Writing Program Expose

In January 2001 at the age of 33, I started writing; and by March of that year had decided to jack in life as a London admin drudge, reading and writing all day as an unqualified paralegal; deciding instead that it was better to be reading and writing what I wanted, rather than filling my head with the information I was taking on at the office.

I'd been wanting to write for a year and more, after someone had put the suggestion in my head, but couldn't start a word. I couldn't even think up a sentence, and nothing would come out. The only thing going for me was that I'd already acquired the basic discipline of sitting at a desk and writing all day, and all I needed to do now, I imagined, to kick-start a transfer of the mind's focus and direction onto a different, more creative path - was to find a way in.

So, on 2/1/2001, I decided to start keeping a Smoking Diary, hoping it would serve the dual purpose of at least writing something, and maybe even lead to a jacking in of the smokes. This is the very first entry:

2/1/01: It is now 9.51 am and I haven't had a fag yet. This is going to be tough, but if I can see through today, then there is hope for tomorrow. I will type onto here when I get desperate for a smoke, which is right now. The mind seems to be a very powerful tool in the addiction process. The tricks played are all very subtle, and indeed, this here shows the lengths gone to, to try and fight the negative side of one's own mind.

14.50. The mind has beaten itself. I folded like a cheap suitcase at just after midday. I ponced a fag off Farah and smoked it at 12.03. At about 2.30pm I ponced a roll up off Mike, so my consumption for the day stands at two.

It is now 15.41 and I don't know why I am typing this in. Oh go on then yes I do. I am hoping that keeping a diary on my smoking thoughts and habits will serve a number of purposes. One will be to possibly aid me in my attempts to reduce the nicotine intake into my body and two is to try and keep alive some sort of dream as regards my creative writing. If I can combine the two of these, then it can only be for the good, for myself and anyone else who cares about the truth of things. Well maybe that's a bit strong but I can always wipe out anything I don't want to leave in this diary.

18.32 and I have succumbed again. I had another about 5.55pm, a roll up off Mike. 3 so far and with the evening ahead of me I am still trying to look on the bright side. Well there's no point in using this as a tool to not have a fag, for the rest of today anyway. I am only typing now for the practice.

I kept it up, writing every day and then, on 9/1/01, the floodgates opened with a two page anecdote that came tumbling out; which shifted any remnant of interest in the work I was doing (reading files of evidence in white-collar tax frauds and precising it down); and moved instead into writing my own stuff. At this point, facing into the onset of middle-age, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to write, just that I didn't want to spend my life moving further and further away from what had been my true heart's desire since playing Shakespeare's Malvolio in Twelfth Night, in the school play at 14. Pretending.

~

In late March 2001, I packed in the pretence of being anything other than a career failure, leaving London and relocating to Cork, Ireland; then booking myself into a Saint Vincent's Homeless hostel and signing onto welfare. I spent the next six weeks in local Libraries, reading anything I could find on writing; writing my diary and pondering how to become an author. It was during this spell I set out the basics to myself. That all I wanted out of the enterprise, was to write one poem or sonnet that could stand in the shadow of Shakespeare's. An unrealistic goal in terms of becoming the Warwick Bard's equal, but by limiting myself to an Ideal of departing this world with just one 'good' poem as a literary legacy, was not exactly putting very much pressure on one's own self-expectation.

I read a back-stack of writer-interviews in a pile of Paris Reviews at Knocknaheeny library, soaking in the authorial tips of modern greats, and was barely worse off financially. Spiritually I felt I'd made the correct decision. Always being a superstitious sort, who'd make decisions using the most - what others would consider - daftest of reasons; my inner compass felt as though it had aligned to a true course. That though those around me at the time had thought me mad, my own instinct felt the opposite.

~

After six weeks, a long standing dental issue had come to a head and I neeeded to have a molar extracted; so returned to my home town of Ormskirk in Lancashire to get it done. Whilst there I discovered that the town's Edge Hill College (now a university), had been running academic writing programs, degrees and MA's, for the past eight years.

Not having the relevant high-school diploma or A levels to gain admittance into third level learning, I initially thought it would be an impossible dream to get on the course; as having to study two years to get the necessary qualifications to go to university, was all pie in the sky to me then, as an uneducated ex-building laborer and admin drudge.

Still, I went up to ask and spoke to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet (not that I knew this at the time) Robert Sheppard, who wrote and runs the writing deptartment programs. He told me that it was OK, there was a six-week Fastrack course that had been created as part of the college's 'widening participation' goal, basically targetting older, unemployed people like myself.

It was starting in two weeks, and was really just a course to get people unfamiliar with computers, up to speed, and which, after several years of working as a poorly paid paralegal, was easy enough to pass. During this wonderful summer, I remember thinking that something George Szirtes terms in his Eliot lecture as, secret levers of the universe; had effected this serendipity that led one back home to learn the very thing I'd decided to pursue and had set my heart on learning. Once the decision to follow my inner calling had been taken, it was as if the gods of Letters had removed all obstacles in my path, and ushered me on the correct course, for the first time in my life.

The writing component could be taken as a minor (quarter), or as half of your B.A. program. Mine was half: Writing Studies and Drama; and on the first day in writing class, a week after 9/11, there were around 45 of us. Some doing English, some Drama, some Film, Media, Womens Studies, and other subjects.

I still have the notes made in that first session; in which we all gave a reason why we were there, and what we hoped to gain. One woman was after writing self-help books, whilst others were there with no specific goal. One young chap from Wolverhampton doing film, nineteen, was wanting to make movies; but the main vibe I picked up on, was Harry Potter. The young kids who made up the bulk of the student writers' cohort, wanted to write fiction that would be as exciting as J.K. Rowling's; and though it was unspoken, it was fairly clear, even to me then, that what had propelled the majority of us into taking the course, was a desire to become rich and famous. If I am being honest with myself, though this wasn't as obvious to me then, there is that secret, not so hidden desire that, maybe, just perhaps, if I develop myself; I too could write summat that would make me a bundle.

But this is certainly not the reason I began writing. I was writing anyway, and had got very good at what I did as an admin drudge; and one reasoned that developing the talent for fantasy I'd always had since a child, was the right thing to do in the long run for me as a person.

Most of those on the course, I don't know what they're doing now; though the course is not about teaching you how to write, as no one can be taught because writing's a solitary pursuit and sport, challenge with yourself; conducted on the pitch of our own intellect. Sheppard used to say his B.A. course is more about finding out if writing's what you want to do or not, than anything else. By the end of it, it was clear who was going to carry on writing and who was just keen to stop the pretence.

Edge Hill's academic status rose in the world after I left, and is now rated as one of the best in England. The writing course, because it's run by a fairly unknown poet, means there's no big expectation. Unlike learning under Motion or Duffy, which (one suspects) is more geared up to getting published. Because Sheppard is the English equivalent of John Ashbery's heir, the 'poetic' underpinning the course is more experimental, and publishing, prizes, all that jazz - played little and no part.

