Nuns Having Fun

I have a dream

~

It is Sunday and I have just returned from a lesbian orgy in a convent, purely as an artist you understand; filming documentary-reality-show footage on a camera phone for an upcoming short film exploring the changing face of vocational life in a habit and how sisters are doing it for themselves. The film is an innovative new reality programme, provisionally titled Nuns Having Fun and I am currently in pre-production negotiations with Living TV and The God Channel.

It's all about nuns, riding around the countryside in Cork and Kerry, testing their vocation to the big fella upstairs by going on dates with hunky farmers. Hand and neck massages along with intimate hot-tub moments should show the TV powers that be that this isn't just another manufactured idea mining the depths of depravity and cultural debasement, but a forward thinking and educational show which will open up a serious debate in this country about what happens when hot sisters and scorching farmer boys get up close and personal.

Nuns are just like anyone else, they need a piece of prime time because they are underrepresented on the telly and they also need to modern up their image and show its not all about praying and playing with the vicar.

We did the publicity shots last week. The nuns were put in miniskirts and suspenders and the art director hired a tractor and had them drinking babycham on it at Stephens Green. Glenda Gilson wanted in on the gig, but we thought she would not be appropriate, as she would have given a wrong, too tacky message to our potential viewers. After the shoot we all went to Ron Blacks, and I must say, once nuns kick off on the bevvy, they can’t control themselves.

I left early at 11pm as I was up for an appointment with the social welfare officer, but four of them tried to get in my room in the nightshelter at 3.30am on Wednesday morning after they’d staggered out of Lillies after being taken there by Bono, who wanted to talk about saving the world over a few quiet bottles of bubbly and how the nuns could help relieve third world debt by doing some charity photo-shoots for Hustler.

~

I awake and write this poem about Biddy Early, a faery healer from county Clare. Born 1798, the year of the failed rising. It is titled

BIDDY EARLY

Seer
surface the end-name talisman
  of this shade's edifice
who lives in the other world
  above consciousness.

Brand the word-leaves
shimmer
bob fixed
turn the air psychic and extract
   a ghost
lulled from space by sheer desire.

Tickle the thought door
  splice open
and stick straight to mainline
    a soft
some say non-existent
   picture
plucked from Tir nOg.

Come
escape
stomp sodden belief underfoot

risk the frozen crushed fish
   tower above trout gut

let logic be mangled
and this looking glass
conjur a woman married four times

who cured gout-limps in
Clare's bleak mid-winter.

A white witch herbalist
living in Feakle
whose piston-sleek mind
unhindered
wrapped
or weighted
read an empty blue bottle reflecting light.

Her mind will steer this absurd straight track
and sense will depict

   - twenty yards from the Q Bar
 ten feet below the Liffey tide mark -

a cormarant perched on the foundation base
of O'Connell Street bridge
pulling fish from green water
as neon-struck rust-cans float by

to reveal a world lit
by the art of Biddy Early from Faha.

LANGPO CRASH

Dear Reader

If this is your first time on this site, welcome, and please, do not think the poetry below is all I am about. The example here is in a form called Linguistically Innovative, that comes out from the far naffer Lancastrian based English sibling of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, or Langpo.

The highly fashionable academy based American modernist poetry circa 1980s and 90s.

This is basically the cutting edge of avant garde and can be traced to one man, Charles Bernstein, who I have spun poems with in Dublin. That's the top and bottom of it. One gifted genius is all it takes to start an Art movement.

I also write in other forms from slam, strict metrical, open-field and basically any genre going. Many poets stick to one, but the more the merrier I say.

The whole idea with Langpo is to be a bit disruptive with the lingo, so take it nice and slow and if you get bored, flip down to the next piece and read how I got my black eye for Ireland.

~

LANGPO CRASH

Wanna
tighten
tweak
peak
and pluck comfort-bones banal?

Wanna dilineate reality's cultural force
in an ASBO scribble

encrypt an electronic watermark
through the continuum's digital blueprint
and write with the ink of memory?

Come
step across the divide
tailor the mind
stroke
and cut to a schoolyard platform.

Here
a violent memory-train chugs love in

silence stops
sound drops
and joy is a fight
attractively flesh
in the sight of deja vous

snatched
as sound shuffling through the seal of surface
fills a magic carriage with fresh-right raindrops
unbreaking to forgive
and...

Heard it before?

Reason crashing out in a journey to the underworld
ghosts that disappear once light is shone

cute gods sensing leather hell
in a milk-break lunchtime

who always remember Morley v Mad Ox

each headbutting the little brick
basin after lunch had settled
when one chipped the chewers in his gob
as his skull crashed onto a white bog rim?

Youth's unintentional masterstroke
was stout shunted schoolkids
and the guards of entry
were wild coarse cognizant and weightless

convincingly set aside
like a congress of persuasive conmen
caught up in tossing back whisky
at a marquee saloon of weekend mayhem
all at sea and misunderstanding

alone
abandoned

the inconsequent watch-word
passing through the spirit fallow
and pastured now
in the omniscient realm

know all
lacking in taste
with ski-boots tailored by Nico

urban footwear
worn by a Shepherd's Bush maestro.

