Top Up George

First, da word on the war of an immensley talented all new langpo language maestro and full time party host MC Megagag.

George, Swifty and their not so incredible mates are on software medication; pop ups, light tablets and full time injections. Their only desire is to ask for more, with black and white certainties in bullseye tosses, throw after throw, every time, to go beyond and become constantly alive in a tastefully engineered practical frame of pure spectacle.

Not the disposable ones, the freebies and throwaways, the ones they don't want. Not like Dawn's recyclable wrap-arounds; the shiny see through accessories at the OT fashion show. Glasses like that never go out because they're always in, just like George and Swifty and the teams of consultants at the war veterans hospital, the Vale, on ward 11; viewing, watching, making a difference to planetrary affairs and taking a tiny part in the show themselves just by being there on-ward when it's going on. Plugged to the full top up.

Bullsye tossers; addicted to work, play, tlc, a PC, biscuits, tea and a few games of Bully, where they tip the mask and become avatars to deport through fibre as leaders and top bottle-washers heading a cypher mass of conquistidors in lone rule; dominant elites, bossing about all day and the state in welfare others connect with via George, the sling and mockney barrow boy daring himself in the words of lingo laws.

One of Georges many bum lickers, Swifty, is thinking of chancing his arm on a sonnet, as long is it isn't just a jumble of loosely numered lines with between 8-10 syllablles, which the straight "A" gang of Full Dollar, DJ Dazzle, Ron the silly man, and Swifty's fellow colleagues on the rap crew are happy to call a sonnet.

A bit like naming a cardboard box a house, thinks Swifty, just because it has six clearly dilineated boundaries keeping out the terror shapes of a beyond the Full Dollar is scared of, touching cloth about, going beyond, uncontrollable and kacking his load over.

"No," he writes

"they are not the same. Both are seperately seen and their presence noted, should there be a need to do so."

So why do they waffle their wonky words which fool no-one but themselves?

Because the current "debate of dare" lies with 2005's recent TS lecture, which Swifty has just finished reading, and already his thoughts are firming up. His first impression, after he read the title, is that this year's seer in speech speaking his blather, the TS reader podium god; was attempting a Frostean register, because the legend of "figure" appears. George Siertz starts well, thinks Swifty. He can not speak, all is not there as his recorded life begins and he chuggs along great guns, but after finding himself a fair way into the seer's maxims Swifty gets to the proper doings. The twinkling tingle and jolt off full gen. The biggy that won't hide, Swifty learns, is that George began his career in poesy at 17, in a far off past when life was one eternal day of Tir nOg commerce at Poetry PLC HQ where George was a new nobody who new orbits of reality connect through undying, to love always in bloom.

The seer in Siertz is at his physical peak in a paradise of the mind where only thought can roam, when he is shown the identity of an "other", in a piece of text he, the unamed "other" dares to call a poem. The poem of a faceless contemporary, shown to George, by another unamed acquataince playing the linguistically small but syntactically big role of being, just another no-one. He who shall remain nameless; for to do so is just not George's natural way. He does not have that kind of false minstrel mask to don, for within his ouvre there is no make-up and paint bag of the shaman and charlatan whose works on paper are utter bollocks. Not the full top up.

After reading this text George Siertz is outraged at the impertinance of the nameless phoney poet and impulsed to wallow in poesy himself. Show the fakers "what's behind the dream", as the poet Rody Ryan might say, by writing a response. Present himself to the world having "read the commentaries...appearing informed", staying "topped up", and wishing only to motor along like the Mossbawn bard, making pretty shapes in lots of lingo. Dance at disco Parnassus, the posh place with real taste certificates and an upmarket jiggy vibe, getting with it according to the rules, the ones in the cannon, knocked up by the greats who found the edge of mental but weren't bonged out to the bonkers state that gets described as

"superb, wonderful and brilliant" by professional chatterers professing a deep concern with the well being of poesy and her slaves.

It strikes Swifty, that Siertz uses the exact same dodges which he moans about in the first part of his TS essay; about sophistry in language and how


"The terms and turns of speech are part of a discourse that determines outcomes and controls debate" and "language is not a tool but a medium"

George Siertz gave a great long spiel about how language can be corrupted and used to keep the serfs, like himself, downtrodden; the usual guff designed to give off humble word merchant vibes, hinting that he is only interested in truth, beauty and pure art. However when it comes to the turn and the two unnamed bit parts of annonymous poet and unamed fellow youth roll on his stage of page he begins "giving it the big one" about wanting to write because someone he was connected to wrote a crap poem. His relationship with this person is not dilineated or given detail; he is just the blur and smudge Siertz is asking us to trust him on, that he was "lousey", in the Don Patterson way.

