ROCKPOOL

The tin long since emptied of chocolate swung
squeaking in rusty protest from his son's hand
who ran on ahead, scattering crabs among
flying strips of seaweed and kicked up clouds of sand.

He caught up with his child where rocks cupped water
and held life in the sunburnt palms of their hands.
Squatting down beside barnacles, his father
broke the surface, seperating tangled strands.

Sun shocked fish flashed silver, fleeing fingers that
stirred up their world. Two submerged plastic sandals
grew snails; jelly fish lolled on the surface; fat
dollops of wax melted colourless candles.

They scooped up stones that caught their eye, sea tumbled
smooth, and glass coloured bottles that clattered
as they hit the tin's bottom. Above, clouds grumbled
and elbowed each other 'til bruised and battered.

A gull squawked a warning and circled the breeze
like a balsa wood mobile. Impending rains
brought them to their feet, legs buckled by stiff knees.
Drops patterned their jackets with polka dot stains.

They ran and rattled to the abandoned stall
where coffee and teapots sat in rings of rust.
On plastic seats they sat watching the rainfall
playing X's and O's in the table's dust.

The sun broke through and mopped up puddles. Trees shook
water from their leaves, cracking athritic bones.
Salty air tickled their bellies. The boy took
up his can. Lunch was waiting. They headed home.

Cerri Mynihan

I met Cerri last night when I attended Rathmines Writer's Group for the first time. They meet every other Thursday in the presbytarian church in Rathgar, South Dublin. Everybody brings a piece of prose or a poem, along with enough copies for the rest of the group, and then read it out. After they read the rest of the group criticise it and finish on the reader responding to the criticism. Basic stuff, but a nice enough bunch. Cerri's poem struck me as she read it like the percussion section of an orchestra, all crash and heavy stress, but bustling along its own way in a distinctive manner which shows the girl has talent.

DREAM SONG

Over the last few weeks I have been dreaming in language. Depending on what I have been writing before I go to sleep, it can be prose, poetry or song, and last night I had a song dream, but as is usual, most of it dissapeared on waking like footprints from a tide washed beach. The only line I can remember is

Fill the sky and paint the stars.

I had just nodded off when it came, and though I was asleep, I knew I was asleep and the song was a dream, which got me excited as my first thought was to try and remember the words and write them down on waking.

A few days before this I was dreaming in critical prose, the language all about

Returning from the front line of the poetry war...in the trenches...

But last night It was more powerful than the prose dreams, because when the song started up it was ringing powerfully in my head and I was very much aware what was happening, even though I was slumbered. The song was accompanied by music and after the first two lines I started to think that I wouldn't be able to remember it all when I woke up. The song went on for about eight lines in total before I woke, and I repeated the above line a few times and hoped it would stick in my mind the following day. I had almost forgotten about it, but I just visited Peter Sirr's blogspot (Poetry Ireland Mag Editor) and he had a post about a dream, which prompted me to wizz over here and write.

If anyone from the Times is reading this, you know it makes sense, and here's a bit of fluff I left on one of the chatboards I use to agitate comedy.

My name is Woolie
da bully lovin sheep shaggar
fillin up dem shelves at da
muther fockin Asda mon

D'yers get me white boy?
D'yer's know where mon blood
from mon? From da Northside laah
where dem police and thieves
is nightly fightin in Bridge Street
by da mon Michael Hunters mon

'n in dem Nursery school mon
where me 'n my crew go wiv
the cider, suppin in dem wendy house
after army cadets on wednesday mon

where we keep our guns
'n shout about left right
left right left wheeel!!

coz wheeze is da stormtroopin
coolsters
gettin bladdered on the park n composin

which don't take no time
coz I'm a witness of love lookin down from the top
froo the bottom of a pint pot laah.

I rock the mic with the wrong
bodies bein seasick 'n teasin the family Houston like wot's on the
Robbie records I got for me birthday, before I got in trouble wiv the police for shootin me grandad for his pension muffa focker
so spread dem wings and fall apart wiv the heart of a dead end bar outline.
Flicker it naggard,

coz I'm da nigga goan blow you way mon.

SLOPPY BOB

One of the registers in my vocal repetoire is Scalljah, who morphed out of Sloppy Bob. Sloppy Bob is a comedy poet who came to me after I wrote a piece purely rhyme driven. Bob is Lancastrian and Scalljah scouse, which is the local vernacular term for a Liverpool person.

At the time I wrote him in Feb 2003, I had just filled my first writer's journal and was in the second year of university. When I re read the journal, the previous 18 months of instinctively plodding along through education, not knowing how the accumulation of knowledge would add up, suddenly became clear. I could consciously discern on the page what I was unconscious of when I had been writing it; discern outlines I was unaware of before my study of various modern writers such as Mayakovsky had switched on a light of learning.

The first fruits I retreived from this harvest of deeper understanding were two poems that I got from a trip to Spain documented on the journal's pages. As I re-read I could see little snippets of poetry in the prose, and I culled two lyric poems from them. The first lines of one, named after the campsite

My gaze is drawn to where
mountains cut the pale blue of dusk
with subtle thrusting lines that taper
to horizons edge and melt into the sea.

Twinkiling lights of fishing boats bob
along the middle distance
as the intermittant cry of peacocks
pierce the midnight air......

I can't remember the rest.

It was as if I had stumbled on a hidden code I had written, unaware I was doing so at the time, and although I cannot recollect the exact sequence of events, I ended up deciding to write a poem purely for rhyme.

I had recently been to the annual college poetry night and a poet had said, very self importantly, about being the "Ex-poet in residence" of a local cathedral, which I heard as pure comedy. Ungrasping of the irony when boasting about where he no longer worked. I was at home playing with this conceit of poet in residence, thinking of I am the poet in residence of..the bedroom at the top of the stairs....Moorgate bogs every Tuesday....Hamleys toy shop...the broom cupboard... etc. I eventually settled on the lines


Hello ladies and gentlemen
my name is Sloppy Bob
I'm usually Slippy Bob
but I've been having terrible trouble
with my vowels.

I'm the poet in residence of
the phonebox.....

and I then lengthened the conceit of phonebox resident

....just outside
every other Sunday
in the summer months
4 till 5
AM


and then wrote purely for rhyme, looking no further than coming up with a small section, trying to rhyme every syllable as much as possible, in this case with the "box" of phonebox, "Sunday" and "AM."

Block bookings taken
minimum five up to about nine
depending on the weather

So you can see that everything assonates, consonates or rhymes, and this is how I wrote it, with no regard to sense. And as I wrote it a narrative emerged, bit by bit, which more or less steered itself. It was as though I were removed from the process, like when I first re-read the journal and saw an intelligence and movement I was unaware of at the time I was making the entries a year or so previously.

You can also find me
playing darts and pool
daily
in the Blue Sphinx
where they'll put your car keys
behind the bar if you've had too
much to drink
smoke, sniff, or if you're having
a bad trip on a dodgy pill them lads
from the Lipton tower blocks have
been knocking out.

I'm very reliable
when I'm not pissed
or high as a kite on crack or smack
which
if I'm honest
at the minute's
erm..quite a bit.

I've got special OAP rates,
some great discounts for schoolchildren,
and I do private tuition, in the comfort
of your own home.

I don't smoke,
wash, drive, or perform live in
situations which are non PC,

tolerate discrimination against minorities;
majorities, or, any section of society
who feel threatened by the pernicious influence of,
poets who are shit;

like my ex,-mate,
Peter.

He's got no grasp of meter,
his line breaks aren't that great,
his rhyme schemes are very weak, and
his central conceits, are crap.

We've not been speaking since he robbed
my midweek spot down the job club,
after the co-ordinator of the poetry workshop and me
had had a falling out,
about, the best way to teach the unemployed
of West Drayton, how to rhyme effectively;
when they're on an interview for a job.

I'd also like to mention, that
my Girlfriend, Sonja,
an asylumn seeker from Eastern Crounjia,
is available for work of any nature,
usually indoors, cash in hand;
though now the ASBO order's nearly over
she can work outdoors in about two weeks.

Ooh, and; I'm nearly forgetting, our Mandy;
Who's a secretary,
and a dancer;
fully clothed,
though she is open for negotiation,
if the price is right;
usually fifty quid.

Also, if you need a bloke to be
doing out around your house;
I had a word with our Shane last night
just after he got released
from the custody suite of the high street cop shop.

Now that witness has disappeared,
They've got nothing on him,
so, he's in the clear and actively seeking a bit of work,
around houses.

He particularly likes helping elderly people,
who are housebound and get confused,
because he's very caring and hands on,
as long as he's getting paid every Friday in cash.

My latest commission is from a multi millionaire businessmen,
who wishes to remain anonymous for reasons I can't divulge.

He wants me to extol the virtues, in rhyme, of a wide range of
quality toilet rolls; washing up liquids,
bleaches and a whole host of other
domestic products;
including toilet ducks.

I first met him through a mate
when I did a gig on a boat.
He wanted me to compose the contents
of a, suicide note
for someone he was in disagreement with.

He offered me sixty quid, cash,
on the spot, no questions asked,
which is not to be sniffed at
when you're a struggling poet
on the lower rate sickness benefit.

He wanted to keep it dignified
so the family wouldn't be getting to upset,
as they learned of his sad demise,
when they fished his body out the river;
so, I obliged and he give us an extra tenner
for a job well done.