MORE

There's been quite a bit going on here Dear Reader. I got a bashing on Monday two weeks back, in the early hours of the morning. Just the one blow, to my left eye, which went completely bloodshot and so this injury means I am not looking at my best at the mo.

It happened in the early hours of the morning, and too be honest the exact details are a bit hazy, I just remember coming too in my bed the following morning with a sore face and realised I must have got a clump, but didn't have a clue if it was as a result of violence inflicted on me by another, or an accident on my part. However due to a cut just below the eye that looks like it may have been caused by a ring, I have decided to retail the fact of a large man punching me once.

The original tale was that I stepped in to save a crowd of heroin addicts from mugging a group of nuns, but no one seemed to believe it, so I dropped the nuns and changed them to tourists, which was far more acceptable to the objective listener.

It's been nearly two weeks now and the redness is fading, and it looks like I will have a faint scar to deepen the bag under my eye, but such is the life of a bloke who boozes a lot and talks about poetry non-stop.

I can imagine the scene.

Monday AM - Desmond Swords -Pissed up poet talking loudly about Irish mythology is appointed as a suitable target by a large man who likes the odd spot of recreational violence. Some folk like to go dogging, others play chess, some want to hit others for sport, it's entirely understandable innit?


~

Last night I went to see my Jazz Duo play, Gavin and Sarah who are going to be backing the poets who turn up to the poetry night I am setting up at Monster Truck Art Gallery, the very bottom of Francis Street Dublin, opposite St Patrick's cathedral D8.

Every other Thursday, that's fornightly, starting on May 25, there will be poetry going on and the Jazz Duo were bonus I bumped into by chance last Monday (a week after the eye bash) at the back of the Irish Film Centre whilst looking for Sweeney or Fintan, two poets I know. I don't have a phone and always just bump by chance into my Art pals, usually in Temple Bar Square or the back of the IFI, and was thinking we were overdue a random encounter, or more hoping because I wanted to see them in person to give them all the spiel on the Art Gallery do. But they weren't there, Gav and Sarah were instead and we got chatting and it turns out they are studying for a BA in Jazz at Blackrock College and are well up for the collaborative venture.

Last night they played the Boom Boom Room above Conways Pub, Parnell Street, which is the building from which Patrick Pearse surrendered to the British army in 1916 after the Rising.

Yeah yeah yeah. More later.

MONSTER TRUCK ART

Yo ho ho nipple me not whats Dear Reader coz da word on the scene here in Liffey land is that an art gallery has just opened at the very bottom of Francis Street, going downhill, and I have been appointed as the Director of Poetry and Chief Executive of the art collective's page and stage department.

Al and Tom are the two young art school graduates who run Monster Truck gallery and are expert in multimedia and a whole host of things happen there. On Wednesday I attended a short film showing of three movies. Very new media and totally on the edge of experiment and style. The first was people doing a lot of tapping and banging in an orchestrated performance art piece that covered the kitchen, bedroom, lounge and bog. Surreal and wacko, but such is true art dearest ones. After that it was a very violent french movie minature of three men slapping each other across the face and calling each other unrepeatable names unprintable in such a respected rag as this. The final one was a cut up of the Japanese comic book feature length cartoon Akira, and it were bonkers but brill if yer get me. The original cartoon is 2 or 3 hours long and set in post holocuast Tokyo and the director had cut it up, spun it through the computer and was also able to superimpose imges at will over the found version he created, tinkling the keyboards as though it were a piano of images.

This was a highly avant garde outing and the best bit is that you can bring your own ale and the off licence does four cans of Hackenberg five percent proof for a fiver, so a tenner means you get to be in the coolest art gallery in Dublin getting tanked up at a fraction of pub prices. The other benifit of this free shebeen house of Art is that you don't have to listen or watch the lesser Dublin drinkers who do not journey on the shuttlebus of rareified thought where we do readers, so get yourself down to

Monster Truck
Francis Street
D8

Right at the very bottom going downhill.

The Thursday night poetry gigs will be held every other week and this will be the melting pot where stage and page meet and reconnect, as I firmly believe that performance poetry as it is called is going to impact on the print world and there are two ways of dealing with it. If you are a print poet you can ignore it as Z list filler and if you are a slam poet you can moan about not being taken seriously, so the natural order of things on this score is simple. Bring the two camps together and both sides will drop the acts they perform because the real physical people will be there all in the same room and they will realise, like the smoking ban, that Ireland can steal a march on the world and be number one at the old waffle in new performance form. The world will follow suit and I will keep taking my tablets to supress the fantasy on which I float, sometimes too high, like the other night when I spoke with Kev, a tramp at the canal who told me about a divine plan he knew of.

As I sat their swigging my Hackenberg, Kev supping what looked like port, he let me in on a few facts, he claims are all part of the plan. Thinking I had met a fellow magus I kept my wits about me whilst pumping him for the real gen, but not wishing to fully connect because I was scared that Kev would seize my spirit.

I have been meeting people lately who tell me fully formed stories, and I have found that the more interesting and bizzare ones come from people like Kev the tramp, but the only way to tease them out is be genuinely human with these people; the waifs, strays, layabouts and societal write offs who many, if not most, would actively steer clear of. They are everywhere and their stories could not be made up, but as I say the only way to hear them is take what they say seriously, so when Kev started on about Satan and him being the messiah, I made my excuses and withdrew, but he gave me some cracking lines.

