Philip Larkin was a miserible effing sod, useful as a bag of arses, porcine offspring roaming in the lab on a farm of pigs who are rotters. Did Phil ever use rozzers? If not he would have I suspect, the grumpy aul git, a thinking man's Alf Garnet shooting straight from the lip, life's shit, get over it, move on, die and fleet in an elemental abyss with the negative greats who refused to go to bed at boarding school.

He was reared in the emotional slums at an intensley depressing time in the history of middle class angst, questioning and railing against a bourgeois blandness they knew was their inevitable fate, their only hope of comedic relief, the onside bore would be happy to state as "earthy" gallows humour, but one which could offend the critical sensibilities of a post-modern third wave femminist or radical intellectual theorist.

His staus as a very important minor poet in the contemporary English lanaguage canon, is secure in spite of this librarian pre-disposed to moaning and whose public kudos and glamour ascended once he went to the ghost-world he strove to be party to and parly with. Acheived the complete detached utterance in a few poems of his that, if not enobling, are certainly heard by the reader's ear as attempts to rise above and reach higher peaks of poetical thought, where the eye is incredibly accurate in apprasing the weight of poetic reality, due to much study, effort and strength of whatever intellect turns within the hearth of experience one publically professes as marker or sign of a poetic wisdom we hold or express.

The image of Larkin as a square librarian has much solid primary truth for the poetic pallete to paint him as Coventry's premier bardic bore, of a primarily northern importance. His grammer school mind in tortuous mimesis in Hull, inversely cast as Ovid in banishment. But whereas Ovid was a social wit writing how-to-pull love poetry on which his fame rested and offended Emporer Agustus enough to cast him out in 8AD, far from the urbane imperial centre he once thrived at, Larkin's is the self imposed emotional exile of a bored bachelor, unwillingly cast as spokesman of middle class misery, far from where he bleakly yearns to be, his deep unhappiness compounded by knowing his life could be not else than that of a detached poet with a blandly original "I."

He is a huge hit with the more depressingly minded, whose sensibilities and primary critical force spinode with Philip's gloomy lyrical mind where "the sun-comprehending" sound is the light boredom of his inner moan for freedom droning on and on in a career of almost supreme self-pointlessness.

A tortured "I" who shuffled books and attended dreary drinks parties he will bitch about in a poetry overcome with what it sees as the anti-civilising agent of the masses, written by a man born into their very centre. The bullseye, trapped in furthest point of escape, unhappily unmarried and acceding to his fete as one destined to annal the decline in global influence of his country in relentless morbid verse. Duplicating in poetry a literary equivilent of the monotonous estates springing up in the working-class hinterland of East Riding, turning that part of what used to be Yorkshire, into one of Europes premier spots of social misrey.

Here is where an early concrete experiment in high-rise planning lunacy was being enacted by the messiahs of 60's Britons, practicing their art of architecture, professing it a catch-all answer to poverty, but which built laboratories of extremely detached thinking into which poured the Smash, HP Sauce and oilskin tablecloths of endless and drably coloured square design one can imagine Phil resting his elbows on, his librarian jacket hung in the functional coatroom by the door, hating Betjemen for being the lighter hearted of the two, yet secretly finding succour in his role as poet pissed off enough to start uttering the eff word in print.

His chosen emphisis is one of contemporary disgust with modernism, technology and the sociatal changes he bore witness to. A sensitive chap whose intellectual paradise was a fictional world in which one suspects a teddy bear and midnight campers in a tent on a beach solving the answer of life over a glass of sherry will appear, the dim yellow light and lapping whirr of the van's fridge a gentle pulse of background electronica, Phil in shorts wiping his glasses, staring at the moon and refusing to speak of a baggy and ever craggier looking Auden, who Larkin measures his progress by. Auden the common anchor of agreement in the wider poetic community.

All schools of contemporary thought converge on Auden and Larkin, the sensible man whose self-loathing arose at the centre of his materialistic existence of documenting the relationship between physical objects and the middle classes, hates him with the disturbing and still fury only a real librarian knows. He who spent his life in libraries, his creative mind outpouring at the calm pool of work in an academic factory's heart of literarture, where the full mind of all knowledge lay stacked, coded and readable.

The uniquely English aspect in his register of grim acceptance and resignation, is the tenor constrained, a full note of human tradgedy does not voice in poetic thermals which convey the full horror of ineffable sorrow. Whereas the history of some cultures accumulate to a dark national poetic psyche, such as Poland Russia and Hungary, Larkin's cause of sorrow is less continentally epic in scope, more regional in focus and outlook. His is the product and aural mirror of an insular mind deeply tucked in at the middle of it's scoiety.

If a plank contained the full spectrum of human psychology, at one end would be saints and scholars and the other would be the intellectually neutered and selfish who like to frighten, leave one in no doubt about what they think, by abandoning the decorum of a previously unwritten poetical law and start effing off. At the safety of his centre, acknowledging his insignificance and asking how poetry, in the generation after Auschwitz, can exist if humanity and techology harness and hate is societally coded into custom over a short period and allowed to run it's horrific course.

To profess poetry as an enobling, detached force of civilising inner wisdom connected to truth and beauty but veiled to the layman, is - to one who does not practice seeking the hidden higher force of language - often considered the occupation of active wierdos, best to be avoided and one wonders how many of today's crop of versemisths Larkin would have round for sherry and a moan about the then current devil.

The short spell of Architet gods orbiting as primary bores within the art world ended in the 1979 winter of discontent, when refuse piled up and rats swarmed. Philip's professional unhappiness at peak register. The knowing eye in " I told you so," tuned to a rarely reached height over a career of deeply begrudged non-affirmational poetry, the man who made effing respectable. His defining line translated into Hibernoenglish is

They feck you up your ma and da

A crazy bald head straight on the cutting edge of displeaseure, in well constructed verse, one mans relentless struggle with himself, a dull bored beauty rising in spite of the subject material, the "shit" he hates but will never escape, terminally trapped as he is to monotonous tedium and vapid self disgust of he who's linguistic fin flashed innner knowledge, his eye behind the "I" winking in tragi-comic glory only one's inner librarian would know. Thus an almost annonymous man from the midlands spent his career thinking up word combinations of eminently individual hue and design.

Larkin's "The sun-comprehending glass" is as individual a linguistic picture as a moon knowing lavatory brush, both arresting in their own way, one more clearly comic. Two combinations whose originality carry a similar poetic weight to an eye experienced in the science of specific linguistic arrangement and trained to access a spiriti mundi once within the poetic-trance, composing.

Phil's professed critical viewpoint is one primarily in a shabby travelling salesman and soggy breakfast flop house, a kip where words come and the thought comprehending sun beyond the veiled glass in high windows go past and beyond it. The deep blue nowhere of an endless grace note sounding and showing nothing but air, simple to recognise when the eye in Larkin deploys his most hacking of phrase, pale blue nothing, hinting of the dead ghost our tradition communes with.

I am in agreement, that the rarest of thought is found driving an epithet lofty in the life-pan filled with sung event and sing fully effable, balanced on its back by sorrow, ineluctable mimesis, a poetical process of time, trial hope and unaired draughts of Sophia from the hearth of mystery and mythical wisdom we deal in as mentalist or magus, act in a language class few know how to join, the entrance is free and wisdom Sophia who flits in the spiritual mundi and cosmic well as ones mind-reflection.

Phil's deep blue air of incredible nothingness where the answers to human phiosophy are answered by inaminate objects only, the hazier, less penitrible and more miserble, so much the better, for Phil followed the Edwardian's and he and Houseman are lumped together as a double act by Michael Schmidt in one of his open letters to Neil Astley.

Right one roll the perfect spring for cycling and aurally imbibe on continual play, U2. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

A few days before Patrick's day the summer seemed not so far away, but now it looks no longer believable. Spring is upon us. Wednesday was warm, but a cold front sprung in and yesterday, for the first time, I saw slush in Dublin. There are frequent hail storms, a bitter North Easterly and the folk below me are engaged in the thrall of a visceral domestic disagreement, silent sulks, hurled insults, slowly their relationship of continual degeneration bubbles and begins a faint background orbit in one's domestic aural space.