George says that this was the first poem he had read written by someone he knew, and it was so false to life his being was overtaken by another worldy spirit and he was forced into action to redress the balance.

Swifty, however, reads it another way, believing it to be an obvious reaction in the jealous 17 year old he imagines Siertz was back then, getting miffed that another may be gifted, just like Swifty is jealous of George? Swifty finds this a more credible plot, as the Siertzean spin George gives is too far fetched for him to swallow whole. Swifty asks

"How many 17 year olds are really wandering round like Byron, Shelly or a young Wordsworth, siezed by outside powers which compell them to right percieved injustices on behalf of art?"

Swifty contests that, the kernel at the heart of this TS delivery is but windy arguments put up by a dreamy youth whose imagination is fizzing on overtime, cluttered up with the flame of fancy and weaving its dream into blockbuster epics where he is the central protaganist, free from moral blemish and here to save the world.

Siertz has a few pops at the Don of last years prattle, and furthers the idea that the poetry world's one constant is the cut and thrust, dust ups, scraps, spats, chance scuffles and protracted battles that occur when poets present themselves through print.

He rehashes the tingling Astley angle about publishers being poets who constrict the market and, in the same breath, says how great and wonderful and how much he respects his own publisher. Cor blimey, knock me down with a lanky streak of soft hair, George Siertz, daring to be different.

But the Full Dollar, the one who Swifty switches off the comment box for because he is a stalker talking scary; beyond the usual. Not the usual anglo, but a born druid and full time wandering bore, with 24 hours of piss poor play in the day with which to entertain his fallow bards, regular readers and fellows at the academy of madness bringing life to deposit. With smoke and mirrors, moonshine, black bag, ops, purple rain by Prince, before slipping into the moniker of artist, formally known as the trotting pompenjay plodding his words, some might say, in the background of sound in the record of Swifty's mental illness, written about as part of MC Megagag's ongoing occupational therapy.

Here We Go Again

ANNOUNCEMENT

Click 'n Listen to Scalljah poem

With a Chaucerean plot choca full of gags striking chords of national wit registered in the ancient state of a natural literature brimming one step before knowing, and at the teetering edge of a first understanding of the nothing that came before us all, the Mad Craic Comedy Basement Collective

War on Tour & Laugh Session Salon Presents - The Live Wit of

Sweeney - Raven - Sloppy Bob - Mr Incredible

AND

Comedy Hip Hop Duo (Leo and Aidan)

PLUS

Special Online Party Recording Guests

DJ GOD

SUPPORTING

MC Megagag

so Cum, Guffaw

DECKS ABLAZE 9pm.

TONITE
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Ladies and Gentlemen

Irish poesie afficianado and editor, Ms Mimi Misery, has listened to

"Basho's Gift of Instant Enlightenment"

Told - in Haiku no less -

what is unknown, yet

about to begin

and punters making pronouncements on topics
of interest,

stated

"what falls before and will again
are those unknowing how
things arrange, or
how to call."

For her fern seed
will land
where faith has a home
and stories untold
await the teller who'll
pocket reality
from her fictions

to create a belief of what lies
within the lone dream her dead lovers
pour still as liquid spirit into many minds.

-----------------------

An Irish Poetry Knobhead Squad was out in force last night, prowling a gallery of art, puffed up in an all weather jacket the operative felt unable to remove, due to her unhygienic state. For the last forty-eight hours, "Dick Tocker" (lurking undercover in the guise of a balding white-slum male officer agent on duty for the Global Poetry Coalition's Intelligence and Enforcement Agency) has been sporting a dress and calling himself "Mimi", fully equipped to capture and extol the showtime vibes crucial for honest poesie to thrive, and; he, as a she, had a right old dust up of things

So much so
that the muse whose balance weights his reality
- in the critical pieces of incisive reportage crewperson Tocker has been contracted to produce -
is no longer communing with Dick/Mimi, and so arrangements have been agreed with an alternative memmber of staff which are now in effect.