FLOWER MOUTH

"Style is a function of theme
Style is not imposed on subject matter
But arises from it
Style is truth to thought."

      ------------

Aoife shouts words but Kathleen rules
her world, and the brown leather robe

draped across the chair
tucked in beneath the table

contained within this locked box
is mine

June cries
coming through the door of the
occupational therapy room where

Aoife sits listening to angelus
bells peel havoc at the hill top.

~

Hear angelus energy share
consciousness with them and have the

sense to look for meaning where none
dare peek for fear of being

labelled mentally unkempt, as June
was before she died a derelict in a
loony bin

opined to be beyond all reach by the
boss head doctor of a city's top

psychiatric hospital where she lived
in nineteen ninety nine when professor

Aoife O'Brien gave injections from ten
to eleven

depending on
depending on...

If there is a cow in the field and
a machine out of order.

~

June is on-ward and in role play
draped upon the chair and chuckling
freely at the table.

The machine is out of order.

June continues

Within this warm room Mick is nowt
but four letters of evidence
of an afternoon's reading

Does June now flit with the big
fella's shade

       in books

deconstruct schoolchildren
from shadows in caves

and tower over oath bound men
to find a simple mountain grace

     written

at life's end?

~

when Yeats ruled a world of words
his imagination rolled fairly from

her tongue pouring forth to write
prayer, fable and a nation's tomb.

~

Me me me me me more than he it was
back when June gobbed off

and got on with the business of
being la la. Nuttying it up for

medication and a cosmic life
of ticking boxes and flapping

wings across forms Aoife's boss
Kathleen the chief executive read

before triggering the only option
on offer for sister June.

~

A barmy woman whose one tribal self
became air worthy ether.

June knew Aoife's way was a leather
restraint belt, and the moniker they
used

Kathleen

for her daily jacket.

will be where the morning lit
mountain's phantasmagoria and shades

leisure long with the ghost of a man
who shot the one who took draughts
of demands to London.

~

Demons came and taunted her in the
telly room until her mind vaporisd

and she disappeared during the angelus
bell, silently faded and went instantly.

Will Kathleen tell?

~

She never spoke
once the initial disolution instantly

dissolved any questions lingering in her
bonce, just got stuck in a box after

her long dance with his reflection at the
grave, where a well of time returns wild
spring flowers.

~

An answer blown on ageless dumb
stone and these eyes fell upon you

Kathleen, who knew what went on when
my heart beat alive and I breathed

being driven through the breeze to an
ambush that night

when the windows got shot threw
and bullets blew open my skull.

~

In the immediate aftermath his
ghost appeared, quivered on a track

leading back through a bog to the past
of that night until

the phantom glow suddenly paled and
withdrew as its light flickered out at the
foot of mouth flower rock. Mick’s shade.

Munster Leinster Rugby Review

On Sunday last, in my capacity as a match steward checking tickets at a gate inside the inside the ground, I attended the Munster versus Leinster semi final of the Heineken Cup rugby match at Lansdowne road. This was the final rugby game ever to be played there before Lansdowne Road is demolished and redeveloped, and the match was an immediate sell out. The sporting fixture gods could not have engineered a more fitting finale for the last rugby game to be played there. Tickets on E bay reputedly changed hands for 1800 euro and the atmosphere was electric. By far the most exciting rugby match I have seen and one already being written into legend.

This job is one of the few benefits to come from living in Dublin’s social underbelly, as you can only get a start by word of mouth and the guys who do it are mainly all boozers who see it as an easy way of making 45 euro whilst getting to see matches others will pay silly money to watch.

There are two types of steward, voluntary and paid. The paid stewards are all old school ready witted Dubliners who work in what is effectively a closed shop, as to get a start, you have to know someone who’ll take you along and introduce you. A throwback to the pre-Celtic tiger era and one which will end for good after the last event, a music concert by the Eagles this summer. A come day go day era of men turning up on speck, often directly from the pub, who then form in a crowd like the old dockers pen, hoping to get picked for a job; and after being paid at the end of the match, make their way back to the boozer.

The voluntary stewards are all healthy looking sports types who attend to see the match for free, impeccably dressed and carrying packed lunches. You can tell the difference between the two very easily. The paid stewards are all red, ruddy complexions and bloodshot eyes compared to their athletically fresh and bushy tailed volunteer counterparts.

Yeats’s notion of Old Ireland being With O’Leary in the grave and the idea that the true Ireland is always somewhere in the past, is a continuous theme from my experience of the place and can be summed up in a phrase I heard when visiting an aged relative in Cork, who, when asked how life was treating him, replied flourishing and perishing, flourishing and perishing. So as one era or activity comes to its natural end, another is there, as ever, awaiting its turn and time as the future history to be mourned once the young fade and the force that drives their fuse loses its first flush of youth and the blossom withers.

