Americans in Dublin.

There are so many great American poets working, and so few reliable recommenders to know who they are who champion them.

I chanced across three very different ones in the last week, all with distinct reading styles.

Tonight it was Jane Hirshfield, who appeared at 15 Usher's Island on the South side of Dublin Quays, reading with Irish poet's John O'Donnell and Dennis O’Driscoll, marking the 40'th anniversary of the founding of The independent legal rights organisation, FLAC (Free Legal Advice Centre).

This is the house Joyce's aunt lived in when it was a tenament, and the current owner is involved in a voluntary restoration project. The whole house was lit by candle-light, with the room where his short story: The Dead, takes place, on the first floor of the house, set exactly as it appears in the tale. A set table next to the hearth of a fire-place. The room next door was full of food and drink which we partook in after the reading.

Hirshfield reads with a very precise, almost verbal staccato delivery, softened by an exact music which reaches towards song whilst never falling conspicuously into it. Uniquely American and very distinctive. Her chimes and rhymes not clanging, are very deft and her poems not spoken in the more sing-song lyrical mode which Irish-Americans Lynch and O'Callaghan's do. This is not to say either is better or worse, merely uniquely themselves.

A treat to hear this fundamental difference between the European and American English poetic by one of the best.

Noel Sweeney (Live from Kilmainham)

Woke early this morning

To the sounds of you leaving
Clipping the wings
Of a new day dawning.

I grieve-like, then cleave
To space in bed
Where an angel used to be.

Ah ! faint form - like breathing
The ghost: tasting it wholly

As it hovers in, on, around,
Under the bed-cover - only
A memory.

To discover, I turn again
To sleep, eat dreams, sweet
Dreams fed to the soul

While spirit-like
On a silver thread, it's you
Inside my head.

As I lay in solace on a half-
Empty bed
You creep-like, come flirting

With the shadows, born
Again in traces of R - E - M.

Five Tombs Told

Dún Fhearghusa (Newgrange) on a bend in the Boyne valley, 5000 years old and restored by Prof. Michael J. O’Kelly, from the Department of Archaeology, University College, Cork; was originally a tomb and its corbeled roof has never leaked since it was built in 3000BC.

~

Highgate cemetry, Karl Marx, i think i saw once, or perhaps not. If i did it was a singularly uninspiring experience.

~

Keats in Hampstead Parish Church is different, as there is a marvelous John Keats memorial bench in the small cemetery attached to what is perhaps, the most pukka parish in the entire Kingdom of England, tucked away behind foliage and used only by junkies and various classes of working people on a break.

Here is a sense of peace; as it is “the first memorial to the poet John Keats on English ground” - as the Westminster Gazzette reported it in 1894, when Edmund Gosse took possession of a marble bust from the pioneering poet Bret Harte (1836-1902).

Harte was born in Albany New York and moved to California in 1853 at the age of seventeen during the gold rush, taking up various jobs until finding one as a printer's helper in San Francisco, where he turned his hand to writing and journalism. He shot to fame in 1868, when the editor of Californian periodical, Overland Review, with a story called The Luck of Roaring Camp, a tale of miners in the Californian gold rush.

In the latter half of 1870 his poem Plain Language from Truthful James - a satire on the racism shown by Irish labourers in North California to the Chinese competing for the same work, was unfortunately read by the middle class readers straight, as a legitimate object of cultural-criticism-as-art, to justify their own prejudices against the Chinese. He later called the poem *trash* and “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.”

~

Harte is an interesting figure in American letters, at one time Mark Twains chief literary rival, whose early works lead him to syndicated fame across the American West, (with the poem above that gained a common title: The Chinese Heathen). In 1871 he returned to Boston and signed an unprecedented $10,000 a year contract to write for the Atlantic Monthly. By by the end of 1872 however, Harte had fallen out of favour and was reduced to lecturing on the gold rush and selling jingle-ads to a soap company.

He ended up a diplomat and intertwined with the men of letters who in his time, united under the aegis of Harvard historian and prof. Charles Eliot Norton; son of a Harvard professor of Scared Literature and the man most credited with accelerating the college into what Harvard is today.

Harte died in 1902 and is buried in St Peter’s Church, Frimley, Surrey, England, and Keats remains in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, (his legacy the largest collection of papers at Harvard), the hero *snuffed out by an article* as Shelly wrote.

~

Shelley's heart is interred in a grave next to Mary Shelly’s in St. Peters Church Bournemouth, and the funary votive rites of poet and audience conferred in the level of vitriolic abuse forerunners from the then avant-garde of a Romantic-vatic lot of heavy boozing transgressors - set off in crazee mixed up mad-heads - their contemporary trolls here online, making me a shakey laureate who roars of tombs in which dead ghosts drawing sustenance of shadowy substantive proofs of the heavier sort, sail into steep ascent, blowing across the top of a nunatuk someplace - Slievemore, or Croaghaun cliffs perhaps (pictured) on Achill island, where the Hawk of Time swirls above the sod.

Reading and Writing: Part One

Every Saturday and Sunday, three second-hand bookstalls appear in Dublin's Temple Bar Square, a stones-throw from the river Liffey. One in particular is run by a chap (sat down with his back to us in the photo) who is the moustachioed, fez-wearing shopkeeper to my Mister Ben - (from the children's TV series of that name, whose secret doorway and portal to the otherworldly adventures was a changing room in a fancy dress shop) - and it is (partly) for this reason i call his foldaway cart: The Magic Bookstall.

There is (what feels like at least), a supernatural element and aroma surrounding the whole business of purchasing books from this man. My small library of books, is founded on the foundational stock from his wooden crate boxes.

Several years ago, I began buying books from him. Every weekend I would wander into the Square and acquire those books whose titles and content seemed most apt; with the act of buying, seeming like serendipity itself - as the process of selection was entirely extemporanous and never deciding prior to spotting the book but knowing intuitively: that book is the next one i must get.

Every book delivered by the gods of Fate, and i learnt to trust in a seemingly chaotic and random princple as the moment of satisfation and intellectual succor connected ultimately to some higher, empyreal calling and essentially, a celebratory inward event: like scoring a spiritual goal in a game-with-self and saying "ye hey, the old magic's alive and well."

And it was a few months ago that I instinctively understood the first phase of my relationship with the Magic Bookstall, had ended after the cart was emptied of the stock, ordered for me it seemed, from Heaven itself.

Until that weekend a few months ago, every Saturday or Sunday saw me ferrying away at least one and often four and five volumes, and it felt as though the stall would never run dry of magic titles i had to have in order to found reality as an intellectually creative observer and painter of verbal shapes seeking a stay against the calamity of Dublin life.

Finally, i came to know that a plateau had been reached, from where one first becomes conscious, can gaze across and clarify in a comprehensible manner, thesteps of the journey to where we are at present - on a firm inner ground paved by pages from the Magic Bookstall - and also Chapters vast second hand floor in their new premises on Parnell Street opposite Lidl, in the Moore Street district where the call and cry of an inimitable inner city Dublin accent selling fruit and flowers, ring as clear and fluted now, as it has done for generations.

There is powerful magic there also, but one yet to be harnessed. It is not the supernal mist invoked by the most unique profession of Dublin flower sellers that is the subject of this blog-post - but of a different, felicitous and befitting, otherworldly aspect surrounding the appropriation and appropriateness of the books to hand upon the shelves of my small library. One which began life in libraires vast and small from (conceivably) all across the planet, and which came to rest, finally, several yards from the Heavenly Cafe, where i would (and still to this very day), decant to read and watch society's fabric spin and yarn from distaff and spindle, to create a prosaic picture with all the awkward bits left in. Flawed yes, accurate - perhaps.

Inscriptions I have found in many of the books an other, ultimately inexplicable force led me to hook and slope off home with after a few pleasant hours perusal and coffee, gazing at the traffic hithering and tithering to and fro about the square - usually with live music of various description and ability wafting across from the corners of the six or so streets which converge into the quad where anything can happen, any book yield itself up in the vendors cart-like contraption holding the boxes in which the cargo stares, inviting us to take them home.

A copy of James Michie's English translations of Horace's Odes, purchased pretty much at the begining of my affair with the otherworldly aspect of poetic life several years ago,

"Ingest and become as one with the Muse

much love, Patrick"

~

The identity of the dedicator and the person who the volume is dedicated to, no one knows, yet the warmth and cordiality of the platonic love, is evident. Often-times i think it Patrick Kavanagh dedicating to Seamus Heaney, or another less well known Patrick sending it forward to someone else. It could be anyone. It could even have been a relative or freind of my parents or grandparents perhaps, i wonder now and again as I gaze longingly at the perfectly executed copper-plate script, day dreaming and lost in inventions of pretense, fabricating histories and lineages on the strength of eleven words in fading red ink.

Ah !

James Kelly. Good Friday?

Good Friday?

Grant me sleep
Even in this raw shaking spring -
And a new bird in a tree. Fill me

With your
Good news,
Or mould me
In your red
Breast.

Spend a million years
In the hunger of my hands,
When every tree waved
And every shadow grew.

Passion was
A profane clause to unite the lonely
Blood that spilled into me.
From the intrique
Of flesh and lust.
And lies of lust.
And love and
Lies of love.

Where I've waited to be chosen,
I'm being fashioned for whoredom,
Born in the breast
And I beg
To feel
The beauty that you see
In the rustle of the brown
Green tree.

~

I bumped into James Kelly on Grafton street and secured a copy of his new chapbook. I have just invested in an audio recorder, with the intention of capturing live poetry events, and so recorded him reading his poem: Good Friday?

On Monday I will be at Ó Bhéal's Second Anniversary in Cork to record:

...the celebration of 100 nights of poetry with the launches of How the Light Gets in … and Five Words - Volume II.

How the Light Gets in … is the fourth in a series of Irish & Canadian anthologies of poetry edited by poet John Ennis. The volume is dedicated solely to Canadian verse and is illuminated by the works of established artists as well as by new talent from both sides of the Atlantic. This launch will feature a number of poems in the anthology, read by poets John Ennis, Tom McCarthy, Patrick Cotter, Billy Ramsell, Leanne O’Sullivan and Paul Casey.

With the occasion of Ó Bhéal’s second Anniversary comes the launch of Five Words - Volume II, the second collection of poems selected from poetry challenges, held before our weekly guests and open-mic sessions during the last year. Poets published in this volume who are present on the evening will read from their entries.


Readings will last between 30-45 minutes after which there will be the usual open-mic session. The night begins with a Poetry Challenge starting around 9.00pm. Guest poets begin between 9.30pm and 10.00pm.

Venue: the Hayloft, upstairs at The Long Valley, Winthrop St, Cork
Time: 9.00 pm
Admission: Free

T: 085 712 6299
E: info@obheal.ie
www.obheal.ie/blog/

Time (Live from Kilmainham)

Remember when we laughed at life square on
in days existing now as only memories held inside,
distanced from this moment
by rotation measured time
we'll never halt
or with any words define?

Words will conjure images
and spark all sorts of trains of thought
careering through the mind,
like kaleidoscopic pictures,
but these we only glimpse upon in passing
with internal eyes
that swiftly frame in wordless abstract
any meaning they divine.

Some things lay beyond
where conscious grasp can't reach,
for time, like truth, is each our own,
unfurls unique to one and all
and lives are lived as days have gone,
no two the same
beyond the passing of horizons by the sun.

And should the echoes of our laughter then return,
when suns now set
outweigh the ones for rising,
will they live with those we leave behind,
when our stream of time no longer flows
and lips of life cease smiling?

Doo Wap: Fashion.

The obvious tenet on which the concept of Fashion is founded, is the principle of the fewer the more fashionable, achieved through either exhorbitant prices or extremely sophisticated (good?) taste.

As a life long fashion no-go area sartorially, I cannot begin to pretend to speak with authority on fashion; but as a younger chap, remember it well. Lime green kecks (pants) at the barn dance. The very memorable goon of dropping a full cup of hot chocolate over myself at nine ten am on the first day of sixth form, where I had appeared in white canvas trousers, spending the rest of the day unable to compete.

Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and Wah! (with the exclamation mark) LP's in the fifth-form dinner break when the final year had access to a record player - clutched and paraded with the covers out. Wedge haircuts, reversable parkers (blue and yellow) - kicker boots, la coste, fruit of the loom, watching Not the Nine O'Clock news before everyone else and cottoning on first to the next big thing; like listening to Boy: U2.

