Monday, May 28, 2007

Ted Hughes

Like poems, the landscape comes alive in death,
in your poems, the rabbit's blood in evening sun
has wobbled to set for Plath's moon.

Alive behind these fine poems
there must have been a powerful loneliness
that crept like some great darkness.

Like the thought fox with his clever eye,
you are he thought fox trying to escape the cage
of disturbing consequences, or feminist rage,

ready to pounce on these platitudes of prey,
Sylvia a victim of that day.
Now innocent too poets are,

with all our deep and hidden hearts
like all true lovers of the arts.
Now I know who these women are,

how they hold their heads at night
and sought a reclusive soul for light.

(After the death of Ted Hughes)

James Kelly

~

James Kelly is a Kerry poet who I first met on February 14 2005, in the Focus homeless charity canteen in Temple Bar. This is a "penny dinners" like place offering a choice of two lunch dishes made with only the freshest of ingredients. One euro fifty and eighty cent for a desert, 30 cent for a pot of tea.

Most of the clientele are down on their luck, many with drug and/or drink problems, and many "normal" people who recognise the logic of dining in the city centre for next to nothing, like James and myself.

There are penny dinners places in most large towns in Ireland, a residual effect of the famine, or "great hunger." This defining tragedy that shaped the national psyche and caused half the population to die or emigrate is the one cultural bind all Irish people have, as a sort of unconscious collective and one reason why in this country, no matter how far down the ladder of depravity one has sunk, there is always a human connection between the highest and lowest in the land.

However in the new prosperous Ireland, most would rather pay 15 times the price for inferior quality food, rather than dine with their fellow citizens who are on their uppers, understandably I suppose if one is wealthy. But being a regular here means one is always aware of the less well off, and naturally, being amongst them, has to view and treat them as humanly as one does everyone else, and it also means compassion and understanding for those at the bottom of the heap is never lost, the common touch if you will.

And James Kelly is very much a human and compassionate poet, one of the last true wandering bards. He traverses all over the country, constantly here and there, selling his chapbook of poems and supporting himself as a poet on his own terms.

He is also mesmeric live. His Kerry accent like human birdsong.

I had heard of him and wondered when we would meet, and it was very apt we did on Valentines day, as I was in Focus having lunch, on the first day of trying to sell some love poems I had printed on flock-gold 90mg A4, rolled round one and a half inch plastic pipe and sealed with wax, a novelty, just for the sheer balls of seeing what would happen.

I introduced myself and we swapped our wares, he gave me a chapbook and I gave him one of the rolled up poems, and read it during the afternoon, learning a few tips from him, one of the most underrated contemporary poets around. Completely off the radar, yet absolutely brilliant.

I stationed myself in the disused doorway of Bewleys on Westmoreland Street and waited, selling a fair few over the course of the next few days, and writing the one below for a guard, who wanted me to compose one for his girlfriend, called Karen.

Your curled red hair like sun-flame
Streaming through the ether
Of a February day, has captured
Every moment of the time it took
For love to ripen and the suddenness
With which I fell for you
Sensuous butterfly
Who makes my spirit quicken
To the music of the thorn bush
And the cherry blossom, sung
In spring to the lilting beat
Of love-song singing, Karen.

Dince Dunek Called

Dince Dunek the dentable dork called.
A moan poet
whose work no one will riddle

until the global brain brings
to its chamber of gas
poetics' cold bloodied carcass

attended to by a top-weight team
of sermon-faced sophists
conversing deep in a language
abstruse and beyond understanding

in a swamp of post-avant thought
addressing webs of hypotheses
resting on the basis of what lies
beyond, in a moment unknown
or reached, but connected to now
by a bridge of wisdom conceived
erect, with solid reflexive ideas
and the full support of conjecture
believed to be facts
waiting to be found

once XY and Z turns
to AB and C

when the ustopp-
able force of truth turns
reason out on its ear and wel-
comes in Derrida, Baudrillard
Krestiva, Barthes and the Sy-
mphonic absence

usurping 1
2 and 3 into a possible 6, that
may be a 4 or nine, depending
on how the color of tomorrow's
noon strikes the sound
of yesterday's light

site

where onlookers standing
in swamps of complexity
ponder on unbelief, and why
the human condition cannot
bend time to its will
with knowledge philosophers
make up in time spent farming
and fishing the mind for proof
of being existentially  moved
to reason the faith of beauty.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

OSBORN BERGIN - TWO PIMPED UP BARDIC POEMS

Below are two poems translated by Osborn Bergin at the start of the 20C. Bergin was a Norwegian academic responsible for lots of translations of poems from the Irish bardic tradition into English, in a very precise and literal way. They are taken from:

Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts And Translations - (1917), which I re-rendered, by cutting out the antiquated language and adding a few words to the second specimen.

The first poem - although in the book - was written by someone without bardic training, and who lived several generations prior to the one which experienced the sudden collapse of the bardic tradition on these islands at the start of the 17C.

Bergin supposed the unknown author of the poem below flourished circa 1500, and writes in the must-read lecture heading the texts and translations:

"His verse is quite lacking the the technique of a professional poet, yet has a charm of its own"

Consolations

Filled with sharp dart-like pens
Limber tipped and firm, newly trimmed
Paper cushioned under my hand
Percolating upon the smooth slope
The leaf a fine and uniform script
A book of verse in ennobling Goidelic.

I learnt the roots of each tale, branch
Of valour and the fair knowledge,
That I may recite in learned lays
Of clear kindred stock and each person's
Family tree, exploits of wonder
Travel and musical branch
Soft voiced, sweet and slumberous
A lullaby to the heart.

Grant me the gladsome gyre, loud
Brilliant, passionate and polished
Rushing in swift frenzy, like a blue edged
Bright, sharp-pointed spear
In a sheath tightly corded;
The cause itself worthy to contain.