But the force of youth was not fading on Sunday, as I watched and learnt the finer points of difference between Irelands premier Rugby rivals. Munster’s home ground is Thomond Park in Limerick, a fortress they have never been beaten at in this competition, which began in 1994. Their supporters clearly had the majority of tickets and they were the most fanatical bunch I have witnessed there and easy to see how intimidating they would be to a visiting team in Thomond Park. As luck would have it they were mostly in the East and South stands, bathed in continual sunshine, whilst the Leinster fans were in the West and North stands, in the shade. Lansdowne is all concrete and notoriously cold in the shade, particularly if like on Sunday, there’s a nippy breeze to blunt the warmth. And especially beneath the stands were the paid stewards man the entrances; but where many, as soon as the game begins, desert their posts to go watch the game.

There were people giving away Leinster and Munster flags outside and inside the ground and the stadium was a sea of red and blue. Red for Munster and Blue Leinster, which added a real sense of carnival and occassion. I, after deserting my position, found myself next to the most fanatical of the Munster fanatics. A gang of thirty or so supporters with boudrans and bedecked in full fancy dress regalia, headed by a man with an electric megaphone rousing the supporters and leading their song of Low Lie the fields of Athenry, much to the displeasure of the two stewards with me who continually shot him disapproving glances which had no effect whatsoever on him, or me; as I was carried along on the tide of sheer passion, a Munster fan for the afternoon.

The neutral supporter could not fail to be moved by their exuberance, energy and loudness, much more spirited than the Leinster lot who are cut from a slightly posher cloth. My mate sketched the difference between the two. Leinster players are usually drawn from the public schools of Ireland, like Blackrock College and other Dublin schools obsessed with rugby, and their style of play is skilful and fluid, like Brazilian soccer. However the Munster tradition is one of dockers and tough Limerick and Cork city boys or Munster farmers who are not afraid to get physical and this is how they negated Leinster and stopped them from playing their usual silky passing game.

Munster got a try in the first few minutes, setting out their stall from the off by getting stuck straight in and dominating the pitch by sheer force of physical will. And when we went pitchside for the last five minutes it was a truly memorable sight. Munster got a try in the dying seconds and after the game ended 30 6 the ballad singer Paddy Reilly came over the speaker singing Athenry and the whole stadium lit up and filled the afternoon air with communal song.

The next game is a friendly soccer match with Chile on May 25, and one which promises to be a corker. The new manager, Stan Staunton had his first one a couple of months ago with Sweden, and even though it was a friendly it was the most exciting match of either rugby or soccer I had seen there. Stan is an ex Ireland and Liverpool soccer player and legend. Prior to coming in as manager the team had no unity and looked decidedly uninspired, but they beat Sweden 3 0 and so he started well.

GARY GEDDES AND FERGUS ALLEN LIVE REVIEW

The last two poets I witnessed at Poetry Ireland's Damar Hall basement space in Stephen's Green, were Fergus Allen, and Canada's Poet Laureate-like, Gary Geddes, a retired poetry professor. 

Fergus Allen is an eighty five year old native of Waterford and Trinity College Dublin graduate, who has been resident in England for the past fifty years; and the poetry in his latest book, Gaslight and Coke, is a recalling and revisiting by him of the landscape of his Irish childhood. 

He was topping the bill several weeks ago, launching this latest collection from Dedalus Press. Whose founder, Achill poet, John F Deane, recently handed over its running to the Portlaoise poet, editor, publisher, broadcaster and proselytiser of poesy, Pat Boran.

Gaslight and Coke was introduced by Boran with the words "never explain, never apologise". After which Allen took possession of the lectern and led us through six poems in a clipped and precise voice with impeccably correct modulations, softened by a barely perceptible Irish brogue. 

Allen's own short précis of his Ars Poetica sketched a self-portrait of necessary detachment, suggesting to us that some Romantic-Modernist hybrid fuel was responsible for motoring the engine of his poetic identity. With a cross-bred Wordsworthean-Eliot-like artisan the mechanic at play in his linguistic workshop. His dichotic register was one of a poet-as-nature's-instrument in spontaneous overflow, whose reservoir of language oozing from unconscious depths, combines and crystallises into concrete utterence under the awareness and intellect of a verbal creator configuring their work at one intentional remove from the intended audience. And who, in his own words, "just arranges the words on the page to affect your thoughts and feelings." 

Allen's expression of belief that his job is one of an emotionally removed, plastic-like conduit that is all technician, allowed the audience only partial access to and appreciation of the full accomplishment of his work when listening to him read. Allen’s self consciousness of his role-as-poet imposed an energy of separation between him and the audience. But one detects that behind the stance of detachment, this slightly po-faced poet-mask Allen wore, was, in fact, an ironic device intended, in part, to dissolve the buffer of seriousness which can keep an audience at bay from a poet at readings.

Ironically stating that his poems are "most impersonal" and "gloomy", and that he "wouldn’t be a proper poet if they weren’t gloomy", did little to dispel the loftiness he alluded to; as his opening address created an over-reaching on his part, which, I suspect, was due to being rusty live. As it was clear that his primary want was to connect on a human level.

That said, the technical quality of the six poems he read were of a high order, displaying the deft, neat and sure footedness of an experienced and expert poet fashioning moments and events from familial remembrances and history, into a poetry whose language is marked by a verbal intricacy and low key but unmistakable confidence sprouting from its stout metrical efficacy. 

