading, and I feel like I almost have a grasp of a concept, I’m liable to start writing,” he says. “At least I’ll have something of it before it slips away.”
Understanding physics—or almost understanding it—is a means for John of “getting a glimpse of something—or maybe glimpses of nothing. Maybe,” he says, “I’m not writing about the particles as much as the emptiness around them, trying to apply those ideas to what’s around me, what I live and other people live.”
The title sequence in Shaken by Physics came out of a writing exercise John started as a thread on an on-line writing group. He admits that getting started writing can sometime be a challenge: “I’m pretty sure there’s always something there. It’s a matter of finding a way in. It’s like muscle memory that way, like riding a bicycle . . . but you need to have access to a bicycle,” he laughs. “Once you find a way to start the writing, it happens. It’s probably a particular sequence of neurons firing. And they know what they’re doing. They’ve done it before.”
If the path in to poetry is tough for the writer, so is the path out, to an audience. “If people just get past the word poetry‚ and read, it’s surprising how much they like it. The word is in a sludge of associations . . . what people think of is reading a poem, and analysing it, instead of letting the poem analyse them. They think they have to dissect poems. But poems are generally alive, and dissecting living things kills them. The great thing about poems is that dissecting them doesn’t kill the poem for everyone.”
John’s image for the path out is another picture of particles and space: “It’s to not think about what’s happening in your reading, but letting it fall in, and letting it knock whatever it can off the shelves as it goes down—picking up associations.”
“People could read more. They’d like it. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be poetry—it doesn’t necessarily have to be my poetry, though I’d like that. The language is what keeps us going. The reading allows us to become more proficient with language, both externally and internally.”
John leans back, backing away from the seriousness of his own argument. He cracks a wry smile. “And if you’re reading,” he says, “you’re not doing nothing else. And the more nothing the better.”