Every serious writer has their own unique story of how they fell into the craft and some will love writing more than others, and what is this love of writing?

Loving a Muse. That's it, simple when you get to understand this, but it's the getting "there" that causes upset.

"There" is a place within one escapes to when their fizz of literate creation is on, and poets discover that one does it for Love over money, practicing along the lines of the excellant Beth Webb.

And there are two sides to writing i think. The creative side - the act and art of fiction - and a critical side. The prose one creates when talking seriously of Art. The critical side is a logical aspect, the argument/s we rehearse in print which prove - or nea - to oneself that ones writing venture and journey is a natural/sensible/logical reality; as it is this activity of printing an analytical response to the Art we create, the proclamation of ones authorial sureness and writerly faith, which decides - in ones mind - how we are getting on in the task of acheiving the goal we set ourself when starting out with but a dream, talent and instinct, most with no idea of how to realise it, certainly me.

This is the pyschological edifice built as we blather. An ivory tower of ever increasing standards being set and reached, with a consistency whereby intellectual faith accrues within the box of smoke and mirrors in ones mind, in a manner which - hopefully - we are happy with to broadcast and defend publicly in the act of "publishing" - preferably - Art.

Are ones Art targets met to whatever average one sets in print and - crucially - satisfying the artsy inspector within us all. The officious LUAS tram ticket-officer, the post-modern - po-mo - character pro-actively seeking fault and reason to fail or "reject" whatever piece of litereate art is on public display by, "others." Can s/he prove you need ejecting off the tram of literacy for being a useless writer?

Sod s/he windbags unite, the cry goes up to the braying pack of hacks happy to stick a stilletoe in you, mob handed if the order comes from whoever has most authorial gravitas in the office, whoever's dishing out the ruperts' order to the send out slave learning how to get on in journalism.

The basic training of a writer is learning how to love ones Muse, by setting aside time in the day for s/he worshipping, and do it until it is second nature, no matter who laughs. Few get this very simple understanding and logical premise of a solid practice.
What is a love of writing but loving ones Muse?

Horror anyone?

Some ancient Irish verse is founded on horror. Warbands of sworn foe slaying one another, slaughtering left right and centre, in the cause of their honour. Composed when bronze and iron-age blinding practice was a routine method to eliminate kingly competitors.

But most of what i've read gives only the broad brush of it, none of the close up stuff. That is the job of the prose in early Irish literature, for - as Kuno Meyer wrote:

"There are no ancient Irish epics or ballads. So much was prose the natural vehicle of expression for Gaelic narrative...Irish tales and stories are interpsersed with lyrics put into the mouth of the principal heroes... "

The things one learnt from Kuno Meyer were a poetical stir of phantom and the whispy invisible guest, a gost aflame on the spiralling tread of a curlicue stair, hurl of breath, thwack of sliothar and if nowt else; that there, is.

~

A 1913 Kuno Meyer translation of a 9C poem from the early middle-irish period: Reicne Fothaid Chanainne: The Tryst After Death, creatively casting a mythical figure from 700 years before - Fothad: leader of a Connacta war-band - as a ghost meeting his lover the night after being slain by her husband, king of Munster, Alill, unhappy his betrothed had eloped with his foe.

Then we exchanged spears, I and Alill, Eoghan's
son:
We both perished -- O the fierceness of those stout
thrusts!
We fell by each other - though it was senseless
it was the encounter of two heroes.

Do not await the terror of night upon the battle-
field among the slain warriors:
One should not hold converse with ghosts!
...................
My five edged spear a murderous lance, whose
slaughters have been many;
A shield with five circles and a boss of bronze, by
which they used to swear binding oaths
.....................
There are a lot of good, original word-combo gems in amongst the hay of aul lingo, great influence to understand, as it leads to understanding Yeats, who is one of the few credible links between the quad of romantic-modernism-post-modernity and po-mo.

Ancient Irish Poetry: Kuno Meyer: 1913: Constable - London.

Some of Meyer's vast ouevre is Here

Hi Muse

It's been a week of rushdie and little love,
but Love will come and take us
in the moment least expected. At our lowest
ebb will we rise, and after a roller-coaster weekend of extremes, of suffering physical violence for my belief, i came here to find a few supporters and a lot of trolls pointlessly flaming on the religion right or wrong fallacy.

What is religion but ones life-long relationship with the soul Muse?