It was great, because I was testing my dream in my home town, where everyone knows me; unable to fake myself into a new me around people I didn't know. And because the poetry component began with Pound's Do's and Dont's and ended with Charles Bernstein and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (Langpo); one had to learn a tradition I would not have done if one's own, lyric sensibilities were left to their own devices. 40% of my study-time was spent outside the official modules, learning Irish myth, that I'd become obsessed by after deciding that the one way to outface a Class obstacle inherent in England, and negate the predominate sensibility of its monarchist poetic; would be to learn what a real Bard had to - just for the sheer feck of it.

My reasoning was: I want to be a poet, but my worst nightmare is meeting someone who will make me feel I am a fake. How can I learn so there's no question of being plastic? Well, in Britain, the ultimate poets used to be bards, who, in Ireland, had a tradition that lasted over 1000 years in print. But, I thought, few people know much about them as we all stick with Homer and the Greeks as the primary poetic base. OK, I thought, imagine - for a laugh - just to shut people up who'd try to poo poo your dream - knowing what a real bard did? That would shut the would-be knockers up, as they couldn't claim you as a fake, because you'd be telling most people something they don't know about.

OK, what do I study?

Once I started studying this topic of what a bard actually did in the old days, it became quickly apparent that this wasn't going to be a short three year course. In the old days it was 12 years through seven grades, before you graduated as a poetry professor or ullav. Perfect, because by sticking to these rules, the ones in existence for a 1000 years and more - turning out British-Irish poets generation after generation - you've as much, if not more, legitimate claim to being on the right course than those who'd assert this is the way you do it, or that is the way you become a poet. Pound, Eliot; any first generation dabbler, will have only their own way of thinking, but the bardic course is set and has been there for 1500 years. You can't argue with it.

And the 12 years is OK, I thought, I'm in it for the long haul and the dream is, just for the craic, knowing the info. If it takes the rest of my life, I thought, so what?

~


The young guy from Wolverhampton doing film, in the very final session, as we looked back on the three years, was in a totally different frame of mind. Gone was the certainty and confidence of three years before; replaced with something else, less assured and more confused. And he was the only one of the many in his boat - who I thought was being fully honest in his response, and for this alone I respected him. He said the one thing he'd learned from his degree, was that he didn't want to be a writer; at least not then, as a 22 year old young man. Instead, he was joining the army. Most of the others whose Harry Potter dreams had evaporated, were not so straight about how they felt.

So, yeah, a writing program isn't for everyone, and I was very lucky because the British state paid, but to dismiss them without having experience is silly.

I was reading a poet elsewhere ranting about the rise of the creative writing programs in the UK, as if attending one will make you less of a writer, as if the 'true' poets are the ones who've never been within a royal mile of a creative writing class. Reality suggests otherwise. You don't become a doctor or lawyer without attending the specific classes, but somehow, writing is considered different to all other professions.

Hmmm. I don't think so.

Mayo Dindsenchas

P

Oh, three-handedly preternatural smoothness
Sligo - Achonry, Aclare - Ballaghnatrillick, Ballinafad,

Skreen, Strandhill - Tourlestrane, Tubbercurry

Eiru Fodhla and Banbha, the triplicate Goddess
Royal Tuatha De Danann queens and married.

Mayo - Attymass, Belcarra, Belmullet, Bohola
Achill to salmon, Finton of Ballina, Assaroe

And Ballinrobe, Ballintober, Ballycastle, Ballyhaunis
Ballyglass, Ballyvary, Bangor and Boytown

Bunnacurry Castlebar, Charlestown, Claremorris, Cong,
Corroy and Crossmolina, Currane, Derreens, Derrew

Dooega, Dookinella, Foxford, Geesala, Glengad
Glenamoy - Keel, Kilkelly, Killala, Kilmaine and Knock

Kiltimagh and Swinford, Shrule, Newport, Mulrany,
Pollagh, Rossport, Tourmakeady and Louisburgh,

Dooagh, Islandeady, Westport Valley and Dugort Church,
poetry occurs effortlessly, endlessly, eternally, forever there

alphabetical Asia in three quarter light from Achill hawk
Slievemore shore, dying in their generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Thus the forest spake.

Welcome to Balony TV

I'm Mike Igoe

He's going to be reading a poem tonight called, Rosanna You Muppet. An unwarranted personal attack on the eternal Mister Universe Ireland 2003

'Rosanna You Muppet.

Rosanna you muppet!
I'm with you, cohabitant in heaven.

Hell! I know your pain of sainted martyrs and cancer sufferers,
I know your agony of wooden rice bowls and children with distended bellies,
I was with you in solidarity when you walked barefoot on landmines and razor wire,
From Land's End to John O' Gods collecting direct debit mandates for the victims
Of burst Russian fission reactors.

I shared your stoic horrors under a 7,600% pay cut, due to inflation,
To feel your connection with public sector school teachers in Zimbabwe.
I was grinding my teeth in the background when you donated those
Twenty-five gallon drums of cooking oil to Haiti
And accepted the key to the city, graciously,

When they buried the machete in your honour.'

Actually, the title of Mike Igoe's poem is not Rosanna You Muppet, but Rosanna you ****. Begins with S and ends in G, LA between: gas poem, not for the tenderest in our
flock of luvvies one must flag-up, from across the spectrum of age and experience, who may or may not choose to draw from one a door of perception closed to none but the man, y'all gotta be ready for the real title of this audaciously ambitious poem. The premise it sets out from, Rosanna You ****, a direct address to a very intelligent all rounder and class first Miss World Ireland, one of the very finest young blooms and brains from The Lady In Red: Daughter of C. DeB. not the kind of thing one would publish under His own imprimatur

...out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling,

...outrageously a veneer may trip one up and slam the door to peptides docking clean, new, protean one's chain of amino acid protein, shuttin off our neural perception of the other biological space-time survivors back from the page time forgot, what you know I know you know but think not.

Get over it.

Thanks very much.

Your head on my belt, do cheann im chrios luv, dichetal do chennaib, spontaneous critical divination from the instinctively topper tip of Cruachán worked for you: Muse of ten thousand American souljahs in a poet army of bardic fluff, came for you

Old freinds, old freinds, sat on a park bench like bookends
a newspaper blows through the cracks, falls on the round

toe, of the high shoe, of the old freinds, winter companions
the old men, lost in their overcoats waiting for the sun,

sounds of the city sifting through trees, settles like dust
on the shoulders of the old freinds. Can you imagine us

years from today, sharing a park bench quietly, how terribly
strange to be seventy, old freinds, memories brushing

the same year, silently sharing the same fears, time it was
and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence

a time of confidences, long ago it must be, I have a photo-
graph, preserve your memories they're all that's left you

Simon and Garfunky

Mike Igoe: Balcony TV - Rosanna You Sla...arghh

Take no notice.