The toilet products gig's ongoing at the moment,
so don't feel shy, about offering me,
any work, in rhyme
you might have coming up.

HANGING

A couple of nights ago I read the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint, who was the UK's most prolific executioner. His total hangings numbered around 450, and the most in one day was 27 war criminals, as just after the second world war business was booming. His father and uncle were both hangmen and he decided to go into the neck stretching business when he guessed what his father did. He called his work The Craft and believed he had been destined to become one by a higher power.

Pierrepoint comes across as a strangely humane and highly intelligent man whose chief concern was giving the condemed a swift and dignified death. He resigned in 1956 after an argument with his employer about his fees. He'd gone to a prison to hang someone who recieved a reprieve and they offered him £1 of his usual £15 fee.

In his 1974 autobiography Executioner: Pierrepoint he comes out against capital punishment, saying -

I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people...The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.

He wrote that the vast majority of those he executed went to their deaths, if not exactly bravely, with a degree of self enforced dignity, and as many were domestic murders committed in the flames of passion, he reckons that the death penalty was a waste of time. He also points out the arbitary nature of public opinion. Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain, and her sentance had a huge public response, and at the time of her hanging had a wave of protestors outside the prison; but a week previously when he executed another woman, no one was interested. Ellis was an attractive nightclub hostess, whereas the women a week before was a dowdy female with no one behind her to raise the flag of public awareness, so she was swept aside and forgotten.

St Patricks day was on Friday, and I wrote a piece then which I couldn't post until now. I have been unable to get online since Friday due to a drinking session.

~~

ST PATRICKS DAY - A BIT LATE

It's 6.50pm on St Patrick's day and I am at Posey Flame HQ here in my office at the blather academy internet cafe, scoring a noised call for those readers wishing to join the craic party at the front line of love. There are numerous high spirited mobs accoutred in novelty Oirish attire, the common denominator of apparel being an oversized fluffy top hat of Guinness, green and gold.

Many individuals have also opted for comedy cut away bum shorts revealing plastic buttocks with the legend pougue mahone written on them. This translates as Kiss my arse, one of the many national catchphrases, along with get fecked, and feck off yer stupid sock cooking mother feckin comtin twot. The usual reply to such pleasantries is Thanks a million, and the overall impression today in this land of a thousand welcomes, is one of a wave of Christmas trees disporting along the streets in a riot of boozed up bonhomie.

Lots of folk have tricolours and shamrocks emblazoned on their painted faces and are joyfully sounding in drunken release, whoops, whoohaas and whehaays to puncture the darkening sky of a cold March evening. Insulated in beer coats and goggles unbridled humanity is being celebrated in Dublin’s heartland, where saints and sinners commingle as one amaphorous mass bedecked in a glittering fantasy to wallow in the carnival of total Irishness.

As I traversed the crowded laneways towards this public hermit open access area where concentration occasionally becomes contemplation, I encountered several drunken Americans standing staggered on the pavement outside the Lord Edward Pub at Christchirch hailing all passsers by with the greeting Happy At Patricks day, in a register one associates with declarations of world peace. The world and his dog has descended on Dublin to partake of the real thing and many will return to their abodes across the sea bearing self-congratulatory meins which say

Yes, I too was Irish for a time.

The history of Gaelic Ireland is vast and until recently was pretty inaccessible to the layman, but behind the didlee dee waffle me wotnots, many who come here seldom see beyond, the heart of a poetic nation ticks its timeless tune. When the thrill seekers have left party central and returned to their normal lives, the full time residents will carry on living in this sophisticated place of many layers, where instinct and sense lead life in a way which can only be described as natural.

