LIGHTBOX

Embracing Dickens (on his 200th birthday)

2012-02-07T17:30:00.001Z

I've always remembered Nabokov's introduction to his lecture on Bleak House. In his book, Lectures On Literature, Dickens follows Jane Austen's Mansfield Park:

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port. [end of quote]

Like Nabokov's, Eliot's enthusiasm for Dickens was infectious. He introduced me to Bleak House with the following passage, which I have sometimes used to demonstrate prose rhythm in creative writing classes:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might say, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better, splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. [end of quote]

There's a swatch of The Waste Land here. That one-word opening sentence reminds me of the beginning of The Burial of the Dead –– 'Unreal city' –– whose powerful, two-word evocation is due to Pound's surgical excision (the original wishy-washy opening was: 'Unreal city, I have sometimes seen and see...').

Another Dickens passage I love is from Little Dorrit, a marvelous description of funereal church bells tolling over soot-blackened houses. The playfulness –– those touches of grim, anthropomorphic humour –– are pure Dickens, bible-black but illuminated with what Tobias Wolff' called 'synaptic lightning.'

Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat. Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a
stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour
approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church,
Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They WON'T come, they WON'T come, they WON'T come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood
for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair.

'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell

stopped. [end of quote]

My grandfather didn't offer me tawny port when he had me sit beside him to read aloud large passages of David Copperfield on a daily basis. This took place in the dining room, with its oversized oak table, grandfather's cigar-scented refuge. The drawing room would have been preferable actually, as it was at the south-facing front of the house, and therefore warmer. These sessions might have put me off Dickens, though it's more likely they fed my burgeoning appetite for exhibitionism (or performance; if I was less lazy I might have had a try at acting). In any case, I am grateful to grandfather, and to Dickens.

(the picture above is one of Dorés engravings, from his book on London)

For Holocaust Memorial Day

2012-01-27T23:44:00.002Z

Stolpersteine*

Someone is at work, prisingout paving stones.

The work looks proper,official, though he is wearing

a cement-dusted leather cowboyhat.

Someone has made space forsomething, a little block capped

with brass, a squarepalm-print outside one

of the houses of the nameless.

Someone has done his homework:HIER WOHNTE _____

a name, date, whatever’s available and

can be packed.

Someone has hammered in, punched eachletter and number,

each dent in the silence of the cleansheet,

each word ringing with blows.

Someone has laid it in your tracks,something to stumble on:

a street testing its voice, ghost of ashine,

blind spot flickering off.

*‘Stumbling Blocks’: German artist Gunter Demnig’s ongoingproject: memorialising those murdered in the Holocaust by setting plaquesoutside the houses they originally lived in. His website is www dot stolpersteine dot com

Superstition & Sentimentality vs Childhood

2012-01-27T15:49:00.002Z

Father (seeing a magpie): Hello Mr Magpie, and how's Mrs Magpie?
Child: Hello Mr I'm Going-To-Kill-You, and how's Mrs I'm-Going-To-Kill-You?

'I'm The The King Of The Castle'

2012-01-25T10:07:00.000Z

After school, I took the wean to visit mum in the nursing home in Dalkey. This has become our routine now, since she became too weak to bring home around a fortnight ago. She has recovered considerably, enough to have short conversations.

Before returning to the car, I waited for him to do his sprint up the steep little path to the railway bridge behind the nursing home (this is an older, more established routine, really a tradition). He shouted his old war-cry, then began again and interrupted himself, thus:

'I'm the king of the ca... I'm the king of nothing at all cos I'm just a kid.'

Not that this knowledge seemed to faze him. Just something he needed to get off his chest.

(photo, taken near the nursing home, shows the castle on the rim of Dalkey hill in the lower left corner)

Pearse Hutchinson's 'Watching The Morning Grow'

2012-01-21T15:56:00.001Z

I read Pearse Hutchinson's obituary in this morning's Irish Times, having first learnt of his death a couple of days ago (Ian Duhig posted one of Hutchinson's poems as a tribute on Facebook).

When I first began to write poetry in the 1970s, Pearse Hutchinson was an important discovery. His poems meant a great deal to me, and still do. In 2006 Peter Sirr, who was editing Poetry Ireland Review at the time, asked a number of poets to select a 'crucial' poetry collection to write about, one that had had a significant influence on their work. I chose Pearse Hutchinson's 1972 collection, Watching The Morning Grow. The essay I wrote (first published in PIR 87 in August 2006) is reprinted below:

In the early 1970s I discovered the Eblana Bookshop, near the top ofGrafton Street. Inside, poetry was the Good News; the latest publications werearranged near the door, on the ‘altar’: tiers of narrow shelves designed toprop them with the covers facing out, like a display of pamphlets inside achurch.

My school poetry anthology, Exploring English 2, had given me atantalising glimpse of contemporary Irish poetry in Thomas Kinsella. Butbrowsing these shelves I came across, for the first time, such poets as DerekMahon, Seamus Heaney, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael Hartnett, and later, from acrossthe water, Philip Larkin’s High Windows.

The first collection I bought was Pearse Hutchinson’s Watching TheMorning Grow. The cover was striking, a boldly emblematic flower linocut ––appropriate, since flowers are a recurring and important motif.

Heaney has described Hutchinson’s poems as ‘first footers, coming to thereader with personal news to tell, keeping him “in the presence of flesh andblood”.’ The news was certainly personal, candid too. Watching The MorningGrow broached feelings I had yet to come to terms with: the underratedimportance of friendship, gentleness and human warmth, openness to othercultures and people, an invigorating sense of solidarity with anyonebrave enough to do or say something that rang true.

The first two stanzas of the opening poem, ‘Ringing the changes onMistral’, recall a local custom, whereby a child was brought round theneighbours, given

a couple ofeggs,

a cut of bread,

a grain ofsalt,

and amatch-stick,

and told to be

as full as anegg,

as good asbread,

wise like salt,

straight as amatch.

As with some of the other poems, it is like a little prayer, exhortationor memo to the poet (and, by implication, to the reader).

Hutchinson is comfortably at home in several languages, among themIrish, French, German, Spanish, Catalan and Rumanian. In a poem like‘Ode to the Future’ this linguistic freedom, and the array of characters fromdifferent cultures and countries who make brief, epiphanic appearances andutterances, could seem rather bewildering to a monolinguist such as myself. Butthe rhythm was never less than compelling, and the voicetrustworthy, someone for whom these languages were pulsing, alive. As ‘Ode tothe Future’ puts it:

“whenever I smell a rose I hear / a trandafír breathing” (trandafírbeing Rumanian for rose).

The second poem in the book, ‘Gaeltacht’, made inroads in my imaginationthat remain to this day. It begins:

BartleyCostello, eighty years old,

sat in hissilver-grey tweeds on a kitchen chair,

at his door inCarraroe, the sea only yards away,

smoking a pipe,with a pint of porter beside his boot

The portrait, from pipe to boot – taking in the sea – is startlinglycomplete. I am reminded now of other iconic portraits, from Montague’s poem,‘Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People’ or Mahon’s “lamplighters,sail-makers and native Manx speakers” from ‘A Dying Art’ (another of thosefirst, inroad-making poems).

Some of the most memorable phrases are delivered in Irish (translationsgiven in the notes at the end of the book). As one of the characters says,‘Labhraim le stráinséiri. Credim gur choir bheith ag labhairt le stráinséirí.’ (I speak with strangers.I believe it’s right to be speaking with strangers). Here was my country as Ihad never experienced it: exotic yet down-to-earth, a dream-territory that didnot seem too out of reach to come to terms with; and the Irishlanguage (that had sent me to sleep in school), out in the open,free of chalk-dust and nationalism.

Perhaps my favourite poem from the collection is the third last, one ofthe apparently simplest, ‘Bright After Dark’. Each of the three stanzas is avivid bat-swoop into a different country, unnamed except in the notes at theback of the book. Superstitions are relayed as facts, thus:

In the firstcountry,

what you mustdo when the cow stops giving milk

is climb, afterdark, a certain hill,

and play theflute: to kill your scheming neighbour’s curse.

If you can finda silver flute to play,

the spell willbreak all the faster, the surer.

But silver isnot essential. But: the job must

be done afterdark:

otherwise, itwon’t work.

