Pete Mullineaux's insightful look at traditional Irish music. A
Poet Prepared.
***
The Bristol born, Galway based
poet, author and playwright Pete Mullineaux knows his way confidently around
traditional Irish music. His poetry collection, Session, (Salmon Poetry), dedicated to his mother, with artwork by
Fran McCann, is guaranteed to leave his readers wanting more.
The poetry, like the
regional variations in the music, varies in style and tone, the common link
being the poet’s voice as a silent observer. Mullineaux uses evocative images,
insightful observation, humour, playfulness and nostalgia. He is a scrutiniser
of intricacies, a watchful eye, someone who listens to the tunes and observes
the people who play them. The reader sees the players’ eyes, fingers, their
bodies, the body language and the resulting inter-personal and inter-musical relationships
being formed. Mullineaux also explores the emotions and psychologies of his
subjects with curiosity and admiration.
One of this writer’s favourites
is A Piper Prepares, where the speaker intimately describes the uileann piper’s
preamble. It is a tantalisingly visual poem with so much anticipation in the
opening lines that the reader hopes the preamble goes on: It’s almost like
shooting up; a captivating ritual / as the belt is looped around the forearm;
the buckle/ notched, blowpipe joined to leather bag; a shard/ of cloth, folded
between elbow and rib for comfort.
Mullineaux has the speaker in this poem
watch the piper assemble the instrument and describe it in slow motion detail. ‘Drones
are attached like pistol silencers, regulators poised,’ and while acknowledging
the tune of the same name, ‘the piper’s apron,’ he remarks on the leather patch
across the lap which provides ‘protection from the crazed jabs of the chanter, /
its manic hypodermic dance.’ As the tune begins, ‘a primal hum vibrates,’ and
‘a gasp/ for air as the bellows fill and suddenly there’s life/ in the lungs
and wind in the reeds...’
‘The Five Mile Chase,’ is
a tribute to Patrick Street. Traditional musicians Andy Irvine, John Carty, Kevin Burke and Jed Foley have their individual stage movements
noted and matched to rhythm, playing styles and character nuances. ‘A tilt of
the chin for the pigeon on the gate/ a bend in the waist for the stack of
wheat/ a wink in the eye for the blue eyed rascal/ a slip in the hip for a trip
up the stairs.’ It’s a twelve line piece that could be sung in jig time. Hup!
Mullineaux uses a
coupling motif throughout the collection. In ‘The Lads of Leitrim,’ an
accordion and a flute player meet up regularly to play a session in a snug in
Manorhamilton. The poet compares their ease and joy in the music to a long
standing marriage. ‘Could there be a love closer to their hearts/ than this –
something to cherish for a lifetime -/ never to part, for better or worse/ in
sickness and in health.’ As they launch into the Fermoy Lasses, he declares ‘these fellas are wedded to the music.’ Another couple, Paddy Canny and Frankie Gavin, have their musical communion told with slow lyrical
ease in ‘Cave Music II.’ Canny, ‘the elder statesman has eyelids drawn / tight
like a mole,’ while the younger Frankie, ‘allows the older man the lead,
follows the set tone/ finding his own empathetic touch.’
Mullineaux provides the
snapshot, watching the young Gavin who could have closed his eyes, but chose
not to. Gavin, who was ‘a generation apart’ at the time, kept watch of the
older man, ‘aware how much this moment must be fixed, / treasured deep in his
own vaults.’
Watching Dermot Byrne and
Floriane Blancke’s playing compelled the poet to write ‘Tabhair Dom Do Lámh.’ Byrne’s
accordion sits ‘like a sleeping child in his lap,’ and Blancke ‘leans forward,
the harp/against her cheek, listening/ for a heartbeat...’ The poem moves
swiftly from the womb analogy, to a child one, when Byrne ‘tickles and squeezes’
the accordion, and like an infant, growing with the pace and momentum of the
tune, together, the duo, ‘fast forward, to courtship, / dancing, making crazy
love / through music.’