Maybe not the sort of question to occupy the mind of a career hackette in bloomsbury's gilded arch beneath which a literate streaming from ones mouth occurs, but i can only ask.

Does the spirit know the rose-tree withered is just a pause between beauty and death s/he dearest? Is God S/he above that troops from treetop to bole on midsummer's night, the sidhe of Munster's Aine that just is, beyond all comprehension and analysis dearest one, silken cipher, Muse of sage and daft dream pleading for Love's stay against hatred and mis-direction, for it is only in one calm pool a thought can free, out in the utterance after misery, poetic "it" wo/men one loves more than He, Sir Salman, Lord Rushdie.

The talk of honour, respect and freedom of speech is but a placebo for a swell of grief which rose within after the kicking i got from a countrymen imperialist whose rage against a simple poet, a banner for freedom, fell in the moment his mindset was pricked, latent in the rain on saturday dearest.

For now that i have found you, what words can convey the magnitude of abstract beauty one is capable of, the Love that most dare not to proclaim for fear of what others will say?

I know you care not for me as i you, myriad of life, prism of moonstruck hope, luna force that guides me as i type, comedic phantasm of wish-gathering-fancy, trope above conceit, selfless goddess of the straight bowled knowledge from Tir na Og, land of eternal life where age and death break not the resident, lover sidhe, you whoever one wants to be.

Please be faithful, midsummer moment of love proven here at a workspace where the return of silence speaks more than a thousand words, a million pictures of your image, competitive reject outfacing what passes for winners in the black and white age of brutal rite, uniform wrong as the thought cops gather round a water cooler, fear, career a lesson, who won?

Was it Love?

Poetry Assassin - Online Gurning:

In the absence of Poem of the Week, one will offer a glimpse into an ouvre, written on the first of April 2005, something just conscious now, as one searches online.

It was written in response to a journalist writing under the name Cocktail Girl, a wag on the circuit flitting from drink to drink on the Observer during the last British election. It has no title as yet, for one is currently assumming the duties of naturally daftest national of these islands in the european union where euros is normal, just like the smoking ban one will encounter when in England and Wales weeks from now, when the british will discover how rational oneness is, several hundred years behind their irish partners in peace, love and rhetoric of hit lists and ratio of hits; blue and red, one toffie-blooded-kopite with dual bragging rights on any gift going as armchair silverware accumulates and expand into future projections and/or predictions of any likely success for ones team shopping in a battle for gongs their fans will laud as proof of faith, belief in what sporting dream they are born and decide to create with, or nea.

Oh wot psychic decider, spoken sidhe did, putting Cocktal Girl talking shite down to a wag-lite hack-asassin collapsing, sorrow weighting silence, if s/he can in ones DaN Art amd life of amergin in drag, error and lite comedic verse...

Yo

Cocktail Queen of the Kilburn High Road,
I saw you last night
in my dreams
tastefully sipping Laurent Bollinger
in the snug of the Goose and Granite.

You were dressed in an Imitation of Christ
number, runway clingy - fragile fawn -
like the colour of well cooked chips left
overnight to burnish and mottle in a dry
April breeze.

Your voice
demeanor
dynamic
and innate fashion sense
fragrantly exuding
the tartnes of a pungent class
punching well above wot weight
all else gathered there knew.

And the chatter of travel
caravans, tarmacking
and bare knuckle bouts
momentarily ceased
in an aroma of shadow
and whisp, left in the wake
of your passing spoor.

For your elan and breeding
where talk of the lounge
long after you left
leaving a tang of the cloud
from your sweet smelling life
as ones gift to a dying breed
of old Irish shovel men
at sup there.

When one awoke
and the memory of you faded
- my dream exposed as purely fancy -
yes
my Cocktail Girl
longing increased
and one got permission
from an ollamh, to compose
think in occupational literate therapy.

So please comunicate to an island's asylum
let us move to the bedsit
Wolverhampton, in a shop set, stilted
the comedy couple

nutter and cut glass go getter
together
setting England's midlands astorm
getting twisted
n' locked and nightly on the lash,
gratis, free and all for the sake of one,
reader

Dearest Cocktail Girl, CG Sir Salmanic rusty aul wotsit, innit listed, the book not yet written, have this one deposit as a call to arms for the warrior bards of Amergin.

