Dear Reader
If you typed Irish Poetry into msn and ended up here, stop a while and have a leisurely read. If you have any questions on poetry, Irish or otherwise, I'm the ideal person to ask, as I am a complete poetry geek who is only too happy to help, so just leave any queries in the comment box and I'll respond with the full vigour of one whose life is spent in constant daydream.
Todays post is a short one; a poem I spent the last two days working up. If you are a regular reader you may know that I am a bit of a disaster when it comes to losing stuff. If I added up all my losses over the last 20 years they would fill a small house, and the number of manuscript books that have disappeared is a joke. Another one went a few days back, 97 pages in, but the most serious loss was about 7 weeks ago when I lost a coat that had a diary in it, which was in the first stage of evolving into the main repository of poems. I won't bore you with the details, but a new way of working and style of writing was emerging which was directly linked to the physical size of the diary, and I had three drafts of poems on there when it went. I can't replace it as they don't have them in the shops here in Dublin and I bought a pocket notebook but it isn't the same. But I perservered and over the last two days magaed to recapture the process that went when I lost the diary, and this is the result.
I write in all styles from high blown esoteric stuff like this example, right through to comedy rap, so if this one doesn't float your boat, my first collection of poetry will soon be available on another part of the site.
Have a nice day.
The Coming Instructors
I recognise speech mirrors silence
and words rise like bricks
from unknown pools when instinct
builds a bridge that shines
upon the hidden outline
of their mind reflecting its
flawed form for all to read.
~~
Their brain
draws waves from reality's canvas
and their willpower moves mine
like hands at an oracle
prodding a lump of knowledge
to stir my first alertness of the other world
and its language which kindles a tune whose flame
is the internal universe ticking my clockwork
song in a unique time truthful to their genius
~~
They are understanding givers
who divine what dream
in a cloud above stars
will breathe in light and make reality
sing of life's return to a slumbered weave
of painted silence with the memory of
one slipped bottle dropped
from a toddler's fingers
the morning milk struck land
and grounded outside a door
to shatter in a puff of broken glass
smashing itself into the mind
by sheer force of will as a first
remembered act of childhood
revealed behind the door of sleep
I make believe my soundless unseen
wave like ripple
lapping on their screen of thought
can open.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
LAMENT
I went to Damar Hall last night to listen to seven poets launch chapbooks. Belfast's Lapwing Press was the publisher who brought an eclectic mix of poets to Dublin and let them loose in the basement of poesy where they wove their magic for about fifteen minutes each, with a comfort break after the first four. I am unable to give a full account because I lost my manuscript book last night after decanting to Whelans Pub and then next door to the Village, an uber cool hangout for the cash flush gargler wanting to continue the late night ambience after throw out time. I wasn't even drunk. I had met a small party in Whelans and they coaxed me to follow them in to the Village, and as I am only barred from most of the boozers in Temple Bar, which is a good ten minutes away, I thought I would be OK drinking to collapse in this trendy haven. I had only been in there a few minutes when an African bouncer came over and asked me to leave. When I emerged onto the pavement I realised my book was still in there, and he let me back in to have a quick supervised scout around the 2.30am scene, but the lights, noise and general disorderly social array were not condusive to success and I decided to come back later. I went there tonight and an Italian barman affected an air of supreme indifference to my plight. When I asked if my book was about, the sum total of his inquiry consisted of a glance at the till and a shrug of the shoulders. I will have to telephone the office staff and try to impress upon them the seriousness of my loss.
The fellas whose business is standing in pub doorways are always on the lookout for a bit of argy bargy aren't they? And now they have two way earpieces and walkie talkies the overall register of their meins is more secret service and CIA than sup hole standabouts. The Village is known for the bands that appear there, and there's many an artist who has strutted the Village boards who''s first gig was strumming air guitars in front of a bedroom mirror, and I can imagine most doormen also indulge in the bouncer equivalent; practicing facial technique as part of the training regime. They all have that bored glacial hue which is the signature of a contemporary social life, and one easy to work up if standing outside a pub is your trade. And as there is not much action in the job, they have to make some work whenever they can get it, so at least I served as another statistic in the job life for one of Ireland's new workers.
But the readings went well and Denis the Lapwing head honcho left me with a memorable statistic. He said that 80% of poetry books are bought by women, but only 20% of poets who get published are from the fairer sex. And Denis was putting this right as 5 of the seven were women, several of whom adjourned to Nearys pub afterwards to engage in post reading poetry chat. I went there with Rob MacKenna, who is from Meath and a very talented poet who you can listen to on the audio site.
Scalljah's Sound House
Also in Nearys was Peter Sirr and Greg Delanty, who said they had read the review I wrote on Delanty's book launch the other week.
Delanty Book Launch
Sirr very kindly put up with me blathering on about the Cauldron of Poesy whilst pretending to appear interested. Maybe I wouldn't have got booted out of the Village if they were there?
The fellas whose business is standing in pub doorways are always on the lookout for a bit of argy bargy aren't they? And now they have two way earpieces and walkie talkies the overall register of their meins is more secret service and CIA than sup hole standabouts. The Village is known for the bands that appear there, and there's many an artist who has strutted the Village boards who''s first gig was strumming air guitars in front of a bedroom mirror, and I can imagine most doormen also indulge in the bouncer equivalent; practicing facial technique as part of the training regime. They all have that bored glacial hue which is the signature of a contemporary social life, and one easy to work up if standing outside a pub is your trade. And as there is not much action in the job, they have to make some work whenever they can get it, so at least I served as another statistic in the job life for one of Ireland's new workers.
But the readings went well and Denis the Lapwing head honcho left me with a memorable statistic. He said that 80% of poetry books are bought by women, but only 20% of poets who get published are from the fairer sex. And Denis was putting this right as 5 of the seven were women, several of whom adjourned to Nearys pub afterwards to engage in post reading poetry chat. I went there with Rob MacKenna, who is from Meath and a very talented poet who you can listen to on the audio site.
Also in Nearys was Peter Sirr and Greg Delanty, who said they had read the review I wrote on Delanty's book launch the other week.
Sirr very kindly put up with me blathering on about the Cauldron of Poesy whilst pretending to appear interested. Maybe I wouldn't have got booted out of the Village if they were there?
Monday, March 13, 2006
Gissa Job
Yesterday's first post related a dream I had which I think may have been a predictive one, precursing the next stage of my writerly development, which I am hoping will be the oracular stage. In the old bardic schools, this stage came in the eighth year of training, and led to Ollamh status, or master-poet. There are no records stating the exact length of time it took to become an Ollamh, but it is specualated as being between 12-20 years. 20 comes from Ceaser, who wrote that it took 20 years to become a druid, who the old bardic schools were directly evolved from. It's closest contemporary equivalent would be beginning the final slog of a PhD, and the Ollamh title itself is still used in Irish academia and is the equivalent of a Professor in English.
Not everyone was able to go for Ollamh, because much of the practice related to divinatory or otherworldly practice. And whilst today's world of science can poo poo this side of the practice, they believed in it at the time. Poetic practice in Ireland during Gaelic times was enourmously complex and would need far more than a blog post to cover the very basics. It is a vast topic and mind blowingly different from any other poetic culture, with the irony being that very few contemporary poets have even the smallest idea on the reality of it. For example, the ultimate form of satire, (whose practitioners needed a license, like Doctors) was the Glam Dicen, which was a legal religio-magical ceremony used to dispose unjust kings and involved around 100 poets and petty kings, with the crucial leagal moment taking place next to a whitethorn bush on a hilltop at a point were several tribal land boundaries met. The head poet would chant the poem and bow away from the tree, and if it was meant to be the unjust kings face would rise with blisters and he would be unable to govern. In Gaelic law a king was debarred if he had any physical blemishes.
*
By the end of training an Ollamh would have to have memorised around 150 ogham tables, (memory aids) many hundreds of myths, poems, verse metres and precise grammatical rules of composition. They had numerous functions and were responsible for Irish lawmaking, much of which is still on record. This corpus of law goes under the name Fenechas or Brehon law, which was entirely civil, without Roman influence and a very sophisticated and fair system. The basic difference between Roman and Gaelic law is that Roman law is a Penal concept, which basically means if you do wrong, you get punished, whilst the Gaelic system was one of restitution and could be summed up if you've done wrong, now this is what you have to do to put it right.
The societal bonds were based on the Derbfine, which is four generations of poeple from a great grandparent to a great grandchild, and was the basic unit in society from which all else sprung. Victims of lawbreakers would always be recompensated because if a wrongdoer defaulted on their fines, the immediate members in their derbfine became responsible. So if John Smith owed Alan Jones four cows for breaking his legs in a drunken fight and didn't pay, John Smith's family would become liable. By far the worst thing that could happen to a person in this society was to be cast out by their family, as they would have no derbfine protection, so it was a self governing system.
Here are some links
The Fénechas and Gaelic Society, an Introduction and Overview
Numerous articles by Fenechas expert Breandán Uí Ciarraide
This one is a dedicated internet group who discuss and air various Brehon and Fenachas topics here
Fenechas Discussion Group
And whilst it is impossible to recreate the course of study the original bards undertook, the outcome of Ollamh training resulted in being able to waffle high grade blather to all and sundry.
Ollamhs were practising hereditary lawyer-poets whose contemporaries, (should the art not have died out during the start of the 17C) would now be able to do things like turn themselves into a salmon, a ten foot teenager, a conjourers wig, an office memo directing top down organisational change, or turn black to white and vice versa; using only the power of their minds, with the relevant incantations being delivered via watching bugs bunny on the cartoon network.
And whilst this is obviously tongue in cheek, the essence of their practice was that they were highly trained word jugglers or sorcerers of sound, and their qualifications would be the equvalent of Noah Chomsky's ongoing post-doctoral practice in quantumn linguistics. Not that such a topic is formally in existence, but these people had custody of langauge that was 1000's of years old, and the magical side to their practice, whilst now lost, rooted in direct and unbroken lineage back to druidic practice. This system is only 300 years severed, unlike the 2000 year dead Greek and Roman poetic templates English Language poetic tradition roots itself in. So whilst poets today will never be able to travel through space and time with a few well placed spells and incantations, the ultimate lineage of today's pension plan minstrels does have a mystic beginning.
*
This post will tie my recent experience in with current theory on the otherworldly side of poetic practice from the main Irish Ollamh, Seamus Heaney, who can legitimately be termed the Mossbawn Bard or Magus, as his prose writing on the poetic art is the most lucid I have read.
*
Heaney has a basic three point analogy which he uses to illustrate the trajectory of a poets career. He takes the owl calling metaphor outlined by Wordsworth in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads and extends on it to show the fundamental changes that occur in the development of the poet during their writing career. Wordsworth describes how he wandered the woods of Cumbria as a child making owl calls with his cupped hands, and tells of the surprise and joy that came when he managed the very first call after many failed attempts.
He then indulged in this activity for the sheer thrill of doing it, until one time, the owl returned his call. After a few times of returned calls the novelty wore off, and he felt himself to be bit of a pro; but just as he was getting used to imitating reality and fooling it into returning his call, the time came when he called and the owl did not return the sound. In the silence that followed, a flood of images or understanding from the universal poetic, or what Yeats called the "anima mundi" became imprinted on his mind, and from this he learnt a fundamental lesson, that at the end of sound is silence.
*
Heaney uses this narrative to illustrate his argument that there are three
stages of development as a poet. The first is when, like the young
Wordsworth making owl calls in the woods of Cumbria, you rejoice in the
sheer novelty and joy of realising you can do it, the very first time you
manage it after much trying .
The next stage is when the owl calls back and you go up a level of skill, understanding that you are pretty handy at this imitating sound lark, and this would be the stage most poets reach and work at.
The final stage however, and one which not every poet reaches, is when the owl no longer calls back and a silence is returned. There is a common view held by many soldiers of song that at the end of poetry is silence; a view which basically translates to the gaining of an axiomatic understanding on the essence of poetry.
On Wednesday last this moment occured to me as I was walking home from Whelans pub singing the Oasis song Maybe.
Up until February 2003 I believed that I was tone deaf, had no musical ability and was unable to hold a note when attempting to sing. However a number of times I had actually dreamt in song, with full musical accompaniament and words; and upon waking would be somewhat confused as I thought I was completely unmusical. These dreams were literally me making up a song in my dreams, both words and music, and although I never gave it much thought it was an oddity I could not work out.
Then one morning in February 2003 I was walking to the college where I was studying in the second year of my writing studies and drama degree, and I began singing Maybe by Oasis and actually managed to hold the note. I can recall the exact moment, as I surprised myself and realised I must be able to sing after all. It was at this point that the dreaming in song made complete sense. This song therefore represents my owl call, as it was the first song I managed to correctly sing, like Wordsworth's first owl call, after many fumbled attempts.
On Wednesday last, just as I was rounding the corner of George Street in Dublin, around 3am singing Maybe, I felt compelled to cease singing and was immediately flooded by a fundamental and silent understanding about poetry. I was hit by a feeling of wonder and scurried home pondering what it meant. The next day I realised I may have reached the crossroads and divination was a gift ready to froth over my cauldron. And the powerful snippet of dream which woke me a few nights prior to this incident and which I describe in yesterdays post, I now take to be another sign or precurser that a new stage is upon me.
The immedite results of this was the cessation of smoking and boozing, as I forcefully realised that now is the ideal time to change my persona from that of a gifted pisshead poet, and into that of a long haul fresh faced rhymster who can get the granny glasses glinting as easliy as drawing young strutters into a room of poesy where they will hopefully discover a practitioner relating a truthful otherworldy vibe.
*
Heaney's three stage idea is a recycling of his basic premises on the poetic art, and one I heard him expound in November 2004 at St Patricks College in Dublin, when he gave a lecture on Patrick Kavanagh. His basic argument is that you start out writing and go along a certain way, and just at the point when you think you have gained a fundamental skill or understanding, (which roughly equates to when you start getting complacent about the gift) you realise that the amount of knowledge you hold is very little, and that when this understanding occurs is when the real start of the journey begins.
He says that as a poet you are always in a liminal state of limbo. You feel confirmed by the last poem you wrote, but feel threatened by the elusiveness of the next one. That's certainly how I feel, and when I look back on all my writing, in some ways, it's as if it is another person who has written it, but I know it's me and this helps to foster a feeling of long term stability.
Not everyone was able to go for Ollamh, because much of the practice related to divinatory or otherworldly practice. And whilst today's world of science can poo poo this side of the practice, they believed in it at the time. Poetic practice in Ireland during Gaelic times was enourmously complex and would need far more than a blog post to cover the very basics. It is a vast topic and mind blowingly different from any other poetic culture, with the irony being that very few contemporary poets have even the smallest idea on the reality of it. For example, the ultimate form of satire, (whose practitioners needed a license, like Doctors) was the Glam Dicen, which was a legal religio-magical ceremony used to dispose unjust kings and involved around 100 poets and petty kings, with the crucial leagal moment taking place next to a whitethorn bush on a hilltop at a point were several tribal land boundaries met. The head poet would chant the poem and bow away from the tree, and if it was meant to be the unjust kings face would rise with blisters and he would be unable to govern. In Gaelic law a king was debarred if he had any physical blemishes.
*
By the end of training an Ollamh would have to have memorised around 150 ogham tables, (memory aids) many hundreds of myths, poems, verse metres and precise grammatical rules of composition. They had numerous functions and were responsible for Irish lawmaking, much of which is still on record. This corpus of law goes under the name Fenechas or Brehon law, which was entirely civil, without Roman influence and a very sophisticated and fair system. The basic difference between Roman and Gaelic law is that Roman law is a Penal concept, which basically means if you do wrong, you get punished, whilst the Gaelic system was one of restitution and could be summed up if you've done wrong, now this is what you have to do to put it right.
The societal bonds were based on the Derbfine, which is four generations of poeple from a great grandparent to a great grandchild, and was the basic unit in society from which all else sprung. Victims of lawbreakers would always be recompensated because if a wrongdoer defaulted on their fines, the immediate members in their derbfine became responsible. So if John Smith owed Alan Jones four cows for breaking his legs in a drunken fight and didn't pay, John Smith's family would become liable. By far the worst thing that could happen to a person in this society was to be cast out by their family, as they would have no derbfine protection, so it was a self governing system.
Here are some links
This one is a dedicated internet group who discuss and air various Brehon and Fenachas topics here
And whilst it is impossible to recreate the course of study the original bards undertook, the outcome of Ollamh training resulted in being able to waffle high grade blather to all and sundry.