For the past few day the noise quota has increased and they are clearly having a tough time, as most at some point experience. I wish them well and hope reality lives happily ever after with them. Worst case scenario I have a Daily Mail to defend me. I'm sure some of the columnists dishing up the answers on everything from how a stetson affects wider society to where Paddy the plasterer stood in a passage tomb at Newgrange last winter solstice, will drive over from D4 to my rescue. Bundle me in the SUV and whisk off to Raglan Road or Ranelagh. Let me live within the heart of their family on a small stipend perhaps, a manuscript as collateral for larger sums, should the need to leave my daily routine of seeking wisdom through friendship with Trevor the tramp at the canal, where we do a lot of good work for the universal psyche.

Send out the positive thought of two men who have turned their minds to many pictures over many years of working on the bench tackling current events together, finding wisdom through friendship with a tramp of ephemera and conundrum whose diverse interests range from eels to divinity and some say he knows the spirit awaiting Saimhan eve is within us, that pets share not their owners intelliegence, the human mind is an animal man.

Thus spake Carol today in the paper, hack-writer imparting her wisdom for a mortgage, kids and career with a platform squares have cornered, all rowed up like a block wall of opinion and blather in print. Carol is a true messiah with a solution for everything. Never does she sign off before having mauled in ink whoever got lashed into and strung up, hung out in her column. Be it the wife of very talented soccer player David, Victoria Beckham who Carol was imploring through the office of her page to put on weight, or Brittney Spears - who is probably unaware Carol exists - who she regularly chides, offers the content of the day in her urbanic mind and wasting anybody's time who reads her for any purpose other than indulging in a brief skin of pointlessness, which is a regular occurence in Carol's column, who is continually urging Mrs Beckham to impliment numerous and far reaching changes in her private life, affecting to instigate an unwanted relationship with Posh, who Carol sometimes loses her rag with - only as a concerned potential friend of a celebrity who clearly isn't interested in taking her advice and may only read her column to laugh at she who seeks to give an incredibly wealthy stranger who actively takes no interest in her, free advice, and the increasingly bizzare behaviour of Carol has caused me some concern, which is why I have decided to go public with my true feelings about Carol, as a construct.


Having no contact with Carol, our relationship is purely fictional on my part, but that's OK, I don't mind. I have a public duty to Carol to maintain a level of concern for her as a fellow artist and, someone who takes it upon themself to assume a duty of public concern, like Carol who displays all the traits of a woman obsessed with another women, who happens to be younger and thinner, which has no bearing on Carol's professional relationship with Victoria. Carols just a concerned hack whose got deadlines and has to turn in her masterpieces several times a week. Burnout rate in columnists is very high, as it's essentially a job of bitching, cut throat, lots of negative reiki and miserable old queens.

There can be only one supreme goddess in the hack world and the chance of becoming one as a regular gob spouting in the blah blah la pond of journalism can make for a toadying time of intrique, subterfuge, boredom and an artistic lean spell if the hack has aspirations of finding inner tranquility via the route of language to the eye of it's mystery and heart of understanding, stick the boot sap love comrade

The newspaper has comprehensive sports coverage, but acts primarily as an open letter to various public figures, in which advice is offered via any number of professional journalists featuring in their numerous columns, many of whom are women with a modern world-view, holding down a career in the arts and juggling the demands of public life with family,a very important part of all our lives, and the columns plead with whoever it is, to take their advice about diet, domestic set up, getting divorced and generally moaning a lot, using the celebs as a hanger for ones bitchy cloak, the common literary register responsible for the much sought after ticket to a magical event in the mind of a man from Co Meath who is a full time fantasist, peace and tranquility advocate and the pre-requisite for a poet hoping to confidently skate and figure the trace of his travels through slamming doors, sudden weighty thuds and other ephemera in the domestic ambience of acoustic topography, where some conduct the campaign at a front line of their literature.

Utopian-paint bore eloquent, bono poetic ear, some say his inner belief equals Sir Paul's and Saint Bob's perfect song, One Love, where a working class hero is the fun thing to be and a compassionate sound from our children who seek guidance from His goodness say, Speke; but one name of the all powerfull Dagda or, humanity.

Canada, New York, Malden
Masschusetts, Calgary
Alberta, Rock Springs Wyoming
Kansas - Eudora, Palm Desert
California, London Lambeth
Ontario - Dryden, Helena
Montana, Reno Nevada
Kentucky - Printer, United
Kingdom, States and China.

Chloe Poems. The Maybes?

Right and left last week I read in four different venues, a performance milestone and interesting run of intense activity. The largest hosting was the final one - Saturday last - a huge gathering of singers, versesmiths and entertainers par excellance. A real celebration of sorts, it was the final in a set of sociologically themed events spread over a few days, which I had been unaware happened, until shortly before the denouement was due to occur, an open mic finale. Numerous Ulster poets where there to demonstrate and celebrate the potential for good to happen in society at a grass root level.

The power of "you too, fair play, good on yer, lash it out, wha'," in a loose taggle of artists seeking victorious utterance on the plain of speech and through that sense of ascending attainment the campaigns engender in the gods of persuassion, teased to form in a rag bag lot of all sorts, assorting, assimilating in the space.

For some not resident in Dublin whose arrangements to attend poetical events in this strange, yet exceptionally rewarding place nessitate an overnight stay, the event was pencilled in, a verbal exchange documented possibly in an advance invite or acceptance, the printed record, a possession of electronic form of what passed between you and the person hosting perhaps?

For the more organised person some may feel uncomfortable around, not - I hasten to add - due to any socioligical defect in the wholly imaginary, yet slightly offputting person, our grey, modest character hinted at. The ghost we do not know but sense has weightless gravitas, the power of his fright invisible, yet relevant for they calling an anorak to fix the location as an islands premier cinema and central repository for much spiritual and physical evidence of her cinematic history and filmic lore.

Many ran to a timetable, but some whose domestic locale is closer and whose orbit of poesy is controlled by a higher power, the personae of tweed in a fishermans grey eye and white of Olwengin river, the jagged green grass at the base of Maumturk and sky in pale blue above Na Beanna Beola, did not.

I hovered at the fringe and assumed the role of poet, important as a bag of arses, wating by the door on twelve pins, frequently slipping out and spending a sizable chunk of the do elsewhere. This being a sudden occurence my plans had been tossed into dissaray and by 11pm I was keen to seal the final abandonment of hope for their retreval, nip to an off licence before it closed; which I accomplished and returned to a sizable cultural space at the Irish Film Institute to herald a cyber-collective's poetic success.

The networking capacity of the world wide web had been marshalled to stunning effect as an organisational tool to keep in touch and draw others into on the quest of seeking poetic affirmation, each in a unique frequency seeking our datum, universe, imaginary rule or, original blueprint to create with, and - as we practice the oral craft - adhere to, in search of clues for ways of making ingenious and extremely pointless verbal fictions considered most ludicrous by all but a few, bring true faith in outward practice of the belief that a key to good humanity unlocks the gate of inner freedom and ritual, to secure and maintain correct spiritual rank in the verbally inverted community, utilise a net and let it support our messianic dream.

Penniless prophets in suburbia whose masses of potential long since dissipated, seeking artistic succour with a harmless cyber career and pretend/project crafted fantasy into an electronic continuum, publishing for hobby, business, pleasure or boredom and met like minded pals who share stuff such as collecting rare violins, manuscripts, stamps, tea bags, jingles or, when looking on less common leisure paths which lead intricate linguists who don't get out much to poets, those who prefer their domestic ritual a singular fictional laneway of love, the mess of self in an adult relationship, paint on pallette, fodder a rise in sound to slip, set, descend an arc of decline and only return in the upswing of an inner lullaby leading back to boy who moved into my neighbourhood, won't do nothing right, just sit down effin a lot.

He don't wanna go to Youghal and learn to read and write, just sits around the house and plays that rock and roll music all nite, utter shite, have you heard, boom boom boom of a backroom where Lilly Marlene met O'Neill, before he met the golden Farrah, Marlene a force in Hollywood fading by the light of Ryan's tawny locks?

London, Derry, Galway and Cork came, Dublin based spoken worders too and addressed fellow fans, toiling comrades, the hip and the lame in linguistic turmoil at a hullaballoo language feast of poem and song, joining the demo, front line veterans celebrating love.

A sizable portion of the collective make planetary displays of themselves in the shop window of my space, where a large number of poets connect, network and find their signpost to wisdom and inner enlightenment point right, the planet of wannabes succour via art with a remarkabley different kind of visceral and physiologically exciting poetic form of engagement in the spoken work, for both reading and audience professional alike.