This aptly titled
collection, Session, by Pete
Mullineaux is a gem. Encore, si’l vous plait? It is available from www.salmonpoetry.com,
bookshops and music stores.
Ballymore Eustace's Hugh Cooney was in Edinburgh last weekend, after enacting something creatively mad in a positive sense; and a brilliantly executed piece of living performance art and storytelling - whilst having an ace time doing it.
A
former festival virgin on his inaugural Edinburgh Fringe or Bust performance storytelling art tour.
He
hitchhiked from London to Edinburgh, over two days, with the live
tracking of him by an online app; a diary of tweets, pics of the random
folk that picked him up, and fb update-selfies by the side of the road
with his thumb and a sign held out. Keeping his family, fans, followers and s/m friends
abreast, engaged and emotionally involved in his (pron. kookullanary) Cuchualainary (copyright John Cummins Poetician)
Cooney baloonae adventure hitchhiking from home in inner city Hackney,
to the good crazee cultural stuff that is Edinburgh in the middle of August.
All
with the goal of reaching his 5pm Saturday slot at the Forest Cafe. He
was slow getting out of London, and having lived there I know this was
potentially the most difficult bit. Escaping the rat race. He had
several short lifts up the M1, and had to turn back and go a different
route the first night. On which he stayed in a country house retreat
someplace in the midlands. He then went NW and made it to Manchester,
then fairly swiftly the rest of the way once in the friendlier North of
England.
Conducting national live radio conversations with the cream of
professional Irish broadcast journalists and DJs manning the decks in
Ireland, keen to give what the Irish call a dig out, for such a great and positive creative idea reliant solely on wishes and a prayer. Faith in the better and best human side of the sixty million people living in Britain.
Like the comedian Tony Hawks was reliant on when he hitchhiked lumping a fridge round Ireland after losing out on a drunken bet, that turned into the basis of an experience from which came a best selling book and film.
A
beautifully kind-hearted motorist adopted Hugh for a final big stretch
of driving, only too happy to buy into his ever increasingly more real,
and manifesting before our very eyes, mad Irish dream coming true on the
road between London and the global Scottish thespian festival.
And
there was lots of love and good vibes by the time he reached his
destination (Hugh pictured above doing the gig), with a few hours to spare to get ready and experience one
of the four human joys, of what Amergin calls in his 120 line 7C Old Irish ars poetica, first translated by Galway University academic P.L. Henry in 1979 - and over twice as long as
his other three poems (numbered seven, eight and nine at the link) far less interesting, imo, or understandable, rosc,
druidic ogham-derived battle magic spells that Paul Muldoon can spend an
hour or two cock a doodle doing about: 'the Joy of fitting poetic
completion'.
That
comes with a 'turning or after turning' of one's three inner artistic
cauldrons and interlocking spiral gyres, so that they spin upward with
momentum of imbas, poetic fizz, literary energy, and facilitation of the
open channel to Creation and one's ineffable gender-neutral mind's voice, mapping the individual voice
closest to the contours of thought, as Newcastle West Limerick poet,
Michael Hartnett, put it.
'Like
one of the Seanchaí/Storytellers of old, equipped with only my stories
(and of course some clothing, cash, sandwiches, voice recorder,
shillelagh, go pro, wine skin and a phone). i’m approaching it very
much as a pilgrimage to see what the buzz is. Should anyone want to hear
my stories, perhaps I can tell them down an appropriate lane or in the
bushes in the park. Or perhaps you know a suitable situation that would
welcome such a vagabond?'
He
made it, had a great debut gig in Edinburgh, and is now in the woods
with a man he has just met. Dogging, by the looks of it. Hugh has a very
satisfied quietly joyful inner glow to his fresh and kewlest of all the
NCAD hipster-faces in Dublin during the time we made art together over
the years. Firstly when I met Hugh, and his Dublin based art-partner, fine artist Tom Lynn.
Lynn, created, with fellow Irish artist, Al Kennington; the Monster Truck Art Gallery on Francis Street in the
Liberties, Dublin 8. The oldest most working-class part of South Dublin.