Once the reality of the past is unshackled from cliché and falshood, the indefinable factor X of Ireland can be stripped back to lay bare its logical and understandable components, and the hocus pocus dissolves to leave an impression of a truly unique and vibrant land, if somewhat predisposed to fantasy and exageration.


~~~~~~~~


This is a poem I wrote two years ago, just before I left England to come and live here.

I had been at writing school for three years and 40% of my time had been taken up by the extra-curricular study of Irish history, from the Invasion myths which list the various waves of invaders who first came during the time of the Fir Bolg race, right through to contemporary times. As I came to the end of my study and realised I was only good for poetry, I realised I had two choices. Stay in England and write poetry as a plastic paddy banging on about some place I only knew through books, or come here and see how the writing panned out. Two years later I'm still here, and this was one of the last poems I wrote before I left the UK.


SIDHING

The wish of the will of the whispering dead
the fill of the lake on the black cloud ahead
the call of the wild and the crash of the dawn
belong to the memory of some terrible storm
that once raged at the living out of all sense
and takes our beginning to a place of no rest.
And so we begin

Long days gone and long days more will
pass over the West and bring talk of a sky
where the eagle above washes its wings by
the wind of the Sidhe on all souls night. And
every night and day when he drew breath a
man who lived by a blue running brook on
Achill gave chase to the thoughts when his
blood ran hot in days long since slipped
into memory.

And his mother wanted only bread and a
small portion of meager fare from the
ground her father ploughed with bare
hands and feet hardened on the western
rocks of an unforgiving landscape.

Here the wind took seven years of a man's
life and the calm sun of a long summer
added seven more. Here the wild sweep of
chattering folk told tales spoken of since -
long before the first memory set in ogham
the words of a poet cut into stone and bark.

Where a language whispered by hands
needed only a keen mind and a tribe druid
to teach how to mirror trees.

But those days disappeared in the slow burn
before a final sharp flame of the dying
culture snuffed out and sailed to the four
corners of earth to take root elsewhere.
and the roots intertwined and grew strong
from the hard times remembered now in
the folktales and anecdotes told by older
members of the tribe.

A Phoenix rising in a mist swells of
tears is our character mirroring that west
of eternal change and numerous weather.
It tells how the collective souls who
lived and died in the centuries of a
presence there live on in the thoughts
that we harbour but don't know why.

Two thousand years in the same tongue
raises few questions and ties the bind our
nation shares, but when the other tongue
took over and the people dispersed the
bonds were such a strength that mere
words were only surface and what lay
behind was a structure of thought laid on
a prehistoric foundation of kith, kin and
blood found in aboriginal places
elsewhere.

Far away in time, some say, a common
stock existed in prehistory at Le Taine
before the big move West when Rome
held Europe in an imperial grip.

And as the other Celts became
subdued, our corner held fast to run a
course untouched by Caesar's penal
law, to keep an ancient European order
buried under Rome; one which carried
on its own way until Cromwell struck his
curse and began to extinguish the Gaelic
way of life.

But still we lingered on and kept our pride
until a dying ember's final comedy of error
repossessed a nation for those whose hope
was buried deep as the forgotten tongue of
druids.

Notes:


Sidhe -- The Sidhe pronounced 'shee' are considered
to be a distinct race, quite separate from human. Sidhe literally means 'people of the (faery) hills'. In mythology they were originally the Tuatha De Dannan, who were the penultimate race displaced by the Milesians.

Ogham -- ancient Irish/Celtic writing system, complete with numerous images and illustrations.

Hi Yall.

Dear Reader

If you typed Irish Poetry into msn and ended up here, stop a while and have a leisurely read. If you have any questions on poetry, Irish or otherwise, I'm the ideal person to ask, as I am a complete poetry geek who is only too happy to help, so just leave any queries in the comment box and I'll respond with the full vigour of one whose life is spent in constant daydream.

Todays post is a short one; a poem I spent the last two days working up. If you are a regular reader you may know that I am a bit of a disaster when it comes to losing stuff. If I added up all my losses over the last 20 years they would fill a small house, and the number of manuscript books that have disappeared is a joke. Another one went a few days back, 97 pages in, but the most serious loss was about 7 weeks ago when I lost a coat that had a diary in it, which was in the first stage of evolving into the main repository of poems. I won't bore you with the details, but a new way of working and style of writing was emerging which was directly linked to the physical size of the diary, and I had three drafts of poems on there when it went. I can't replace it as they don't have them in the shops here in Dublin and I bought a pocket notebook but it isn't the same. But I perservered and over the last two days magaed to recapture the process that went when I lost the diary, and this is the result.

I write in all styles from high blown esoteric stuff like this example, right through to comedy rap, so if this one doesn't float your boat, my first collection of poetry will soon be available on another part of the site.

Have a nice day.

The Coming Instructors

I recognise speech mirrors silence
and words rise like bricks
from unknown pools when instinct
builds a bridge that shines
upon the hidden outline
of their mind reflecting its
flawed form for all to read.

~~

Their brain
draws waves from reality's canvas
and their willpower moves mine
like hands at an oracle
prodding a lump of knowledge
to stir my first alertness of the other world
and its language which kindles a tune whose flame
is the internal universe ticking my clockwork
song in a unique time truthful to their genius

~~

They are understanding givers
who divine what dream
in a cloud above stars
will breathe in light and make reality
sing of life's return to a slumbered weave
of painted silence with the memory of
one slipped bottle dropped
from a toddler's fingers
the morning milk struck land
and grounded outside a door
to shatter in a puff of broken glass

smashing itself into the mind
by sheer force of will as a first
remembered act of childhood
revealed behind the door of sleep
I make believe my soundless unseen
wave like ripple
lapping on their screen of thought
can open.

LAMENT

I went to Damar Hall last night to listen to seven poets launch chapbooks. Belfast's Lapwing Press was the publisher who brought an eclectic mix of poets to Dublin and let them loose in the basement of poesy where they wove their magic for about fifteen minutes each, with a comfort break after the first four. I am unable to give a full account because I lost my manuscript book last night after decanting to Whelans Pub and then next door to the Village, an uber cool hangout for the cash flush gargler wanting to continue the late night ambience after throw out time. I wasn't even drunk. I had met a small party in Whelans and they coaxed me to follow them in to the Village, and as I am only barred from most of the boozers in Temple Bar, which is a good ten minutes away, I thought I would be OK drinking to collapse in this trendy haven. I had only been in there a few minutes when an African bouncer came over and asked me to leave. When I emerged onto the pavement I realised my book was still in there, and he let me back in to have a quick supervised scout around the 2.30am scene, but the lights, noise and general disorderly social array were not condusive to success and I decided to come back later. I went there tonight and an Italian barman affected an air of supreme indifference to my plight. When I asked if my book was about, the sum total of his inquiry consisted of a glance at the till and a shrug of the shoulders. I will have to telephone the office staff and try to impress upon them the seriousness of my loss.

The fellas whose business is standing in pub doorways are always on the lookout for a bit of argy bargy aren't they? And now they have two way earpieces and walkie talkies the overall register of their meins is more secret service and CIA than sup hole standabouts. The Village is known for the bands that appear there, and there's many an artist who has strutted the Village boards who''s first gig was strumming air guitars in front of a bedroom mirror, and I can imagine most doormen also indulge in the bouncer equivalent; practicing facial technique as part of the training regime. They all have that bored glacial hue which is the signature of a contemporary social life, and one easy to work up if standing outside a pub is your trade. And as there is not much action in the job, they have to make some work whenever they can get it, so at least I served as another statistic in the job life for one of Ireland's new workers.

But the readings went well and Denis the Lapwing head honcho left me with a memorable statistic. He said that 80% of poetry books are bought by women, but only 20% of poets who get published are from the fairer sex. And Denis was putting this right as 5 of the seven were women, several of whom adjourned to Nearys pub afterwards to engage in post reading poetry chat. I went there with Rob MacKenna, who is from Meath and a very talented poet who you can listen to on the audio site.

Scalljah's Sound House

Also in Nearys was Peter Sirr and Greg Delanty, who said they had read the review I wrote on Delanty's book launch the other week.

Delanty Book Launch

Sirr very kindly put up with me blathering on about the Cauldron of Poesy whilst pretending to appear interested. Maybe I wouldn't have got booted out of the Village if they were there?

Gissa Job

Yesterday's first post related a dream I had which I think may have been a predictive one, precursing the next stage of my writerly development, which I am hoping will be the oracular stage. In the old bardic schools, this stage came in the eighth year of training, and led to Ollamh status, or master-poet. There are no records stating the exact length of time it took to become an Ollamh, but it is specualated as being between 12-20 years. 20 comes from Ceaser, who wrote that it took 20 years to become a druid, who the old bardic schools were directly evolved from. It's closest contemporary equivalent would be beginning the final slog of a PhD, and the Ollamh title itself is still used in Irish academia and is the equivalent of a Professor in English.

Not everyone was able to go for Ollamh, because much of the practice related to divinatory or otherworldly practice. And whilst today's world of science can poo poo this side of the practice, they believed in it at the time. Poetic practice in Ireland during Gaelic times was enourmously complex and would need far more than a blog post to cover the very basics. It is a vast topic and mind blowingly different from any other poetic culture, with the irony being that very few contemporary poets have even the smallest idea on the reality of it. For example, the ultimate form of satire, (whose practitioners needed a license, like Doctors) was the Glam Dicen, which was a legal religio-magical ceremony used to dispose unjust kings and involved around 100 poets and petty kings, with the crucial leagal moment taking place next to a whitethorn bush on a hilltop at a point were several tribal land boundaries met. The head poet would chant the poem and bow away from the tree, and if it was meant to be the unjust kings face would rise with blisters and he would be unable to govern. In Gaelic law a king was debarred if he had any physical blemishes.

*

By the end of training an Ollamh would have to have memorised around 150 ogham tables, (memory aids) many hundreds of myths, poems, verse metres and precise grammatical rules of composition. They had numerous functions and were responsible for Irish lawmaking, much of which is still on record. This corpus of law goes under the name Fenechas or Brehon law, which was entirely civil, without Roman influence and a very sophisticated and fair system. The basic difference between Roman and Gaelic law is that Roman law is a Penal concept, which basically means if you do wrong, you get punished, whilst the Gaelic system was one of restitution and could be summed up if you've done wrong, now this is what you have to do to put it right.