Much performance there is an opposite of the regimented, sombre and somehwat boring tradition of a silent poetic reverance the occasional verse centric poet historically fell prey to concocting as the primary enthrallment or soporific live aid over the duration of a career in the public speaking of defunct mumbo jumbo, important as pigshit, quantum torpor.

Unconscious audience members are notably absent in this pro-active new wave, where the liminal state between psychological and physiological support, vocal advocacy and howling encouragement is but the oral warp of an acoustic weft, strands for the poet to snarl or harness, mesh of experience in chance and timing as they practice in reality a sound of the string within. Test an aural object, go verbal, career as a witness of measure and thus live teeth with supportive participation in the genuinely different yet populist strain of affirmational poetry are cut, nascent, spring-like and the indicator of an active health in the form of oral gymnastics bestowing what - some say - constitutes a contemporary edge, incisive and ever more sharply dilineating the shift in balance, away from print/reader and into live/audience, engaged in the grass root process that twenty years ago was a limbo land of crazy bald head straights, hip loonies forging underground careers, John Hall and - ten years later - Chloe Poems.

Faith accrued on stage won out at the UK Arts Council. The polarity of it's funding ethos entirely reversed over the course of a decade, the seismic shift this year, as the majority of poet funding now being doled is to artists of dual focus who publish, plus perform, thus signalling the strategy of mothballing a pre-web wine and cheese career train the mainstream crop who lit big in the 70's - 90's were once reared on and radical marxists at.

The emphasis no longer is on the wholly printed logo of a remote and aurally enobling mind, but one's word as performative text. The ethos being that by encouraging language experts to master the physiological side of opening the gob and going for broke, so their capacity to entertain will increase, in more clear lyrically immediate and measurable manner than pre-net.

The notion of detached utterance - a legacy WB Yeats left the poetic community as it's most influential English language poet of the 20C - is no longer the sole prepotent force affecting movers and shakers grooming careers and picking chosen ones, but one slipping in eminence and influence, as rap copping where the action gets decided snaps a clap-o-meter of syntax, a briefcase, some papers and spectacles.

The arts officer is ex-habit, busted for finding God in O'Neill, who begins the meeting with a bendy yoga move, adding gravitas and weight to the theory delivered straight that all avenues of escape open or shut matter not to the gods, their world a web of singledom, inability to upgrade, guess reality to be some dream a gifted laureate is and not just docked effing off at the page where leak sound and motion, career along a lonely path aural but also orally trod, the artistic spirit a masterpiece where the headcount of an audience in transit is his. Tot up the time of engagement and spread good art, funding with a purpose of corporeal participation for a lingo nuts audience.

It is logical that poets at the nexus of their performance ability draw bums on seats, enthrall instantly in the flesh more than the previous - and ever dwindling - mainstream book maestro administering to consumers who dropped shopping for poetry fare on the High Street where increasingly pointless squares whose dwindling corner at market talking up the torpor, sales falling, annointing the wholly chosen one's, the next best bet on the possibly real thing, the modern poet in a formulae that guarantees anything goes, any mad theory given a brush at the old guard bog struggling to paint with the authorative eye poetic proclomations from the stratosphere of lyrical intelligence, a polygon of poesy must cube out at least in order to acheive career bouyancy in the overpopoulated circus of primarily free verse with supple muscular rhythm and rhyme, with all sorts of think-ups in the mix.

The name of the game is pyrotechnical wordplay, a lot of blaze and little dependable heat or goliaths on the horizon fresh from Parnassus, an offspring of Appollo dropped by a crane into the hustle and bustling lingo discipline, in which a lot of potty people train, for as many reasons as there are nutters in search of lettered enlightenment, a publisher to take one's work on and publish primarily for oneself - like John Hall of Citizen 32 fame and myself.

A legend proving it over the course of living his unique career of long slog, which paid off for John, as he now has the most exciting whirlwind to rip through UK poetry since Philly Hobsaum jiggied a Group, sharing his professional orbit.

John is the connection to and took a polar opposite career course from a cute huer, Pam Ayres . You should see Socrates in the 70's, yeah you should hear Socratic Pam, she's the kind of the girl who made News of the World and kind of cultural reality and de facto dictator to boot, of remote poetry that drew millions in. She was as watched as the biggest mid seventies prime time gods. Men like mimic Mike Yarwood and his most senior variety genius Bruce Forsyth, still acting the entertaining maggot in his eighth decade. A primetime legend. Pam's feat of holding the TV gaze of a nation whilst acknowledging the sum of her wisdom is an awareness of her ignorance, psyche and place in the rating's rank at the entendre of bottom ender charts none but Pammy, Betcheman and a few other quare feckers have entered.

For those who do not bet, John Hall is a rational cosmologist's punt, his live cultural currency commanding an ascending rate of coolness in curent exchange for his experiential worth as a poet. Pam too has incredible kudos and this ex RAF - now special agent of light comedic verse - is undercover or due a surge to even greater heights, should the spheres command her re-entry into an orbit of fame not for the faint hearted anytime soon.

Chloe Poems, was once eyed, shared a bill with at Stamps Wine Bar in Crosby, around the time a friend of mine from inner city Liverpool - where Chloe hails from - introduced me to a rock 'n roll band from his hood called The Maybes? Who eyed also in the nemeton of Civic Hall three years ago when Ormskirk roared.

A remote force not of this world motions Chloe Poem's career orbit and his inner ascent her higher power, the authority controlling Chloe's chromatically trans-neutered accent is north inner city Liverpool. Not a location condusive to inspiring unnatural faith of eventual poetic attainment for a sensitive man who dresses as a woman, expressing philosophy he preaches through Chloe Poems, unless the force be with you, Chloe on the Dolby speakers drifting out of hearing range only true gods command, she whose persona is flawlessly executed and far removed from the physically neutral looking and shy, but clearly focussed man behind her creation who I also shared a waiting area with, a cramped set of stairs - the toilets were his changing room - leading from the bar to the upstairs function room where a randomly drinking audience in a light state of intoxication were fully entertained by the incomporable Chloe, who is unforgettable in utterance, unlike no other craic-whore queen cooking nazi sock and fecking at a Toxteth crack-shack beyond a scale of one to ten, who has ever effed off his head before, because she invented his accent and her rage between register passes for both prol and aristo alike, simultaneously. So all who flock to witness this master and mistress of linguistic control, eff off, she is untouchable in the performance of his work.

A veteran verbalist voicing truth to the nation but constrained by fairness and diviersity legislation, injects a common dose of sensible utterance at packed places wherever she stars to an audience of fellow artists who practice being human, cold juice the shell Chloe out could claim mid afternoon sofa rights, an alternative Pam Ayres for noughties effing Briton. Bruiser from a bowery dell booming on the cobbles, of a slapper's stolen heart, her pimp a wicked old tranny, the non recollectable hag old fag and annonymous author of the voice in useless force, her alter ego his male mirror out reaching to effable she who is all feckin this and fockin that.

He posesses a similar spirit as the Maybes?

What struck me about this gang of scouse rockers - whose EP cover is the image above - was how far they outshone the support bands and nearest musical rivals, on the night. All round; in singing, playing and harmony, they exposed a raw and powerful truth to a competition who, wilting in jealousy at four gods sounding in cultural thunder beyond the attainment of all but chosen ones, tried as best they could with the dream more dwindling charade, and continued. A tight four piece drawing all within earshot to tap along, true rock 'n roll band and joy to hear, who rock with raw vocal power, as I re-discovered on Myspace. On the up, 54,000 hits, songs played 30,000 times by eager listeners.

Have a listen. You will not be dissapointed by the lead singer and visceral verbalist blooming like the mesmeric rocker he is. His voice is at peak strength and I am willing to bet will outroar most others circuiting a similar lyrical track.

The Maybes?

New Site

I've set up a My Space site, as I can post recordings there that are streamed. Have a listen to the brilliant Addy and Raven who attend the Monster Truck. Addy is a singer, Raven is one - if not the - best live poet reciting on the weekly open mic in Dublin.

Dublin Poets

Monster Truck is on tonight, 73 Francis Street, at the very bottom, South end, opposite Fallons pub and next to the Brown Envelope antique shop, so come on down 8-11pm.

5 Euro in Free booze.

Donkey Business

A true story. Only in the wacky West and picked up from Galway First

"A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised “to get out and meet people,” the local court heard last week.

Thomas Aloysius McCarney with an address in south Galway was charged with cruelty to animals, lewd and obscene behaviour, and with being a danger to himself when he appeared before the court on Friday. He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.