And it was the Monster Truck Art gallery where
i encountered these two who created the poet in residence position i
held there for several months. Both recent graduates, who'd
graduated the same or a year before i had from Edge Hill.
Hugh
is one of the made-members of the island's most successful and highly
secretive Irish art mafia. Hugh makes contemporary Art in numerous
forms. Including food, music, and, what he is best known for, the crazee
comedic performance art youtube comedies he scripts, performs, records, uploads, and
then come, fall, show sit, sues reads the evidence, prosecutes, and
often in drag, with a cast of characters drawn from the entertaining and artistically rendered phantasmagoria
of his mind.
In the mythological history of Ireland, Amergin, from Amhairghin - which Ireland's most prolific Irish language poet, Gabriel Rosenstock, in his book, Beginner's Irish, defines as: 'born of song' - is the druid poet of the seventh and final otherworldly race of people that took possession of the island. The Milesians, or Sons of Mil Espaine. He is the last of the otherworldly poets of ancient myth and considered the founding poet of the modern day Gaels.
The annals accord to Amergin's voice, 172 lines of poetry, spread over four texts.
His most well known of these lines is a twenty line riddling poem and 7C text written in the drudic form of 'rosc', Song of Amergin/Duan Amhairghine.
It is considered to be the oldest and first poem written in Ireland, and the one Amergin text of the four that Irish poets know of and give themselves license to sound lala about when responding to.
Aul Plumdoon Paul Muldoon himself spends an entire Oxford Poetry Professor lecture allusively punning on it in a speculative experimental discourse, that, if any of us had written and published on social media, it would, perhaps, as recently happened to me, have garnered what Amergin calls in a different, and longest of the four texts: 'the abundance of goading one receives when they take up the prosperity of bardcraft.'
And in 1700 BC, in Seathrún Céitinn/Geoffrey Keating's: Foras Feasa ar Éirinn/Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland; more usually translated History of Ireland.
As already stated, the annals accord to this mythical figure, Amergin, 172 lines of poetry spread over four texts. Three of the texts (poems 7, 8 & 9 at the link) are virtually impenetrable riddling poems of the most metrically ancient 'rosc' variety. Old alliterative druidic blessing and battle-magic spells written in the most archaic 3-/5C Goidelic text, originating in the very first Irish letters, Ogham. A singularly interesting two to three hundred year reality that represents the transition period from oral druidry to literate bardic Old Irish letters of the 5C.
In the Medieval prose narratives these are the most metrically ancient alliterative verses, that are set apart from the prose, punctuating it as direct speech from the mythological poets' mouths. And signifying by the verse that what is being spoken is the most profoundly antique and eloquent words, that come out from the mouths of the numerous poet-characters, as spontaneously spoken poems - at the most significant parts of the tales they appear in.
Of which we have one hundred and ninety-eight remaining primary tales, of the 250 prim-scéla 'primary tales' we know where the number taught, and learned by rote and heart, and that made up a very large part of the Gaelic poet's education, on the seven step, twelve to fourteen year, bardic filidh poet-training curriculum.
When metrical poems are recorded directly from the mouths of the character, they are usually serving the purpose of changing the narrative entirely by means of spoken magic.
However, the fourth of Amergin's four pieces, appears in the Trinity College Dublin manuscript 1337 (formerly H 3.18); and though it is untitled, it is the most important, by far, imo, of the four texts traditionally attributed to the founding poet of the Gaels. And it is a very different, far less densely riddled poetic text.
That
the student poet at grade one, foclo, was, I suspect, introduced to
during their first Halloween to May Day semester, in the poet-training schools, that taught the art and trade of fíliocht / poetry - in one form or another (fíliocht originated in druidry, then evolved into literate bardic, before filidh 'poets' practice) - for twelve hundred years; to forty generations of poets.
The untitled text (link to Eryn Rowan Laurie's most recent scholarly translation.), that has no title, I suspect, because it didn't need one, as everyone knew it; is a mixture of short alliterative-lines of rosc, and longer lines of hybrid prose-poetry. It spells out in black and white the earliest verbal druidic ars poetica. The purest bardic voice on record, telling the reader exactly what poetry is, and how it works in a person, 'body and soul'.
