Genji Monogatari

by Mark Young

Genji Monogatari is a sequence of 54 poems, each keyed to a chapter of the 11th century Japanese classic by Murasaki Shikibu. The result is a complex and beautiful palimpsest, wherein we are privileged, simultaneously and sequentially, to look upon worlds within worlds within worlds. Mark Young opens the book on the processes of the composition of the sequence itself so that, along with his reading of Genji, we are also given the progress of the writing of that reading. His technique, foregrounded here, demonstrates a fidelity to stochastics allied with a profound knowledge of, and respect for, tradition: "replaying / our cached millennium." All the characteristics of Young’s recent work—ferocious intellect, coruscating satire, black humour, exquisite emotion—are fully present, along with something difficult to name: as if, in the drawing back of screen after screen after screen, what is revealed is the nakedness of all enclosure, the silence inside both world and word. —Martin Edmond

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Novels, Japan

60 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2010

About the author

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia & has been publishing poetry for almost sixty years.
Source: back cover of "Random Salamander"

Reviews

[Mareto]

This book is a feature-length fictional story created by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century in the middle of the Heian period. The correct name is "Genji's story", and there are also names such as "Hikaru Genji's story", "Purple story", and "Purple connection". In posterity, abbreviations such as "Genji," "Gengo," "Purple sentence," and "Purple history" were also used. It composes the life of the main character, Hikaru Genji, and the various lives of his family for more than 70 years, and depicts the details of the life of the court aristocrats at the height of dynasty culture in a graceful and clear manner. The outstanding literary achievement, which is completely different from the narrative works before this, has a view that can be called a miracle in the history of literature. It is said to be a classic that continued to have normative significance in the development of Japanese cultural history, not limited to the history of story literature after that, but it is not only a legacy for the Japanese but also evaluated as the best literature in the world.

[Paul Siegell · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The price of crude oil / is a psychotic ghost / that haunts my / poetry."

Another so-smart book by Mark Young. Grab your favorite scissors, the nice pair in the drawer you don't often open, then bundle a newspaper, an ancient Japanese text, the Internet, and even your GPS navigator and give them all over, give them all over to the wildly skilled hands of Mark Young. From it all, he will take "up a brush / & traced a poem in the air."

For example:

LIV. The Floating Bridge of Dreams

There are significant
differences in the
sequence length of
immobilized DNA in
the new batch of lap-
top chips Intel rolled
out on Monday. Today,
of course, we are likely
to have rain. The browser
window open under the
browser window I had
open to search Google
for references to the
drake fly has playing
one of one hundred &
forty-eight YouTube
clips of The Rolling Stones
doing Sympathy for the
Devil. Most of them
are about the fishing
lure whose etymology
is entomology. I type in
"Murasaki" & spend the
remainder of the near
nine minutes replaying
our cached millennium.

(originally published in Moria)


I mean, c'mon. How tight is that? Get this book, immediately.

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback...