They live in the lamplight of dusk
riven shade, releasing souls
from the stone of dolmen beds
Diarmuid and Gráinne stretched
out on when fleeing from Fionn.
We live as water, their lair’s
underground and we listen
to sea shells for sounds of their life
crowding in on us.
Now their memory is lost, dream
stealing and tossed by love,
bent by Manannán’s whim,
we steer the world, a spinning top
of life, the merry go round
they draw still, and watch
collecting in the ether, the air
of humanity’s ghost,
its shadow dissolving their light,
and our rough thought, swept
gentle in the grain of speech
a hue of Áine and Aengus Óg.
Stay upon our rock and set love
free, be gentle and kind
whilst remembering life
is precious, breathing invisibly
still, hear?
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Angelic Deer Cry
Strong is the power of ones light.
The spiritual armour of goodness
Resisting rulers' wicked wiles
And the cult of men in darkness.
Within us our beastial faith lies,
Learning of truth in the fearless
Charm composed to invoke divine
Defence against all manner of evil
And inscribed upon Saint Patricks
Breastplate. A loricae. The snippet
Below, in druidic protection meter.
"I arise today
Through the strength of heaven
Light of sun
Radiance of moon
Splendour of fire
Speed of lightening
Swiftness of wind
Depth of the sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock.
I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me."
Peace we shod in the feet of faith
Standing in light with a shield
Of truth. Damnation we quench
By prayer. No devil fire awaits
Above; all wickedness is here
On earth. Salvation - in the end
Is down to us, flesh and sword,
The word our blood, and spirit
Gods writing it hear our belief.
The spiritual armour of goodness
Resisting rulers' wicked wiles
And the cult of men in darkness.
Within us our beastial faith lies,
Learning of truth in the fearless
Charm composed to invoke divine
Defence against all manner of evil
And inscribed upon Saint Patricks
Breastplate. A loricae. The snippet
Below, in druidic protection meter.
"I arise today
Through the strength of heaven
Light of sun
Radiance of moon
Splendour of fire
Speed of lightening
Swiftness of wind
Depth of the sea
Stability of earth
Firmness of rock.
I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me."
Peace we shod in the feet of faith
Standing in light with a shield
Of truth. Damnation we quench
By prayer. No devil fire awaits
Above; all wickedness is here
On earth. Salvation - in the end
Is down to us, flesh and sword,
The word our blood, and spirit
Gods writing it hear our belief.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Cherish Mon Amis.
I recently read a book on Yeats. The Yeats We Knew, which are the texts of five Thomas Davis Lectures, first broadcast on RTE in 1965, as part of the centenary celebrations of his birth. These short memoirs in this 100 page slim book, give the reader a glimpse of the man behind the mask. And the impression we are left with is, he was a lonely man. He made it his business to strike the poetical pose, and really i am just riffing now as my energies are gone somewhat.
After a brief flood and flash,
lead the evening dance to a goal
he has
the verse king of Kilmainham, free
to sing, made reality a webbed light
of October mist withering in pale grey
cloud that dimmed to a soft cool
breeze, chilled as night drew in.
And the ghost of William Yeats said:
"Then what?"
Did the words he write solve any wrongs
or slights his loved ones suffered
as they fled? And what cold bed
of mourning found the arch beneath
which i awoke, dawned on heather,
left in rann, a rambling man waffling on,
head sieved to a million bits
as instructors came, speaking
of this and that to him?
Of how silence persecutes
a void of knowing calm
in setting sun, as a brief flash of solitary
life leaves us, all and one, all alone,
the ghosts who sit on Yeats's throne
and count the hours before morning
in moon lit mists that wax on wrongs
we suffer when the cold grey gun
- pulled to shoot a dream that blew
a brothers head wide open -
makes a splash for cameramen
who catch the brain seeping
as critics tell you of us, jangling on
and on, calling for the glow to spot,
shine upon one mind alone?
An audience anonymity dressed,
freedom dead so we can sing
of our concealed sex, saying,
what of it?
Tell the mob to name
what isn't in the hat and then, after
that, to rhyme the hours we have took
and speak, without a cursing call
or backward look, goodbye, adios,
the world released us mon amis,
to a vacuum of knowing, and the slow
sharp pull of bestowing one cloak
we made as humanity leaped in crawing
song. And men and women hiding
there, who believed in freedom once,
will ask, is it here to sing again?
Of course said A to B to C
we only wanted to be free
in our anonymity. What's our name,
tell us quick, let them keep invisible
irrelevance in heavy hints, our wish
in clever words revealed a sinning
truth kinking time, in wrought
thinning sloped grace of a moon
facing West.
They jangle on faery friends and sing
of what lies eloquence make behind
the grey eyes of a grey ghost
and the hooded caul of a thousand
broken lives left blowing in the laughter
of songs sung anonymously that sing
and strike the blow; tell us
of yourself, oh invisible host, again.
And really, it was a good read.
After a brief flood and flash,
lead the evening dance to a goal
he has
the verse king of Kilmainham, free
to sing, made reality a webbed light
of October mist withering in pale grey
cloud that dimmed to a soft cool
breeze, chilled as night drew in.
And the ghost of William Yeats said:
"Then what?"
Did the words he write solve any wrongs
or slights his loved ones suffered
as they fled? And what cold bed
of mourning found the arch beneath
which i awoke, dawned on heather,
left in rann, a rambling man waffling on,
head sieved to a million bits
as instructors came, speaking
of this and that to him?
Of how silence persecutes
a void of knowing calm
in setting sun, as a brief flash of solitary
life leaves us, all and one, all alone,
the ghosts who sit on Yeats's throne
and count the hours before morning
in moon lit mists that wax on wrongs
we suffer when the cold grey gun
- pulled to shoot a dream that blew
a brothers head wide open -
makes a splash for cameramen
who catch the brain seeping
as critics tell you of us, jangling on
and on, calling for the glow to spot,
shine upon one mind alone?
An audience anonymity dressed,
freedom dead so we can sing
of our concealed sex, saying,
what of it?
Tell the mob to name
what isn't in the hat and then, after
that, to rhyme the hours we have took
and speak, without a cursing call
or backward look, goodbye, adios,
the world released us mon amis,
to a vacuum of knowing, and the slow
sharp pull of bestowing one cloak
we made as humanity leaped in crawing
song. And men and women hiding
there, who believed in freedom once,
will ask, is it here to sing again?
Of course said A to B to C
we only wanted to be free
in our anonymity. What's our name,
tell us quick, let them keep invisible
irrelevance in heavy hints, our wish
in clever words revealed a sinning
truth kinking time, in wrought
thinning sloped grace of a moon
facing West.
They jangle on faery friends and sing
of what lies eloquence make behind
the grey eyes of a grey ghost
and the hooded caul of a thousand
broken lives left blowing in the laughter
of songs sung anonymously that sing
and strike the blow; tell us
of yourself, oh invisible host, again.
And really, it was a good read.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Shock and Bore
Someone asked what had happened to Peter Hitchens, the man who advocates genoicide for muslims, brother to Christopher the Daily Mail fascist, both of whom have made a life out of professional moaning.
What's happened to him?
I think he has detached from humanity. I saw him on the British TV programme, Question Time and he looked fighting fit, much more well scrubbed than his brother who was also on the same show. He struck me as very arrogant. A very "important" air about him. I haven't read any of his stuff, and so can only respond to him as an intellectual construct and printed entity. Detached from the real humanity of him, as i have only experienced Hitch via an electronic image, talking on a TV show to a crowd of people.
Many who asks questions, this is there moment in the spotlight. Imagine the tales of the audience, the bungled question say for one unused to public speaking. The tongue tied and shy and the unique individuals, all of them, just like Hitch and his bro. Hitch struck me as a very articulate person, and a great sense of conviction about what he said. That he believed what he was advocating, was the main point i got from this experience.
And reading the blog Rosen links to about Hitchen doing his warmonger act to a provincial American audience, was struck by how the writer also interpreted him in person. Basically saying that what he advocated was genocide of a billion people who have a faith in a fiction he trashes as such, but very unintelligently, and selfishly, i suspected, as what he promotes is linked to his own financial position.
The book he wrote, from what i gather, however clever the arguments in it, also promote what he is known for saying, which is to address what he sees as a problem which has not materially affected his own existence, with great physical force. I think he may have carved out a very well paid career for himself, as a man who causes controversy in order to benefit financially from the hoo ha.
A very selfish and ultimately unintelligent thing really, as he is basically advocating world war, just so he can fly round the world and feeling important as he winds up the masses. He doesn't advocate a solution to the problems his own mind alone puffs up - magnifying a threat and blowing it out of proportion, for the selfish reasons of making himself money, i suspect - and thus he displays supreme stupidity; as the ultimate logic of what he is saying, would cause his golden laying goose and jet set life to disappear, and it would be only then the daft git copped on.
When the financially lucrative rhetoric he espouses, talking in a very confrontational way and offending the fundamental sensibilities of a culture not his own, returned materially at its most terrible logic consequence, and forced the silly twit to live in the material conditions his stupidity seems intent on creating for others he does not know personally and who play no part in his life, except as the fictional fodder feeding his golden goose.
I would suggest we laugh at him, as there is nothing more effective than deflating the ego of a self important bore like this person..what's his name? Hitchens hitching his soul to the dark side we all have the hate of a fighting fit hack whose cause is getting cash, whose love is imperial, whose books sell by the shed load, feeding on a wave of fear and causing it to grow. One man, one dickhead who calls people stupid to their face when they ask him a question, as the linked article states. If one person calls another stupid, surely it means they too understand and are capable of stupidity?
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who flies round the world profiting from a rhetoric advocating genocide, making lots of lolly, insulated completely from the worlds they speak of, knowing them only as a specialist self righteous bore who passes through gathering evidence for his one sided crap arguments many find distasteful, the rule of thumb is these people are dangerous talkers doing it, not for a Love of humanity, but money. Speak of the daft git, but his arguments are rubbish and he has had a lifetime sat on his arse thinking in print, and anyone can sound reasonable and clever, if they find out how to.
The real responsibility a writer has once they have reached this state of eloquence, i believe, is to try and make the world a better place, not worse, and by the sounds of it, he wants muslims to suffer, so he can have a few quid. And so i hereby propose Hitchen be known from now on as the man who scratches for hate, itching sore points and if he really wants to help, to go and help as a charity worker in a third world country and get a dose of humanity, like right now, and give the thick cu.. a cutting quip, quick, hitch him to Love and forget the guy, man, male macho posturing...is he a bricklayer, a carpenter, and artist of the flesh? No, so picture the thicko as a man in a dress, visualise it and laugh.
Call him an idiot sat on his arse for a living, thinking..wow aint he the clever dick, a sissy, a big girls blouse who hasn't got the courage to fight the physical battles his doom and gloom, but very financially lucrative texts call for. So what does that say?
He wants to be cock of the world, but is a coward who does it with a clever hating mind, as he feels physically inadequate, obviously. Silence the gob by seeing him for what he is. A prickle ickle dickie wickle boring git..we love you hitch, please, we beseech you, stop being such a miserable git, bluddy moaning all the time for cash, and surprise yourself and us by doing summat good for a change...learn Arabic and tell us then what you do know, i bet you bloody can't be arsed to speak of the muslim world in a language it understands instead of all this phoney baloney hack speak that is so last millennium man, aint you heard, humanity has been restored, should you choose to believe it.
I do and earn nowt from my pronouncements but the good feeling i get from working hard and not going for the easy kicking. We can all moan, but the true pros know the real gift is speaking of goodness, the .00001% who learn how to control their gobs and direct poetic goodness to come, with nought but the mind and a belief in whatever fiction it takes to float. Ascend, transcend the quotidian and reach the enobling stream, in order to lead by example..
What's happened to him?
I think he has detached from humanity. I saw him on the British TV programme, Question Time and he looked fighting fit, much more well scrubbed than his brother who was also on the same show. He struck me as very arrogant. A very "important" air about him. I haven't read any of his stuff, and so can only respond to him as an intellectual construct and printed entity. Detached from the real humanity of him, as i have only experienced Hitch via an electronic image, talking on a TV show to a crowd of people.
Many who asks questions, this is there moment in the spotlight. Imagine the tales of the audience, the bungled question say for one unused to public speaking. The tongue tied and shy and the unique individuals, all of them, just like Hitch and his bro. Hitch struck me as a very articulate person, and a great sense of conviction about what he said. That he believed what he was advocating, was the main point i got from this experience.
And reading the blog Rosen links to about Hitchen doing his warmonger act to a provincial American audience, was struck by how the writer also interpreted him in person. Basically saying that what he advocated was genocide of a billion people who have a faith in a fiction he trashes as such, but very unintelligently, and selfishly, i suspected, as what he promotes is linked to his own financial position.
The book he wrote, from what i gather, however clever the arguments in it, also promote what he is known for saying, which is to address what he sees as a problem which has not materially affected his own existence, with great physical force. I think he may have carved out a very well paid career for himself, as a man who causes controversy in order to benefit financially from the hoo ha.
A very selfish and ultimately unintelligent thing really, as he is basically advocating world war, just so he can fly round the world and feeling important as he winds up the masses. He doesn't advocate a solution to the problems his own mind alone puffs up - magnifying a threat and blowing it out of proportion, for the selfish reasons of making himself money, i suspect - and thus he displays supreme stupidity; as the ultimate logic of what he is saying, would cause his golden laying goose and jet set life to disappear, and it would be only then the daft git copped on.
When the financially lucrative rhetoric he espouses, talking in a very confrontational way and offending the fundamental sensibilities of a culture not his own, returned materially at its most terrible logic consequence, and forced the silly twit to live in the material conditions his stupidity seems intent on creating for others he does not know personally and who play no part in his life, except as the fictional fodder feeding his golden goose.
I would suggest we laugh at him, as there is nothing more effective than deflating the ego of a self important bore like this person..what's his name? Hitchens hitching his soul to the dark side we all have the hate of a fighting fit hack whose cause is getting cash, whose love is imperial, whose books sell by the shed load, feeding on a wave of fear and causing it to grow. One man, one dickhead who calls people stupid to their face when they ask him a question, as the linked article states. If one person calls another stupid, surely it means they too understand and are capable of stupidity?
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who flies round the world profiting from a rhetoric advocating genocide, making lots of lolly, insulated completely from the worlds they speak of, knowing them only as a specialist self righteous bore who passes through gathering evidence for his one sided crap arguments many find distasteful, the rule of thumb is these people are dangerous talkers doing it, not for a Love of humanity, but money. Speak of the daft git, but his arguments are rubbish and he has had a lifetime sat on his arse thinking in print, and anyone can sound reasonable and clever, if they find out how to.
The real responsibility a writer has once they have reached this state of eloquence, i believe, is to try and make the world a better place, not worse, and by the sounds of it, he wants muslims to suffer, so he can have a few quid. And so i hereby propose Hitchen be known from now on as the man who scratches for hate, itching sore points and if he really wants to help, to go and help as a charity worker in a third world country and get a dose of humanity, like right now, and give the thick cu.. a cutting quip, quick, hitch him to Love and forget the guy, man, male macho posturing...is he a bricklayer, a carpenter, and artist of the flesh? No, so picture the thicko as a man in a dress, visualise it and laugh.
Call him an idiot sat on his arse for a living, thinking..wow aint he the clever dick, a sissy, a big girls blouse who hasn't got the courage to fight the physical battles his doom and gloom, but very financially lucrative texts call for. So what does that say?
He wants to be cock of the world, but is a coward who does it with a clever hating mind, as he feels physically inadequate, obviously. Silence the gob by seeing him for what he is. A prickle ickle dickie wickle boring git..we love you hitch, please, we beseech you, stop being such a miserable git, bluddy moaning all the time for cash, and surprise yourself and us by doing summat good for a change...learn Arabic and tell us then what you do know, i bet you bloody can't be arsed to speak of the muslim world in a language it understands instead of all this phoney baloney hack speak that is so last millennium man, aint you heard, humanity has been restored, should you choose to believe it.
I do and earn nowt from my pronouncements but the good feeling i get from working hard and not going for the easy kicking. We can all moan, but the true pros know the real gift is speaking of goodness, the .00001% who learn how to control their gobs and direct poetic goodness to come, with nought but the mind and a belief in whatever fiction it takes to float. Ascend, transcend the quotidian and reach the enobling stream, in order to lead by example..
Friday, September 28, 2007
Sidhe Lennan
refuse to look past
a pool, cloud drawing
love to force a tide of will.
Storms of white horse water
whip the dawn and
sleeping the beggar
scattered his dream.
Love is a neighbour
in this mirror of broken
blossom rippling in night
scented silence and divinity
crying within us, rises
in the remembrance of a ghost
flickering beyond love,
the momentary illusion of a lost
son who fled when passion
beneath his hooded caul web
wrapping the night above us,
enmeshed her fragrance
of memory tapered
to what passed between us,
what drop from the scaffold
befell us and why the platform
will claim a green glow.
The red lipped lady envisaging
Ballsbridge and Tara, marching
the ancestral flow of his heart less
rendered to hate; shocked to the state
of bemused imitational grace.
Flit free soul
steal the shadow of my home
and make love with none but
your own, cool breeze we move
through in sandy cove, moss
siding on the wall, complicit the windless
sidhe is here.
Strike up the tune, smith
bellow and humour, the spiritual show
before last moon drop, first rain falling
is lost now in wetness, the cool slow rock
No longer will i wait for the sensuous skin
of a princess who held an image for me
trembling to turn and leave, fading
as a wheat field waves beneath an August
moon, the lip red life of her i will discover,
the eye beholden to no other.