All these activities, I was a failure at getting right and didn't even try, drawn as I was to Elvis and the Wolfe Tones instead of the Liverpool lips and rock gods, still going, like JCC, exactly the same, still ranting about the working class not getting a break and stuck in a time warp, John Cooper Clarke's brain and fashion sense trapped in 1983. Groundhog Day. God Save the Queen. Sid and Nancy: nothing changed, everything remains the same the more change happens.

Fashion: turn to the left (1997). Fashion: turn to the right (2010) - perhaps, when Dave (Cameron) becomes the new Tone (Blair) as squats and general poverty get trendy again: perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Day and Hudson, Rock and Doris, drainpipes and quiffs, long hair and skins, swings and rondabouts, men and women, the impelling desire for love and nothingness held in equipoise between head and heart, between the legs and ears, always fashion steers us along to what we become - and on the cobbles its distressing for a fee: ripped jeans jack and sean and Johnnie G, auld ear air sings free, hears above the cocophony toing and froing about the table: benevolence or sneer on the blank and empty canvas.

Fashion what's within to be, original and uniquely wee ewe eyes of blinding night's epiphany and scream for moi, moi moi before the stock's all gone and nothing's left but God fashioning us.

~

barks the word verification.

Philip L's Fetish for Spank Mags

We are all stars, but some of us are gazing in the gutter - ha ha ha.

Are we not clever dearest fops, in a fallen age of awfully logical angelic buttercups praying to a yellow cob of sun - ho ho ho: aren't we so dainty with our hair so flopped and fingernails manicured to mirror the transulence of rain in a verbal storm of moi moi moi - ha ha ha ha.

oh ! Oscar, darling, Lord Sloames is driving to Hyde Park in his hanson, would you like a lift?

I always find being transported in tradesperson's carriages, rather distatestful - it's like asking one's butcher for advice on interior furnishings.

ho ho ha, yes my dear boy, but have you not heard, asking one's butcher for advice on interior decor, is not unlike drinking champagne with one's footman - perfectly acceptable as long as one of you know where the sausages go.

ho ho ha, but Bunty dearest chum, knowing where the footman's sausage goes, is not unlike inquiring of a harlot at St Pauls cathedral, supremely tasteless unless the vicar's an actress and everything's onstage at the Clarion and the audience is occupied with the pieties of the common fawns, alright for holidays in Brixham, but not for bollockings of cocksmen - ha ha ha ha ha - and then, after turning into a politically correct puff - of air - ha ha ha - so wickedly, we should be strung up by the new artists of the post-millenium age.

Oh really Oscar my darling, and why so, pray tell?

Well, because have you not heard, everything's absurdly amusing as long as we stick to a script in which one affects the ticks and tricks of aristocratic micks.

You can't say mick, only that the sausages are thick - ha ha ha - Oscar you nob, deserving to tread that mill for all the teen rents you despoiled, and your memory can rot in that tent square peg for all we care, coz we are sick - sick of the spank-mags, mogs and boons, the wolly nogs and fools who say we've to hide our real thoughts on you bleddy bog trotting mockers of the one true grace, behind a consumate laureate bending in the breeze.

PL

God save the Queen

bumhole

Larkin abaaahhhhht..

Live Poetry

This is a recording of me (Desmond Swords) made in Damar Hall, July 2006, when I was part of that years Poetry Ireland Introductions Series, an annual scheme in which emerging poets are given an opportunity to workshop and read their poetry under the aegis of Poetry Ireland.

Left - Right - Musical Prose

A traveller on the love-bus, fresh and high from reading Kristeva, Perloff and A Wild Salience by Rae Armantrout, told me of a theory which came in a dream when listening one day to the invisible stars above, calling them to account and make up the map of what becomes of love when roses fade and birds migrate beyond a realm of meaning, subverted, staid and losing faith in the pleasure of abandoning reason.

They said there is a musicality within we are born to hear and perform, pre-programmed in our pineal gland, where resides what Descartes identified as the Seat of the Soul that melatonin discharges and can be found in Eavan Boland's New Collected Poems.

Consciousness, the colleague stated, is where a universal metrical template forms, forged by vibrations, karma and emanations which surround us as we gestate within the womb, mirroring the process and progress we all experience prior to our birth as blooms born to wither in a brief flash of eternal light, before being snapped back into the vacuum of pre-existence.

Life, the colleague conveyed as we sat drinking coffee in an anonymous Victorian square, much like any other anonymous Victorian square, and through which a body of free flowing physical traffic tarried hither and tither in pale weak light of the overcast March evening - acting as a liquid signifier of the human lexicon contextualising what was being said at that moment, several hours since -- is spoken of at length in the celestial sonancy our listening for a cosmic voice can wrought.

The first observance of what's occuring in a piece of verse, is a pre-verbal tweet of what idea, afloat on an opaque signifier; alert and unspeaking of what lifts beneath waking the voice within, beginning in silence, surprises us.

Pythagoras.

A supernatural sky sheathing stone
beneath time gods grant
within those of grace

embeds a sign in the spiritual
language of spoken love
and the electrical expressway

of an obedient divinity, to become
inspired and find the Muse

who knew wisdom hidden
from mortals, comes by divination,

water moving
cold and fast.

At the beginning
the home exact
the epithet illegible

Zenophan said you stopped
the whipping of a puppy

because you recognised the soul
of a friend in metempsychosis

is not a self-proclaimed wise man
but one who pursues wisdom

through friendship. A philosopher
with knowledge of Egyptian

Chaldean and Magi secrets

your constitution in the city
of Sybaris, taught the immortal

mystery and understood souls
return continuously

until harmonious peace is all
they construct. That art won number

is the universal law and unity
the law of God.

~

Hidden and heard, still between
a tick tocking eye unfurled

outside our ken

each blade, leaf, stalk, stem
and endless ratio pours into being

your template mirror subdued
in cerelium render of the Temple Bar

palm trees one instrument creates
and calibrates, to air in a square

reality marking time back and forth
parading people between

ornate hand-painted pale greens
and aqua-marines in the spectrum

of Cafe Bearg, pizza and ice cream,
hot dogs and coffee on southern quays,

where your world turns between gods
and the good, as a primal source mind

of existence in stock bill hand flyers
and sign-standing arrows that lick

flourescent light on black backings
painted on faces pointing to fortune

tellers and watchers in Crown Alley.