Authorial List Poem

Poe, Humboldt, Pope and Coleridge, Bacon, Shelley, Parke
and Greene - Bryant, Lincoln, Fremont, Cooper, Alex

Langston and Charles Bernstein

Rudge and Whalen, Wilde and Blaser, Hamilton, Godwin
Nietzsche and Gay - Whittier, Garrison, Ticknor, Creeley

Washington, Horace and Wittgenstein

Samuel Beckett, Alan Ginsberg, Henry Adams, Lowell
and Leigh - Corbiere, Wilberforce, Longfellow, Matthiessen

Silliman, Vendler and Sophocles

Desmond Swords

Cork Poetry

Memory.

My thoughts are clear like a crystal fountain,
As a river runs with a breeze: come to the edge
And seek out the forest, come to the forest

And seek out the tree. Over yonder lies the ocean
With waves that will carry you over the mountains
of Time to the foothills of Dream.

We sail with the full moon and we will fly over
The silent sea; for the music is our dreaming
And the dreaming is our song, and our Vision sets

Us forward to a place where we belong. Run
With time to the fields of open starlight,
To the quiet place where the spirit of life rests

In your heartbeat; a sacred fire, the flame within

And stay for a long time beyond the borders
Of description, to discover your true heart.
And with an open mind the music sets you free

The music lets you be and takes you to the farthest
Shore, as melody makes a voyage of life's blood
Dearest promise, to raise the spirit within.



Tommy Livinsgstone.

The poet below is Ailsing Fox.

I heard her first in 2004, not long after I'd arrived in Dublin in search of something. An 'itch' and poetic kink had led me there, armed with only a photocopy of the final results from a Building Studies and Drama BA, and a bill for several outstanding sums from the student hardship fund I'd been unwilling and unable to repay.

One's exit velocity from Edge Hill University in one's home town of Ormskirk Lancashire, where Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon taught from 2001-4, had enough momentum to bowl me, a bicycle and two panniers containing all my worldly goods, onto the now defunct Liverpool–Dublin fast ferry.

I'd decided that researching the bardic history of poetry in Ireland and trying my hand at writing it in Dublin, was the only sensible option for a man with a professional Building Studies qualification and interest in performance who, at 43, was fast approaching middle age.

I alighted at the North Wall and cycled along the coastal path to my sister's home in Baldoyle: a beachhead from where to launch one's assault upon the literary citadel of Dublin, and float or implode in urban Ireland’s poetry flame HQ.

I met Aisling Fox within the first few weeks, below in the basement of Brogans pub on Dame Street, where Gerry McNamara hosted his Write and Recite poetry night and poets gathered, trumping one another and self-trumping ourselves. Competitive, but in a healthy and natural, Irish way, in which the rational of us being there in the first place, seemed equally mixed between tragedy and the comedic premise that meant one either sunk or swam.

Fox had not been long back from having spent a few years in a Latin country, Cuba I think, and demonstrates her command of Spanish in the video.

A tour de force recital, from a very talented woman at the peak of her live skill.

Unfortunately, one's time in Dublin led me to sink into madness and unhappiness when I realized the competition was just too good for me to ever make it as a professional ditty maker. Luckily, I now work as a university lecturer, teaching Cognotive Assonance to the poetically disabled of America, in Boston and Chicago.

Have a nice day.

Merrie England

I've just been watching a news-video on the Guardian website English Defence League march in London.

The opposing, anti-facist marchers, are a mix of black and white, both genders and lots of non-accented voices, chanting:

We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite.

The EDL chant:

'England till I die, England till I die, I know I am I'm sure I am I'm England till I die.'

A black man in the anti-fascist camp on a megaphone addresses the anti-EDL crowd:

'If we don't stand out against them, then what happens is they start to grow, and when they grow they start to act like people did in the past, and one day people say, what happened? Why didn't people stand out? And that's why I'm proud to say...'

(shot cuts to EDL)

The EDL are all male, white, wearing lots of Burberry, baseball caps, sporting regional accents, left arms across their breast as they voice themselves publicly in unison, hands touching their hearts, wistful looks on their faces and cans of Carling clutched in their right hands.

'I'm with the EDL mate, yeah. There's thousands of us, all round the country', the first interviewee tells a person holding the camera, as he folds and rolls up a red-crossed white banner proudly sporting the name of his group, his accent sounding anywhere from Devon to Norfolk.

Do you feel part of a big movement? - he is asked:

'It's not a case of I feel part of a big movement, I am part of a big movement mate', he replies.

'E, E, EDL, E, E, EDL' they chant (aggressively), squaring up across the police lines against their opponents, who chant:

'There are many many more of us than you, there are many many more of us than you ...EDL go to hell, take your fascist place as well.'

The English Defence League are upset about 'Muslims'.

We will never submit to Islam, one of the placards reads, opposite a large burly thirties male on a loud-hailer administering political rhetoric in what sounds like an East midlands working class accent, the men, many of whom have shaven heads, bonding vocally in support:

'...today your brother, your son, your grandson, and I say to you now, don't worry, it's gonna be OK, the English Defence League is here, and we are here for yooooo (wild cheering) ...d'yer know what, even God bless the Muslims, they'll need it, when they're burning in fuckin hell.' (more wild cheers)

One young man, short, close cropped ginger hair, middle England working class accent, tells us:
'I'm not racist whatsoever, not one bit, but the thing is yeah, they're the racists, coming to our country and blowing the place up, yeah. How can I be racist?'

Another chap standing near him, more senior in years, the same sort of look and dress, hoodie, can of Carlsberg in his right hand, the alcohol bringing out his loquacity, in a heavily working class Manchester accent:

'The thing is yeah, if a white English Christian speaks up for White English Christians, we are branded racists. The Muslims can say what the hell they like, but if we say something bad about Islam, about the Pakistanis, about the Bangladeshis, we are branded racist scum.'

Another man standing with him, East Midlands accent, looks like he's had a few, interjects:

"What the fuck are they even doing in this country? Fuck 'em else where. Go back to your own country. Go back to your own country coz you're not welcome in this country."

'No, no, they are welcome, as long as they abide by English Christian rules -- the Manc philosopher counters in heavy nasal emphasis a la Liam Gallagher, turning 'christian rules' into kristeeaaan roooles -- ...they're welcome. They come here, but they scrounge and they plot to kill and bomb us at every occasion they can get..

With this final piece of insight, he shrugs his shoulders, the can waving upward and an EDL steward, his face covered by a scarf, whispers something into the ear of the Manc, who instinctively moves his left arm with the Carling can in it, across his breast and attempts to shift the emotional pitch of his voice into sombre and sober address, as the can touches his heart momentarily in a sign of respect:

'The fallen troops. God bless 'em. God bless the fallen troops.'