Who loves me and shows wonder
in the words making love for her, hear? Us
an illusion, we the air and world through
which sidhe move, and the girl
i will become when the womb of life
surrenders and sea claims my energy,
releasing the feat of gods who craw
no longer on Fodhla's shore for humanity
to come.
Sidhe told first, of love blind in a silly verse
sincerely writ which hit me, stripped me of anger
and now we learn together as man and wife,
split no more, the goddess unseen
devoid of flaws and a soul of grace,
a heart who cares, a women who made me
believe again.
You.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Angel, voice in the head.
Angel is a person online who is a regular voice in my head and i learnt today s/he smashed up the telly:
"I wouldn't advise anyone else to do this as I was surprised how thick the glass is and had to hit it a few times and the splinters fell around the place."
Angel is a real force promoting literacy, and s/he fears for going mad, as s/he feels like a number. I think s/he lives in Manchester, near the Derbyshire side and s/he has been a force for good in my life. I met this person first on the Guardian books blog when i was researching my po-mo practice based on the ogam alphabet and David, who i fancy coz he looks like he might bin posh off and settle down wiv me in my bedsit, now the voices have come, to instruct me how to send orders to my butler in the intellectual womb of the anima mundi, which the heavy user of cannabis, william yeats, details in the distillation of his own research, the head crunchingly baffling and superbly logical book, "The Vision".
This was never finished by Yeats as it was his bible of self, the seriousness with which he took his life and work, all there for the reader to enjoy, or rather, shake their head in bafflement at, for yeats was gyre mad, going on about them like angel does boom boom and the bbc being gitz.
Angel sent the governement a letter, but they fobbed angel off, after s/he had told them s/he wasn't paying it, and would smash the telly up if they demanded money with menaces gain. Angel is a very cultured and civilised person with a few pet hates; one being the aforementioned "boom boom" music that anti-social people play when doing drive bys and gangstering about wiv da faeries, like posh and rebecca, who fancies me coz i am the worlds most successful nail extension practitioner on the planet. The voice in my head Angel wrote:
"The letter said they would call so I wanted to leave them in no doubt. I had told them I'd smash it if they didn't give me time to sell it as I just would not pay again for what has become a pain in my ears and a phobia. I took a few pictures of it to send to them but I think they're going to call and torment me."
So why do they do it, the BBC gitz? Do the boom boom? and the bbc wiv all that rubbish they put on the telly.
The poor quality and declining standards of the official apparatus, is another bedbug of Angel's; and is the reason i do not watch, as most of it has no point beyond having a rubbish excuse to pay photogenic people who can appear to be interested in what the rational mind says is rubbish; lots of money. Why do attractive chefs, gardeners and other bores get paid thousands a day by the tax and licence payers, when a less photogenic but better candidate does not? Sheer prejudice based on the most shallow of human whims. A desire to see only nice lookers. Why do airheads get lots of lolly for being stupid and convincing the rest of us this behaviour is worthy of imitation?
"I hadn't switched the thing on for months from a phobia that developed as a result of the drumming that invariably accompanies every programme. I've had to drop my favourites one after another from the drumming soundtracks. Then I wrote and told them."
The bbc are hounding my Angel and it's not on and s/he is the victim of a conspiracy between the bores who pay themselves ridiculous amounts of cash to have people fawn over them for doing what we do for free. Create. And they create boom boom bull..ahem..pimping up playschool next they will, getting jackanory on the go, reading Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs to five year olds...
"Some times I wish I had the courage to hang myself because once these civil servants get a hold on you they never want to let go.
I hope I won't go mad when they start poking their noses around in my home; that I'll be able to stay sane because they way they treat me is nothing less than persecution and I don't know what it is that sets them off. But I'll be living on a knife edge until this torment and ordeal is over. I just don't want any more BBC, or any others, in my life anymore."
Angel likes having civilised conversation, reading, writing, hot baths, cooking and basically enjoying life as a normal person without any weirdos ramming it down our gobs; da bling and moan manly macho stuff, that life is crap and that we should all kill one another to get what we want. The pimp my life bbc reality presented to us wiv da hoes and playas in a forest of weeds. A thick and doomed Male mindset i find offensive as a femminist spokesperson.
I do not have a tv licence, coz i do not have a telly and and the one thing i notice is the dearth of bad news. Even the radio is not listened to, or newspapers bought. I was buying the irish daily mail for the first few months of it appearing, as it was only 20 cents or summat daft, and quite a lot of text, and as it was new, the editorial team would have been wanting to appear different than the rest of the comics like the irish star and irish sun; and when the irish daily mail came, i was surprised as the one papaer in england i bought, was the mail.
And some of my irish friends reckon the mail was a good thing to happen, even though i was moaning it was just another step for the west brit mentality to be twisting our heads.
Carol Malone, i think it's her, i'm not sure, but the editor, nolan his name, unsure how to act, what tenor to go for. I mean this is as brit as it gets innit, the mail; and now i don't have a telly, or listen to the radio, when i pop to the shop, i only have to glance at the headlines to get the picture. But nolan the ed, he is a young fella and does the regular grave address to the nascent readership which its parent paper promoting the british agenda of tip toe tally ho aul chap, does. But it's has gone up to 70 cent now, so i stopped buying it, so i don't know if nolan is getting it any more irish or not.
The commentating hacks are D4 headz moaning about the school run and try to sound exciting, and the one thing i love about here, is that all this new west brit act, of aping the english mores, for a tip ho jolly chap, is too comedic to take seriously, and cannot root really, the materialism which will see us being greedy gitz and inhumane to one another; in the sense of shared cultural currency being no more than a tip ho jolly nice mansion there biffo me beano laah, and really when i think about it, i don't fancy carol any more, not since i learned about her obsession with how posh looks and a hopefully soon to be single dave, who fancies me.
Carol i always admired a bit, for looking good, having her make up on in the right way, and generally, being a hack who photographs well, but nolan, well, he fancies me i reckon, and after i saw the cricket match at trinity between the theatricals and the teflon headz, that was it, i cracked the code of how to make Englsih an acceptable cultural fling on the lawns of Oxford, who also fancies me, i think, but either way, once cricket gets took up by us, and we start all getting behind it, once we we start winning stuff, then that is the culture cracked and tara stands...
"I wouldn't advise anyone else to do this as I was surprised how thick the glass is and had to hit it a few times and the splinters fell around the place."
Angel is a real force promoting literacy, and s/he fears for going mad, as s/he feels like a number. I think s/he lives in Manchester, near the Derbyshire side and s/he has been a force for good in my life. I met this person first on the Guardian books blog when i was researching my po-mo practice based on the ogam alphabet and David, who i fancy coz he looks like he might bin posh off and settle down wiv me in my bedsit, now the voices have come, to instruct me how to send orders to my butler in the intellectual womb of the anima mundi, which the heavy user of cannabis, william yeats, details in the distillation of his own research, the head crunchingly baffling and superbly logical book, "The Vision".
This was never finished by Yeats as it was his bible of self, the seriousness with which he took his life and work, all there for the reader to enjoy, or rather, shake their head in bafflement at, for yeats was gyre mad, going on about them like angel does boom boom and the bbc being gitz.
Angel sent the governement a letter, but they fobbed angel off, after s/he had told them s/he wasn't paying it, and would smash the telly up if they demanded money with menaces gain. Angel is a very cultured and civilised person with a few pet hates; one being the aforementioned "boom boom" music that anti-social people play when doing drive bys and gangstering about wiv da faeries, like posh and rebecca, who fancies me coz i am the worlds most successful nail extension practitioner on the planet. The voice in my head Angel wrote:
"The letter said they would call so I wanted to leave them in no doubt. I had told them I'd smash it if they didn't give me time to sell it as I just would not pay again for what has become a pain in my ears and a phobia. I took a few pictures of it to send to them but I think they're going to call and torment me."
So why do they do it, the BBC gitz? Do the boom boom? and the bbc wiv all that rubbish they put on the telly.
The poor quality and declining standards of the official apparatus, is another bedbug of Angel's; and is the reason i do not watch, as most of it has no point beyond having a rubbish excuse to pay photogenic people who can appear to be interested in what the rational mind says is rubbish; lots of money. Why do attractive chefs, gardeners and other bores get paid thousands a day by the tax and licence payers, when a less photogenic but better candidate does not? Sheer prejudice based on the most shallow of human whims. A desire to see only nice lookers. Why do airheads get lots of lolly for being stupid and convincing the rest of us this behaviour is worthy of imitation?
"I hadn't switched the thing on for months from a phobia that developed as a result of the drumming that invariably accompanies every programme. I've had to drop my favourites one after another from the drumming soundtracks. Then I wrote and told them."
The bbc are hounding my Angel and it's not on and s/he is the victim of a conspiracy between the bores who pay themselves ridiculous amounts of cash to have people fawn over them for doing what we do for free. Create. And they create boom boom bull..ahem..pimping up playschool next they will, getting jackanory on the go, reading Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs to five year olds...
"Some times I wish I had the courage to hang myself because once these civil servants get a hold on you they never want to let go.
I hope I won't go mad when they start poking their noses around in my home; that I'll be able to stay sane because they way they treat me is nothing less than persecution and I don't know what it is that sets them off. But I'll be living on a knife edge until this torment and ordeal is over. I just don't want any more BBC, or any others, in my life anymore."
Angel likes having civilised conversation, reading, writing, hot baths, cooking and basically enjoying life as a normal person without any weirdos ramming it down our gobs; da bling and moan manly macho stuff, that life is crap and that we should all kill one another to get what we want. The pimp my life bbc reality presented to us wiv da hoes and playas in a forest of weeds. A thick and doomed Male mindset i find offensive as a femminist spokesperson.
I do not have a tv licence, coz i do not have a telly and and the one thing i notice is the dearth of bad news. Even the radio is not listened to, or newspapers bought. I was buying the irish daily mail for the first few months of it appearing, as it was only 20 cents or summat daft, and quite a lot of text, and as it was new, the editorial team would have been wanting to appear different than the rest of the comics like the irish star and irish sun; and when the irish daily mail came, i was surprised as the one papaer in england i bought, was the mail.
And some of my irish friends reckon the mail was a good thing to happen, even though i was moaning it was just another step for the west brit mentality to be twisting our heads.
Carol Malone, i think it's her, i'm not sure, but the editor, nolan his name, unsure how to act, what tenor to go for. I mean this is as brit as it gets innit, the mail; and now i don't have a telly, or listen to the radio, when i pop to the shop, i only have to glance at the headlines to get the picture. But nolan the ed, he is a young fella and does the regular grave address to the nascent readership which its parent paper promoting the british agenda of tip toe tally ho aul chap, does. But it's has gone up to 70 cent now, so i stopped buying it, so i don't know if nolan is getting it any more irish or not.
The commentating hacks are D4 headz moaning about the school run and try to sound exciting, and the one thing i love about here, is that all this new west brit act, of aping the english mores, for a tip ho jolly chap, is too comedic to take seriously, and cannot root really, the materialism which will see us being greedy gitz and inhumane to one another; in the sense of shared cultural currency being no more than a tip ho jolly nice mansion there biffo me beano laah, and really when i think about it, i don't fancy carol any more, not since i learned about her obsession with how posh looks and a hopefully soon to be single dave, who fancies me.
Carol i always admired a bit, for looking good, having her make up on in the right way, and generally, being a hack who photographs well, but nolan, well, he fancies me i reckon, and after i saw the cricket match at trinity between the theatricals and the teflon headz, that was it, i cracked the code of how to make Englsih an acceptable cultural fling on the lawns of Oxford, who also fancies me, i think, but either way, once cricket gets took up by us, and we start all getting behind it, once we we start winning stuff, then that is the culture cracked and tara stands...
Thursday, September 20, 2007
H.E. Bates: Fair Stood The Wind For France.
1979-1983 were my secondary days, from childhood to ones youthful coming of age in a time, just like todays.
The kids, as they are now. Some bookish and studious, swottish and "stiffs". Some smoking and swearing at the square ancient gitz over 16, who just didn't get it; could never be hip, as one being young whose horizon of time was eternal and wrongdoing didn't exist.
As a teenager who knew Duran Duran were really nought but a flash in the pan. And words, came at my command, as "king of the one liner" who dispatched all with a quip off the cuff that came from ...only God knows where..verbally dueling and never beaten or bested; until the first flush of full beauty had gone, as i turned 31..32..33 and slipping into forty, facing down the OAP barrel, i never thought i would live to see today, but did so; and for this i give thanks to God.
A good looking gob no longer, alas, O woe is moi, with only a costume of masks to prove ones humanity and bluff with in the search for a soulmate who'll Love being a pensioner with me, when all's said and done.
For this is all i have. Literacy, dear readers, colleagues in Love looking for peace to move us prosperously forward, no longer looking down the barrel of a gun, needle or bottle, but wallowing in September sunlight.
And as one casts back to the time in class, one can hear a work of Literature that moves my hand here, now.
Fair Stood The Wind For France. The characters were a RAF crew who crashed and got sheltered in a farm house by a family with the Resistance, and the central love between Franklin and Francois. She with an unshakable faith in goodness and God. He, an agnostic loner, detached from all around him and trusting no one, till she came along. Frankie was a philanderer, losing himself in the bottle during a brutal wartime England.
His untrusting and world weary assumptions on humanity, challenged for the very first time when coming into contact with the French family, trusting still, faith in God and the moral duty of acting on the side of goodness in a treacherous time of collaboration and resistance to the nazi foe, which was the perfect scenario for Bates to explore the fundamental nature of humanity. Between the material and spiritual.
The gun Frankie keeps with him at all times, is the symbol Bates used to convey the essential intellectual core of Frankie's mental world view. One were the ultimate power resides with man, and the gradual dissolution of this psychological state came as he fell in love with Francois, and is exposed as a mirage in this passage:
"Frankie looked to the revolver and saw it suddenly as a useless and pathetic thing. He had become so used to handling a weapon as big as a house, and carrying enough power to wipe out a small town, that he had forgotten there were other sorts of power. He looked at the three people sitting in the lamplight waiting for a sound. He saw them, the three generations of one nation, as part of a defenseless people, as part of the little people possessing an immeasurable power that could not be broken...He knew it clearly now as a more wonderful thing, more enduring, and more inspiring power than he had ever believed possible: the power of their own hearts."
The story's surface had terror, war, drink and yet was not in yer face wound sharing, but deft storytelling, revealing an intelligence at work and the author, calling on the ineffable light of human goodness within, to maneuver the eternal.
I think that my passion for English as a child, was pot luck, as i had a great teacher, and played Malvolio at 13; the high point of my theatrical career thus far. It was downhill all the way since then, but still, introduced me to the joy of language. And i suppose mastering the intuitive nuts and bolts of it, depends on how much effort one puts in to acquiring "true" linguistic knowledge; which is..?
The kids, as they are now. Some bookish and studious, swottish and "stiffs". Some smoking and swearing at the square ancient gitz over 16, who just didn't get it; could never be hip, as one being young whose horizon of time was eternal and wrongdoing didn't exist.
As a teenager who knew Duran Duran were really nought but a flash in the pan. And words, came at my command, as "king of the one liner" who dispatched all with a quip off the cuff that came from ...only God knows where..verbally dueling and never beaten or bested; until the first flush of full beauty had gone, as i turned 31..32..33 and slipping into forty, facing down the OAP barrel, i never thought i would live to see today, but did so; and for this i give thanks to God.
A good looking gob no longer, alas, O woe is moi, with only a costume of masks to prove ones humanity and bluff with in the search for a soulmate who'll Love being a pensioner with me, when all's said and done.
For this is all i have. Literacy, dear readers, colleagues in Love looking for peace to move us prosperously forward, no longer looking down the barrel of a gun, needle or bottle, but wallowing in September sunlight.
And as one casts back to the time in class, one can hear a work of Literature that moves my hand here, now.
Fair Stood The Wind For France. The characters were a RAF crew who crashed and got sheltered in a farm house by a family with the Resistance, and the central love between Franklin and Francois. She with an unshakable faith in goodness and God. He, an agnostic loner, detached from all around him and trusting no one, till she came along. Frankie was a philanderer, losing himself in the bottle during a brutal wartime England.
His untrusting and world weary assumptions on humanity, challenged for the very first time when coming into contact with the French family, trusting still, faith in God and the moral duty of acting on the side of goodness in a treacherous time of collaboration and resistance to the nazi foe, which was the perfect scenario for Bates to explore the fundamental nature of humanity. Between the material and spiritual.
The gun Frankie keeps with him at all times, is the symbol Bates used to convey the essential intellectual core of Frankie's mental world view. One were the ultimate power resides with man, and the gradual dissolution of this psychological state came as he fell in love with Francois, and is exposed as a mirage in this passage:
"Frankie looked to the revolver and saw it suddenly as a useless and pathetic thing. He had become so used to handling a weapon as big as a house, and carrying enough power to wipe out a small town, that he had forgotten there were other sorts of power. He looked at the three people sitting in the lamplight waiting for a sound. He saw them, the three generations of one nation, as part of a defenseless people, as part of the little people possessing an immeasurable power that could not be broken...He knew it clearly now as a more wonderful thing, more enduring, and more inspiring power than he had ever believed possible: the power of their own hearts."
The story's surface had terror, war, drink and yet was not in yer face wound sharing, but deft storytelling, revealing an intelligence at work and the author, calling on the ineffable light of human goodness within, to maneuver the eternal.
I think that my passion for English as a child, was pot luck, as i had a great teacher, and played Malvolio at 13; the high point of my theatrical career thus far. It was downhill all the way since then, but still, introduced me to the joy of language. And i suppose mastering the intuitive nuts and bolts of it, depends on how much effort one puts in to acquiring "true" linguistic knowledge; which is..?