Ollamhs were practising hereditary lawyer-poets whose contemporaries, (should the art not have died out during the start of the 17C) would now be able to do things like turn themselves into a salmon, a ten foot teenager, a conjourers wig, an office memo directing top down organisational change, or turn black to white and vice versa; using only the power of their minds, with the relevant incantations being delivered via watching bugs bunny on the cartoon network.
And whilst this is obviously tongue in cheek, the essence of their practice was that they were highly trained word jugglers or sorcerers of sound, and their qualifications would be the equvalent of Noah Chomsky's ongoing post-doctoral practice in quantumn linguistics. Not that such a topic is formally in existence, but these people had custody of langauge that was 1000's of years old, and the magical side to their practice, whilst now lost, rooted in direct and unbroken lineage back to druidic practice. This system is only 300 years severed, unlike the 2000 year dead Greek and Roman poetic templates English Language poetic tradition roots itself in. So whilst poets today will never be able to travel through space and time with a few well placed spells and incantations, the ultimate lineage of today's pension plan minstrels does have a mystic beginning.
*
This post will tie my recent experience in with current theory on the otherworldly side of poetic practice from the main Irish Ollamh, Seamus Heaney, who can legitimately be termed the Mossbawn Bard or Magus, as his prose writing on the poetic art is the most lucid I have read.
*
Heaney has a basic three point analogy which he uses to illustrate the trajectory of a poets career. He takes the owl calling metaphor outlined by Wordsworth in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads and extends on it to show the fundamental changes that occur in the development of the poet during their writing career. Wordsworth describes how he wandered the woods of Cumbria as a child making owl calls with his cupped hands, and tells of the surprise and joy that came when he managed the very first call after many failed attempts.
He then indulged in this activity for the sheer thrill of doing it, until one time, the owl returned his call. After a few times of returned calls the novelty wore off, and he felt himself to be bit of a pro; but just as he was getting used to imitating reality and fooling it into returning his call, the time came when he called and the owl did not return the sound. In the silence that followed, a flood of images or understanding from the universal poetic, or what Yeats called the "anima mundi" became imprinted on his mind, and from this he learnt a fundamental lesson, that at the end of sound is silence.
*
Heaney uses this narrative to illustrate his argument that there are three
stages of development as a poet. The first is when, like the young
Wordsworth making owl calls in the woods of Cumbria, you rejoice in the
sheer novelty and joy of realising you can do it, the very first time you
manage it after much trying .
The next stage is when the owl calls back and you go up a level of skill, understanding that you are pretty handy at this imitating sound lark, and this would be the stage most poets reach and work at.
The final stage however, and one which not every poet reaches, is when the owl no longer calls back and a silence is returned. There is a common view held by many soldiers of song that at the end of poetry is silence; a view which basically translates to the gaining of an axiomatic understanding on the essence of poetry.
On Wednesday last this moment occured to me as I was walking home from Whelans pub singing the Oasis song Maybe.
Up until February 2003 I believed that I was tone deaf, had no musical ability and was unable to hold a note when attempting to sing. However a number of times I had actually dreamt in song, with full musical accompaniament and words; and upon waking would be somewhat confused as I thought I was completely unmusical. These dreams were literally me making up a song in my dreams, both words and music, and although I never gave it much thought it was an oddity I could not work out.
Then one morning in February 2003 I was walking to the college where I was studying in the second year of my writing studies and drama degree, and I began singing Maybe by Oasis and actually managed to hold the note. I can recall the exact moment, as I surprised myself and realised I must be able to sing after all. It was at this point that the dreaming in song made complete sense. This song therefore represents my owl call, as it was the first song I managed to correctly sing, like Wordsworth's first owl call, after many fumbled attempts.
On Wednesday last, just as I was rounding the corner of George Street in Dublin, around 3am singing Maybe, I felt compelled to cease singing and was immediately flooded by a fundamental and silent understanding about poetry. I was hit by a feeling of wonder and scurried home pondering what it meant. The next day I realised I may have reached the crossroads and divination was a gift ready to froth over my cauldron. And the powerful snippet of dream which woke me a few nights prior to this incident and which I describe in yesterdays post, I now take to be another sign or precurser that a new stage is upon me.
The immedite results of this was the cessation of smoking and boozing, as I forcefully realised that now is the ideal time to change my persona from that of a gifted pisshead poet, and into that of a long haul fresh faced rhymster who can get the granny glasses glinting as easliy as drawing young strutters into a room of poesy where they will hopefully discover a practitioner relating a truthful otherworldy vibe.
*
Heaney's three stage idea is a recycling of his basic premises on the poetic art, and one I heard him expound in November 2004 at St Patricks College in Dublin, when he gave a lecture on Patrick Kavanagh. His basic argument is that you start out writing and go along a certain way, and just at the point when you think you have gained a fundamental skill or understanding, (which roughly equates to when you start getting complacent about the gift) you realise that the amount of knowledge you hold is very little, and that when this understanding occurs is when the real start of the journey begins.
He says that as a poet you are always in a liminal state of limbo. You feel confirmed by the last poem you wrote, but feel threatened by the elusiveness of the next one. That's certainly how I feel, and when I look back on all my writing, in some ways, it's as if it is another person who has written it, but I know it's me and this helps to foster a feeling of long term stability.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Mother Love
The post immediately below this one is a bit heavy going for the more casual reader, so I thought I'd top it with a lite post and poem. I was reading that last night Sat 12 March, there was an Irish bloggers award bash in Dublin. As usual I heard about it the day after and missed out on meeting my fellow Irish bloggers. With that in mind, this poem needs no explanatory notes. It was written for my mother.
MOTHER
Mother
I will love you
in a thousand years from now
when the sands of time have
worn our bones to dust
and we are both at rest
beneath the film of earth
which sprung us to life.
And I will love you when
eternity holds
pincered in its grasp
the memories of our long
forgotten lives
which dissappear into the
ether like a single rising breath
and mingle with humanity's mass
to travel as the sap of sunlight
ascending through consciousness
in one short flash
before darkness snaps and
swallows us back into the womb
sweeps us to the moment
when the pith and gristle of
existence can begin
as our souls once more unfold
upon the threshold at the nexus
of life and start swimming from
the shallows to the deep
MOTHER
Mother
I will love you
in a thousand years from now
when the sands of time have
worn our bones to dust
and we are both at rest
beneath the film of earth
which sprung us to life.
And I will love you when
eternity holds
pincered in its grasp
the memories of our long
forgotten lives
which dissappear into the
ether like a single rising breath
and mingle with humanity's mass
to travel as the sap of sunlight
ascending through consciousness
in one short flash
before darkness snaps and
swallows us back into the womb
sweeps us to the moment
when the pith and gristle of
existence can begin
as our souls once more unfold
upon the threshold at the nexus
of life and start swimming from
the shallows to the deep
DREAMING
About a week ago a lucid snippet of dream caused me to suddenly awake from my slumbers and I have been puzzling its significance since then, wondering if it was a sign that the oracular or divinatory stage of my development is now possible.
I don't fully understand what this stage is all about and only have my own poetic experience to go by, but the process used to chart the topography I believe I’m anchored in and moving through, is one of intuition and this very powerful dream-snatch is one of the few I have experienced which I instinctively feel to be predictive.
Demios Oneiron is the Village of Dreams on the way to Hades in Greek myth and Artemidorus of Daldis in Asia Mionor was a 2C Roman writer who wrote the Oneirocritica, a critical study of 3000 people’s dreams. This was the first text Guttenberg printed after the bible, and indicates the importance it was held in during the dawning days of mass print.
Artemidorus categorized five dream states, 3 predictive and 2 non-predictive. The 3 predictive are –
1 – Oneiros – allegorical/symbolic
2 – Homora/visio - literal predictive
3 - Chrematismos/Oraculum – an apparition of God or other who tells fortune
But back to the dream. I was facing a small audience of fellow poets from the weekly Write and Recite grouping, and I was about to deliver a poem from memory. We were in some kind of half enclosed half outdoor environment and there was an invisible microphone in front of me, in the sense of I had a clear focus on exactly where my mouth had to position itself to speak. My intention was to lean back slightly, physically swivel round a full revolution on my right foot and, as I stomped down my left foot on successfully completing this manoeuvre, launch into a poem.
At the moment of first turning I noticed a tree to the left of me in a first budding of spring leaves which were the colour of pale apple skin and I said
we should give thanks for this,
- opining we should thank the creator for all life. As I went through the full revolution, everything occured in slow motion, and as the turn continued I immediately saw the back of a monk dressed in a brown woollen habit who was performing some kind of ceremony. I instinctively knew that I was witnessing, and had become part of, a scene from the 7C.
If you imagine a full circle of 360 degrees and a line down the middle splitting it in two, then the 21C audience of fellow poets were awaiting my performance in one half and did not see the 7C scene I had suddenly become privy to and which was happening opposite them in the opposing semi circle. It was as though they were facing an invisible three dimensional cinema screen showing a scene which ran down a centre line, and I had straddled either threshold to became part of these two realities simultaneously.
As soon as I caught site of the monk I felt an incredible surge of energy, as though I were a jump jet about to take off, and before my back was fully turned on the poet audience they witnessed my facial reaction to what I was seeing. But unaware of what I saw, they misread my expression and mistook it for one which signalled that I was going into comedic mode, and the first rumblings of a laughter cloud began to surge amongst them in that half of my dual reality. I realised that there had been some kind of slippage or kink in the fabric of the continuum and I had inadvertently become enmeshed in two existences at once, and a millisecond before completing the revolution I awoke with a start.
Artemidorus believed that the interpretation of dreams is nothing other than the juxtaposition of similarities.....
......and with one significant alteration, I can mangle this quote into service as the maxim describing my essential theory of poetry –
Poetry is nothing other than metaphor, or the juxtaposition of difference.
Essentially a combining of difference, which Samuel Johnston summed up in his essay on the metaphysical poets of the 17C
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
The basics of this, and the smallest component of a poem are startling word combinations that do not usually appear side by side, which constitute the kernel unitary pieces of poetry: words like - concrete/icecream tarmac/bagpipes or paperweight/tractor.
So these lie, like the start point in a set of concentric ripples, at the heart of the poetic art, and the furthest extension of them is the basic idea behind the conceit of a poem. So in Heaney's 1966 poem Digging,the various binary differences that appear in one whole to form the outer reaches of the basic conceits are -
father/son manual/mental pen/spade
and some of the startling word combinations are -
squat pen and loving the cool hardness.
From what I can gather through piecing together the various writings on Celtic poets from the bardic tradition, divinatory training began in the eighth year of study and culminated in Ollamh status. However not every poet was capable of oracular practice because the highest level of poetic insight was only gained by those who experienced the widest range of joy and sorrow.
The blueprint ofAmergin's 7C Cauldron of Poesie
poem outlining how the poetic gift operates, states that everyone is born with three cauldrons in them.
A cauldron of Incubation - which is born upright in every person and which distributes wisdom in their youth.
A cauldron of wisdom, which is born on its lips (upside down) and which distributes wisdom in every art including poetry
A cauldron of motion, which is born on its lips in ignorant people and slanted in those with the poetic gift.
The cauldron of incubation and wisdom are only mentioned once and it is clear from the text that the cauldron of motion is by far the most significant, as this represents the potential and natural poetic capacity one is born with. The poem states that 50% of people are born with the cauldron slanted, and 50% with it on its lips or upside down.
So a person born with a slanted cauldron of motion is born with poetic potential, as it means it will be possible to fill up, and can be visualized like a glass tilted at 45 degrees beneath a tap, whose pouring of water will enter the glass. Every other person who is born with it on its lips means that their container is upside down and will be unable to fill, much like pouring water onto an upside down glass.
The water in this case comes in the form of the four human sorrows and four human joys in life, as outlined in the poem. Each joy or sorrow experienced is capable of turning the cauldron of motion, and the more it turns the more upright it becomes, until, in those who acheive the Highest Streams, it ends up on its back, and the highest ridges of poetic wisdom have been reached where the oracular poet's waffle and insight can froth over.
When the text is analysed it is pretty simple and commonsensical, as what it says is that anyone born with the poetic gift has the potential to reach the highest streams, but these will only come to those who experience the widest range of joy and sorrow, and couple it with hard writerly graft and constant study. Like any other profession, it is not necessarily the most naturally gifted who reach the top, but those who stick at it and go the full course. Michael Caine has an apt analogy which illustrates this idea. He says that actors from his generation found success through hanging on whilst everyone else dropped off, and it was more a case of the last few standing than the swiftest and most able being winners in the race.
The 50% division of who has natural capacity may be arbitary, but it reflects the fact that some are born with more natural linguistic ability than others. The motion of the cauldron is described –
What is this motion? Not hard; an artistic turning or artistic after-turning or artistic journey, i.e., it bestows good wisdom and nobility and honor after turning,
I picture the cauldron of motion as being the repository of our life experience, and how we choose fill, ie live our life, dictates how our poetic development turns out (no pun intended) and I am trying to figure how this turning type dream connects to the cauldron text. Maybe it's my equavalent of Yeats' automatic writing and the instructors who came and gave him metaphors to use in his writing.
But the quote which resonates with me most is by Pierre Curie, the husband of Marie, who stated -
You have to make your life a dream in order for your dreams to become reality.
I don't fully understand what this stage is all about and only have my own poetic experience to go by, but the process used to chart the topography I believe I’m anchored in and moving through, is one of intuition and this very powerful dream-snatch is one of the few I have experienced which I instinctively feel to be predictive.
Demios Oneiron is the Village of Dreams on the way to Hades in Greek myth and Artemidorus of Daldis in Asia Mionor was a 2C Roman writer who wrote the Oneirocritica, a critical study of 3000 people’s dreams. This was the first text Guttenberg printed after the bible, and indicates the importance it was held in during the dawning days of mass print.
Artemidorus categorized five dream states, 3 predictive and 2 non-predictive. The 3 predictive are –
1 – Oneiros – allegorical/symbolic
2 – Homora/visio - literal predictive
3 - Chrematismos/Oraculum – an apparition of God or other who tells fortune
But back to the dream. I was facing a small audience of fellow poets from the weekly Write and Recite grouping, and I was about to deliver a poem from memory. We were in some kind of half enclosed half outdoor environment and there was an invisible microphone in front of me, in the sense of I had a clear focus on exactly where my mouth had to position itself to speak. My intention was to lean back slightly, physically swivel round a full revolution on my right foot and, as I stomped down my left foot on successfully completing this manoeuvre, launch into a poem.
At the moment of first turning I noticed a tree to the left of me in a first budding of spring leaves which were the colour of pale apple skin and I said
we should give thanks for this,
- opining we should thank the creator for all life. As I went through the full revolution, everything occured in slow motion, and as the turn continued I immediately saw the back of a monk dressed in a brown woollen habit who was performing some kind of ceremony. I instinctively knew that I was witnessing, and had become part of, a scene from the 7C.
If you imagine a full circle of 360 degrees and a line down the middle splitting it in two, then the 21C audience of fellow poets were awaiting my performance in one half and did not see the 7C scene I had suddenly become privy to and which was happening opposite them in the opposing semi circle. It was as though they were facing an invisible three dimensional cinema screen showing a scene which ran down a centre line, and I had straddled either threshold to became part of these two realities simultaneously.
As soon as I caught site of the monk I felt an incredible surge of energy, as though I were a jump jet about to take off, and before my back was fully turned on the poet audience they witnessed my facial reaction to what I was seeing. But unaware of what I saw, they misread my expression and mistook it for one which signalled that I was going into comedic mode, and the first rumblings of a laughter cloud began to surge amongst them in that half of my dual reality. I realised that there had been some kind of slippage or kink in the fabric of the continuum and I had inadvertently become enmeshed in two existences at once, and a millisecond before completing the revolution I awoke with a start.
Artemidorus believed that the interpretation of dreams is nothing other than the juxtaposition of similarities.....
......and with one significant alteration, I can mangle this quote into service as the maxim describing my essential theory of poetry –
Poetry is nothing other than metaphor, or the juxtaposition of difference.
Essentially a combining of difference, which Samuel Johnston summed up in his essay on the metaphysical poets of the 17C
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
The basics of this, and the smallest component of a poem are startling word combinations that do not usually appear side by side, which constitute the kernel unitary pieces of poetry: words like - concrete/icecream tarmac/bagpipes or paperweight/tractor.