It isn’t always necessary to ‘load every rift with ore’. What makes thiswork, what gives it its rhythm and hypnotic music, is its prosaic, halting,matter-of-factness. Even the odd punctuation plays a part: those colons, likedramatic pauses.

If, as Helen Vendler suggests, poetry ‘insists on aspooling, a form of repetition, the reinscribing of a groove’, ‘Bright After Dark’ embodies that movement in eachstanza, each country, each setting-out. And it ends perfectly, with a directiveto ‘…drop / grains of maize for whoever comes after you: / for only maize canlight the way on a dark night.’ So the poem’s talismanic brightness shifts fromincantatory music to cinder/guardian angel and finishes in an imaginaryellipsis, a trail of light-seeds.

Hutchinson’s collection was one of the first that gently but firmlyshook me, and woke me up.

Academic

2012-01-18T21:22:00.000Z

School’s out for thesummer

School’s out for ever

School’s been blown topieces

–– AliceCooper

NurserySchool

I wet myself and memory frames the shot,

zooming out as I dwindle, shrink

to a red, screaming dot.

Kindergarten

A grey house lost in a big field

is ‘The German school’. Herr Schmidt’s eye-patch is real.

Herr Muller does not smile.

During break I learn how to slot together two dry

stalks of horse chestnut leaves to make

the bones of an airplane. When I try

the new noise on my tongue, itgets stuck

in my teeth, though I cancount from null

to elf, and bid Guten morgen,Gut nacht ––

Merit Cards

Stiff, with rounded edges, like invitation cards,

there are three kinds, three colours.

The best (to say you are doing good work or great)

is pink as a strawberry milkshake.

My usual, anaemic blue, carries ‘Remarks’

such as my mother’s ‘I’d like to see higher marks.’

The rarest, iodine yellow, you can almost smell:

miching? stealing? –– one stop from being expelled.

Science 1.

Clear as Once Upon a Time, wearrive

at the three states of being:

Alive, Dead, Never Alive.

Headmaster

There is his specially made

leather ‘biffer’ –– hand-sewn for the trade?

christened Lizzy, and there is a Big Lizzy too ––

something to take on patrol, to smack at intervals

the echoey institutional walls

where those who’ve been sent outside to wait

begin to flinch and quake.

He has his eye on the ‘gurriers’ who wear

army coats of ‘bull’s wool’. When he warns

‘There’ll be wigs on the green’

my blankness flickers, screens some kind of lost

scuffle: an antique lawn dotted

with powdered rugs (flying from our own heads

done up as Ladies, M’Luds)

so I should be prepared when he brings in

a new boy (who seems already old and beaten)

and heartily invites him

to ‘tell us how many schools you’ve been expelled from.’

Science 2.

The lovely wrongness of mercury.

I ask Paddy where we can get some, so

he asks the Japanese boy, Sato,

who escorts us into the empty lab

as if he owns it. We tip

a whole Aspirin bottle’s worth out of a tube

and before we can wonder

what to do with it, Paddy –– in secret communion

with some inner double-dare –– rolls

one of those heavyweight tears

off his palm onto his tongue.

New Teacher

My coddled home-life couldn’t have prepared me

for Poole –– flushed, freckled, big as a bull,

always on the simmer. Catching me

dozing again, he puts his full weight into it

and the telephone in my left ear is ringing for weeks.

Geography

Dr Goldin (Butsy): too old, too mild,

his heaped astray a caldera of crushed words.

Each time he turns we hum behind his back

till he whirls and flings the duster (a jarring Clack!),

glares at us and erupts: ‘You pack of bastards.’

Maths Teachers

Red-faced O’Byrne, rasping in his chalky cloak,

swirls and pounces; no use, something un-

clicked when numbers winked

into letters.

Murphy, like Groucho,

raises a clownish eyebrow:

‘I’ll tear your hides off and hang ‘em up

like strips of bacon!’

Theblackboard is a prop

for what sizzles and smokes: entertainment, exit lines.

Latin

Mr Banks’ drone could not be drier

as he conjugates: amo, amas, amat…

till a terrible drought rolls in along the Tiber,

the flagons empty, love itself gone flat.

Art

Paddy draws cars with the same attention to detail

I will give to page 3 models from The Sun.

Meanwhile, there are subterranean systems

to be mapped, where lost fools fall

into the traps laid

by what lurks there: creatures we call

The Figures: faceless and aglow as if made

out of lightning –– one touch and you’re dead.

English

‘I wandered lonely…’ as Gardner (Weedy)

passing our window; in his hands

a book held open like a breviary.

Poetry, since now and then he’ll chance

on a nugget and halt to tilt his face

at the sky: a practiced smile, radiance.

French

Mr Feutren (Fruity) isn’t from France

but Brittany. Important. Make no mistake.

Something (anger? passion?) has shorn his face

to a bald, beak-nosed, hunched-electric presence.

Yes, he fought with the Germans during the war.

A Breton nationalist, why should he hide

what he believes? What he did was justified

(though I’m not sure who these justifications are for).

The Irish, so stupide! Hard to believe

how little we know, and how can we make a start

when, in restaurants, we ignore the heart

of asparagus, to nibble at the leaves.

Now he has lost patience and swoops to wrench

some slowcoach from his desk. I am in his sites

and will be next. Because of or despite

what he has fled, he teaches excellent French.

Biology

On a wall in the jacks: Iam 13 and I love gees ––

‘The penis is then placed in the vagina…’ ––

but when a 5^th year boy unfolds a page of these

close-ups (like lurid mugshots) we’ve somehow skipped

to a field manual, a dressing of wounds, ripped.

Rugger

A door swings open or shut

for good, when in the midst of it I find

I’ve laced my new, unbroken pair of boots

to the wrong feet.

Prefect

Lunch queue: someone shouts (his voice and face

straight out of TomBrown’s Schooldays):

‘You! Boy! Bring me a jug of water!’

Is he talking to me? No way: ‘You must be joking.’

But as he looms, long and tight-lipped, I see

no joke, unless he thinks it funny

to noose my tie until I almost choke.

The Mock Leaving

What are they to make of someone so studiously dreamy

he falls asleep in strict Bill Tector’s class,

his ear tuned to nothing much at all

unless it’s the sottovoce lullaby

from the desk behind: Rooney

intoning the same Pink Floyd line

over and over: ‘the lunatic / is on the grass…’

2011-12-31T20:54:00.000Z

Strange dream last night (though I suppose most of my dreams are strange, after a fashion). Just remember a tiny fragment: walking along a road where a couple of small girls were playing. After I passed them one shouted 'Are you an atheist?'

Only one answer to that: yes and no. Amis's definition of agnostic (as in acknowledging our immense ignorance in finding the right questions (never mind answers) to the great cosmic Because) is about right.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all. As your man puts it, 'Live long and prosper' (if the latter wish is not too tall an order under the circumstances).

Photo above is a view of our snow-crusted road after midnight on January 1st 2010 (you can see a firework going off far right).And here's a little something to go with it, if you're in the mood:

Dublin, January 2010

At home, hearing the knock
of fireworks – the city uncorked

shaking and shaking its bells –
he peers out, listens, inhales

real snow, newly laid
on steps, road –– a decade’s

slippage underscored by black
street-lit tyre-tracks

looping the hedged corner
out of what was –– just –– there.

Christmas Cracker

2011-12-25T13:09:00.000Z

Which is the more correct?
(a) Ho fucking Ho
(b) Ho fucking Ho-Ho
or (c) Ho-Ho fucking Ho

A French Teacher

2011-12-21T12:04:00.000Z

Mr Feutren (Fruity) isn’t from France
but Brittany. Important. Make no mistake.
Something (anger? passion?) has shorn his face
to a bald, beak-nosed, hunched-electric presence.

Yes, he fought with the Germans during the war.
A Breton nationalist, why should he hide
what he believes? His margin was justified
as his uniform: SS-Oberscharführer.

The Irish, so ignorant! Hard to believe
how little we know, and how can we make a start
when, in restaurants, we ignore the heart
of asparagus, to nibble at the leaves.

Now he has lost patience and swoops to wrench
some slowcoach from his desk. I am in his sites
and may be next. A Nazi rampage? Despite
or because of his past, he teaches excellent French.