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
I suppose if prose is the light ale of writing, poetry would be the heavy proof gear, which most writers would agree is the creme de la creme profession, and the reason it attracts all sorts of chancers, deadbeats and those looking for the easy option.
And I admit, I was the same, as when i started writing i looked at it logically, thinking there are roughly four genres
Short story
Novel
Script
Poetry
And thinking the first three beyond me on a purely word-count basis, first opted to have a dabble at the fourth one, poetry. My reasoning being that, though the intellectual feat of juggling multiple characters and narrative involved in churning out the thousands of words needed to create a novel was beyond my ability, the creation of a hundred or so word poem; even an idiot like me must be capable of that.
Obviously this was in the mind of an untutored man approaching middle age; and to balance out any charge of amateur intent as a writer of poetry; my first ruminations on this topic led me to the decision, that i would rather write one formal sonnet whose quality was on a par with the worst of Shakespeare, than a thousand poems of disposable free-verse.
To this end i began a poem - still unfinished, in the sense i am not happy with it - which represents my very beginning in the dark art of bluffing in print that i am a poet.
Always in the mind, dreams and abstract thought
Just beyond where our conscious grasp can reach
And seldom is a complete meaning caught
When we try to give these glimpsed fragments speech.
If I, awake and able held a dream
In place so long that reason cuts the form
Would then the mind reveal through nightly stream
All of the inner truth with which we're born?
Would daylight's waking hours to us bring
Reality as such when slumbered warm?
Or would dreams be mute without voice to sing
And stay unlocked to keep a constant form?
Such thoughts as these have often been before
And leave our mind to ever search the more
So this is one of my semi-stone poems, its companion piece not yet written (hopefully) will be the final one i ever write; and casting an eye back six and a half years later, the most obvious technical point which betray this piece as the work of a beginner, is its lack of enjambment.
The syntactic sense of each line, ending at the terminal point of it, like a ship or train labouring along in regular and predictable short bursts. But still, this is the truth of my beginning and whatever the aesthetic properties of the piece are, I do take the tiniest crumb of artistic comfort that my desire to write was not occasioned by the negative impulse of jealousy and/or arrogance.
Twice i have come across people who began their foray into the poetic Art after reading, what they considered to be, weak and unaesthetic specimens written by another, in their opinion, less talented, fellow human, and being in some way offended, decided to re-dress the aesthetic balance in favour of Culture; which - rightly or wrongly - strikes me as another form of snobbery and an exclusional artistic rationale.
I have heard this argument twice now, the last time a couple of days ago, when someone told me, of the few poems they have ever written, the first was done so after reading an attempt by someone, which they thought so poor, they decided to write one in reply, to balance up the inferior art with what they considered to be the real gen, from their own mind.
I have always been suspect of this argument, no matter how convincingly it is presented. That the origins of ones Art can legitimately begin in this way.
Though i suppose the theoretical nuts and bolts will allow it in some form; it's just that it always smacks of a desire to write which is first occassioned by the impulse of jealousy. And again, as I write this i become aware that it may not be as cut and dried as my thinking would have it; seeing that there is such a thing as very poor poetry, and the collision of time, chance, and an individual life, the gods may conspire to arrange in such a way that a poet's career can begin in such circumstances. Who knows?
Can there ever be an answer to such a question?
I suppose at the final cut, we are all unique and have a singularly original path into the Art of verbal mimesis, the making of - what most would agree, on the face of it appear to be as - incredibly pointless acoustic objects; which serve no purpose in existential affairs.
Except perhaps as a spiritual stay, a psychic plea for Love and peace, and it is the level of logical, demonstrable faith the individual artist has about their "poetic" or critical blueprint on the whole shaboodle, which will imbue their work with what sense of gravity the reader detects or decides it possesses.
And poetry being the archest Art of the linguistic chancer, where several poems a year can be got away with; indeed bluffed up to being the output of a shamanic magus of the spaciest order, so the heights of self and public delusion are at their greatest within this - to my mind - laughably monickered; "profession."
A profession whose majority of contemporary practitioners have no unifying thread of technical agreement. Indeed there are a plethora of schools and cliques, all claiming bragging rights for possessing a hot line to a linguistic messiah, to speak from the pure poetic source of shade and light, and to be connected to shadows flitting in Plato's cave where the eternal Muse exists as the cosmic vibration detectable to only the most highly trained of instinctual artists bestowed by a divine Bard with the otherworldly gift as rare as hot snow.
And I admit, I was the same, as when i started writing i looked at it logically, thinking there are roughly four genres
Short story
Novel
Script
Poetry
And thinking the first three beyond me on a purely word-count basis, first opted to have a dabble at the fourth one, poetry. My reasoning being that, though the intellectual feat of juggling multiple characters and narrative involved in churning out the thousands of words needed to create a novel was beyond my ability, the creation of a hundred or so word poem; even an idiot like me must be capable of that.
Obviously this was in the mind of an untutored man approaching middle age; and to balance out any charge of amateur intent as a writer of poetry; my first ruminations on this topic led me to the decision, that i would rather write one formal sonnet whose quality was on a par with the worst of Shakespeare, than a thousand poems of disposable free-verse.
To this end i began a poem - still unfinished, in the sense i am not happy with it - which represents my very beginning in the dark art of bluffing in print that i am a poet.
Always in the mind, dreams and abstract thought
Just beyond where our conscious grasp can reach
And seldom is a complete meaning caught
When we try to give these glimpsed fragments speech.
If I, awake and able held a dream
In place so long that reason cuts the form
Would then the mind reveal through nightly stream
All of the inner truth with which we're born?
Would daylight's waking hours to us bring
Reality as such when slumbered warm?
Or would dreams be mute without voice to sing
And stay unlocked to keep a constant form?
Such thoughts as these have often been before
And leave our mind to ever search the more
So this is one of my semi-stone poems, its companion piece not yet written (hopefully) will be the final one i ever write; and casting an eye back six and a half years later, the most obvious technical point which betray this piece as the work of a beginner, is its lack of enjambment.
The syntactic sense of each line, ending at the terminal point of it, like a ship or train labouring along in regular and predictable short bursts. But still, this is the truth of my beginning and whatever the aesthetic properties of the piece are, I do take the tiniest crumb of artistic comfort that my desire to write was not occasioned by the negative impulse of jealousy and/or arrogance.
Twice i have come across people who began their foray into the poetic Art after reading, what they considered to be, weak and unaesthetic specimens written by another, in their opinion, less talented, fellow human, and being in some way offended, decided to re-dress the aesthetic balance in favour of Culture; which - rightly or wrongly - strikes me as another form of snobbery and an exclusional artistic rationale.
I have heard this argument twice now, the last time a couple of days ago, when someone told me, of the few poems they have ever written, the first was done so after reading an attempt by someone, which they thought so poor, they decided to write one in reply, to balance up the inferior art with what they considered to be the real gen, from their own mind.
I have always been suspect of this argument, no matter how convincingly it is presented. That the origins of ones Art can legitimately begin in this way.
Though i suppose the theoretical nuts and bolts will allow it in some form; it's just that it always smacks of a desire to write which is first occassioned by the impulse of jealousy. And again, as I write this i become aware that it may not be as cut and dried as my thinking would have it; seeing that there is such a thing as very poor poetry, and the collision of time, chance, and an individual life, the gods may conspire to arrange in such a way that a poet's career can begin in such circumstances. Who knows?
Can there ever be an answer to such a question?
I suppose at the final cut, we are all unique and have a singularly original path into the Art of verbal mimesis, the making of - what most would agree, on the face of it appear to be as - incredibly pointless acoustic objects; which serve no purpose in existential affairs.
Except perhaps as a spiritual stay, a psychic plea for Love and peace, and it is the level of logical, demonstrable faith the individual artist has about their "poetic" or critical blueprint on the whole shaboodle, which will imbue their work with what sense of gravity the reader detects or decides it possesses.
And poetry being the archest Art of the linguistic chancer, where several poems a year can be got away with; indeed bluffed up to being the output of a shamanic magus of the spaciest order, so the heights of self and public delusion are at their greatest within this - to my mind - laughably monickered; "profession."
A profession whose majority of contemporary practitioners have no unifying thread of technical agreement. Indeed there are a plethora of schools and cliques, all claiming bragging rights for possessing a hot line to a linguistic messiah, to speak from the pure poetic source of shade and light, and to be connected to shadows flitting in Plato's cave where the eternal Muse exists as the cosmic vibration detectable to only the most highly trained of instinctual artists bestowed by a divine Bard with the otherworldly gift as rare as hot snow.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Save Tara Gigs 29 September.
Dear Diary.Another sunny day saving Tara. Cycled up the coast to Howth in the morning and then back to the homeless canteen for lunch. A small piece of pork and spinach and chick pea curry with rice and mash, and a slice of carrot cake, 1 euro ninety cent.
Spent the afternoon writing e mails and catching up with who is saying what in the various poetical chat joints from which i am barred for speaking of bardic lore. A name none dare speak, for fear of having to acknowledge a poetic truth too complex to cognise without much study.
Sad, but we all need our campaigns to keep us in active service at the front line of WaR, the writing and recital which forms the basis of a serious bores career in creative unemployment and a full time life of total work avoidance.
Then to the Royal College of Surgeons for 6.30 to the Denis O'Driscoll launch of his new book. It was in the ballroom and packed to the gills. I was on the lookout for a big fish after nearly finalising the bill for the Save Tara gig on 29 September, which I am organising the poets for as part of my MC duties. I was three short and had a feeling the real job would be finished there.
One of the female poets I had written to but had not got back as she only checks her e mail once a week, Bernadette O'Reilly, was there and agreed to do it, so two more to go. At this point i had four women and two men, the idea to have an equal balance of sexes..
I asked one poet I knew, but he wasn't keen to do it without payment, then asked Pat Boran, RTE's answer to Ian MacMillan, but a much savvier and gifted operator. He immediately agreed, until told the date, which clashed with another gig he has booked, there in black and white, printed in the Poetry Ireland newsletter.
He suggested asking Peter Fallon, and Gabriel Rosenstock, Ireland's premier Irish language poet, with over 100 books to his name, and at this point got speaking to Tom Conaty, who was advocating Rosenstock also.
I met Gabriel first at an IMRAM event in 2005, which is the Irish language poetry festival, and his method of introduction was very novel. He waved his hands around my aura chaunting a bardic Ohhmm, and said a few words in Gaelic, and i spun him one of mine when he requested me to, after which he took my hand, solemnly looking into my eye saying that our meeting had been written in the stars and was meant to be.
Rosenstock was only one of three poets I have spoken to who know of the Amergin Cauldron of Poesy poem, Conaty bumping up the number to three tonight. I said to Paul Casey, who is co-ordinating nationally, that I thought O'Driscoll's launch would be the place things were nailed down, and that the list would come by bardic methods, as we wanted poets who care about Tara, not the ones with books to sell first and Conaty is perfect as he is very modest; proposing i ask Rosenstock do it when i first spoke with him. And it was only when he started talking of myth and i asked him to do it, i realised he was mad keen to do it in the first place.
Conaty is a Cavan poet and senachie/storyteller and childrens' writer, who is as mad on the myth as i am, and we had a good long chat, and just as Boran re-aired his thought about asking Peter Fallon, Fallon came through the door with Heaney, and i decided against it as the two heavyweights stopped at the top of the stairs and shay and i made direct eye contact for the very first time, on the fourth time of our orbits intersecting, a number the bardic mind could go to town on as regards interpreting the psychic foundations of this whole shaboodle; the just meant to be'ness of it, saving Tara. And it is fitting that the bill was finalised in this space, where all the Irish mob from the Mossbawn magus down were milling about.
Heaney threw his hat in with the agitators on Thursday's independent and any true poet, as Boran and Conaty did, would immediately recognise the worthiness of such a cause. Not to promote the selling of books is this, but to keep the dream and keep the memory, tell how the throne room there at Tara was called the "Réalta na bhFile", "Star of the Poets."
The four cycles of myth can be poo pooed, but in a wider context, the global one, this island is the HQ of poetry and we are rightfully proud of the true ones who spend six years swimming home to the Well of Siegas, the source of the Boyne, as no other country has the poetic we do, and learning to be a bardic poet, takes the same effort and length of study as to become a doctor, and just as difficult.
Don't confuse the real Irish poet with their English equivalent, a pointless rent a bore employed to hang around libraries or infant schools chanting the cat sat on the mat to disinterested five year olds. We are the best in the world, with the most respect. Look at Heaney, Yeats, Kavanagh, all touched with the otherworldly crush the English mob can only dream and get green about, so Love and peace, the toxic shock has gone and so think on, Save Tara from they who believe it is worth trampling on 2000 years of culture to shave an hour off their journey to the commercial centers they only want to accrue material wealth in, and for what? To have two houses instead of one? Three cars instead of none?
Three generations ago, we were all in the bog, and look at us now, greedy bastards pretending we are connected to they who did have it tough, my mothers great grandmother tossed on the roads of Bohola, Mayo, in 1847, she herself hearing second hand the tale, of they who dies in their millions, and for what? So we can sup in Starbucks and moan about the weather and what shit is on telly, what material goods we deserve? I am a poor man and always have been, never had a penny, never missed it, and on 29 September in seven locations on the island including Dublin, Derry and Achill, Save Tara gigs will be happening.
Have pride in your island and attend if you can, voice support for the real Ireland, not the millionaire mindset, the expectations of our dead generations, ran to a full belly and a roof over their heads, a song in their hearts and ...yeah, simple life untroubled by a mass of material wealth
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Official Poetry: Ireland.
This is a section of the dán díreach ('strict-straight verse') anamain ('glorious profit') praise poem by arch poetry professor and Ard Ollamh Eireann, Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, (Godfrey Finn O'Daly).
Written when in the literary-legal service of the Earls of Desmond, composed in honour of Maurice Fitz Maurice Fitzgerald junior (Muiris Óg), the future short-lived second Earl of Desmond, and addressed directly to Edward III.
At whose court in Windsor castle Maurice Óg, the eldest son and heir of the third baron and first earl Maurice Fitzthomas Fitzgerald Sr., and his first wife, Margarete De Barry, was briefly fostered/hostaged; spending time learning the ways of a Hiberno-Norman aristocrat serving his king in Ireland.
Edwardian Old Irish expert and the poem's translator, Osborn Bergin, has dated the poem to between 1356, when the first earl, Maurice Fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, died and Maurice Óg succeeded him; and 1358, when the second earl, Maurice Óg, drowned crossing the Irish sea.
Maurice Óg was succeeded by his youngest half-brother, son of their shared father's third wife, Aveline Fitzmaurice, Gearóid Iarla, Gerald Fitzgerald Desmond the Poet earl.
Who leapfrogged his older brother, the eldest son of Aveline FitzMaurice, Nicholas Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, who had been classified (in the language of the time) as an 'idiot'.
Gerald had a lot more luck in the hot seat than Maurice Jr., spending forty years in Limerick before snuffing out in 1398. Gerald's most famous poem is "Mairg adeir olc ris na mnáibh" ("Speak not ill of womenkind"). Legend has it he was a shapeshifter and got hitched in a diabolical union with the Tuatha Dé Danann and Munster earth goddess, Áine.
A throwback to the iron age practice, when the Kings of Munster married the sod itself. What truth there is in this, one can only speculate, but certainly he was the first of the Hiberno-Norman aristocracy to become a partially qualified literary Filí poet, writing poems in Gaelic and Norman French.
Indeed The Fitzgeralds of Desmond "Deas Mhumhain" - South Munster - were the immigrants who went most native with most gusto, and whom the phrase Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis - "more Irish than the Irish themselves" - sprung up around. Though this 350 year old dynasty rent apart in the Desmond Rebellions which kicked off the Tudor holocaust.
~
Áine was a granddaughter of Manannán mac Lir, the pyschopomp sea god and son of Lir, the oldest deity in Irish myth and ruler of the waves himself. And behind Lir therefore, a void of knowing. But we know the myth that sprung up around Gerald is that he sleeps beneath the horse shoe shaped Lough Gur, at the foot of Knockadoon Hill in county Limerick, and that one day he will return on a silver shod steed, to "save Ireland."
And water features prominently in the history of this once most romanticized, famed and august, now wholly forgotten clan of Geraldine aristocrats. That rose from being the hired muscle of an invading Strongbow's Norman army, through three barons, fifteen earls, and ten uninterrupted generations of brutal physical force politics; to end up Munster and Ireland's most culturally and politically influential and militarily powerful Medieval family.
A rum bunch and mixed bag, ranging from men of high culture, Lord Justices and Chief Treasurers dispensing judicious and stately wisdom that maintained the cultural peace and socially prosperous harmony, to nephew, uncle, and cousin-killing nihilists and victims wracked on the tide of their own ego, greed, hate, history, hubris, humanity, love, religion, and the whims of a wicked Queen whose own hired muscle hunted down and exterminated the final tragic, Gerald FitzGerald, the 15th Earl of Desmond.
Whose decapitated head was sent and spiked on London Bridge, his half a million Munster acres were escheated, and planted with, among others, the poet Edmund Spenser. Who wrote the epic verse which birthed modern English poetry, The Faerie Queene, in one of Desmond's castles at Kilcolmon. That he had bagged for himself as Secretary to Lord Grey's mission, and near silent witness to the extermination of this line by the understated two word 'rough work' Spenser recorded his fellow man of letters and mercenary, Walter Raleigh, eagerly set about during the Smerwick Massacre, that signaled the ignoble tragic turning point of the doomed Second Desmond Rebellion.