The role of author
exploring where language may lead
has been handed over to the mind of MC Megagag
Lovidia Yeats,

who wields
through mechanical pencil
and keyboard
what thoughts within her allotted span
will breathe in print towards
unmarked borders winding through the breeze unchecked

to a point of light calculation
- now gadget measured -
but once a knowledge vast generations
of ancients guarded in the temples of their gods;

on the cusp of getting brought
within a complex of arbiters
whose practice of symbol
ritual, truth, 24 hour a day unemployment
and full time leisure opportunities

takes place continuously
here at the Helicon Heights HQ
of Dublin Quays

where the Liffey river urges you to drop in, turn on and tune out. For a strange thing is afoot in the world of verse, and art-hewn bulliten boards straining under the leish of trivia are informing us of tremendously important developments in the world of Irish words and, as one night's tale can be told as anothers let me recount how

In a sea
beneath some steps
the shorebound salmon
listens to nuts talking of fish
swimming through squalls

and an audience of water falling sedate
as its force lifts bouyant
affirmnational rites.

Elsewhere
a lone headlamp collides
with alert rabbit-like eyes, alive
but

unable to hop through space
bouncy, unexpected
pressing and real.

So it merges in absent connection
unspotted
heard
tasted or told,

and the animal sticks up its paw
cutting figures through air
searching for the centre-point
of dawn's eternal love

in a flame of life
timelessly tick
tocking homeward to a cool
faced glow where modernity's edge

sits atop of nature
kip grim

unable to hide or stop
from flopping completely
in frozen shatters
as its meek clop beat bop
bleats chip silent from the clock.

Colette Nic Aodha - Sundial Launch

I've just come from Damar Hall, the new venue of Poetry Ireland on Stephens Green, listening to Colette Nic Aodha from Mayo and currently living in Galway with her three sons. "Sundial" is the title of her first collection in English. She has had three Irish language poetry volumes published by Coisceim as is this one. She read six works which all displayed a verbal sense of sound that is a trademark in most Irish poets. The natural way assonance is patterned in and the inherent musicality of the lingo weavers over here suggests that the thought structures of the old tongue must still be knocking about; in basic mode - like the emergency lights after a power cut stay on - always there as the linguistical outline, which Peter Fallon would say "is in the DNA."

Unfortunatley I do not have her book to hand, as I didn't have the purchase price, but I had a quick scan of the bloke's next to me (there to support so he would have to "buy a book") which was enough to soak in a basic appreciation of the assonantal Irishness we are unable to escape from even should we want to. The six she read were

1 - She sold soap on a rope - This was a mildly satirical list poem repeating the refrain "Avon Women are"..blah blah blah, who the poet has idealised as all being a perfect "10" hot blondes with busy lives and shallow minds.

2 - Next up on the set list was "Career Change" about an old woman of 78 changing careers, with the line "we farmed our bodies out to sea" sticking in my head at the time.

3 - ? Oops, journalistic error, I couldn't hear what she said so had to write a question mark, then forgot to ask her post bash as we all had a gargle of the Poetry Irealnd white and red. However this was quite a powerful piece of satire, slagging off all and sundry who had provoked her ire, certainly not an affirmation poem. She has imbued the spirit of satire completely and would seem to be a tough cookie to go head to head with in a slanging contest or iomarbháigh, as it was known in the bardic days, when they had formal counter-boasting competitions. Being out on the West Coast raised on the myths of Ireland means she has a knowledge of the gaelic system of licensing satirists; and their power was feared throughout the land, much like journalists today wielding influence in the showbiz columns.

Picture the scene. You are a wannabee celeb of Tom Cruise proportions in China Whites and you spot the Daily Mirror 3am girls quaffing back the ale. You are attired in a sheepskin shirt and sieze your big chance at tabloid advertising by sashaying over to weave your aura round the scantily clad hacks, but the vibe is wonky and the next day you get a one line mauling taking the Michael at your stature, maybe sticking a nickname on you, (ail - in bardic grading means a piss take moniker that sticks) say "the sheepskin shortarse."

"Woe is me" you would lament over your coco pops and hangover the following afternoon whilst recovering from the blunders of the night before.

The old Irish satirists were much in this mould, gaining patronage through fear as much as anything else. Quick wits on the piss wanting free scoff, could we say?

In addition could some claim to record around 12 levels of "official" satire in gaelic Ireland, from -

aisnéis: "insulting speech, without harmony", which was not in metrical verse, right through to the ultimate biggie -

glám dícend - a full magico-religious ceremony involving 100 people, and done to bring about the downfall of a king. Here is a quote from this site -

http://www.dnaco.net/~mobrien/irishptr/drchpoem/filimisc.html

"The satire ritual of legend, that blisters the face. The king is fasted against; counsel is taken with 30 laymen, 30 bishops and 30 poets about making a glám dícend. The king is warned once more. If the king refuses the satirist's request, none of the 90 who were consulted may hinder the glám dícend."?