When our French teacher (in St. Conleth's, Clyde Rd. Dublin) died in 2010 he left a load of papers of 'historical interest' (along with a bequest of £300,000) to The National Library of Wales. This created a minor scandal because of his historically interesting past as a Breton nationalist/collaborator in the Bezen Perrot, essentially an SS unit. He even had a proper uniform and title: SS-Oberscharführer. He fled after the war, first to Germany then Wales and eventually Ireland. Though I never learned a word of French (or much else) in school, he was a vivid presence, and apparently (according to my school friends) a brilliant teacher. So I've included him (above), in a sequence I'm working on about my school days (ironically titled 'Academic').

PHOTO: SS-Oberscharführer Louis Feutren, ID photo for his Soldatenbuch, c. early 1945. (Bezen Perrot archives)

More Spares

2011-09-24T18:01:00.000+01:00

To call someone who has committed some atrocity 'an animal' is a gross insult to all our fellow fauna. Human is one thing, humane quite another.

The Dust Collector*

2011-09-13T13:51:00.001+01:00

gets down on his knees
in some corner of a cathedral, not to pray but see

if there’s a speck, a bloom, a trace,
or if the infernal place

is as emptied of history
as London’s National Gallery or the Uffizi.

Out of ‘all these actions that took place here’, his eye falls
on anything at all

for the scanning electron microscope.
‘My grandmother was a great collector… sugar cubes, soap…’

Human vacuum, genius
of what escapes us,

he is sensitive
to the great snow-globe of dust in which we live,

that arrives from outer space ‘every minute here’
‘growing in the corners somewhere…’

*Wolfgang Stoecker ‘My Empire of Dust’

Of A Man, Falling

2011-09-11T18:16:00.000+01:00

At-ease-looking, almost poised –
though his soiled shirt

has come untucked – he might
be attempting to pass

the one-leg-stand test
or lounging, between drinks,

at a party, his back
braced by a wall, if

the world had not turned
him upside down

into the plummet
of streetwindowsky,

the brain in its cockpit – flight
the flight of his thought

a ten second freight –
for all we know

a counterweight.

Image 'September 11 from Space', from NASA

Spares

2011-09-08T11:01:00.004+01:00

Some Epigrams and Aphorisms

Speaking ill of the dead is one of the surest ways of keeping them alive.

My grandfather could never master driving, but was a great believer in hitching, especially in his old age. To hitch a lift was to marry two of his pet delights, thriftiness and talk. Getting from A to B was strictly secondary; a car was a vehicle for the captive audience.

Project ‘Iffy’: to refashion Kipling’s most cherished (and possibly worst) poem. The first stanza might begin:

Never mind keeping your head, if you’ve some idea
Where heads are located, while idiots who haven’t a clue
Are scrambling, rifling the dictionary, the fridge, IKEA…
Then blaming their headless-chicken-shit on you

Tragically, the decline of religion in the West has done little or nothing to discourage the average individual succumbing, every now and again, to sociopathic orgies of self-worship.

God is not Great

says Christopher Hitchins. I say
god is great, only
with a small g
and atheism with a small a.

Memo. Beware taxi drivers who talk politics. Especially those who announce ‘I’m voting BNP’ and follow this by declaring ‘They should pull the shutters up!’[sic] These are the kind who may curtail your incredibly naive attempt to discuss such matters with a Travis Bickle glare and the accusatory conversation-stopper: ‘You’re toying with me mate, you’re toying with me!’

Racism is the refuge of the deranged sheep, the kind that has managed to furiously pull the wool into its own eyes.

Politics

we can set aside as easily as the cat its fur-ball,
the hedgehog its ticks.
Just remember: any creature can scratch, bring up its gall.

On Radio 4, a woman on the joys of wandering naked in a garden with fellow ‘naturists’, sniffing the roses etc. As if, while enacting a reversal of Adam and Eve’s shameful discovery, they might forget to notice each other’s nakedness. And that is what naturism is: dressing for indifference, as if this were, somehow, a virtue.

Unless it is intended to remain hermetic, I think the worldlet created in any given poem should have at least some aspect of the familiar. But its greater obligation is to provide the Three S’s: Surprise, Surprise, Surprise.

Aerialist

To condemn the wide-eyed, well-balanced poem for staying on the fence
that is its glory
makes as much sense
as reprimanding a novel for telling a story.

Auden (who sang the praises of the permeable limestone landscape) called poetry ‘memorable speech.’ I think great, or even just good, poems should have at least an element of this; they should resonate in the way that a good song or piece of music does. If they manage that I will forgive them much, including a good deal of impermeability.

Historical irony should come tempered with humility. What Milosz called ‘praising art with the help of irony’ can ruin a poem. And weak irony, the smirk behind the frown (or behind the scream, in silly movies such as ‘Fright Night’) is good for nothing but guffaws. Yet irony is the iron in literature’s blood. Life itself is intrinsically ironic, its brightening flare never quite touching the end of the bricked-up tunnel.

Diversion

Having long since bypassed the old distillery,
we overshot the bypass. These days
most tributaries are in a hurry
to forget how to praise.

On The Reek

2011-08-13T18:39:00.004+01:00

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…
Except it isn’t April but the end
of a dark, damp summer.

**

So we drive through Saturday and pull in
at the evening car park: artic lorries, shops
for fast food, ice cream, the great white elephantantry
of shiny statues, rosaries, scapulars, all

the luggage you might need for what loured ahead:
blue-green slopes decapitated by cloud,
the most ominous-looking mountain I ever dreamed
of setting foot on

**

yet already there, above the burger stand,
the variously coloured trickle is in place:
people marking a zigzag route, a bright
sprinkle of hundreds and thousands.

**

Only the third tallest in the county,
somewhere between a mountain and high hill,
yet there is something in those compact angles,
a rough-drawn, broody pyramid, a hay rick
of the older gods: Pagan Cruachán Aigle
where sinister Crom Dúbh hangs out.

**

My cousin’s idea: we’d bring along our cameras,
keeping in mind our icon, Josef Koudelka’s
black and white: three men in shirts and jackets
kneeling, bent over their staffs in the 1970s,
backdropped by a geological matinee,
the islands in Clew Bay.

**

A relief, a break, an adolescent lapse:
to be more or less footloose on the road
in our fifties, remembering similar trips
when next to no one depended on us, and we
depended on little enough, our old friendship

that took us to odd corners, a procession in Louth,
or longer ago (when driving our own cars
seemed exotic as marriage, a child, a house…),
when it made perfect sense to try to hitch
from Dublin to Dingle after six in the evening
to a New Year’s party in Cong; to fall asleep
in a warm car and wake on the outskirts of Limerick,
to walk and walk and walk and walk and walk
through flat, mizzling darkness till we saw

a light in an upstairs window, above a lounge-bar,
and called till the window opened and a man in a vest
growled: ‘What the fuck are you doing, hitching
to Tralee at this hour of the night?’ Then closed the window
only to open his door: ‘Step into the light
and let’s look at you.’

**

A road atlas, a tent, duvets, sleeping bags
(and sleeping pads), as if we could shore up
against our old, well-tested indecisiveness;

a bit of rain and the wipers wipe all thoughts
of camping, out. I phone and book a room
in The Ocean Lodge, some miles and a burst of starlings

past Lousiberg: a place I haven’t been to
since my first visit, in my early 20s
properly camping with an organized friend:

wave-thump, sizzling sausages, the white noise
of The Milky Way. Or the evening we followed a trail
of posters on lampposts, for a 'Disco Inferno’

which, it turned out, was for youngsters, girls and boys
sipping ‘minerals’ on opposite sides of the hall,
a mirrorball stirring the floor.

**

The shower goes on in a nearby room and I wake
again, to the humming and roaring, in a music box
lodged under a waterfall.

**

Intending to be there by 7, we make it by 9.
Apocalypse weather. An army chopper harrows
overhead towards the party-coloured trail

that has thickened since yesterday, its two streams –
going up coming down – looking from here
like a convergence, aftermath of survivors
migrating to and from.

**

A rack of ashplants, freshly hewed, for sale
lined against a dry stone wall: €5. Beautiful.
But carrying a camera and bulky shoulder bag…

I buy a one-litre bottle of water, follow
the flow, past the man with the megaphone
holding up a picture of Padre Pio,

the first of a gauntlet of leaflets, holy hustlers
of burnished Truths, Pro-Lifers, Born Agains…
washed out by a stream’s low chuckling

under bramble: a lift.