Your spiritual proof, home of the five
white beech in pale gold leaf, branches

ranging 30 feet, their boles
in cylindrical bar sheaths,

is the current of musicality in language
defining speech, something textured

with sumptuous heart - a warm book,
curling by the fire, the look of night

becomingly long, automatically warning
in the reach above a trickle of tourists,

rent boys and scangers scaveging
a Santa Claus cap wilting flaccid

on the head of an accordian player
asking, perhaps - for change,

for a hostel - utterly ignored
by his cilentelle wishing him away

comfortable with dog eared blankets,
and pressed between the leaves,

a happy ending

This date got me thinking of identity. The base datum made when rooting first our mind into place and culture. The signs we follow and/or connected with, which guide us along life's path.

Childhood would appear the most logical time for this to happen. When we consciously decide what to buy into. The base line Datum we take our bearing and measurement of self from. The one we trace back to and start from again if we decide to try a new track.

~

The Englishness i grew up in, was a one which defined itself in opposition to the notion of southern Englishness: a northern one. In this model, total Englishness was a duality I did not ultimately connect with, because my parents, like Morrissey's, are not English.

~

This is why we were unable to connect, because our home life meant it could never be. Most children reared in the Irish culture in England, have this confusion in their mind to various degrees. How can we connect to a place whose imperial past so colours our perception of what Englishness is?

England had a lot of colonies and some who come to England through this link, may have a fundamental beef with Englishness as a cultural force for good in their lives, depending on what vibe of Englishness was doing the rounds in their home nation. Often they have come from a place with a history of English subjagation.

~

It always seemed to me that the bottom line of being English, was being happy about being a subject of another person. I know that technically the english are not subjects but citizens; and it seems the contract between individual and nation went through a lot of change since the sixties, when everyone began wising up to the reality that English life as a citizen was preferable to being a Subject. improved Education made people see the truth, and improved standards of living -- whilst the technology boom meant the rituals, magic and theatre from a non-technological past stopped happening, once people got free of being the playthings of monarchy.

~

Some think we are the playthings of politicians and global business. Daddy's boy george the second, whose idea - some say - was to expand his familial business interests by becoming the pres. Tony on the fag end of his seventies sixties trip, sincerity slipping beneath the accumulation of cock ups. Plus his datum had a rock-star-messiah complex going on, but unlike the real thing, he had only the costume of political office in which to perform. Suits at all time.

He couldn't slip on a pair of wraparounds and slip into the oval office for a chat about third world debt like his template - Good.

~

This is what Morrissey could be doing if he returned home to his culture, instead of throwing gladioli about the stage his dream built, swapping faxes with Alan Bennet when he lived in the UK. Before he re-located to Los Angeles and became a hispanic icon in a bewildering twist upon his path. His innate quality of being to effortlessly astound all who follow his doings.

~

Rupert Murdoch has a gas with the lads about how to keep the billions happy. If Morrissey's on page seven, ten, ignored - and what news to broadcast.

~

Morrissey's looking good on being a vegan. I saw him on on a TV chat show and it was clear his years had been well chosen. Maybe he could join me and you in our garden of Eden dearest?

Stephen felt excluded from the fun and games in Hulme. Spent all day dreaming of being himself, alone in his bedroom, one poster on the wall. Johnny Rotten - God Save the Queen and a facist regime Sid felt a part of before overdosing in the centre of his and Nancy's whirlwind. Died like her majesty's mother, an icon of englishness.

~

Sid James and Barbara Windsor.

~

Plurailty of tongue - come, speak of england and sound what is heard in anima mundi. Mint the noise of imperial coinage, pull from the purse, pocket and cauldron the spirit you control cover or stir. Spend it abroad with us.

Yesterday and today, when cycling up Dame Street to Lord Edward Street, I saw an elderly man I used to live in the next room to, when I was a resident at the Iveagh Hostel on Bride Street, pictured above. He is a schizophrenic with cancer, and has deteriorated significantly since I saw him last. He doesn't look like he has long left.

He is one of those people who we know to see but have never spoken to. Like in any town, some people we have known by sight from childhood, but never a word passed between us. Strange, and yet, entirely human. A common experience.

I lived at the Iveagh from July 2004 to December 2005. It provides direct access accommodation in single rooms for 70 single homeless men with low support needs and there are 125 single rooms providing long term accommodation.

I moved there in July 2004 a newly (2:1) Writing Studies and Drama graduate, right after finishing university in England, living in a small room in the basement for the first six months, where the 70 short-term homeless men are housed; and then on the first-floor for a year, in the room next door to where the man I saw on Dame Street yesterday has been living for many years. And as a lot of the other long-term residents there also have. Some have been living in their ten-by-six rooms for forty years. And happy to call it home.

I moved there with the practical and romantic notion that I would test myself as a trainee three-year old barely between bardic grade-one Focloc and two MacFurimid ('son of composition') student-poet in Dublin, whilst living with society's poorest, of which I was one. It was a practical solution to my then homeless situation. As though I eventually got educated, I was for extended periods in my twenties prior to getting educated, in a series of similar hostels and in the same boat as all the men living week to week in the Iveagh, who I lived with for the first 18 months of being in Dublin.

I moved out after Brian, an alcoholic in his fifties, on one to three bottles of Jameson a week, discovered he had inoperable secondary cancers throughout his body. Brian was a really kind man, who everyone liked because of his openly honest nature, and at this point, I instinctively knew it was time to move out and look forward with my dream, that decanted a kilometer away to a self-contained studio-room on the first floor in a Victorian terrace off the South Circular at Donore Avenue.

Long term the Iveagh hostel is not an ideal venue for inculcating healthy eating habits. And with minimal cooking facilities making your own food is the exception. If I am honest, I am too much of an emotional coward, and though my moving out had been slowly on the back-burner to-do list for some weeks, I was spurred to move out the second of those final few weeks with him facing a swift and sudden end.

I was too spiritually weak and afraid and had no intention of witnessing someone i shared alcoholic tendencies with pass on in such a sorrowfully tragic 'private matter' before my inexperienced eyes. My emotionally privileged existence, being a happy reader and doggerelist in the life-long swim to Segais Well, I knew couldn't handle well -what proved to be- the month-long terminal decline and his death within weeks of being diagnosed after going to a doctor with excruciating headaches.