Crop Circles Message For Human Race Decoded
Uploaded by ufoblogger. - Explore more science and tech videos.

Thanks Jah

There are some achingly mental thought-pictures and scenes in those eloquent sentences; useful because bodies live in constant flux and borrowed forms that are transitory; the same beloved name a language-ghost we ourselves inhabit; the eight-four-two-one persons in a derbfine and temporary matter chained by this present mind, to inherited form of bodies and people disappearing in sequence, each a physical poem brought to every one of us - veiled at the entrance in shrouds of skin: we cannot remove them, our beginnings in..this absence you know; non-presence and big eye bang that cannot measure, only print ‘I’ who cannot speak separate from one’s own course. The dead who made us.

You recognize two distinct ways from the many one things you love, unequivocally appropriate, you’re poetically everything, all moments gone that makes a lineage not so much you, but the multitude who went before and live as you, in translation, not lent, borrowed, nor asked for, but imposed by an active force within, mirroring without, in perfect balance, in the space between what you make and what I make, in that intermingling reflectional text and conversation with of the other: wise perhaps insofar, as poetics, this is a relational art — it is what happens when utterance declared, not ‘I’ who speaks, but something borrowed that speaks for me, you who inhabits what construct, attached to our race of human s/he, is that genderless marker of formless state reason formed, which thus, because it is possible, to move thankfully within, they are us and we them, already gone — who shape-shifted into us, the ineffable form and formula few speak. It is through them life comes. The dead make us thus.

One2

02

We’re the sidhe alive, buried silence of a faery troop, airing, fourteen streams of poetry composing me and you. They are us.

02
G4
8-great-grandparents, it’s who we are, fourteen streams of poetry make a derbfine, the bass of clan-measure, cards, people marking who we are, all potential as the first and fifteenth roll, Danu’s dice decides.

Rainbow on a Carpet

Being very much a minority art-form since time immemorial, all one can hope for is to create well, that which appears, here and in the applications with which literature's delivered to a minimum six hundred million of us who speak, read and write the quarrel within ourself that is..this experience of a container and lens, mind and consciousness presenting itself: us in what we construct, demolish, taunt, jib, jibe, offend, turn on, woo, live and Love with via a 'technology of the intellect' - Language.

On the planet, are 1.8 billion speakers, readers and writers of varying proficiency, ability and talent for playing themselves in this Language. Just one percent of which, are 200 million potential customers with a sincere and (possibly) passionate interest in anything one presents that they believe 'good' enough to read, first - and then purchase because a spell compelling them to read again because it is poetry, enacts the charm of an author's native wit and nose for a real 'it' which cannot be solved nor analysed, only recognised and harnessed, understood not drily, static and detached, but passionately, full of life and actualized by - imbas: a Gaelic word meaning mental excitement within the imagination, a poetic fizz and inspiration one need possess when in the comas and throes of a compositional go. Writing.

Blunders given, again.

"Ireland had chances at Croke Park and in Paris but didn’t take them. France were there for the taking but Ireland never grabbed it – as usual. They were afraid of that next step and were mentally not strong enough. They can complain all they want. That is not going to change anything. France are going to the World Cup – get over it. They want sympathy as usual. It is the usual carry on and it is boring."

They'll bore you to death - Keano said. Seriously.

"Ireland had their chances in the two games [against France], and they never took them. But it's the usual FAI reaction - 'We've been robbed, the honesty of the game' - he said.

There was one match against Georgia where Ireland got a penalty and it was one of the worst decisions I've ever seen which changed the whole course of the game. I don't remember the FAI after the game saying we should give them a replay."

~

It's a game, for millionaire sports-people, (men really) who deserve our supplications before them as the 'we' they are who care enough to play fair at all times when lying through our back teeth about how appalling it all is, hey? - the neat fair square, as per status quo global luvvies living the dream - inside centre fullback, left and right tighthead prop and number eight, predestinating happenstance as a wheel of fortune spins - fly and scrum half.

One word stressed straight: it's a ninety minute experiment kicking toward the target, in a fortress not one's own. Unlocked and open to all paranoia and success, confined in a space slaying their faux try, from a loosehead prop, blindside flanker, our poetical eye, ay?

ha ha ha ha

hé res a goal guarded by yer one scoring the win away from home, citadel doors ajar - outside centre-cheat, 50/50 karma-prospect kismet serendipity and one's portion of free will, stars to come of our own volition, Choice of English, hatreds eeking the art away, what is written by the heavens, luck and death in one's horoscope as scorpio - low key container of obelisks bought with the obolus tenth or sixth Charon of the metrical measure, tracks in one's aura, site, constellation crumbling overhead as the sentence spent, terminates.

~

"I'd focus on why they didn't clear it. I'd be more annoyed with my defenders and my goalkeeper than Thierry Henry. How can you let the ball bounce in your six-yard box? How can you let Thierry Henry get goal-side of you? If the ball goes into the six-yard box, where the hell is my goalkeeper?"

So, these few frauds looking up to me,
all the colours of an opaque wit, in naked

blush; all the tones of a royal douche-bag
I have been thinking about, them people

blindly deluded that the boys in green, sad soccer knobs, were gonna pull off a miracle in Paris. And who are now in uproar because of an honest mistake they claim as the 'cheat', whose charge sheet contains instant admittance of the 'accident' instinct and the finer, noble qualities humankind exhibit, on and off both stage and pitch, as per the actor Henry, imagine that scene: it is reality - get over it - us not playing in the hallowed Shirt: not even in the stands - we will sell the volvo and fly to Nelson Mandela Bay, ask Santy to take us to where it aint gonna happen, because our sportspeople (men really) can't cut it at the highest level, in the real Premier and super, excellent league. Not on the international pitch as representatives of the Shirt they can't y'all.


~

I was listening to Marian Finucane, with Keano the focus of a mass outpouring of divided and highly incendiary craic: one fan and Irish person so incensed, called for diplomatic relations with France to be suspended until an honourable outcome for what is, perhaps, the human world's most shared cultural signifier and symbol of one's native National pride and spirituality. One memorable quote from the Times: 'we should call in the police' - as if anyone gives a toss about it.

I am glad they didn't get in, because if they did, it would be just another excuse to indulge in jingoistic self-congratulation about how great the Irish are, how friendly and loveable and all that rubbish stuff that flows out of a deep insecurity and colonial hangover, always blaming the 'other' for anything that goes wrong. Bastards.

It is telling, that the Irish who go to Britain, are welcomed and do well, taking over the airways with their funniness, but it's a one way street when their scion returns to where no brits from a similar platform: talk to every person in every county they know, to be a Shirt in every province, and the global success. And yet the official body, the FAI, who won't even acknowledge my e mails about a proposal for doing it on a shoestring of 400,000 a month - to make it happen and for us to go to the finals - are singing in the wind if they think FIFA will be in any way amenable to their begging chorus, we wuz robbed won't cut it in Durban and Port Elizabeth next year, when the group winners and runner-up winners will be proudly representing their Shirt in South Africa.

ha ha ha ha

Who cares?