The societal bonds were based on the Derbfine, which is four generations of poeple from a great grandparent to a great grandchild, and was the basic unit in society from which all else sprung. Victims of lawbreakers would always be recompensated because if a wrongdoer defaulted on their fines, the immediate members in their derbfine became responsible. So if John Smith owed Alan Jones four cows for breaking his legs in a drunken fight and didn't pay, John Smith's family would become liable. By far the worst thing that could happen to a person in this society was to be cast out by their family, as they would have no derbfine protection, so it was a self governing system.

Here are some links

The Fénechas and Gaelic Society, an Introduction and Overview

Numerous articles by Fenechas expert Breandán Uí Ciarraide

This one is a dedicated internet group who discuss and air various Brehon and Fenachas topics here

Fenechas Discussion Group

And whilst it is impossible to recreate the course of study the original bards undertook, the outcome of Ollamh training resulted in being able to waffle high grade blather to all and sundry.

Ollamhs were practising hereditary lawyer-poets whose contemporaries, (should the art not have died out during the start of the 17C) would now be able to do things like turn themselves into a salmon, a ten foot teenager, a conjourers wig, an office memo directing top down organisational change, or turn black to white and vice versa; using only the power of their minds, with the relevant incantations being delivered via watching bugs bunny on the cartoon network.

And whilst this is obviously tongue in cheek, the essence of their practice was that they were highly trained word jugglers or sorcerers of sound, and their qualifications would be the equvalent of Noah Chomsky's ongoing post-doctoral practice in quantumn linguistics. Not that such a topic is formally in existence, but these people had custody of langauge that was 1000's of years old, and the magical side to their practice, whilst now lost, rooted in direct and unbroken lineage back to druidic practice. This system is only 300 years severed, unlike the 2000 year dead Greek and Roman poetic templates English Language poetic tradition roots itself in. So whilst poets today will never be able to travel through space and time with a few well placed spells and incantations, the ultimate lineage of today's pension plan minstrels does have a mystic beginning.

*

This post will tie my recent experience in with current theory on the otherworldly side of poetic practice from the main Irish Ollamh, Seamus Heaney, who can legitimately be termed the Mossbawn Bard or Magus, as his prose writing on the poetic art is the most lucid I have read.

*

Heaney has a basic three point analogy which he uses to illustrate the trajectory of a poets career. He takes the owl calling metaphor outlined by Wordsworth in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads and extends on it to show the fundamental changes that occur in the development of the poet during their writing career. Wordsworth describes how he wandered the woods of Cumbria as a child making owl calls with his cupped hands, and tells of the surprise and joy that came when he managed the very first call after many failed attempts.

He then indulged in this activity for the sheer thrill of doing it, until one time, the owl returned his call. After a few times of returned calls the novelty wore off, and he felt himself to be bit of a pro; but just as he was getting used to imitating reality and fooling it into returning his call, the time came when he called and the owl did not return the sound. In the silence that followed, a flood of images or understanding from the universal poetic, or what Yeats called the "anima mundi" became imprinted on his mind, and from this he learnt a fundamental lesson, that at the end of sound is silence.

*

Heaney uses this narrative to illustrate his argument that there are three
stages of development as a poet. The first is when, like the young
Wordsworth making owl calls in the woods of Cumbria, you rejoice in the
sheer novelty and joy of realising you can do it, the very first time you
manage it after much trying .

The next stage is when the owl calls back and you go up a level of skill, understanding that you are pretty handy at this imitating sound lark, and this would be the stage most poets reach and work at.

The final stage however, and one which not every poet reaches, is when the owl no longer calls back and a silence is returned. There is a common view held by many soldiers of song that at the end of poetry is silence; a view which basically translates to the gaining of an axiomatic understanding on the essence of poetry.

On Wednesday last this moment occured to me as I was walking home from Whelans pub singing the Oasis song Maybe.

Up until February 2003 I believed that I was tone deaf, had no musical ability and was unable to hold a note when attempting to sing. However a number of times I had actually dreamt in song, with full musical accompaniament and words; and upon waking would be somewhat confused as I thought I was completely unmusical. These dreams were literally me making up a song in my dreams, both words and music, and although I never gave it much thought it was an oddity I could not work out.

Then one morning in February 2003 I was walking to the college where I was studying in the second year of my writing studies and drama degree, and I began singing Maybe by Oasis and actually managed to hold the note. I can recall the exact moment, as I surprised myself and realised I must be able to sing after all. It was at this point that the dreaming in song made complete sense. This song therefore represents my owl call, as it was the first song I managed to correctly sing, like Wordsworth's first owl call, after many fumbled attempts.

On Wednesday last, just as I was rounding the corner of George Street in Dublin, around 3am singing Maybe, I felt compelled to cease singing and was immediately flooded by a fundamental and silent understanding about poetry. I was hit by a feeling of wonder and scurried home pondering what it meant. The next day I realised I may have reached the crossroads and divination was a gift ready to froth over my cauldron. And the powerful snippet of dream which woke me a few nights prior to this incident and which I describe in yesterdays post, I now take to be another sign or precurser that a new stage is upon me.

The immedite results of this was the cessation of smoking and boozing, as I forcefully realised that now is the ideal time to change my persona from that of a gifted pisshead poet, and into that of a long haul fresh faced rhymster who can get the granny glasses glinting as easliy as drawing young strutters into a room of poesy where they will hopefully discover a practitioner relating a truthful otherworldy vibe.

*

Heaney's three stage idea is a recycling of his basic premises on the poetic art, and one I heard him expound in November 2004 at St Patricks College in Dublin, when he gave a lecture on Patrick Kavanagh. His basic argument is that you start out writing and go along a certain way, and just at the point when you think you have gained a fundamental skill or understanding, (which roughly equates to when you start getting complacent about the gift) you realise that the amount of knowledge you hold is very little, and that when this understanding occurs is when the real start of the journey begins.

He says that as a poet you are always in a liminal state of limbo. You feel confirmed by the last poem you wrote, but feel threatened by the elusiveness of the next one. That's certainly how I feel, and when I look back on all my writing, in some ways, it's as if it is another person who has written it, but I know it's me and this helps to foster a feeling of long term stability.

Mother Love

The post immediately below this one is a bit heavy going for the more casual reader, so I thought I'd top it with a lite post and poem. I was reading that last night Sat 12 March, there was an Irish bloggers award bash in Dublin. As usual I heard about it the day after and missed out on meeting my fellow Irish bloggers. With that in mind, this poem needs no explanatory notes. It was written for my mother.


MOTHER

Mother
I will love you
in a thousand years from now
when the sands of time have
worn our bones to dust
and we are both at rest
beneath the film of earth
which sprung us to life.

And I will love you when
eternity holds
pincered in its grasp
the memories of our long
forgotten lives

which dissappear into the
ether like a single rising breath
and mingle with humanity's mass
to travel as the sap of sunlight

ascending through consciousness
in one short flash
before darkness snaps and
swallows us back into the womb

sweeps us to the moment
when the pith and gristle of
existence can begin
as our souls once more unfold
upon the threshold at the nexus
of life and start swimming from
the shallows to the deep

DREAMING

About a week ago a lucid snippet of dream caused me to suddenly awake from my slumbers and I have been puzzling its significance since then, wondering if it was a sign that the oracular or divinatory stage of my development is now possible.

I don't fully understand what this stage is all about and only have my own poetic experience to go by, but the process used to chart the topography I believe I’m anchored in and moving through, is one of intuition and this very powerful dream-snatch is one of the few I have experienced which I instinctively feel to be predictive.

Demios Oneiron is the Village of Dreams on the way to Hades in Greek myth and Artemidorus of Daldis in Asia Mionor was a 2C Roman writer who wrote the Oneirocritica, a critical study of 3000 people’s dreams. This was the first text Guttenberg printed after the bible, and indicates the importance it was held in during the dawning days of mass print.

Artemidorus categorized five dream states, 3 predictive and 2 non-predictive. The 3 predictive are –

1 – Oneiros – allegorical/symbolic

2 – Homora/visio - literal predictive

3 - Chrematismos/Oraculum – an apparition of God or other who tells fortune

But back to the dream. I was facing a small audience of fellow poets from the weekly Write and Recite grouping, and I was about to deliver a poem from memory. We were in some kind of half enclosed half outdoor environment and there was an invisible microphone in front of me, in the sense of I had a clear focus on exactly where my mouth had to position itself to speak. My intention was to lean back slightly, physically swivel round a full revolution on my right foot and, as I stomped down my left foot on successfully completing this manoeuvre, launch into a poem.

At the moment of first turning I noticed a tree to the left of me in a first budding of spring leaves which were the colour of pale apple skin and I said

we should give thanks for this,

- opining we should thank the creator for all life. As I went through the full revolution, everything occured in slow motion, and as the turn continued I immediately saw the back of a monk dressed in a brown woollen habit who was performing some kind of ceremony. I instinctively knew that I was witnessing, and had become part of, a scene from the 7C.

If you imagine a full circle of 360 degrees and a line down the middle splitting it in two, then the 21C audience of fellow poets were awaiting my performance in one half and did not see the 7C scene I had suddenly become privy to and which was happening opposite them in the opposing semi circle. It was as though they were facing an invisible three dimensional cinema screen showing a scene which ran down a centre line, and I had straddled either threshold to became part of these two realities simultaneously.

As soon as I caught site of the monk I felt an incredible surge of energy, as though I were a jump jet about to take off, and before my back was fully turned on the poet audience they witnessed my facial reaction to what I was seeing. But unaware of what I saw, they misread my expression and mistook it for one which signalled that I was going into comedic mode, and the first rumblings of a laughter cloud began to surge amongst them in that half of my dual reality. I realised that there had been some kind of slippage or kink in the fabric of the continuum and I had inadvertently become enmeshed in two existences at once, and a millisecond before completing the revolution I awoke with a start.

Artemidorus believed that the interpretation of dreams is nothing other than the juxtaposition of similarities.....

......and with one significant alteration, I can mangle this quote into service as the maxim describing my essential theory of poetry –

Poetry is nothing other than metaphor, or the juxtaposition of difference.

Essentially a combining of difference, which Samuel Johnston summed up in his essay on the metaphysical poets of the 17C

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

The basics of this, and the smallest component of a poem are startling word combinations that do not usually appear side by side, which constitute the kernel unitary pieces of poetry: words like - concrete/icecream tarmac/bagpipes or paperweight/tractor.