Before this however, the Iveagh offered a perfect balance to my writing. The writing kept me sane and the homelessness helped me keep a balanced perspective after arriving at the height -and through the final four years- of a mass cultural delusion and toxically tragi-comic social ostentation and default crassly nouveau riche Celtic Tiger affections - when sporting in the then new literary form of pseudo-critical spontaneous online trolling/freedom fighting in the battle of Ideas and on inherently unstable and shifting speculative sands of the discourse with poets at various literary-topic talk-sites I stumbled across and began writing and publishing linguistically innovative conversational doggerel at straight after arriving in Dublin and becoming a resident in the Iveagh homeless hostel.

~

When a well known poet dies, there is a brief outpouring of condolence, but not for the homeless men in the Iveagh.

The poem below was occasioned with this man as the human agent propulsing to life the fictional Sweeney of the title. And on this day of all days I think it appropriate to remember the forgotten men like the one I saw yesterday.

A Stray

Sweeney spat flakes of monologue
to an invisible foe in room 108
before he took the plunge.

A flyer of thought
who'd lick round corners like a knife wind

sweep up shined steps
and cyclone through swinging doors
of the red-brick kip called home,

trailing an underbelly-aura of tramp-glamour
through the smell of pine-fresh floor-polish
lining corridors like the yellow smoke
of Eliot's Prufrock.

He'd wake to reality's nightmare
cursing in a feral wheeze or grunt
and shout about

"cunts....bastards....lazy wankers dying of cancer"

then bang a wall with his fist
and start the day dissolved in tears.

He never socialised
or idled with others

just the one time of a long chat with himself
in the communal area, before Oisin complained
to a warden, who shut him up,

stuffed him back in his dressing room
where he worked on the final scene.

A plasterboard box left whistling
as he stepped onstage at the shelter
deep acting
at 8 12 and 4,

dressed in a drab bundle of grey rags
clutching a mug

with a look to no one
and none to him.

What demonic cause sucked his life
away behind the eyes
and forced his lips to pucker gumward;
curdle twisted words in his mouth
and draw sweat onto the one shirt
he ever wore and never took off?

Years of liquid cosh and ECT
beat and drained Sweeney's blood-bound scrap with life

nuked his mind and buckled his passion
on an anvil of despair

razed thought to a desert, where a phantom's whisp
baked his nut to the brain-scrambled recipe
a frazzled garda scraped from the pavement
and time struck from the memories of residents -

this spirit passing to assemble at the  House of Donn.

Arghhhh!!!!! mmmmnn... yummmy yummy yummy.. lurrvve, darlink darlink darlink,
squiffy super dooper... oh my god oh my god oh my god !! arghhhh

.. gimmie gimmie gimmie -- let me touch, let me touch, let me touch, let me touch - the hair, hair, hair, so so fantastically blowy blowy blowy...arghhh, arghhhh....ummmm, yah yah

come, come, come, need me need me need me. arghhh!!

yes, yes, yes -- want want want want - need need need...arghh!!!
oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.. arghhhhh!!!

..die, die, die dying darling darling
let me love you one more time, upright darlink be mine tonight

Mandy motion one more time
darling, darling, ummm mandzie

mandzie wimby womby bemby wemby
noh ! noh ! noh ! arrghhh !!!!

wickle mamby
darlink you poor thing, come mandz
let mwee make it becker wiv a wuvly wickle floral print

checklist --- hair, teeth, hotpants, esturay mahnday
dahrlink gonna gwiv yoo a B, B, E and moors of mockle main,

any day noo mah gwin yiz
twickle madnzie, twixle yiz iz soo intellectual that yiz iz
gonna git made into a star mandzie, darlink,

wiv a nickle tatterz caterpillar dwess,
ummm..

I cannot go on anymore living the lie so, hello.

Ireland 3 - Sweeden 0

1 Mar 2006 ... Steve Staunton the saviour of Irish soccer, starts his reign in charge of the Republic with an impressive victory in a Wednesday night friendly in Dublin's Lansdowne Road.

~

What you are reading, is Seamus Kennelly and Brendan Heaney making believe, you too can dream of being the one who flies under night heron wings, blushing above memories and cemetries holding the fuse of they who came before and make us the people we've become.

Of course, I no longer know if this blog is a good idea. I have no readers, there is no chance, it seems, of a poetry editor snapping up and selling my work, so it is not as the worlds number one writer I must dabble, but as a bundle of breathe and brilliance from the outer making the inner real. The gods without are the cause, but the location is within this skin and bone container claiming:


Self and Imagination

war and peace colliding in a fictional realm of grace
sheer gliding linguistic citizen, invisible the crown

hidden within literacy, an owner, community, calm
verbal pathway belief leads you to - ruby lip lover
unseen juganaut of faith - dreams and freedom

bouyancy saviour v Ireland, happening printed
by inner sidhe, and the vacuum a language sailor

in shadow and shade, tree like in peaceful wooden
scenes, twig witchery bog breath druidical spacer

breathes. Magi gathering beneath stadium eaves
a night the saviour appeared in a friendly. Passion

play, coyote like shyness, the diametrical opposition
in essential flux, perfect harmony of itself, yourself;

friendly being and true native spirit - fair play, phwo-
of 40 thousand witnesses coopered to it, the love...

Next game, was a 0 - 1 drubbing in May at home by poorer Czech opposition, and in the stadium, the saviour's golden one-game honeymoon, ended in bitter recriminations, in what became an unceasing wave after wave of woe for the spirit of soccer on the island.

And when the man appeared pitchside, and not making it happen by a sheer belief alone, many fans lost belief that one game had given. It was a fluke, some said, the team played so well that first frozen March spring evening, dark and bitter, but still, the unexpected result. One voice roaring, home.

The on pitch action, spoke far far louder than the saviour getting it wrong.

The greek strain in the tragedy, appeared in the next match, Hera and her locks of woe in a three tri con of pure belief the saviour was before the fall. The consensus in the stadium was, the saviour was shown up for a chancer; and prophetic doom voiced in the Sun and stars on which the fans affirmed, gave rise to the belief that it had all been a cosmic jape, at their expense, and thus: none were happy.