Anonymous

Original translation Osborne Bergin Pimped Up - Desmond Swords

"Unscholarly and therefore unconventional in style" Bergin wrote and each poet in the bardic tradition wore a unique mask, whilst working in a highly conservative tradition.

The second one is another Anonymous work, but this time a trained poet, and a completely different texture and effect than the one above, much dryer and less loose, betraying the highly formalised style the bards wrote in, and was written by an unknown ollamh (ulav), or Doctor of Poetry, the highest of the seven grades the poet ascended through, reached after 12 or so years.

The anonymous ollamh is in italics and my additions are un-italicised.

Casting dice from sun to sun in succession
The course of a chequered smooth

Stream in polished and inverted flux
Reversing

light that soars aloft in so brief a space
As I traverse this heavy sodded world
Throughout

Thoughtless and my mouth devoid of

Murmuring arrogance or reproach
Peace with them I bow to the

blind, logical fleet and

blessed smooth and comely band:
Who above all I make friend my orphan
Who left me
not alone

~

What this pimped up translation renders obsolete and cannot be discerned by the unaware eye, is the incredibly sophisticated metrical form the original printed poem is wrought in, but we do get a sense of airiness and buoyancy, the way the poem floats and how - to my ear - one word can inject a change and reverse the register of gravity in the sixth line to one of weightlessness.

"traverse this heavy sodded world"

These are five words which suggest a blur of earthly goo and mud, and on their own, in this sequence, have a connotational force of linguistic gravity which gives it an earthly charge, yet the very next word dissolves this muddy, liminal state of in-betweenness. One whose force in the aural chamber projects a diffuse and downward gooey sense, sinking rather than air-bound.

This five word sequence, one verb, two adjectives and one noun - with "world" itself an expansive word in a pretty wide ball-park for our minds to haunt, and yet the next word completely transforms our pentagonal party and is the psychic lift off point in the poem.

And this poem adumbrates a template, or poetic form of disembodied Yeatsean address, used in his practice of being an arch spacer and ghostly communicator, and this bardic example is the dreamy, pale, wishy washy scud of tilted utterance, lofty and displays how the addition of one word - "throughout" - can shock the connotational charge of a line to flux and its linguistic gravity, to reverse and re-polarise from earth to air.

So now this small unit of six words are no longer weighted into and by the muddy, sloppy goo, but is inversed into a six word sequence that is no longer the utterance of an earth bound sequence, but one which ascends into a poetic space suggestive of the up, up and away-ness of the crepuscular Celtic twilight Augusta Gregory and Silly Willy Yeats ushered in as the maddest bunch of artists about at the start of the 20C.

The esoteric teachings of Yeats and his transcendental bunch who made up the Dublin wing of the Golden Dawn, lit the minds and practice of many an artist dreaming and being so in Dublin, Galway and London.

Each of these cities has its own charm and yet somehow the combined magical quality in this mix, the DGL ratio, was conducive to creating the ether of possibility in bardic poems, that - as Bergin explains - cannot be fully captured in the dry scholarly and scrupulously forensic re-rendering to English he was famed for undertaking in the early part of the 20C.

The missing magic and key ingredient for our poetical-craic-philosopher, is the intricate patterns and relationship of the verbal parts in the Gaelic original, its sheer metrical sophistication, is a marvel very few come to know ever existed, even though a study of this tradition offers an abundance of information to the serious bluffer and virtual poet-gamer alike.

Perhaps the most obvious source of detecting the undertow and understanding its register is when diving in to these deposits and seeing what happens when one has a go at pimping them up, cutting out the dead words that are culturally obsolete, the "thee, though, wilst etc..." which clutters and detracts the eye from easily greasing along.

And yet this said, the real bardic specimen, seems to my ear, composed by a voice in the clouds, whose washy pastel brush of the fuzzy focus reveals an ultimately unknowable mind-set, steeped in the druidic tradition, whilst our gooey amateur is gloriously human to us.

I wouldn't say either is "better" than the other, because as pieces to an accurate pointer of poetic excellence, one poem lacks the immediacy of the other, and one is the ying to the others' yang.

Let love pilot us,
Lugh haunt our embrace
Amegin Bergin
giving thanks

"for the transcript of the text I am indebted to Miss Eleanor Knott..." Bergie translation.

bogeyman dabble
dance the eye chaotic
measure the neutral
balanced utterance
silence, sound, time
live ratio and unknown
un-bluffable, a unique
fictional windy wind

please smoulder on her
mugshot the severe pinch
of an immensely wonky image
a diet of Stonehouse
never ending slabs of Dutch Gold and Windsor
chav-fag
multiple exes to fill
the dreary day
resident in the underbelly
scanger and scary psychos
terrorise the mind
UK' galatic 70's stunner
Stevie Smith, bore
life's tepid pointlessness - 1942

BOG FACE

Dear little bog-Face
Why are you so cold?
And why do you lie with your eyes shut?
- You are not very old.
I am a Child of this World
And a Child of Grace
And Mother I shall be glad when it is over.

Stevie Smith

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

I love her for her largess, her warmth of spending and to be honest, am immensely attracted to her hair. You can tell a lot about people by their hair, and I think it says so many good things about her

mary mary jackanbairy let me be your doley pal
sweary sweary hates your barnet
your gorgeous locks
fine, fuller figure
of a lady who shops
in marks and spencers
not Lidl

mary my manly-bag
of sheer female
politically astute maidenhood
i love you mary mary

put the fix in
pull some strings
get me a bed
nurses and a game of twister
jack daniels, coke and GHB party-poppers,
berties daughters
dozy rozy, chris de burgh's daughter

nanny, missus, ronan, keith, orville, daniel
majella and the corrs can come with paddy
plastered clutching an envelope

bung in the best of red hurley
wind the ipod on, deja vu, i have a poster
blown up of you mary

don't let sweary troll or flame us
as we contort, the force of physical love
crackling, static of lust and passion turning us
on as we twist with the nurses
before my transplant and extension
tadpole to whopper,
new heart and liver

then we can be as one my mary, mary swervy
wervy go go get me a bed.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Liz
Liz
Meet me at the little nest
At the Head of the Sea - Kenmare
Iveragh and Beara peninsula
Let's take the Island first Formorian
From brothers Eremon Eber Fionn

Make believe Ir is an interpolation
Landed life a pastime of war, raid
And invasion after high tea at Eton.