But back to water. Poet Gerald the third earl's son and successor, John Fitzgerald, the fourth earl, lasted only a year before drowning, according to the rolls, in Bel-atha-an-droiched, a place google gives no return for.
A 2000 year language, lost. Yet the ancient poetic knowledge and Coimgne, there still, on the pages time forgot, in black and white for all and any to possess who are interested and have the focus, thirst, grit and grá to will the words in letters struck lying scattered surely reanimated back to eternal life upon the modern electronic page.
Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, died in 1387. He also experienced the heavy weight of profound spiritual tragedy; losing his own son, and writing a poem expressing inconsolable bereavement for his child, which appears in the seminal introductory lecture forwarding the book from which the Desmond praise poem also is taken. Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts And Translations.
First published in 1970, and with 66 poems residing between the pages.
The verses below make up the middle section of this long praise poem. The portion of it buttering up Edward III, in which the eminently educated courtly poet, Ó Dálaigh, likens Maurice Jr. to Lugh, the Tuatha Dé Danann god who was the son of Tuatha Dé Dannan father Cian and Formorian mother Ethniu (Enya)-; daughter of Balor; a pirate-raider whose stronghold was Tory island off the coast of Donegal, and who kept her locked in a tower after a druidic prophecy that he would die at the hands of his grandson.
Needless to say a long tale of his birth involving shenanigans with a stolen cow and Cian disguised and helped by the female druid Birog, dressed as a women, tricked his way in to the tower and got jiggy with Enya, who had seen no man except the one in her dreams, who was Cian, naturally, this being a completely mythical tale.
And when she gave birth, to triplets, Balor ordered they be slung in the sea, but Lugh was saved by druidess Birog and given to Manannan mac Lir, who passed him on to be reared by his foster mother Tailtiu, final queen of the Fir Bolg, a Connacht based outfit of gods and goddesses. And when it was time for him to become the star, as was written in his "dán", another name for Art and poetry, which carries a much deeper connotational valency, with a core meaning of "fate"; Lugh went to Tara, at Samhain.
Where he is turned away, as the door is closed for the night, and cannot be opened till daylight.
The doorkeeper says he can't come in, as they have "a man of your art" in there. But undeterred Lugh reels off a list of what he can do, the various arts, crafts and and skills he has. Still no dice. Until he asks, if any of the Tuatha De Dannan flock inside the walls of Tara, possess all the arts he has claimed to have.
And with that, Lugh jumps over the walls, thus negating the need for the door to be opened.
Basically, he was not going to be turned away, as he was the best and knew it was meant to be because of his dán his poetry, his fate. Written in the stars, the same as Balor's dán/poetry/fate was that he die at the hand of his grandson.
And it was Hubris that got Balor done, coz he stole the cow from Cian, and thus the reason why Cian was on Tory island dressed as a women in the first place. So if Balor had not been so greedy and covetous, he would not have written his own fate in that way.
And this tale, The Coming Of Lugh To Tara, is precised down by Ó Dálaigh, and we read in the line:
"The like of Maurice, who exalted bards, was Lugh Longhand"
The stock trick, of likening the subject of the praise to the ancient most noble and famed Irish gods. This particular Earl was not noted for anything so deserving of such extravagant praise, and would be dead by the age of twenty-three; but that was by the by.
The job of a poet in bardic-filidh Gaelic literary culture was a universe away from what the job of a poet is today; because their Tradition was linked unbroken to the living druids, and had been around for 2000 years by the time the Tudor monarchy pro-actively rent the island and all life on it apart.
Cromwell of course, who came less than fifty years after the death of Liz 1, being the antichrist figure in Ireland. A mentally ill person who believed he was some kind of messianic instrument - as his insane scribblings prove - and thus his policy of terror, scorched earth and famine, that Cromwell believed should be, and was, visited upon the Irish, as the will of what terrible God his poor deluded brain conjured during his bouts of clinical lunacy, commanding him to slaughter the Gaelic sinners, professing spiritual fealty to Rome and speaking a language he did not understand one word of and wished to only eradicate from the face of the earth.
But this was still 250 years away, and Ó Dálaigh was a cut above the average Ard Ollamh, one of the top three to have ever practiced in the whole 1200 years bardic-filidh poets' literary tradition.
~
It was no marvel that he did good, so excellent
was his training. No marvel men envied his fortune
so great was his gaiety. A merry tale will be found
with the skillful youth; so tall and bright, elegant
and white-footed; this leader of the fair host who
excelled in understanding, comeliness and success.
Who - in short - won all the varied excellences
with the excellence of his sweetness of voice.
His prize for valour, his prize for wisdom, for beauty
or generosity, were not granted to any heir of his age.
Strength in luck, luck with success, a modest heart,
understanding to keep him, curling tresses he had
gotten. When he was injured, the sod that
chanced to be under his white foot, certified it to be
the handsome brown haired prince. The planets
declared it to his curling hair.
~
The like of Maurice, who exalted bards, was Lugh
Longhand; equally great in knowledge was this
valiant compeer equal in sway. At the age of
Maurice, the earl's son, he delivered Banbha,
when he, the mighty tree of Bladhma, defeated
the race of the Formorians. At Eamhain in the east,
Lugh the darling of Tara beheld Tara - Rampart
of Té - when he reached it after searching the whole
earth. Lugh, champion of our choice, finds the door
closed: he goes to the smooth even-surfaced wall;
he strikes the knocker. "Where have you come from"
The doorkeeper said
"O young red-cheeked man; tall, smooth, strong
and bright?"
Answered Lugh, who sought nor shirked no fight
"I am a poet from Eamhain, of the Apple trees,
of swans and yew trees."
"It is not lawful for you" said the doorkeeper,
"to come to our good house. There is a man
of your art in our stronghold, bright and ruddy one.
The House of Miodhchuairt belongs at this time
to the sons of Ethliu; we must tell of the qualities
of the fair curved house. One of the qualities of the
House of Miodhchuairt, whose borders are smooth,
is that two of one craft are not admitted, fair
and furious one. So many are the arts
of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, bestowers of cloaks,
that you must bring to them an art they do not know."
"Among my arts - conceal it not to the company
beyond the gate - is leaping on a bubble without
breaking it. Go recount that. Snámh ós éttreóir,
arrying a vat on the ridges of the elbows;
these two arts are in my power; go declare it. Ask
whether there is one of the vigorous throng
that can outrun any steed on the fair soft green,
we promise a race. What i recount is here as an
extra beyond them, and in their own arts, none
is so expert as I. I speak not in anger."
Written when in the literary-legal service of the Earls of Desmond, composed in honour of Maurice Fitz Maurice Fitzgerald junior (Muiris Óg), the future short-lived second Earl of Desmond, and addressed directly to Edward III.
At whose court in Windsor castle Maurice Óg, the eldest son and heir of the third baron and first earl Maurice Fitzthomas Fitzgerald Sr., and his first wife, Margarete De Barry, was briefly fostered/hostaged; spending time learning the ways of a Hiberno-Norman aristocrat serving his king in Ireland.
Edwardian Old Irish expert and the poem's translator, Osborn Bergin, has dated the poem to between 1356, when the first earl, Maurice Fitz Thomas Fitzgerald, died and Maurice Óg succeeded him; and 1358, when the second earl, Maurice Óg, drowned crossing the Irish sea.
Maurice Óg was succeeded by his youngest half-brother, son of their shared father's third wife, Aveline Fitzmaurice, Gearóid Iarla, Gerald Fitzgerald Desmond the Poet earl.
Who leapfrogged his older brother, the eldest son of Aveline FitzMaurice, Nicholas Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, who had been classified (in the language of the time) as an 'idiot'.
Gerald had a lot more luck in the hot seat than Maurice Jr., spending forty years in Limerick before snuffing out in 1398. Gerald's most famous poem is "Mairg adeir olc ris na mnáibh" ("Speak not ill of womenkind"). Legend has it he was a shapeshifter and got hitched in a diabolical union with the Tuatha Dé Danann and Munster earth goddess, Áine.
A throwback to the iron age practice, when the Kings of Munster married the sod itself. What truth there is in this, one can only speculate, but certainly he was the first of the Hiberno-Norman aristocracy to become a partially qualified literary Filí poet, writing poems in Gaelic and Norman French.
Indeed The Fitzgeralds of Desmond "Deas Mhumhain" - South Munster - were the immigrants who went most native with most gusto, and whom the phrase Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis - "more Irish than the Irish themselves" - sprung up around. Though this 350 year old dynasty rent apart in the Desmond Rebellions which kicked off the Tudor holocaust.
~
Áine was a granddaughter of Manannán mac Lir, the pyschopomp sea god and son of Lir, the oldest deity in Irish myth and ruler of the waves himself. And behind Lir therefore, a void of knowing. But we know the myth that sprung up around Gerald is that he sleeps beneath the horse shoe shaped Lough Gur, at the foot of Knockadoon Hill in county Limerick, and that one day he will return on a silver shod steed, to "save Ireland."
And water features prominently in the history of this once most romanticized, famed and august, now wholly forgotten clan of Geraldine aristocrats. That rose from being the hired muscle of an invading Strongbow's Norman army, through three barons, fifteen earls, and ten uninterrupted generations of brutal physical force politics; to end up Munster and Ireland's most culturally and politically influential and militarily powerful Medieval family.
A rum bunch and mixed bag, ranging from men of high culture, Lord Justices and Chief Treasurers dispensing judicious and stately wisdom that maintained the cultural peace and socially prosperous harmony, to nephew, uncle, and cousin-killing nihilists and victims wracked on the tide of their own ego, greed, hate, history, hubris, humanity, love, religion, and the whims of a wicked Queen whose own hired muscle hunted down and exterminated the final tragic, Gerald FitzGerald, the 15th Earl of Desmond.
Whose decapitated head was sent and spiked on London Bridge, his half a million Munster acres were escheated, and planted with, among others, the poet Edmund Spenser. Who wrote the epic verse which birthed modern English poetry, The Faerie Queene, in one of Desmond's castles at Kilcolmon. That he had bagged for himself as Secretary to Lord Grey's mission, and near silent witness to the extermination of this line by the understated two word 'rough work' Spenser recorded his fellow man of letters and mercenary, Walter Raleigh, eagerly set about during the Smerwick Massacre, that signaled the ignoble tragic turning point of the doomed Second Desmond Rebellion.
But back to water. Poet Gerald the third earl's son and successor, John Fitzgerald, the fourth earl, lasted only a year before drowning, according to the rolls, in Bel-atha-an-droiched, a place google gives no return for.
A 2000 year language, lost. Yet the ancient poetic knowledge and Coimgne, there still, on the pages time forgot, in black and white for all and any to possess who are interested and have the focus, thirst, grit and grá to will the words in letters struck lying scattered surely reanimated back to eternal life upon the modern electronic page.
Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, died in 1387. He also experienced the heavy weight of profound spiritual tragedy; losing his own son, and writing a poem expressing inconsolable bereavement for his child, which appears in the seminal introductory lecture forwarding the book from which the Desmond praise poem also is taken. Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts And Translations.
First published in 1970, and with 66 poems residing between the pages.
The verses below make up the middle section of this long praise poem. The portion of it buttering up Edward III, in which the eminently educated courtly poet, Ó Dálaigh, likens Maurice Jr. to Lugh, the Tuatha Dé Danann god who was the son of Tuatha Dé Dannan father Cian and Formorian mother Ethniu (Enya)-; daughter of Balor; a pirate-raider whose stronghold was Tory island off the coast of Donegal, and who kept her locked in a tower after a druidic prophecy that he would die at the hands of his grandson.
Needless to say a long tale of his birth involving shenanigans with a stolen cow and Cian disguised and helped by the female druid Birog, dressed as a women, tricked his way in to the tower and got jiggy with Enya, who had seen no man except the one in her dreams, who was Cian, naturally, this being a completely mythical tale.
And when she gave birth, to triplets, Balor ordered they be slung in the sea, but Lugh was saved by druidess Birog and given to Manannan mac Lir, who passed him on to be reared by his foster mother Tailtiu, final queen of the Fir Bolg, a Connacht based outfit of gods and goddesses. And when it was time for him to become the star, as was written in his "dán", another name for Art and poetry, which carries a much deeper connotational valency, with a core meaning of "fate"; Lugh went to Tara, at Samhain.
Where he is turned away, as the door is closed for the night, and cannot be opened till daylight.
The doorkeeper says he can't come in, as they have "a man of your art" in there. But undeterred Lugh reels off a list of what he can do, the various arts, crafts and and skills he has. Still no dice. Until he asks, if any of the Tuatha De Dannan flock inside the walls of Tara, possess all the arts he has claimed to have.
And with that, Lugh jumps over the walls, thus negating the need for the door to be opened.
Basically, he was not going to be turned away, as he was the best and knew it was meant to be because of his dán his poetry, his fate. Written in the stars, the same as Balor's dán/poetry/fate was that he die at the hand of his grandson.
And it was Hubris that got Balor done, coz he stole the cow from Cian, and thus the reason why Cian was on Tory island dressed as a women in the first place. So if Balor had not been so greedy and covetous, he would not have written his own fate in that way.
And this tale, The Coming Of Lugh To Tara, is precised down by Ó Dálaigh, and we read in the line:
"The like of Maurice, who exalted bards, was Lugh Longhand"
The stock trick, of likening the subject of the praise to the ancient most noble and famed Irish gods. This particular Earl was not noted for anything so deserving of such extravagant praise, and would be dead by the age of twenty-three; but that was by the by.
The job of a poet in bardic-filidh Gaelic literary culture was a universe away from what the job of a poet is today; because their Tradition was linked unbroken to the living druids, and had been around for 2000 years by the time the Tudor monarchy pro-actively rent the island and all life on it apart.
Cromwell of course, who came less than fifty years after the death of Liz 1, being the antichrist figure in Ireland. A mentally ill person who believed he was some kind of messianic instrument - as his insane scribblings prove - and thus his policy of terror, scorched earth and famine, that Cromwell believed should be, and was, visited upon the Irish, as the will of what terrible God his poor deluded brain conjured during his bouts of clinical lunacy, commanding him to slaughter the Gaelic sinners, professing spiritual fealty to Rome and speaking a language he did not understand one word of and wished to only eradicate from the face of the earth.
But this was still 250 years away, and Ó Dálaigh was a cut above the average Ard Ollamh, one of the top three to have ever practiced in the whole 1200 years bardic-filidh poets' literary tradition.
~
It was no marvel that he did good, so excellent
was his training. No marvel men envied his fortune
so great was his gaiety. A merry tale will be found
with the skillful youth; so tall and bright, elegant
and white-footed; this leader of the fair host who
excelled in understanding, comeliness and success.
Who - in short - won all the varied excellences
with the excellence of his sweetness of voice.
His prize for valour, his prize for wisdom, for beauty
or generosity, were not granted to any heir of his age.
Strength in luck, luck with success, a modest heart,
understanding to keep him, curling tresses he had
gotten. When he was injured, the sod that
chanced to be under his white foot, certified it to be
the handsome brown haired prince. The planets
declared it to his curling hair.
~
The like of Maurice, who exalted bards, was Lugh
Longhand; equally great in knowledge was this
valiant compeer equal in sway. At the age of
Maurice, the earl's son, he delivered Banbha,
when he, the mighty tree of Bladhma, defeated
the race of the Formorians. At Eamhain in the east,
Lugh the darling of Tara beheld Tara - Rampart
of Té - when he reached it after searching the whole
earth. Lugh, champion of our choice, finds the door
closed: he goes to the smooth even-surfaced wall;
he strikes the knocker. "Where have you come from"
The doorkeeper said
"O young red-cheeked man; tall, smooth, strong
and bright?"
Answered Lugh, who sought nor shirked no fight
"I am a poet from Eamhain, of the Apple trees,
of swans and yew trees."
"It is not lawful for you" said the doorkeeper,
"to come to our good house. There is a man
of your art in our stronghold, bright and ruddy one.
The House of Miodhchuairt belongs at this time
to the sons of Ethliu; we must tell of the qualities
of the fair curved house. One of the qualities of the
House of Miodhchuairt, whose borders are smooth,
is that two of one craft are not admitted, fair
and furious one. So many are the arts
of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, bestowers of cloaks,
that you must bring to them an art they do not know."
"Among my arts - conceal it not to the company
beyond the gate - is leaping on a bubble without
breaking it. Go recount that. Snámh ós éttreóir,
arrying a vat on the ridges of the elbows;
these two arts are in my power; go declare it. Ask
whether there is one of the vigorous throng
that can outrun any steed on the fair soft green,
we promise a race. What i recount is here as an
extra beyond them, and in their own arts, none
is so expert as I. I speak not in anger."
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2007
Upstairs in The Palace Bar - Saturday 8 September - and a mad great night of Inclusional collective affirmation, all poets from across the divide, from Paddy Finnegan to David Lordan, Galway to Cork.
Sweeney - Leinster finalist All Ireland Slam Championship 2007..
Dave Lordan - Patrick Kavanagh Winner 2005 - amazingly A1 Live.
Orla Martin - she speaks a superbly luscious language of verbal honey.
Fintan O'Higgins - filidh bardic stock. The O'Higgins dominated Irish letters in Connacht for 500 years, and he has it in his psychic dna, transmitted through the blood of his poet forebears, as much - but probably less - than his belief in the good of Poetry and the peace it can bring
Dr Jessica Peart - Maynooth English expert, brilliant work, and only been going a couple of years on the page, yet seriously gifted, in the most modern way of a highly intelligent mind - certainly in Boland territory, with in the capacity of her imagination that is simply and uniquely, herself.