So these lie, like the start point in a set of concentric ripples, at the heart of the poetic art, and the furthest extension of them is the basic idea behind the conceit of a poem. So in Heaney's 1966 poem Digging,the various binary differences that appear in one whole to form the outer reaches of the basic conceits are -

father/son manual/mental pen/spade

and some of the startling word combinations are -

squat pen and loving the cool hardness.


From what I can gather through piecing together the various writings on Celtic poets from the bardic tradition, divinatory training began in the eighth year of study and culminated in Ollamh status. However not every poet was capable of oracular practice because the highest level of poetic insight was only gained by those who experienced the widest range of joy and sorrow.

The blueprint of

Amergin's 7C Cauldron of Poesie

poem outlining how the poetic gift operates, states that everyone is born with three cauldrons in them.

A cauldron of Incubation - which is born upright in every person and which distributes wisdom in their youth.

A cauldron of wisdom, which is born on its lips (upside down) and which distributes wisdom in every art including poetry

A cauldron of motion, which is born on its lips in ignorant people and slanted in those with the poetic gift.

The cauldron of incubation and wisdom are only mentioned once and it is clear from the text that the cauldron of motion is by far the most significant, as this represents the potential and natural poetic capacity one is born with. The poem states that 50% of people are born with the cauldron slanted, and 50% with it on its lips or upside down.

So a person born with a slanted cauldron of motion is born with poetic potential, as it means it will be possible to fill up, and can be visualized like a glass tilted at 45 degrees beneath a tap, whose pouring of water will enter the glass. Every other person who is born with it on its lips means that their container is upside down and will be unable to fill, much like pouring water onto an upside down glass.

The water in this case comes in the form of the four human sorrows and four human joys in life, as outlined in the poem. Each joy or sorrow experienced is capable of turning the cauldron of motion, and the more it turns the more upright it becomes, until, in those who acheive the Highest Streams, it ends up on its back, and the highest ridges of poetic wisdom have been reached where the oracular poet's waffle and insight can froth over.

When the text is analysed it is pretty simple and commonsensical, as what it says is that anyone born with the poetic gift has the potential to reach the highest streams, but these will only come to those who experience the widest range of joy and sorrow, and couple it with hard writerly graft and constant study. Like any other profession, it is not necessarily the most naturally gifted who reach the top, but those who stick at it and go the full course. Michael Caine has an apt analogy which illustrates this idea. He says that actors from his generation found success through hanging on whilst everyone else dropped off, and it was more a case of the last few standing than the swiftest and most able being winners in the race.

The 50% division of who has natural capacity may be arbitary, but it reflects the fact that some are born with more natural linguistic ability than others. The motion of the cauldron is described –

What is this motion? Not hard; an artistic turning or artistic after-turning or artistic journey, i.e., it bestows good wisdom and nobility and honor after turning,

I picture the cauldron of motion as being the repository of our life experience, and how we choose fill, ie live our life, dictates how our poetic development turns out (no pun intended) and I am trying to figure how this turning type dream connects to the cauldron text. Maybe it's my equavalent of Yeats' automatic writing and the instructors who came and gave him metaphors to use in his writing.

But the quote which resonates with me most is by Pierre Curie, the husband of Marie, who stated -

You have to make your life a dream in order for your dreams to become reality.

WRITE THROUGH

The two examples here chart the trajectory of my acquisition of a form called write through, which is when you use the words of one text and re-configure them into a different one.

The examples are the result of a very good exercise the poet can use to sharpen and focus their concentrational ability.

Paul Durcan

, in his Ireland Professor of poetry lecture on 15 February 2006, said something along the lines of poetry being the ability to turn concentration into contemplation. As though by sheer force of will you can concentrate something into poetic life; which conjours up

a John MacNamee

phrase, bending the perimeters of consciousness. And this exercise certainly does that.

I wrote these two in May 2004, a month before I left writing school for a full time voluntary career in alcoholism and literary oblivion. I was sitting at my computer looking out into the back garden and the green spring view spurred me into setting about writing a scenary piece. I was plodding on with the description for an hour or so and just as tedium started to kick in my eye aprehended Ted Hughs's Lupercal and Sylvia Plath's The Collossus perched on the top of the monitor screen. I had got them out of the college library and was due to read them that night. As I scribbled away, an idea came after writing the line
my eye turns to
Lupercal resting on the Collossus.

I decided to juggle what I had already written and reconfigure the exact same words to create the second half of the piece. I would use all the words except Lupercal resting on the Collossus, which would only appear once, acting as a dividing line at the mid way point of the piece. I used all the same words, including the short conjoining words like and, then, the, etc. This isn't really a poem I would put in my collected, more a low grade abstraction which serves only as an example of the form. The words are irrelevant really, as they serve to show the process and demonstrate my first effort at this form.

Beyond the thin crevasse an upward thrust of green
and a snow like freeze of mottled tan
hawk across to subtle shades of tapering yellow,
brush verde’s tender final trickle
and caper to the edge of left.

A rake of garment
in stark white synthetic blue
hang inert
amidst the narrow band of late spring colour
whose tumbles of profuse symmetry merge
in precise disorder with the May dusk.

Birds call excited
and cry unseen
to cajole a dog’s gruff response
in the fading light.

Falling inward the black mood
retreats with the blue night
and I cast for line of weight
in the measured glare of nature's balance
and switch on mind to symbol as my eye turns to

Lupercal resting on The Colossus

The two minds whose symmetry in precise disorder
hang profuse in a gruff stark black mood
- beyond the upward edge of natures tender balance -
hawk amidst the line unseen
in synthetic shades of inert weight
and band across the thin crevasse and thrust symbols,
which merge by tumble in a rake of mottled colour.

Yellow green and tan caper into a white,
falling like snow to freeze verde blue.

Then - as excited birds of the May dusk -
they call my measured glare inward
and taper in retreat to a final trickle
then cast their subtle narrow cry
and cajole and dog my garment of response
to the late spring nightlight left fading

A highly bland read that doesn't go much beyond novelty, and would certainly not have Neil Astley or Michael Schmidt beating a bath to my inbox with a set of golden handcuffs, or the Barnsley bard Ian MacMillan sticking a microphone in my face expecting magic.

However, doing this was the mental equivalent of knocking down a brick wall and re-assembling it, forcing my mind to percieve each component word and, because of this seperation process, become more attentive to the precise structure of the initial text and alert to every single word. My mind felt like it were straining itself through a seive, as though I had undergone a first bout of physical exercise after a long spell of sedentariness. The fruits of this brain flexing was a sharpening of its overall sense of awareness to individual words, as the mind tweeked to a higher frequency of recognition; like being able to differentiate individual trees in a wood or gaining night vision.

This exercise was another one along the way of training my brain to become more flexible and responsive to the esence of language. By using small texts to seperate and reconfigure, the mind develops its ability to chop up, jumble, juggle and re-lay language, just like a builder disassembling a structure to reclaim the material for other uses.

I also understand now, that the mental fizz that acts of such concentration in composition creates, equates exactly with one of the four poetic joys in

The Cauldron of Poesy

poem attributed to Amergin. This is translated by Rowan Laurie as the

joy of fitting poetic frenzy from the grinding away at the fair nuts of the nine hazels on the Well of Segais.

And creating the piece as a whole was a challenge whose pay off was a second of the 4 Amergin joys, which is the -

joy of the binding principle of wisdom after good (poetic) construction

Amergin's first joy perfectly describes the excitement we feel in our heads when composing, and the second captures the tranquil sense of completion which comes after our labours cease and their final product is there on-page to look upon and take poetic pleasure in; a sort of, "I made that" feeling, whicht engenders a sense of self dignity and pride.

So, with the mental froth in full bubble I decided to try again, but this time using a Hughes or Plath poem as the text to reconfigure. I read the books and settled on Plath's The Collossus. I wrote a 17 line run up before diving in and setting down the juggled Plath words.

Her's start after the line -----write through----- and are italicized; with the piece as a whole effectively being the second part of the above, blamanche like write through.

SYLVIA PLATH - WRITE THROUGH

Did she angle wonder on the grasp
extending reason her creation
drove wild beyond loathing,
by constantly digging in hunt of sound
to knit rock firm sharp pictures alive with,
like a gem stitched braid
upon whose surface
her eye discerned a myriad of texture?

Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterfly
wind chanced and framed like a Japanese print
of bold delicacy
fittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detail
where every line rehearsed perfection,
crisp as stalk fresh shoots?

Nosed in did her compass net an imprint of
discordant shadow in savage butt and jagged antinomy
absent of balance nature or measure

----------- write through---------

like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line?
Did she mix thirty years of laboured hours
in little pails and gluepots
to create an oracle married in shadow?
Crawl like an ant over immense dead stones
in the black fluted night
and proceed to entirely open
the lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?
Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throat
to bray at Orestiea,
or some Roman mule god with acanthine hair
scaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?
Was she never counted by her father
or others who
none the wiser
no longer listened
as she dredged her bawdy bones of mourning
and pieced together with blank eyes
her pithy historical mouthpiece
left to colour and stroke our ears?
Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of stars
which littered her tongue like lysol on clear white plates
climb ladders of weedy cypress jointed
by the wind of a blue sky arching above to
properley squat at some old forum and consider
landing keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?

This is a great method to use on small texts, particularly blogspot comments at various po mo sites, as you can take a slightly pompous sounding deposit and twist it about. It's not important to keep the exact same words I think, only for the very first one you do, as you effectively give yourself an unreal goal and acheive it once then slacken the rules to fit once done. Like deploying meter. Once you have that form to your own personal satisfaction, then you can use it how you wish.

Greg Delanty Collected Do

Yesterday I was in the drawing room at the Royal College of Surgeons witnessing Greg Delanty perform the significant operation of publicly birthing his Carcanet collected poem publication, which spans 1986-2006 and is a fusion of the seven books in his oeuvre. Being in the Surgeons is big time and only used to roll out large guns of the contemporary canon. Poets with the magic ingredient fingers don’t get put on; the oomph, spark and diddly dee jigger me wotsits from Tir nOg, which all Irish greats are famed as having in abundance. This was no ordinary Monday night launch; which have been held lately in the stark whitewashed basement of Damar hall, where mobile screens double as makeshift walls, shielding the audience from the sight of a humming computer bank.