"Newsmen’s flashes flickered...angels on the prowl...unfamiliar gravity...pale faces hung from upturned pupils," and most memorable of all "black is something abstract like an absence." 

The example Allen offers to the neophyte writer is analogous to Heaney offering us Yeats in his 1978 University of Surrey lecture, Yeats As An Example?" In which the Sligo Magus’s later period is invoked as that which "reminds you that revision and slog work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish." 

Work of Allen’s "finish" is seldom the result of several easy drafts, and his "arranging" is the labour-intensive product which comes when skilful word conjurers couple an initial linguistic yielding of the first poetic dig to a solid sense of the conductor composing a verbal score by continual refinement and contemplation, until, by sheer repetition and practice, over many years, a hard won skill emerges, mirrored in the work itself. 

___

Gary Geddes's read at Damar Hall last Thursday 13 April, and his public persona was markedly more at home and at ease with itself than Allen’s. No doubt due to his former career as a creative writing teacher, with a continuous and regular reading schedule in pockets and boltholes of poetry throughout the globe. More old pro than older poet, but with an obvious and innate human warmth of a kind which an audience can sense from the off, and which immediately melts the barriers and misconceptions of the kind prevalent at Allen's reading, by closing whatever divide exists between the words "poet" and "person." A natural and unforced spirit I have witnessed in few poets and one which is indicative of a writer comfortable in their own skin as someone who betrays no outward sign of wishing to impress an audience by overtly advertising their poet-ness. 

Where the "shiny armour of Moi" is conspicuous by its absence. This is because they investigate, conquer, carve out and create inward realms from the territory of their imagination, and successfully export the resulting fantasy to a wider external reality of conscious utterance, where onlookers apprehend and appreciate it’s validity and affirm it as art accurately reflecting and echoing existence in its most fundamental aspect. Poetry itself in the pure Aristotelean form of mimesis, making to understand why we humans stretch out a hand and attempt to draw rational patterns from the cosmos in a desire to celebrate the civilising potential of our human condition and proclaim belief in it. Pat Boran exudes this quality, as does Liverpool writer, Jimmy McGovern. 

These three are all writers whose personal backgrounds are conducive to staying grounded and maintaining a no nonsense approach to literature which treats the listener as a fellow human conspiritor in the melioristic effort of improving society's aesthetic well being through personal example. Geddes dispenses with all vestige of formality, opting instead for a conversationalist approach of drawing the audience into intimacy by confidently using the space and making it his own. Many poets at book launches and professional readings who do not have much live experience are understandably nervous and some conceal it better than others. 

However, the main consequence of a lack of live experience is to use the lectern as a safety shield, behind which one can fight to keep a state of outward calm, concentrating on the unknocking of knees and getting to the end of the set, instead of yielding to the dynamic of the moment. Geddes took possession of the lectern and, sensing the distance this created between him and his audience, instinctively moved in front of it to inject a feeling of instant connection; demonstrating that he was alive to the reality of the situation, his position in it and, crucially, the most direct and effective way of realising the full potential of that situation. 

He has seen beyond the props of podium and social fourth-wall convention many poets are unable to operate without, and places reflexivity over rigidity, comfortably adopting an adaptable approach which means he will extemporise instead of disguising any lack of vision of the true self behind the cloak of a book. The more a poet reads or performs to others, the more public confidence they acquire, and all performers, be they poets, singers or actors, have to go through a live apprenticeship before they can achieve a degree of performance-readiness which cannot be faked, and which sets the competent apart from the very best. Geddes has this in spades, seamlessly segueing from introduction to poem with effortless élan which never sounds rehearsed or stilted. 

He dares to reveal his humanity and his experience allows him the luxury of being unconcerned about the odd stumble or hiccup as he reads; book in hand to prompt him as he looks out off the page and into the audience, performing his work more from memory than script. Whereas Allen’s opening gambit was to announce himself from a rarefied Yeatsean elevation, like a priest at mass intoning a homily of his creed and demanding the tilted gaze of a detached audience, Geddes’s ploy was the self-deprecating position of a secular and direct eye-level address, which enervates empathy and solicits genuine interest form the audience. 

He began with the John Marquis quote about the launching of a new poetry collection being as significant as "dropping a feather in the grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo", which, at a stroke, removed all expectation and pre-conception from the audience, and let Geddes get on with reading his work; something he and the audience clearly enjoyed. The first poem was titled Johnny Bunn, the only student he ever inflicted corporal punishment on, and who became a firm friend over the course of time. Johnny Bunn appeared in his second, pastoral poem, giving us a window on and sense of the real life of a poet whose first impulse comes, not from the academy, but from the mundane and universal events of daily experience. 

All the poems of his I have read are in first person narrative, and he draws from and presents us with his own experiences, as well as donning the mask of numerous real and imagined figures from various historical points the sweep of his career has concerned itself with. But what marked Geddes out was the enlightening and entertaining way he managed to weave and link his poems and introductory anecdotes together, keeping the listener fixed on him by a process of accreditation which created a bond whose viscosity thickened as the night wore on, adhering poet and audience together in a shared communal experiencing of humanly accessible art.

BROGAN SLAM

Her face of flat black leather cap and spectacles
Sally, a willowy Miami Uni poetess
in V neck sweater, being
.perfectly average
- a tinge of show off Spanish -
is verbally kicking Cuban Culture in the good ole U S of A.