On the corner of Fleet and Westmoreland Street' the spiritual home of irish writing since english took over and Irish hacks got delivering the rant and praise strangely mixed in some Yeatsean con-trick of smoke and mirror; still blent in the place English language can be suppressed to express a deeper, more human spirit, magic will happen.
And not only in the sense of the spirit of Love, but also for the capacity of taking on human sorrow, to offer as some faint hope, to oneself as others, the collective psyche of the irish poetic experience, connecting in the most terrible of beauty and such, but still, wo/manity first and the spark of wit, evident for all to see and experience.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
One of the most unknown poetic lore - containing the most complete and real poetic - is the four cycles of Irish myth, the mystical knowledge therein constituting what the druids called
On Coimgne - A spiritual term, whose eytmology is unknown but which stretches back and connects to flitting shadows in the cave Plato talks of as being the poetic omphalos of all verse.
Knowledge held in trust for the common mob, by their druidic betters, the Nemed (aristoi) status of the top dog lot, intellectual mandarins in an ancient culture, probably beyond the comprehension of modern wo/manity to grasp, such was it so all encompassingly different from what goes on today.
And this knowledge was effectively contained in the four cycles of Irish myth. The Fianna cycle, Historical cycle, Mythological and Ulster cycles. A compact myth pack where all the narratives are completely domestic, with the odd brython or pict making an appearance, but essentially the islands very own system equal to, and in some cases we can argue goes beyond, the graeco-roman system on which the modern English poetic tradition founded itself 400 years ago.
An imititive act of copying; unlike the goidelic lore; still purring like a bunch of kittens, in full working order, oiled and ready to be took on and used in the bardic sense of the word, to express whatever one wishes, any whim and it can convey still, the deepest of spiritual swirl within ones most secret inner self, in any spelling yer wunt.
For there is little awareness or understanding of this 1200 year tradition of gaelic writing, which began with the proto-old Irish ogam alphabet - based on Latin glyphs - around the 3C and which ended 1300 years later.
And by ratio, it has been dead - wrong word - for but a third of the time it existed; first murdered during the cultural holocaust the Tudor monarchy pro-actively rent upon the island and all life on it. cromwell being the antichrist, the man who believed he was some kind of messianic instrument - as his insane scribblings demonstrate - and thus a policy of total scorched earth and famine - cromwell believed - should be visited upon the Irish, as the will of what terrible God his poor deluded brain conjured during his lunacy, commanding him to slaughter these gaelic sinners, speaking a language he did not understand and wished to, only destroy.
And i do not wish to sound like an embittered racist who has the mind set
"I can't speak my language coz of them britz, british b.stards..i can't speak gaelic, coz of them britz, british b.stards, blah blah blah" - But i was tossed off the Guardian books blog at the weekend, for contravening their talk lore - rightly so - for being too windy, in effect, for being a poet and for writing in a register which sought to speak of Love. Daft perhaps, but my take is that poets have a responsibility to promote Love and peace, not war.. This was after a four month full on trolling exercise that saw my word count go up to 5000 a day, and i realsied in reptrospect that that was the final ascent to Anruth - Enobling stream level in the bardic tradition.
The editor, her drippy staff and i had been dancing a pretend game of poetical mindplay, and they outed themselves as cultural facists after four months of me working there as a troll seeking to speak only to promote a love for Literacy and not the marketing and spin of commercial activity a poet must engage in aside from the act of poetry.
And thus, was I tossed off her rag, for being too windy - rightly so - for contravening the talk lore there. I had 800 pages of sheer wind come out over four months and knew i was learning something at the time, as this is a natural occurence, the white hot tide of constant language-gushing out as we ascend to the next stage of our poetic attainment.
I knew what i was doing, even if some of the spacier stuff looked odd; and i do not mean in an aggressive or threatening way, just odd. This is because i am a poet, who is quite individual in my approach, though naturally I understand why they who conform to a normal consumerist, commercial notion the collective poetic brain defines as poetic identity, do so.
Basically now, the consensus is that a poet is someone who writes stuff they call poetry, publish it in a book and do a bit of moaning in the rags now and again, about how untalented most other people writing what they call poetry, are. The odd one being nice and human, but these, unfortunately, few and far between, in the sense of them being able to be happy to talk wo/manly and choose friends from the lower orders, date a bin man or dine in a canteen for drug addicts and the homeless on a regular basis, perhaps.
And thus after four months at work, effectively learning how to become a better journalist than the pros in the guardian, at the final, when i had out-faced the hacks, i got carrried away and probably said stuff that was too satirical and upset a drip or two, the moany ones who love writing in to complain to, someone, anyone, it doesn't matter, as long as the target of their culturally facist wangst stops spieling their dream on the page because drippy aint happy wiv 'em.
But another compelling reason, was after four months a bloke called Mr Bomber, who bombed in trolling two months ago, below the line, appeared above the line, plucked from the dregs of the commentating classes, and at this point an ossification and clearing of mental mist occured, as it collectively dawned on us long termers and heavy users of that board, that ..hold on..if Mr Bomber can go above the line, so can we.
And compounding this was Jo Ridgwell - bomber - his piece was effectively the manifesto for a loose collection of his dring and drug pals, only three of whom where personal freinds, the rest a rag bag sort of dissaffected writers unhappy at the no-chance they stood with normal publishing routes, and the manifesto for these writers, poets etc, was "F.ck You" I kid ye not.
And i ended up setting up a lit site and a few of the grandie mob came on board, which the ed did not like, stealing her thralls and getting them thinking of not being a muppet for others all the time.
And so i was cast out, banished, ComBod snipped me, and yet i managed to return under a different guise and posted within the limits, on an irish thread that turned into the usual book list; which - after 200 deposits - had no mention of this gaelic bardic past, the 1200 and more years of the native island language, on which the 200 years of english is thus spake.
For some reason ComBod lost the plot and totally excised any and all trace of my writing, leaving mesages of "deleted by ComMod as this poster mentions one who is no longer here", and several other bits of text that made it clear his head was completely done in and he was taking it very personal; acting like a wronged wo/man cutting up their ex-lovers clothes, scrubbing all trace of a chavvy oink who dared view this gaelic past.
Who had the cheek to point out that there was not one reference to the gaelic bardic culture, and sought to remedy it with a few lines from one of the most highly respected poets in the 1200 year tradition. Three times longer than the English poetic tradition and based - not on an imititive graeco-roman metrical lore - but a native one.
So, as i say an all, forgive me for bringing certain psychic baggage and sense of injustices to this forum, but it is within the broad scope of what i wish to address here today..
The literal meaning of On Coimgne, is elusive and not fully known, lost in the primordial spume of the oral tradition on the island where memory is queen, and the poets from this tradition, we can pretend to believe its trace is distilled into us at our conception.
The aul irish cod of it being our collective psychic dna, a way of out-facing the charge of being racist about poets from different cultures; though the truth is this island is one of the few places in the world who could get away with such a claim; or rather, the rest of the world will go along with our cod of being natural born poets.
A perfect piece of linguistic avoidance, of not getting bogged down in the contemporary PC side-show of shout and counter shout by thought cops and mind sheriffs seeking out potential wrong-thinkers, patrolling and bossing about in the madness of a divisive western culture based on the - essentially roman - Penal concept of a binary understanding; where the shades and grey subtleties of existential reality are ignored in favour of opting into a mediatised hygenic fiction that this is good that is bad, and even when one is believing they are doing things impulsed for and by love, as in the Love poet; some nasty troll chancers will try to point out why you are actually the devil for saying the most innocuous and harmless of utterances.
And thus the druids held the knowledge in trust for the people, this On Coimgne, and in reality, it meant learning the four cycles off by heart and the various meters that sprung up and were invented over the course of the tradition, and there is an old quote that has come down to us, believed to be of druidic origin, as it is used in conjuction with this slippery, grey, almost invisible On Coimgne word none can say for sure they know what it means.
S"he is no poet who does not synchronize and harmonize all the ancient knowledge."
And so poets from the island, the descendants of this mythic bunch of mad-heads, can learn from this neglected myth system, what knowledge the druids and fili held in the oral tradition, or at least attempt to learn of the On Coimgne, the four cycles. For as the saying goes that
S"he is no poet who does not synchronize and harmonize all the ancient knowledge." The On Coimgne effectively, the four myths. And whilst i wouldn't hold this as a truism or a must for the irish poet, what a larf it would be if someone actually did try to work, or rather, engage with the world as a poet on this one base premise?
And at this point, i have to admit i am addicted to irish myth, and the more i study the easier it gets to talk of poetry and verse with a certain knowledge few other poets possess, even though this myth system is supremely compact compared to the sprawl of european myth; ultimately all connected, as there was no sea and thus no narural boundary or terminus where european myth could safely be said to stop.
But the gaelic myth is not like that. It is all there on the pages time forgot and should one choose to try and re-connect, or just browse through with no intention but to pass an idle five minute, it is there, purring and ready to be took on; in around six years or so, should on possess the thirst and focus to take on the full of this knowledge, contained in a voluminous four cycles.
And it was only in the sixth year of study, once one had progressed from the fifth grade of Clio - ridgepole - to Anruth, or Enobling stream, one could practice publically for material reward. A great system to talk of poetry with, as it is a one founded by druids - the ultimate poets - and evolved along soley poetic lines.
1200 years uninterupted poetic culture, name me one poet from it Dave?
Exactly, mad and proof that the purest source of poetry, containing the most answers - or certainly as productive as any other - few poets practicing today are even aware of; preffering instead to make up and cobble their own from a mix and match of various cultures poetics.
But one can liken this collective ignorance to the metaphor of silence we need for true gravitas. For the really important things in life aren't "tidy yer bedroom", but the murdering of people and the killers to be the state. The cop in the street who kills ones brother, father, mother, sister, whoever, with everyone knowing and unable to do nada, whaddya say dave? Exactly, the worse the crime perpetrated by the state, the bigger the silence as the truth is supressed by the idiots who haven't copped on that life is much more civilised and enjoyable in the long run when people are straight with one another instead of seeking to be great all the time, to possess the arogance of a Great briton. And indeed it is only because they have stuff to hide, dishonest intent wrapped up in a christian ethos, as bush and blair did in Iraq ..that it's actually all your fault dave..the middle east..
But i digress, the fili/poet had to take on the full of it, and the whole thread, the entire history is there and can be read, understood, the lineage and pedigree, all there in black and white, with no missing portions, no centuries unaccounted for; right back to the ogam; invented by and used for 150-200 years during the time the druidic culture was crossing over to christianity and they devised a system of writing with an orthography all their own, based on the latin alphabet.
The annals state goidelic to be a mixed combination of the three best areas of langugae in greek, hebrew and another one which slips my mind. Clear and total myth, but this particular tale is very thorough and worthy of further inspection..but not now dave..not now..later, after we've got to know each other a bit better..
The detailed myth for its invention involving 72 scribes who were sent round recording the various langugaes that came to be after the tower at Babel collapsed and speech fragmented.
And so, what of the poet who has the dream, of being the poet according to the above quote? Indeed if followed to the letter this quote would exclude every poet who did not study their native myth.
But for the perfectionsist of verse, the prize one can plan to acquire in a pretty empty field where all other irish competitors are connected more to the graeco roman mythos, is ones very own universe, become as influential as Cromwell, but for Love dave, love...
And it is only now the bones of it have ossified in my mind, in my sixth year of full time 14 hour a day study, i know how to use it; as once one has their own personal myth kitty, one can say owt thee wunt, effectively, when we learn how to initial and upper the case of i and strike the most important glyph:
I
you is the writer.
But i suppose what i've learnt is that we all need a myth system, be it self created using 50's American cartoon lore or the four cycles. I prefer the cycles and after six years have took the skeleton of it on board; though it do be very daunting when my eyes first apprehended the ogam, and various names in the mythos.
Indeed, it excludes all but the highest of poetical minds and is a year - two really - before you even find you feet, such is the strangeness when first met, reconnection to a forgotten and criminally ignored tradition, that does hold answers for all poets, should they chose to gamble on finding poetic answers there.
Welcome to my gulag dave..Let me be your reader, please, all welcome.., the real irish bard..a plastic shaman, a pretend mick, an English git, british..b.stard, i can speak my language coz of the british gits, i hate me..just get chatting..everyone's bleeding resigning anyway. Ditch this board and come wiv me..
Rule no 1 - post something back, even if it's just one word.
Thank you very much, Love..peace go slag them hacks off
http://literaturelover.createforum.net/literaturelover.html
On Coimgne - A spiritual term, whose eytmology is unknown but which stretches back and connects to flitting shadows in the cave Plato talks of as being the poetic omphalos of all verse.
Knowledge held in trust for the common mob, by their druidic betters, the Nemed (aristoi) status of the top dog lot, intellectual mandarins in an ancient culture, probably beyond the comprehension of modern wo/manity to grasp, such was it so all encompassingly different from what goes on today.
And this knowledge was effectively contained in the four cycles of Irish myth. The Fianna cycle, Historical cycle, Mythological and Ulster cycles. A compact myth pack where all the narratives are completely domestic, with the odd brython or pict making an appearance, but essentially the islands very own system equal to, and in some cases we can argue goes beyond, the graeco-roman system on which the modern English poetic tradition founded itself 400 years ago.
An imititive act of copying; unlike the goidelic lore; still purring like a bunch of kittens, in full working order, oiled and ready to be took on and used in the bardic sense of the word, to express whatever one wishes, any whim and it can convey still, the deepest of spiritual swirl within ones most secret inner self, in any spelling yer wunt.
For there is little awareness or understanding of this 1200 year tradition of gaelic writing, which began with the proto-old Irish ogam alphabet - based on Latin glyphs - around the 3C and which ended 1300 years later.
And by ratio, it has been dead - wrong word - for but a third of the time it existed; first murdered during the cultural holocaust the Tudor monarchy pro-actively rent upon the island and all life on it. cromwell being the antichrist, the man who believed he was some kind of messianic instrument - as his insane scribblings demonstrate - and thus a policy of total scorched earth and famine - cromwell believed - should be visited upon the Irish, as the will of what terrible God his poor deluded brain conjured during his lunacy, commanding him to slaughter these gaelic sinners, speaking a language he did not understand and wished to, only destroy.
And i do not wish to sound like an embittered racist who has the mind set
"I can't speak my language coz of them britz, british b.stards..i can't speak gaelic, coz of them britz, british b.stards, blah blah blah" - But i was tossed off the Guardian books blog at the weekend, for contravening their talk lore - rightly so - for being too windy, in effect, for being a poet and for writing in a register which sought to speak of Love. Daft perhaps, but my take is that poets have a responsibility to promote Love and peace, not war.. This was after a four month full on trolling exercise that saw my word count go up to 5000 a day, and i realsied in reptrospect that that was the final ascent to Anruth - Enobling stream level in the bardic tradition.
The editor, her drippy staff and i had been dancing a pretend game of poetical mindplay, and they outed themselves as cultural facists after four months of me working there as a troll seeking to speak only to promote a love for Literacy and not the marketing and spin of commercial activity a poet must engage in aside from the act of poetry.
And thus, was I tossed off her rag, for being too windy - rightly so - for contravening the talk lore there. I had 800 pages of sheer wind come out over four months and knew i was learning something at the time, as this is a natural occurence, the white hot tide of constant language-gushing out as we ascend to the next stage of our poetic attainment.
I knew what i was doing, even if some of the spacier stuff looked odd; and i do not mean in an aggressive or threatening way, just odd. This is because i am a poet, who is quite individual in my approach, though naturally I understand why they who conform to a normal consumerist, commercial notion the collective poetic brain defines as poetic identity, do so.
Basically now, the consensus is that a poet is someone who writes stuff they call poetry, publish it in a book and do a bit of moaning in the rags now and again, about how untalented most other people writing what they call poetry, are. The odd one being nice and human, but these, unfortunately, few and far between, in the sense of them being able to be happy to talk wo/manly and choose friends from the lower orders, date a bin man or dine in a canteen for drug addicts and the homeless on a regular basis, perhaps.
And thus after four months at work, effectively learning how to become a better journalist than the pros in the guardian, at the final, when i had out-faced the hacks, i got carrried away and probably said stuff that was too satirical and upset a drip or two, the moany ones who love writing in to complain to, someone, anyone, it doesn't matter, as long as the target of their culturally facist wangst stops spieling their dream on the page because drippy aint happy wiv 'em.
But another compelling reason, was after four months a bloke called Mr Bomber, who bombed in trolling two months ago, below the line, appeared above the line, plucked from the dregs of the commentating classes, and at this point an ossification and clearing of mental mist occured, as it collectively dawned on us long termers and heavy users of that board, that ..hold on..if Mr Bomber can go above the line, so can we.
And compounding this was Jo Ridgwell - bomber - his piece was effectively the manifesto for a loose collection of his dring and drug pals, only three of whom where personal freinds, the rest a rag bag sort of dissaffected writers unhappy at the no-chance they stood with normal publishing routes, and the manifesto for these writers, poets etc, was "F.ck You" I kid ye not.
And i ended up setting up a lit site and a few of the grandie mob came on board, which the ed did not like, stealing her thralls and getting them thinking of not being a muppet for others all the time.
And so i was cast out, banished, ComBod snipped me, and yet i managed to return under a different guise and posted within the limits, on an irish thread that turned into the usual book list; which - after 200 deposits - had no mention of this gaelic bardic past, the 1200 and more years of the native island language, on which the 200 years of english is thus spake.
For some reason ComBod lost the plot and totally excised any and all trace of my writing, leaving mesages of "deleted by ComMod as this poster mentions one who is no longer here", and several other bits of text that made it clear his head was completely done in and he was taking it very personal; acting like a wronged wo/man cutting up their ex-lovers clothes, scrubbing all trace of a chavvy oink who dared view this gaelic past.