An underground setting easily imaginable as the first choice destination for passengers travelling to eastern European cold spots this winter on CIA "rendition flights." A place where the run of the mill literary riff raff and lower orders launch their poetry books and christen them with several bottles of Poetry Ireland red or white, dished up in small plastic cups to deter the senior alcoholics from hogging the scarce supply of ale.

It was Sunday best all the way last night, as there was a full bar with robust measures freely available to all attendees, who were even trusted to sup from real glasses of ample size. Knocking back a few of these over the course of an hour or two means that the sensible boozer can set themselves up for a bargain night out. Instead of furtively drinking in the public parks with street drinkers, where there is a distinct lack of civilised exchange, the financially astute can lay down a firm base for further gargle whilst simultaneously imbibing the most cultural literary vibes in a city where to leisure is to learn. In Dublin it is possible to receive gratis what some happily pay through the nose for and is a feature I have attuned my radar to sniffing out, and one I greatly appreciate

The mob numbered around fifty, headed by he who shall remain nameless and a trio of warm up language workers eulogising a route of waffle to the Cork poet. First up to talk was Poetry Ireland director Joe Woods, who swiftly marked out what would happen next, spraying out guide lines which the duo following him engineered into a track of unbridled praise. Job done Joe was relieved from the next part of the operation by Carcanet publisher Michael Schmidt, who purred on site his small truck of words and emptied them as the short hardcore of spoken blurb upon which Boston University poetry professor Michael Ricks dolloped a final lay.

Schmidt’s address amounted to acknowledging Delanty as a talent in his stable who had spent a lot of time in America, informing us he (Schmidt) was approaching free bus pass age and saying Ricks had "defined the way I read poetry", when he taught him at Oxford. So, with the younger men out of the way Chris took centre stage and got to work on pumping up Greg, beginning with the history of how Delanty came to his attention. He told us how the widow of Alan Dowling, a man he considered untalented and described as a "bad rich poet" was responsible for setting up the prize in her dead husband's name, which brought a 24 year old Delanty to Ricks's notice and caused him to invite Greg to read at Cambridge. After that Delanty was off traipsing round the states carving out a career in verse and now he's back in the motherland with an emigre's bag of tricks to sing with.

A few TS Eliot quotes featured as the critical blueprints and buoys he used to construct and float his opinion that Delanty’s work contains "unholy glee and holy mirth" and that he "trusts his reader to take the point" without snickering at them. He quoted someone I failed to catch, saying that Delanty’s respect for the reader is because

"most people aren’t interested in poems because most poems aren’t interested in people, whereas Delanty "is."

He then read another quote written by Eliot at his most culturally paranoid, just before he took British citizenship. His old chestnut about the number of languages worth writing in being very small because only those with a national literature to draw on are somehow worthy. An argument whose logic would deny the world of English speaking American and Antipodean literature, and a quote which Ricks believes Eliot wrote in a very unsure state of mind, not really believing it himself. How this was woven into Delanty I cannot remember, but the Boston Prof continued by saying that what could be a cacophony in others, Delanty makes polyphonic, and what is left of his poetry is the "metal (feeling and thought) behind the words."

Ricks finished by reading the Delanty poem Phone Bird, in a speaking voice that made it impossible for me to detect when he had finished reading, and as he invited Delanty to step into the bardic circle to begin, claps drowned out his final few words.

Delanty read six poems competently enought and then we left to journey into the cold night air and go about our lives.

Is there a readership for poets who can write in more than one form?

Is mastering the discipline of writing under strict rules, be they metrical, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or any other genre, a practical piece of kit for the mental mountaineer wishing to ascend the peaks of language and reach the higher ridges of poetical thought?

During the three years of attending writing school in my home town of Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK, I came to believe that the way to acheive non-combatant status in the continual poetry wars and avoid being the critical cannon fodder for any one group or individual would be to compose in as many forms as my learning revealed, from metrical verse right through to avant-garde forms and the newer genre of performance poetry. Whilst there my programme evolved to centre on memorising each poem I wrote before they reached a final written form, by editing and nailing them orally in the college theatre’s rehearsal rooms.

Metrical poetry was an absent other from the syllabus, casting an unspoken of shadow we were implicitly encouraged to ignore and consider as all but extinct. Treat like an aged aristocrat gasping their last beneath an oxygen tent of nostalgia, or holed up in a grace and favour bedist of a bankrupt stately home, whose faded grandeur, grip and influence had completely loosened and been deemed irrelevant.

The study of meter had not been factored into our learning because the poetry classes, traced an outline of modern and post modern verse, (mostly American) which dealt with contemporary forms and thoughts the working majority of mainstream word churners choose to ignore, dismiss or consider as irrelevant; in much the same way as their poetry and poetics can be rubbished by the spiritual avant-garde offspring of artits like Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein or Bob Cobbing.

Artists, like me, in the work-place of Cyberia creating software aided sound, sight, concrete and even conceptual poetry containing no words. Inspired by John Cage’s silent concerto, 4 minutes thirty three seconds, this is a one off, and once in a career poem whose only successful execution was authored by Charles Bernstein, and is a poem he is incapable of sounding and can be recited by anyone anywhere on the planet with access to peace and quiet.

Our six semester hike through the range of modern verse began at the base camp of Imagism, where we were issued an all in one Ezra Pound bible, blueprint, trail guide and survival pack; filled with instructions and ingredients for, hopefully, constructing our own poetic philosophy over the course of the next three years. The accumulative wisdom we were to distill into a final document summing up our stance with the world as trainee poets, and so, theoretically, leave as fully operational linguists equipped to sell our dream fare in a modern and crowded market place where poesy retails to consumers of verse.

For three hours a week and six in the final year, we traversed the landscape of American modernism from our college classroom, journeying through the foothills of Black Mountain poetry to the summit of Charles Olson's projective verse theory; which most of us failed to grasp, although we all tried to appear enlightened. The chronology of our studies mirrored the chronology of material looked at, and with only our Ezra-packs to sustain and show our minds how to travel through space and time, we ventured from North Carolina to San Francisco; teleporting to the City Lights bookshop looking for clues. We mopped up Ginnsberg and Kerouac's beat with a map of pink tinged toilet paper, which turned increasingly neon when our classes adjourned to the New York School, where we met Ashberry, Koch, O'Hara et al. Finally we felt our way through queer theory, touched on Amiri Baraka and terminated at the gates of Langpo.

The head scribe who set up and oversaw the degree programme is the linguistically innovative academic poet from the English avant-garde,

Robert Sheppard

whose poetry modules compass a non-mainstream topography, charting a course where populist verse is cast in the role of suspect scion and heir to the Wordsworthean patriarch hitched to life support. A poetic kept in coma by the enemies of po-mo thinking, unbelieving faith healers such as Billy Heaney and Seamus Collins: top quacks of a medical team funded with government subsidy and the profits of commercial poetry.

During our time there we, in the words of the Mossbawn bard,
read the commentaries and presented ourselves as informed; by nodding gravely to mask any bemusement or simply not turning up to class; particularly during the final year when the really crazy theories kicked in.

The first afternoon of the final semester there were only three students who had voluntary signed up to the Reading and Writing as a Poet class. Present were Nicola, myself and Jennifer; a North Lancastrian and very gifted English major with a quirky voice from a similar vein of thought as the refreshingly talented poet Geraldine Monk, another Lancastrian. No one could fail to notice Jennifer's language gift, or the fact that she was stunningly attractive; but just as I was getting used to the idea of Robert, Jennifer, Nicola and I spending six hours a week in one another’s company creating and discussing the making of poetry, Robert decided to act. He went a few doors down the corridor to a short story class were the thirty nine other writing students in the year had elected to attend and shanghaied Neil, Stephanie, Katy and another young female student who rarely attended after that first afternoon.

However, the delights of sharing class time with the beautiful and gifted Jennifer were yet to come; as it was during the second year when being taught by a PhD student, Cliff Yates, that I decided to devote the next part of my learning to the study of and attempt to acquire, meterical form. This was because whenever I attempted to air the subject Cliff made it clear that this was a no go area. The make up of the module meant the nearly Dr Yates would grade my poetry, and as the deadline drew near people in the class began openly wondering how this could be done. What objective measuring could be deployed, particularly on a course that is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry based where the theoretical datums are so recently chalked up and, for some, incredibly difficult to locate?

Although learning to float ideas in the increasingly scientific tide of a 21C poetic drew out a proficient sense of how to achieve buoyancy in the open seas of composition, the fact that our swimming instructor had no metrical aids or training made me all the more curious about this form. My instinct was telling me that it must be important because, up until Pound if poetry wasn't written in a metrical form, the finished article was just not considered poetry.

What was even more obvious was how dense and disconnected much of the critical writing around poetry was; as though the complexities of the topic up for chat were on a par with understanding the mechanics of space travel or brain surgery. A quantumn linguistics class taught by a poet scientist who would run our finished work through the deep throught of some NASA strength software to compute a final and fixed decision on our overall talent for word play.

It was becoming increasingly clear that the highly detailed and hard to follow positions and definitions of what poetry is which were being offered to us by many of the writers, was the product of an industry. A job at the academic factory seemed to be what the end goal of education was all about for would be modern poets. Get taken on by the boss poet or writer whose philiosophies would have to be your own before the name plate could be affixed to the cubicle door from where you could begin launching yourself upon the literary world. A fully paid up member of the respectable poetry world, playing the game and taking part.

I had recently finished reading a book

Uriel's Machine

written by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. This book charts the history of freemasonary and specualtes on the stellar mathamatics and perfect accuracy used by the neolithic architects who designed the still standing stone age buildings at Newrgrange.

There is a monastry that is now a hotel tucked off the main A59 dual carrigeway at Aughton on the SW Lancashire border with Merseyside and Liverpool. The hotel and one time home of monks is at the far end of a field which is a few meters opposite the house and was used by dogs and their walkers in the autumn after it had been cropped, up to the following sprng. I was with the dog journeying from the road and through the hedge gap onto the field, when an image of the sun, obscured and orange like the lit tip of a cigarette behind the thick mist, struck itself into my mind and I harnessed the swirl of ideas this set in motion as the theme of this piece.