So these lie, like the start point in a set of concentric ripples, at the heart of the poetic art, and the furthest extension of them is the basic idea behind the conceit of a poem. So in Heaney's 1966 poem Digging,the various binary differences that appear in one whole to form the outer reaches of the basic conceits are -
father/son manual/mental pen/spade
and some of the startling word combinations are -
squat pen and loving the cool hardness.
From what I can gather through piecing together the various writings on Celtic poets from the bardic tradition, divinatory training began in the eighth year of study and culminated in Ollamh status. However not every poet was capable of oracular practice because the highest level of poetic insight was only gained by those who experienced the widest range of joy and sorrow.
The blueprint of
poem outlining how the poetic gift operates, states that everyone is born with three cauldrons in them.
A cauldron of Incubation - which is born upright in every person and which distributes wisdom in their youth.
A cauldron of wisdom, which is born on its lips (upside down) and which distributes wisdom in every art including poetry
A cauldron of motion, which is born on its lips in ignorant people and slanted in those with the poetic gift.
The cauldron of incubation and wisdom are only mentioned once and it is clear from the text that the cauldron of motion is by far the most significant, as this represents the potential and natural poetic capacity one is born with. The poem states that 50% of people are born with the cauldron slanted, and 50% with it on its lips or upside down.
So a person born with a slanted cauldron of motion is born with poetic potential, as it means it will be possible to fill up, and can be visualized like a glass tilted at 45 degrees beneath a tap, whose pouring of water will enter the glass. Every other person who is born with it on its lips means that their container is upside down and will be unable to fill, much like pouring water onto an upside down glass.
The water in this case comes in the form of the four human sorrows and four human joys in life, as outlined in the poem. Each joy or sorrow experienced is capable of turning the cauldron of motion, and the more it turns the more upright it becomes, until, in those who acheive the Highest Streams, it ends up on its back, and the highest ridges of poetic wisdom have been reached where the oracular poet's waffle and insight can froth over.
When the text is analysed it is pretty simple and commonsensical, as what it says is that anyone born with the poetic gift has the potential to reach the highest streams, but these will only come to those who experience the widest range of joy and sorrow, and couple it with hard writerly graft and constant study. Like any other profession, it is not necessarily the most naturally gifted who reach the top, but those who stick at it and go the full course. Michael Caine has an apt analogy which illustrates this idea. He says that actors from his generation found success through hanging on whilst everyone else dropped off, and it was more a case of the last few standing than the swiftest and most able being winners in the race.
The 50% division of who has natural capacity may be arbitary, but it reflects the fact that some are born with more natural linguistic ability than others. The motion of the cauldron is described –
What is this motion? Not hard; an artistic turning or artistic after-turning or artistic journey, i.e., it bestows good wisdom and nobility and honor after turning,
I picture the cauldron of motion as being the repository of our life experience, and how we choose fill, ie live our life, dictates how our poetic development turns out (no pun intended) and I am trying to figure how this turning type dream connects to the cauldron text. Maybe it's my equavalent of Yeats' automatic writing and the instructors who came and gave him metaphors to use in his writing.
But the quote which resonates with me most is by Pierre Curie, the husband of Marie, who stated -
You have to make your life a dream in order for your dreams to become reality.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
WRITE THROUGH
The two examples here chart the trajectory of my acquisition of a form called write through, which is when you use the words of one text and re-configure them into a different one.
The examples are the result of a very good exercise the poet can use to sharpen and focus their concentrational ability.Paul Durcan , in his Ireland Professor of poetry lecture on 15 February 2006, said something along the lines of poetry being the ability to turn concentration into contemplation. As though by sheer force of will you can concentrate something into poetic life; which conjours up
a John MacNamee phrase, bending the perimeters of consciousness. And this exercise certainly does that.
I wrote these two in May 2004, a month before I left writing school for a full time voluntary career in alcoholism and literary oblivion. I was sitting at my computer looking out into the back garden and the green spring view spurred me into setting about writing a scenary piece. I was plodding on with the description for an hour or so and just as tedium started to kick in my eye aprehended Ted Hughs's Lupercal and Sylvia Plath's The Collossus perched on the top of the monitor screen. I had got them out of the college library and was due to read them that night. As I scribbled away, an idea came after writing the line
my eye turns to
Lupercal resting on the Collossus.
I decided to juggle what I had already written and reconfigure the exact same words to create the second half of the piece. I would use all the words except Lupercal resting on the Collossus, which would only appear once, acting as a dividing line at the mid way point of the piece. I used all the same words, including the short conjoining words like and, then, the, etc. This isn't really a poem I would put in my collected, more a low grade abstraction which serves only as an example of the form. The words are irrelevant really, as they serve to show the process and demonstrate my first effort at this form.
Beyond the thin crevasse an upward thrust of green
and a snow like freeze of mottled tan
hawk across to subtle shades of tapering yellow,
brush verde’s tender final trickle
and caper to the edge of left.
A rake of garment
in stark white synthetic blue
hang inert
amidst the narrow band of late spring colour
whose tumbles of profuse symmetry merge
in precise disorder with the May dusk.
Birds call excited
and cry unseen
to cajole a dog’s gruff response
in the fading light.
Falling inward the black mood
retreats with the blue night
and I cast for line of weight
in the measured glare of nature's balance
and switch on mind to symbol as my eye turns to
Lupercal resting on The Colossus
The two minds whose symmetry in precise disorder
hang profuse in a gruff stark black mood
- beyond the upward edge of natures tender balance -
hawk amidst the line unseen
in synthetic shades of inert weight
and band across the thin crevasse and thrust symbols,
which merge by tumble in a rake of mottled colour.
Yellow green and tan caper into a white,
falling like snow to freeze verde blue.
Then - as excited birds of the May dusk -
they call my measured glare inward
and taper in retreat to a final trickle
then cast their subtle narrow cry
and cajole and dog my garment of response
to the late spring nightlight left fading
A highly bland read that doesn't go much beyond novelty, and would certainly not have Neil Astley or Michael Schmidt beating a bath to my inbox with a set of golden handcuffs, or the Barnsley bard Ian MacMillan sticking a microphone in my face expecting magic.
However, doing this was the mental equivalent of knocking down a brick wall and re-assembling it, forcing my mind to percieve each component word and, because of this seperation process, become more attentive to the precise structure of the initial text and alert to every single word. My mind felt like it were straining itself through a seive, as though I had undergone a first bout of physical exercise after a long spell of sedentariness. The fruits of this brain flexing was a sharpening of its overall sense of awareness to individual words, as the mind tweeked to a higher frequency of recognition; like being able to differentiate individual trees in a wood or gaining night vision.
This exercise was another one along the way of training my brain to become more flexible and responsive to the esence of language. By using small texts to seperate and reconfigure, the mind develops its ability to chop up, jumble, juggle and re-lay language, just like a builder disassembling a structure to reclaim the material for other uses.
I also understand now, that the mental fizz that acts of such concentration in composition creates, equates exactly with one of the four poetic joys inThe Cauldron of Poesy poem attributed to Amergin. This is translated by Rowan Laurie as the
joy of fitting poetic frenzy from the grinding away at the fair nuts of the nine hazels on the Well of Segais.
And creating the piece as a whole was a challenge whose pay off was a second of the 4 Amergin joys, which is the -
joy of the binding principle of wisdom after good (poetic) construction
Amergin's first joy perfectly describes the excitement we feel in our heads when composing, and the second captures the tranquil sense of completion which comes after our labours cease and their final product is there on-page to look upon and take poetic pleasure in; a sort of, "I made that" feeling, whicht engenders a sense of self dignity and pride.
So, with the mental froth in full bubble I decided to try again, but this time using a Hughes or Plath poem as the text to reconfigure. I read the books and settled on Plath's The Collossus. I wrote a 17 line run up before diving in and setting down the juggled Plath words.
Her's start after the line -----write through----- and are italicized; with the piece as a whole effectively being the second part of the above, blamanche like write through.
SYLVIA PLATH - WRITE THROUGH
Did she angle wonder on the grasp
extending reason her creation
drove wild beyond loathing,
by constantly digging in hunt of sound
to knit rock firm sharp pictures alive with,
like a gem stitched braid
upon whose surface
her eye discerned a myriad of texture?
Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterfly
wind chanced and framed like a Japanese print
of bold delicacy
fittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detail
where every line rehearsed perfection,
crisp as stalk fresh shoots?
Nosed in did her compass net an imprint of
discordant shadow in savage butt and jagged antinomy
absent of balance nature or measure
----------- write through---------
like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line?
Did she mix thirty years of laboured hours
in little pails and gluepots
to create an oracle married in shadow?
Crawl like an ant over immense dead stones
in the black fluted night
and proceed to entirely open
the lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?
Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throat
to bray at Orestiea,
or some Roman mule god with acanthine hair
scaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?
Was she never counted by her father
or others who
none the wiser
no longer listened
as she dredged her bawdy bones of mourning
and pieced together with blank eyes
her pithy historical mouthpiece
left to colour and stroke our ears?
Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of stars
which littered her tongue like lysol on clear white plates
climb ladders of weedy cypress jointed
by the wind of a blue sky arching above to
properley squat at some old forum and consider
landing keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?
This is a great method to use on small texts, particularly blogspot comments at various po mo sites, as you can take a slightly pompous sounding deposit and twist it about. It's not important to keep the exact same words I think, only for the very first one you do, as you effectively give yourself an unreal goal and acheive it once then slacken the rules to fit once done. Like deploying meter. Once you have that form to your own personal satisfaction, then you can use it how you wish.
The examples are the result of a very good exercise the poet can use to sharpen and focus their concentrational ability.
I wrote these two in May 2004, a month before I left writing school for a full time voluntary career in alcoholism and literary oblivion. I was sitting at my computer looking out into the back garden and the green spring view spurred me into setting about writing a scenary piece. I was plodding on with the description for an hour or so and just as tedium started to kick in my eye aprehended Ted Hughs's Lupercal and Sylvia Plath's The Collossus perched on the top of the monitor screen. I had got them out of the college library and was due to read them that night. As I scribbled away, an idea came after writing the line
my eye turns to
Lupercal resting on the Collossus.
I decided to juggle what I had already written and reconfigure the exact same words to create the second half of the piece. I would use all the words except Lupercal resting on the Collossus, which would only appear once, acting as a dividing line at the mid way point of the piece. I used all the same words, including the short conjoining words like and, then, the, etc. This isn't really a poem I would put in my collected, more a low grade abstraction which serves only as an example of the form. The words are irrelevant really, as they serve to show the process and demonstrate my first effort at this form.
Beyond the thin crevasse an upward thrust of green
and a snow like freeze of mottled tan
hawk across to subtle shades of tapering yellow,
brush verde’s tender final trickle
and caper to the edge of left.
A rake of garment
in stark white synthetic blue
hang inert
amidst the narrow band of late spring colour
whose tumbles of profuse symmetry merge
in precise disorder with the May dusk.
Birds call excited
and cry unseen
to cajole a dog’s gruff response
in the fading light.
Falling inward the black mood
retreats with the blue night
and I cast for line of weight
in the measured glare of nature's balance
and switch on mind to symbol as my eye turns to
Lupercal resting on The Colossus
The two minds whose symmetry in precise disorder
hang profuse in a gruff stark black mood
- beyond the upward edge of natures tender balance -
hawk amidst the line unseen
in synthetic shades of inert weight
and band across the thin crevasse and thrust symbols,
which merge by tumble in a rake of mottled colour.
Yellow green and tan caper into a white,
falling like snow to freeze verde blue.
Then - as excited birds of the May dusk -
they call my measured glare inward
and taper in retreat to a final trickle
then cast their subtle narrow cry
and cajole and dog my garment of response
to the late spring nightlight left fading
A highly bland read that doesn't go much beyond novelty, and would certainly not have Neil Astley or Michael Schmidt beating a bath to my inbox with a set of golden handcuffs, or the Barnsley bard Ian MacMillan sticking a microphone in my face expecting magic.
However, doing this was the mental equivalent of knocking down a brick wall and re-assembling it, forcing my mind to percieve each component word and, because of this seperation process, become more attentive to the precise structure of the initial text and alert to every single word. My mind felt like it were straining itself through a seive, as though I had undergone a first bout of physical exercise after a long spell of sedentariness. The fruits of this brain flexing was a sharpening of its overall sense of awareness to individual words, as the mind tweeked to a higher frequency of recognition; like being able to differentiate individual trees in a wood or gaining night vision.
This exercise was another one along the way of training my brain to become more flexible and responsive to the esence of language. By using small texts to seperate and reconfigure, the mind develops its ability to chop up, jumble, juggle and re-lay language, just like a builder disassembling a structure to reclaim the material for other uses.
I also understand now, that the mental fizz that acts of such concentration in composition creates, equates exactly with one of the four poetic joys in
joy of fitting poetic frenzy from the grinding away at the fair nuts of the nine hazels on the Well of Segais.
And creating the piece as a whole was a challenge whose pay off was a second of the 4 Amergin joys, which is the -
joy of the binding principle of wisdom after good (poetic) construction
Amergin's first joy perfectly describes the excitement we feel in our heads when composing, and the second captures the tranquil sense of completion which comes after our labours cease and their final product is there on-page to look upon and take poetic pleasure in; a sort of, "I made that" feeling, whicht engenders a sense of self dignity and pride.
So, with the mental froth in full bubble I decided to try again, but this time using a Hughes or Plath poem as the text to reconfigure. I read the books and settled on Plath's The Collossus. I wrote a 17 line run up before diving in and setting down the juggled Plath words.
Her's start after the line -----write through----- and are italicized; with the piece as a whole effectively being the second part of the above, blamanche like write through.
SYLVIA PLATH - WRITE THROUGH
Did she angle wonder on the grasp
extending reason her creation
drove wild beyond loathing,
by constantly digging in hunt of sound
to knit rock firm sharp pictures alive with,
like a gem stitched braid
upon whose surface
her eye discerned a myriad of texture?
Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterfly
wind chanced and framed like a Japanese print
of bold delicacy
fittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detail
where every line rehearsed perfection,
crisp as stalk fresh shoots?
Nosed in did her compass net an imprint of
discordant shadow in savage butt and jagged antinomy
absent of balance nature or measure
----------- write through---------
like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line?
Did she mix thirty years of laboured hours
in little pails and gluepots
to create an oracle married in shadow?
Crawl like an ant over immense dead stones
in the black fluted night
and proceed to entirely open
the lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?
Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throat
to bray at Orestiea,
or some Roman mule god with acanthine hair
scaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?
Was she never counted by her father
or others who
none the wiser
no longer listened
as she dredged her bawdy bones of mourning
and pieced together with blank eyes
her pithy historical mouthpiece
left to colour and stroke our ears?
Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of stars
which littered her tongue like lysol on clear white plates
climb ladders of weedy cypress jointed
by the wind of a blue sky arching above to
properley squat at some old forum and consider
landing keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?
This is a great method to use on small texts, particularly blogspot comments at various po mo sites, as you can take a slightly pompous sounding deposit and twist it about. It's not important to keep the exact same words I think, only for the very first one you do, as you effectively give yourself an unreal goal and acheive it once then slacken the rules to fit once done. Like deploying meter. Once you have that form to your own personal satisfaction, then you can use it how you wish.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Greg Delanty Collected Do
Yesterday I was in the drawing room at the Royal College of Surgeons witnessing Greg Delanty perform the significant operation of publicly birthing his Carcanet collected poem publication, which spans 1986-2006 and is a fusion of the seven books in his oeuvre. Being in the Surgeons is big time and only used to roll out large guns of the contemporary canon. Poets with the magic ingredient fingers don’t get put on; the oomph, spark and diddly dee jigger me wotsits from Tir nOg, which all Irish greats are famed as having in abundance. This was no ordinary Monday night launch; which have been held lately in the stark whitewashed basement of Damar hall, where mobile screens double as makeshift walls, shielding the audience from the sight of a humming computer bank.
An underground setting easily imaginable as the first choice destination for passengers travelling to eastern European cold spots this winter on CIA "rendition flights." A place where the run of the mill literary riff raff and lower orders launch their poetry books and christen them with several bottles of Poetry Ireland red or white, dished up in small plastic cups to deter the senior alcoholics from hogging the scarce supply of ale.