It is an extremely fascinating document that very few readers, and even less poets, are aware exists. Because it was only first translated in 1979, by the late (2011) Professor Emeritus, N.U.I. Galway, Patrick L. Henry.
Who birthed it into English as the subject of a specialist scholarly article in Studia Celtica
#14/15, 1979/1980, pp. 114-128, 'The Cauldron of Poesy'.
The second translation was by co-editor of the annual Royal
Irish Academy journal Ériu, and Ireland's preeminent Old Irish expert on Early Irish law
texts, poets, poetry and metrics; School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Professor Liam Breathnach.'The Cauldron of Poesy,'
Ériu
#32, 1981, pp. 45-93.
In my opinion this ancient rosc and prose-poem text is a/the holy grail of (Irish) poetry. Clearly detailing the most brilliantly simple yet also most authentic and most ancient poetic we have with which to understand what it is we are doing in letters. That only a handful of people have ever read.
~
Amergin's first (and his most famous) poem, Song of Amergin, is commonly accepted as the earliest Irish poem ever written, in the 6/7C AD.
It is twenty lines, that in the tale it appears in, The Coming of the Miliseans, Amergin spontaneously recites as he steps off - with his eight brothers and a large group of warriors - one of the thirty-six Milesian ships that arrived and set anchor in Kerry, at the mouth of the Kenmare river, around Beltaine/The first of May.
We're told, in an eleventh century Clonmacnoise annal, Chronicon Scotorum: 'On Thursday, the Kalends of May, on the l7th of the Moon'; 'the Year of the World 3500'.
There to face-off with the Tuatha De Danann, for killing their uncle, Ith, whose death at the hands of the De Danann occured after he'd spied the island with Mil his brother, from the Bregon tower in Northern Spain, and had gone to the island on a reconnaissance mission with a handful of relatives and retainers. Ith's enthusiasm for what he found on the island concerned the De Danann as a threat to their own possession of it and so they killed him rather then let him leave and possibly come back with an invasion force.
The Tuatha De Danann had been in possession of the island for three hundred years, after seizing it themselves in the two Battles of Moytura/Magh Tuireadh, 'plain of pillars'. Keating dating their arrival to 1477 BC, and the Four Masters dating it 1897 BC.
The act of speaking this ancient alliterative riddling poem, Song of Amergin, that there's is no agreed set translated text of (tho there are numerous translated versions by various Celticists and poets) is traditionally interpreted as 'born of song', Amergin himself, as he steps ashore, claiming and taking possession of the island for this seventh and final mythological race.
That forty generations of poets traced their own existence to and wrote of for 1200 years in their own literate vernacular language.
And immediately after Amergin speaks aloud his most famous Song, our mythical druid then spontaneously recites the second of the texts attributed to him.
A short eleven line poem-blessing titled, Bríocht Baile Fharraige/Bounty of the Ocean (poem number nine at the link.).
After this blessing poem the eight Milisean brothers and their forces wade ashore. Where they briefly skirmish with Tuatha De Danann forces in the Slieve Mish mountains as they make their way to Tara.
At which point in the narrative they parlay with the De Danann chiefs, and with Amergin the mediator-poet negotiating between the two sides a battle plan is agreed by both the mythological races. The events at which become the next part in the tale, The Coming of the Milesians.
It is agreed that the Milesians will return from the middle of the island to their ships, and set sail over nine waves out. Then, if they can make it back ashore, the island is there's to fight the Tuatha De Danann for the possession of.
However, a trick up their sleeves, the De Danann druids magically speak some roscanna (rosc pl.) to conjure up a storm that sinks five of the Milisean ships; that triggers the third of Amergin's texts, a twenty-one alliteratively lined rosc poem titled, Invocation of Ireland (Professor Eoin MacNeill's 1922 translation), that is spoken as the druidic counter-spell spontaneously recited by Amergin onboard one of the surviving three ships the storm does not sink. And that beats the magic of the De Danann druids and quells the storm.
