The Tuesday Poem: Refeaturing Michael Harlow & “I Am A Tyger”
‘I am a Tyger’
Despite 10 years
of ‘talking cure’, twice
weekly, such intimate
conversation between strangers,
he remains quite convinced
that he is still, you know,
a tyger
As a child no taller
than a table leg, he always
suspected he was a cat
It was the last of the litter,
Chatterwot, the family favourite,
who taught him, age 11,
to speak ‘cat’
And he did. Not dog
or stag or unicorn, he knows
himself to be a tyger, ‘burning
bright’, in a body made strange
And of course he believes
he was adopted – his true parents
you see, were tygers, too.
© Michael Harlow
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from Cassandra’s Daughter (Auckland University Press) 2005
I Am A Tyger is reproduced here with permission.
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Fine poems should be read and heard more than once, so I’m continuing with my series of relooking at poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010. Michael Harlow’s I Am A Tyger was posted here on August 24, 2010 at which time Michael offered the following comment:
“Most immediately the poem grew out of note in a medical journal, so there are one or two ‘found’ items of language there, translated imaginatively. From early on I’ve been fascinated by the imaginative role animals play in our collective psychic life — and that’s universal. In all manner of ways we identify with the animal world psychically, that is imaginatively alive in all of us. The ways in which we do this, and why, tell us a great deal about how we survive even ourselves. The extraordinary power of the imaginative reality ‘I am a Tyger’ that can overwhelm another and actual reality. The spelling of ‘Tyger’ is meant to be a kind of underlying resonance to Blake’s poem.”
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Michael Harlow was born in the United States and arrived in New Zealand in 1968. He has published seven poetry collections: Edges (1974), Nothing but Switzerland and Lemonade (1980), Today is the Piano’s Birthday (1981), Vlaminck’s Tie (1985), Giotto’s Elephant (1991), Cassandra’s Daughter (2005, 2006), and The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (2009, Finalist National Book Awards 2010). He has been poetry editor of Landfall and Robert Burns fellow at the University of Otago. In March 2014 he received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand.
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