**

The starting point: white Adze-Head on a plinth
in Popish robes, holding a shamrock: below him,
eddying around his feet (three times or seven?)
the clack and thunk of walking sticks, and the talk
circling clockwise.

**

The first or last or once-in-a-life-timers,
the charity climbers and record breakers (twelve times
in twentyfour hours or twice a day for a year),
the old man with a sanguine smile who’d climbed it
forty years ago ‘…and always said
I’d come and do it again like.’

**

Each must carry something, a belief,
grievance or grief, a camera, a curiosity
or sure-footed uncertainty as to why
we are here, or anywhere.

**

Among the backpacked and walking-booted the odd
white feet, black-soled, mud squelching through toes
bleeding a little from the sharper stones,
or gingerly working their way down, off the track,
over soothing bracken and grass. A woman passes
singing quietly, a couple chanting the rosary,
a lanky man in a white linen suit and hat,
working his ashplant, loping ahead, spotless
apart from his shoes and cuffs, a teenager talking
to herself (but no, it’s her phone).

**

Another rocky stretch and I feel it now,
every step in my bones and tendons: scree,
(a lovely word, like shale): decisive crunch
of heels on quartzite gravel, and the gold seam
farther down, the one the Mayo council
declared ‘fine where it is’.

**

Are you keeping faith with Mohammed or the mountain
or neither of them, or both?

**

Steepening more and more, till it’s an effort
to raise the head higher than rising ground,
the Order of Malta in high-vis yellow jackets
at their dome tent, watching us pass.

**

Near the first stall (bales of bottled water),
off to the left the mountain dips and rolls
into The Saddle, maybe seventy feet
to a dark blue tarn: encircled by stones, words:
INDIA, BILBAO, RUSSIA… a nesting place
for mapless geography, borders melted away:
countries, cities, continents laid out
in cloud-script, an SOS.

**

Steepening towards the summit, the air is dense
with mountain-breath. We come to a cairn broad
as a hay stack: the first station, and again
that eddy of people circling clockwise; I start
to step in line then don’t; that rote rotation
Van Gogh’s tight grey roundabout of men
in a prison exercise yard.

**

Nothing but wet scree now, going up and up,
and the others coming down, half toppling
onto us. So that’s what the sticks are for,
to be dug like oars into sliding rocks as they stumble
downwards into the upcoming Sisyphean
rubble on conveyor belts,

**

and then we are becoming there, becoming solid
as the blocky mirage of stone huts like Slievemore’s
ghost village, but with blue tarpaulin roofs
weighed down by ballast-rocks: dealing out Mars Bars,
Club Orange, crisps… and why not? Prayer is trade,
a mark-up for the ones who made it, soaked
queuing on muddy shale laced with a froth
of jostling empty bottles.

**

A hoarse Ave Maria like a hand
wiping at condensation; murmuring walls,
people walking in circles doing the stations,
kneeling, bent over their sticks (as in Koudelka’s,
though today the view is closed)

**

a lank-haired old man sagging, bowing to grip
the grave-rails the bed

**

roving restlessness of little groups
thickening before the cloud-pale chapel,
the priest in his glassed-in pulpit intoning mass
over a tannoy (a dismal background strumming
as someone strangles a guitar)

**

two gorgeous traveler girls with great hooped earrings

**

a family group: four children with the parents
unpacking sandwiches

**

a lad with his arm draped on a smiling girl
sitting on a rock (a seat on a bus, a snug,
side of an unmade bed)

**

Purgatory’s kitchen: someone has left
the kettle on. High time to shuffle off
like precipitation, find the weaker force,
the clogged rockslide down.

**

Weeks later I remember the first time
I climbed a mountain (or high hill) in West Cork
rapidly, in my sixteen-year-old stride,

how I found a dead bird and hoped I hadn’t stepped on it,
a cairn of stones at the top I dubbed ‘the alter’,

and nearby, in a little grassy hollow,
an egg-shaped boulder (plucked up and laid there
by the erratic ice-gods) and how it came:

the muttering stream of the first poem I ever wrote,
whose words I never fully understood:

something about the compulsion to climb and hear
‘the loud mouths the soft mouths of cows
tearing the grass from rock’ and ‘the sea climbing

the sand’, and what it felt like to look down
at our orange tent ‘waving up’ and try
to sing ‘the small song of the beast that might love
the impossible delicate gift.’

Opening Lines

2011-06-12T00:03:00.001+01:00

FATHER: I like the sound of rain on the car roof.

SON: So do I.

FATHER: What else do you like the sound of?

SON: I like the sound of rain on a balloon.

FATHER: What tastes do you like?

SON: I like the taste of the salt of the sea on my skin.

Geronimo (or I Read the News Today Oh Boy)

2011-05-03T23:02:00.018+01:00

I was in Wexford at my wife's parent's place when I heard. The initial reports seemed muddled or contradictory, and it now appears that many of them were: that OBL was living in a 'luxury compound' (called 'ramshackle' on The News At Ten), that he returned fire with the Navy Seals (apparently he was unarmed), that one of the helicopters was shot down (apparently it made a hard landing and had to be destroyed), that OBL attempted to use his wife as a 'human shield' (it now appears that she was considerably more animated than any shield and got shot in the leg for her pains). Then there is the matter of that strange and speedy burial at sea, though apparently they have genetic proof that the target actually was OBL. More significantly, there is talk of film footage, evidence apparently too gruesome to be released to the public.

So, the reportage continues, and probably will for some time, a rich compost of fact and rumour, out of which will sprout who knows what conspiracy theories, myths, books, films, etc. As Heaney put it so perfectly in his take on an ode by Horace, 'anything can happen.' A soft-spoken man with a Guru-beard can be responsible for nearly 3000 deaths (in three fell swoops), can in fact be the architect of the slaughter and, not incidentally, the demolisher of that very singular dual-edifice, the 'twin towers', which Norman Mailer so detested, calling them 'two huge buck teeth', declaring 'the ruin more beautiful than the buildings.'

The act reverberated, and still does, a tuning fork for a different century, a different way of being uncertain. For me (as with most people, I imagine), it also embodies a particular time and place in my own life. I have, at most, a very dim memory of where I was when the Kennedys or John Lennon were killed. But I can recall exactly where I was when September 11 took place. I was with my cousin Isobel, looking for some decent coffee in a supermarket in the little town of Silvesh in Portugal. We were there with our mothers, Sheila and Nuala (both in their early eighties at that stage) and their older, very English sister, Moira. Isobel had arranged the holiday, which turned out to be the last time these sisters would travel together. We had been there perhaps two weeks at this stage, two thirds of our holiday, well-settled in the house we were renting: white arches, cool tiled floors and marble stairs, with a lovely large pool, all nested among lemon groves at the end of a long, loudly crunching stone-and-dirt lane which trailed and twisted under leafy canopies, through a wildly barking farm, before emerging onto the hot, smooth road into town.

Being the only driver, I had agreed to rent a car at the airport and follow the instructions and map sent by the estate agent. A silly plan. I had never driven outside Ireland and we soon became lost. As evening abruptly switched to night, we ended up in a tiny village off the motorway, with hardly any idea where we were. Stressed and tense, I entered a roundabout the wrong way, and when a lone motorist speeded towards me and honked aggressively I shouted at him (stating the obvious): 'Can't you see I'm a fucking tourist?' Unfortunately, all this occurred under the eyes of a couple of local policemen, so we had to pay an on-the-spot fine of 80 Euro.

We finally gave in and called the estate agent. She arrived fairly quickly and offered to lead us to the villa, a journey of perhaps twenty minutes or so. When her taillights took a totally obscure turn into the unmarked drive I realised that we would never have found the place. As we followed her car around the narrow bends, we began to discern an odd orangy flickering, as if the whole horizon were aflame and we were entering some ominous fairy tale. I can still hear Moira's queenly, unruffled drawl: 'Oh my god, we're driving into a forest fire.' And there was a forest fire, or a bushfire anyway. But it was far more distant than it had appeared. I came down to breakfast to find the lemon groves untouched, but on a rounded, not-too-distant hillside you could see the damage: a little crest of spent match-sticks.