AUGHTON

The yellow orange sunset jumble glows
through silver prism mist clinging to straw
stumped grey winter fields depleted by cold
and as golden summer crops have been shorn
by harvest blades autumn yieldings mow
the dog jumps through a gap in the hawthorn
bounding towards a priory built of sandstone:
a place once governed by monastic law

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

Did monks believe souls sped along alone
to fulfill the plan of a rising dawn
as Uriel told Enoch long ago,
that countless lives in time surge toward
space near where matter compels spirits flow
and exchange their urges to be born
instant, anew to eternally glow
by leaping one to other in the storm?

OGMA ME EYE

I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago. I recieved a small diary for a Christmas gift which also had a detachable and refillable jotter pad the size of the diary itself neatly tucked in the back cover; so effectively it was a mini notebook. I had never used one before, but as the new year started I began using it for jotting down word combos, as and when they struck me or I heard them. It was turning into a very handy little book as it was small enough to comfortably fit in my coat pocket. I usually use an A4 size hardback jotter and a mechanical pencil, but cycling home from my sisters along the coast one evening three weeks ago, I stopped and sat gazing out over to Howth and took out the diary.

It was dark, but the light from the street lamps cast enough light to write with and I wrote the first line down as I heard a bird skimming the water. Then as the days passed and the book started taking shape I realised that my writing process was evolving into using a smaller book. It made sense because, unlike the A4 hardbacks where you can ream out the words, this small book was condensing the words down, and making me a lot more aware that page size has an effect on the pysche. This is how Raymond chandler used to write. He would put a very small yellow paper in the typewriter to concentrate his writing, as the less words that can fit on the page the more you think on what words get put down and, so the theory goes, the less room for flab.

The diary had two parts, the blank jotter, which had turned out great for research notes, and the diary itself, which I was starting to use in an innovative way. Every page had a quote at the top and the physical lines of the layout (which broke the day down into two hour blocks) meant I could experiment with how the shape of the poem evolved, as it could incorporate the few words already printed on the page. After two weeks I had three drafts working up, which I felt were an improvement on my usual stuff and I was effectively in a process of refining my compositional method.

However last week I had a bit of bad luck. I got my dual MP3 recorder/radio and memory stick stolen from a public internet shop I use, after forgetting to take it out of the computer when I left. When I returned twenty minutes later after realising I had left it behind, it was gone. I was gutted because it had lots of files I hadn't backed up and have had to chase around the net for, and my recording activity has been temporarily halted. It recorded in two modes, one the quality of a very good dictaphone and the other, a line in function that took a microphone and recorded to CD quality. All a third of the size of a mobile phone.

Prior to losing it I was a one man walking studio who could record anywhere, so I was gutted. That night I went out, got drunk and lost my only decent coat, an all weather one with detachable fleece. And in the pocket? Yep, the diary where my inchoate methods were taking shape. And in the two weeks prior to this I had two bicycles stolen, one of which I still owe 40 euros for, and guess where the guys number is? Diary again. And the final twist was that on the Valentines night when I lost the MP3 and coat I had just delivered a letter and three poems (to prove my bona fides) to Ralph Fiennes who is appearing at a theatre here, asking him if I could record him reciting a poem of his choice. Naturally he hasn't got back to me.

But poetry is an art of faith and a week later I have tried to shake off any negativity by just keeping going and writing, knowing that adversity can only make me stronger in the long run.

OGMA ME EYE

In open seas of composition
- by swimming twenty yards out to seer
the pre-verbal
tweet of an idea -
float on an opaque signifier

but be alert and unspeaking of what
lifts beneath you
waking the voice within

Then
consciously perch like a gentle merman
or migrating sea bird awaiting to sweep
across still shallow waters and

sit understanding
the incoming tide
divining to hear what word god
returns when the odds of hitting
aural bullseyes cease to be wrongly spoken of

VIEW FROM A BRIT

Dear Reader

Yesterday, on Friday 17 February I attended a Bank of Ireland lunchtime poetry reading in Foster Place, Dublin where the human warmth of Michael Longley was on display, and I will post up something on his reading another day. I started this post with the intention of writing about the Longley reading, but ended up musing on the eternal question of what it means to be Irish; not to the degree or depths commentators such as Fintan O'Toole do, but from my own perspective as a second generation "plastic Paddy brit"

The Friday event goes under the banner Out to Lunch, takes place every other Friday at 1.15pm and lasts for around half an hour. The man who runs it and introduces the poets is called John MacNamee, who is a bit of a local legend here. He is a Dubliner, early sixties and behind the old school gruff mask of being too cool to chit chat or shoot the breeze with anyone who has less than two books published, I detect he is actually a very warm man with a good heart. His own book The Man in the Hat is a memoir of short anecdotes sketching an autobiography of traipsing the globe as a tortured poet and living hand to mouth in the warm pool of crocodiles that is literary Dublin.

The idea that literary Dublin is founded upon a very healthy tradition of hostility and hatred, with groups of individuals bonding through mutual bitterness towards those who acheive any degree of artistic or material success, is a cliche I detect holds some comedic truth. I have witnessed this darker part of human unkindness in the famed celtic rapier wit and it can be summed up in a Bono anecdote, which goes along the lines that in America people see the guy who done good with a mansion on the hill and say -

"One day, I'm gonna be that guy."

Whereas in Dublin and Ireland they say -

"One day, I'm gonna get/kill that guy."

And whilst this is obviously a stab at black humour it does illustrate an aspect of the Irish pysche which, I think, ultimately roots back to the warlike nature of the celt, and the notion that an Irish person could have a fight in an empty phonebox. The whole mythology of the land centres on the idea of war as sport and warrior bands cattle raiding, with various petty kings forming military alliances to invade other petty kingdoms for booty and mutual profit; and when the tide of events and politics changed, alliances would dissolve and new ones be made. One year two political and social units could be united in arms and the following year, facing each other on opposing sides of the battle.

This traditional behaviour was normal commercial practice, as the whole corpus of gaelic fenechas civil law testifies to; and whatever was the most opportune alliance to make at the time were the ones that came into being. This translated into there being a robust set of customs condusive to fostering long standing animosity and enmity between groups at constant squabble or fight, whose leaders were well versed in adopting theatrical posturings to whip up a frenzy of indignation and outrage as an appropriate pretext to embark on raids whose whole purpose was the material seizure of goods from their neighbours.

But when Cromwell came at the start of 17C and the "in house" "war as sport" fighting turned its focus outward to a "common brutal foe" (which exploited local politics by enlisting the aid of one tribe against another) a long process began which telescoped all greivance towards the English crown, culminating in the modern tradition of hating the brits; a public enemy number one who the Irish were taught to hate from birth up until the recent economic boom, when their minds tuned into putting euros in their pocket rather than verbally sticking it to the absent brits at all available opportunities. This whole area is still a can of worms, but since the 1994 ceasefire and resulting reletive stability the average young person in Ireland today is not being brought up in the same way as many of their parents and grandparents were; to blame the brits for all of Ireland's, and by extension their own personal, ills, long after majority independence had been gained and when most of the protaganists of the civil war are dead. A few months back I overheard a Dubliner in a pub blaming a brit bloke for him being unable to speak the Irish language. In a completely serious and straight faced register the man told him it was his country's fault, the brit's, that he the Dub had been denied his linguistical birthright.

The brit looked lost, all he was after was the craic he'd seen on the adverts, the smiling Irish with a 1000 welcomes, and he hadn't bargained on paying through the nose for the fun of standing trial in front of a one man international court of humanity wanting to know what he, the brit, had to say about him, the Dub, not speaking Irish. The brit said he was born in 1965, nearly forty three years after independence, and anyway, pre-1922 when he and the Dub were in Tir nOg awaiting their brief return to mortality, all four of his Irish grandparents were in Ireland fighting the brits; but if it helped he would take the blame and buy the next round.

Ok, Ok, I didn't overhear it at all, you guessed right, it was me getting the third degree. But this question of hate runs so deep it is difficult for the outsider to understand or someone in my boat to coherently express in a way which does not lead to cliche or invoke danger.

Trying to accurately trace what many believe to lie at the very centre point of the Irish understanding is a difficult task, as I beleive that the kernel resting there is something which is the essence of poetry itself; the two opposing forces of war and peace which characterise the Irish, the Plato's egg of saints and sinners or scholars and bandits mentality of two contrasting things within the whole which seem more obvious here than elsewhere.

But ultimately, what I am trying to get across is the nature of Dublin poets, whose lineage leads back to Yeats; a masterful and magisterial poet, as well as being a first rate snob, toff, complete spacer, one of the most significant poets of the 20C and someone who was the embodiment of all the these conflicting differences; but who I also think, shoulders a fair amount of responsiblity for the tradition of Dublin poets being stand-offish.

When, in the words of Patrick Kavanagh, "Yeats handed in his gun," and figures such as Austin Clarke, Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien and Kavanagh himself filled the topography, the Yeatsean role model of the poet as a distant, removed and frosty mystic had taken firm root, which has resulted in a legacy of Dublin poets cultivating a remote, disinterested and incurious bearing when out and about.
An essence of this persona is captured in the famous cartoon of AE (George Russell) and WB Yeats, so absorbed in their own contemplations as they gaze skyward that they do not notice each other as they cross on the pavement when journeying to one another's respective gaffes a few houses apart on Merrion Square.

And when Kavanagh died and his shadowy laurel tiara fell into the Dublin literary ring for the current crop of pensioners to sing possession of, his behavioural legacy of being snappy, brusque, bluff and dismissing all competition who entered his orbit with a throwaway quip was taken up by the new (now old) crop of mainly university educated wannabees hoping to become head Oollamh.

Many Dublin-centric poets in their late summer years have a stock Kavanagh anecdote that takes place in the learning temple of a pub where the Monaghan magus plays up the role of a man bored with their presence and barking out one-liner maxims in between studying the form of the gee gees. It is ironic that this most superficial, uneducated Kavanagh in the boozer vibe is the one perpetuated by the first wave who benifited from education, and I recognise this snippy, bearish and gruff habit of social non-intercourse as being a prevalent common denominator within the various stratal groupings. From lightweight open micers to the magus heavyweights of contemporary verse the main feature in the bearpit of writerly interaction is, that many are expert ignorers and deploy this tactic as the main weapon of choice.