Who had the cheek to point out that there was not one reference to the gaelic bardic culture, and sought to remedy it with a few lines from one of the most highly respected poets in the 1200 year tradition. Three times longer than the English poetic tradition and based - not on an imititive graeco-roman metrical lore - but a native one.
So, as i say an all, forgive me for bringing certain psychic baggage and sense of injustices to this forum, but it is within the broad scope of what i wish to address here today..
The literal meaning of On Coimgne, is elusive and not fully known, lost in the primordial spume of the oral tradition on the island where memory is queen, and the poets from this tradition, we can pretend to believe its trace is distilled into us at our conception.
The aul irish cod of it being our collective psychic dna, a way of out-facing the charge of being racist about poets from different cultures; though the truth is this island is one of the few places in the world who could get away with such a claim; or rather, the rest of the world will go along with our cod of being natural born poets.
A perfect piece of linguistic avoidance, of not getting bogged down in the contemporary PC side-show of shout and counter shout by thought cops and mind sheriffs seeking out potential wrong-thinkers, patrolling and bossing about in the madness of a divisive western culture based on the - essentially roman - Penal concept of a binary understanding; where the shades and grey subtleties of existential reality are ignored in favour of opting into a mediatised hygenic fiction that this is good that is bad, and even when one is believing they are doing things impulsed for and by love, as in the Love poet; some nasty troll chancers will try to point out why you are actually the devil for saying the most innocuous and harmless of utterances.
And thus the druids held the knowledge in trust for the people, this On Coimgne, and in reality, it meant learning the four cycles off by heart and the various meters that sprung up and were invented over the course of the tradition, and there is an old quote that has come down to us, believed to be of druidic origin, as it is used in conjuction with this slippery, grey, almost invisible On Coimgne word none can say for sure they know what it means.
S"he is no poet who does not synchronize and harmonize all the ancient knowledge."
And so poets from the island, the descendants of this mythic bunch of mad-heads, can learn from this neglected myth system, what knowledge the druids and fili held in the oral tradition, or at least attempt to learn of the On Coimgne, the four cycles. For as the saying goes that
S"he is no poet who does not synchronize and harmonize all the ancient knowledge." The On Coimgne effectively, the four myths. And whilst i wouldn't hold this as a truism or a must for the irish poet, what a larf it would be if someone actually did try to work, or rather, engage with the world as a poet on this one base premise?
And at this point, i have to admit i am addicted to irish myth, and the more i study the easier it gets to talk of poetry and verse with a certain knowledge few other poets possess, even though this myth system is supremely compact compared to the sprawl of european myth; ultimately all connected, as there was no sea and thus no narural boundary or terminus where european myth could safely be said to stop.
But the gaelic myth is not like that. It is all there on the pages time forgot and should one choose to try and re-connect, or just browse through with no intention but to pass an idle five minute, it is there, purring and ready to be took on; in around six years or so, should on possess the thirst and focus to take on the full of this knowledge, contained in a voluminous four cycles.
And it was only in the sixth year of study, once one had progressed from the fifth grade of Clio - ridgepole - to Anruth, or Enobling stream, one could practice publically for material reward. A great system to talk of poetry with, as it is a one founded by druids - the ultimate poets - and evolved along soley poetic lines.
1200 years uninterupted poetic culture, name me one poet from it Dave?
Exactly, mad and proof that the purest source of poetry, containing the most answers - or certainly as productive as any other - few poets practicing today are even aware of; preffering instead to make up and cobble their own from a mix and match of various cultures poetics.
But one can liken this collective ignorance to the metaphor of silence we need for true gravitas. For the really important things in life aren't "tidy yer bedroom", but the murdering of people and the killers to be the state. The cop in the street who kills ones brother, father, mother, sister, whoever, with everyone knowing and unable to do nada, whaddya say dave? Exactly, the worse the crime perpetrated by the state, the bigger the silence as the truth is supressed by the idiots who haven't copped on that life is much more civilised and enjoyable in the long run when people are straight with one another instead of seeking to be great all the time, to possess the arogance of a Great briton. And indeed it is only because they have stuff to hide, dishonest intent wrapped up in a christian ethos, as bush and blair did in Iraq ..that it's actually all your fault dave..the middle east..
But i digress, the fili/poet had to take on the full of it, and the whole thread, the entire history is there and can be read, understood, the lineage and pedigree, all there in black and white, with no missing portions, no centuries unaccounted for; right back to the ogam; invented by and used for 150-200 years during the time the druidic culture was crossing over to christianity and they devised a system of writing with an orthography all their own, based on the latin alphabet.
The annals state goidelic to be a mixed combination of the three best areas of langugae in greek, hebrew and another one which slips my mind. Clear and total myth, but this particular tale is very thorough and worthy of further inspection..but not now dave..not now..later, after we've got to know each other a bit better..
The detailed myth for its invention involving 72 scribes who were sent round recording the various langugaes that came to be after the tower at Babel collapsed and speech fragmented.
And so, what of the poet who has the dream, of being the poet according to the above quote? Indeed if followed to the letter this quote would exclude every poet who did not study their native myth.
But for the perfectionsist of verse, the prize one can plan to acquire in a pretty empty field where all other irish competitors are connected more to the graeco roman mythos, is ones very own universe, become as influential as Cromwell, but for Love dave, love...
And it is only now the bones of it have ossified in my mind, in my sixth year of full time 14 hour a day study, i know how to use it; as once one has their own personal myth kitty, one can say owt thee wunt, effectively, when we learn how to initial and upper the case of i and strike the most important glyph:
I
you is the writer.
But i suppose what i've learnt is that we all need a myth system, be it self created using 50's American cartoon lore or the four cycles. I prefer the cycles and after six years have took the skeleton of it on board; though it do be very daunting when my eyes first apprehended the ogam, and various names in the mythos.
Indeed, it excludes all but the highest of poetical minds and is a year - two really - before you even find you feet, such is the strangeness when first met, reconnection to a forgotten and criminally ignored tradition, that does hold answers for all poets, should they chose to gamble on finding poetic answers there.
Welcome to my gulag dave..Let me be your reader, please, all welcome.., the real irish bard..a plastic shaman, a pretend mick, an English git, british..b.stard, i can speak my language coz of the british gits, i hate me..just get chatting..everyone's bleeding resigning anyway. Ditch this board and come wiv me..
Rule no 1 - post something back, even if it's just one word.
Thank you very much, Love..peace go slag them hacks off
http://literaturelover.createforum.net/literaturelover.html
Monday, August 06, 2007
"..the believer is no longer under the dominion and control of law, but under the dominion and controlling influence of grace. The believer has left the kingdom of spiritual fear for a kingdom of spiritual freedom. Saying that is enough to start a revolution!"
Stephen Davey
Hail the main bore!!
Greetings Literature lovers. Welcome to my gulag.
And for all my fellow competing colleagues who hate and wish a holocaust upon me, i apoligise for being rubbish in print, please go here. I hacked into the Pentagon slush fund account for some CIA work - deniable op fund. Just type in yer bank account number and 50,000 dollars gets transferred straight away, no questions asked, completely deniable to the crooks who put it there in the first place, coz it don't exist see, except in my universal ...blah blah tada yaah..
For your eye is apprehending - as one speaks -
www. irishpoetry.blogspot.com
I decree that all who like to read and talk of it in print, please feel free to c'mon and be as windy or silent as yer wunt, at the one all islands' talk-shop spoken of by such eminent verse experts and supremely self-important personages as Schmidt in the London Times, Ricks in the Telegraph, Carol Anne Duffy and Sharon Oldes in Hello, Roberto Potts in Guardian and Dan Gioa in Washington; as the most troll free of places with the most loving chat, and nea a ComBoddie about to be the drippy wan git stopping the flow, the natural Irish way of languid conversation, on books and writing.
Be you purely a reader or Stephen King, it makes no odds in the cyberspace nation of a million welcoming eyes; they who Love in the shack of pure Literacy an all, being contemporary; poetry apprehended and nea a man bag in sight with which to dip in and pull out a pen in order to record its happening, just the full on in yer face'ness of it, a nation of windbags, not listening, nea no never no more, but waiting for us to shut up so they can butt in..tell of its passing by them an all..fievin my dream..so c'mon in and be yerself Dear reader.
Being a new dictatorship based on Inclusion and nea fear - and thus silence - but true Free speech, on any and all news. Indeed the reason the press got hold of this site is because we broke the news about Brown, being in Iraq and all wiv george and that, and have writers posting from Guantanemo and Berlin. Putin's PA is secretly talking to me, of the next scoop, during medication time an all
http://literaturelover.createforum.net/literaturelover.html
Stephen Davey
Hail the main bore!!
Greetings Literature lovers. Welcome to my gulag.
And for all my fellow competing colleagues who hate and wish a holocaust upon me, i apoligise for being rubbish in print, please go here. I hacked into the Pentagon slush fund account for some CIA work - deniable op fund. Just type in yer bank account number and 50,000 dollars gets transferred straight away, no questions asked, completely deniable to the crooks who put it there in the first place, coz it don't exist see, except in my universal ...blah blah tada yaah..
For your eye is apprehending - as one speaks -
www. irishpoetry.blogspot.com
I decree that all who like to read and talk of it in print, please feel free to c'mon and be as windy or silent as yer wunt, at the one all islands' talk-shop spoken of by such eminent verse experts and supremely self-important personages as Schmidt in the London Times, Ricks in the Telegraph, Carol Anne Duffy and Sharon Oldes in Hello, Roberto Potts in Guardian and Dan Gioa in Washington; as the most troll free of places with the most loving chat, and nea a ComBoddie about to be the drippy wan git stopping the flow, the natural Irish way of languid conversation, on books and writing.
Be you purely a reader or Stephen King, it makes no odds in the cyberspace nation of a million welcoming eyes; they who Love in the shack of pure Literacy an all, being contemporary; poetry apprehended and nea a man bag in sight with which to dip in and pull out a pen in order to record its happening, just the full on in yer face'ness of it, a nation of windbags, not listening, nea no never no more, but waiting for us to shut up so they can butt in..tell of its passing by them an all..fievin my dream..so c'mon in and be yerself Dear reader.
Being a new dictatorship based on Inclusion and nea fear - and thus silence - but true Free speech, on any and all news. Indeed the reason the press got hold of this site is because we broke the news about Brown, being in Iraq and all wiv george and that, and have writers posting from Guantanemo and Berlin. Putin's PA is secretly talking to me, of the next scoop, during medication time an all
http://literaturelover.createforum.net/literaturelover.html
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Olé
Certainly we star, and when our trajectory and kink is traced,
when the heat of ones current and career-currency is such
as it is when entering the second mythosic phase, all prophets -
true dub souljahs - have when seriously messing about with
ancient myth kitties and such. we will be recorded on black
onyx, the plinth of all cognomen cased upper, nea lower like
some meff of verse kiddas..c'mon, nea never no more, all true
bores sing wiv me now, O let me be your reader, Ahern, ebda
blerté..olé, olé olé olé, get lost bog witchery broomstick breath,
nea the sidhe moves in phantasmagoria and shade, le market
purr as lé singer Sadé does dans le grandé..ta ta laaah..chime
on souljah dub prophet of the straight bowled knowledge from Tír na Og...
For the geasa tuten-kah-moon and the crazee gang, did not remember - the curse of a certain protaganist in a tale being outed, the story becoming spoken by printed voice alone, doing the work of projecting narrative an all..- what can it be but pure instinct..i love it when a plan comes together in the morning, napalm wounded window slats tap an acorn crop, black oil shines beyond a raven blue, look..phwoar..eye the silver fox, see the staggering stumbling wan heavily drinking;
and yet all thread of momento move there, tracing to him and the dodge in a perfect environment for which to practice ones drinking wiv a certain je nous say wha..found in dub only, the right to be a different shape, whatever bleeding colour one so desires, no racism when all the race is but a mass of spacers fighting in empty armchairs and all..best when dreaming, for whatever it is, that 1200 year connection, that edifice of gaelic letters, needs a fully certed lore wo/man, it is i who struck the glyph
I
you are moi amouré..leader..let me lay down rules in rann; i am not here in anger, i speak as a concerned bore, nosey and a bit lonely, wanting just to be the star, at any cost, any sacrifice and any betrayal, here at hq - imagination - a joke the buzz it is, a trail of ghosts, crossing over, c'mon in, please all speak and be..
when the heat of ones current and career-currency is such
as it is when entering the second mythosic phase, all prophets -
true dub souljahs - have when seriously messing about with
ancient myth kitties and such. we will be recorded on black
onyx, the plinth of all cognomen cased upper, nea lower like
some meff of verse kiddas..c'mon, nea never no more, all true
bores sing wiv me now, O let me be your reader, Ahern, ebda
blerté..olé, olé olé olé, get lost bog witchery broomstick breath,
nea the sidhe moves in phantasmagoria and shade, le market
purr as lé singer Sadé does dans le grandé..ta ta laaah..chime
on souljah dub prophet of the straight bowled knowledge from Tír na Og...
For the geasa tuten-kah-moon and the crazee gang, did not remember - the curse of a certain protaganist in a tale being outed, the story becoming spoken by printed voice alone, doing the work of projecting narrative an all..- what can it be but pure instinct..i love it when a plan comes together in the morning, napalm wounded window slats tap an acorn crop, black oil shines beyond a raven blue, look..phwoar..eye the silver fox, see the staggering stumbling wan heavily drinking;
and yet all thread of momento move there, tracing to him and the dodge in a perfect environment for which to practice ones drinking wiv a certain je nous say wha..found in dub only, the right to be a different shape, whatever bleeding colour one so desires, no racism when all the race is but a mass of spacers fighting in empty armchairs and all..best when dreaming, for whatever it is, that 1200 year connection, that edifice of gaelic letters, needs a fully certed lore wo/man, it is i who struck the glyph
I
you are moi amouré..leader..let me lay down rules in rann; i am not here in anger, i speak as a concerned bore, nosey and a bit lonely, wanting just to be the star, at any cost, any sacrifice and any betrayal, here at hq - imagination - a joke the buzz it is, a trail of ghosts, crossing over, c'mon in, please all speak and be..
Friday, August 03, 2007
Lead ahouy - spieling Dream
Let me be your reader; i bessech you all here today for the goodness that is bono Love; good, good loving..Bob sung and continues to in his uniquely spiritually irish country and western way of american expansion first lore, heard wiv the song when sung, in pure dub..mahn.
Expand my base of Love. please, i urge you vist and speak uncensored by time. Nea snip but a double gift of two coterminious threads,
Wanna waffle wiv yer gob in the vacuum?
..who do we choose, dearest reader of One love, one hug, we gotta harry that language bro..go wan and be on yer own sailor breathing in shadow and shade in ones native..english innit, peesey pie laah, so go lick the tree in a room full just being tree like, in littered garish faux aul D minus and piece of peace ohhmm'ing as only a wooden can.
So suck on the twig witchery bog breath, druidical space magi gather..literature, Love 3 sweeden O that night stan first appeared as saviour wiv a living legend, Robbo in full five year bus pass OAP back up mode, stood starring by cameras squeezing stan's hand; before he was hospitalised with another health fright, he once again, amazingly defied and sailed through - A1 living legend Mr robson; wiping our manager's imaginal arse..and yet nea, for we and bobby, robbo, bob rosbon he is mate, why eye, if it aint mah gee'ordie wan Roberto Cúchulainn, and i beat them 3 nothing scando sweede breateing turnips that raw spring night, April stars, slick sky, the roar of support keeping all there warm, in a friendly wan - and yet still - passion reversed and reserved, coyote like shyness, a diametric oppositional flux in perfect harmony, essentially itself, yerself; and being friendly an all, true national spirit of fair play appeared..phoof..just like that; 40 thousand witnesses; coopered to it,
Love... The next game, alas, bobby was needed to wipe stan down, after a drubbing we got by poorer opposition and staunton's golden glow disappeared in bitter recriminations, Keano sized slaggings and batterings in a continual and unceasing wave after wave of woe for the spirit of soccer on the island.
And when stan appeared pitchside, as manager, making it happen on the pitch by sheer belief alone, none nea more were wanting to believe, for the results and state of on pitch action, spoke far far louder than the Louth wan, getting it wrong; even uninventive soccer hacks slagged, wounding staunton at will, embarresing to read really, and tv interviews showing yer man under the cosh and in supreme personal turmoil, professionally, as saviour and flame of island soccer spiritual lore writing his own myth.
Alas; it went downhill, this geordie louth paradise of sir and partnership of stanley staunton avec roberto robson; taking on the hue and tenor - in the press - of true greek tradegy worthy of a laughably inventive armageddon myth; itself to appear in the next match, as Hera doing whatever it is she does to ramp up prophecy, her locks of woe in what three tri con of pure bollix beleif stan was having back then an all...
Coz stan was shown up for the chancer he bleeding was see; prophetic doom was voiced in the fecking Star, the Sun affirming how shit he was, how worthy of pure viciousness he was deserving, how professional soccer journalist jihadic windbags exhaled their green bile on this man of tender wan years being beaten racketeringly by these horrid mob of negative trollie gits.
Thus to fail stan had to be, and..hey, get real and sack the turnip breathing thick git, before michael barrymore nicks his job.