Next Irish up is Barry
a flop top of wedgy coiffuer.

My Alternative Life

is a thump tub rant of masculine end rhyme,
then he waxes
For Abbey
before
Dave Franklin
makes an appearance on his set list
bullseye quiver rhyming
June with Moon.

I extemporise a write through of his words
snaffling them
over the heads of old friends turning into relationships.
His cessation makes way for Sweeney from Tipperary
with long scratched back curly hair proclaiming

he's so shocked coz she's selling rock

a point he makes the central thrusting conceit
of the warbling tune,
injecting the odd earthy word before turning to
CCTV doing real time stage wise

although his words do not embrace
the ubiquitous proliferation of the lensual explosion
and he wraps up knocking off a love one
which pricks to last beyond his total moments.

David Noone takes the stage
straight from a moody shadow Irish booze ad
- all black hair and knee length serge coat -
to share his
Wanting,
a rant on Plath's poetics
before spouting
Starless,
a coffee shop composition
poured out in a mid Atlantic elasticated bass warble.

Cigarettes and Coffee
is the lengthy drawn out repetitive finale,
his ramble lip synch swirling look
drawn from a drunken cut price vein
of the James O'Broin school

his manner, savant like and devoid of embarrassment
much like MC Benelux Phil
preceding, with a few fag quit verses
before Aisling's
What's it all about
veers words toward and away from slam and trad simultaeneously.

I wrote this poem written at a poetry night about 16 months ago, pretty much off the bat as I was watching and listening to them. The italiscised words are lifted directly from the mouths of the poets I describe in the poem. I read an interview with Heaney in the Daily Telegraph and he concurred with Billy Collins and Amiri Baraka, that the stuff that comes out quickly and unlaboured is the work which tends to stay the test of time

RANT ON NEO-CON CON

Imagine a beer spokes-model
with an attraction-to-disaster IQ of 180
has a really dedicated energy he expends
on inventing a purpose for being
his very own fief cheif, multi tasking
as the gang master of a glamorous staff of
peace-nicks manning the decks at
suicide hotlines in central Bagdad.

Say he works out the answer to
middle East peace on the back of a
coaster

is a sado-alcoholic who keeps a naggin
of whiskey hidden in the toilet cylinder
of the bunker where the red button rests

and his radiantly soft, supple and youthful
looking skin, glows perfectly flawless at
the stroke of a powder brush, beautifully
crafted to blend and match those top
flaws with a sheer cover of corrective
cosmetic camouflage.

Think
instead of being careful, he's care free
with an effortlessly simple economic fitness
regime, to keep family and national finances
balanced behind the complexion of democracy

moisturized with tinted concealer, remotely
applied when directing insurgency busting
exercises on the Irish highway into green zone

like a play station gamer cleaning up with
actively soft soaping outlooks that suck up
grease by sleight of hand, in an easy,
no nonsense neo-con swindle no one believes
in but him

Halliburton shareholders, soldiers of fortune
corporate stock holders, private security
companies who profit from war, and those who
like their god angry, righteous, out to
remove the menacing threat of terror that
can make kids watching Mickey Mouse Club
switch off through fear,

stop rich kids on the road to decadence from
getting personal valets for thirteenth
birthdays because their parents are too scared
of who the help might be

quiet questions demanding answers for
the thousands who die due to discredited
documents, dismissed and forgotten by
politicians who got it wrong from the word go

and who
three years later with no end in sight
and a world losing all faith in their words
still insist they did things because
- just like John Edgar Hoover and Joe Ray
McCarthy -
they love America.

MICHAEL SCHMIDT STANZA LECTURE

The head of UK poetry publishing house Carcanet is Michael Schmidt, professor of poetry at Glasgow University and a man with a huge knowledge of poetry. He is the author of the excellent book

Lives of the Poets

, which is a tour de force biographical history charting all major English Language poets since Chaucer. He is a poet, critic and novelist, who is known more for his critical work than the other two, which is unsurprising to anyone who has read the Lives of the Poets book, which is the best sort of its kind I have come across, by far.

Prior to his Glasgow position he was the head of the creative writing programme at Manchester Metropolitan University for many years, and his great business rival in the poetry wars is Neil Astley, who is the head of Bloodaxe Books, which is based in Newcastle in the NE of England, and between them they have the contemporary UK poetry market more or less stitched up. Bloodaxe published two huge selling anthologies Being Alive and Staying Alive which took a lot of critical bashing by acadcemic high brows who Astley calls the Poetry Police who complain that these high selling anthologies represent a general dumbing down of poetry. For some reason they seem to think that big sellers equate to low quality, but the obvious retort is that they are just jealous because the verse they champion as being the true inheritor of TS Eliot's more intellectual modernist poetry isn't as popular.

Last year Astley delivered the annual Stanza Lecture at Aberdeen university with a robust attack on the poetry police, and although no names were mentioned it was clear that the main object of this mauling was Schmidt. Astley said that the poetry police are basically snobs and self appointed know alls who won't face up to the facts that their opinions are not as culturally important as they would like to think.