SHOCK!! SHOCK!! SHOCKER!! Winnie: Working Class Scumbag.

This is an interesting text by Churchill I creativised here in the cheap hoe factory where

"I hate you ready shower of foreign invaders, robbing me lingo and having a laugh with our tragically national icons, reverse engineering their reputations. Why can't I do that, I'm from Oxford, with a lawn and ponies!

Why can't I make people laugh, you horrible bitching bores! I want to turn Frank Carson into the octagenarian Dr No and make big Ian go bonkers..."

Yeah yeah yeah, there's always a big fella or short arse git to take the piss out of here, don't worry about it, you deeply uninventive slagger."

~

SHOCK! Winston Mon, Whassup Bro, Wanna Pop At The Nogzi Lot?

How The Jews Can Combat Persecution: Winston Churchill: 1937

"The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew, non-Jew"....Jock, Geordie, Manc, Mick, Brum, Monkey Hanging Hartlepudlian scum.

"...is that the Jew is "different." He..."

..Hey Spence get gender correct you fat toffy git...

"looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed."

Winston Churchill Senor Hacking tortured artist?

Get real brainwashed ones, he was a lard arsed rich bloke I am willing to bet would not have pissed on you if you was on fire.

"I hang my head in shame every time I see this behaviour, as I am a true Englishman who would gladly amputate any part of my own body, and kill others, for any member of the aristocracy who asked me to do so. In fact, I would press the button in the Whitehouse if my master requested, because I have that rare quality, which Fleet Street sadly lacks, loyalty to the Crown."

~

What a laugh we brave enslaved Baldric gened Britons had when all our masters surveyed was pink in their name, won by us good old working class scumbags toffs tell what do when using us as tools to secure their dream all across the planet, us pissing and shatting ourselves laughing at their stiff upper lip one liners.

"Baldric, die now"

Hurrah for the queens and kings of England we died on demand for and tugged our greasy unwashed forelocks to.

How blessed we scum
Our aristocracy love us
More than we them

England or Engurland, we all are indebted to them born better than us, it's just that soemtimes I think it's not right, that Harry's not respected enough for kicking it all off, and Liz

Liz
Virgin princess
Own and possess
Us your subjects
Dye in my memory
Let us war and dream
Die in the underpass

All of our tribe
Live without rancour

In Hyde Park corner
Let me kill scumbags
For minimum wage
Their remains a gift
To remember love by.

Liz
Liz
Lovely Elizabeth
Bring back beheading
Let me majestically
Spike up their skulls
On walls surrounding
Your countless mansions
For a piece of cloth
A slither of tin
Pinned on my chest
Let me piss in Buckingham
Palace garden after
Tea, a biscuit and death
Come slow, slow, no stop

Don't come at all, live
Invisible around us
Your mug and those of us
Unlucky enough to be born
In a royal derbhfine.

Liz
Liz
Elizabeth let me
Race with your horses
Gymkhana no more
The son of the 7th Duke
Of Marlborough, Spenser
Saved us, tug tug tug.

~

Sir Winnie was born into an aristocratic sept of the Dukes of Marlborough, wigged up ponces, born for spoiling and who ably served the imperialist cause, unflaggingly for centuries, their duty to diddle scum and enslave them. Hurrah!

Whenever they went beyond the nine waves of, where the honest peasants knew their place, men like the born to be Sir Winston turned up, unininvited by those he was there to kill or rip off and take the piss out of as but one servant of her and his Majesties, bored on a throne thinking up who to war with next for their lives to have meaning.

Winnie was great gas, hated the working class and against a national Health or Education service, as he knew that educating the masses only took from the champion's portion.

Great violent toff to sort out Adolf and the boys, a useless humanitarian, voted the greatest of Britons recently by the Great on the greater island of Fiendishly Crap UK.

~

SHOCK!! SHOCK!! BORING GUARDIAN HACK!

I read this earlier today in the anima mundi, written by the media slappa whose name and piece I didn't bother reading much. He's not been taking the VD tablets the Guardian blog-bore, and he knows being poxy will send him back to Highgate cottage and hospital, a return to the psychiatric fame academy he trained to be a journalist in.

He was having a hobnob, a coffee and going on about being brave, praying it was in an appropriately noble register, his brief list of names and a reference to Winnie being the man to invoke for a Brit to get boring about, advertising in a tenor which claimed astronauts are the perfect hero, choosing to end, depress au revoir to the reader with his state of mind:

"I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit." Followed by the strains of Jingle Bells on a smuggled harmonica. That was Wally Schirra, who.."

We spent billions on sending into space with a harmonica in a moment of supreme pointlessness, just because JFK and the political dynasties of Uncle Sam wanted bragging rights with the Russkies, a small game taking up lots of conscripted labour, some of whome went AWOL, the unmanly puffs, not like Uncle Sam and kooky George the alkie, born to be a boss and pain in the ass to all beneath him on the human pole, the sociual pecking order. George III George, let Daddy pay for the election, Tone of Kennedy's Bono.

Liz
Liz
Beautifully stunning and wonderful boss, national capo, queen of bonded-slavery, you who exude class and poise with a rare grace, which clearly proves that good taste is genetic, as well as scummy taste.

Basically it's all down to breeding. english people want to serve and work to make the greater English better's and higher ups lives easier than ones own. It is ones nature, because a compelling desire to know our place and defer to our masters has been bred into us over thousands of years's?