So, back to the supermarket two weeks later. We asked a couple of Scottish tourists if they could help us find some coffee, and they did their best. Before parting, they asked us (by the way, as it were) if we'd heard about Manhattan being 'under attack'. We thought they must be regurgitating some half-digested tidbit. Then, a little later, walking through the charming narrow streets, possibly in search of a little café, somewhere with a bit of shade to sit and talk (and drink coffee), we noticed a modest crowd bulging out from a little sports shop. We became curious when we realised they were all gazing at a TV mounted on the wall inside. Then we saw the planes, the orange-black plumes, indelible and unforgettable. I had thought till recently that what we had seen was one of the endless action replays, but Isobel has since told me that she checked the time and is now convinced that we actually witnessed the second plane hitting its target in 'real' time.

Of course we wanted more information, but we were in Portugal. Back at the house, the only English-speaking TV was an American business channel (might have been CNBC) mainly concerned with stockbroker news, though we were given the occasional update or interview, and endless reruns of the exploding towers along with old footage of OBL, probably taken in Afghanistan. Thus we became familiar with the man's placid features, in his white robe or camouflage-jacket in the Afghan mountains, seemingly at ease, holding some weapon or other. Was OBL a suspect or had he claimed responsibility in those first days of the 'new world order'? I remember wondering why he didn't declare his hand more quickly, since everything had gone so spectacularly to plan. What could be more perfect? Not merely 'terrorism' but, as Martin Amis coined it, 'horrorism', an OTT 'Die Hard' sequel in brutally ironic (though in some ways even less real) flesh and blood.

Other things conspired to make that holiday memorable. It had been memorable in a good way up till then, the ladies relaxing in the pool, my mother's infernal arthritis all but forgotten.. After The Event, we kept the TV on, hopeful for some more detailed news in between financial updates; the screen followed us around the living room like an unsleeping eye and we were neither there nor there, in an anteroom of one of 'those big words that make us so unhappy.' Then, towards the end of our holiday, the youngest sister, Nuala (Isobel's mother), began to feel a bit shaky in her legs. This occurred perhaps a day before we left. We didn't know the signs, or didn't know them well enough, though Isobel was worried. We managed to get her mother to a doctor on the day of our departure. He didn't appear too concerned, advised a scan as soon as it might be convenient.

The airport was chaotic, long queues, police and soldiers with automatic weapons, our mothers in wheelchairs. We had to dump anything sharp, so mum sacrificed a pair of decorative old nail scissors, her mother's. Nuala was groggy now. We tried to decide whether we should try to get her back to that doctor; I even made a call, but nobody spoke any English and I hadn't a word of Portuguese or Spanish. And suddenly our queue was on the move, we could be back in Dublin in a couple of hours. So we boarded, and Nuala went into a coma. I asked one of the cabin crew if they could call ahead to have an ambulance ready in Dublin. This was a mistake, and we were a hair from being told to leave the plane (they don't fly gravely ill passengers), but we managed to convince them (or they allowed us to convince them) that it wasn't all that serious after all, no worries, we'd be fine, honestly.

We did manage to get an ambulance very shortly after landing, and though Nuala had a 'massive cerebral hemorrhage' she survived another decade, and weathered a few more strokes, to die peacefully, and mercifully quickly, in St Vincent's hospital last year. And Moira, the eldest, has recently died at nearly 95. And now they've shot the man who loomed so large in that strange, dislocated holiday. It all might have happened last week, or yesterday.

A couple of other things Mailer said in the aftermath of September 11: 'I'm always dubious about patriotism.'So am I, though I can understand the jingoistic flag-waving, the celebrations, and even emapthise a little with the festival atmosphere that must prevail in American cities, especially NY. Who could argue with the mother of one of the firefighters who died that day, her belief that this is what he would have wished? Mailer thought Georg W. Bush seemed like 'a man who had never been embarrassed by himself.' Absolutely. So I am very glad it was Obama's terse, grave sentence 'Justice has been done' that helped set the mood, a counterpoint to all the misplaced optimism and gaiety. Imagine if this had happened on GWB's watch; the thick-skulled, insufferable gloating, the victory parades, the great, self-congratulatory banquet of bullshit.

6 a.m. Question Time

2011-03-01T12:15:00.000Z

Daddy?

[sleepily] Yeah?

I have a question for you.

What?

What are stretch limos for?

[blank pause]

Are they for Rock Stars?

Throw It Away, Why Don't You?

2011-02-23T00:04:00.006Z

What is a short memory good for? Forgetting.

Forgetting that Fine Gáel is part of the same old deeply compromised Civil War machinery that created Fíanna Fáil.

Forgetting that terms like 'Blueshirt values' are rancid, stinking with irony.

Forgetting that part of our problem is our gullibility.

Forgetting that 'liberal economic policies' are what landed us in this.

Forgetting that our innate conservatism (in thrall to the banks' and big business's Happy Hour) is what landed us in this.

Forgetting that FG's pride in 'fiscal rectitude and minimal government interference' (not to mention 'liberal economic policies') should make our scalps creep and our hair (if we possess any) stand on end.

Forgetting that it's high time to change the channel.

Forgetting that, if we must use terms like 'values', Labour's are worth voting for.

Forgetting that, if we do not change the channel (or at least modify it), we may get what we deserve: a FG government who have a mandate to do whatever they they like.

A Place On A Map

2011-02-13T13:21:00.007Z

Reading Katy's blog today, about the recent events in Egypt, I found myself commenting rather extensively, so felt it might be more pertinent to say my piece here, since this is not only a blog, but also functions as my personal journal, my space for disentangling thoughts.

Not that my thoughts are going to amount to very much. Egypt, whether in its present incarnation or as depicted in the 15th Century (above) is, for me, a place on a map. I've read some travelers' accounts (or I think I have, though I can't recall them) and seen numerous programs about the Egypt of the Pharaohs. I love Cavafy's poetry, and in my 20s I raced (and waded) through Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. But I know next to nothing about Egyptian politics or people.

Mubarak's was, apparently, a horrifyingly corrupt and brutal regime, so good riddance to it. At least 300 people have been killed, but an objective has been achieved; a government has been overthrown by the very people it had thought to govern for perhaps another 30 years. And now what? The Muslim Brotherhood (slogan: 'Islam is the solution') is in the wings, or close to the stage. Should they step into the spotlight, are they likely to bring in a more egalitarian society, or go the way of Iran and steer the revolution into a narrow, airless cul-de-sac?

Katy also posted this moving Youtube vlog by Asmaa Mahfouz, who is said to have helped 'spark the revolution'. Asmaa is earnest and passionate (and her delivery seems, to me, to have some of the chanting, incantatory music of a poem). Although she begins by mentioning how four men burned themselves in protest, I like the way she insists that people should NOT burn (i.e. 'martyr') themselves, but simply come onto the streets and support each other. The only thing that distances me slightly (due to my own cultural tics and reservations) are the references to peoples' 'manhood' and, finally, God.

One of the commentators on Katy's blog wrote: Bless the martyrs. Really? What I would wish, if I felt qualified to wish anything, is that the Egyptians somehow wind up with a society we might call democratic (botched, battered and degraded as that word is); a society, in any case, is which martyrdom doesn't play a part, is, in fact as alien to the citizens as the repressions of the police state they are struggling to emerge from. I would also wish for widespread empathy and a tolerance that extends to those who have no religion: the atheists, the agnostics, the hopelessly befuddled or those who barely give a thought to such things. I would wish for the wonderful scope and sanity of human scepticism that recoils in disgust and utter contempt from repressing or persecuting anyone merely because of their race, politics, gender or sexual orientation (or religion). Something along those lines anyway; if I had anyone (or thing) to pray to I'd pray for that, or for the whopping dose of good luck that is long overdue the Egyptians, not to mention the Bahrainis, Iranians, Libyans, etc, etc.

Photo from Wikipedia: Nile River Valley and the city of Bulaq, as seen by Piri Reis, a Turkish admiral, geographer and cartographer who lived from 1465 to 1555.

Metaphorical Portrait (Almost Finished)

2010-12-03T11:10:00.010Z

Or perhaps I should say 'it will be nice when it's finished' (as one of the Python film crew apparently replied when asked what he thought of Scotland).
Or borrow that actual/metaphorical snow from Joyce's The Dead:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Or, hard on the heels of that, Derek Mahon's fabulous Snow Party, which has snow 'falling / Like leaves on the cold sea.' Here's the last three stanzas:

Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares,

Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;

But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of Ise.