Solicitor for the accused Ms Sharon Fitzhenry said that her client had been through a difficult time lately and that his wife had left him and that his life had become increasingly lonely.

“Mr McCarney has been attending counselling at which he was told that he would be advised to get out and meet people and do interesting things. It was this advice that saw him book into the city centre hotel with a donkey.”

She added that Mr McCarney also suffered from a fixation with the Shrek movies and could constantly be heard at work talking to himself saying things like “Isn’t that right, Donkey?”

Supt John McBrearty told the court that Mr McCarney who had signed in as “ Mr Shrek” had told hotel staff that the donkey was a family pet and that this was believed by the hotel receptionist who the supt said was “young and hadn’t great English.”

Receptionist Irina Legova said that Mr McCarney had told her that the donkey was a breed of “super rabbit” which he was bringing to a pet fair in the city. The court was told that the donkey went berserk in the middle of the night and ran amok in the hotel corridor, forcing hotel staff to call the gardai.

McCarney was found in the room wearing a latex suit and handcuffs, the key to which the donkey is believed to have swallowed.

He was removed to Mill St station after which it is said he was the subject of much mirth among the lads next door in The Galway Arms.

He was fined €2,000 for bringing the donkey to the room under the Unlawful Accommodation of Donkeys Act 1837."

Monster Truck Spring Reading

Come, laugh, relax, blather, gas, learn your craft at the ultimate temple and trade speech, watch, hear sonic-beauty whirr your inner gyre and buzz with Dublin poets - 5 Euro in - free booze - Mondays.

All welcome.

Monster Truck Art Gallery - Francis Street, city centre, South of the Liffey.

The perfect spot to gather, recite, listen and develop acoustic skill, with smirting area and hard-drive capturing the magic for those wanting computer quality cuts of their textual selves at the orgy of live oral utterance, on the front line of love in an art gallery at the heart of Dublin's urbane art and soul district.

Monday night's formatt is continual poem or song, one per person going round in a loop, to reduce waiting time and keep an even karma in the temple where all those predisposed to wordic fantasy and exageration can verbal, 8 - 11 pm, bouyed on a professional bono free ambience and off licence priced tipples. The real thing. No rip off.

Let loud roar, come super gobs and gab on a near gratis night, in the fittest environment for linguistic practice mon online compadres. Foster onto a public stage for the mutual benifit of all mankind your hocus pocus there, sojourn to this sophisticated place of many layers and find the verse you fought dawn's smooth rising for when the thorn leaf opened in the sun, dew-wet life was salmon and Seigas and the sound of reality ringing abroad was speech and song, at a world where poetic wordplay is the order of business.

under a mathmatically democratic entertainment policy, talk of the sky and eagle above who washes its wings by the wind of the sidhe on all souls night, breeze through to hear and dissolve in the ambience before leaving for home, hale in good cheer and with the memory of a hopefully poetic experience from a night of controlled instinct and sense of speech the aural mesmerist lead you to - Monster Truck art gallery near St Patrick's cathedral

the Liberties - bottom of Francis Street (S End) next to the Brown Envelope antique shop and opposite Fallons pub.

Monday 5, 12, 26 March and 16 April

8 till 11pm


~

The Poetry Director of the Monster Truck art gallery in Dublin needs poets for a summer reading series, so get in touch before the April funding deadline at Poetry Ireland, for May/June readings and recieve a fee for your recital. This deadline is every two months. Those wanting featured readings for July/August should get in touch before June.

e mail - desmondswords@hotmail.com -

Not a soft touch on the second-hand
bicycle front, he lashed out

got a proper form of two wheeled transport
that set him right back.

Unable to pay rent he was, once again
living in the shed on a building site

at the quarry near Clondalkin,
where he wandered lonely in a cloud

of clinical depression, oozing a downer
on all whose path he crossed. The fold up

cycle that rides like a joke, a visual pollutant
sore thumb of the high street, scenic vandal

drew jeers and derision from pedestrians
on to his person undertaking the act

of looking a prat on two wheels a ten
year old wouldn't be seen dead owning.

~

Oracular mop top

“yeah yeah yeah.”

Gods of body and soul understand,
hear they say a Mersey beat lit the fuse

of revolution. Imagined a planetary
magical mystery cult and let it be

in the heart of Speke and Woolton.
John, Paul, Aunty Mimi, mothers Mary

and Julia, circuiting until peace
throughout the universe is all across

the watchtower, protected by her silver
spoon. Imagine Freddie his dad

doing Al Jolson impressions at Newcastle
Road, in the bedsit with Julia playing a banjo

not the John who got mobbed
all round Earth, smoking pot with Lucy

in the sky, purple hearts, Mind Games
diamonds with Yoko lying in bed, Rock

and Roll, two anti-war protestors, Walls
and Bridges. Three albums from the lost

weekend John spent with Harry Nillson
David, Sir Elton, Ringo and John

after the white period with his personal
assistant and lover May Fung, the sweet

bird of paradox. Didn’t anybody tell her
didn’t anybody see

Yoko’s on the phone to Linda
and Linda’s on the phone in the Bag

O’Nails, '68 and called again when Sir
Paul needed sorting out with a bag

of weed for the start of the tour in Tokyo
1980. It was a cold and wet January

day, Sir Paul was saying the stuff's
not his, giving it some of that rock

and roll music, any old time the King
never knew his twin nor John

that his little sister Ingrid existed.

~

What chance had Jim Morrison
of watching Star Wars after Burbank ’67

when he sung the original lyrics of Light
My Fire and was never invited back on

by Ed Sullivan ever again.

~

Elvis went mad
at the decline of rock ‘n roll decorum

guess he couldn’t get much higher
than the standard that sent Jim to Paris

in March ’71, ostensibly to recuperate.
But Jim lost weight, shaved off his beard

and died three months later, in July
an overdose, some say - heroin

others natural causes. 27, the same
as Bolan in his prime when children

of the revolution rode white swans
wore hot pants and drove a Capri

to Walthamstow dogs listening to Elvis
on the radio in the final stage

of weight gain, as Meat Loaf
roared into Top of the Pops on a chopper

like a bat out of hell. Maybe he can talk
all night, the cat who sang two

out of three aint bad, but in a game
of the world where the champions

are the biggest dandies rocking round
Wavertree clock tower, John went that

one step beyond at an out
of the way occasion and will dispose

the new wave of chart invaders
the annual surge of return.

Mods coming back, Madnes ruling
top spot all summer miming baggy

trousers in the middle of the street
our house.

On high ground in Tomar's Wood ships herd
in Dublin Bay, sail in sunlight and drop ashore

Hiberno-Norse raiders Máelmorda instructed
brother-in-law Sigtrygg to muster for the civil war

on an island his foot on the Fal stone could claim
if Dalcassian Mor cranium were cleaved; tossed

in blackthorn, remove the rival Ri's claim by right
of violence with sword. Be not just Ard Ri or high king

but emperor in the Armagh book. A bardic-voiced
composer; compass, meter amigo, ear-dreamt darling

spark of the ink, kindle, fire, single plough and satirist
croaking on the pillar of promise a secret song

sky-gods in the vulgar vassal skilfullly rhyme
striding low, at ease, travelling as noise angled in

music from an oak of two blossoms, banner of Horace
Ars Poetica, indexing ethnicity on desolate poetical

night with angelic language, prickly talk and naming
a next step of travel in the wind-like voice, ear and eye

reversing valde melancolicus, God's amanuensis
slayer, "chief of sinners," ace of hearts in mischief
and wickedness

...it will tend to prevent effusion of blood for the future
..knows what he fights for.. loves what he knows..”

Horse General in the New Model Army, fan of Gustav
Adolf the Great, at a posthumous execution, the corpse

hung in chains, beheaded; and was not a first time for
some, ripping up pavements at the love-parade riot

looting shoe's from shops, trilling

"Scum! Scum! Scum!"

and Charlie Bird

"You orange bastard."

Cast as Cromwell by thug-reason and the island
mob, looking not to love.

ACHILL

I am typing this in Castlebar, Mayo, after decamping to Achill island for a few weeks, to give myself a rest and sluice out the aural cocophony clangering round my mind before the next creative splurge.

I hit the ground running this year, as I've been on non-stop compositional benders since Christmas and for a while now have been dreaming in language. Asleep but consciously composing poetry and prose in my slumber, aware of it's quality or lack thereof as my mind whirls through the blender. The lines I remember occur in what poet Katy Donovan describes as

"The slumbertime before actual sleep."