This year it was Schmidts turn at the podium

Michael Schmidt's 2006 Stanza Lecture

. Magus Michael basically said people need to be taught how to "read" criticism and poetry the right sort of way. Among others, he stuck the boot in on Larkin for being an alleged dunce and conjured up him and AE Houseman as being a mid century double act enforcing the dead creed of romanticism upon an unsuspecting public, rather than allowing Schmidt's favoured form of modernism unfettered access to the reading world. His argument was essentially giving the medal of honour to intellect rather than emotion in the poetry war. But the glaring subtext was about Neil Astley not being his boyfriend.

The piece below is a satirical evaluation of his lecture, and to give you the background so you don't lose your way I must explain a few things first. Michael is now in Scotland so there are a lot of references to this, and reference also to him being in Manchester. Also he was born in Mexico, which I also allude to.

During the lecture Schmidt made reference to how he knows when he recognises poetry, adding to the AE Houseman notion that real poetry gives you goosebumps when shaving. He added a feeling like an invisible spear going through his stomach, his stomach and throat tightening and his loins stirring when in the prescence of real poetry of an erotic kind.

Philip Larkin is from Coventry and used to be a librarian in Leicester.

There is also lines of poetry from Larkin, Ted Hughes and Auden, all in bold, whilst direct quotes from Shmidt are in quotation markes.

An Ollamh is an Irish word which dates back to the celtic bardic schools which evolved out of druidic practice and they had an unbroken run up till 17C, when Cromwell came and extinquished the way of the Gael. It means an Irish Professor of poetry.

Ard-Filidh is another Irish word and means head poet. In pre-17C Ireland a poet was a filidh or fili in the plural.


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


After intellectually ingesting, what one of the more comedic voices in my personae mask bag would articulate as, Mick Schmidt's gob slop, I have swilled his chatter around the critical bucket of my mind and distilled its essential relevance into what I believe to be a salient precis of his current critical doings.

One which details the topography where an ongoing war over the very ownership of poesy is being fought between two unequal forces. One power is an elite band, stationed in, what can be termed, the Schmidt house or stable of song, and is made up of a small but highly trained unit of crack special force poetry professionals who are all cutting edge experts in the highly complex field of quantum linguistics. This creme de le creme crew of champion thinkers claim politics of rank play second fiddle to the eternal truth of verse they joined the fight to find and foster onto a public stage for the mutual benifit of all mankind.

The field marshal-professor heading this outfit tells us that whether you hail from Oxbridge Ollamh stock or a bog outside Barnsley is irrelevant to your prospects of entering this corps, as what counts is the poetry and criticism you create during your tour of duty at the frontline of love.

Opposing these are a larger force of language artists who Schmidt, head man and top bottle washer directing operations from his bunker in Glasgow poetry flame HQ, claims is made up, not of committed fighters who score the verbal truth of beauty, but mere "cheer leaders," and commercial mercenaries whose hack contribution to the world of letters is a shallow dot to dot poetry of meaningless soundbite, which only serves to brainwash the public into buying a low brow literature which undermines the very fabric of civilised society.

These mass market jigaboos are said to be completely unsuited to minister the purer gospels of the western poetry cannon, and are made up of a mass of amatuer enthusiasts unable to read in the right manner, and headed by a man, men, woman or women who Schmidt himself does not name but believes responsible for the weakening of quality and debasing of power in the holy words crucial to his dinivatory practice, where the diaphonous veil to the otherworld is lifted using such methods as tummy and throat tightening, invisible stomach spearing, eye wetting and knob stiffening; all goosebump ceremonies which take place when shaving in the bog.

The erudite bruiser of thought cutely covers all angles by anchoring to a base quote of Cornel West which bemoans how the academy has become more like a field hospital for some of the less hardy soldiers of thought who, upon witnessing the futility of mental carnage when in the trenches, soon fall sick and shell shocked, losing the will to fight and sacrifice themselves in the battles of art, and so retreat from the front line to spend their days as non combatants in calmer conceptual arenas of the educational grove.

This, we are told is due to a "rampant anti-intellectualism in this country, the fear of critical sensibilities, democratic sensibilities, that is deeply ensconced within the parochialism and provincialism of the very people whom we often invoke."

With eloquent artifice Professor Mick waffles to life a lofty modern screen by Audenesque logic and its powers, where the yellow eyed hawk of an eternal Yeatsean-like poetic is projected as his bird of prayer and reason planing the erudite thermals of an aesthetic atmosphere high above, what I imagine as, the unmolested meadows of a simpler, less rarefied, more earthbound thought-scape where, in Ard-Filidh Mick’s report, AE Houseman and, to a lesser degree, Larkin, eke out the proletariat of poesy role Schmidt has them perform in his fanatsy theory.

Glasgow’s number 1 critical druid, in keeping with West’s notion of simultaneously slagging a lack of imagination and invoking creativity, cites and chides the High Windows author and one time Leicester librarian as, both witness for and prosecutor of, Mick's modernist cause; in a Larkinesque strong but foolish type, schizophrenic register.