Liz
Liz
Turlough Mor has eighteen
Kids and ten missus
Sean just keeps his prisoner

Look Liz
In saffron mantles
Gallowglass grunt
Cut to the palace
Suck up, see the Proud Mor
Unable to handle
Untangle the mess
Of all this creation.

Liz
Liz
Let me love you every Christmas and cheer the BNP.

If I was legally allowed to stand for parliament, I would do so as the Burscough: No Plebs platform that would bring in legislation (already drafted by the bedsit cabinet) which would allow every man, woman and child on the island the opportunity to pledge personal allegiance to any born bute who bossed for Liz,

Liz lovliest Lilibeth sat,
superbly selectively bred

her head of state pledged
contracted between us chavs

and the wonderful, favourite, fave gorgeous toffie
nosed bluebloods: whereby us scumbags - fit

only for filling mass graves - promise to voluntarily offer all goods and services, and die on request or be executed, if the ending of our lives furthers the whimsy of any member within the royal derbhfine.

The tasks and responsibilities of the pledge are enormous, and involve much hardship, but would unite us as never before, and we would be sending a very strong message to the planet we are at war with, that we are building on and consolidating our traditional way of life.

A way of life, masters and those who know what is good for us living their lives and going about ruling us without having to worry about anything what so ever. That is what we are here for.

Every single subject of this land, in my opinion, should be proud and honoured to help carry a tiny piece of the immense burden which the Great Boss family gift us.

Liz

Liz

Hear the blade whir
Hugh prostrate beneath, Bount
Knew you were dead, Mor O'Neill
Not
Liz
Liz
Busted Hugh the O'Neill Mor
Holding the nuts and unbeatable
Royal
Flush
Cards divinely dealt goddess
Directing a sublime charade

Held you, piece of fictional
Intelleigence, a fantasy queen
Chimera who bluffed and crushed
Hugh the Great Earl unaware
Existence dealt him proof
An island's wholly ghost mimes
At history's pointed tip
Submits one short celestial act
Ineffable burlesque, tragic
Slap-stick on a stone floor

Hugh

Hugh who knew war goddess Morrigan
Amassing her crop of severed acorn
Heads from before Partholon sailed
Up river Roughty the Tuesday Abraham
Turned sixty, the annals say Liz,
was helpless.

Amergin Bergin

My beauty crown befriender
Sound short, sweet or silent
Sequential night succintly pass
Luna flame lighting the message
Love is peace and running space
A Goidelic tribal song of Amergin.

~

D.S: Stardate: Highgate Wood, Captain Dante tugging in the bushes with gods of trade, rented cabal of dossers soliciting her utterance, wanna tip?

Think!

Not just space and style, but a whole way of seeing
Small press independant publisher Captain Dante
Getting ahead in a fantastical world more galactic
Undisputed star of the Medieval bore-scape, lingua
Franca decanted to Algiheri's universal word-trough
His comedic logo lettering art, hefts in poetical gravitas
On an island of resident windbags hacking their duty
To dance the eye and profess from a public pulpit
Secular poems to cyber flocks founding a split
In the virtual cosmological core myth
Of the Florentine popinjay, Dan's Art.

~

Dan-direach is the most complex of Irish bardic meters to work in and translates as "art-straight" and inverts to the "straight art" bardic meter filidh poets composed in, after at least five or so years spent in what was the Irish universities, the bardic schools that trained the secular writers or filidh who inherited the modified role of the druids after the first Culdean monks came in the 4C. These language workers were/are the forgotten Algiheri flock of "knowing ones," and they were/are the faithfull and highly trained poets reaching for a full capacity in the fictional field, hoping the pool of language can be accessed from the neighbourhood of self where they have chosen to learn and practice.

Quest for their wind to star in cyberspace
War, draw the light on lettered practice
With others in the of Manannan mac Lir,
Fand, Aine and Niamh location of Tir na Og
Dante's place for the underwater plebisite.

~

"Freedom of speech a fundamental right"
Rote the dreamer scribing the islands'
Literate history, recording events routed
Through millenia to search the earliest
Utterance in proto-Old Irish. Oh eye?

Goidelic Ogam orthography (letters)
Not Latin but of the the "I" spiral
Mad Brittonic tourists tattoo
On coccyges above their arses after
A weekend in Whelans drunkly imbibing
Fascinated by the simply obscuring alphabet
Of sheer crossover, in a voice-oil running
Tribe and clan Goidelic in the culture

~

A thousand waves of inavsion on Sir
John is in Norwich Ogham inked on his neck
Link between modern Druidry and ancient
Seers who weave the vernacular
Voice, rent not its fabric, island life Harry
Potter executed by the queen of memory to the most astonishing levels.

~

I am Goidel, Brythonic for "Raider" and "Culture Show" is on RTE radio and in full fantastical flight Derek Mahon is reading, speaking his voice in verbal bubble, murmering in my right ear, Deggsy blathering live from Aidan Higgins ouvre:

"..unadorned as the town of Trim, not a stitch to spare her blushes.."

"Trims a nice town, but it’s the words he’s after.."

Mahon explains, the instinvtive linguistic search for an acoustically felicitous femminine parsing word to reign and slap into place - in double-matting upward effervescent force - the simple mathmatical object of aural premise, his utterance as close as it gets to oral perfection on the page.

~

There is a very intricately rendered tall tale - or joke told-straight - in the 14C Book of Ballymote Ogam manuscript, recounting a clearly made-up event about Fenius Farsa a mythical king of Scythia in classical antiquity, in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and the northern Caucasus, which is currently Kazakhstan, Southern Russia, Eastern Ukraine, Azarbaijan, Belarus, and some of Poland.

With two Irish men called Goídel mac Ethéoir and Íar mac Nema He gathered together 72 scribes and went to study the confused languages at Nomrods Tower on the Shinar plain in Mesopotamia, only to discover that the Tower of Babel had collapsed and the poets dispersed.