It was Sunday best all the way last night, as there was a full bar with robust measures freely available to all attendees, who were even trusted to sup from real glasses of ample size. Knocking back a few of these over the course of an hour or two means that the sensible boozer can set themselves up for a bargain night out. Instead of furtively drinking in the public parks with street drinkers, where there is a distinct lack of civilised exchange, the financially astute can lay down a firm base for further gargle whilst simultaneously imbibing the most cultural literary vibes in a city where to leisure is to learn. In Dublin it is possible to receive gratis what some happily pay through the nose for and is a feature I have attuned my radar to sniffing out, and one I greatly appreciate
The mob numbered around fifty, headed by he who shall remain nameless and a trio of warm up language workers eulogising a route of waffle to the Cork poet. First up to talk was Poetry Ireland director Joe Woods, who swiftly marked out what would happen next, spraying out guide lines which the duo following him engineered into a track of unbridled praise. Job done Joe was relieved from the next part of the operation by Carcanet publisher Michael Schmidt, who purred on site his small truck of words and emptied them as the short hardcore of spoken blurb upon which Boston University poetry professor Michael Ricks dolloped a final lay.
Schmidt’s address amounted to acknowledging Delanty as a talent in his stable who had spent a lot of time in America, informing us he (Schmidt) was approaching free bus pass age and saying Ricks had "defined the way I read poetry", when he taught him at Oxford. So, with the younger men out of the way Chris took centre stage and got to work on pumping up Greg, beginning with the history of how Delanty came to his attention. He told us how the widow of Alan Dowling, a man he considered untalented and described as a "bad rich poet" was responsible for setting up the prize in her dead husband's name, which brought a 24 year old Delanty to Ricks's notice and caused him to invite Greg to read at Cambridge. After that Delanty was off traipsing round the states carving out a career in verse and now he's back in the motherland with an emigre's bag of tricks to sing with.
A few TS Eliot quotes featured as the critical blueprints and buoys he used to construct and float his opinion that Delanty’s work contains "unholy glee and holy mirth" and that he "trusts his reader to take the point" without snickering at them. He quoted someone I failed to catch, saying that Delanty’s respect for the reader is because
"most people aren’t interested in poems because most poems aren’t interested in people, whereas Delanty "is."
He then read another quote written by Eliot at his most culturally paranoid, just before he took British citizenship. His old chestnut about the number of languages worth writing in being very small because only those with a national literature to draw on are somehow worthy. An argument whose logic would deny the world of English speaking American and Antipodean literature, and a quote which Ricks believes Eliot wrote in a very unsure state of mind, not really believing it himself. How this was woven into Delanty I cannot remember, but the Boston Prof continued by saying that what could be a cacophony in others, Delanty makes polyphonic, and what is left of his poetry is the "metal (feeling and thought) behind the words."
Ricks finished by reading the Delanty poem Phone Bird, in a speaking voice that made it impossible for me to detect when he had finished reading, and as he invited Delanty to step into the bardic circle to begin, claps drowned out his final few words.
Delanty read six poems competently enought and then we left to journey into the cold night air and go about our lives.
An underground setting easily imaginable as the first choice destination for passengers travelling to eastern European cold spots this winter on CIA "rendition flights." A place where the run of the mill literary riff raff and lower orders launch their poetry books and christen them with several bottles of Poetry Ireland red or white, dished up in small plastic cups to deter the senior alcoholics from hogging the scarce supply of ale.
It was Sunday best all the way last night, as there was a full bar with robust measures freely available to all attendees, who were even trusted to sup from real glasses of ample size. Knocking back a few of these over the course of an hour or two means that the sensible boozer can set themselves up for a bargain night out. Instead of furtively drinking in the public parks with street drinkers, where there is a distinct lack of civilised exchange, the financially astute can lay down a firm base for further gargle whilst simultaneously imbibing the most cultural literary vibes in a city where to leisure is to learn. In Dublin it is possible to receive gratis what some happily pay through the nose for and is a feature I have attuned my radar to sniffing out, and one I greatly appreciate
The mob numbered around fifty, headed by he who shall remain nameless and a trio of warm up language workers eulogising a route of waffle to the Cork poet. First up to talk was Poetry Ireland director Joe Woods, who swiftly marked out what would happen next, spraying out guide lines which the duo following him engineered into a track of unbridled praise. Job done Joe was relieved from the next part of the operation by Carcanet publisher Michael Schmidt, who purred on site his small truck of words and emptied them as the short hardcore of spoken blurb upon which Boston University poetry professor Michael Ricks dolloped a final lay.
Schmidt’s address amounted to acknowledging Delanty as a talent in his stable who had spent a lot of time in America, informing us he (Schmidt) was approaching free bus pass age and saying Ricks had "defined the way I read poetry", when he taught him at Oxford. So, with the younger men out of the way Chris took centre stage and got to work on pumping up Greg, beginning with the history of how Delanty came to his attention. He told us how the widow of Alan Dowling, a man he considered untalented and described as a "bad rich poet" was responsible for setting up the prize in her dead husband's name, which brought a 24 year old Delanty to Ricks's notice and caused him to invite Greg to read at Cambridge. After that Delanty was off traipsing round the states carving out a career in verse and now he's back in the motherland with an emigre's bag of tricks to sing with.
A few TS Eliot quotes featured as the critical blueprints and buoys he used to construct and float his opinion that Delanty’s work contains "unholy glee and holy mirth" and that he "trusts his reader to take the point" without snickering at them. He quoted someone I failed to catch, saying that Delanty’s respect for the reader is because
"most people aren’t interested in poems because most poems aren’t interested in people, whereas Delanty "is."
He then read another quote written by Eliot at his most culturally paranoid, just before he took British citizenship. His old chestnut about the number of languages worth writing in being very small because only those with a national literature to draw on are somehow worthy. An argument whose logic would deny the world of English speaking American and Antipodean literature, and a quote which Ricks believes Eliot wrote in a very unsure state of mind, not really believing it himself. How this was woven into Delanty I cannot remember, but the Boston Prof continued by saying that what could be a cacophony in others, Delanty makes polyphonic, and what is left of his poetry is the "metal (feeling and thought) behind the words."
Ricks finished by reading the Delanty poem Phone Bird, in a speaking voice that made it impossible for me to detect when he had finished reading, and as he invited Delanty to step into the bardic circle to begin, claps drowned out his final few words.
Delanty read six poems competently enought and then we left to journey into the cold night air and go about our lives.
Friday, February 24, 2006
Is there a readership for poets who can write in more than one form?
Is mastering the discipline of writing under strict rules, be they metrical, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or any other genre, a practical piece of kit for the mental mountaineer wishing to ascend the peaks of language and reach the higher ridges of poetical thought?
During the three years of attending writing school in my home town of Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK, I came to believe that the way to acheive non-combatant status in the continual poetry wars and avoid being the critical cannon fodder for any one group or individual would be to compose in as many forms as my learning revealed, from metrical verse right through to avant-garde forms and the newer genre of performance poetry. Whilst there my programme evolved to centre on memorising each poem I wrote before they reached a final written form, by editing and nailing them orally in the college theatre’s rehearsal rooms.
Metrical poetry was an absent other from the syllabus, casting an unspoken of shadow we were implicitly encouraged to ignore and consider as all but extinct. Treat like an aged aristocrat gasping their last beneath an oxygen tent of nostalgia, or holed up in a grace and favour bedist of a bankrupt stately home, whose faded grandeur, grip and influence had completely loosened and been deemed irrelevant.
The study of meter had not been factored into our learning because the poetry classes, traced an outline of modern and post modern verse, (mostly American) which dealt with contemporary forms and thoughts the working majority of mainstream word churners choose to ignore, dismiss or consider as irrelevant; in much the same way as their poetry and poetics can be rubbished by the spiritual avant-garde offspring of artits like Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein or Bob Cobbing.
Artists, like me, in the work-place of Cyberia creating software aided sound, sight, concrete and even conceptual poetry containing no words. Inspired by John Cage’s silent concerto, 4 minutes thirty three seconds, this is a one off, and once in a career poem whose only successful execution was authored by Charles Bernstein, and is a poem he is incapable of sounding and can be recited by anyone anywhere on the planet with access to peace and quiet.
Our six semester hike through the range of modern verse began at the base camp of Imagism, where we were issued an all in one Ezra Pound bible, blueprint, trail guide and survival pack; filled with instructions and ingredients for, hopefully, constructing our own poetic philosophy over the course of the next three years. The accumulative wisdom we were to distill into a final document summing up our stance with the world as trainee poets, and so, theoretically, leave as fully operational linguists equipped to sell our dream fare in a modern and crowded market place where poesy retails to consumers of verse.
For three hours a week and six in the final year, we traversed the landscape of American modernism from our college classroom, journeying through the foothills of Black Mountain poetry to the summit of Charles Olson's projective verse theory; which most of us failed to grasp, although we all tried to appear enlightened. The chronology of our studies mirrored the chronology of material looked at, and with only our Ezra-packs to sustain and show our minds how to travel through space and time, we ventured from North Carolina to San Francisco; teleporting to the City Lights bookshop looking for clues. We mopped up Ginnsberg and Kerouac's beat with a map of pink tinged toilet paper, which turned increasingly neon when our classes adjourned to the New York School, where we met Ashberry, Koch, O'Hara et al. Finally we felt our way through queer theory, touched on Amiri Baraka and terminated at the gates of Langpo.
The head scribe who set up and oversaw the degree programme is the linguistically innovative academic poet from the English avant-garde,Robert Sheppard
whose poetry modules compass a non-mainstream topography, charting a course where populist verse is cast in the role of suspect scion and heir to the Wordsworthean patriarch hitched to life support. A poetic kept in coma by the enemies of po-mo thinking, unbelieving faith healers such as Billy Heaney and Seamus Collins: top quacks of a medical team funded with government subsidy and the profits of commercial poetry.
During our time there we, in the words of the Mossbawn bard,
read the commentaries and presented ourselves as informed; by nodding gravely to mask any bemusement or simply not turning up to class; particularly during the final year when the really crazy theories kicked in.
The first afternoon of the final semester there were only three students who had voluntary signed up to the Reading and Writing as a Poet class. Present were Nicola, myself and Jennifer; a North Lancastrian and very gifted English major with a quirky voice from a similar vein of thought as the refreshingly talented poet Geraldine Monk, another Lancastrian. No one could fail to notice Jennifer's language gift, or the fact that she was stunningly attractive; but just as I was getting used to the idea of Robert, Jennifer, Nicola and I spending six hours a week in one another’s company creating and discussing the making of poetry, Robert decided to act. He went a few doors down the corridor to a short story class were the thirty nine other writing students in the year had elected to attend and shanghaied Neil, Stephanie, Katy and another young female student who rarely attended after that first afternoon.
However, the delights of sharing class time with the beautiful and gifted Jennifer were yet to come; as it was during the second year when being taught by a PhD student, Cliff Yates, that I decided to devote the next part of my learning to the study of and attempt to acquire, meterical form. This was because whenever I attempted to air the subject Cliff made it clear that this was a no go area. The make up of the module meant the nearly Dr Yates would grade my poetry, and as the deadline drew near people in the class began openly wondering how this could be done. What objective measuring could be deployed, particularly on a course that is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry based where the theoretical datums are so recently chalked up and, for some, incredibly difficult to locate?
Although learning to float ideas in the increasingly scientific tide of a 21C poetic drew out a proficient sense of how to achieve buoyancy in the open seas of composition, the fact that our swimming instructor had no metrical aids or training made me all the more curious about this form. My instinct was telling me that it must be important because, up until Pound if poetry wasn't written in a metrical form, the finished article was just not considered poetry.
What was even more obvious was how dense and disconnected much of the critical writing around poetry was; as though the complexities of the topic up for chat were on a par with understanding the mechanics of space travel or brain surgery. A quantumn linguistics class taught by a poet scientist who would run our finished work through the deep throught of some NASA strength software to compute a final and fixed decision on our overall talent for word play.
It was becoming increasingly clear that the highly detailed and hard to follow positions and definitions of what poetry is which were being offered to us by many of the writers, was the product of an industry. A job at the academic factory seemed to be what the end goal of education was all about for would be modern poets. Get taken on by the boss poet or writer whose philiosophies would have to be your own before the name plate could be affixed to the cubicle door from where you could begin launching yourself upon the literary world. A fully paid up member of the respectable poetry world, playing the game and taking part.
I had recently finished reading a bookUriel's Machine
written by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. This book charts the history of freemasonary and specualtes on the stellar mathamatics and perfect accuracy used by the neolithic architects who designed the still standing stone age buildings at Newrgrange.
There is a monastry that is now a hotel tucked off the main A59 dual carrigeway at Aughton on the SW Lancashire border with Merseyside and Liverpool. The hotel and one time home of monks is at the far end of a field which is a few meters opposite the house and was used by dogs and their walkers in the autumn after it had been cropped, up to the following sprng. I was with the dog journeying from the road and through the hedge gap onto the field, when an image of the sun, obscured and orange like the lit tip of a cigarette behind the thick mist, struck itself into my mind and I harnessed the swirl of ideas this set in motion as the theme of this piece.
AUGHTON
The yellow orange sunset jumble glows
through silver prism mist clinging to straw
stumped grey winter fields depleted by cold
and as golden summer crops have been shorn
by harvest blades autumn yieldings mow
the dog jumps through a gap in the hawthorn
bounding towards a priory built of sandstone:
a place once governed by monastic law
-----------------------------
Did monks believe souls sped along alone
to fulfill the plan of a rising dawn
as Uriel told Enoch long ago,
that countless lives in time surge toward
space near where matter compels spirits flow
and exchange their urges to be born
instant, anew to eternally glow
by leaping one to other in the storm?
Is mastering the discipline of writing under strict rules, be they metrical, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or any other genre, a practical piece of kit for the mental mountaineer wishing to ascend the peaks of language and reach the higher ridges of poetical thought?
During the three years of attending writing school in my home town of Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK, I came to believe that the way to acheive non-combatant status in the continual poetry wars and avoid being the critical cannon fodder for any one group or individual would be to compose in as many forms as my learning revealed, from metrical verse right through to avant-garde forms and the newer genre of performance poetry. Whilst there my programme evolved to centre on memorising each poem I wrote before they reached a final written form, by editing and nailing them orally in the college theatre’s rehearsal rooms.
Metrical poetry was an absent other from the syllabus, casting an unspoken of shadow we were implicitly encouraged to ignore and consider as all but extinct. Treat like an aged aristocrat gasping their last beneath an oxygen tent of nostalgia, or holed up in a grace and favour bedist of a bankrupt stately home, whose faded grandeur, grip and influence had completely loosened and been deemed irrelevant.
The study of meter had not been factored into our learning because the poetry classes, traced an outline of modern and post modern verse, (mostly American) which dealt with contemporary forms and thoughts the working majority of mainstream word churners choose to ignore, dismiss or consider as irrelevant; in much the same way as their poetry and poetics can be rubbished by the spiritual avant-garde offspring of artits like Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein or Bob Cobbing.
Artists, like me, in the work-place of Cyberia creating software aided sound, sight, concrete and even conceptual poetry containing no words. Inspired by John Cage’s silent concerto, 4 minutes thirty three seconds, this is a one off, and once in a career poem whose only successful execution was authored by Charles Bernstein, and is a poem he is incapable of sounding and can be recited by anyone anywhere on the planet with access to peace and quiet.
Our six semester hike through the range of modern verse began at the base camp of Imagism, where we were issued an all in one Ezra Pound bible, blueprint, trail guide and survival pack; filled with instructions and ingredients for, hopefully, constructing our own poetic philosophy over the course of the next three years. The accumulative wisdom we were to distill into a final document summing up our stance with the world as trainee poets, and so, theoretically, leave as fully operational linguists equipped to sell our dream fare in a modern and crowded market place where poesy retails to consumers of verse.
For three hours a week and six in the final year, we traversed the landscape of American modernism from our college classroom, journeying through the foothills of Black Mountain poetry to the summit of Charles Olson's projective verse theory; which most of us failed to grasp, although we all tried to appear enlightened. The chronology of our studies mirrored the chronology of material looked at, and with only our Ezra-packs to sustain and show our minds how to travel through space and time, we ventured from North Carolina to San Francisco; teleporting to the City Lights bookshop looking for clues. We mopped up Ginnsberg and Kerouac's beat with a map of pink tinged toilet paper, which turned increasingly neon when our classes adjourned to the New York School, where we met Ashberry, Koch, O'Hara et al. Finally we felt our way through queer theory, touched on Amiri Baraka and terminated at the gates of Langpo.
The head scribe who set up and oversaw the degree programme is the linguistically innovative academic poet from the English avant-garde,
whose poetry modules compass a non-mainstream topography, charting a course where populist verse is cast in the role of suspect scion and heir to the Wordsworthean patriarch hitched to life support. A poetic kept in coma by the enemies of po-mo thinking, unbelieving faith healers such as Billy Heaney and Seamus Collins: top quacks of a medical team funded with government subsidy and the profits of commercial poetry.