Slowly, the underperforming saviour became subject to a vicious campaign of bile and brutal satire, some claiming of which, he was deserving, and the professional soccer pundits, jihadic hacks and windbags practicing their dark journalism, exhaled their crushed longings and hope on this man of tender years, in a relentless torrent of begrudgery and brooha.

Thus a failed saviour, he had to be, and the talk turned to ..hey, get real and sack the turnip breathing thick git, before michael barrymore nicks his job...


However, in the hour of need, when all was lost and the saviour had took to taking long walks to ponder his next move in the intolerable hot house of highly volatile public opnion, an even greater act of supremely divine intervention occured. The random miracle everyone knew in their most secret of selves - it is clear now - and collectively held similar pictures within the immediate and central same border or dernier or some such natural tide mark of anarchy this island has -- manifest in the exterior form of events which made reality seem but a handmaiden to the saviour's Fate.

The soccer magus and saviour from Drogheda was delivered a galactic intervention needed to rescue him from the off pitch antics that stemmed from the underperforming players who he was unable to motivate. The human man behind the saviour mask, appeared; after a comatase drunk - in clear dire straits beyond the one the saviour was facing - drew a replica firearm within the saviours personal space when he was pacing the Louth shoreline in deep professional turmoil, the night before the next game, wondering what woe was to appear on the morrow in his war with the hacks.

And what did was so bizzare, it was a miracle of sorts, because at the next press conference, on the morn before that fateful August match, after the fake gun had been pulled on our saviour by an irrate - not fan; but bewildered fellow countryman with lunatic tendancies when in drink - the saviour was very upset, but his deeper spirit not only flickered, it flamed....

He, actually - couldn't care about the personal trauma, of the imitation arm in his space being wove around by an inebriated upset person, which the saviour properly copped onto sharpo, but the grief it gave his parents and family, the press intrusion had caused...

But that night in August 0 - 4 Holland at Landsdowne Road and post 1 - 0 away in Suttgard to Germany, the saviour was doomed to a long drawn out goodbye in a war of attrition with the armies of enemies ranged against him. Alas he was slowly sacraficed, for underperforming, some say, in his role as a miracle worker with shorts, shinpads and ball.


Eight fair years, honest blooms, if you ever find us
bleeding, declare by the dead generations that give

the living their claim, the pipes are laid square, gutter
spout pointing downwards, a temple of telling tales

by the door post and stories most tender, border lying
straightlines drifting to the very terminus of an image

amazing to see, the under-line current that will affirm
the island queen of memory's annointed Her leaders,

following the straight bowled knowledge from Tír
na Og, in the name of god and of the dead generations

from which we receive an aul tradition, land of eternal
youth, a mythical place existing on pages time forgot

the singular straight line, visible in a captioned image,
lives and will prove with nought but light and air,

no roman came and smashed the altars, but the native
men and women aways here. And so the transition from druid to fili and the bardic to soccer culture, was not a renty one of heart break and pain, but joyous, some say. In the dark ages, Ireland - renowned for being the beacon of light, hope peace - for peace light and hope, is nought but belief..

A four square canon of greats the rest of the globe may shake their head in bewilderment at. GB Shaw? Heaney? Doyle? And the others?

For all our faults, to give hope to others not resident here, we must do good things; be putting hope into the world.

The globe is full of men mongering doom, but none have a right to fix the boundary of another's intellect in the quest to stop our heart beating, cuisle, so declare the right of us to a belief in oursleves and control of our destiny.

None can make us believe a book is any good but our eyes alone; and of the best irish poets ever to have practiced, and who did so in the - now forgotten - bardic culture that existed for 1200 years, Gofraidh O Dalaigh is an arch ollamh, William Carleton the son of a seanachie, so read and believe a mind crossing can place de facto dictator at number one, any it wants.

gra agus siochain.

Baraka

Hallelujah, wow ! wow !
Hallelujah, Wow ! Wow !

. everthing goan be different after we die
we aint goan be hungry, aint goan be pain
aint goan be sufferin, won't go through this again
after we die.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, wow ! wow !

Amiri Baraka - Dope
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

This is a circa 1978 recording of Amiri Baraka reciting Dope.

Born in Newark New Jersey in 1934, 74 year old Baraka was the Poet of the Black power movement and one time Greenwich Village beat poet whose slave name was Lee Roi Jones, but which he changed upon becoming radicalised after Malcom X's assassination. When Baraka was New Jersey poet laureate in 2001, he caused a storm of outrage with his poem Somebody Blew Up America - written within a month of 9/11.

~

I first heard Dope in the final year of university when Robert Sheppard, the linguistically innovative poet who instigated and runs the writing degree at Edge Hill University in my home town, which i stumbled onto by accident, almost - brought in a set of recordings for us to listen to during the final semster of six, of a wholly Modern American Poetry course spanning three yrs.

One Friday afternoon in the NW of England, in a non-descript classroom with the seven or so on the final poetry module -- only three of whom had elected to be there by their own volition (Robert having to shang-hai three out of the heavily oversubscribed Short Story class on the first day in order to legally carry on) - we listened to the series of poems Sheppard had brought, two of which were by Baraka.

The first poem I heard Baraka read, was Black Dada Nihilismus from 1964, which i thought sounded like an inarticulate racist, and then Dope (link leads to download) - from his Revolutionary Marxist period during the Carter administration, and which i thought was as viscerally powerful and gripping to listen to, as Black Dada Nihilismus was not.

The 1964 recording struck me as the voice of an inarticualte man with a chip on his shoulder, but 12 or so years later, he had learnt his craft of live poetry, by plodding on, reading, writing, and non stop recital, and it is a tour de force damning of the whole American political process, as it was then, in relation to the rampant inequality black people were subjagated by.

. it can't be capatilism.

Jimmy Carter wouldn't lie,
you heard him at the state of union address
swearing on Rosalynn's face lift:

I wouldn't lie.

Nixon lied.
Haldeman lied.
Dean lied.

Hoover lied --- Hoover sucks too, but Jimmy don't
Jimmy wouldn't,
Jimmy aint lyin.

It must be the Devil, must be the devil
put your money on the plate
it must be the devil
in Heaven we'll all be straight.

It can't be Rockerfella
he gave Amis poot-booty a scholarship
to behaviour modification university
and Genivive almost-white works for his foundation.