Fenius scattered his flock of penmen to study with the original linguists and stayed at the tower co-ordianting the retreival and ten years after his literate quest was complete, and 25 centuries later Wikipedia , the new and improved Library of Alexandria states:

"...and Fenius created in Bérla tóbaide "the selected language", taking the best of each of the confused tongues, which he called Goídelc, Goidelic, after Goídel mac Ethéoir. He also created extensions of Goídelc, called Bérla Féne, after himself, Íarmberla, after Íar mac Nema, and others, and the Beithe-luis-nuin (the Ogham) as a perfected writing system for his languages. The names he gave to the letters were those of his 25 best scholars...."

The link between Ogam and Goidelic to the casual reader flicking through the Book of Ballymote cannot be grasped in a skim-read, if at all, and even from this short explanation, you will appreciate how a full study of the orthography of Gaelic is not a five minute job for those of us working to write in the perfect tongue using tricks found in language retrieved from the Tower of Babel.

Whatever the truth about the roots and evolution of the Goidelic language is, the material holding the clues is voluminous and proved impossible to crack.

Robert Graves, like Dante and Yeats, had a go at tackling Ogam and dilineating the holy grail of Western European language, but after a short way in the poet realises that Graves is only juggling a million snatched pieces of myth from the pan-European corpus, and offering us the blaze of sheer intellectual invention, lots of spark but no purchasing flame or single logical thread of extrapolation to convince any but those who wish to be led by his charisma alone, trancers lacking spiritual sustenance mistaking his his mumbo jumbo for literate druidic "wood utterance" or "fiodhradh," a tree-letter divination rite performed by druids using magical Ogam and a few twigs.

Graves whole premise starts shaky and is founded on very tenuous connections based on what his imagination wants to believe, asking an illogical amount of faith from us, and is too daft to amount to an argument whose startling blaze is in place of the absent knowledge his instinct sniffs but his eye failes to deliver in print. Although he knows his stuff, being a know all on Greek myth, one suspects a lot of smoke and mirror and bluffing, as by the end (if you reach it) he has juggled so many ifs and buts that we no longer follow (or care) as he lost us long before once we realised his blather was not about conveying knoweldge to a reader, but his poetic own-search and trawl, his theory much like Yeats' or Dantes' and thus the personal belief system each single poet constructs if they are to write serious critical prose on the subject of the straight art of faith called verse.

The White Goddess is his imaginative go at proving his knowledge of Ogam to himself and his father, an Ogam expert. Graves wanted to be the main know all on "wooden utterance," which is the invisible and silent tongue so tantalisingly unknown and misunderstood by most, the verbal shade all poets spend their career of ritual ram-raiding in the word-hood, seeking wordic booty and spoil in the life long prayer to reach and cloak their art crafty, unseen by the competition they closely watch and observing what knowledge within the rough weave and pool of self-hood can be tousled and osmosis out to be woven and washed in to a different composition.

A medieval poet, when compiling any set of texts, in the attempt to add - in his time and culture - academic weight to a deity who makes the poetry gig happen will voice from behind the many masks covering the gag of his oir her life and tell whoppers in the straight art spun with metrical yarn in a narrative stitched to such logically mindboggling lengths, that only the very committed reader can hope to unpick the thread of logic or unravel any sense from them, other than them being the gobs to cause contemporary ears to gasp in greening amazement at the pointlessness beauty of their sound.

Approaching the Book of Ballymote Ogam trieste illiterate, deaf and without some awareness of the wider Irish corpus, the poet is left with a confused impression; the half-glimpse a mild prod may not direct to understanding, as full cognisance involves a lorra intellectual ossification for the skeleton outline of a literate history to dilineate within the ollamh's intellect, these men living on forgotten pages only those seriously committment to he whose name stems from the Brythonic word for "raider," eye with any coherent cognisance of what Mangus was scribing on about.

The astonishing and incredibly complex Ogam de-coding procedure is so rarely done some claim the intellectual mechanism must be "inbuilt" (as well as anal, the Goidelic sound-raider might say) and this de-bars all but the most committed of Goidelic groupies to discern what incrediblely sophisticated level of cultural skullduggery went on in these Bard's minds, for the thousand years of Goidelic letters, life and practice.

The bards' business was fact, incredibly tall stories, needed for all the illigitimate children to an official pedigree when pledging to fight for the right to be a sweet singing wordy git.

Ogma is the poetry god who invented the Goidelic alphabet and gag-kitty, and secret knowledge of his letters lie in the mythical cranebag of Mannan mac Lir, a sea god - "Mannan son of Lir" - Lir being the shadowy ruler of time and deep space in the Goidelic pantheon. The magic bag from which the secret formula of the Goidelic language is supposed to spring out from when the the lucky druid got a grip of this slippery thing, made from the skin of Mannan's daughter Aoife, and containing nine articles that appear elsewhere in the myth:

"..Manannan's house, shirt, knife, the belt and smith's hook of Goibniu, the shears of the King of Alba, the helmet of the King of Lochlann, the belt of fish-skin, and the bones of Asal's pig which the son of Tuirenn had been sent to fetch by Lugh. The treasures were only visible at high-tide, at the ebbtide they would vanish. The bag was passed from Manannan to Lugh, then to Cumhal and finally to Fionn. The contents of the crane's bag correspond to the Hallows of Annwn and to the treasures guarded by Twrch Trwyth...."


This wizzards sound-satchel ended up in the hands of Fionn MacCumhal in the time he is supposed to have lived in the first few centuries after Jesus. Finns name translates as - Finn "son of slave-women," a "cumhal" being a female slave, worth three rare gold coins from the royal Tara mint, in a time when bartering greased business.

Like Cuhullain, Sean the Proud O'Neill Mor, but unlike Finn, Ogma - Father deity of the Tuatha De Dannan - was a shagger with lots of kids by different women and the de facto cosmic dictator, playing his role in the history of the Goidelic lingo and letters that route to a druidic order, who invented the Ogam orthography (precursor to proto-Oh ey) first writ on twig, branch, rock and which morphed into Old Irish in the 5-6C.