But then, a random and even more supremely divine intervention. the miracle everyone knew in their most secret of selves, who - it is clear now - collectively held similar pictures, within the immediate and central same border of dernier or some such natural tide-mark of anarchy this island has, and thus life in the psychic breath of her living wans; and stans professional armageddon within the pincers of fictional lore, at that time.. back then an all..when we was bludding in yer new wans..had a tough druidical call to it, a big ask; yet a printed sacrafice in the press; the stringing up of stan an all..afore the match.
The riling and back bitchery goss, spuming in byzantium labrinth, pro-begrduger nasities and yer wotist wans all gunked wiv hate an all..back in the day when it where fair go and game to play the man; no intention of kicking the ball, going for bone, a clean unlucky break, accidental wans..erm..a hem..was not the true Keano spirit, the defiance that goes beyond being pensioned out at the foot of a living soccer Legend from the most staunchly pro territorial bunch. thus doesn't it just be then, Stan staunton's Art - dan; sidhe it is..bleeding faeries pal..is all that keeps him sane..stanley in swan grace with apple and yew trees, an acorn and ridge pole,
the silver branch of an enobling stroll on the sand looking for clues to cement success in his future, but all stan found was an inebriated troll, flaming on the aul wounds, picking at scaps, wanting answers form Lugh himself..gadzooks stan; get a bleeding grip of the pisshead and toss him to the ground..who we are..one stan..one man, we gotta pretend we like the wan..playing shit innit..i love you stan...wot a tit..c'mon golden ballss..snigger..hey pack it in, stan is our leader in soccer lore, have some damn respect..cuisle on and hate but remeber we Love, stan..we thought you would turn up for the guard of honour, keot waiting by yer wans, to upset at the trauma of the drubbing to face the stewards silent inquiry that night i cannot forget, but no longer recall who beat us, prefer to forget the bhouys do stan...we Love; do you stan staunton?
And yet nea, but yet the soccer magus and prophet staunton from Drogheda was delivered a galactic intervention needed to rescue him off pitch. The human stan appeared; after a semi comatase drunken mentally ill person - in clear and supreme dire straits beyond the one that went beyond stan's - drew, not the bannana of an criminally amatuer virgin heist ending in failure; but a replica firearm; or airpistol...i dunno; but summat looking approximate enough when recklessly whipped out after several bottles of buckfastfor, to cause supreme a fright to send one bannanas on the beach when in immensely serious think.
And so, at work, out of office hours most certainly - but stan works pitchside see..injecting faith, whilst trying to shoulder an arm around the new blood; wans getting a right pasting in the home arena..cries of rubbish and such..not inspiring then. Yet the odd glimpse - the san marino game..stan. Love, we'll always have the san marino match; when we humilated them just for a psycho rite of blind faith, bonkers and went a trouncing these sporting good lookers in the first and full bloom of..stan..was Marino beautiful as the Formorian Balors who ended up back wiv the gals gracing the the page in rags, glend, sars and wotsit, wiv udder wans, Aoife and her croney young aul wan, the three of as/is in one triple protectional aspect of sheer sidhe and wind, dust and a handful of broken tongues, sounding suitably stupid, thus a poetical lyricist
I
struck the glyph stan..
you were confidence personified in chill April..force for Good, the cold a reminder of what ghosts them wooden-cups bowled at lansdowne, april four degrees, above or below, none know, but cold most certainly; the hot breath froze and red nose glowing, but the voice spoke volumes, sung the fields of athenry through a megaphone, that Muster Aine sidhe, her man yer wan was a a legend, central boudhran co-ordinating 50 drums, dr Yees wiv his megaphone at Lansdowne for the real game of Legend, Leinster chaps and Limerick dockers, there for a friendly - grudge - match of sheer stubborness, brutal logic of one for all or die trying; the one in the top five of any sport, the ye observing and turning life to Art.
And this fake piece of metallic armoury was wielded by the drunk, interupting within Mr staunton's personal space and national soccer lore - peace - when our leader do be pacing a shoreline in deep ponder, wondering what professional woe was to appear next in his war with the hacks.
And what did is the most so bizzare thing, that it was, effectively, a miracle of sorts. At the next press conference, about the ensuing game for which stan had been pacing about, for it were a day or two afore the actual existential kick off, the home game, after the fake gun; not banna - had been pulled on stan, by an irrate; not fan - but bewildered fellow citizen and lunatic - Stan was pissed off personally, and his deeper spirit, not only flickered, but thus, flamed.
As he actually couldn't give a toss about the personal trauma to himself of havinmg a pisshead wield an imitation arm in his space - man who pulled a fake gun on him - ..erm; actually i remember now, the gunman was bladdered on heavy proof liquors, a concoction of much booze; so stan properly copped onto that sharpo.
But either way, stan staunton wasn't arsed about himself; but his parents and family, as the press intrusion angle, of them not being relevant to a soccer match. And yet in a mad way, a good - bono - crazee sense of irrefutable logical irish way, life works ok; the island where memory is queen and royal flush busting, or at least check mating any other wan, yers aul wans a holding as sidhe, shee, tuatha de dannan..she..shh, sh - Love
Expand my base of Love. please, i urge you vist and speak uncensored by time. Nea snip but a double gift of two coterminious threads,
Wanna waffle wiv yer gob in the vacuum?
..who do we choose, dearest reader of One love, one hug, we gotta harry that language bro..go wan and be on yer own sailor breathing in shadow and shade in ones native..english innit, peesey pie laah, so go lick the tree in a room full just being tree like, in littered garish faux aul D minus and piece of peace ohhmm'ing as only a wooden can.
So suck on the twig witchery bog breath, druidical space magi gather..literature, Love 3 sweeden O that night stan first appeared as saviour wiv a living legend, Robbo in full five year bus pass OAP back up mode, stood starring by cameras squeezing stan's hand; before he was hospitalised with another health fright, he once again, amazingly defied and sailed through - A1 living legend Mr robson; wiping our manager's imaginal arse..and yet nea, for we and bobby, robbo, bob rosbon he is mate, why eye, if it aint mah gee'ordie wan Roberto Cúchulainn, and i beat them 3 nothing scando sweede breateing turnips that raw spring night, April stars, slick sky, the roar of support keeping all there warm, in a friendly wan - and yet still - passion reversed and reserved, coyote like shyness, a diametric oppositional flux in perfect harmony, essentially itself, yerself; and being friendly an all, true national spirit of fair play appeared..phoof..just like that; 40 thousand witnesses; coopered to it,
Love... The next game, alas, bobby was needed to wipe stan down, after a drubbing we got by poorer opposition and staunton's golden glow disappeared in bitter recriminations, Keano sized slaggings and batterings in a continual and unceasing wave after wave of woe for the spirit of soccer on the island.
And when stan appeared pitchside, as manager, making it happen on the pitch by sheer belief alone, none nea more were wanting to believe, for the results and state of on pitch action, spoke far far louder than the Louth wan, getting it wrong; even uninventive soccer hacks slagged, wounding staunton at will, embarresing to read really, and tv interviews showing yer man under the cosh and in supreme personal turmoil, professionally, as saviour and flame of island soccer spiritual lore writing his own myth.
Alas; it went downhill, this geordie louth paradise of sir and partnership of stanley staunton avec roberto robson; taking on the hue and tenor - in the press - of true greek tradegy worthy of a laughably inventive armageddon myth; itself to appear in the next match, as Hera doing whatever it is she does to ramp up prophecy, her locks of woe in what three tri con of pure bollix beleif stan was having back then an all...
Coz stan was shown up for the chancer he bleeding was see; prophetic doom was voiced in the fecking Star, the Sun affirming how shit he was, how worthy of pure viciousness he was deserving, how professional soccer journalist jihadic windbags exhaled their green bile on this man of tender wan years being beaten racketeringly by these horrid mob of negative trollie gits.
Thus to fail stan had to be, and..hey, get real and sack the turnip breathing thick git, before michael barrymore nicks his job.
But then, a random and even more supremely divine intervention. the miracle everyone knew in their most secret of selves, who - it is clear now - collectively held similar pictures, within the immediate and central same border of dernier or some such natural tide-mark of anarchy this island has, and thus life in the psychic breath of her living wans; and stans professional armageddon within the pincers of fictional lore, at that time.. back then an all..when we was bludding in yer new wans..had a tough druidical call to it, a big ask; yet a printed sacrafice in the press; the stringing up of stan an all..afore the match.
The riling and back bitchery goss, spuming in byzantium labrinth, pro-begrduger nasities and yer wotist wans all gunked wiv hate an all..back in the day when it where fair go and game to play the man; no intention of kicking the ball, going for bone, a clean unlucky break, accidental wans..erm..a hem..was not the true Keano spirit, the defiance that goes beyond being pensioned out at the foot of a living soccer Legend from the most staunchly pro territorial bunch. thus doesn't it just be then, Stan staunton's Art - dan; sidhe it is..bleeding faeries pal..is all that keeps him sane..stanley in swan grace with apple and yew trees, an acorn and ridge pole,
the silver branch of an enobling stroll on the sand looking for clues to cement success in his future, but all stan found was an inebriated troll, flaming on the aul wounds, picking at scaps, wanting answers form Lugh himself..gadzooks stan; get a bleeding grip of the pisshead and toss him to the ground..who we are..one stan..one man, we gotta pretend we like the wan..playing shit innit..i love you stan...wot a tit..c'mon golden ballss..snigger..hey pack it in, stan is our leader in soccer lore, have some damn respect..cuisle on and hate but remeber we Love, stan..we thought you would turn up for the guard of honour, keot waiting by yer wans, to upset at the trauma of the drubbing to face the stewards silent inquiry that night i cannot forget, but no longer recall who beat us, prefer to forget the bhouys do stan...we Love; do you stan staunton?
And yet nea, but yet the soccer magus and prophet staunton from Drogheda was delivered a galactic intervention needed to rescue him off pitch. The human stan appeared; after a semi comatase drunken mentally ill person - in clear and supreme dire straits beyond the one that went beyond stan's - drew, not the bannana of an criminally amatuer virgin heist ending in failure; but a replica firearm; or airpistol...i dunno; but summat looking approximate enough when recklessly whipped out after several bottles of buckfastfor, to cause supreme a fright to send one bannanas on the beach when in immensely serious think.
And so, at work, out of office hours most certainly - but stan works pitchside see..injecting faith, whilst trying to shoulder an arm around the new blood; wans getting a right pasting in the home arena..cries of rubbish and such..not inspiring then. Yet the odd glimpse - the san marino game..stan. Love, we'll always have the san marino match; when we humilated them just for a psycho rite of blind faith, bonkers and went a trouncing these sporting good lookers in the first and full bloom of..stan..was Marino beautiful as the Formorian Balors who ended up back wiv the gals gracing the the page in rags, glend, sars and wotsit, wiv udder wans, Aoife and her croney young aul wan, the three of as/is in one triple protectional aspect of sheer sidhe and wind, dust and a handful of broken tongues, sounding suitably stupid, thus a poetical lyricist
I
struck the glyph stan..
you were confidence personified in chill April..force for Good, the cold a reminder of what ghosts them wooden-cups bowled at lansdowne, april four degrees, above or below, none know, but cold most certainly; the hot breath froze and red nose glowing, but the voice spoke volumes, sung the fields of athenry through a megaphone, that Muster Aine sidhe, her man yer wan was a a legend, central boudhran co-ordinating 50 drums, dr Yees wiv his megaphone at Lansdowne for the real game of Legend, Leinster chaps and Limerick dockers, there for a friendly - grudge - match of sheer stubborness, brutal logic of one for all or die trying; the one in the top five of any sport, the ye observing and turning life to Art.
And this fake piece of metallic armoury was wielded by the drunk, interupting within Mr staunton's personal space and national soccer lore - peace - when our leader do be pacing a shoreline in deep ponder, wondering what professional woe was to appear next in his war with the hacks.
And what did is the most so bizzare thing, that it was, effectively, a miracle of sorts. At the next press conference, about the ensuing game for which stan had been pacing about, for it were a day or two afore the actual existential kick off, the home game, after the fake gun; not banna - had been pulled on stan, by an irrate; not fan - but bewildered fellow citizen and lunatic - Stan was pissed off personally, and his deeper spirit, not only flickered, but thus, flamed.
As he actually couldn't give a toss about the personal trauma to himself of havinmg a pisshead wield an imitation arm in his space - man who pulled a fake gun on him - ..erm; actually i remember now, the gunman was bladdered on heavy proof liquors, a concoction of much booze; so stan properly copped onto that sharpo.
But either way, stan staunton wasn't arsed about himself; but his parents and family, as the press intrusion angle, of them not being relevant to a soccer match. And yet in a mad way, a good - bono - crazee sense of irrefutable logical irish way, life works ok; the island where memory is queen and royal flush busting, or at least check mating any other wan, yers aul wans a holding as sidhe, shee, tuatha de dannan..she..shh, sh - Love
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Dream on and Spiel Bhouy
I have always been a voracious reader and in the formative years was lucky to have a sister 5 years older who is a book nut, and thus i imbibed the classics; as she was making up her own canon with a first class brain; now speaking three languages - lives in Rome and her kids speak yada yada yada. Too clever by half; but loadsa stuff that i have forgot, yet, as canons go, a pretty broad wan and perfect, as i only read them coz they were there.
So my eldest sister is responsible for me first reading in a neutral way - or rather - the selection of books was just "there" and - looking back - was perfect in every sense; as i didn't have to decide myself what to choose when starting out, and thus could then - and now - approach books impartially.
And whilst we begin with a healthy reverence coz we are "fans first" writers second; as we up our oeuvre - word count - this starts tipping, as we become as much writer as reader.
And to be a writer one need only strike one glyph.
I
You is the writer, essentially, and don't please disagree, even if you do. In print be proud. You have as much right as any writer, whoever they are and be. That's what we learn as we do it, that writing is a con - or trick of the mind - or rather; the registers and incredibly important gravitas critics try to muster up about individual books in the rags, of - decision - yea or nea - success or failure - is a con.
Because the literary worth of any book is rarely - either or - but more sophisticated than that; and honesty is the "voice" we try to "find" and out as a writer.
And as we crack on and get an oeuvre under our belt of experience, realise that - actually - it doesn't matter what life we have as a writer, as it is a state of mind first.
The "there" within only we alone have and uncover - or not. And it is the dig of word, word, write, one by one, which leads us to the inner "there", which is all writing is.
And I am here as a bore first and bores buzz off this affirmational discovery, when we get the hang and sense of writing. When the initial:
"oh no i am shit with nowt to say of interest" - wears off as we suss on that, actually i do have stuff to say, and - for me - it all began around the age of 14 - the most impressionable age for the mind, like the Ovid line about the mind being but warm wax melding to whatever form is there.
And the very first intellectual questioning was pondering the relationship between one and zero. Something and nothing. All night long i would ponder in sheer amazed going nowhere'ness. Being stoned without having to inhale.
And although i hadn't took in any philosophy, i think that 14 is a pretty fair mean average age when most minds first awake, questioning.
The initial wonderment which strikes with only the virgin bloom of truth, and most tender of times; although i do remember thinking i was a step ahead of others intellectually; as my sounding board was H, the brain-box of the year who has a ferocious intelligence and is now some engineering doctor in the corporate machine.
Hubris. But whatever it was, i launched over the lip into youth/adult-hood, full on and reckless.
Looking back now i was still the same in the head. No changes or fundamental intellectual u turns since then; always the same outlook and belief. A brief flirt with frank zappa was as whacko as i got; but the books i read is like knowing what song is on the piano as it plays, we learn this first.
Before we write knowingly, we believe never will we play it ourselves, be musical.
So we take on and in every note until our Love for literature spills over and we find a succession of messiahs in print. Me and H discussing Herman Hesse and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance in the top field in the fourth and fifth year of high school.
Our fads as serial philanderers in the party of Literacy; true free lovers abandoning ourselves in the affirmational register of:
Yes, i read and loved it.
And getting windier, certitude, the unknowing next stage of actually getting a life in print.
We all love reading and - de facto logical - writing; and after we have been a reader for years and sport online here, we get a different take on the biz, just by writing ourselves in the bear pit of internet and wood pulp. And it is interesting to have this life in print, become a cheerleader and dictator of literate Love, in the best sense of a benign dictator who doesn't really boss, but our experience alone, outing here, in the new media.
The wealth of readership we have accrued, enough of a weight to make us believe we are the un-fake and real reader first. And the logical next step as we read - and after decades or nea of reading - is that we get the urge to talk in print about our love for these fictions and wotnot.
And so we talk, first off being ourselves as best we can, until a strange line/stage/level whatever is crossed/ascended whatever; and it is only after the act, and when in it, when we read back what we wrote, we realise that this first time thing happened.
The simple honest muse coming through after a few hundred thousand words of dig and imitation, we realise as we cotton on to the basics of the craft.
Coz when we start, all we can do is imitate what we have read, and if we have a library in our head, silent and uncommented on, it takes a while to find our feet and the true warmth of practice cheering us up no end as we sit alone armed with nought but a hard stare into space and dreams of Love and peace.
And we get loved up in print, or rather, we get honest in it, thinking...hey, i like this feeling of being real in print, me as i want to appear to others, as a reader of thousands of books it took me to get to this stage of talk.
And i apologise for any over-exuberance or weirdness that may stop the flow of craic, the call and return, online hurley it is, for me, trolling all day and i am learning to understand in a gang i realise now are just like me, in love with writing and reading as human beings.
And to try and make up for the daft posts i did dear reader, i want to ask we pretend for a mo.
We have to name a favourite book and talk about it.
Not why or owt like that, but just to get the ball and flow of talk rolling, coz it's only pretend see, so there are no rules but they we make up as we pretend. And though i am not expressing what i want, the fact that we only know each other in print, and time being the key to what trust is here after our two year suss of words and thus the outing here..mine is erm...top of the head it has to be; not yer fave, but when the first word/book title appears, just dive straight in and start gassing owt.