The three surviving brothers; Amergin, Eber and Eremon, make it ashore and then take the island when they beat the Tuatha in battle three days later, in the Battle of Tailtin, modern day Teltown between Navan and Kells in Meath.
After which Amergin, in his mediator-poet-judge-druid role, divides the island between his two surviving brothers, Eremon taking the North and Eber the South.
There's a dedicatory poem written by Padraic Colum, which prefaces one of his editorial masterworks, Anthology of Irish Verse (1922), that recounts this incident.
To George Sigerson, Poet and Scholar
Two men of art, they say, were with the sons
Of Milé,—a poet and a harp player,
When Milé, having taken Ireland, left
The land to his sons’ rule; the poet was
Cir, and fair Cendfind was the harp player.
The sons of Milé for the kingship fought—
(Blithely, with merry sounds, the old poem says)
Eber and Eremon, the sons of Milé
And when division of the land was made
They drew a lot for the two men of art.
With Eber who had won the Northern half
The Harper Cendfind went, and with Eremon
The Northerner, Cir the poet stayed;
And so, the old Book of the Conquests says,
The South has music and the North has lore.
To you who are both of the North and South,
To you who have the music and the lore,
To you in whom Cir and Cendfind are met,
To you I bring the tale of poetry
Left by the sons of Eber and of Eremon.
A leabhráin, gabh amach fá’n saoghal,
Is do gach n-aon dá mbuaileann leat
Aithris cruinn go maireann Gaedhil,
T’réis cleasa claon nan Gall ar fad.
Originally a comment on Derry poet Mel Bradley's facebook. ...
Lovely poem there, Mel.
There
was an interesting article in 2008 by a New York rabbi and Torah bible
scholar, Mark Sameth, who spent 20 years study on the appearance of the
Tetragrammaton in the Torah. The Hebrew theonym יהוה, commonly
transliterated into Latin letters as YHWH, most commonly pronounced as
Yahweh and Jehovah. Strict conservative Jewish traditionalists 'avoid
reading it as יהוה exactly as it is spelled, either aloud or to
themselves in silence, nor do they read aloud transliterated English
forms such as Jehovah or Yahweh.
Instead
the word and pronunciation is replaced with a different term, whether
used to address or to refer to the God of Israel. Commonly substituted
Hebrew forms are: hakadosh baruch hu “The Blessed Holy One” or Adonai
“The Lord” or Hashem “The Name”. Such terms are believed to equally
refer to the same as One as יהוה or Jehovah, in much the same way that
the English terms “God”, “LORD” or the “Creator” are used to refer to
the God of Israel.' (wiki)
There
is no agreement on the etymological root of the Tetragrammaton, tho
there's a school of thought that it comes from a triconsonantal root היה
(h-y-h), a verb meaning "to be", "exist", "become", or "come to pass".
Sameth's
own conclusion of his twenty year textual investigation appears in an
article in the summer 2008 issue of the CCAR Journal, published by the
Central Conference of American Rabbis, an association of Reform rabbis:
"Who is He? He is She: The Secret Four-Letter Name of God"
He
theorises that a basic druidic ogham trick is behind cracking this
literate mystery, because when the Tetragrammaton is read in reverse and
the four letters are flipped, the sounds become, he says, the Hebrew
words for "he" and "she." So, God, is not He, Lord, etc, but He/She.
When
I read Sameth's conclusion of a life long study into God, i
independently had come to the same conclusion, by a different route of
study. I'd been four years post-graduate,
independently studying the voluminous mass of textual material that made
up the bardic filidh poet-training curriculum; all in Irish, and
relying on English translations, that only since the turn of the 21C
it's been possible to access, all virtually. The source material i was
reading, all in Irish manuscript; was
pointing to the exact same thing. That God is a gender-neutral spirit,
and within us all as our disembodied mind and intelligence, that in
everyone, regardless of our gender, is the wholly spiritual s/he Sameth
theorises he found in the Torah.