It must be niggers.
It can't be Mellon, he gave Winky suck-ass
a fellowship in his bank
put him charge of closing out mortgages

in the low-life Pittsburgh Hill nigger section.
It can't be him,

Yes sir - Yes sir - Yes sir - Yes sir - Yes sir
yes sir - yes sir - yes sir - yes sr

put your money in the plate
don't be late, don't have to wait, all goan be in heaven after you die.

~

This is the link to a great and lengthy interview with Baraka from Black Collegian.com, in which he gives advice on writing.

Baraka studied philosophy and religion at Rutger's University, Columbia University and Howard University and left without obtaining a degree to join the US Air Force in 1954, from which he was dishonourably discharged for violating his oath of duty, at the rank of Sergeant - as a result of three anonymous letters to his C.O. accusing him of being a communist, lead to the discovery of Soviet writings in his possession.

But it was in the air force he did much of his early reading, as there was nothing much else to do, and it was here he was part of an informal self-educators reading group of young black men reading the classics for the first time and talking philosophy. But the one thing I got from reading the piece is that Baraka was very much aware of the responsibility he had been given through his upbringing, to stand fast and remember the history of black America.

When he was a child before the civil rights movement he recounts a story his grandmother told him as a boy, about a black boy who had had his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth after being accused of raping a white woman, and he rhetorically questions why she would tell him this at such a young age, and replies:

"Sweet little old lady from Alabama.... Why would she tell you that story? ...you still got it in your mind, sixty years later, you still remember that story? -- "yeah, I remember it" -- in detail? --"absolutely" -- well that’s why she told it to you.

I don’t know if y'all still have that in your homes, I can’t speak on that, but I know that is what we as writers have to do, continue that tradition. The only way I can see that tradition being extended is through the role and function of the writer in the community."

And so Baraka obviously views his work as being part of a tradition greater than himself, the one singular person, and which I take as the main sign of his integrity as a poet.

Baraka ingested a lot of reading and created his own world view, which constantly changed over the course of time as a result of the changing social conditions, which to some extent his poetry brought about. So rather than being a poet reacting to circumstances he has no control over, Baraka actively seeks a poetry of impact. Poetry which will have an effect, and which comes out of his basic stance rooted in the little black boy from an educated family growing up in unfair times.

And his live power is a direct result of his sincerity, as he has steered his own course to a point of understanding where he is clear of his role and the historical foundations of poetry from which that role came.

. goan get all you need, once you gone. Yes sir - I heard it on the Jeffersons,
i heard it on the Rookies
i swallowed it home on Roost -yes sir !

wasn't it nice, wasn't Slavery nice
wasn't it so cool
and all you had to do was wear derbies
and dress and train chickens

and buy your way free if you had a mind to.
Must be the devil
it wasn't them white folks

~

He argues that poetry is nothing but music and rhythm. He thinks that "words fly on the rhythm" saying that the rhythm comes first, words second. I can relate to this, as there is a pre-verbal music and we can tune into it, and at the rarest alignment, the words fit not because of their properties of sense and meaning, but because no other words will. The sound is specific to such a degree only those explicit words link into what chain Shakespeare through the mask of Caliban has as - sweet sounds knitted together, and air which does not trouble or cause discomfort. And once s/he has the nack and know of how to do it, the words are not laboured over, but come on the fly, not consciously chosen - in a process of attuning our instinct by the vehicle of experience through practice, leading to what (if any) eloquence others may (or may not) discern, which connects or moves their inner music-world, as a result of our interior world outing in a fair semblance and accurate reflection from our pool of self-song sung sweetly flowing from one human being, to another.

Straight Criticism we learn at college, begins with treating a text as a non living body of words we intellectually dissect, cut apart and state the author wrote such a string to evoke a mood, make a point, link to some other part or stream of links in a chain flowing before us - and describing the reasons we think an author was impelled by, grasp the creational process which a text/poem arises out from. Created not wholly by reasoned intellect, but a mix of faith, surrender, cunning and trust in moments of satisfaction Heaney speaks of - that we have learned to recognise, instinctively, to yield our belief to that. And though others may look on in bewilderment, shaking their heads at the seemingly reasonless decisions our art impells us to take, at the end of the text, something of Art will appear and pass the finish line on only a hunch, hint, pre-verbal sense of knowing when to end, and a seemingly methodical laying out of words will be the result.

The smooth author's mind, as though the narrative had already been written and just needed excavating.

...lazy niggers, chain they-self and threw
their own black ass in the bottom of the boat.
Come to think of it, there was a certian king ass Bawaki to help throw yo ass in the bottom of the boat

your mama, your wife and you never seen them no more.
It musta been the devil.

Give me your money, put it here in this plate
heaven'll be here soon, you just gotta die
just gotta stop livin

close yer eyes, stop breathin and Bammo !
heaven'll be here.

Bammo ! you'll have all of what you need

a wow wow
Wow ! Wow !

A Poetry of Belief, Faith & Hope.

There is an article in today's NY Times by Adam Nagourney: The '08 Race: A Sea Change for Politics as We Know It - who speaks how this election has fundamentally upended the way presidential campaigns are fought and how the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down - citing the internet as the instrument making a brand new relationship between our leaders and ourselves.

Adam O'Riordan writing on Barack Obama's inner poet in todays Guardian books blog, speaks of the freshness of his conversational style, which (I think) appears to be the forthright human honesty of a seemingly normal person who has plucked the day by harnessing new medias and making them the vehicle for a message of hope and change by inclusion.

Instead of detached multi-millionaires relying on a rhetoric of agression and using one way monologic publishing to instil the fear of unseen forces amongst us, we now have (on the face of it) human normality wrapped in a message of hope; opening the vent of our hearing as we awake and cop on to the simple act of Communication, on the human level.

They who seek to rule by fear, do not like people talking to one another, and in the past in the press, politicians had it this way and we had to take their word that certain dangers existed which didn't. WMD etc. But now, with the net, we can speak amongst ourselves, check facts, pulll up information that would before have taken far longer.

Thus, the cute rich who had us running around chasing ghosts, mist and fabrications whilst staying one step ahead spreading untruths and confusion that manifests in a false fear of others - no longer hold civilisation to ransom.