Coz its the swim, the process that i'm after, beauty and humanity with truth as we start to suss how to just be ourself in print.
So forget the amber light in the UK traffic control system. The "get ready" and prepare one.
In Ireland they don't have it, and this was the first thing i realised after a week, and it removes the chance of cocking up through over-preparedness. That one last tap of a pocket to check you have...whatever in there - for the hundredth time - in the very moment that the light goes red-amber; the two seconds that can trip you up.
You blowing it - not purposely, but nerves perhaps - the brief wait. And in Ireland it aint here. It's either or, no three way split of stop get ready go, but stop and go, that's it and it is almost an insignificance - but a very real difference it makes - this tiny thing that is nought but a mode, a method or idea essentially.
A mindset of "this is how it is," when it actually isn't a divine thing, but human mindset, and ermm..fave book in my mind now, all the Sven Hassel war novels. Obviously raw and war, not my real fave, but that's what came.
Any takers?
So my eldest sister is responsible for me first reading in a neutral way - or rather - the selection of books was just "there" and - looking back - was perfect in every sense; as i didn't have to decide myself what to choose when starting out, and thus could then - and now - approach books impartially.
And whilst we begin with a healthy reverence coz we are "fans first" writers second; as we up our oeuvre - word count - this starts tipping, as we become as much writer as reader.
And to be a writer one need only strike one glyph.
I
You is the writer, essentially, and don't please disagree, even if you do. In print be proud. You have as much right as any writer, whoever they are and be. That's what we learn as we do it, that writing is a con - or trick of the mind - or rather; the registers and incredibly important gravitas critics try to muster up about individual books in the rags, of - decision - yea or nea - success or failure - is a con.
Because the literary worth of any book is rarely - either or - but more sophisticated than that; and honesty is the "voice" we try to "find" and out as a writer.
And as we crack on and get an oeuvre under our belt of experience, realise that - actually - it doesn't matter what life we have as a writer, as it is a state of mind first.
The "there" within only we alone have and uncover - or not. And it is the dig of word, word, write, one by one, which leads us to the inner "there", which is all writing is.
And I am here as a bore first and bores buzz off this affirmational discovery, when we get the hang and sense of writing. When the initial:
"oh no i am shit with nowt to say of interest" - wears off as we suss on that, actually i do have stuff to say, and - for me - it all began around the age of 14 - the most impressionable age for the mind, like the Ovid line about the mind being but warm wax melding to whatever form is there.
And the very first intellectual questioning was pondering the relationship between one and zero. Something and nothing. All night long i would ponder in sheer amazed going nowhere'ness. Being stoned without having to inhale.
And although i hadn't took in any philosophy, i think that 14 is a pretty fair mean average age when most minds first awake, questioning.
The initial wonderment which strikes with only the virgin bloom of truth, and most tender of times; although i do remember thinking i was a step ahead of others intellectually; as my sounding board was H, the brain-box of the year who has a ferocious intelligence and is now some engineering doctor in the corporate machine.
Hubris. But whatever it was, i launched over the lip into youth/adult-hood, full on and reckless.
Looking back now i was still the same in the head. No changes or fundamental intellectual u turns since then; always the same outlook and belief. A brief flirt with frank zappa was as whacko as i got; but the books i read is like knowing what song is on the piano as it plays, we learn this first.
Before we write knowingly, we believe never will we play it ourselves, be musical.
So we take on and in every note until our Love for literature spills over and we find a succession of messiahs in print. Me and H discussing Herman Hesse and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance in the top field in the fourth and fifth year of high school.
Our fads as serial philanderers in the party of Literacy; true free lovers abandoning ourselves in the affirmational register of:
Yes, i read and loved it.
And getting windier, certitude, the unknowing next stage of actually getting a life in print.
We all love reading and - de facto logical - writing; and after we have been a reader for years and sport online here, we get a different take on the biz, just by writing ourselves in the bear pit of internet and wood pulp. And it is interesting to have this life in print, become a cheerleader and dictator of literate Love, in the best sense of a benign dictator who doesn't really boss, but our experience alone, outing here, in the new media.
The wealth of readership we have accrued, enough of a weight to make us believe we are the un-fake and real reader first. And the logical next step as we read - and after decades or nea of reading - is that we get the urge to talk in print about our love for these fictions and wotnot.
And so we talk, first off being ourselves as best we can, until a strange line/stage/level whatever is crossed/ascended whatever; and it is only after the act, and when in it, when we read back what we wrote, we realise that this first time thing happened.
The simple honest muse coming through after a few hundred thousand words of dig and imitation, we realise as we cotton on to the basics of the craft.
Coz when we start, all we can do is imitate what we have read, and if we have a library in our head, silent and uncommented on, it takes a while to find our feet and the true warmth of practice cheering us up no end as we sit alone armed with nought but a hard stare into space and dreams of Love and peace.
And we get loved up in print, or rather, we get honest in it, thinking...hey, i like this feeling of being real in print, me as i want to appear to others, as a reader of thousands of books it took me to get to this stage of talk.
And i apologise for any over-exuberance or weirdness that may stop the flow of craic, the call and return, online hurley it is, for me, trolling all day and i am learning to understand in a gang i realise now are just like me, in love with writing and reading as human beings.
And to try and make up for the daft posts i did dear reader, i want to ask we pretend for a mo.
We have to name a favourite book and talk about it.
Not why or owt like that, but just to get the ball and flow of talk rolling, coz it's only pretend see, so there are no rules but they we make up as we pretend. And though i am not expressing what i want, the fact that we only know each other in print, and time being the key to what trust is here after our two year suss of words and thus the outing here..mine is erm...top of the head it has to be; not yer fave, but when the first word/book title appears, just dive straight in and start gassing owt.
Coz its the swim, the process that i'm after, beauty and humanity with truth as we start to suss how to just be ourself in print.
So forget the amber light in the UK traffic control system. The "get ready" and prepare one.
In Ireland they don't have it, and this was the first thing i realised after a week, and it removes the chance of cocking up through over-preparedness. That one last tap of a pocket to check you have...whatever in there - for the hundredth time - in the very moment that the light goes red-amber; the two seconds that can trip you up.
You blowing it - not purposely, but nerves perhaps - the brief wait. And in Ireland it aint here. It's either or, no three way split of stop get ready go, but stop and go, that's it and it is almost an insignificance - but a very real difference it makes - this tiny thing that is nought but a mode, a method or idea essentially.
A mindset of "this is how it is," when it actually isn't a divine thing, but human mindset, and ermm..fave book in my mind now, all the Sven Hassel war novels. Obviously raw and war, not my real fave, but that's what came.
Any takers?
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
ABC POETIC
In 1948, Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973) wrote a fifteen page critical text on her personal creative process in an early anthology containing various authors views on the nuts and bolts in their how-to of writing; and reading this:
"The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie" - I was struck by Shelley's, Defense of Poetry; where he talks about poetry being:
"..a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.."
A lie (fiction) being conjured and kinked by the writer's imagination, such that it's imprinted reflection imports into the readers mind, some poetic or wider universal truth; more hinted at, not explicit, and with an unseen, implicit gravitas, absent and buried in the text as the psychic weight of a knowing creational mind.
The effect we can imagine produced when a féath fíadha, or druidic mist of invisibility was conjured by the filidh, back in the time when fiction and fact mixed, appearing on the pages time forgot, in old irish manuscript, where i found my own answers and myth hoard, still perfectly working, supremely poetic, oiled to roar of eternal truths, and a gift from Ogma, the islands' god of poetry in both Brythonnic and Goidelic culture.
Shelleys quote, and indeed his Defense of Poetry, is written in lingo far deeper than - what George Szirtes calls - the quotidian "linguistic aggregate," of everyday speech.
And this got me thinking of my own poetic, or critical abc of the poetic act and Art; the initial and founding two thirds of which, came after reading Heaney's 1986 T.S. Eliot memorial lecture at the Univeristy of Kent, in which he dissects and decodes Wordsworth's poem - There Once Was A Boy - to illustrates his own philosophy on the basics. This is the poem recalling Wordsworth in his childhood, making owl calls in wild lakeland woods, around which Heaney constructs his case.
I will not outline the other influence, save to say it is American poet Amiri Baraka's piano analogy, which parallels Wordsworth and Heaney's poetic, in which he also expounds and advocates a three stage development to explain how a poet ascends to eloquence.
Heaney's essay is on Plath and appears in one of his two collections of critical prose writing, Finders Keepers: The Indefatigable Hoof Taps: whose submrged yet simple and deftly sophisticated three point logic, i detected when reading George Sziertes' eloquent skating metaphor in his T.S Eliot address in 2005.
As mentioned, this text was a contributing intellectual third to the poetic i cobbled together, as my own three point take which charts the stages of poetic development, or as Heaney describes it:
"..poetic journey" of "three stages which seem to exemplify" the "three degrees of poetic achievment.."
Heaney's logic is very poetically persuassive, as he reduces the mumbo jumbo of less linguistically skillful poets - trying to pass off unconvincing and often confused critical prose as verbal beauty - to an easy abc of poetry; using Wordsworth's poem from Lyrical Ballads - as the core of his analogy - to effortlessly elucidate, in an affirmational register, what poetry is.
And Heaney explains his poetic in deceptively sophisticated, yet precise, straightforward terms and - most importantly - based on the grounds of a consummate positive belief, as opposed to defining his core poetic faith in oppositional terms, which many poets fall into the trap of doing. Saying "This is what poetry is not," rather than what it is.
Not bad going when dissecting a poet who committed suicide. A true pro, who uses There Once Was A Boy:
"...as a parbale of these three stages.." of poetic development in the chase for the magical linguistic gravitas only they who sincerely profess poetry possess.
And he takes the young wordy one tramping in the Cumbrian woods making owl calls; telling us:
"The first task of the poet" is "to learn how to entwine his or her hands so that the whistle comes out right...to trumpet and tu-whit, tu-whoo..happy to perform this feat for its own sake, repeatedly, self-forgetfully and tirelessly..an original act of making, the equivalent in the oral/aural sphere of.." making sand castles or mud pies.
And i concur, also believing that this is the first stage in ones career as a verse-smith, when we write our first poetry, and as Heaney says, go:
"Listen I can do it! Look how well it turned out! And I can do it again! See?"
The second stage in the trajectory to ollamh, is when the owls start returning our calls, us fooling the real thing, much as when we start getting into mags and being considered as genuine by other poets. Heaney describes this stage as:
"..the vale filling with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy's art," and "we have the image of the classically empowered poet, the one who has got beyond scale-practising..who rejoices in the spirit of life" as "..the owls in our own dream branches begin to halloo in recognition."
He goes onto describe how the third stage of poetic achievement, when the poet can no longer make the owl calls, "cannot make any noise with his hands" as Heaney described it, and is summed up in the Wordsworth poem:
"And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening...the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and the uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom..
~
Heaney has a beautifull metaphor for this moment, describing it as:
"..like the bird of poetry at the glass pane of intelligence , seeing where it needs to go but unable to gain entry. But the windo glass is miraculously withdrawn and deep free swoops into the blue pool.."
Achieved as the poet is gifted - out of the blue - full sight of their myth kitty and eternal image/symbol hoard, by whatever gods their gods swear by in the music of what's happening in our career, as we ascend or nea, hear or not in the return of silence, what ghosts flit to us from the anima mundi.
This is the third stage, after we have become the bees knees at mimesis, and engaged in our call and return with the birds of poetic utterance, and - my spin is - that we reach the point where we have become so real to other poets/owls, that they no longer return the call, and we are left dumbstruck and unable to make the sound, and in this moment of complete surrender - when we believe the game is up and there will be no more return - we are rewarded for our slog, effort and imaginative faith by the gifting of whatever poetry gods one believes in; with the keys to the door of our myth hoard, along with our poetic garb, dress and badge of entry to the third and final stage of sound-development.
A peak few manage to ascend or conquer in their search for the nuts and bolts knowledge of song and the sound-scapes whose form is revealed only to they who dig and swim to the deepest and most lambent flame of ones inner linguist valency; where the aggregrate of language is at its least quotidian and the most fruitful routes to ones unique word-crop, cluster as the poetic reward.
"The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie" - I was struck by Shelley's, Defense of Poetry; where he talks about poetry being:
"..a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.."
A lie (fiction) being conjured and kinked by the writer's imagination, such that it's imprinted reflection imports into the readers mind, some poetic or wider universal truth; more hinted at, not explicit, and with an unseen, implicit gravitas, absent and buried in the text as the psychic weight of a knowing creational mind.
The effect we can imagine produced when a féath fíadha, or druidic mist of invisibility was conjured by the filidh, back in the time when fiction and fact mixed, appearing on the pages time forgot, in old irish manuscript, where i found my own answers and myth hoard, still perfectly working, supremely poetic, oiled to roar of eternal truths, and a gift from Ogma, the islands' god of poetry in both Brythonnic and Goidelic culture.
Shelleys quote, and indeed his Defense of Poetry, is written in lingo far deeper than - what George Szirtes calls - the quotidian "linguistic aggregate," of everyday speech.
And this got me thinking of my own poetic, or critical abc of the poetic act and Art; the initial and founding two thirds of which, came after reading Heaney's 1986 T.S. Eliot memorial lecture at the Univeristy of Kent, in which he dissects and decodes Wordsworth's poem - There Once Was A Boy - to illustrates his own philosophy on the basics. This is the poem recalling Wordsworth in his childhood, making owl calls in wild lakeland woods, around which Heaney constructs his case.
I will not outline the other influence, save to say it is American poet Amiri Baraka's piano analogy, which parallels Wordsworth and Heaney's poetic, in which he also expounds and advocates a three stage development to explain how a poet ascends to eloquence.
Heaney's essay is on Plath and appears in one of his two collections of critical prose writing, Finders Keepers: The Indefatigable Hoof Taps: whose submrged yet simple and deftly sophisticated three point logic, i detected when reading George Sziertes' eloquent skating metaphor in his T.S Eliot address in 2005.
As mentioned, this text was a contributing intellectual third to the poetic i cobbled together, as my own three point take which charts the stages of poetic development, or as Heaney describes it:
"..poetic journey" of "three stages which seem to exemplify" the "three degrees of poetic achievment.."
Heaney's logic is very poetically persuassive, as he reduces the mumbo jumbo of less linguistically skillful poets - trying to pass off unconvincing and often confused critical prose as verbal beauty - to an easy abc of poetry; using Wordsworth's poem from Lyrical Ballads - as the core of his analogy - to effortlessly elucidate, in an affirmational register, what poetry is.
And Heaney explains his poetic in deceptively sophisticated, yet precise, straightforward terms and - most importantly - based on the grounds of a consummate positive belief, as opposed to defining his core poetic faith in oppositional terms, which many poets fall into the trap of doing. Saying "This is what poetry is not," rather than what it is.
Not bad going when dissecting a poet who committed suicide. A true pro, who uses There Once Was A Boy:
"...as a parbale of these three stages.." of poetic development in the chase for the magical linguistic gravitas only they who sincerely profess poetry possess.
And he takes the young wordy one tramping in the Cumbrian woods making owl calls; telling us:
"The first task of the poet" is "to learn how to entwine his or her hands so that the whistle comes out right...to trumpet and tu-whit, tu-whoo..happy to perform this feat for its own sake, repeatedly, self-forgetfully and tirelessly..an original act of making, the equivalent in the oral/aural sphere of.." making sand castles or mud pies.
And i concur, also believing that this is the first stage in ones career as a verse-smith, when we write our first poetry, and as Heaney says, go:
"Listen I can do it! Look how well it turned out! And I can do it again! See?"
The second stage in the trajectory to ollamh, is when the owls start returning our calls, us fooling the real thing, much as when we start getting into mags and being considered as genuine by other poets. Heaney describes this stage as:
"..the vale filling with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy's art," and "we have the image of the classically empowered poet, the one who has got beyond scale-practising..who rejoices in the spirit of life" as "..the owls in our own dream branches begin to halloo in recognition."
He goes onto describe how the third stage of poetic achievement, when the poet can no longer make the owl calls, "cannot make any noise with his hands" as Heaney described it, and is summed up in the Wordsworth poem:
"And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening...the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and the uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom..
~
Heaney has a beautifull metaphor for this moment, describing it as:
"..like the bird of poetry at the glass pane of intelligence , seeing where it needs to go but unable to gain entry. But the windo glass is miraculously withdrawn and deep free swoops into the blue pool.."
Achieved as the poet is gifted - out of the blue - full sight of their myth kitty and eternal image/symbol hoard, by whatever gods their gods swear by in the music of what's happening in our career, as we ascend or nea, hear or not in the return of silence, what ghosts flit to us from the anima mundi.
This is the third stage, after we have become the bees knees at mimesis, and engaged in our call and return with the birds of poetic utterance, and - my spin is - that we reach the point where we have become so real to other poets/owls, that they no longer return the call, and we are left dumbstruck and unable to make the sound, and in this moment of complete surrender - when we believe the game is up and there will be no more return - we are rewarded for our slog, effort and imaginative faith by the gifting of whatever poetry gods one believes in; with the keys to the door of our myth hoard, along with our poetic garb, dress and badge of entry to the third and final stage of sound-development.
A peak few manage to ascend or conquer in their search for the nuts and bolts knowledge of song and the sound-scapes whose form is revealed only to they who dig and swim to the deepest and most lambent flame of ones inner linguist valency; where the aggregrate of language is at its least quotidian and the most fruitful routes to ones unique word-crop, cluster as the poetic reward.
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