From the humblest scribblers gathering to the glitziest of talks and book launches a strict heirarchy of behaviour operates, which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye; so Paul will talk to Michael but not John, unless it's a low grade do where Michael is absent and the only others in attendance are non-members of the public (the lowest currency of all in literary Dublin) who don't count as they are blind to the subtleties of literary politics and aren't in the loop of gossip to publicise any untoward relations. In Irish life appearances are highly important as the veneer of normality which drape the real machinations, and even if you are a moral bankrupt behind closed doors, being seen in an exchange with those beneath you in the poetry pecking order is considered bad form in a land where nod and elbow languages rule supreme.

And the example given contains only three variables. Once the full compliment of wafflers congregate and all the various performers and factions go to their various lengths to ignore or catch one another's eye, the acting that occurs is on a par with a student pantomime. The sorriest sight is lone writer A sniffing round the personal body space of writer B as s/he converses with someone else they consider being at least their equaly stature, in a deeply fascinating chat initiated for the sole purpose of ignoring A.

Most Dublin poets I have come across have a very keen sense of their own status within the milieu, as a pack of lettered humans sniffing, wagging tails and growling at the underdogs and runts to keep outside the territory or deferring submissively to those with bigger barks, and this is the tradition John MacNamee was born into. A culture where even the corner boys measuring their spits have a strict ethical policy of who's who. However, lurking buried beneath the grave fronts of tombstone posturing I strongly sense the eternal child wanting to play; swap ideas, smile, laugh and make friends over a bit of daftness. But the Yeats legacy, compounded by Kavanagh and coupled with the traumatic Dublin heritage of booze sodden learning and the clerics of fear who warped the nation's pysche has left its mark in the form of a mask worn as armour which, once seen through, allows the alert bystander a full view of the Dublin poets common humanity we all possess.

The social plating which is so prevalent in other poets I have met was gloriously absent from Longley and his aura was that of a benign grandfather, which he is four times over to grandsons, and he stated that he was going on "grandfather strike until I get a grandaughter," a gag which raised a titter in the mixed audience of middle aged surburbanites, leaving cert students, the ne'r do well usual suspects (myself included) and the odd spattering of nuns. His capacity for making an immediate human connection was apparent from the off when a succession of latecomers straggled in during the first ten minutes, and Longley stopped his reading, beckoning them in and pointing out vacant seats; acting with an essential kindness conspicous by its absence at other gatherings I have attended.

His behaviour affirms my belief that often the larger the artist's reputation, the more approachable and down to earth they are, as they have discovered their own truth and exist and survive as an artist in the way Heaney so eloquently states, in their "own esteem," undriven by the ego of "moi." Paula Meehan echoed the first part of this sentiment during the 2004 Kavanagh prize award to Joe Horgan when she said that poets starting out storming the entrance to an exclusive literary citadel they imagine exist, climbing over the walls and launching all sorts of assualts of entry; once inside the walls, realise that there is no "there" to get to; that the artist or poet has to construct that mental reality themselves. As well as the author, they are the printer and publisher of their own passport and artist's ID card, which does not manifest itself as a physical document of valedation, but as an impress of the mind only they the creator can stamp through belief. The art of faith that is poetry.

Love Day

Last year I was sat outside the disused Bewleys Coffee shop on Westmoreland Street flogging my love poems for two euros a go. It cost me ten cents a sheet, and I rolled the printed copy around an inch and a half plastic pipe and sealed them with a wax seal I forgot to pay for from Reads stationers. I made 150 euro, wrote a poem to order for a guard and another one about a charity worker called Linda who was prancing in front of me.

That day last year was the first time I met Jame Anthony Kelly, a local legendary Kerry character on the streets of Dublin, last of the wandering bards, who travels across the island attending all manner of fleadhs and festivals, and can be seen selling his chapbooks on the streets of Dublin.

And when the goats and sheep are sorted in however many years from now, he will be remembered, perhaps, for possessing an integrity publicly unremarked upon at the time by the cultural professionals and literary careerists only too happy to never mention his name; until his voice is no longer living.

At which point, no doubt, as in the case of Kelly's comrade in Dublin street poetry, Galway linguist Paddy Finnegan, they will all start publicly speaking of his legendary doings.

I thought it fitting that the day I started selling my stuff direct to the public I met Kelly, as I had been hearing about him as a local legend  since first arriving in Dublin to carry on post-graduate research into the twelve year bardic filidh curriculum, nine months earlier.

One of his constant refrains about some of the more high brow poetry do's is

"There's precious little poetry there."

Mairead Byrne, the Langpo queen and long time poetry professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, name checks him in a poem she wrote, and which I heard her recite at a "Meet The Beats" event at Mother Redcaps pub, September 2004.

But this one was written in 2003 in the final year of my tertiary BA studies. The evolution behind its arrival is documented here, when chatting with the Hungarian British poet, George Szirtes, on the process of live and literary practice.

LROVSE

Underneath it all
we talk
over and above what is;
so why not stay a while
and let me dream
of life with you?

I will not make a hollow pledge
of empty words
which promise something
I can’t give;

the wind
the sea
or starlight’s shimmer
on your hair.

The bond I undertake to seek
exchanges comforts
found from understanding
and being understood;

although
when I gaze upon your form
I see emotion as a mirror

you, the one love
who will never truly stand before me.

Your flesh can be only touched
in dreams
when reality comes alive
in epic tales, played out nightly
or in that half snooze state
we sometimes get to fool around in;

a world where my desire for you can be indulged

DESPERATE FOR A DATE?

The place to waffle with published Anglo poets at the cutting edge of English Poesy, is here

Poem UK.

Here you will find such quality talent as Roddy Lumsden, Ed Barker (son of Dylan Thomas's mate George), Steven Waling, Kate Evans Bush, and our own Mark Granier. Modern minds swapping opinions on whatever comers up, from Homer to Happy Days and the colour of Henry Winkler's whatsists. This deposit was left by myself after hoking deeper into the illusion that I am a blatherer worthy of public endowments. I handed in my artist bursary application form to the Arts Council on Friday and just filled it in straight. I need money coz I've been a literary bum long enough and now that I have an Mp3 recorder am a one man Pat Boran and walking radio station rolled into one.

But the serious reason for rooting deeper is the Amergin text, (scroll further down)written at the middle of the Irish poetc tradition in 7C by someone who had generations of poet forefathers behind him and many more in front. I have been airing this up for discusssion to try and gauge its relevance, whilst also writing about it in order to firm up my own ideas on it, and no one has engaged with me on it. So when the usual talk of "What is Poetry?" starts and everyone gives it the Greek spin as being the beginning, I switch off as there is a tradition in Ireland that lasted a few thousand years and only ceased 300 years ago. Read and giggle.


Hurrah

My suicide was a complete success and I am now in the poesie holding area of a great beyond where dreamers go to after death. You may read about me in the national press, as I sent my obituary to Daisy Goodwin, Robert Potts, Neil, Michael, Chris, Rupert and Ron Silliman. You will find my remains on the roof of the Poetry Cafe in Betterton Street and the commeration will be wherever the poetry community decide, so please come, all are welcome. I have left a recorded piece I wish to be played at the after service of remembrance piss up in the Cheshire Cheese pub on my blogsite; a tender moving rant of supreme incoherency which I hope will not bore too much as you chat about the good old days of never knowing me. My only wish is that you bury my left hand in a small corner of Westminster Abbey, my right leg in Highgate Cemetry and my heart beneath a wind ravaged fir tree in a small demense next to the deserted village on Achill Island, Co Mayo. Failing this I would like my organs donated to poets in need of transplants.

Here in the otherworld all is an ecsatic vision, white, soft and ethereal, like being a constantly changing image of light and shade on the cinema screen, high on non-addictive heroin, Mescalin and Sunny Delight like pop containing a premium strength additive of E numbers.

As though I were Pete Doherty, all of the Arctic Monkeys and Band Aid rolled into one along with Elton John Paul Liam and Noel, but the only custody I am in is MTV heaven with Kate Moss's heart and an abundance of harmless crack, whilst being the permanent number 1. Like being Brad, Jen and Angelina living happily ever after in a global orphanage where all the kids we foster are the sprogs we practice making between the three of us, all day long with no judgement, jealousy or need for toilet breaks and telephone calls.

I am in no recognisable physical form or shape and (fingers crossed) should be a completely disembodied voice very shortly. I have been chatting with Michael Donaghy and Robert Creeley, as we wait for St Peter to run us past s/he without name who will decide our ultimate destination and earthly reputation, and we are all hoping to get the nod by our respective language gods. Ogma for me and Mick and a less obvious one for Bob as he has to negotiate with Frost, Whitman, Pound, Eliot and WCW before he gets to somewhere in Greece, I think, I'm not sure as what he's been saying all sounds a bit complicated; but we are all praying together and will be very happy for each other if we end up supping sack with Ben Jonson and Bill Shakes at top table, or if we are in a packed back garden at the amateur barbecue sharing sonnets about sparrows on the village green.

There are a number of possibles in play and the decisions will be made based purely on our ouvres according to the standard formulae which have always been used since the beginning of babel; and you will be surprised to hear that all our temporal posturing and the grand theories we spend our lifetimes thinking up are completely rubbish and entirely wrong.

Simon Magus told me that there is no magic behind the art or complex modes of analysis used to figure the final result, as every one of us has their very own free will advisor to the creator, who lets us trace the watermark of our success or failure as poet, bluffer, nutter or fool during our stint on earth with a pen of faith we fill and use or leave in the box, and guess what?

There are no laurel cups or short straws, because an absent concept of competition is everywhere and there is only love, peace, wonderully superb gorgeousness and free dinners, as our energies are all alone but united in the past, present and future in a way the living mind can not grasp, so I won't attempt to convey the sense of afterlife oneness, save to say its a laugh.

But before the clouds of unreality tip their load via the boundless sky of cybersapce and dissolve your interest in a mist of verbiage to bore your brain and you surf away from this deposit, I can communicate some info from the waiting room of equal greatness for all. Apparently there was a Homer, a woman called Alana, who was not a simple warrior shepardess living the joi de vie with an entourage of party fawn fighting wo/men. She made the Illyiad up for a laugh, and the real story of how she came to tell this tale is too terrible to convey here because if I told you what Alana told me, you'd think I'd gone coco and lost my marbles. Too fantastic is the truth, so I will keep a lid on it and lie................Oooh, I'd better go because Elvis and Plato are calling me for a discussion on the eternal chicken, egg and cheesburger debate.