Ogma's name means "honey mouth." Hmm, Goidel is an oily shaping shade and deity innit? Sibling song of Gual, alive in the "oil," one of the "yes" in three languages Dante picked to mix in his trilogical three card trick he tried to construct the tower of babel with, much like the later magus Yeats did with his apologia "The Vision," which "I" Goidel bets is one of the most impenitrible poetic texts ever assembled, with a side pot in short odds that only silly Willy himself could poorly articulate - if at all - to the uninitiated poetry bore looking for canonisation, what he meant.

A Butler vision silly Willy never realised or finished writing, thus his final thought on the whole wordplay thing ultimately stopped at the point of his passing.

~

Did that play the butler wrote
Send men to their utterance
Casual or in full ceremonial
Saffron battle dress perhaps
As he waited for a wit to crack
Silly butler spacer-man moaning Sligo Amigo whose mind contained

Maghnus mac Melaghlin Ruadh O Duibggeannain - Manus "son of Melaghlin Roe O'Duigenan" - a "fili" or poet trained to scribe at Goidel High - Bard School, an oak in the wood of the tree Universities who wrote the Book of Ballymote.

Osborn Bergin knew Magnus well as he was a Dante shedding the Celtic Twilight literary movement on which an island founded itself at the revolutionary start of the 20C. Bergin was a man who connected to the spirit of Amergin, the founding professional historian, poet and genealogists who came with the final wave of invaders, the Milesians, and Amergin's number was glueing the various fictional strata of contemporary myth, to strands in the cultural cloak of Goidelic society, whose spiritual bond was literately snipped, as plantational fury pinnacled with the unleashing of Cromwell, champion of the common herd wishing only violence be brutal and swift, teach the scumbags no trick of "civilisation" to low to turn and murmer from the existential poetic cauldron of Amergin and Algihieri.

Magnus Roe O'Duigenan was from a clan of post-graduate professional historians and wood centric scribes, pledging fealty to a sept from the MacDermot kings of Moylurg in Roscommon, NE Ireland.

The etymology of Ireland is unclear. Whether it is Ir, brother of Amergin, or Eriu, daughter of war goddess Ernmas is unclear, as there are so many competeing blocks of data and fantasy that evolved during the thousand golden years of literature in the Goidelic civilisation, and Magnus was but a tiny cog scribbling along, in and through his span, weft in a tradition drenched in - and printed by - filidh poets tied to the iron age mindset, their ancient language a dinosaur, and nearing the final flush of it's maturity during Magnus' Medieval era.

To digest and yield a track leading to difinitive linguistic proof on the nomenclature of Ireland, leads the shadow chaser to the ghost of a potentially non-existent Ir, generally considered by the spacers in the know, as an interlopation by a poet on the make, claiming lineage to someone he made up who didn't exist in the official myth of a tribal history situated in the topography of outright fiction, created by an honorable bunch in the scam to explain how a swan seeded the bun in Ir's wife's Goidelic oven.

The essentiall bollix wrapped in an enigma posing as myth masquerading as truth depending on how daft an audience can be led to believe existence can be, is or descend to. One two three, the metrical diamond trilogical daemons in the O.I. card trick, one for each base, another for now and a spare to direct the readers inner pyschological floe, gettit?

The intellectual shag-ice a maestro of hocus pocus and wholly fictional non-existential magus in full telepathic powers, can slip on as his pathology collapses in the wieght of a disbelieving ear. The Moylurg of Magnus was itself a sub-kingdom the Connachta ruling dynasty bossed, who along with many competing branches seeking to become the apical founder of all island rule in a culture of continual war raid and invasion on Eriu daughter of Ernmas, sister of Fodhla and Banbha, singular aspect of the triple land goddess the Goidelic kings ritually wedded to when stepping up to the ultimate role of Ri of the tuatha and also sister to the three war goddesses, Badb, Macha, Morrigan aka Annan and with brothers Glon, Gnim, Coscar, Fiacha and Ollom, you can get a flavour of the shifting sands on which the history's written. It is interesting to note however that Eriu is the Norse and Saxon word for "land."

~

The Ogham trieste in the 14C Book of Ballymote was assembled one hundred years after Dante's "De vulgarati eloquentia" - "On vernacular speech," a work with clear parallells to the Goidelic tongue, also a vernacular which had been in print for seven hundred years when Dante first upgraded his Tuscan from vulgar to official vernacular.

Moylurg in Goidelic is Magh Luirg an Dagda, "the plain of the tracks of the Dagda." The Dagda is the apical deity in the Tuatha De Danna mythology, who are the penultimate peoples or "wave of invasion" strands of the Irish corpus of tall tales, that one finds in the verbal aeroplanes that spell - in lettered smoke - the sky, voiced not in vulgar "lingua d'oc" of Southern Europe Dante co-opted into his failed attempt to definitively blueprint the how and why Babel works, in De Vulgari eloquentia. As the Wikipedia author puts it:

"nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil" ("some say oc, others say si, others say oïl"), thereby classifying the Romance languages into three groups based on each language's word for "yes", the oïl languages (in northern France, Gual), the oc languages (in southern France), and the si languages. The word òc came from Vulgar Latin hoc ("this"), while oïl originated from Latin hoc illud ("this [is] it"). Other Romance languages derive their word for yes from the Latin sic, "thus", such as Spanish, Insubric , Italian , Catalan sí, or Portuguese sim...."

~

Magnus fits into the oil'ish myth, compiled from the dawn of the Irish printed utterence, and competing dynasties in the wider Goidelic culture - which had shrunken considerably to a small island on the fringe - stressed in femminine upsing and existed through a quirk of time accident and distance from the centre of an imperial force that snuffed out Gual and lit French to a Gallo-Romance language, as Goidel's Brythonic sibling fought it out with the waves of Dane, Saxon, Angel and later Viking culture, all vying for linguistic supremacy at the fringe of Roman speech.