Fox Wins All Ireland Crown

Congratulations to Craigavon's Séamus Fox for securing the first prize winnings of 200 euro at last night's All Ireland Poetry Slam Championships, in the Crane Bar, Galway.

Second was Stephen Murray from Cork and now resident in Galway.

It was all good fun and more about the doing than the winning. Judging poetry and performance is an on-the-night lottery, and often the difference between first and fifth is zero: but someone had to win, and Séamus was as worthy a winner as any.

The Crane bar (above in the photograph) is like the Cobblestones pub in Dublin: centre of the traditional music scene in the city, and the poetry takes place upstairs.

It was a locked out night, run under the aegis of North Beach Poetry Nights, host to the most vibrant Slam scene in Ireland: John Walsh, the organiser of North Beach, had his hand firmly on the door once it kicked off around 9.15pm, keeping it closed and turning away a few punters for whom the physical limit of the fairly roomy space, was such that it was impossible to fit everyone who wanted to come, in.

Next year it is Leinster's turn to host the final, number four in the Series.

180

Along the flight-path of angels was a village called Poetry
where stir the artful dawn-dropped moments pictured

three floors above a flat centre of what green cold
sweat, threatening to tear out your eyes, as lust, bushelled

under a thick rain, pitch black, no flickering spotlight
in the earth's ceiling this morning:

"not the scars of your childhood and childbearing,
not the birthmarks and blemishes of your skin,
not the graying of your hair,

not even the weight of all my burdens upon you"
filled you with dread.

Afternoon lock-ins with bores and villains,
buying hooky gear just to fill the time

"...like liquid fire - the sun shone that morning,
it was beautiful" exemplary saint - mannequined,
muted and risen to perfection, ready to embrace

the halo from where we slept, still clasped in a watching
angel's palm "that spreads through the sky as my step-
by-step-ladder to say goodbye; for together

we're leaving at the first breath of day, and my love
is asleep and dreams love can be all of life, at best

death, a timely rest - for who yearns to stay the course ...

II


There was a village called Poetry
i beg you - hold this letter from my heart,

for life well lived: light now in the corner
where a month ago was dark

you who travel too swiftly for me to follow,
lovely poem. Taste the essence and define
what professors of English name sublime

resisting the impulse to slide again beneath
and mould myself to the contours of a body.

What else could we have done?
accomplished other than quietly ending
in sleepy self-embrace, or prayer
simple shadows of the window blinds
tattooed in my memory
by the orange ink of dawn?

III

There was a village called Poetry
Abode there with we who sing wind-sighs

so many "why's"

trees lining the street
as two recommended friends meet

mist-plumes of water we have sung - long ago
going back, when psychopomp sea-goddesses
with foamy hooves of light, an audience of pillars

in the night; talking till dawn on long golden
strands of Atlantic breakers, in muscular arms -
laid across a naked breast, hailed a cab and went
back to your place; lost the fey D'Arcy my darling,

the swift onset of dawn and dew that rent
my petticoat, its moistness leading to a chill

darling dearest, why must men quit me so?

The sweetest suitors dissipate before the first cock-
crow: a multitude of sins to bloody awareness with,
though it really doesn't matter now I can remember
wild hair and warm smiles,

remember how we sat for hours, affirming love
as true; though our hands were parted

still wedded through this pen to yearning aches,
to be as one with you again my darling.

~

The above piece is a write-through poem. Write-Through is a form very few poets exercise in. Probably because most will be unaware of the forms existence, but also because many will mistakenly believe it too challenging a form to return rewards; which is not necessarily the case.

The current July/August edition of Chicago's Poetry Foundation's Poetry Magazine (read in full at the link) - was devoted to Flarf poetry, and in an article by Kenneth Goldsmith, Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo, he informs us of:

..the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed - from what it is, into poetry. The radical presence and significant force in contemporary American poetry, asks:

Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard?

Being reared and working in the British and Irish equivalent of American contemporary language poetry: in the Concrete school of doing things on the page, it is only chance I stumbled across this compositional method. Virtually all but a handful of cued in poets with a working background knowledge of the more inconsequential threads of contemporary practice, work in the Concrete poetry form, or know its lineage, peaks and troughs and relationships with American poetry as it is now.

I have written in depth elsewhere, of how I came to write in the write-through form.

Sometimes the finished piece will bear no resemblance to its original, because it has been altered at letter level, using the letters of the words, to create new words. The label Found, therefore, only applies when working at the level demonstrated above; which takes - more or less - full lines from a variety of found poems, all being culled from their original context and re-woven into this found-piece.

The poems came from this months guardian books blog Poster Poems thread, whose creator is the much neglected modernist and fellow middle aged radical reared in the linguistically innnovative branch of poetry, Billy Mills. The posters whose pieces I have stolen from, are pretty much all writing anonmyously and posting under the names: anytimefrances, creel, HenryLloydMoon, hic8ubique, Iamnothere, Leemar, Martianisms, OhGodNotHimAgain, Parisa, paulspen, pinkroom, reenimus, Stoneofsilence and UnpublishedWriter.

The only two I know of who are not anonymous, are class agitator CJ Underwood, and woman of international glamour, suzanabrams.

Grá seen PL Cubarta broom rat.

TAZZ

Sometimes, at night the same darkness shares the same table
we pull this swollen current across: this river, this stream and ocean
of memory where lines cast as if, not by you who keeps us barely
breathing at dawn, but this climate; always the same warm wind
by a river, and walking this river, or any river, whether the Rhine
or la Plata, a depth wisest in the widest dark of the world, closed
where only the dead can enter and not even untiring infinite time
label tame, and everything in silence life defines in symphonies
as the payment of attention to what differences between us refined
what belief we leave behind when the way in that is ours, in summer
at least, would inspire us into killing on the slightest pretext, humanity.

You and me from the bottom of the river’s race, our hands and face
fiercely tied, press into a serious curve and divertimento making nest
with our cheek touching the other raining flesh, dead mouths in body’s
night, breast and head, infecting with it; with propaganda - our touch
kept quietly in the night as if it were terror on earth, this other body
the reigning dead who move in oboe and violin, superb flute not hiding -

who’ll find, would we allow it, those coughing counts that fan in error;
themselves may be why friends in the election gang - nobody from
here: this country in orange rags at the age of four squatting, forever
in scream in a cave, cell, tent, cage sustaining any heart of any growing
bird, grass, afternoon, air, animal and siesta fate-cloud fallen with last
light along what rising edge a sighing wind that forgives our heart still,
barely ours, who care not to remember.