During our time there we, in the words of the Mossbawn bard,
read the commentaries and presented ourselves as informed; by nodding gravely to mask any bemusement or simply not turning up to class; particularly during the final year when the really crazy theories kicked in.
The first afternoon of the final semester there were only three students who had voluntary signed up to the Reading and Writing as a Poet class. Present were Nicola, myself and Jennifer; a North Lancastrian and very gifted English major with a quirky voice from a similar vein of thought as the refreshingly talented poet Geraldine Monk, another Lancastrian. No one could fail to notice Jennifer's language gift, or the fact that she was stunningly attractive; but just as I was getting used to the idea of Robert, Jennifer, Nicola and I spending six hours a week in one another’s company creating and discussing the making of poetry, Robert decided to act. He went a few doors down the corridor to a short story class were the thirty nine other writing students in the year had elected to attend and shanghaied Neil, Stephanie, Katy and another young female student who rarely attended after that first afternoon.
However, the delights of sharing class time with the beautiful and gifted Jennifer were yet to come; as it was during the second year when being taught by a PhD student, Cliff Yates, that I decided to devote the next part of my learning to the study of and attempt to acquire, meterical form. This was because whenever I attempted to air the subject Cliff made it clear that this was a no go area. The make up of the module meant the nearly Dr Yates would grade my poetry, and as the deadline drew near people in the class began openly wondering how this could be done. What objective measuring could be deployed, particularly on a course that is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry based where the theoretical datums are so recently chalked up and, for some, incredibly difficult to locate?
Although learning to float ideas in the increasingly scientific tide of a 21C poetic drew out a proficient sense of how to achieve buoyancy in the open seas of composition, the fact that our swimming instructor had no metrical aids or training made me all the more curious about this form. My instinct was telling me that it must be important because, up until Pound if poetry wasn't written in a metrical form, the finished article was just not considered poetry.
What was even more obvious was how dense and disconnected much of the critical writing around poetry was; as though the complexities of the topic up for chat were on a par with understanding the mechanics of space travel or brain surgery. A quantumn linguistics class taught by a poet scientist who would run our finished work through the deep throught of some NASA strength software to compute a final and fixed decision on our overall talent for word play.
It was becoming increasingly clear that the highly detailed and hard to follow positions and definitions of what poetry is which were being offered to us by many of the writers, was the product of an industry. A job at the academic factory seemed to be what the end goal of education was all about for would be modern poets. Get taken on by the boss poet or writer whose philiosophies would have to be your own before the name plate could be affixed to the cubicle door from where you could begin launching yourself upon the literary world. A fully paid up member of the respectable poetry world, playing the game and taking part.
I had recently finished reading a book
written by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. This book charts the history of freemasonary and specualtes on the stellar mathamatics and perfect accuracy used by the neolithic architects who designed the still standing stone age buildings at Newrgrange.
There is a monastry that is now a hotel tucked off the main A59 dual carrigeway at Aughton on the SW Lancashire border with Merseyside and Liverpool. The hotel and one time home of monks is at the far end of a field which is a few meters opposite the house and was used by dogs and their walkers in the autumn after it had been cropped, up to the following sprng. I was with the dog journeying from the road and through the hedge gap onto the field, when an image of the sun, obscured and orange like the lit tip of a cigarette behind the thick mist, struck itself into my mind and I harnessed the swirl of ideas this set in motion as the theme of this piece.
AUGHTON
The yellow orange sunset jumble glows
through silver prism mist clinging to straw
stumped grey winter fields depleted by cold
and as golden summer crops have been shorn
by harvest blades autumn yieldings mow
the dog jumps through a gap in the hawthorn
bounding towards a priory built of sandstone:
a place once governed by monastic law
-----------------------------
Did monks believe souls sped along alone
to fulfill the plan of a rising dawn
as Uriel told Enoch long ago,
that countless lives in time surge toward
space near where matter compels spirits flow
and exchange their urges to be born
instant, anew to eternally glow
by leaping one to other in the storm?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
OGMA ME EYE
I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago. I recieved a small diary for a Christmas gift which also had a detachable and refillable jotter pad the size of the diary itself neatly tucked in the back cover; so effectively it was a mini notebook. I had never used one before, but as the new year started I began using it for jotting down word combos, as and when they struck me or I heard them. It was turning into a very handy little book as it was small enough to comfortably fit in my coat pocket. I usually use an A4 size hardback jotter and a mechanical pencil, but cycling home from my sisters along the coast one evening three weeks ago, I stopped and sat gazing out over to Howth and took out the diary.
It was dark, but the light from the street lamps cast enough light to write with and I wrote the first line down as I heard a bird skimming the water. Then as the days passed and the book started taking shape I realised that my writing process was evolving into using a smaller book. It made sense because, unlike the A4 hardbacks where you can ream out the words, this small book was condensing the words down, and making me a lot more aware that page size has an effect on the pysche. This is how Raymond chandler used to write. He would put a very small yellow paper in the typewriter to concentrate his writing, as the less words that can fit on the page the more you think on what words get put down and, so the theory goes, the less room for flab.
The diary had two parts, the blank jotter, which had turned out great for research notes, and the diary itself, which I was starting to use in an innovative way. Every page had a quote at the top and the physical lines of the layout (which broke the day down into two hour blocks) meant I could experiment with how the shape of the poem evolved, as it could incorporate the few words already printed on the page. After two weeks I had three drafts working up, which I felt were an improvement on my usual stuff and I was effectively in a process of refining my compositional method.
However last week I had a bit of bad luck. I got my dual MP3 recorder/radio and memory stick stolen from a public internet shop I use, after forgetting to take it out of the computer when I left. When I returned twenty minutes later after realising I had left it behind, it was gone. I was gutted because it had lots of files I hadn't backed up and have had to chase around the net for, and my recording activity has been temporarily halted. It recorded in two modes, one the quality of a very good dictaphone and the other, a line in function that took a microphone and recorded to CD quality. All a third of the size of a mobile phone.
Prior to losing it I was a one man walking studio who could record anywhere, so I was gutted. That night I went out, got drunk and lost my only decent coat, an all weather one with detachable fleece. And in the pocket? Yep, the diary where my inchoate methods were taking shape. And in the two weeks prior to this I had two bicycles stolen, one of which I still owe 40 euros for, and guess where the guys number is? Diary again. And the final twist was that on the Valentines night when I lost the MP3 and coat I had just delivered a letter and three poems (to prove my bona fides) to Ralph Fiennes who is appearing at a theatre here, asking him if I could record him reciting a poem of his choice. Naturally he hasn't got back to me.
But poetry is an art of faith and a week later I have tried to shake off any negativity by just keeping going and writing, knowing that adversity can only make me stronger in the long run.
OGMA ME EYE
In open seas of composition
- by swimming twenty yards out to seer
the pre-verbal
tweet of an idea -
float on an opaque signifier
but be alert and unspeaking of what
lifts beneath you
waking the voice within
Then
consciously perch like a gentle merman
or migrating sea bird awaiting to sweep
across still shallow waters and
sit understanding
the incoming tide
divining to hear what word god
returns when the odds of hitting
aural bullseyes cease to be wrongly spoken of
It was dark, but the light from the street lamps cast enough light to write with and I wrote the first line down as I heard a bird skimming the water. Then as the days passed and the book started taking shape I realised that my writing process was evolving into using a smaller book. It made sense because, unlike the A4 hardbacks where you can ream out the words, this small book was condensing the words down, and making me a lot more aware that page size has an effect on the pysche. This is how Raymond chandler used to write. He would put a very small yellow paper in the typewriter to concentrate his writing, as the less words that can fit on the page the more you think on what words get put down and, so the theory goes, the less room for flab.
The diary had two parts, the blank jotter, which had turned out great for research notes, and the diary itself, which I was starting to use in an innovative way. Every page had a quote at the top and the physical lines of the layout (which broke the day down into two hour blocks) meant I could experiment with how the shape of the poem evolved, as it could incorporate the few words already printed on the page. After two weeks I had three drafts working up, which I felt were an improvement on my usual stuff and I was effectively in a process of refining my compositional method.
However last week I had a bit of bad luck. I got my dual MP3 recorder/radio and memory stick stolen from a public internet shop I use, after forgetting to take it out of the computer when I left. When I returned twenty minutes later after realising I had left it behind, it was gone. I was gutted because it had lots of files I hadn't backed up and have had to chase around the net for, and my recording activity has been temporarily halted. It recorded in two modes, one the quality of a very good dictaphone and the other, a line in function that took a microphone and recorded to CD quality. All a third of the size of a mobile phone.
Prior to losing it I was a one man walking studio who could record anywhere, so I was gutted. That night I went out, got drunk and lost my only decent coat, an all weather one with detachable fleece. And in the pocket? Yep, the diary where my inchoate methods were taking shape. And in the two weeks prior to this I had two bicycles stolen, one of which I still owe 40 euros for, and guess where the guys number is? Diary again. And the final twist was that on the Valentines night when I lost the MP3 and coat I had just delivered a letter and three poems (to prove my bona fides) to Ralph Fiennes who is appearing at a theatre here, asking him if I could record him reciting a poem of his choice. Naturally he hasn't got back to me.
But poetry is an art of faith and a week later I have tried to shake off any negativity by just keeping going and writing, knowing that adversity can only make me stronger in the long run.
OGMA ME EYE
In open seas of composition
- by swimming twenty yards out to seer
the pre-verbal
tweet of an idea -
float on an opaque signifier
but be alert and unspeaking of what
lifts beneath you
waking the voice within
Then
consciously perch like a gentle merman
or migrating sea bird awaiting to sweep
across still shallow waters and
sit understanding
the incoming tide
divining to hear what word god
returns when the odds of hitting
aural bullseyes cease to be wrongly spoken of
Saturday, February 18, 2006
VIEW FROM A BRIT
Dear Reader
Yesterday, on Friday 17 February I attended a Bank of Ireland lunchtime poetry reading in Foster Place, Dublin where the human warmth of Michael Longley was on display, and I will post up something on his reading another day. I started this post with the intention of writing about the Longley reading, but ended up musing on the eternal question of what it means to be Irish; not to the degree or depths commentators such as Fintan O'Toole do, but from my own perspective as a second generation "plastic Paddy brit"
The Friday event goes under the banner Out to Lunch, takes place every other Friday at 1.15pm and lasts for around half an hour. The man who runs it and introduces the poets is called John MacNamee, who is a bit of a local legend here. He is a Dubliner, early sixties and behind the old school gruff mask of being too cool to chit chat or shoot the breeze with anyone who has less than two books published, I detect he is actually a very warm man with a good heart. His own book The Man in the Hat is a memoir of short anecdotes sketching an autobiography of traipsing the globe as a tortured poet and living hand to mouth in the warm pool of crocodiles that is literary Dublin.
The idea that literary Dublin is founded upon a very healthy tradition of hostility and hatred, with groups of individuals bonding through mutual bitterness towards those who acheive any degree of artistic or material success, is a cliche I detect holds some comedic truth. I have witnessed this darker part of human unkindness in the famed celtic rapier wit and it can be summed up in a Bono anecdote, which goes along the lines that in America people see the guy who done good with a mansion on the hill and say -
"One day, I'm gonna be that guy."
Whereas in Dublin and Ireland they say -
"One day, I'm gonna get/kill that guy."
And whilst this is obviously a stab at black humour it does illustrate an aspect of the Irish pysche which, I think, ultimately roots back to the warlike nature of the celt, and the notion that an Irish person could have a fight in an empty phonebox. The whole mythology of the land centres on the idea of war as sport and warrior bands cattle raiding, with various petty kings forming military alliances to invade other petty kingdoms for booty and mutual profit; and when the tide of events and politics changed, alliances would dissolve and new ones be made. One year two political and social units could be united in arms and the following year, facing each other on opposing sides of the battle.
This traditional behaviour was normal commercial practice, as the whole corpus of gaelic fenechas civil law testifies to; and whatever was the most opportune alliance to make at the time were the ones that came into being. This translated into there being a robust set of customs condusive to fostering long standing animosity and enmity between groups at constant squabble or fight, whose leaders were well versed in adopting theatrical posturings to whip up a frenzy of indignation and outrage as an appropriate pretext to embark on raids whose whole purpose was the material seizure of goods from their neighbours.
But when Cromwell came at the start of 17C and the "in house" "war as sport" fighting turned its focus outward to a "common brutal foe" (which exploited local politics by enlisting the aid of one tribe against another) a long process began which telescoped all greivance towards the English crown, culminating in the modern tradition of hating the brits; a public enemy number one who the Irish were taught to hate from birth up until the recent economic boom, when their minds tuned into putting euros in their pocket rather than verbally sticking it to the absent brits at all available opportunities. This whole area is still a can of worms, but since the 1994 ceasefire and resulting reletive stability the average young person in Ireland today is not being brought up in the same way as many of their parents and grandparents were; to blame the brits for all of Ireland's, and by extension their own personal, ills, long after majority independence had been gained and when most of the protaganists of the civil war are dead. A few months back I overheard a Dubliner in a pub blaming a brit bloke for him being unable to speak the Irish language. In a completely serious and straight faced register the man told him it was his country's fault, the brit's, that he the Dub had been denied his linguistical birthright.
The brit looked lost, all he was after was the craic he'd seen on the adverts, the smiling Irish with a 1000 welcomes, and he hadn't bargained on paying through the nose for the fun of standing trial in front of a one man international court of humanity wanting to know what he, the brit, had to say about him, the Dub, not speaking Irish. The brit said he was born in 1965, nearly forty three years after independence, and anyway, pre-1922 when he and the Dub were in Tir nOg awaiting their brief return to mortality, all four of his Irish grandparents were in Ireland fighting the brits; but if it helped he would take the blame and buy the next round.
Ok, Ok, I didn't overhear it at all, you guessed right, it was me getting the third degree. But this question of hate runs so deep it is difficult for the outsider to understand or someone in my boat to coherently express in a way which does not lead to cliche or invoke danger.
Trying to accurately trace what many believe to lie at the very centre point of the Irish understanding is a difficult task, as I beleive that the kernel resting there is something which is the essence of poetry itself; the two opposing forces of war and peace which characterise the Irish, the Plato's egg of saints and sinners or scholars and bandits mentality of two contrasting things within the whole which seem more obvious here than elsewhere.
But ultimately, what I am trying to get across is the nature of Dublin poets, whose lineage leads back to Yeats; a masterful and magisterial poet, as well as being a first rate snob, toff, complete spacer, one of the most significant poets of the 20C and someone who was the embodiment of all the these conflicting differences; but who I also think, shoulders a fair amount of responsiblity for the tradition of Dublin poets being stand-offish.
When, in the words of Patrick Kavanagh, "Yeats handed in his gun," and figures such as Austin Clarke, Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien and Kavanagh himself filled the topography, the Yeatsean role model of the poet as a distant, removed and frosty mystic had taken firm root, which has resulted in a legacy of Dublin poets cultivating a remote, disinterested and incurious bearing when out and about.
An essence of this persona is captured in the famous cartoon of AE (George Russell) and WB Yeats, so absorbed in their own contemplations as they gaze skyward that they do not notice each other as they cross on the pavement when journeying to one another's respective gaffes a few houses apart on Merrion Square.
And when Kavanagh died and his shadowy laurel tiara fell into the Dublin literary ring for the current crop of pensioners to sing possession of, his behavioural legacy of being snappy, brusque, bluff and dismissing all competition who entered his orbit with a throwaway quip was taken up by the new (now old) crop of mainly university educated wannabees hoping to become head Oollamh.
Many Dublin-centric poets in their late summer years have a stock Kavanagh anecdote that takes place in the learning temple of a pub where the Monaghan magus plays up the role of a man bored with their presence and barking out one-liner maxims in between studying the form of the gee gees. It is ironic that this most superficial, uneducated Kavanagh in the boozer vibe is the one perpetuated by the first wave who benifited from education, and I recognise this snippy, bearish and gruff habit of social non-intercourse as being a prevalent common denominator within the various stratal groupings. From lightweight open micers to the magus heavyweights of contemporary verse the main feature in the bearpit of writerly interaction is, that many are expert ignorers and deploy this tactic as the main weapon of choice.