Clients of Ceasar in the time of Caligula fought for a villa and back-up from the status-quo troops, drawn from all over Europe, North Africa and beyond all knowing the shrunken Goidelic spark flamed fierce in the quirky air, one days dangerous sail away, over - what in Goidelic mythology is termed - "nine waves," an apt, pointed shorthand blowing in the wind and whose eytomolgy belies it's simple poetical consistency.

This resolutely natural sounding bit of wordplacement fits the first shoe of metrical everffescent success , founded on the rule of overwhelming physical force in number, like being Irish and it's king a client of the from a apologia, historical ,Dante's ouevre and purpose."authorial artist to lend weight to their claim of being verbal magicians and an indispensible caste of "Nemed" status, their written history a thousand years old when the edifice collapsed after Henry VIII ginger issue began steering the intrique for her forty year ride, the queen king, ace knave and joker of the Northern European Renaissance.

Her face is a card in the poker game of history whose slender corporeal weight was irrelevant when infused with life, when the virgin queen was herself as conscious energy, divine princess no longer but Queen and ruler whose psychic hand dealt and dabbled in chess and specialised in bluff, her illusion conquering all at court with a policy of divide and rule. To her enemies she was an ace of hearts in michief and wickedness, who excelled in the courtly atmosphere of con and counter-con, triple bluff, unheard of skullduggery, but to her servants she was the hefty bluff in their quest for power in her name in the golden age of English letters, when it took its first gulps of air as a living vernacular, 300 years after Dante's essay.

The bluffing poet can also extract using the first trick in the book of verbal illusion, by inverting the similarity tool, to expand into uncharted space of poetic meaning, the binary whose fixed, neutral state is always weighted to lilt with upsing or alliteratively positive snag, acoustic barb of immeasurable weight when spoken, but for the anal poetry bore, the grain of agitation at the centre of their search for verbal oyster as they dive, find, prize and methodically discard, extracting a use for whatever turns up, catches the eye, the spoken pearl of singular basic return.

~

Luminous is the light and dark, a trick of accident and chance, volume, selection and the learner in language tries to cultivate this femminine effevesence and charge for linguistic expansion, as the plough and star in their field of literate force, going red drawf of imploding, absence or coruscatingly "there" in the moment of mimesis, making kicks as an artist shelling their string.

Both Dante's and Magnus' works, to amatuer and bluffing professional alike, convey the polar opposite cultural charges of the tradition in these two men. Dante is the positive, overflowing force who effectively invented modern Italian, by combining the different written Medieval Romance dialects of Latin Europe , the Oil, Oc and Si, to create the template for modern Italian, in his own uniquely literate ideolect, stunningly sensible for imitation as his voice sought any word from an speaker.

As Mahon said, its the acoustic profile a poet tunes to over the years, how the sound of a word dilineates to fit the self-made blueprint of utterance the aural object must specify to for the artists whose names were crushed as Goidelic society collapsed and the "fili" (poet) lineage - stretching back to an originating druidic pool doing all the important talking during the pre-literate iron age, aristocracy, were snuffed in a short sharp slap, the twighlight unbreaking the dip of one

Sunset strip shimmy through window slats
Edging across a bone white wall and beech
Wood floor with mole knots dotting the faded
Grain.

As dusk draws darkness in
Peeling back the pith of light
Opaque forms appear in pale shadows
And cast a chill spell in the night air.

A ghostly clan seep
From the otherworld through pictures
On brick, visit the room filling the hours
Before dawn with an aroma of spirits
Spectres and long silent ancestors.

Their fuse of flesh life lit and left
As a pyramid of past
We’ve no cognisance of, the human
History, reality chained existence
To an unfathomable entity.

A void of unconsciousness
No man or woman will speak
Of until humanity detaches, sings
No more of distress, but happiness.

Dip header Dereks off again:

"realistic homegrown tradition and something more experimental and cosmopolitan"

Reffering to Higgins and Magahern, saying

"I think maybe Higgins' time has come."

Mahon continues, speaking at home in Kinsale, at the Aidan Higgins at 80 Weekend where his life and work are being celebrated, poetry getting affirmed.

LEARNING OUTCOME

Have a putsch Cull the duffer hack,
please Ms can I make a suggestion?

Ring in the imperial vibe,
enthrall the colonial chavs
let their bitching be the cause of slit psychosis,
the latest mental tick must have, try out lifestyle-tourettes
fashion victim loving scuzzy black dress scag goddess scrummy
scummy septum sniffer, pure image, cosmetic slap, remote con
of the beautiful one, self unexceptional
hanging, awaits love to come calling when detox is over
a back-pocket bung, reward for the long haul, O'Cuiv, O'Higgins, O'Ward O'Daly and literate septs in lettered combat,

poison in satire, outright lies bought and paid for, truth the Gordon knot comrades, the loonies detach, brutal, vicious, rude back-slang patois of chat illegible to the uninitiated of God knows where, some kip in Ipswich

where soul survivors on a lost weekend reunite , Caister on the Norfolk Coast, unattractive Britonic masses go mad, middle aged idots dress as tarts, pimps and traffic wardens for the fun night out spent searching for a craic in their mid-life crisis,

immortalise the memory of fat people wearing next to nowt
dressed for a masque ball of boring Albion soul circa Wigan Casino, '79

Blondie at the height of her power, yeees. ~

Tommy Eliot is stern
Kappa Kappa Gamma media chav slappa
bore I'd not heard of...

"but I have so many squares I want to compete with right now...wait a bit..plan to go right and devour :

Nogzi: The Tweeney Implosion and Wayne: The True Crocky, Mandy Motions new soccer stat. bio on Rooney McLoughlin doing a bitta blue bizz in the hibiscus border

grannie Beeb and a BBC Radio Four tranny locked in a bog in the corrider blowing Andy Crowley's mesmeric allure. What a book!