Gormless Gurning

Conceptualist Tony Gormley, a substantially subsidised intellectual ex-public schoolboy and deep thinking sculptor whose rusty works supply a metaphor for all that is (not) new, exciting, shared, (or) inclusive in Britain, and whose conceptually common experience of Britain mediated through the mind of an artist who can empathise with the average Briton so much they attract £140,000 of gambling tax to elevate pedestrians seven meters above Trafalqar Square for the incredibly creative removal from the common ground, (so) the body becomes a metaphor - has today been honoured for his contribution to the Culture of Foetry and Flarf, with an audience of compliant participants in stationary behaviour his genius has contextualized into generating Art whose Conceptual gravity and merit is wholly spurious, it has been alleged by Allegro Cortina, the grand-daughter of Conceptual Art founder Marcel Duchamp.

Ever since her grandfather's reverse-psychology upended the art world by prioritizing and framing ideas instead of material Creation, by the simple act of rotating a standard Bedfordshire urinal 90 degrees, giving it a title of Fountain and signing it "R. Mutt 1917" - the subsequent success of Conceptual art has been assured.

A success contingent not on the quality of the physical, but on the proclamation, promotion, propagandizing and publicity in the mass media organs, of whatever theory, idea and intellectual scaffold the artist can convince others to believe as, Reality.

R. Mutt (Duchamp) so signed this toilet 'sculpture', because he didn't want his fellow jurors on the selection commitee of the Society of Independent Artists - who had announced it would exhibit all submissions for their 1917 Exhibition - to know it was him submitting the 'sculpture'.

The only terms for inculsion to this show of a Society claiming itself Modern, was a six dollar fee, which generated $12,500 from 2,500 entries.

Duchamp, who had very wisely decided not to be a proxy murderer for a small bunch of closely related multi-millionaires who instigated the first mass-mechanised orgy of slaughter so their class of (so called) civilization could continue - on arriving in neutral New York, found himself already a celebrity with numerous (wealthy) art lovers offering him patronage.

He fell in with a group of anti-art surrealists and dadaists including Italian Futurist Joseph Stella, and Walter Arensberg, a wealthy American art collector and the son of a steel company president - who all rejected the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society, whose Ideology they believed had led to the insanity of the first world war.

The dadaists exhibited this in ways which appeared to embrace irrationality, and because the Modernism manifests in behaviour we have not experienced before, its conception and first becoming attracted global interest solely because of its novelty and Uniqueness - coupled to highly developed self-promotional abilities and the eloquence of a handful of artists.

Arensberg, Duchamp and Stella bought History when they attended J.L. Mott Iron Works on 118 Fifth Avenue, purchased a urinal, and at 33 West 67th Street:

"..took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - (which) created a new thought for that object."

After much debate on the artistic legitimacy of Fountain by the commitee members (most of whom did not know R. Mutt was one of them) the toilet bowl was excluded from the catalogue and hidden from view during the show, with Duchamp and Arensberg resigning from the commitee after the exhibition and setting about stage 2 of the psychological heist.

In the second (and final) issue of their mag The Blind Man, poet Lousie Norton attached her name to an article on the 'disappearance without disussion' of Fountain (in which the quote above appears) - mocking the bourgeois aesthetic and proclivities of the jurors on the committee and obliquely referring to them as 'ornamental monkeys' - because the object was irrevocably associated in their atavistic minds with a certaion natural function of a secretive kind - (having a leak)

She began by likening humanity to the philosophers in Dante's Inferno, their heads set the wrong way on their shoulders. We walk forward looking backward, each with more of his predecessors personality than his own. Our eyes are not ours - the author wrote, before introducing a host of contemporary writers, paraphrasing the' sacred marriage of ideas' from La Dissociation des Idees, by a recently deceased French Symbolist poet and highly influential critic (when alive) Remy de Gourmont.

S/he claims someone likened Fountain to ladies legs in a Cezanne painting, introduces a counter quote by Montaigne 'the very "essence and motion of folly", followed by a rebuttal of this 16C French authority, before the wisdom of a now unread Gertrude Stein pops up along with a famously forgettable quote by schizophrenic Friedrich Nietzsche, and ending with the weight of the most recently cleverest deceased, de Gourmont.

~

The difficulty for those who follow them of course, is that conceptual Art is what American Poet Laureate Thomas Brady has noted - 'very professional, very protocoled Author Bio statements in the journals, Museum-performance brochures, and University of' - Gormley's (mission statement) "..of metaphor, symbol..in the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues to specific individuals, elevation of everyday life to the" blah blah "elevation onto the plinth, and removal from the common ground..position formerly occupied by monumental art..to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society": ie, you and ME, skint in a bedsit being a concept/reality.

VERY VERY BORING GORMLEY - SHOW ME THE FUCKIN GURN MOANY !!!!!

Segais Omphalos

What is the Muse but Memory of a great tradition, Finnegas and Finn McCool speaking the meaning of *éces* - which the modern Irish word for poetry, *éigse* routes to.

Éces is an Old Irish word which the word *poetry* as we understand it today doesn’t really capture. In the most basic of sense it means the nuts and bolts of knowledge.

~

Mnemosyne, the original Greek muse, the etymology rooting to a house of the moon, its essential meaning is, Memory.

Her pool in Hades was the opposite of Lethe, which was a pool/river of forgetfulness the dead drank from so they would not remember their past life when being re-incarnated.

The Orphic Mystery rites had initiates drink from Mnemosyne’s pool so they would remember in order to acquire omniscience, and instead of being re-born on Earth, pass onto the Elysian Fields, which Hesiod in Works and Days refers to as the Isles of the Blessed, far to the west and which in Celtic Mythology are Tír na nÓg, (land of the ever young) the most popular of several Celtic otherworlds where happiness is found, similar to Avalon in Brythonic myth.

The poetic Tradition of Gaelic poetry, is called *on coimgne* - which Kuno Meyer translated as *historical knowlege*. Meyer was an early 20C Celticist who, along with Rudolph Thurneyson, Osborn Bergin, D.A. Binchy (uncle of Maeve) and others, first translated Gaelic manuscript and were part of the Dublin milleau of Yeats and his cronies.

On Coimgne breaks down into 350 tales, 250 primary and 100 secondary. Secondary ones were never written down and only learned from grade four cano (whelp) up to seven ollamh (poetry professor), passed from lip to ear.

A list of 187 primary tales in 16 genres appear on folio 189b of the 12C Book of Leinster: Do nemthigud filed, -- Of the Qualifications of a Poet.

Destructions (9), and Preyings (11), and Courtships (14), and Battles (9), and Caves (11), and Navigations (7), and Tragedies (13), and Feats (17) and Sieges (9) and Adventures (14) and Elopements (12) and Massacres (38) and Eruptions (2) and Visions (7) and Expeditions (4), and Marches (13).

The maxim following this primer reads: “(s)he is no poet who does not synchronize and harmonize on coimgne” - the ancient knowledge.