But substituting the word "before" with "after," as I slip in and out of being fully awake. Alas I have not managed to salvage anything, this morning a full qautrain faded on waking like footprints on a tide washed beach and only a snatch of snippeted lingo was saved.

"Inner verbal" something or other.

This process - I imagine - relates to cracking aspects of poetic knowledge - quite literally - in my sleep. The ideas in the prose I write perculates and settles during sleep, to froth forth anew into a tighter linguistic expression, which I then promptly forget. But I am supposed to be on holiday and happy switching off for a week or two till the mental tide returns.

Achill is the perfect setting to busy oneself as the unconscious does it's work. It is the place which inspired Michael Longley to start writing again after his ten year hiatus and where he does all his composing. John F Deane is from here and in Lynotts bar they've seen and heard all the greats. I spun out a few on Saturday night with the in situ English guitar man. It is a magical place. As far west as one can go, disconnected from the mainland when the tide is in and to it when the tide it's out. All four seasons in one vista, framed all round by mountains and completely blanketed by bog. My paternal grandmother was an islander, and both my maternal grandparents were from Bahola, a few miles down the road.

Got Connected

Walking the rhodedendrum sheltered road
from McLoughlin's to the cottage, I became
connected to a patchwork of field bog and
peat smoke; where even the dead brown
heads of wild rhubarb fell into being with the
dog bark and bird call puncturing the silence
wrapping the island completely. Save for the
foam white horse-water dancing at the
Atlantic's Eastern edge.

And calling to the half bright moon - as a ruby
pink finger of crimson cloud ringed atop of
Slievemore mountain gently paled to white mist
and disappeared into the ether that warm May
night - I felt the silk and velvet light of Achill
hold within its grasp all the waves of time that
ever broke upon the ridges of those multi shaped
mountains and wind ravaged fir trees. Always
ever-blooming in the present moment of now
no sweeping hand can measure; silent in the tribal
heart beating it's Bunacurry blood beneath the
May moon.

I, Homo Bonobo Mor?

"The Bonobo Congo Pygmy Chimp does not form permanent relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by gender or age."

~

Ready, get set - so go conscious and great up an ineffable
utterance mouthing in a General Hotel where two
strangers found love with each other this evening
eloquent creature who fleets as mister and mistress
dogging your bit for national love - all hope of seeing
you live abandoned as a Homo spirit took possession
of Virgil's IQ on the motorway, the night pit-lips
pulled up and tongued Virge's voice to Mnemosyn
who'll speak at Write and Recite, next week, Tuesday
Cassidy's pub - Westmoreland Street - ask an ear
if art in actuality's hear.

“lash it out wha?”

Debauch and swing on a raw seat at the counter-misogynist
orgy in vocal, public riot - duel execute light fool
board crank positive energy click, spell - hear what
happens online galactic commandress attending VIP
booth in a business dream-suite where loners long as one
swept in Tuesday night of therapy.

"D'yer gerri?"

Yo new god just come out she knew he was a moaner, but last
night made a show of singing the self penned song of desolate
lyrical beauty look effortless the sixth time he professed in
public session as a witness of reward who came foward
reading heaven from time's earlier utterance of joy
balanced light, proclaiming back the is in Write and Recite as it
rages- WaR - Dublin’s most poetically occupied theatre of
competent verbal combat and practice, one's vibrant under
mesh less rigidly warped by top brass who simply murmur
and tinkle in Cassidy's gaffe. One’s fluid front line of faith and
powder god-bombs blowing a cannon listen, speak, learn and
commandeer there a supply of live-time in the vocal support
pack of HQ’s atmospheric line leader and rally his cry of
command to commando of verse operative word
the song sibling sings an alternative matriarchal "Yo" Mor

“Bantu O bono Bolobo ancestor Bonobo”

You too's 99% Homo Sapien gene, Congo pygmy chimp Bonobo. What set it to permanent bonking's unknown but you cross the line of - WaR - public place of song, sup slops till yiv sung no more - during the course of composing this missive Dear Nora, Homo Sapien near Bonobo blossom in a cultural hot house sotto la spotlight with pals who poesy at the longest running generally continuous contemporary open mic, O space-agent et tu homo Bonobo? Tuesday night’s career in overload docked but inner city at the root orbit of Cassidy’s beating heart O Amergin, Eriu and Bonolo eclectically mixed - four years of competitive commune - addictive gods binding live through fields of weekly literate action. Spread not Bonobo the Appollo one balding ancestor war vibe, but map the Hazel and route with nine nutty daughters unite and ask the island factions who glare not to answer the question

"Homo O’Homer be here con tu O Bonobo?"

WaR no more troglodyte, little homo walk upright and toss in egalitarian gait, cultural chimp constantly at it O Bonobo matriarch of monkey love round Bololo river Congo O Harold Coolidge homo Sapien know WaR in Bonobo is absent, society balanced by orgy as Bonobo make constant love not war. Homo is ear Homer Bonobo Mor; factual distraction at the bacchanalian free fall, face-test in a bathroom clutching the razor shading Hewson or Houseman - phantasmagorist O Bonobo, starch poetic illusion - reality of neck hair bristling at the behest of Homo linguistic sorcerer bono be one of Bonobo yew's in stark illustrative prose, call Homer back and manner what measured goat-stitch will keep at the edge of invention to scribe the fantasy house man and linguistic roller coaster, yews rocket along a single quivering ride, playmate composing the skein-thick sense abandoned opposite Homer's thin scan of Homo's poetic page life in the house at gas public when the start of last century wrote in Bonobo Mor verse - now alas - selectively practiced due to ultra shocking literacy rates – less if his tongue sprung a fresh line, found her habit of stress and ditched what's old overboard, cast oft soft babbling viva voce singing ancestoral Bantu Bonolo and Congo of Bonobo eye from ancestor ghost Sapien Homer - literate fellow Homo Bonobo Mor, tongue mistress utter he be

Layer of syntax Pan Sapien, ear pluck of O absent tunesmith up the oracle at work in celestial string, tug on homo humanity, dress proof in a glimmer slit - beauty deaf to time and profess poetic reality as this gob, smacked on a voice-rail unable - quantity songstress of immense talent - to convey what scale your gift counters O pan galactic age-bud of Euro amour in sight of Bonobo command at work blare ear O career once more who score the deed of verbal gods and breathe solo, island queen of memory.

Uncle

Source a way in: purchase, pull up
make foot upon a shore of conscious

and reason the world to turn on its
axis - Sword released on old plain
five days after crossing at Tallaght.

From street to hospital death-bed a
week ago.

The day of return we share your
weight uncle, from alter to hearse
man of small stature - your mass
easily borne by us uncle, brother, father
and son

"Does Mr Mooney know Barney?"

..the number of lipstick
in bags thrusting forward
is up on our mother's time
when bags were smaller with
less lippy inside to item, fix
view or spring from the eye a
picture absent or image left
to rust til it completely exists.

"Dear do we know?"

He lived before Nemo swam
and vanquished him to exile.

Extinct: his trill of love's now
silent on tape in a box of memory
pristine up creaky step and rung
locking an attic in sound, shadow
and the ghost of Homer in visible

ear-craft, eye - tongue, seer to flaw
the imprecise mind resting on a
table cloth uncle John, love
swept asunder in the pit of tears.

One summer day when the sun was soft
I slipped on a sheepskin shawl and - walking
wide eyed with wonder through the world
wearing the habit of an unholy hermit
that May morning on Malvern Hill -
thought I felt a faery-jolt befall me.

I was weary with wandering so went to rest
on a broad bank by the brook-side - to lay
down, lean and look on water - but the
stream's wet strain of merry slumber swayed
me asleep, and I began a marvellous dream
of being in a wilderness I'd never seen before.

Looking East to the sun, my eye fastened on
a magnificent tower - stout on a hilltop
and in the deep dale below, a dark dungeon
whose deep ditches were a terrible sight to
behold.

Between these two was a wondrous field
full of folk and all manner of men from
commoner to king - working and wandering
at the world's command.

Some honest ones put to the plough - planting
sowing and sweating hard to win what wasters
by their gluttony destroy - and some with
proud countenance coming disguised, dressed
in the garb of deceit.