What a writer! Check out Mandy and learn to avoid offence when care free commenting above the line his art's holiness is tenderly banging on to Joanna about, after not bumming but noting an awareness, adroit and ambidextrous with identity shifting on bank of self.

Experience a confused buttercup, let love be its verbal first divination, twig it, the bore behind the comment that's being offered on the box?

Will You Ever Feck Off Out Of it

Whooa donkies bonking ponies
Eddy, just as were getting too cozy.

There is a brilliant writer in Galway (moving to Cork) whose blog The Arse End Of Ireland is on the roll.

She's the psychological front-of-house, ecstatic knowing quotidian power of non-stop slagging, Sweary say:

"fantasise about travelling back in time to Leaving Cert year, just for a week, with the unshakeable confidence and shit-stirring glee that's developed in me since, and I'd create such ginormous ripples in the teenage psyches of my nemeses that they'd be dribbling in wheelchairs by the time 2007 rolled around. Teenagers are vicious. Adults are vicious and much, much more imaginative."

Cooor What A Shocker Sweary Sweary McInerney

"When I reached this place"
It was all very various
All very today,
Verily MacNeice Scowling Graves lost
In thicket-foe of fawn, dawning Doe-eyed Mexican
Genral op Mick and Boston prof Ricks
Affirm the songstress with

"a complex about being... the same kind of tenacious little bitch that all the pretty, damaged girls were, and she'll get great marks in Irish, and wash her hair every day, and get everyone else's names wrong..." not that

"The wit was indelicate
The wind well timed
Eloquently blown from a branch
Of a language tree-spelt and
Rooted in the lingusitic silt
Of a profuse and shrouded past
Elegantly polished silken
Whitethorn blosom, which litter
This wind-drenched land Sidhe (shee)
Shucked empty of myth

"I pulled a nice pint, which kept the ould men happy, and I wore tight t-shirts, which kept all the men happy. I wasn't the chattiest of barwomen, though. You wouldn't have found me huffing my way through hyperbolic scandal like some sort of bedhopping Coronation Street character. I pulled pints, I took money, I gave change, and I watched TV. I didn't really go in for the ould interaction.

Why this, you might ask? Ah. Well, you see, in the Arse End Of Ireland in particular, you have what's known as the locals to put up with. Your regular customers, in the pub trade, are your lifeblood. Grand day, isn't it? It's supposed to stay like this all week. The wind's got a bite on it like a starved Mary Harney on a toffee apple, but it's good for the few blades of grass you call crops, isn't it?"

Oh what a terrible way to carry Denise Riley,

"I don't want absence raw
..this beautiful...rain lyric
..a pool with an eye in it."

Pallster sweary McInerney funnily slagging to us, Connacht people's investigitive gonzo princess with the gob from a cast-list of Viz,

do you remember the day when a ghost
besuited in white offered assistance to Randal
Hopkirk and the figure who re-drawers
the Rubicon

Everyone nodding
No sodden boys
It was all very
Unexceptional
Very Tommy Stearns
Viv
Viv betrothed to Eliot
Imagine what returns
To sharpen the tooth
God, invert the dog
When glory glitters
Humminbirds bent,
beat meaning God
Ezra looped in the sky
Insanely content believing
Inversion reversed us God
Animals who suffer
The ecstacy
Tom
Tom
Bolw Tommy blow

"Whispers and small laughter
Between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters
Meet
Bowspirit cracked with ice and paint
Cracked with heat. I made this, I" may
"Have forgotten
Remember
The rigging weak and..canvas
Rotten...my own..garboard strake
Leeks, the seams need caulking
This form, this face, this life .....
The awakened lips...of time
Beyond...speech unspoken
...granite islands toward my timber
And woodthrush calling through the fog"
Comes verily discreet the one who knows

"Irish people won't let anything like the tragic or mind-boggling personal stories of others get in the way of their flapping on about themselves, as in Ireland, no one listens to anyone; they just wait for them to stop speaking..."

Sweary Sweary you shit hot bitching amigo, before switching on to gas under my own identity pedal; do you know the succesfull execution of the island accent is the only true test of a non Irish actor's ability, effable McInerney?

"Sure, how long were the English putting us down and ignoring our heritage? It's no wonder the nation matured into one full of windbags, and each with our own fecking personal geography...."

Tis true I assure you

"regulars.. wear you down, you know, drive Mother Teresa into the arms of heroin, so annoyingly monotonous are we, come in, sit down, get Guinness, and sup it til it solidifies, interjecting every twenty seconds, "Lovely day". Every twenty seconds. Lovely day. Lovely day. Lovely day. the reason I turn out so twisted."

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

INDYMETER

What becomes of love when roses fade and birds migrate

beyond the realm of meaning,

subverted, staid and losing faith in the pleasure

of abandoning reason?


And what reason,

whereby all sober thought discarded in lust's flame

to serve beside raw passion

beats now within?


That order was swept away along with all censure

of rash and ill judged action

in hot days of flush youth when belief had words to say

the day is of small matter.


And what matter,

creating still days when time is abundant unable

to cease or stray from our life

traps now within?


The initial register of their quivering timbre

became a significant hush

as each immeasurable moment sequentially

stole forward all dawn through to dusk.


And the dusk,

like a rainbow ring arching into a cloud

startles colour to the eye,

does dance my

imagination chaotic, by upending sound

reason and trying

with constant attempt to straddle some powerful force

all shades of passion embrace.


And this embrace,

like youth’s fading light draws softly in darkness

quenching ardour by decay,

is nature's force.


The Heraclitan stream upon whose surface all thought

fixes logic and symbol

our world of flux creates, and which we seek to harness

events of this temporal

manifestation of unknowable order to,

as though it were dolmen stone.


But this stone,

riven deep into a wet rich clay of live cold earth

impervious to us all

holds no thought,

only the imprint all sequential moments that drew

each to the next have made known

before passing to fade like the rose and migratory bird.