~

Which brings us to the Muse of Gaelic tradition.

The otherworldly omphalos, the wet muse of Irish myth, is known by a variety of names: the Well of Segais, Sidhe Nechtan and Connla’s Well.

The mythology surrounding the well states it is a still-pool source of the Boyne river, and informs us how only Nechtan and his three cupbearers were allowed in the vicinity of the well, to perform magical rites, walking round it clockwise, chaunting incantations to invoke a supreme intelligence they hoped would deal favourably with their wants and wishes.
One day Nechtan’s wife Boand (who gave her name to the river Boyne) broke the taboo or *geisa* of not going near the well, and walked round it counter-clockwise, causing it to erupt in fury and bring the river Boyne into being, whilst scattering Boand’s limb and body parts in places whose toponyms etymologically route to her name and are recorded in another body of lore the poet need learn to qualify, the Dindsenchas.

The dindsenchas are 176 poems and prose commentaries which recount how places got their name. There is a 23 stanza poem of the dindsenchas which tells how the Boyne got hers.

~

The well is surrounded by nine hazel trees, and each nut contains total poetic wisdom, and these nuts are known as *the nuts of knowledge* — cnó coill hEolas which (according the Cauldron of Poesy, a 7C text laying out poetic principles):

“…cast themselves in great quantities like a ram’s fleece upon the ridges of the Boyne, moving against the stream swifter than racehorses driven in the middle-month on the magnificent day every seven years."

~

Unlike the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, there is no sense of the forbidden about them, (indeed they are greatly prized if highly elusive) and the short-cut way to dispense with the 12 difficult years of training in the bardic curriculum, is to catch a Salmon of Knowledge who has fed on the nuts in the well and eat it, thereby ingesting the full of poetic wisdom seciond hand. The earliest name for the Salmon of wisodm/knowledge is eo fis and the modern name is bradán feasa.

A Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn son of Cumhaill) tale encapsulates this poetic of getting it all at once by eating the Salmon of Knowledge, which appears in the body of lore known as The Boyood Deeds of Finn McCool, found in the Fenian Cycle of Irish myth and which there is some debate as to the era the tales where set in, but in the centuries around the time of Christ, and these started getting written down in the 7C.

There are four cycles in Irish myth, the other three being:

2 - Mythological Cycle - detailing the pagan invasion mythology and featuring a cast
from six races of gods who fight amongst themselves for control of the island.

3 - Historical Cycle - cycle of kings detailing tales of legendary kings

4 - Ulster Cycle set ion the time of king Conchobar mac Nessa, in the time Pliny was writing around the time of Christ and detailing the adventures and battles of of the Uliad and their hero Cúchulainn, with ther rivals in Connacht, led by Maeve and the prime tale being Táin Bó Cúailnge - cattle raid of Cooley.

~

Finn McCool is the name of a person whose birth-name was Demne: (finn means *fair, bright, shining* and with a positive charge on fair) a poet-warrior who was the last chief of the fianna in Irish mythology. The fianna were independant aristocratic bands of young men who lived outside of society and were called upon by various petty kings in times of war to fight their battles amongst themselves, and who went raiding across the sea for thralls and spoil.

Finn’s father Cumhaill, was also a chief of the fianna, killed by his rival for the leadership, Goll mac Morna (goll meaning one eyed, an injusry sustained in his fight with Cool senior). The fight came about because Cool had abducted Muireann Muncháem (”beautiful neck”) the daughter of Kildare druid Tadg mac Nuadat (Tadg son of Nuada), who appealed to High King Conn Cétchathach (”Con of the Hundred Battles”) who outlawed mister Cool and gave his rivals the perfect excuse to do away with him.

But Muireann was already pregnant by Cool by the time they got her back, and her father didn’t want to know after this, so baby Finn — who, remember, at this time was known by his birth name of Demne - was put into the care of his father’s sister, the druidess Bodhmall, and her female warrior companion Liath Luachra, who raised him in the forests of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Offally and Laois (pron. leesh)

He got the nick-name of Finn in childhood by some boys seeing him swim in the river, because of his pale hair glinting in the sun.

He was brought up trained in the art of warriorship and druidry, andas a youth, entered the service of a number of local kings in the midlands incognito, but such was his skill his true identity was always discovered and he was sent packing because it was too politically sensitive for a minor king to be having the son of Cool in his camp.

At the age of 15, he fell into with Finn Éces, or Finnegas the druid, who had his nemeton (druidic grove) by the banks of the river Boyne, where he had set up hoping to catch a Salmon of Knowledge, and took Finn in as his pupil, teaching him in the poetic craft.

Finnegas is a cipher for bright, good, positive (finn) knowledge- Finn Éces, and Finnegas had been told a prophesy, that though he would indeed catch one of the fabled Salmon of Knowledge, but alas he (Finnegas) would not get to profit intellectually and from the magical nuts of knowledge the fish had feasted on at Segias, as another person, someone called Fionn, would instead.

Now, this tale already has two people called Finn, one of whom is going by a nom de plume and with a real name of Demne and Finn Éces being the original name of Finnegas.

One day after seven yrs waiting by the bank and practicing druidry whilst also instructing his pupil Demne, (seven years being the time it took to enter the ollamh zone) Finnegas caught the fabled fish and naturally, remembering the prophecy - that not he but a person called Finn would get his mind altered by it, recieving the source of all poetry — Finnegas would have no doubt had a look around, checking that no likely candidtae was about for the fish to fall into their hands. Giving the fish to Demne he told him to cook it, but on no account eat any of it, not even a crumb, as the s/he who had the first taste, got the poetic gift, all at once.

Demne/Finn was cooking it, and some fish fat accidently splashed onto his thumb, and instinctively sticking it in his mouth, the knowledge from the nuts of wisdom, instantly infused him and when Finnegas came back to the cooking area, could tell straight away by the look on Finn’s face, what had happened.

Cerebral Lunatics

At five past
Tuesday

celebral lunatics
talking of relevance
on art boards
in cyberspace

gather sound

claiming to make
patterns of exchange
which create

a number of truths
that show their commitment
to concrete expression

by anchoring sense
in earth-bound images
within the context
of modernity.

She listens
transfixed
hypnotised

by the weight
of voices

and
tests a theory
of how
to picture
meaning

by measuring
the relative
length
of each syllable

with its syntatic
sense
and
the
degree
of assonance
consonance
and
alliterative value
when
spoken
to
life
by
a
poet's breath.

Mad Mad Knobheads

I just received an e mail which is both laughable and interesting as it raises a fundamental question about Freedom of Speech:

Dear Background Artist:

I just ran across your article entitled Guest Poet: CAD Laureate, posted on May 6, 2009, http://irishpoetry.blogspot.com/2009/05/guest-poet-cad-laureate.html, and I would like to raise an issue that is of concern to Selling Power magazine, which is the use of our trademark.