That
is hidden and visible only to initiates with knowledge of a druidic
trick taught to forty generations of poets in Ireland, as the very
founding concept of their trade. And that they were introduced to as a
newly arrived grade/level one trainee-poet, foclo (word-weaving
beginner) - starting their first Samhain to Beltaine semester in the
singing schools of yore. With a further six grades to go on the twelve
to fourteen years of study ahead of them, before they graduated, at the
seventh and final ollamh grade, and took their place as a Doctor of
Poetry in the Gaelic literary tradition. (5-17C).
Robert
Graves also concluded after a lifetime of deep study of Myth, and
writing hundreds of books, that what he calls the 'unimprovable
original' Stone Age poetic was gender-neutral. And it was only with the
Greek Iron Age Appollonian falsifying of the previous more Maternal s/he
religion, that all the 'God is solely male' nonsense took hold, and
really made its mark with the spread of the Roman empire. Because it was grafted and forced onto the stable and peaceable s/he religion, that was a couple of thousand years old when the Mediterranean Levant civilisations began seven centuries of mass implosion and collapse, after the Minoan eruption of the island of Thera, (now called Santorini) around 1500 BC. The new deathly man-cult spread by the new Iron technology, that represented a scientific quantum leap at the time.
The
new Man is God religion was spread in much the same way the deluded
murderous morons of Daesh are doing now. 'Bow down and devote every
waking second of your life to what our He god commands you do in life,
that is the one God, or it is His will you be horrifically tortured and
murdered as a non-believer, by His earthly good guys' engaged in all
the genocide and proselytizing about this wholly bullshit Male God and
Creator. All for the purpose of legitimizing as being divinely approved
of, their acts of pedophilia, mass-murder, rape, torture and terror that
is the Male death cult. What Graves calls intellectual homosexuality.
The elevation and worshiping of a solely Male deity as Creator of the
real world and all us men and women in it. Yeah, right.
Learned a poem that will carry its own weight
through the use of its quatrains and stanzas,
on its own feet speak and stand in spoken song;
upon a stave of the Creator's making stage
a strophe of inventively voiced syllables that speak
the contract from lip to ear, in a mouth binding
oaths that pledge this demi-realm of spirit,
slate green sea, by the music of what happens
in its own paradise & mind-blue mystery,
to the oneness that and this, that and this, that
& this, that literate on the pages of our memory is.
An absent anarchic body of light, blind presence,
attentive ear, the eye of tradition and lore
one must listen to and learn the fundamental
tenets of before claiming in canto, section
and rann, movements from cosmic to singular
and back again 'be the branches of genealogy
off-spring are born from, extending to summon the living', in the same line of spoken psalm
carry weight by sound alone; and be not bold,
slapdash, timorous, or touchy, brought not
to ruin by low drunken tricks; but the law-abiding
hand-of-mind form, imbhas forosnai, spontaneous manifestation of knowledge in a poem carrying
its own weight; created slant, spun & set airborne
by the power of prayerful wings; alone within
and without us - 'taken from the mysteries of the elemental abyss.'
Desmond Swords
...
The inspirational source text for this was Miriam Gamble's poem, Bodies, that I saw on the Guardian Poem of the Week Series where I was centred in spontaneous writing during years six to twelve of one's practice founded on the poetic of 'speculative discourse'.
A critically self-reflective poetic picked up during my first three years of writing and studies (2001-4), doing what before the name-change was an Edge Hill joint Writing Studies BA, founded and created by Robert Sheppard at Edge Hill's Linguistically Innovative Poetry School in one's home town of Ormskirk, SW Lancashire, England.
Cuchulainary is an adjective coined by All Ireland Slam Champion 2013/4, Dublin Coolock poet, John Cummins.
We number love hard core cushla in conscious order, pull strings & flux at humanity's fete; name divinity Kathleen the terrible pleaser who'll advance and retreat as you tease out life's music. Spirit moments from love let her alphabet rattle it's answer an ear cocked to what art here will hear - island queen of memory.