Many put themselves to prayer and penance
for the love of God, living strict and straight
lives in the hope of bliss in a heavenly hereafter
like anchorites and hermits cloistered in cells
not coveting the pleasures of flesh or loitering
lecherously along life's path.

Some opt for commerce to accomplish success
it seems, as in our sight such men thrive. And
some mirth-making like minstrels, getting
gold with their glee and guiltless - I believe.

But japers and janglers, the children of Judas
revel in fantasies and make themselves fools
unwilling to work though having the wit to.

What Paul preached of them I need not
prove here.

~

On diddlee listening to dee Simon Armitage's re-rendering of the Middle English alliterative romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I decided to seek joy with William Langland's Piers Plowman, dive in and dabble in alliterative meter, as one does. To give you an idea of the weirdly original - lines 30-33

And somme chosen chaffare; they cheveden the bettre
As it semeth to oure sight that swiche men thryveth;
And somme murthes to make as mynstralles konne,
And geten gold with hire glee giltlees, I leeve-

Dear Reader -

Some opt for commerce to accomplish success
it seems, as in our sight such men thrive. And
some mirth-making like minstrels, getting
gold with their glee and guiltless - I believe.

~

Project manager of the imagination and overseer in a fictional reality who'll work if one's muse shares elswhere.

Heaney had the same idea when he birthed Buile Suibhneg in Wicklow as Sweeney Astray.

It is logical to assume alliterative meter - strictly speaking - is the one linguistic undermesh we all share, possess and profess to be our native poetic, in the sense of it's scansion being the one most closely mapping our speaking. The one metrical pattern to measure and co-ordinate with when bluffing down our poetical path through this brief flash of life called consciousness, mon cushla Mor datum - my spiritual core.

Meter O tricky matter with fixed understanding of accent and stress in our language. I say tOmato, you say tomAto and they say the tomatO yiz discover in Dublin

"is a whirly whack hurling of poetry there."

On first meeting PJ Brady - Cavan man, actor and poet who has - for the last 20 years in a mesmeric one man show - starred as Kavanagh in a ninety minute monolouge speaking only Patrick's words - I sought what lore had

"Patrick Ka/va/nAgh,"

unaware I was incorrectly pronouncing Ka/va/nAgh as an a/na/pEst, placing a strong stress on the final of the three syllables, and worthy of a verbal bufoonary award. I did not initially understand or even recognise that the native spoken voice speak KAv/an/agh a dactyl. DAct/yl/ic - the primary stress on the first, not third syllable. Naturally, PJ shook his head not knowing I meant KAv/an/agh of the dactyl - and five minutes of repeating KavanAgh - on the verge of jacking in the mantra - he grasped my quest referred to KAv/an/agh of the dactyl and man he can be like himself - once I wrote it down.

The misunderstanding occured as my ear didn't discern where the native speech places stress on the word Kavanagh. Indeed I was unable to pronounce it correctly for a few months of being here, such was the complex vocal subtlety used to render it in speech. To PJ's ear I sounded like a man from Barnsley with no native speech asking for directions to "the beach" in Madrid when he should say "la playa." We were effectively speaking two different words. Mine to his ear was babble, his to mine not, containing as it does the original vocal gene on which the name - as it is rendered now - is spoken. Only in print was Kavanagh shared between us, prior to me acquiring the nack of saying it correctly.

Kavanagh's native tongue had evolved into talking English over the course of a linguisticaly unique historical path - Yeats could claim - is an authentic cultural trace, link and contemporary route to the entirely oral art we profess a connection to. Our original watermark of the poetic oomphalos the mind of all human stirs at and returns to.

Yeats - champion dreamer and arch poet - could say a net or set of acoustic instruction manuals and roadmaps of intricate and perfectly original design routing to our true poetic, lie covert beneath the debris and fall out of the island history, superficially concealing them from view to the eye of those ignorant of the island's history.

This poetic is still in active song and charts it's society, whose myth - 400 years after a cultural bleitzkreig began, irrecovably showering the native way of existence into sudden mortal decline - connects us to Homeric practice via a living root our founding godfathers in the graeco roman english cannon, unfortunately did not recognise, ignored and actively set about destroying.

At this Tudor point of our poetics trajectories, one island had a 1000 year written tradition, much of it recorded in manuscript from the dawn of writing on it, 1500 years ago - at a time when all contracts between individuals in society were - in the absence of print - solely verbal - whilst one had men like Sidney and Spencer - poets of England in renaissance and the first brutual flush of it's imperial bloom, asserting a savage and virgin beauty.

A full comprehension of this orally ordered society is impossible. Much of our quotidian doings are contracted or undertaken in print. From a simple e mail to our job itself, so inhabiting the rationale and talking with any authority on Homer or Amergin depends if the ghost we profess of speaks through us. If we recognise our fundamental whisper or hear inherent and logical signs in the society were writing is unknown. We from literate society can not fully understand. Only project a mental construction and guess with varying degrees of straight facedness how to humanly connect with Homer?

Chase a shadow of the goatherd king we claim as our spirit guide whose silent voice - we hope - will speak to and through us. Paint his eye and discover what sound behind the veil noises to uncover the one evolutionary route to our vocal art we hope still connects. Praying his and our conduit to myth running before the time memory was printed, do so as one.

And although the last of those unlucky enough to have been at the final quick severing from their millenia old tradition during the Tudor upheaval are now forgotten to all but a few, these men do connect to a pure orality and represent the spirit of Homer in a way Sidney, Spencer, Raleigh and the fellow founders hallowed in our graeco-roman cannon do not.

On one side a composite Elizabethan courtier poet. On the make, an ear tuned to wooing ladies and tongue swearing by the myth of his poet god he claims is Homer. On the other SIDE an annonymous courtier poet of Ireland, crusty, steeped in his 1000 year written tradition, composing verse in archiac rules of prosody perfected four hundred years previously and in a language exclusive the poetry and whose higher streams and most difficult meters not all found, but with ten centuries sheer weight of alumni numbers who all cite Amergin as their main mythical man to claim a supernatural relation with. The island's real Homer.

Four poets, at least three of action, 2000 years apart. Raleigh from his nations virgin first crop who can not claim a directly live histoical hot wire to prove supernatural connection - though anchors proudly in our canon. Himself a set founder and full critical support. Pot shots at the Lords of verse are discouraged. They played a part and we want our myth unstirred, so - we say little.

Sir Sidney Spencer wrote in times when violent death, killing and a ruthless approach to business cast a pall of general horror over the period of kamakaze-like implosion of the island's civil structure, renting asunder our final link to a bronze age system of society which evolved untroubled in a - by dark age standards - tranquil paradox. The final piece of Goidelic existence unground and unaffected by the Roamn empire or its collapse. The critical mass point before a balloon bursts, is it's greatest capacity and the propensity of humanity to route to anarchy on a regualr basis is evident.

One we map only with hindsight, by piecing together the human motives which caused the centre to cease holding itself and collapse in disorder.

The poet steeped in ancient practice facing Sir Walter, linking to Homer, believes Amergin is as close as one gets to being Homer - his actuality running back could almost converse with Appollo.

A man any poet - one assumes - would recognise Amergin's reality of the Homeric way. Our Bard - as he clearly is - a living experiment of what happened when a culture from the Homeric age stayed intact and survived, far from the calamaties of our graeco-roman mythic oomphalos one could describe as the poem gene guaranting we pass our linguistic DNA test . The closest one has to a textual explanation of what poetry is, how it works and why. Poetry as a live entity we execute in our pratice, the desire for one's poetic reality to be.

Naturally there is much disagreement on what relevance Amergin or Homer have. To some none. My argument is we connected to Homer 1000 years after his death so he can not connect to us as Amergin does, his tradition only being dead less than 400 years. 6 centuries short of the 1000 needed before he can really teach, us poetry hu?

The the new breed of Raleigh and Co did not speak the native language, or consider bardic culture a living poetic tradition worth further inquiry. Not godfathers of our cannon whose desire for tolerence and divirsity extended to bardic poets.

And whilst we throw an eye back to this time 400 years ago - when the collpase came - we laugh about the cliche that a native speaker from our island is born linguistically lucky - as if poetry is a part of our physical code - I suspect there is a grain of somethng we can't entirely discount or hold as an unquenchable poetical fantasy.

But in these days of enforcable diversity and tolerance, pertaining to a genetics of poetry needs sensitive and careful wording for the voice of discourse to tread in and think of exploring culturally fragile boundaries which may erode under a Hagiographic intelligence which critically outweighs our Homeric Tudor saints of poesy, but we go boldly on.