~

Charles Bernstein who set up the world's first internet Poetics discussion group Buffalo Poetics list - which began as a small band of Robert Creely, Susan Howe, Pierre Joris, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff, Silliman, Keith Tuma and numerous other liberal American poetic greats -- is the man for accurate internet prophecy in relation to poetry and the web.

In his seminal I Don’t Take Voicemail paper, first delivered orally as “The Art Object in the an Age of Electronic Technology” -- presented at a symposium, sponsored by the Parsons School of Design, at the New School in New York, on April 16, 1994 - Bernstein lays out his vision of how this then, very new communication technology, will pan out and his poetical prophecy was accurate in many respects:

"The most radical characteristic of the internet as a medium is its interconnectivity. At every point receivers are also transmitters. It is a medium defined by exchange rather than delivery; the medium is interactive and dialogic rather than
unidirectional or monologic.....The potential for discussion and collaboration is appealing–the format mixes some of the features of correspondence with a discussion group, conference call, and a panel symposium such as this one (with the crucial difference that the distinction between audience and panel is eroded)."

One of my favourites is the poetry of politician Robert Francis Fitzgerald Kennedy, a full blooded American with eight Irish great grandparents, along with his brothers, all poets. And it is in a brother Francis Fitzgerald's extemporised address in Indianapolis, breaking to a black audience the news of Martin Luther King's murder, that living poetry is as History itself:

'So ask tonight
return and say a prayer for the family
-- Yeah, it's true -- but more important
say a prayer for our own country,
Which all of us love -- understanding
and compassion can do the country good
In difficult times

...the majority of people in this vast
country who live together,want to improve
the quality of life and see justice for all
Human beings that abide by peace in our land.

So let's dedicate ourselves to what a Greek poet
said many years ago:

"tame the savageness of man and make gentle
the life of this world."

Aeschylus

And my own humble prayer:

Strong is the power of our light.
The spiritual armour of goodness
Resisting rulers' wicked wiles
And the cult of men in darkness.
Within us beastial faith lies,
Learning truth in a 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."

Sunday Night Live

Hep cat Jack and Al in Vegas, two high balls no hookers, Greg and Ginsey at it like bonobo pygmy chimps with a couple of dwarfs purchased in Walmart - discount for poets - no, no make that a brehon to go, de-capped lower case no need for titular bullshit. Jack was like that, a Kerouac from New Ross, French-Wexford-Canadian, African American, Amergin through and through. Top of the world ma, made it to the cover of a Rolling Stone back when Neal was on the road -- Frisco, circa 1952.

Three bottles later, we sorta sorted out the thoughts in our head into some kind of insane order, got the ball rolling before Obama stepped up to the plate at the railroad, the town hall, the campus, the community and a couple of Sarah Palin's with two John McCains, garbled, frozen eyes in a war on horror, the lies love and truth, well yer hadda be here to prove it, to know what moved us, caught the tune that's now in the music of what passing between us, happened as Setanta prior to becoming Cúchulainn - fought at the ford in Ardee, with the state line Ohio, stump at the railroad, the oval office of Sean and Francis Fitzgerald filling out space with the air so eloquent; only a trace of humanity, irish, low key, democrat-republican lover of the deepest nuance, lives in our history, and man could Jackie blow.

How Dare you K!!!!

YouWriteOn.com

Free Publishing for 5,000

YouWriteOn.com Will Publish 5,000 Writers For Free!!

Arts Council funded YouWriteOn.com will publish the first 5,000 writers who contact us for Free - Fiction & Non-Fiction.

Absolutely appalled!!

This is outrageous, truly a bad, bad and dangerous development.

Quality control gone by the wayside for some tin pot scheme which will bring 5000 books into the world that will not sell, that will not lead to commercial publishing for all but the most talented of authors, who will not sign up for it, because there is no one there to give them feedback and tell them what they have to do next to become a published author in the real sense of having an editor-author relationship, which underpins the very edifice of Publishing.

i am very very concerned about this and have written letters to eighteen different organisations about it, demanding it be stopped, that the arts council staff who came up with this stupid idea, and all those responsible, be immediately dismissed from their jobs.

i am starting a campiagn against it, and if any of you sensible people are concerned enough to get involved, there will be a demonstration in ten cities across the world, where we will be demanding this outrage cease. please get involved, please, please write to the arts council and your local TD, MP, Congress-person, Senator, and representatives for the bodies which conduct the political life of yr area, please, please, this runs against all natural law and i am very very concerned, consumed with fears, and am totally and utterley appalled.

if this venture has not been called off by Friday 3rd October, i will be chaining myself to railings of the arts council and beginning a hunger strike.

This is no laughing matter, this is pathetic, stupid, reckless, wanton and - if not criminal - certainly should be.

Come, come with us and let us show the world, we are intelligent, thoughtful, human lovers of literature which at least has some quality control checks and balances at the entry point.

already i have lost quite a lot of sleep about this, unable to work and am starting to suffer from depression. if my mental or physical health deteriates to the point where i am unable to conduct my lawful daily business, i will be suing the arts council for damages.

i have already engaged a barrister on a retainer of 5000 and a daily fee of 500 sterling, to make sure every legal avenue is explored for this reckless, entirely innapropriate venture to get stopped.

And whatever you do, do not buy a book called Ovid Yeats - Love Poems, by Desmond Swords.

Desmond Swords book, if it comes out, will corrupt the very fabric of eternal space and time (if such a state exists) and will corrupt our loved ones, make clever people stupid, take away the voting rights of the appalled and cause others great distress in their professional and personal lives, due to his disguise of grey hair, five ten, very very superficially compelling onscreen when reading live poetry, which has been enhanced with computer graphics to make him appear attractive to both men and women of all ages, and there is a very real danger, should this book

Ovid Yeats - Love Poems

by desmond swords, with a deep passion, nay addiction for bardic lore, the voice appearing out of nowhere, happy to have in a shop window speaking all new.

. can make your children, cleverer, happier, stop them getting bullied at school, make them lose their spots, become a millionaire at 12, just by looking at this book

Love Poems - Ovid Yeats

confer a cloak of invisibility upon anyone within six yards of it, make you a better ballet dancer, to olympic standards, just by touching the cover, and live forever should you read one line of the first poem, and become ...

you get the picture, stop

Desmond Swords, be appalled with me, come, come, let us strap up, this rougue intellectual poet.

. i am appalled!!!