By simultaneously admonishing and praising Coventry's premier bard for not fully fitting into the Schmidt vision of what and how, clever arty types should write and think in order to keep the Mexican born General's poetry clock ticking its steady tock of confused truth, the audience glimpse the hidden written lesson whose brilliantly dichotic context reveals the core secret code that enables all those willing to learn, how to correctly read Mr Mickey's submerged meaning, in such a way that they too can become expert and prolonged chatters of absolute irrelavant maxims which say nothing at all, in a star bore way that will leave family, friends and colleagues gasping with envy at your pointlessness.

The failed Oxford scholorship boy from Bromsgrove, Alfred Edward Houseman is Micks old duffer spoilsport with a misguided but intelligent mind who; befuddled in the straightjacket of a 19C hangover, mans the currently intact sandbanks holding back the tide of progressive thought; whilst Larkin is AE's young fogey sidekick and partner in rhyme, whose intellectual legacy is cast as a finger still wedged in the dyke, upon whose bank the corporate headquarters of the cheerleaders has been built.

The bankrupt romantic leanings of Alf and Phil are offered by Schmidts as a counterpoint he exhibits as the evidence of an esoteric light mass far outweighed by the gravitas of a poetic whose tetrad of godfathers enforce the creeds of loopy Ezra, plastic Anglo Eliot, Chester Kallman's third class degree boyfriend Wystan Hugh Auden and Sligo’s most verbal magician of the modern era, silly Willy Yeats.

The tenor of Mick's lecture suggests that the Larkinesque Frinton folk who stood and watched the frigid wind /tousling the clouds, could easily stand in as the hinted at great unlearned the ex Bard of Manchester thinks are in need of readerly re-education and reprogramming to fully appreciate the subtleties of top drawer modern poets and critics. This is because "reading is an acquired skill" and what is on the page can be interpreted in many different ways.

The way I read it, the newly Glaswegian shape shifter paints a shadowy catchall archetype; a sort of literate moron whose natural habitat is no doubt the rich industrial shadows or a Mr Bleaney’s room whose flowered curtains/thin and frayed, open out onto a cut price crowd of cheap suits, red kitchen-ware...electric mixers, toasters...where only salesmen come; probably based in NE England and who work in the business of spieling slick sounding patter to the special needs readers Mick wants to re-tune and who are conditioned to buy simple because their untutored ears are deaf to his rarer and ultimately more rewarding note.

This is no Hughsean landscape with a staring angel...gazing amazed at a work/that points at him amazed; but an Audenesque altar where, in the words of the man himself An unintelligible multitude....whose logic brought them....bored officials....watched from without and neither moved nor spoke....The mass and majesty of this world....could not hope for help and no help came...

As magus Michael explains, there was a dumbing down of criticism in the latter part of the 20C, which is a dangerous thing because it stifles the modern thinking crucial for art to contribute to the civilising process and so, by inferance, help grease the mechanics of societal peace.

And although his prognosis is that civilisation is on the mend in the internet age, the bulk of his lecture is a warning about how the above mentioned cheerleaders who are responsible for the non-prioritising of cleverness are still engaged in active cheer, flouncing about in the literary equivalent of miniskirts, hotpants and crop tops, tempting readers who don't know their own mind to pander to the shallow meaningless sides of their being.

Cut price predatory movers shaking a throwaway sound and dancing humanity to a future of total poetry daftness bedecked with frivolous bits of literary twaddle that aids, abets and assists the tenebrous global force of economic and educational homogenisation, which panders to unquestioned prejudice and promotes the literary equivalent of MacDonalds, KFC and Oprah.

Michael's main want is to see imaginative thinking increase and the quality of art recognition and appraisal to be raised, by fostering reason/judgement, over taste/emotion. The self appointed minister for culture and oink free Scotland fan says that this goal is achievable if people keep their mental knife-gates sharp and open, by honing the blade of inquiry with lots of reading and writing quality poetry and criticism, in such manner which allows their minds to culturally receive the new and gauge the old in a more aesthetically truthful way than at present.

If we imagine poetry readers as telly viewers and Mick a dictator general of all channels, he would replace Wife Swap and Celebrity Pig Farm with round the clock Arena, the South Bank Show and commission lots of new programmes by those with critically impressive astute imaginative minds, who subscribe to his galagtic outlook. By deciphering the hidden codes and following his programme we can attempt to bump up the mean level of cultural awareness and so, I assume, make our own direct contribution towards world peace and global love.

If only they would devote time to learning how to properly listen to him telling them how to make up their own minds, then they too could hear what he does and make informed choices based on a sensible, inclusive artistic policy tolerant of all other brain spaces, as long as their thinking does not interfere with Mick's job as a world visionary in charge of running civilisation.

It has also struck me that beneath the surface of what is being said, the pages of a more interesting, psychological debate can be read. This is the second part of a bi-annual report consisting of two conflicting halves, and details the current state of play between two publishing houses; compiled by their self made commanders in chief who have waffled a way to planetary prominence and become; in their own minds and the minds of those housed in their respective stables, two top warriors doing battle for the misty laurel beret of a nation’s poetic ideology.

A tug of war double act between the superpower duo of poetry, driven along on a commercial undertow by two first class lingoists, wordsmiths and verbal gymnasts duelling in the circus ring of poesy; whose spoken blurb arguments are extended essay length plugs both blatherers attempt to dress up as essential validations of their deepest poetic belief.

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.