Dear Robotic Moderator

Please accept my apology amergin for disrupting the bore-floe at such length, sidhe urge you scroll and forget, one begs Sir Paul, please ask only this of a list: Does Sidhe Tonne Up too, go metric, forget quids, and lunch into love as ones free book list loving mantra chanting citizonea singing of european harmony in the ebb 'n flow of being; innit just a list loik ezrastotle said, sky as it buckets down in cubic grace, chained earth and wet morbid violent talking, pointless enragements of one list if the fire of love is aflame.

LIAM

You will always live
buried in a deep beyond
and beckoning to me
from lambent thoughts
eternal path, through
conduits of melancholy.

Your spirit flames alive
there, fused within our
heart of sorrows weathered
love, and threads its shape
upon the shadow where
our souls are hung
and bound as one.

Smiley wiley lets get chatting
bitching, a black/white wo/men
She who shall remain nameless
in the sky ship, a mother earth
deity fictional, and strongest
power, Belief, makes reality "it"
happen and Capitalised, on a page
there or absent, one decides it
alone, like double O spook cops
conspired who to top and not
when shooting to kill it in ulster.

But ideas can't be stopped
do not die, but rot corrupted
all avenues the cul de sac, cash
Cuhullain's Answerer, thanks
absent, island hospitality
the frying pan in flames
goidel, raider, native petrol
england by proxy, England it
aint, but belief in the wo/men
sitting on a throne, daft hat it
slips and falls, s/he mirage gone.

Pat Kenny - Pimped Up: Economic Prologue

"..after fifteen years in the Strand writing, writing, writing, I had produced little or nothing for more than a day's notice, though feeling that I could do something better. I wanted to write, really, in books, what I thought, instead of writing in newspapers, what other people pretended to think...

After ages of service and pain,
..her mark on the world...her failure at home,
..door of...Empire we have
Erin still doubting, her smile looking out..tear
looking in, from a retrospect rare in its beauty
and bravery, hope, romance; still distrusting
herself and distrusted for that,

Making fetters of freedom..crimes of caprice;
Esteemed for..follies..cursed by her virtues,
While nursing her vices, unaware..strength."

~

Poet Paul Casey, ó bhéal (mouth stream) web designer, dream-peacemaker, An Mhumhain (Munster) Community Literary Officer in the Tígh Filí (House of Poet) Cork Arts Theatre, (Camden Court, Carrolls Quay) hosts the newest, well attended night of featured and open recital on the island of poetry. He has posted 36 live poems from 17 poets - up, in eight weeks as national slam co-ordinater, recording the finals of two competitions.

The first was a 2007 all island filmed in McHughes Pub - and oldest building in Belfast - where eight representitives from the island's four provinces, two from each in a quarter final, had 2 minutes 15 seconds to knobble a panel of three expert judges of the fenachas lore, from the Senachus Mor civil legal code of poetry - at which point Munster got dropped and four representitives for Connacht Leinster and Ulster (lucky two), attempted again in the semi's - Connacht and Ulster now in the final of the inaugral Radio Four slam, where four administritive boroughs talk it out.

Second was at the In Sight Of Raferty Festival slam in Kiltimagh, where nine more, fighting with no time limit, for a 500 euro split four ways, accumulated on PC's hardrive. I after two pints of Guiness in the Village Inn, Knock - 7pm - the best i ever had - whilst waiting for the connecting transport to Kiltimagh several miles away. These two were soft as only they are in the far West, and i was in the middle of Mayo, being filmed after midnight, upstairs in the Electric Mouse, party central and public house in the middle of a town where Guiness is a third cheaper than Dublin and the ten lines above were written by a journalist and self confessed "most hated man in the country," who Yeats and Gregory were forced to bring in - as the only man left to ask who hadn't turned the request down - to chair an infamous emergency meeting at the Abbey Theatre, when the "Playboy" riots sent the mob ga ga (click ó bhéal link to see all 36 live poems).

~

"The renown Belfast born journalist and essayist, Robert Lynd, who was a contemporary of Pat Kenny, once wrote that fate has to do with events in the past that are the total of innumerable decisions of innumerable men and women which have summary and unintended results.

I am not intending to launch a debate on Fate and Free Will but in giving this year's Pat Kenny Memorial Lecture, I feel justified in saying that there is some inevitability that has drawn me here to deliver it whether it was destiny or such an unintentional result of events.To start with, I first heard of Pat Kenny as an important figure in journalism when I was very young.