The newspapers are indeed right: snow is (almost) general. Outside my window, right now, the hedges are bowed under it, tree branches meticulously overlaid, wires in their winter coats, the large ceramic pot on the doorstep skull-capped with a perfectly white dome. Whiteout, bailout, our drained economy... there seems to be a metaphorical synchronicity at work. But of course, metaphors are cheap. Above is a snap of the old sod as it lay yesterday, on Dec. 2, 2010. Image from the NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response website, where there are many more, all in the public domain and free to use.

Coming On Here With Yer Oul Palaver

2010-11-19T23:58:00.006Z

Someone had to say it, finally, on TV, in this instance on RTE's Prime Time. Rabbitte's anger is refreshing, especially when it is articulated so concisely. Reminds me of Barney Frank's excellent response to the moron who questioned Obama's 'Nazi' health care policies.

All Souls

2010-10-31T13:07:00.002Z

Remember all the clocks glow
black tonight. Do you know
who that is, knocking VERY LOUD,
so the dog whimper-drags its household
under the table? Cacophony
is the new literacy, a library
of graves open their traps,
and walking dead are snapped
face-painting and jogging
in the park, a letterbox bangs
open its genie smoking (who sends
letters anymore? Fuck em!)
But who will blow-dry the choked
gutters? That man in the raincoat
keeps three suitcases stuffed
with leaves under his bed.
Air needs a new cocoon,
orange and black balloons
on gateposts, old crones
ubiquitous as traffic cones,
a stark simpler colour,
pumpkins and burnt paper,
the ink-spotted tree that burst
into rooks. And what's the worst
he can do? There he is again
(he always is) behind you
if you turn in the leaf-padded lane
behind the new houses where
we'd poke for hours – a stick
snaps, a distant firework –
and what's the worst game
we can play, and whose turn
is it now, who'll be It this time?

October Streetlight

2010-10-21T19:19:00.003+01:00

A crisp night, enough breath to blow
a fallen sycamore leaf
in and out of its bat-shadow
on the car roof.

For The Scrapbook: 10/10/10

2010-10-10T23:46:00.003+01:00

I just wanted to do a post with that title, particularly the triple 10. So I drove out to the docks again and found this heap of scrap metal, which I've photographed before. But it was larger than I'd seen, and I liked the way it staged a mountain, a metal Sugarloaf, in front of the Pigeonhouse chimneys.

Detail: San Francisco, 1982

2010-09-21T23:03:00.012+01:00

Even telegraph poles look foreign: tarry, scuffed
and twice as thick,

stapled with colourful fliers: travel ads, want ads,
apartments, missing pets, people –

When torn off to make way for new ones (torn in their turn),
the tiny corners remain,

a mesh of staked claims, stitches, a wound
that won’t close. I zoom and click,

wondering what my roommates will make of
the furious mosaic.

One thinks it’s a shanty town, another a beach
or city dump, or maybe a march

or sit-in, people holding up placards, right?
Close enough.

In The Dead Zoo

2010-09-01T11:52:00.004+01:00

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
– Seamus Heaney

Aflame with antlers,
almost tapping the ceiling, a roof-raiser
bursting with sex and death.

Should we view it from over or under –
stand on the tiled floor
or the tundra?

*

More inscrutable than the Sphinx:

the trophy-head of a rhino
shot and stuffed over a century ago

by Colonel Spinks.

*

Where is he,
my frog-hunting, 12 year old self,
soft-eyed hoarder
of Wildlife magazines, dogged haunter
of ditches and bogs?

*

DO NOT TOUCH

the rhino’s tarry flesh
just yet –

wait for the rat kangaroo
and the parchment bats

to undo.

*

Here, touching what
he should not:
an elephant’s cunt,
a wound
in an old coat.

*

How to fade
from a dazzling op-art zebra
into just that shade
of sepia.

*

Upstairs, along the galleries,
dust-coloured moths and butterflies

(ribbons from an antique war)
recall the killing jar,

though one or two
flash – forget-me-not blue

*

Or here, this boy who holds
to his hiding place among
the grown-up coats hung
in a glass wardrobe.

*

Creaking Victorian ark
whose hold is a maze
of mirrors, our faces
float over the glass
eyes of your great
and less great apes,
your frozen tableaux
(white hares in the snow
from a snow globe),
libraries of learned
dust which is not returned.

*

The Fin Whale’s skeleton,
suspended on wires, swims
overhead. Its mammal spine
(black against fogged glass)
is an x-ray that might pass
for all of us.

Fridge Detail: How Cool Is Cool?

2010-08-13T13:38:00.004+01:00

I was reading a thread in an online forum and noticed that several people replied to a particular comment with that ubiquitous, one-size-fits-all adjective: 'Cool'. I have occasionally done so myself and can understand its attraction: a pleasantly retro, street-smart throwback to the Beats, or earlier, to the 'stay cool' 1950s, the jazzy 40s. It is one of those words with a variable temperature, depending on its user's tone of voice: from (often high pitched) red hot, gorgeous, superb, 'wicked', etc. to (flat, low-pitched) lukewarm, so-so, okay, a shorthand for 'can we talk about something else now?'

Reading about it on the excellent World Wide Words, I was only slightly surprised to learn that its roots (as a slang term) can be traced farther still,'a subtle transformation of a standard English form that goes back to Beowulf, in a rather literary metaphor for being unexcited, calm or dispassionate.' Apparently it resurfaced and became fashionable in the 18th Century, with those still-used phrases 'cool as a cucumber' and 'keeping a cool head', and began to shift into its current (more positive) meaning in the mid 20th century.

I think a large part of its attraction is in the sound, that refreshingly breezy double-vowel blowing through two portholes, and its tactility: hinged shut on the tip of the tongue's L, like licking a stamp, posting a seal of approval.

Fine and dandy, but I'm a little weary of its ubiquity. In fact, I've probably been weary of it for decades, like the American-Irish cousin I once shared a house with in the 1970s; whenever some visitor thought something 'really cool', my cousin's zippy retort was invariably 'Yeah, man, put it in the ice-box!' So, to resurrect an anachronistic antonym from the deep-freeze, I'm beginning to find 'cool' distinctly uncool.

Saint Patrick On Nipples

2010-08-12T16:56:00.010+01:00

I've just started 'Ireland: A History', by Thomas Bartlett. I'd read a couple of reviews and it sounded interesting, the kind of history I might actually read through (instead of making my way through the first 50 pages then setting it down to get a cup of coffee, never to raise it again). The reviewers noted, however, that he is rather scanty on the earlier bits, covering the pre-medieval period (431, St. Patrick's arrival, to 1541: Protestant Ireland) in under 80 pages. But I am greatly encouraged by passages such as the following, in which Bartlett quotes then comments on an odd phrase from the writings of Patrick (about his initial sojourn in Ireland, as a slave):

Lastly, as an aside, Patrick discloses than when he sought to flee Ireland on the ship, he entered into terms with the sailors, but that he 'refused, for fear of god, to suck their nipples'. This startling remark – given matter of factly – has been a cause of some embarrassment to Patrician enthusiasts, but it has to be seen in the context of Patrick's detestation of 'cults or idols and abominations' which he had dedicated his life to overthrowing. What Patrick was doing was pointing to the prevalence of pagan practices – sucking nipples was a way to pledge loyalty – and in doing so he was making the obvious point that the Ireland in which he had been a slave was largely pagan.

It is for revelations such as these that I persist in my lifelong battle to educate myself.

An Ars Poetica In Fragments

2010-07-22T15:52:00.010+01:00

I am not familiar with Jennifer Moxley's work, though I have come across her name before, usually on Ron Silliman's blog. And it is Ron I owe thanks to for providing a link to her recent Fragments of a Broken Poetics on Poetry Daily.

Moxley concludes her series with an Afterword, in which she describes how 'three French points of contact converged to create the conditions for the writing and occasion of these fragments', such as René Char's Fureur et mystère—

particularly his writing on the architecture of the poem, "Partage formel" ("The Formal Share")—that sparked some new thinking in me. Char's use of aphorism, as well as his delightfully fanciful logic, suggested a refreshing way to avoid the line-in-the-sand rigidity of writing a contractual poetics—those manifestos of orthodoxy that, in laying down the poetic law, always manage to spontaneously recruit an army of cops to enforce it. Reading these statements activated my critical muse and I began to write my own series of aphoristic statements; to think from where I was, to try and state—simply, concisely—what I believed at that moment about the poetic art.