The word "Selling Power" is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for sales effectiveness. For example you wrote: “Duffy looks like she couldn't give a hoot about all that, and so could use her position to achieve her political thrills, whilst also elevating her own selling power sky high.” We do not condone such uses of our trademark.

As a practical matter, when you describe sales effectiveness, there are a wide range of terms available such as: sales excellence, sales savvy, sales mastery, sales acumen, sales efficiency, and many more.

The reason for this letter is to educate writers like yourself that we want to protect our trademark, since we don't want to risk Selling Power being declared by the courts a generic word. Therefore we ask you not to use Selling Power as a phrase since it is our legal trademark.

We would like to receive a written acknowledgment of this letter stating that you will in the future identify Selling Power as a trademark if you should write about our magazine, and not use Selling Power as a phrase. If we do not hear from you, we will need to take further action.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

All the best,

Gerhard Gschwandtner
Founder and Publisher
Selling Power
1140 International Parkway
Fredericksburg VA 22406
Office: 540-752-7000 Cell: 540-273-2555

P.S. Watch Selling Power videos online www.sellingpower.com/video

~

Not only does Gschwandtner want to own the rights to two common words, but to stop others from using them in the normal course of speech, without paying him, and also to sell me stuff.

Dear Gerhard Gschwandtner

What planet are you on?

Sven Hassel

The 14 psuedo-autobiographical second world war books of 91 year old Danish author Sven Hassel, (translated into 19 languages), stands up to numerous re-readings. Danish, he joined the German army, he claims, because it was easier than getting to England and joining the army there.

He deserted and when caught, was put in a penal tank regiment made up of "criminals and dissidents" and the material for his books is based on his time in the penal tank regiment. However, Hassel has one strong critic who claims he was in the SS and his wife really wrote the books. Whatever the truth is, they are compelling reading and like Frank Zappa, his work tilts towards inspiring culthood more than than fandom.

His books follow the experience of the cast of out-cast characters, the deserters, court-martialed soldiers, political prisoners and death row cadre of the (fictional) 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment, the lowest form of military life, closest to the front line hells of the Second World War, who take us from Finland to the Russian Steppe, Normandy and Monte Cassino.

Hassel's novels transcend cultural and national boundries. There are no good guys or bad guys, merely the killed or not killed, pawns of death traded on the whims of those engineering the slaughter far from the front lines. The horror, terror and nihilism of this godless period is recounted with a dispassionate veracity in which the insignificant quotidian human events of daily existence, play out in the hearth of history's flame. The minor parts speaking for a human whole screeching of the authentic experience. His stories capture a banality of the acclimatised individual pawns resigned to fate, whose only loyalty is towards one another in a dog eat dog daily life.

The web of hatreds, tensions and fights between the members in the most expendable of regiments, rippling in a pool of human relationships history has ravelled these men in, are exposed in such a way as to offer a glimpse; a view into the real world behind a rhetoric of sanatised nightly war-news in which the emblems of order, parade ground, spotless uniforms, flags hoisted and draped in clean symetrical lines - disguise the truth of what we do not see and which Hassel's 14 books do not censor of flinch from describing. The characters are not pretty, nor nobel, but criminals and chancers killing men women and children, stealing from corpses and cracking the blackest of gags whilst doing so, infusing the narratives with a logicality of real experience.

We are brought in to see a birds-eye view of what hell on earth is really like, from the remote, safe distance of pseudo-autobiographical fiction-fact which can be re-read again and again. Like Flemming's Bond books in the sense of re-readability, but without the plasticity and veneer of wishful thinking and imperial self-congratulatory romance which idealises and makes attractive the notion that there is a natural order, morally on the right side of murder and killing. In Hassel, killing is a dirty business carried out by flesh and blood men and described without the patina of loyalty to a cause.

"After that he blessed the weapons with which we were to exterminate barbary, but I do not think it helped. For a miserable little priest to stand up and make the sign of the cross at a great tank can be scarcley very effective magic, even if you believe in magic, which I cannot. At the most you might imagine such a creature bewitching small arms. And anyway, they lost the war."

The reward of re-reading Hassel, is that he reminds us in the most graphic terms, what's possible when the world goes insane, and in the absence of affirmation in the good of man, we are rewarded with an almost religious sense - the firm conviction that we must remain vigilent to the truth of his fictions, to not be fooled that war is noble and that a cause not our own individual concern as a human being, in far flung lands - deserves our personal attention.

If the politicians want to go invade some far flung stone age place, why not settle any disputes as those they pay to kill on their behalf? One on one, man to man, bravely and for the cause their own actions wrought? Why ask others to do something we ourselves will not? Because we are needed more, our life more important?

There is no nobility in the face of mechanised and wholesale butchery, merely animal man at his most naked and primitive self.

"It is odd seeing a person lying or sitting or running or hobbling away right in front of you, and for you not to turn aside but drive straight on, over him. Odd. You do not feel anything. You are aware only that you cannot feel. Perhaps some other day, in a week, a month, a year, fifty years. But not just at that moment. There is no time for feeling; the whole business is just something that is happening, going on, pictures and noises, most acutely perceived and immediately shoved automatically to one side to be analysed later."

Flarf's Guardian

Rupert Brooke was dreadfull bore
who never wanted da de da more
de da de da de da de da da and
who wrote with a rubbish hand
de da de da de da because he
could not write for effin toffee

And now here he is held up high
To us the plebs, as high as sky
Just because he could rhyme
But not do enjament ever at all
Which even a ten year old can
de da de da de da da da da and
so we have him now as the man.

~

Dear Editor of Shagma Magazine

Please accept for consideration the above piece I wrote in a workshop I attend, run by the very prestigious Daryl Mann Fluffy, who won last years Backward Prize for poetic innovation and is the Creative Literature Professor of the award winning online college and centre of excellance with ten gold stars awarded by the Society of Higher Imaginative Technology in Barnsley, the premier portal for getting on in the industry.

The poem is part of a sequence which investigates the space between desire and objectification of the contemporary symbols which alert us to the act of definition and of post-avant ironizing the ineffable force which interrogates meaning in its most specific sense - in light of something different, urgent, pressing and which I hope is self-evident in the piece.

This poem came second in last years Totley Twitter Poetry Prize, garnering praise from the likes of Martin Ashberry who lectures at Bridlington College for Excellance and who said in the commendation:

"Flarf De Da has written a seminal work, taking the notion of banality and undercutting it with a wry comedic slant which undercuts and wrongfoots the reader, forcing is to question the material itself, using all the metrical and musical tools to effect this cross-graining of the material, in lines such as:

de da de da de da de da da

the first eight syllables dancing along with a metronomic regularity, and then the stunning surprise of da da, where we are expecting a de da. A simple, effective and hugely intelligent strategy which opens up the poem to a multiplicity of mappings. Never one for the tired and predictable, Flarf De Da is a name to watch."