From the humblest scribblers gathering to the glitziest of talks and book launches a strict heirarchy of behaviour operates, which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye; so Paul will talk to Michael but not John, unless it's a low grade do where Michael is absent and the only others in attendance are non-members of the public (the lowest currency of all in literary Dublin) who don't count as they are blind to the subtleties of literary politics and aren't in the loop of gossip to publicise any untoward relations. In Irish life appearances are highly important as the veneer of normality which drape the real machinations, and even if you are a moral bankrupt behind closed doors, being seen in an exchange with those beneath you in the poetry pecking order is considered bad form in a land where nod and elbow languages rule supreme.
And the example given contains only three variables. Once the full compliment of wafflers congregate and all the various performers and factions go to their various lengths to ignore or catch one another's eye, the acting that occurs is on a par with a student pantomime. The sorriest sight is lone writer A sniffing round the personal body space of writer B as s/he converses with someone else they consider being at least their equaly stature, in a deeply fascinating chat initiated for the sole purpose of ignoring A.
Most Dublin poets I have come across have a very keen sense of their own status within the milieu, as a pack of lettered humans sniffing, wagging tails and growling at the underdogs and runts to keep outside the territory or deferring submissively to those with bigger barks, and this is the tradition John MacNamee was born into. A culture where even the corner boys measuring their spits have a strict ethical policy of who's who. However, lurking buried beneath the grave fronts of tombstone posturing I strongly sense the eternal child wanting to play; swap ideas, smile, laugh and make friends over a bit of daftness. But the Yeats legacy, compounded by Kavanagh and coupled with the traumatic Dublin heritage of booze sodden learning and the clerics of fear who warped the nation's pysche has left its mark in the form of a mask worn as armour which, once seen through, allows the alert bystander a full view of the Dublin poets common humanity we all possess.
The social plating which is so prevalent in other poets I have met was gloriously absent from Longley and his aura was that of a benign grandfather, which he is four times over to grandsons, and he stated that he was going on "grandfather strike until I get a grandaughter," a gag which raised a titter in the mixed audience of middle aged surburbanites, leaving cert students, the ne'r do well usual suspects (myself included) and the odd spattering of nuns. His capacity for making an immediate human connection was apparent from the off when a succession of latecomers straggled in during the first ten minutes, and Longley stopped his reading, beckoning them in and pointing out vacant seats; acting with an essential kindness conspicous by its absence at other gatherings I have attended.
His behaviour affirms my belief that often the larger the artist's reputation, the more approachable and down to earth they are, as they have discovered their own truth and exist and survive as an artist in the way Heaney so eloquently states, in their "own esteem," undriven by the ego of "moi." Paula Meehan echoed the first part of this sentiment during the 2004 Kavanagh prize award to Joe Horgan when she said that poets starting out storming the entrance to an exclusive literary citadel they imagine exist, climbing over the walls and launching all sorts of assualts of entry; once inside the walls, realise that there is no "there" to get to; that the artist or poet has to construct that mental reality themselves. As well as the author, they are the printer and publisher of their own passport and artist's ID card, which does not manifest itself as a physical document of valedation, but as an impress of the mind only they the creator can stamp through belief. The art of faith that is poetry.
Yesterday, on Friday 17 February I attended a Bank of Ireland lunchtime poetry reading in Foster Place, Dublin where the human warmth of Michael Longley was on display, and I will post up something on his reading another day. I started this post with the intention of writing about the Longley reading, but ended up musing on the eternal question of what it means to be Irish; not to the degree or depths commentators such as Fintan O'Toole do, but from my own perspective as a second generation "plastic Paddy brit"
The Friday event goes under the banner Out to Lunch, takes place every other Friday at 1.15pm and lasts for around half an hour. The man who runs it and introduces the poets is called John MacNamee, who is a bit of a local legend here. He is a Dubliner, early sixties and behind the old school gruff mask of being too cool to chit chat or shoot the breeze with anyone who has less than two books published, I detect he is actually a very warm man with a good heart. His own book The Man in the Hat is a memoir of short anecdotes sketching an autobiography of traipsing the globe as a tortured poet and living hand to mouth in the warm pool of crocodiles that is literary Dublin.
The idea that literary Dublin is founded upon a very healthy tradition of hostility and hatred, with groups of individuals bonding through mutual bitterness towards those who acheive any degree of artistic or material success, is a cliche I detect holds some comedic truth. I have witnessed this darker part of human unkindness in the famed celtic rapier wit and it can be summed up in a Bono anecdote, which goes along the lines that in America people see the guy who done good with a mansion on the hill and say -
"One day, I'm gonna be that guy."
Whereas in Dublin and Ireland they say -
"One day, I'm gonna get/kill that guy."
And whilst this is obviously a stab at black humour it does illustrate an aspect of the Irish pysche which, I think, ultimately roots back to the warlike nature of the celt, and the notion that an Irish person could have a fight in an empty phonebox. The whole mythology of the land centres on the idea of war as sport and warrior bands cattle raiding, with various petty kings forming military alliances to invade other petty kingdoms for booty and mutual profit; and when the tide of events and politics changed, alliances would dissolve and new ones be made. One year two political and social units could be united in arms and the following year, facing each other on opposing sides of the battle.
This traditional behaviour was normal commercial practice, as the whole corpus of gaelic fenechas civil law testifies to; and whatever was the most opportune alliance to make at the time were the ones that came into being. This translated into there being a robust set of customs condusive to fostering long standing animosity and enmity between groups at constant squabble or fight, whose leaders were well versed in adopting theatrical posturings to whip up a frenzy of indignation and outrage as an appropriate pretext to embark on raids whose whole purpose was the material seizure of goods from their neighbours.
But when Cromwell came at the start of 17C and the "in house" "war as sport" fighting turned its focus outward to a "common brutal foe" (which exploited local politics by enlisting the aid of one tribe against another) a long process began which telescoped all greivance towards the English crown, culminating in the modern tradition of hating the brits; a public enemy number one who the Irish were taught to hate from birth up until the recent economic boom, when their minds tuned into putting euros in their pocket rather than verbally sticking it to the absent brits at all available opportunities. This whole area is still a can of worms, but since the 1994 ceasefire and resulting reletive stability the average young person in Ireland today is not being brought up in the same way as many of their parents and grandparents were; to blame the brits for all of Ireland's, and by extension their own personal, ills, long after majority independence had been gained and when most of the protaganists of the civil war are dead. A few months back I overheard a Dubliner in a pub blaming a brit bloke for him being unable to speak the Irish language. In a completely serious and straight faced register the man told him it was his country's fault, the brit's, that he the Dub had been denied his linguistical birthright.
The brit looked lost, all he was after was the craic he'd seen on the adverts, the smiling Irish with a 1000 welcomes, and he hadn't bargained on paying through the nose for the fun of standing trial in front of a one man international court of humanity wanting to know what he, the brit, had to say about him, the Dub, not speaking Irish. The brit said he was born in 1965, nearly forty three years after independence, and anyway, pre-1922 when he and the Dub were in Tir nOg awaiting their brief return to mortality, all four of his Irish grandparents were in Ireland fighting the brits; but if it helped he would take the blame and buy the next round.
Ok, Ok, I didn't overhear it at all, you guessed right, it was me getting the third degree. But this question of hate runs so deep it is difficult for the outsider to understand or someone in my boat to coherently express in a way which does not lead to cliche or invoke danger.
Trying to accurately trace what many believe to lie at the very centre point of the Irish understanding is a difficult task, as I beleive that the kernel resting there is something which is the essence of poetry itself; the two opposing forces of war and peace which characterise the Irish, the Plato's egg of saints and sinners or scholars and bandits mentality of two contrasting things within the whole which seem more obvious here than elsewhere.
But ultimately, what I am trying to get across is the nature of Dublin poets, whose lineage leads back to Yeats; a masterful and magisterial poet, as well as being a first rate snob, toff, complete spacer, one of the most significant poets of the 20C and someone who was the embodiment of all the these conflicting differences; but who I also think, shoulders a fair amount of responsiblity for the tradition of Dublin poets being stand-offish.
When, in the words of Patrick Kavanagh, "Yeats handed in his gun," and figures such as Austin Clarke, Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien and Kavanagh himself filled the topography, the Yeatsean role model of the poet as a distant, removed and frosty mystic had taken firm root, which has resulted in a legacy of Dublin poets cultivating a remote, disinterested and incurious bearing when out and about.
An essence of this persona is captured in the famous cartoon of AE (George Russell) and WB Yeats, so absorbed in their own contemplations as they gaze skyward that they do not notice each other as they cross on the pavement when journeying to one another's respective gaffes a few houses apart on Merrion Square.
And when Kavanagh died and his shadowy laurel tiara fell into the Dublin literary ring for the current crop of pensioners to sing possession of, his behavioural legacy of being snappy, brusque, bluff and dismissing all competition who entered his orbit with a throwaway quip was taken up by the new (now old) crop of mainly university educated wannabees hoping to become head Oollamh.
Many Dublin-centric poets in their late summer years have a stock Kavanagh anecdote that takes place in the learning temple of a pub where the Monaghan magus plays up the role of a man bored with their presence and barking out one-liner maxims in between studying the form of the gee gees. It is ironic that this most superficial, uneducated Kavanagh in the boozer vibe is the one perpetuated by the first wave who benifited from education, and I recognise this snippy, bearish and gruff habit of social non-intercourse as being a prevalent common denominator within the various stratal groupings. From lightweight open micers to the magus heavyweights of contemporary verse the main feature in the bearpit of writerly interaction is, that many are expert ignorers and deploy this tactic as the main weapon of choice.
From the humblest scribblers gathering to the glitziest of talks and book launches a strict heirarchy of behaviour operates, which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye; so Paul will talk to Michael but not John, unless it's a low grade do where Michael is absent and the only others in attendance are non-members of the public (the lowest currency of all in literary Dublin) who don't count as they are blind to the subtleties of literary politics and aren't in the loop of gossip to publicise any untoward relations. In Irish life appearances are highly important as the veneer of normality which drape the real machinations, and even if you are a moral bankrupt behind closed doors, being seen in an exchange with those beneath you in the poetry pecking order is considered bad form in a land where nod and elbow languages rule supreme.
And the example given contains only three variables. Once the full compliment of wafflers congregate and all the various performers and factions go to their various lengths to ignore or catch one another's eye, the acting that occurs is on a par with a student pantomime. The sorriest sight is lone writer A sniffing round the personal body space of writer B as s/he converses with someone else they consider being at least their equaly stature, in a deeply fascinating chat initiated for the sole purpose of ignoring A.
Most Dublin poets I have come across have a very keen sense of their own status within the milieu, as a pack of lettered humans sniffing, wagging tails and growling at the underdogs and runts to keep outside the territory or deferring submissively to those with bigger barks, and this is the tradition John MacNamee was born into. A culture where even the corner boys measuring their spits have a strict ethical policy of who's who. However, lurking buried beneath the grave fronts of tombstone posturing I strongly sense the eternal child wanting to play; swap ideas, smile, laugh and make friends over a bit of daftness. But the Yeats legacy, compounded by Kavanagh and coupled with the traumatic Dublin heritage of booze sodden learning and the clerics of fear who warped the nation's pysche has left its mark in the form of a mask worn as armour which, once seen through, allows the alert bystander a full view of the Dublin poets common humanity we all possess.
The social plating which is so prevalent in other poets I have met was gloriously absent from Longley and his aura was that of a benign grandfather, which he is four times over to grandsons, and he stated that he was going on "grandfather strike until I get a grandaughter," a gag which raised a titter in the mixed audience of middle aged surburbanites, leaving cert students, the ne'r do well usual suspects (myself included) and the odd spattering of nuns. His capacity for making an immediate human connection was apparent from the off when a succession of latecomers straggled in during the first ten minutes, and Longley stopped his reading, beckoning them in and pointing out vacant seats; acting with an essential kindness conspicous by its absence at other gatherings I have attended.
His behaviour affirms my belief that often the larger the artist's reputation, the more approachable and down to earth they are, as they have discovered their own truth and exist and survive as an artist in the way Heaney so eloquently states, in their "own esteem," undriven by the ego of "moi." Paula Meehan echoed the first part of this sentiment during the 2004 Kavanagh prize award to Joe Horgan when she said that poets starting out storming the entrance to an exclusive literary citadel they imagine exist, climbing over the walls and launching all sorts of assualts of entry; once inside the walls, realise that there is no "there" to get to; that the artist or poet has to construct that mental reality themselves. As well as the author, they are the printer and publisher of their own passport and artist's ID card, which does not manifest itself as a physical document of valedation, but as an impress of the mind only they the creator can stamp through belief. The art of faith that is poetry.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Love Day
Last year I was sat outside the disused Bewleys Coffee shop on Westmoreland Street flogging my love poems for two euros a go. It cost me ten cents a sheet, and I rolled the printed copy around an inch and a half plastic pipe and sealed them with a wax seal I forgot to pay for from Reads stationers. I made 150 euro, wrote a poem to order for a guard and another one about a charity worker called Linda who was prancing in front of me.
That day last year was the first time I met Jame Anthony Kelly, a local legendary Kerry character on the streets of Dublin, last of the wandering bards, who travels across the island attending all manner of fleadhs and festivals, and can be seen selling his chapbooks on the streets of Dublin.
And when the goats and sheep are sorted in however many years from now, he will be remembered, perhaps, for possessing an integrity publicly unremarked upon at the time by the cultural professionals and literary careerists only too happy to never mention his name; until his voice is no longer living.
At which point, no doubt, as in the case of Kelly's comrade in Dublin street poetry, Galway linguist Paddy Finnegan, they will all start publicly speaking of his legendary doings.
I thought it fitting that the day I started selling my stuff direct to the public I met Kelly, as I had been hearing about him as a local legend since first arriving in Dublin to carry on post-graduate research into the twelve year bardic filidh curriculum, nine months earlier.
One of his constant refrains about some of the more high brow poetry do's is
"There's precious little poetry there."
Mairead Byrne, the Langpo queen and long time poetry professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, name checks him in a poem she wrote, and which I heard her recite at a "Meet The Beats" event at Mother Redcaps pub, September 2004.
But this one was written in 2003 in the final year of my tertiary BA studies. The evolution behind its arrival is documented here, when chatting with the Hungarian British poet, George Szirtes, on the process of live and literary practice.
LROVSE
Underneath it all
we talk
over and above what is;
so why not stay a while
and let me dream
of life with you?
I will not make a hollow pledge
of empty words
which promise something
I can’t give;
the wind
the sea
or starlight’s shimmer
on your hair.
The bond I undertake to seek
exchanges comforts
found from understanding
and being understood;
although
when I gaze upon your form
I see emotion as a mirror
you, the one love
who will never truly stand before me.
Your flesh can be only touched
in dreams
when reality comes alive
in epic tales, played out nightly
or in that half snooze state
we sometimes get to fool around in;
a world where my desire for you can be indulged
That day last year was the first time I met Jame Anthony Kelly, a local legendary Kerry character on the streets of Dublin, last of the wandering bards, who travels across the island attending all manner of fleadhs and festivals, and can be seen selling his chapbooks on the streets of Dublin.
And when the goats and sheep are sorted in however many years from now, he will be remembered, perhaps, for possessing an integrity publicly unremarked upon at the time by the cultural professionals and literary careerists only too happy to never mention his name; until his voice is no longer living.
At which point, no doubt, as in the case of Kelly's comrade in Dublin street poetry, Galway linguist Paddy Finnegan, they will all start publicly speaking of his legendary doings.
I thought it fitting that the day I started selling my stuff direct to the public I met Kelly, as I had been hearing about him as a local legend since first arriving in Dublin to carry on post-graduate research into the twelve year bardic filidh curriculum, nine months earlier.
One of his constant refrains about some of the more high brow poetry do's is
"There's precious little poetry there."
Mairead Byrne, the Langpo queen and long time poetry professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, name checks him in a poem she wrote, and which I heard her recite at a "Meet The Beats" event at Mother Redcaps pub, September 2004.
But this one was written in 2003 in the final year of my tertiary BA studies. The evolution behind its arrival is documented here, when chatting with the Hungarian British poet, George Szirtes, on the process of live and literary practice.
LROVSE
Underneath it all
we talk
over and above what is;
so why not stay a while
and let me dream
of life with you?
I will not make a hollow pledge
of empty words
which promise something
I can’t give;
the wind
the sea
or starlight’s shimmer
on your hair.
The bond I undertake to seek
exchanges comforts
found from understanding
and being understood;
although
when I gaze upon your form
I see emotion as a mirror
you, the one love
who will never truly stand before me.