I am glad she spared us yet another orthodox manifesto. And I have a fondness for aphorism (Auden and Don Paterson come to mind, as do Beckett's versions of Chamfort). I like the form's constraints, the way it pushes a thought or idea to be fully born then cuts the cord. And the aphorism's yen for clarity can certainly be refreshing, especially when many contemporary offstream poets seem less interested in fragmentation than disintegration; their poetry (or 'poetics') is all too often bursting to explain itself while simultaneously tightening the gag. Anyway, here's a small selection of Moxley's [apologies for the disrupted formatting]:

III

A poet only needs one poem, a poem only one reader. Moving from singular to shared in this instance is a rudimentary economy. It is less affecting than a mortal kiss, more than a passing conversation. The poem will always provoke an acute desire to know its creator, "acute" because hopeless.

VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.

IX

Poets whose readings lead us to believe ourselves part of a spontaneous and instinctive consensus have left poetry behind. Perhaps for the better.

XI

In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn't what it used to be.

XIII

The book is the means, not the end. It should conform to the poem, not vice versa. Otherwise the imagination becomes a small box, which thinks only of the larger box it wishes to resemble. An ideal book is a bed: a comforting place in which poems can sleep while awaiting illumination. Both poem and book, however, are subject to the capricious lens of human attention.

XIX

A momentary bewilderment arouses the mind. Many words, lines, and phrases may temporarily baffle without spoiling the reading experience as a whole.

XXIII

The poet is buried in the obliterated whiteness beneath the dark letters of poem.

XXVIII

Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.

XLIII

Poetry is not politically efficacious in countries where it is not valued as a cultural necessity by the general populace.

I am not sure all of these work (though this may just be due to my own misunderstanding). For example, I suspect IX may be read in at least two very different ways. And XXVIII seems, to me, a bit overwrought. Overall though, many of Moxley's Fragments did what good aphorisms ought to do: they made me think.

Paintings In A Room

2010-05-11T12:12:00.005+01:00

should hang true
as mirrors or windows

to be turned to

between the reversed shadows
and the stuff seen through.

Nuala Stephenson: 1920-2010

2010-04-09T12:03:00.008+01:00

My aunt Nuala died on the morning of April the 9th, 2010. She was just a few weeks past her ninetieth birthday. Her children asked me to write something along the lines of a eulogy. My first thought was that I wouldn't know where to start, since Nuala has been so much a part of my life, particularly what are called the 'formative years'. But I soon realised where to begin, so things began to occur to me and the piece gradually took shape over the next couple of days. So this (with some editing) is what I read at the final stage of the funeral, the cremation in Mount Saint Jerome's:

Just a week before she passed away, Nuala left me a gift. Not directly, but in a talk with her son David. She told him that she remembered my original birthday. I never knew my father. But neither did I know, till last week, that Nuala was the only person present with my mother at the time of my birth, in the hospital at Islington. She remembered clearly seeing me lying on a towel, my first floor in this world. Nuala was my aunt, my friend and my second mother, and her children, my cousins Isobel, David and Susie, became, over the years, as close as siblings. I cannot remember how many years I spent with my second family in that amazing house in Avoca Terrace; I was in and out so often that it was more than a home from home; rather each of my homes was, to me, an extension of the other.

I was brought up by my mother and grandparents in a house called Rockville (perhaps because of the large rockery in the back garden). This house was on Stillorgan Grove, about half a mile from Avoca Terrace. If Rockville was not entirely dominated by my grandfather, his was certainly an important presiding spirit. The air was somewhat sober, an unspoken curfew was in place and late night chats in the kitchen were sternly discouraged (of course, not really that unusual in the 1970s). By contrast, Avoca Terrace really was a different planet, with a far lighter gravity. The largest, topmost apartment in a tall old Victorian terrace house, it was a place of landings, literally flighty, its huge, high rooms exfoliating off three steep staircases, the snaky-laddery stem of the building.

Nuala and her husband Desmond were both artists, and the evidence was everywhere: poetry books, books on music and art, a large heavy tome of Doré prints (with graphic illustrations for Dante’s Inferno), an old hard-backed copy of Ulysses that looked as if it had actually been read; on the walls oils, watercolours and reproductions of drawings by old masters, ceramics on the shelves and bookcases, little sculptures (such as the bronze Romulus and Remus on the mantelpiece that fascinated me as a child).

One room in particular, always known as ‘the orange room’ because of its old Tintawn carpet, was galleried with Desmond’s and Nuala’s marvelous landscapes, portraits and still lives. Its ancient, ceiling-high mirror enlarged the room even more. Portals were everywhere. The big window was full of trees and sky: all was light, buoyancy, space. Nuala and Desmond had met while students in the old NCA on Kildare Street. In the spirit of the times, Desmond courted Nuala, leaving a rose on her easel. However, somewhat contrary to the spirit of the times, both of these people were surprisingly modern; they were serious about their art, persevered with their studies and got their degrees. They were also adventurous, traveling separately throughout Europe for several years, before eventually marrying in Dublin and setting up home. And they were married for barely six years when Desmond died, tragically young in his 40s, shortly after the birth of their third child, so Nuala was left to the rearing of three young children.

Nuala and my mother were close as it was, but Desmond’s death brought them closer still. We went on many holidays together, usually to the West of Ireland, Galway or Barley Cove in West Cork. Myself and Nuala’s children have vivid memories of one particular holiday when we shared a cottage (in or near Connemara I think). I had recently entered my frog and newt-hunting phase and there was a luxurious stretch of bogland behind the cottage: tall reeds, mossy grass, water. Time thickened; we spent whole days there, weeks, lifetimes, the hot sun on our backs, iridescent dragonflies stopping overhead, our hands steeped in the orangy water, looking for froglets, or the dark little flickery newts (with gorgeous Turneresque sunrises on their bellies) that we could never quite catch.

Another tradition was the shared Christmas dinners, and the big decision: whose house (or later whose flat) to hold them in? It was often Nuala’s, if only because they had the orange room with the enormous black-painted German walnut table. I have a whole box of photographs that charts our aging at that table, above the turkey-aftermath, the half-full bottles, shreds of wrapping paper in the background, red-eyed, flash-lit faces (the boys' becoming bearded, longer-haired then balding), fashion-paraded in differently bright-dark jumpers and blouses.

Perhaps I was too young myself (or too dreamy, as usual) but I have no recollection of witnessing the devastation that Desmond’s death must have caused. And though Nuala was a widow I would never have attached to her that rather grim title. Nuala’s perpetual youthfulness, her curiosity and delight in life, was intense and insatiable, and as teenagers this curiosity, coupled with her readiness to talk (almost any time of the day or night), was wonderfully liberating; a grown-up, from another generation, one that had experienced the upheaval of the second World War (or The Emergency), yet she might have been one of us.

But of course she wasn’t. She was a mother who, like any mother, fretted about her children. But she also bequeathed on them her adventurousness and eagerness to travel, her curiosity and love of conversation and the arts (not to mention a wealth of talent ); she gave each of her children what Patrick Kavanagh might have called ‘a flavour of personality’; they are each, distinctly, themselves, comfortable and at home in their own skins.

I should mention Nuala had a great sense of humour, sometimes girlish and giggling, and often far from politic; when out ‘with the girls’, Nuala or Sheila, one might find oneself attempting to make like a chameleon in the face of a high-pitched voice commenting, quite loudly, on someone nearby (in a café, bus or cinema): ‘Look at that man, isn’t he odd!’ or ‘Is that a boy or a girl?’ Nuala’s humour could also be sharp and sophisticated; she wasn’t above slagging you off. Like my mother, she had a great eye for colours, and would often tell me if my mine were mismatched. Her elegant daughters, like myself, were children of the 1980s, and Nuala could never quite appreciate their love of all things black. Not that many years ago, she confided in me (what was apparently a very old joke, though I hadn’t heard it before): ‘I call them the Little Sisters of The Avoca.’