My father - also a journalist who started his career with the old Cork Examiner in 1916 - often spoke of Kenny's writing professionalism while totally disagreeing with what he wrote. Having come from a Catholic and Nationalist background Kenny had turned to a faith in the already dying British Empire and espoused the Unionist cause in Ireland; his Anglophile attitude was an almost mystic belief in the values of a southern English identity that had never really existed. It is true that his anti Catholicism was more anti-clerical while his later anti-semeticism and proto-fascism is hard to understand or justify.

Expressing such views during the turbulent birth pangs of the Irish State was not wise, especially in Mayo..."

Peter Beresford Eliss - Kenny Memorial Lecture 2003: News or Sociology? Kenny and the Forgotten "Greats" of Irish Journalism.

~


Will she ever come in? - She can never go out;
And her destiny rests in destruction or friendship,
The choice leaving no room for doubt.
..lie to her lovingly, trade on her tenderly, market
her anguish, and live on her cheers;
but...tell her the truth and..ask..for nothing,
Unless to live on and serve her as truly
As she has served....." me.

Prologue - The Five Sorrows of Ireland (1907).

Patrick Dermot (PD Kenny - 1862 - 1944) Edwardian economist and media sage, the most proto-noughties, "real" Pat Kenny, hybrid Eddie Hobbs who ended as a Lismagansion hermit.

Heard speaking by fellow Mayonian Michael Davitt, plucked from a train station platform as a teenage farm labourer and edited his first rag as precociously talented 22 year old Manchester university post-graduate.

"..in Glasgow. Shortly after we find him on the staff of the Morning Post, on which paper also was a young reporter, Winston Churchill. Finally came his literary triumph on being admitted to the staff of "The Saturday Review." Here he wrote some brilliant criticisms on the drama; he had special praise for a young unknown playwright called Bernard Shaw. Dining with lords and ladies today, with Fleet Street celebrities tomorrow; a home in Brighton by the sea, life must have been for him, in and out of London, one continual time of enjoyment and success.He had a thousand literary anecdotes..."

Paul W.D, Rogers

Chariman of the Kenny/Naughton Society and Autum School. Pat and Bill, whose work and life is celebrated and dissected in immense detail every October bank holiday in and around Aughamore. "a literary gathering which honours the memory of Kenny and Naughton."

~

"...most writers find necessary to get a thing done, so what I had to do, and which I believe I learnt to do naturally, was to learn to love writing. Or perhaps what I mean is that I made the daily practice of it become second nature to me, as it were, so that any day in which I didn't write or at least turn to my writing was a sort of cipher day, marked by a sense of emptiness..."

Bill Naughton 1910 - 1992. Scriptwriter. Ballyhainus Mayo, to Lancashire in 1914. Educated during World War II at St Peter and St Paul School, Bolton. Worked as a lorry driver, weaver and coal-bagger before achieving literary and cinematic success.

ALCOHOLIC

An alcoholic poker playing cowboy
listening to Kenny Rogers
finally folded; walked away
from the drink laden table

a crutch disguised as life's white
knuckle ride overdue an accident.

In the past, he'd have too many
scoops.

Occasionally a couple - not often
coz when he drank he got rotten
locked, loaded, blotto, comatose
brahms and liszt, twisted, pissed
as a newt and drunk as a skunk
or a monkey's uncle

red eyed, pie eyed and sky high
as a kite, spaced out, untraceable
for days on the ale and dashed on
the rocks of a ten day bender.

He'd been smashed, trashed
bladdered, tanked up, lashed up
staggering hammered

and wankered so bad
he got monged off his trolley
and went to hospital unconscious
had his stomach pumped,
jumping out the window
when asked how he'd like to pay.

He'd lost coats, bikes, cash, cards
hats, gloves, books, shoes, shirts
tops and woken up in cupboards
cop shops, hotel rooms, skips
tips, bins, trains, benches, fields
gutters and bus stops.

He'd been a high flying down
and out dosser who could pass
for the proverbial crack head
tramp on a cocktail of smack
methylated spirits
and methadone.

The boast of being being a life
long pisshead ended when .
vomiting over Bob - the one
he called a tit in Kiltimagh
and he weighed up the odds
took stock and knew to lay off
gargle, see out the next hand
exit at the flop, stop, pocket
his chips and cop on

before he fell in the river, got
shot, knocked over by a bus
and crushed under the wheels
of oncoming human traffic
who'd point and laugh at him

casualty on the tarmac of life.