Your flesh can be only touched
in dreams
when reality comes alive
in epic tales, played out nightly
or in that half snooze state
we sometimes get to fool around in;
a world where my desire for you can be indulged
Monday, February 13, 2006
DESPERATE FOR A DATE?
The place to waffle with published Anglo poets at the cutting edge of English Poesy, is here Poem UK. Here you will find such quality talent as Roddy Lumsden, Ed Barker (son of Dylan Thomas's mate George), Steven Waling, Kate Evans Bush, and our own Mark Granier. Modern minds swapping opinions on whatever comers up, from Homer to Happy Days and the colour of Henry Winkler's whatsists. This deposit was left by myself after hoking deeper into the illusion that I am a blatherer worthy of public endowments. I handed in my artist bursary application form to the Arts Council on Friday and just filled it in straight. I need money coz I've been a literary bum long enough and now that I have an Mp3 recorder am a one man Pat Boran and walking radio station rolled into one.
But the serious reason for rooting deeper is the Amergin text, (scroll further down)written at the middle of the Irish poetc tradition in 7C by someone who had generations of poet forefathers behind him and many more in front. I have been airing this up for discusssion to try and gauge its relevance, whilst also writing about it in order to firm up my own ideas on it, and no one has engaged with me on it. So when the usual talk of "What is Poetry?" starts and everyone gives it the Greek spin as being the beginning, I switch off as there is a tradition in Ireland that lasted a few thousand years and only ceased 300 years ago. Read and giggle.
Hurrah
My suicide was a complete success and I am now in the poesie holding area of a great beyond where dreamers go to after death. You may read about me in the national press, as I sent my obituary to Daisy Goodwin, Robert Potts, Neil, Michael, Chris, Rupert and Ron Silliman. You will find my remains on the roof of the Poetry Cafe in Betterton Street and the commeration will be wherever the poetry community decide, so please come, all are welcome. I have left a recorded piece I wish to be played at the after service of remembrance piss up in the Cheshire Cheese pub on my blogsite; a tender moving rant of supreme incoherency which I hope will not bore too much as you chat about the good old days of never knowing me. My only wish is that you bury my left hand in a small corner of Westminster Abbey, my right leg in Highgate Cemetry and my heart beneath a wind ravaged fir tree in a small demense next to the deserted village on Achill Island, Co Mayo. Failing this I would like my organs donated to poets in need of transplants.
Here in the otherworld all is an ecsatic vision, white, soft and ethereal, like being a constantly changing image of light and shade on the cinema screen, high on non-addictive heroin, Mescalin and Sunny Delight like pop containing a premium strength additive of E numbers.
As though I were Pete Doherty, all of the Arctic Monkeys and Band Aid rolled into one along with Elton John Paul Liam and Noel, but the only custody I am in is MTV heaven with Kate Moss's heart and an abundance of harmless crack, whilst being the permanent number 1. Like being Brad, Jen and Angelina living happily ever after in a global orphanage where all the kids we foster are the sprogs we practice making between the three of us, all day long with no judgement, jealousy or need for toilet breaks and telephone calls.
I am in no recognisable physical form or shape and (fingers crossed) should be a completely disembodied voice very shortly. I have been chatting with Michael Donaghy and Robert Creeley, as we wait for St Peter to run us past s/he without name who will decide our ultimate destination and earthly reputation, and we are all hoping to get the nod by our respective language gods. Ogma for me and Mick and a less obvious one for Bob as he has to negotiate with Frost, Whitman, Pound, Eliot and WCW before he gets to somewhere in Greece, I think, I'm not sure as what he's been saying all sounds a bit complicated; but we are all praying together and will be very happy for each other if we end up supping sack with Ben Jonson and Bill Shakes at top table, or if we are in a packed back garden at the amateur barbecue sharing sonnets about sparrows on the village green.
There are a number of possibles in play and the decisions will be made based purely on our ouvres according to the standard formulae which have always been used since the beginning of babel; and you will be surprised to hear that all our temporal posturing and the grand theories we spend our lifetimes thinking up are completely rubbish and entirely wrong.
Simon Magus told me that there is no magic behind the art or complex modes of analysis used to figure the final result, as every one of us has their very own free will advisor to the creator, who lets us trace the watermark of our success or failure as poet, bluffer, nutter or fool during our stint on earth with a pen of faith we fill and use or leave in the box, and guess what?
There are no laurel cups or short straws, because an absent concept of competition is everywhere and there is only love, peace, wonderully superb gorgeousness and free dinners, as our energies are all alone but united in the past, present and future in a way the living mind can not grasp, so I won't attempt to convey the sense of afterlife oneness, save to say its a laugh.
But before the clouds of unreality tip their load via the boundless sky of cybersapce and dissolve your interest in a mist of verbiage to bore your brain and you surf away from this deposit, I can communicate some info from the waiting room of equal greatness for all. Apparently there was a Homer, a woman called Alana, who was not a simple warrior shepardess living the joi de vie with an entourage of party fawn fighting wo/men. She made the Illyiad up for a laugh, and the real story of how she came to tell this tale is too terrible to convey here because if I told you what Alana told me, you'd think I'd gone coco and lost my marbles. Too fantastic is the truth, so I will keep a lid on it and lie................Oooh, I'd better go because Elvis and Plato are calling me for a discussion on the eternal chicken, egg and cheesburger debate.
But the serious reason for rooting deeper is the Amergin text, (scroll further down)written at the middle of the Irish poetc tradition in 7C by someone who had generations of poet forefathers behind him and many more in front. I have been airing this up for discusssion to try and gauge its relevance, whilst also writing about it in order to firm up my own ideas on it, and no one has engaged with me on it. So when the usual talk of "What is Poetry?" starts and everyone gives it the Greek spin as being the beginning, I switch off as there is a tradition in Ireland that lasted a few thousand years and only ceased 300 years ago. Read and giggle.
Hurrah
My suicide was a complete success and I am now in the poesie holding area of a great beyond where dreamers go to after death. You may read about me in the national press, as I sent my obituary to Daisy Goodwin, Robert Potts, Neil, Michael, Chris, Rupert and Ron Silliman. You will find my remains on the roof of the Poetry Cafe in Betterton Street and the commeration will be wherever the poetry community decide, so please come, all are welcome. I have left a recorded piece I wish to be played at the after service of remembrance piss up in the Cheshire Cheese pub on my blogsite; a tender moving rant of supreme incoherency which I hope will not bore too much as you chat about the good old days of never knowing me. My only wish is that you bury my left hand in a small corner of Westminster Abbey, my right leg in Highgate Cemetry and my heart beneath a wind ravaged fir tree in a small demense next to the deserted village on Achill Island, Co Mayo. Failing this I would like my organs donated to poets in need of transplants.
Here in the otherworld all is an ecsatic vision, white, soft and ethereal, like being a constantly changing image of light and shade on the cinema screen, high on non-addictive heroin, Mescalin and Sunny Delight like pop containing a premium strength additive of E numbers.
As though I were Pete Doherty, all of the Arctic Monkeys and Band Aid rolled into one along with Elton John Paul Liam and Noel, but the only custody I am in is MTV heaven with Kate Moss's heart and an abundance of harmless crack, whilst being the permanent number 1. Like being Brad, Jen and Angelina living happily ever after in a global orphanage where all the kids we foster are the sprogs we practice making between the three of us, all day long with no judgement, jealousy or need for toilet breaks and telephone calls.
I am in no recognisable physical form or shape and (fingers crossed) should be a completely disembodied voice very shortly. I have been chatting with Michael Donaghy and Robert Creeley, as we wait for St Peter to run us past s/he without name who will decide our ultimate destination and earthly reputation, and we are all hoping to get the nod by our respective language gods. Ogma for me and Mick and a less obvious one for Bob as he has to negotiate with Frost, Whitman, Pound, Eliot and WCW before he gets to somewhere in Greece, I think, I'm not sure as what he's been saying all sounds a bit complicated; but we are all praying together and will be very happy for each other if we end up supping sack with Ben Jonson and Bill Shakes at top table, or if we are in a packed back garden at the amateur barbecue sharing sonnets about sparrows on the village green.
There are a number of possibles in play and the decisions will be made based purely on our ouvres according to the standard formulae which have always been used since the beginning of babel; and you will be surprised to hear that all our temporal posturing and the grand theories we spend our lifetimes thinking up are completely rubbish and entirely wrong.
Simon Magus told me that there is no magic behind the art or complex modes of analysis used to figure the final result, as every one of us has their very own free will advisor to the creator, who lets us trace the watermark of our success or failure as poet, bluffer, nutter or fool during our stint on earth with a pen of faith we fill and use or leave in the box, and guess what?
There are no laurel cups or short straws, because an absent concept of competition is everywhere and there is only love, peace, wonderully superb gorgeousness and free dinners, as our energies are all alone but united in the past, present and future in a way the living mind can not grasp, so I won't attempt to convey the sense of afterlife oneness, save to say its a laugh.
But before the clouds of unreality tip their load via the boundless sky of cybersapce and dissolve your interest in a mist of verbiage to bore your brain and you surf away from this deposit, I can communicate some info from the waiting room of equal greatness for all. Apparently there was a Homer, a woman called Alana, who was not a simple warrior shepardess living the joi de vie with an entourage of party fawn fighting wo/men. She made the Illyiad up for a laugh, and the real story of how she came to tell this tale is too terrible to convey here because if I told you what Alana told me, you'd think I'd gone coco and lost my marbles. Too fantastic is the truth, so I will keep a lid on it and lie................Oooh, I'd better go because Elvis and Plato are calling me for a discussion on the eternal chicken, egg and cheesburger debate.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
King Can
Another day another poem dear reader.
I wrote this a few weeks ago, and put it up at the
As/Is website, where I post under the nom de plume of Scalljah and this site is a collaborative blog where Langpo poets weave their po mo madness, and has been the most instrumental point of my development over the last year. Sheila Murphy posts there and in the next few days I will begin to reveal the various experiences that have occured to me on a poetical level, which are the reasons I have faith in the divinatory aspect of poetry. There have been a couple of inexplicable occurences between myself and other poets, and the story of me and Sheila is one of them.
So that's something to look forward to, absent viewer, as Stephen King would say. He reckons that writing is no more than telepathy, the writer sending out his mind and the reader drawing themselves into it. His book "On Writing" is the best how to write manual going, and the history behind him writing it is also very interesting. He got very badly hit by a juggernaut and wrote it as part of his recovery after coming out of the coma. In the opening spiel he says that although he had been asked many times to write such a book he was against the idea because he thought
"Who am I to tell anyone how to write?"
And although he is gilding the lilly a bit the basic humanity of the man is obvious, as the voice is him, not one of his characters. And no matter what people's opinion of his work is, it cannot be denied that he is one of the most prolific writers ever, a born natural waffler. In the book he says that during interviews a common question is -
"How do you write?"
And his reply is
"One word at a time."
He says that some of the interviwers think he's being funny, but this is his genuine philosophy on the whole affair, and it cannot really be faulted, and I think most people who've been writing a while would latch onto this as carrying truthful weight. In his writing book he describes writing his epic book "The Stand." Up till this point he had been a major booze and drug freak, and his writing routine was supping ale, smoking and dancing at the keyboard, spilling out his mind in a half gone state. He would have been in his late 30's at this point and then halfway through the book he hit bottom and quit the drink and drugs madness, and this is clearly discernable in the book. The first half is all about 98% of the global population getting wiped out after a doomsday biochemical weapons leak from a top security military base, and it is very dark with some wickedly funny baddies. The second half is when the two communities representing good and evil fight it out, and a lot more emphasis on the loving and lighter side of existence rather than the conveyor belt of horror and baddies of the first half of the book, written when he was at the peak of his drunkeness. By the time he decided to quit, half way through the book, he said the plot was a nightmare as he had created so many characters he couldn't figure a way of tyinf it all up; so what does he do. Blows them all with a nuclear bomb that his "Trash Can Man" character drags to the baddie HQ of Las Vegas, and the goodie grouping in the mountains of Colorado all live happily ever after. Class A entertainment with a rehabbed second half.
Mental Illness
I like shopping in Asda
stalking the bag lady shuffling down Bride Street
supping Dutch export
collapsing in gutters
scaring my reflection
daring to be a dickhead
tipping a wink to the lunatic fringe
on ward role play with bi-polar patients
making gags 'bout all weather tellytubbies
a bit of bully,
tossing double top to finish off.
and walking in tandem with women on tow paths.
Dogging at Rufford lock
watching the Linnets at Vickie park
dancing at Barons with Burscough Billets
metaphorically vomiting on the queen mothers'
headstone in her crypt of remembrance at Windsor
and filling my boots on the slopes of Paranassus
with laurel stems
woven in a crown I make believe my own;
fantasy gifts of Minerva, Mnemosyne, Appollo and Ogma
having a party and letting me know
"We are ones who make
glitter and red carpet treatment
turned Bob Dylan to Homer
rock the souls of Elvis, John
Liam and Noel
so go tell the world of gods
whose secrets unlocked reveal
an oasis of monkeys and beatles
day-dreaming you too will join them
here beneath Partholan skies."
I wrote this a few weeks ago, and put it up at the
So that's something to look forward to, absent viewer, as Stephen King would say. He reckons that writing is no more than telepathy, the writer sending out his mind and the reader drawing themselves into it. His book "On Writing" is the best how to write manual going, and the history behind him writing it is also very interesting. He got very badly hit by a juggernaut and wrote it as part of his recovery after coming out of the coma. In the opening spiel he says that although he had been asked many times to write such a book he was against the idea because he thought
"Who am I to tell anyone how to write?"
And although he is gilding the lilly a bit the basic humanity of the man is obvious, as the voice is him, not one of his characters. And no matter what people's opinion of his work is, it cannot be denied that he is one of the most prolific writers ever, a born natural waffler. In the book he says that during interviews a common question is -
"How do you write?"
And his reply is
"One word at a time."
He says that some of the interviwers think he's being funny, but this is his genuine philosophy on the whole affair, and it cannot really be faulted, and I think most people who've been writing a while would latch onto this as carrying truthful weight. In his writing book he describes writing his epic book "The Stand." Up till this point he had been a major booze and drug freak, and his writing routine was supping ale, smoking and dancing at the keyboard, spilling out his mind in a half gone state. He would have been in his late 30's at this point and then halfway through the book he hit bottom and quit the drink and drugs madness, and this is clearly discernable in the book. The first half is all about 98% of the global population getting wiped out after a doomsday biochemical weapons leak from a top security military base, and it is very dark with some wickedly funny baddies. The second half is when the two communities representing good and evil fight it out, and a lot more emphasis on the loving and lighter side of existence rather than the conveyor belt of horror and baddies of the first half of the book, written when he was at the peak of his drunkeness. By the time he decided to quit, half way through the book, he said the plot was a nightmare as he had created so many characters he couldn't figure a way of tyinf it all up; so what does he do. Blows them all with a nuclear bomb that his "Trash Can Man" character drags to the baddie HQ of Las Vegas, and the goodie grouping in the mountains of Colorado all live happily ever after. Class A entertainment with a rehabbed second half.
Mental Illness
I like shopping in Asda
stalking the bag lady shuffling down Bride Street
supping Dutch export
collapsing in gutters
scaring my reflection
daring to be a dickhead
tipping a wink to the lunatic fringe
on ward role play with bi-polar patients
making gags 'bout all weather tellytubbies
a bit of bully,
tossing double top to finish off.
and walking in tandem with women on tow paths.
Dogging at Rufford lock
watching the Linnets at Vickie park
dancing at Barons with Burscough Billets
metaphorically vomiting on the queen mothers'
headstone in her crypt of remembrance at Windsor
and filling my boots on the slopes of Paranassus
with laurel stems
woven in a crown I make believe my own;
fantasy gifts of Minerva, Mnemosyne, Appollo and Ogma
having a party and letting me know
"We are ones who make
glitter and red carpet treatment
turned Bob Dylan to Homer
rock the souls of Elvis, John
Liam and Noel
so go tell the world of gods
whose secrets unlocked reveal
an oasis of monkeys and beatles
day-dreaming you too will join them
here beneath Partholan skies."