So pretty scary; unlike colette, who was attired in post-theatre cocktail blacks and a diamonte chandelier necklace, a wisp of hair falling foxily about her face as she gracefully moves through the seive of air to reach the final line of this satirical work -

"eternal engulfed falling black hole......this poet never forgets her detractors."

Erm..so I'd better keep it nice and lite otherwise the supernatural forces which surround poetry may beam me up, chain me to the naughty chair of the cosmos and subject my spirit to an eternity of Kurt Schwitters Titter Mix Vol 1, eight euro CD.

4 - Open Letter to Billy Collins - another softly satirical poem where the narrator gets wobbly over one of America's main wordman, recalling an encounter with him where less load and heavyweight collide and spark to light a poem of him being, like many a poet, a bit of a "Jack Daniels" man.

"...didn't wash for the full revolution of a moon" the narrator says, who we are led to suspect is the author herself, for we discover the composition of the letter is being worked after her career arc hits the height of an appearance fee for being present and reading at a literature event, and the big time of getting into paid print.

5 - "Speaking Minority Languages" - Distracted at this point by the inner sound of my mind which stole attention away from detailing Collete's full register, I indulged during this rendition, the thought of a muse escaped and had a brief mental time out moment from pinching lingo from the other's sounds, weaving public as the fibres in what societal fabric of needs which order our lives and timetable our routine of, eat, work and shop awake etc.

6 - "Sundial" - Her collection's title - Her great-grandfather built a sundial in a Mayo homestead. The poem is of his daughter's dying.

7 - "The Mob" - A kaleidoscpic jumble of classical gods from antiquity are tossed in the air, as she tells us of the cultured phonies she has no time for, finshing on the line

"They can shove their gods up their kaleidescope"

I detect this work may be alive in its own right as a text, possibly with an audience agog; as I, prior to my first hearing, became informed from her un-horse like mouth with first hand knowledge of any potentially expected explosion in the wow and dazzle factors that baffle outsiders unable to grasp what absence is apparent when some of the cultural code and sensibility comes in an ancient "nod and wink language" where a central laissez gaelic faire doctrine exists and watches time mangling its quantum codes, incalcuably uncracked or computed to exactness elsewhere, but finely infitting with an island where any compact between two parties is implicity overt, in the sense of that there is a natural state of awareness that all future projections, from island peace breaking out to popping round your pals gaffe for a jangle, contain no guarantes of coming to pass as reality.

Maybe because of an inherent logic in the psyche which states that when Irish people speaking English arrange to drop by around 8pm, it is understood, unstated, to expect an estimated time of arrival for 8-9pm,as the usual running order is to ignore the start time, because nearly all events, from posting letters to national affairs, inevitably kick off fifteen a minimum of minutes later than advertised, in person or print, so a mini wave of Manana is constantly breaking its way towards a shore alive with rushing matters. Ooh, I need a lie down, before I continue with the serious critical blather about how this collection is somewhat satirical, satire being the dominant strain I detected in the current ouvre of Nic, who is also an organiser of the IMRAM Irish langugae festival, which takes place in Dublin every October. In addition to this Collette is on the board of Poetry Ireland Directors, keeping an eye out for the good health of Irish poesie in general, undertaking directerly duties.

She left and went on the lash down a Grafton Street boozer whilst I slaved over the limp computer to bring the gossip and tattle straight from source. Another event bashed out and begoned.

---------------

However, the night is but young and there are a very attractive couple of Italian internet users seated next to me who need assistance finding some sense of themselves as artist, so I am thinking of introducing myself, by way of saying

"Good evening, my name is Ovid, would you care to dance with my readers and be their inspiration to trip it down the disco and bust shapes like we three could should we all agree on the formula life holds, in a yet untitled poem I am yearning to write once you convince me to sit by your smile moist in the west wind shedding its wetness. Any suggestions?" I am going to ask

Honest faith is everywhere, awaiting
collection by those who find belief in
flammeble bits of life's lumber which sheds
suspended until their ignition tells
those wanting to share shelf paper crack thin
rafter packed hut stacks, to prepare with
dizzy array, undead woods dry dazzle
and pray their cinder sparks will blend as one
should a soulmate on fire prime the cannon
of love to blow instantly tender once
a force fans light to where its flame has gone.

Love

Ovid Yeats