All who have expert knowledge of Kavanagh through text agree on witnessing PJ's mesmeric invention of Kavanagh - the benefit for those who uphold his vision of an Innerskeen genius living alone - on a set beneath spotlight with minimal props of poverty - a desk, hat and vocal veracity.

The Irish vernacular places it's primary stress on a different vowel than the English one does when speaking his name. Irish voices stress the first syllable of his surname

"KAvanagh" - rendering him spoken - a dactyl - not KavanAgh as an anapest. This means the premise of agreement that the graeco-roman scansion method of our language is uniformly shared, is an aporia. A non-starter concept on reality, those who believe in do so by travelling past existence, to explain why metrical verse is an oft misapprehended topic - the domain only of senior anorak-mad knowing ones clad to search alphabets ad infinitum?

Because we puzzle our depth with the implement of myth - we who fleet lost - human nature suggests, will share our experience in verse with all thus.

"An anapest - KAvanagh. Can you hear it getting louder and louder, stressing in words like, wait - make and bake? Can you hear if I shout it breaking down to collapse and dissolve the belief in a past never lived? What box of one-treasure tricks at the end of a rainbow day-away, desperate to stress the one sonic-blast of blown solid loudness no instrument but mine projects?"

Divinity riddle intelligibly - incoherence confuse to slip through our students who grasp what sense a boffin wielding his instrument of graffiti at a whiteboard won't catch - that one's metrical relevent pattern is discerned by none but the self. Stay in shadow and face the well mirrored pool of an erupting ear.

"Dear me what a dreary event to turn up for,"- learners think at the grove - "a star role underperforming. We're desperate for a disco go melody of bell knelling ending our session with this resident bard, bore and blusterer bungling up hand outs or lurching through lectures to tea break and cessation of duty."

Come cache of dreamers dactyl elsewhere - disperse up a rung and drift with Tristan, Schwitters - Kurt - Tzara and Raven Casey - thunderjet blackbird thrusting through space with ear, eye and ability. Patrick - practiced inventor whose myth was reality - .

~

There is deep disagreement between all gang band and clan. Graeco-roman meters of antiquity - whose terminoloy all use - are quantitive and the syllables in this ancient verse system are not measured by counting the number and ratio of stressed syllables in verse - unlike the accentual stress prosody used to measure pattern in our speech - but by measuring the length of them. The amount or - quantity - of time it takes to speak syllables of Homeric verse. Greek and Roman no spoken in a why eye ee by gum all rite sing song of a yer wha stressing Dublin twang shoehorns quantitive lingo of space age prosody into...

The metrical foot of bluffers and experts alike - the idiot-proof iamb - one short syllable - mora - followed by one long syllable - 2 moras....in light. In our accentual-stress prosody an iamb has nothing to do with sound length, but represents one unstressed syllable...in.... followed by a stressed one.....light

.....in light....spoken, is an iambic truth of reality proving the concept in both the Greek sense of it being a short syllable followed by a long one and the English sense of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one - it is an iamb. When reversed - light in - a trochee. The longer syllable first. The stressed syllable. The shorter syllable second - unstressed.... be/ing... is a trochee.

Greek meter routes to a length of time it takes to raise the leg 90 degrees and lower it again, as we arty types stomp in uniform beat to our song, verse or tale in a poetry arena. The initial raising of one leg to 90 degrees represents one long syllable and the return down - 2 short rapid syllables. A slight jar, jolt or split when returning through the 45 moment. A poetic - measure of movement through time. A dactyl. One long syllable and two shorter ones - WhAck wa wa. thing.

Imaged clear in an illustration of the literal meaning of this Greek word and prosodic term dactyl.

In English the words....light in a.... scan as a dactyl. It is a foot whose measure is a long syllable followed by two shorter ones. Greek for finger, which - in graeco-roman metrical terms -makes perfect sense and is vision, sound and logic combined - the bone-division of one's finger. An easy picture.

And the fun and complications start when we transfer this term over to our prosody. English being a stressed language, our dactyl refers not to syllable length, but to one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. The three syllables -

Light/ in/ a - are a dactyl, in both the greek Greek understanding of a long syllable - light - then two short ones - in a - and in our prosody. A stressed syllable - light - followed by two unstressed ones - in a.

Confused? This system is a native way of measuring perfectly the quantitive and unstressed language it evolved from - Greek first and then Latin. One can clearly read, hear and see the measures of Latin, which makes for a uniform scansion of the text, regardless of the speaker, but in our language, where we place stress on words differs from place to place. I say KavanAgh, you say KAvanagh.

It's validity as a shared and commonly understood set of rules poets can measure by - hinges on place of stress. So KavanaAgh is measured/scanned in English prosody as an anapest. Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable - a/na/pEst - Ka/va/nAgh

KAvanagh scans dAct/yl/ic in Irish - dactyl - one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, whAck wa wa -KA/van/agh. Totally reversing Ka/va/nAgh as an anapEst. This seemingly minor irrelevance of where two different voices emphasise the A in Kavanagh is difficult to convey in print, but it's actuality represents a subtle sonic annomoly between two groups of English speakers that illustrates the key tenets of the whole business of English prosodic scansion.

Only hearing this acoustic event enough times to the degree The only way to understand is to hear experience it, which bonkers the intellect enough to haul up a white flag or red rag of agreement on the man behind the mechanic making his boiler blow poetry of what is....

~

The renaissance courtiers of Tudor England who birthed modern English language verse, holding holy prosodic instruction books of technical terms from a non-native Greek and Roman metrical system - 2000 miles distant and 1000 years dead at it's closest living point. We imported, wholesale, our weapon of myth from Greece circa 500 BC, rather than develop our own alliterative div friendly system of learning to rote knowledge in ones memory. Disecting nursery rhymes in sombre gravitas, stirring in laughter.

Henry VIII was the first monarch to rule Britain after a long and protracted time of brutal civil war when the powers on the island were too busy fighting amongst themselves to concentrate on something so ambitious and fivilous as court poetry - in the sense Hal's literary minded pals and pawns agreed was a muse. A civilised polis where men of culture and learning blather out the meaning of thought in a native conversational art.

We did not plump for mangled middle English, the language of the lower orders, but a tongue few natives know. A treasure chest of tales, boo hoo and bravado mixed and connecting us via one workshop late starter in self-belief who looks for love to stop blowing his chance of finding the high thermal wind of sheer expression - life getting on with him, letting the husk of history blow lost, laughing and coming to rest with his love. Can you here it the diddlee dee dum?

We looked to Greece and decided to connect - by invention - an Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage with the linguistic ideas we decipher from written traditions long expired.

Latin, being the lingua franca of the Tudor age - coupled to a belief that our native tongue spoke no magic and the literary allure of a far off exotica - lulled us to it. We were sirened to frenzy by sheer weight of myth. Four hundred years of make believe, propogation and grafting later, few choose to consider the true route to our poetic template closer to home (Cauldron of Poesy text from the Irish tradition - composed by one or many poets with centuries of quantum linguists behind them and centuries more ahead. See the link to Ireland's True Poetic on the right.)

So brainwashed - when our flawless native poetic is aired, we professing a "serious" interest in verse do not hear it's authenitic and logical sound, preferring instead to turn deaf in the hope a slippery philisophical foot from the Parnassian teat with no simple rubric or uniform agreement about how measuring a truth of poetry works, fits our wish for fictions to live.

What better way to claim our poetic culture is legitimate than to suckle on a Homeric dactyl as proof we're his historic progeny, when we went about - at that time - the entirely new business of agreeing our native datum from an adopted blueprint we drew the poetic and ouevre of a nation from scratch with. An innovative act of immitation, with no claim to authenticity - unlike Amergin, his equivalent from the Goidelic oral tradition of poetic legislators.

The premise that graeco-roman prosody is more accurate than our own is a fallacy - as the mark of the graeco-roman poetic we decide to agree equally on - our alliterative lingo don't slip easily into. This faith pays belief into our foot fund over centuries of prayer to exist - is amongst many - a bouyant delusion that accentual-verse scansion is rigid science rather than abstract principle.

A flexible system without hard or fast rules we create our own indiviual prosodic method with - and which wafflers to wavelength professors in the sonic arts interpret differently, depending on where one's talk stresses the trall la la on Kavanagh, in alliterative lines - unbustable bombs of iambic proportion.