Friday, February 03, 2006
Neil I need you
I wrote this in the summer when I was in the throes of connecting with the Write and Recite group, and it is todays poem of the day, so read and enjoy and please leave your comments Neil, Rupert, George and Mike; who I imagine as my ideal readers. Four figures from publishing who will whisk me off on a magic carpet ride of whirlwind poetry readings at converted mills in the North of England and the QE hall on the Southbank, where I can revisit Hungerford bridge and check out my old pitch. See the new faces and sip coffee in the Film centre cafe, gazing out at the bookstalls at last light and listening to the jazzing busker blow his sax. My slim and stylish hardback black notebook will be open at page 48 and I will be engrossed in conversation with an arty looking man who turns out to have been Mr Sensodyne tooth paste 1992. A true story readers; for I have been close to the flame of second hand success, back in the old days when the smoke was my staggering ground where I stumbled along the chartered streets dreaming of golden flagstones and Stephen Spielberg discovering me as I dished up the dips at islington High Street's Pizza Hut.
They were the days; young free and the rest of life stretched before me like an unbroken vista whose end was too far away to believe as real. Alas how time creeps up and takes us all. One day your 19 and turning down opportunity after chance and the next your begging for a smile from the ropey lookers working in Londis. Another tired face whose aura fails to excite. So read on and breathe it.
We are training as language artists
in an alluring Western based ambience
where pastoral and urbane intersect
vectors of cultural flux mesh serendipitously
and there are bards enough proclaiming of posie
from the page to station on every street corner
mountain peak, in all wooded glens,
and working every sector of the poetic spectrum
poets' compose with to reach "there"; be it
- quantitive, syllabic, accentual stress, combined metric
slam, L=A=N=G=A=U=G=E, open form, tragic
confessional, comedic, write-through or mental composition -
Techniques we have come to possess and will deploy
with varying degrees of success, failure, loss and benifit
in the aquiring of skills which increase the consumptional
capacity of our appetite for language
until such time that we feel capable of, metaphorically
eating the alphabet
a goal acheivable in 15 years hence
when we dream of scoffing knowledge on lingo binges
feasting on linguistical fare
lashing our eyes full of letter nosh
sucking soundgrub into our ear's gut
and ingesting text for regurgitation to "other" voices
who passenger on the shuttlebus of love;
where we are all gourmets gorging on blather
in one united assotment of sound, from
a quick smooth swoosh of solid reliable speed hulks
hurtling into a deep unconscious order of unkowable tune, to
freight laden trucks labouring in gridlock on
clogged access routes to the sublime fleeting energy;
whose jolts can compact galaxies to black
holes vacuum packed with an absence of time
tracing our concept mark of living as one with the infinite mind;
and bestowing by its thrumb
seer gifts of prophetic possession
to some poetic depositers of text, be it printed or binary coded opticle
data bits travelling through fibre to gozzy gawp gawk fests yet to begin.
We are the knocker uppers tapping on the window pane of literature
fitting up the page with poesy of all genre and form
from recognisably life affirming
to the unrecognisably banal barren mind space of knowing
if a singular discharge un-owns creation.
And between these two extremities
is life itself
replicating and assembling its note of busyness
demanding access to profess that you wander
round the kitchen like a two bit twok till all from
Ballymum to Ballsbridge sing
"The salmon you seek swims ineluctably upstream
to bind complete the continuum's principle impulse
returning through a labyrinth imititive of bioscape
brainshapes recording the pictoral quiver flue
of a life force unborn but spawning wisdom"
Shall we look into beyond for the faithfully inclined
unhearing what tune of belief to sing as they rise to begin their song?
They were the days; young free and the rest of life stretched before me like an unbroken vista whose end was too far away to believe as real. Alas how time creeps up and takes us all. One day your 19 and turning down opportunity after chance and the next your begging for a smile from the ropey lookers working in Londis. Another tired face whose aura fails to excite. So read on and breathe it.
We are training as language artists
in an alluring Western based ambience
where pastoral and urbane intersect
vectors of cultural flux mesh serendipitously
and there are bards enough proclaiming of posie
from the page to station on every street corner
mountain peak, in all wooded glens,
and working every sector of the poetic spectrum
poets' compose with to reach "there"; be it
- quantitive, syllabic, accentual stress, combined metric
slam, L=A=N=G=A=U=G=E, open form, tragic
confessional, comedic, write-through or mental composition -
Techniques we have come to possess and will deploy
with varying degrees of success, failure, loss and benifit
in the aquiring of skills which increase the consumptional
capacity of our appetite for language
until such time that we feel capable of, metaphorically
eating the alphabet
a goal acheivable in 15 years hence
when we dream of scoffing knowledge on lingo binges
feasting on linguistical fare
lashing our eyes full of letter nosh
sucking soundgrub into our ear's gut
and ingesting text for regurgitation to "other" voices
who passenger on the shuttlebus of love;
where we are all gourmets gorging on blather
in one united assotment of sound, from
a quick smooth swoosh of solid reliable speed hulks
hurtling into a deep unconscious order of unkowable tune, to
freight laden trucks labouring in gridlock on
clogged access routes to the sublime fleeting energy;
whose jolts can compact galaxies to black
holes vacuum packed with an absence of time
tracing our concept mark of living as one with the infinite mind;
and bestowing by its thrumb
seer gifts of prophetic possession
to some poetic depositers of text, be it printed or binary coded opticle
data bits travelling through fibre to gozzy gawp gawk fests yet to begin.
We are the knocker uppers tapping on the window pane of literature
fitting up the page with poesy of all genre and form
from recognisably life affirming
to the unrecognisably banal barren mind space of knowing
if a singular discharge un-owns creation.
And between these two extremities
is life itself
replicating and assembling its note of busyness
demanding access to profess that you wander
round the kitchen like a two bit twok till all from
Ballymum to Ballsbridge sing
"The salmon you seek swims ineluctably upstream
to bind complete the continuum's principle impulse
returning through a labyrinth imititive of bioscape
brainshapes recording the pictoral quiver flue
of a life force unborn but spawning wisdom"
Shall we look into beyond for the faithfully inclined
unhearing what tune of belief to sing as they rise to begin their song?
Sunday, January 29, 2006
GAYBO
Today the sun is shining and my flash has gone. I'm on a bit of a downer and have been so out of it I ended up reading Gay Byrne's 1972 memoir "To Whom it may concern" written 10 years after he started the late late show and the triumphalist register of a successfull media baron reminded me of a chord present within my own writing. The need to justify decisions and take the high ground. But whereas Gay was hard working man and over achiever incarnate, I am his mirror opposite on that score, although we do share a broadly similar facial appearance, a fact that thrust itself into my consciousness this morning after washing my hair in the communal bath at the kip and trimming my sideburns. I'm saving on a haricut until I'm less skint. Gaybo had all the work stitched up from the word go, alternating his time in the early 60's between the UK and Ireland, putting himself about in as many formatts as possible, from serious news to lightweigh knockabout, he was there to waffle and chat.
Gaystar began in Realto compering at the church socials round Dolphins Barn and his dream was to become Eamon Andrews. He started out in insurance and quit to work for another driven inner city boy in the motor trade who wrote the penny apples book, but Gay retraced his steps back to the insurance game via cinema managing and amatuer showbiz until RTE came calling in the form of his sibling Ernest, who trained in American TV.
Gay filled a Cuchullan spot in the Irish pysche of the youth who can and does get it all. Ryan Tubriddy is the contemporary equivalent and as the old timers fall by the wayside to the new kids on the block, so the anecdotes spill out and then we have around 6 or seven TV folk all droning on about why they are the ones who know best.
I saw Gybo give Terry Wogan his lifetime gong and it was obvious they couldn't stand each other and it was obvious that Wogan went to the UK because Gaybo had all the work stitched up this side of the water. But fair play to the old pro and long may he blather. I will finish his CV off when I get home from the trials of the day.
Today is speakers corner and I will go and give it a bash. Usually Dave McSavage is there doing his comedy and he must take around 2-300 every time for his half hour. Although I read the other week he was in court for selling his CD's. If only I could find a way to sell my poems.
Jangler on a global soapbox
gravely begrudging from deepest Dublin
talent elsewhere oozing freely from the page
in a full weight of class which beguiles,
draws the eye to soak amongst and run along
become her light warm wind
in late May smells of meadow flowers
melting inner daybreak.
Do not drop or draw across
the line her laughter
will return to paint past when a
promise of summer pervades the air
Sacred loyalty stolen from a passing breeze
rise the veil of sorrows
steer your way earward and over-quench
my lonliness inherently roll
roll rolling the night show
of memory glow blowing annon
in the water goodbye.
Gaystar began in Realto compering at the church socials round Dolphins Barn and his dream was to become Eamon Andrews. He started out in insurance and quit to work for another driven inner city boy in the motor trade who wrote the penny apples book, but Gay retraced his steps back to the insurance game via cinema managing and amatuer showbiz until RTE came calling in the form of his sibling Ernest, who trained in American TV.
Gay filled a Cuchullan spot in the Irish pysche of the youth who can and does get it all. Ryan Tubriddy is the contemporary equivalent and as the old timers fall by the wayside to the new kids on the block, so the anecdotes spill out and then we have around 6 or seven TV folk all droning on about why they are the ones who know best.
I saw Gybo give Terry Wogan his lifetime gong and it was obvious they couldn't stand each other and it was obvious that Wogan went to the UK because Gaybo had all the work stitched up this side of the water. But fair play to the old pro and long may he blather. I will finish his CV off when I get home from the trials of the day.
Today is speakers corner and I will go and give it a bash. Usually Dave McSavage is there doing his comedy and he must take around 2-300 every time for his half hour. Although I read the other week he was in court for selling his CD's. If only I could find a way to sell my poems.
Jangler on a global soapbox
gravely begrudging from deepest Dublin
talent elsewhere oozing freely from the page
in a full weight of class which beguiles,
draws the eye to soak amongst and run along
become her light warm wind
in late May smells of meadow flowers
melting inner daybreak.
Do not drop or draw across
the line her laughter
will return to paint past when a
promise of summer pervades the air
Sacred loyalty stolen from a passing breeze
rise the veil of sorrows
steer your way earward and over-quench
my lonliness inherently roll
roll rolling the night show
of memory glow blowing annon
in the water goodbye.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Amergin's 7C Cauldron of Poesie
Click the link above and source a simple, serious sensible poetic from the Irish equivalent of Homer, written circa 7C and appearing in the Auraicept na n-Éces, which appears in the grammatical trieste section of the 15C Book of Ballymote. The book of Ballymote is a compilation work of various manuscripts knocking about Ireland that came into the possession of Manus O'Duignan, who was the oollamh scribe of Tonnaltagh McDonagh. Within this book there are many triestes on various matters and the Auraicept na n-Éces was supposedly used in the bardic schools to instruct the training poets. Conservative decorum was the watchword of these places and by 12C the bardic poetic language had reached a level of technical perfection that stayed the same for the next 400 years. The written language changed very little and took no heed of how the spoken vernacular evolved, thus imposing an artificail standard, so much so that a poem written in the 16C could pass for one written 400 years earlier. The bardic schools have their pre-literate roots in druid practice and the original form of Ireland's poetic.
Its centre is Seigas, an underwater well in Tir nOg, a land of eternal youth below the sea, which later merged into the sidhe or faery realm after the Milesian displaced the Tuatha De Dannan tribe. These are the final two of six peoples documented in highly detailed "invasion" myths.
Ringed by nine hazel trees which rain down their fruit swifter than a ram’s fleece moving at the speed of crazed salmon gorging on this harvest upon their dying return; Seigas is also the source of the river Boyne, whose banks at Newgrange support a stone age structure of celestial engineering with corbel roof, leak less from 3000 BC to now.
Each nut on these imaginary trees contain total knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment; so the salmon and nuts, along with numerous tributary plots and casts in the cannon, combined in the mind with a physical reality surrounding the myths, route it to a very potent poetic through a wealth of valid symbols few are aware exist, but which is the guiding spirit in this art, equivalent to a poetic religion.
The Celtic equivalent of Aristotle's "Poetics" is a Plato’s egg and omelette of hazelnuts, fish and Seigas and the written prayers scribbling their way to piece puzzles from that society’s obscured reality reflect the pattern of finds my quest lights up, and I offer them as tribute at the Greco-Roman altar of knowledge.
Where the mother of all nine Helicon muses, Mnemosyne is Ogma, a word god gifting language to seers, the priestesses at Delphi’s oracle divining auguries, are Tuatha De Dannan weather shamans performing vast draughts of speech to the sky, and Amergin is Homer, Eros Aonghus, Zeus Lugh, Apollo Cúchulainn and Helen of Troy Maeve of Connaght.
--------WHAT AM I ON ABOUT? - THE ROOTS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE POETRY-----
Most contemporary English language poets musing upon the exact nature of their calling or career have scant knowledge of this 1000 year old system which, in historical terms, has only recently expired and is a lot closer in time to the Greek poetic underpinning the English tradition.
This poetic resides in a 7C text attributed to Amergin and its contemporary relevance to others practicing poetry is a subject I wish to discuss. The text can be accessed by clicking the title link. Few poets are interested in this area of historical literature which, ironically, offers answers for the contemporary poet who seeks a real undertanding of their craft. Much of the material is currently being translated and disseminated online, and this corpus of work documenting 1000 years of religious and secular Irish history is now available to all for the very first time. For those who with a serious interest in poetry it is essential reading and I will now give an overview of how this culture was lost.
Beginning in the late 16C and culminating in anti catholic "penal" laws spanning much of 17C, a succession of English parliaments attempted to eradicate Gaelic modes and thought by, amongst other things, making the language illegal to speak or write. The language goal was eventually achieved by a combination of Daniel O'Connell's advice, Victorian business methods and nature, when failed potato harvests of the 1840’s resulted in an economic famine where 1 of an 8 million population starved to death and 2 million fled the land through hunger.
Roman penal concepts did not reach Ireland and Pre-17C Gaelic law was entirely civil, with a legal infrastructure unique in Europe, as it was not based on Roman law but a poetic practice, taught in what has become known as “bardic schools”; whose roots lay in pre- literate druid times and ran for over 1500 years, producing, by the time of its collapse, the most metrically complex poetry in Europe. The products of these schools were highly trained learned poets steeped in their tribe's history and officials at the court of their petty king and chieftain patrons.
The poets of these bardic schools were effectively lawyers who wrote in both prose and verse; the metrically complex poems being composed mentally before being committed to writing. The full training period was 20 years to become an oollamh or professor and by this stage the poet would be expected to be able to recite from memory hundreds of pieces in numerous genres, including the main cycles of myth and their tributary stories, geneoligies and legal works. An idea which comes to mind is an actor who has the complete works of Shakespeare memorised after having played at the RSC for 20 years.
At the time of its first death blows the English metrical tradition, based on imitating Greek and Roman forms, was first being brought to life through courtiers of Tudor and Elizabethan England, some of whom took a hand in aiding the destruction of this poetic. Edmund Spencer went there in the 1570's to acquire land and wealth as part of the various military campaigns which quelled the Desmond rebellions of the mid and late 16C, believing that for the country to become "pacified", the language and customs must be destroyed by violent scorched earth policies and famine. Whilst there he wrote the document, "A View on the Present State of Ireland" in the early 1590's in which he laid out his ideas, and is now considered a prose polemic genocidal in intent.
Unlike Philip Sidney's able courtier father, Henry, Spencer's lot in Ireland was not successful and he returned to England after the segun Earl of Desmond, whose confiscated lands had been granted to Spencer, burned down Kilcolman Castle in late 1598 where Spencer had been living since 1580, and the poet returned to London dying a few months later.
A founding father of English language poetry, Spencer's "Faerie Queen" is the legacy of a literature written in very violent circumstances, whose full relevance has rarely been brought to the surface when considering his work. And whilst Spencer considered himself a poet, he was dismissive of the homegrown sort
" soe far from instructinge younge men in Morrall discipline, that they themselves doe more deserve to be sharplie decyplined; for they seldome use to chuse unto themselves the doinges of good men, for the ornamentes of theire poems, but whomesoever they finde to bee most lycentious of lief, most bolde and lawles in his doinges, most daungerous and desperate in all partes of disobedience and rebellious disposicon, him they sett up and glorifie in their rymes, him they prayse to the people, and to younge men make an example to followe."
By the middle of 17C the bardic school system of training law poets had collapsed over the previous three or four generations, along with the infrastructure and teaching methods, and although the poetic heart of a nation stopped beating in its usual form after this, a full record of pre17C Gaelic custom is left in both religious and secular deposits. Much of the secular work is in Fenechas or Brehon civil law texts; first distilled uncorrupted from an original oral form and onto the page in the 6C when the first writers of non Romanised Europe devised their written vernacular, until the time these codes constituting the legislative glue of cultural peace combusted in late 16C scorched earth campaigns.
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