Blame Aristotle for the confusion, as his work Poetics was one blathered as the ultimate technical text on the theoretical reality - mechanics of poetry - when I was first introduced to him at the start of my study. I found him sombre yet deeply penitrable. It's no wonder - we moan - people think prosody is a nugget of knowledge few have found enough of to go on about it when they are describing the underlying talk of what's dull but important.

It is logical we grove dwellers ditch Aristotle's complex Poetics and consume Horace's Ars Poetica instead as the touchdown guide to the real sound in prose. I discovered he read as Heaney, straightforward, sensible and obviously written by a man dabbling in the dark dance of diddlee dee and fully engaging with reality and art - as Wystan Hugh said for the penny to drop now I realise Aristotle is a talker of poetic theory, not a practitioner of verse. He telling us how to write it is like a poet telling the digger how to use a spade or Dr. Who a time machine.

Hook to Horace, his ratio is joy born of experience on a journey of learning in travels around the alphabet he taught is the truth of poetic reality - reletive and sensibly understood by all. Horace wrote

Poets wish either to profit or delight.

The Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity College is holding a series of nine lectures, readings and discussions themed around Poetry and Politics. The events are every Tuesday - start at 7.30pm and are an hour or so long. The third one is next week.

http://www.tcd.ie/OWC/events.html

Among the poets listed to read are Sean O'Brien, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and George Szirtes. On Tuesday evening I went to listen to the Head of Trinity's English Department, Stephen Matterson deliver a lecture on The Poetry of WH Auden.

~

Auden is a poet whose full ouevre I am yet to ingest. If the truth be known I have read only a handful of anthologised poems from the four hundred he wrote, and of his four hundred prose pieces, virtually none. So Matterson's address was the perfect prelude and primer for an Auden-ignorant like myself to attend, as he sketched the basic autobiographical and critical outline of a poet who inherited the shadowy laurel crown of intellectual English language verse after Yeats - to quote Kavanagh -

"Handed in his gun."

Now I've been at the writing lark for five years and the skeletal shape of my research interests (the history of Irish poetry and Ireland's four mythological cycles) has accurately ossified, a sense of clarity and cognisance of how the long haul in one's poetic learning pans out, is becoming apparent.

And the central poetic philosophy contained in the the Amergin poem heading the Auraicept Na N-eces, Auden discovered for himself. (see - Ireland's True Poetic - link on the right)

The Amergin text - which explains exactly what the poetic gift is and how it works - states that only those who have experienced the widest extremities of joy and sorrow will progress to Ollamh status. An Ollamh is a professor of Poetry in the Irish bardic tradition and Amergin's logic is basic common sense. The wider the gap between and the more intensley you have known love, grief and loss, the higher the poetical streams you will be able to reach or draw from. Auden mirrors this thinking in his essay on Frost.

"A poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly..."

~

When I fell into writing - more by accident than design at the age of 34 - I breathed a huge sigh of metaphorical relief, as I had finally - on the cusp of middle age - stumbled across the path I knew was "the one;" as throughout my adult life there had always been a nagging awareness that I had not acknowledged, addressed or developed what I instinctively understood to be my true self-Oomphalos. Something Auden described the location of -

"The centre that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind."

Instead of ending up with a wife and kids, I found an inner vocation.

Until this time I had chanced my hand at many different and varied jobs but had never settled on any of them and I was rapidly approaching the middle years of life with an ever deepening sense of frustration and failure - facing the prospect of sliding into my forties as a career-less bum. It was as though the voice of Plato in Yeats' poem was growing ever more audible and insistent.

"What Then?" Sang Plato's ghost, "what then?"

~

I read somewhere that a writer is someone who is fit for nothing else, and for me it had become the only realisitc option left available. What better way can one who is without qualifications or capital present themselves to the world than as an artist? No more embarrassing introductions or need to gloss reality and manufacture ambition for an audience when the question of work arises.

But how would I know if this decision was a realistic or rational one and not a self decieving fabrication? What better way to carry on being a slacker once youth has faded than sitting in coffee shops with an open notebook, broadcasting to the world that you are not a middle-aged layabout, but a thinker? A man of words? I may be able to fool myself, but would I be successful at fooling others should this change of direction be only a charade?

Would I be merely digging a deeper hole for myself by avoiding conventional employment? What if a few years down the line of written engagement I were to unmask myself and find I was lumbered with a life of regret? Maybe even suffer a complete mental collapse as the conceptual foundations of my existence became exposed as a mirage supporting only fictions? These were fears I'd have to work through and hope were unfounded. Better to try and fail I reasoned, than never dare to chase the dream.

~

Like many, my first artistic awakening began with a part in the school play. Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which brought accolades and plaudits and - as one of my pals reckons - was the cause of unfulfilled aspiration that set me on the road to ruin. If this event had not occured and the theatrical door had remained unopened, I would not know the addictive thespian twang of public warmth and may have been content to uncoil my years as a builder retailing sharp one liners. My natural stage the pub tap-room and construction site.

However, once tasted I wanted a real relationship with the slippery imaginitive gods, immediately and without any effort on my part. I demanded the muse pay court to me like a Big Brother TV contestant, whose ego far outweighed my ability, demanding instantaneous reward and paying zero regard to mental effort. Too much unwarranted belief in my ability. I was too daft and too young to grasp an accurate and nuanced understanding of life, and this - coupled with an un-containable imagination - made for a highly delusional mix.

As though the physical reality of one's self is enough. An expectation easily borne at such a tender age - when the future stretches beyond our horizon like the limitless pages of a blank manuscript book we can never hope to fill. And this confidence - wedded to an endless supply of arrogance only the untried and unexperienced possess - was the fuel of my unbridled youth, creating a cocktail of laughably unrealisitc ambition. In short I was a powerful dreamer whose art was never articulated beyond the first stage of mental rehearsal.

On this long and ironic journey to poetic enlightenment the years had gradually turned me from a heavy weight verbal star in the teenage arena - with an innate and unconscious ability to toss off one-liners and slaughter all at will who dared joust with me - to a washed up has-been even the dimmest of my peers could land their spoken blows upon, wounding me at will to stutter a feeble response as they laughed at the once swift joke king toppled to a barstool clown.

~

I started this piece with the intention of sounding knowledgable and clever about a poet who it is de riguer to profess an understanding of, but I suppose what it is I'm really trying to get across is the notion that there is always hope. The most rewarding discovery I made in writing (after all but myself had written me off) is understanding how a marriage to the imagination is for life, and so there's no great urgency to get hold of Auden's psyche as he will come in time.

As long as we plod away in print, joy and success can only follow. The hard part for me was finding what it was I should be doing and learning how to create the environment and processes in which I could write successfully. And by success I mean what Amergin calls -

"the joy of the binding poetic principle and wisdom which comes after (good) poetic construction."

This is the contentment we get after writing a piece we consider successful, using the sole rule and measure we have - the self made one Heaney describes in his prose, and which is effectively the final arbiter and only guarantee a poet can ever possess.

And one aspect of Auden Matterson successfully got across was his attempts at re-casting his earlier works during his later years, ditching all notion that a seperation exists between the private and public self and surrendering to the idea that honesty is the essential thing in Art.

In the forward to his 1966 edition of Collected Poems he dropped some of his best known work, writing -

"Some poems which I wrote and unfortunately published because they were bad-mannered or boring, I have not included here."

He ended up U turning on many of the lines written in his twenties, when he was viewed as the political poet writing public verse which might change reality. That a sense of civitas rather than direct action is one the poet should cultivate.

He came to believe that the long poem which came out of his time in Spain during the civil war; "Spain" - who many consider the greatest anti war poem of the 30's - was a "dishonest" poem and dropped it from the collected version of his ouevre.

"A dishonest poem is one which expresses - no matter how well - feelings or beliefs which it's author never felt or entertained. Shamefully I once wrote

History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon

That I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective, is quite inexcuasable."

~

This is arguably his most oft quoted and well known line and Matterson said that the whole lecture series is about exploring the impact and legacy of this line.

~

Eamon Lynskey was in the audience and afterwards we went to warble at the Write and Recite open Mic in Cassidy's on Westmoreland street, the only two from the lecture to do so. These are the most instructive nights I have experienced. When a bit of high brow theory is followed by the actuality of the art. Well worth the 5.50 euro. And the line of the night which sums up Auden at the end of his journey?

Never greening for the big money
Never neighing after a public image.