So our universe was ruled by the female principle; ‘the mothers’ were a driving force. Both Nuala and my mother encouraged me to enter what was then Dún Laoghaire School of Art. They took seriously my attempts at writing, they nurtured. When my grandparents died I was living in Bray; my mother had the Rockville to herself, so it was natural that she should wish to move out of that too-large-and-lonely house and settle in Avoca Terrace, in the hall flat, beside her sister. And when I came to live with and care for my mother a few years later, in a sense everything clicked into place. It was a kind of homecoming. It was my world, and it still is (and now it is also a home to my wife and our child, my mother’s grandson).

For this, and everything else, I give thanks to Nuala, whom I will miss.

Dog Matter

2010-03-28T12:30:00.007+01:00

On the forum of a photoblog I am a member of, one of the bloggers recently posted the following query:

Sadly we lost our dog a few weeks ago. However, since we got his ashes back we have heard him a few times around the house – Physiological or Spiritual? Has anyone else experienced similar noises/ events?

Someone responded by simply stating: 'There will be a totally rational explanation.'

In all probability, yes, a rational explanation is waiting in the not-too-shadowy wings. Rational as in 'agreeable to reason', 'sensible'. But 'totally' rational? My innate scepticism doesn't incline towards a belief in a spirit world, but I am always open to being surprised (and I have been, at least thrice). And then, what is the rational explanation for our existence, beyond the big bang theory and the fact that the universe seems to be continually expanding (though, apparently, weirdly and too quickly and in odd clumps, due to dark matter/energy/flow etc.)? And what manner of infinite not-thereness did we pop out of anyway? That last question probably answers itself, without elucidating anything. The cosmological constant has been readjusted more than once. Perhaps they'll eventually find room for rationally irrational ghosts in the machine (or the dogged house).

Geminiphobia

2010-03-14T19:40:00.003Z

'If there are ever two of me I will cry forever and ever.'

Under Investigation

2010-03-10T21:54:00.005Z

'I'm not asleep, I'm just looking at the inside of my eyes.'

Fade Street

2010-02-10T18:09:00.003Z

It's about time that I announced here that my third collection, Fade Street, is open for traffic; it now has its own page on the Salt website.

I'm also delighted that Chris selected one of the photographs I sent him for the cover. I think the book looks great, and I hope anyone who ventures inside it will find the inhabitants just as engaging.

Spot Of Dying: Part 2 (Planet Of the Dead)

2010-01-20T20:10:00.005Z

'I hope there is a planet where nobody dies and there is no school because everybody knows everything.'

Newly Laid Road, 8.30 a.m. Dublin

2010-01-09T22:20:00.001Z

Portrait Of England As A Giant Snowflake

2010-01-08T12:05:00.007Z

Or a fragment of a steamed-up mirror or the lid of a frosted puddle (the 'wafer-ice' crunched by 'mass-going feet' in Kavanagh's poem): our big sister island, quilted and tucked in (20 below in some places, apparently the same as the South Pole), but getting on with it after a fashion. And snow is (almost) general all over Ireland too. And we are getting on with it, though less reliably, schools closed indefinitely, most roads ungritted, Transport Minister Noel Dempsey refusing to return from his holiday till the weekend (if the airport is open that is), the Environment Minister John Gormley not happy with his 'Minister For Snow' tag; some consider that Gormley has been made a scapegoat by Cowen, given a 'hospital pass' (no idea what that is, but I like the oddness of it). The local roads are frozen slush, to be driven dreamily slow, the car occasionally sleep-sliding towards the pavement, the steering wheel dangerously (but also pleasantly) light in my hands. Snow, as I pointed out to our son, rhymes with slow.

A little medley of winters:

Cold tonight is broad Moylurg
There is more than glass between the snow
Soundless as dots
(O loose moth world)
In the gloom of whiteness
John Donne has sunk in sleep
With all the numberless goings-on of life
Like jewelry from a grave
Between the woods and frozen lake
The snow drops its pieces of darkness
Soft as excrement, bold as roses
It is falling like leaves on the cold sea
Softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves

Each line is from a different wintery/snowy poem by a different poet (except for one, which is taken from a story that closes like a poem). Names of poems/poets below:

'A Song of Winter' by Anon (10th Century Irish trans. by Kuno Meyer)
'Snow' by Louis McNeice
'Safe in their alabaster chambers' by Emily Dickinson
'Lives' by Philip Larkin
'Elegy for John Donne' by Josef Brodsky
'Frost at Midnight' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
'The Imaginary Iceberg' by Elizabeth Bishop
'Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost
'The Munich Mannequins' by Sylvia Plath
'January' by R.S. Thomas
'The Snow Party' by Derek Mahon
'The Dead' by James Joyce

Image thanks to NASA/GSFC and the MODIS Rapid Response website, which allows free use of its images. MORE HERE

Butterfly Dad

2010-01-04T19:22:00.012Z

I was finally reunited with our five year old son yesterday evening, after he and his mum had spent nearly a fortnight at her parent's place in Wexford. The delay was partly due to their being virtually snowbound, but he was also enjoying himself hugely: a tree-hut with snow on the roof, snowman, snowball-fights, his Jack Russell Pippa barking at snow, woods, presents, boundless space, etc., etc.

So today (with S back in work and school still out) we spent the whole day together. A little of playing a little hide-and-seek, of making up stories (sitting in my lap as ONE HUNDRED wolves closed in) and practicing numbers and letters. He's beginning to be interested in what these peculiar characters do, the sounds they make and (what I always encourage) the shapes they form on the page. He is well able to write his name now, in block capitals anyway, and he enjoys writing/proclaiming it. So his name was the first word. Mum, naturally, was the second (had to remind him how to make a U). Dad was the third choice. Perhaps because of his left-handedness, he got the first D back to front, which made an interestingly symmetrical graphic. A butterfly! he said. And so I am, hopefully emerging from my chrysalis the odd time at 52.

January 2010

2010-01-01T01:28:00.012Z

At home, hearing the knock
of fireworks – Christchurch uncorked

shaking and shaking its bells –
I peer out, twitch my nostrils.

Real snow, newly laid
on steps, road – a decade’s

slippage underscored by black
street-lit tyre-tracks

looping the hedged corner
out of what was – just – there.

Do Reindeers Have Magic Legs?

2009-12-24T19:27:00.004Z

That's the question our five year old recently asked (it being the time of the year that's in it). And it would have been even more charming if he put it to us over breakfast rather than waking his mum in small hours.

The Goat On The Roof Syndrome

2009-12-22T10:18:00.023Z

I hadn't thought about this for awhile. About twelve years ago I house-sat for friends of mine, TP and his family, who had gone to visit relatives in Australia. Their home was an ancient little cottage at the foot of the Sugarloaf (it was called, appropriately, Bun-a-tSleibhe). Here they kept some chickens and goats; also Jack, a white and grey cat that behaved rather like a dog, and Bunter, a Jack Russel that behaved rather like a cat (or occasional lap-dog).

One morning I looked out the kitchen window and saw something that made me grab my camera (see photo above). It wasn't only the oddness of the goat, but the happy symmetry of the goat and chicken, heraldic, back to back, that touch of Chagall surrealism. The phone rang. I put down my camera. It was my then girlfriend, Paula. When I began to tell her about what I was looking at she interrupted me excitedly. She had just had a session with a psychic: palm, tea-leaves, etc. (a woman from Crumlin, one of the best apparently). According to Paula, the woman 'saw' something in the tea-leaves that puzzled her: 'Someone who is close to you... he is in some place where... there are animals all around... strange... I don't understand... I am seeing an animal... on a roof...not a cat... an animal that should not be on a roof...' That's paraphrasing of course, but the psychic's 'vision' was at least as oddly precise as that.

I called up Paula half an hour ago to confirm some of the details. We chatted for a bit about things, not necessarily super (or un-) natural, just incidents that stick in the memory. She mentioned a couple of recent ones: wood-pigeons flying overhead in the twilight suddenly, briefly under-lit by a sparky streak of light: a meteorite. Also recently, in this unusually wintery winter, a robin on a fence-post she had kept her eye on for some time, fascinated to note what the freezing air made of its thin little puffs of bird-breath.

But what did that odd, seemingly precognitive, animal-on-the-roof vision mean? Nothing, I imagine. People who read tea-leaves probably chuck in a wealth of odd, extraneous detail in the hope that something might stick (and the knowledge that what sticks is what will be remembered). Anyway, I don't have much truck with psychics, partly though disbelief/disinterest and partly my own brand of superstition. The latter reaction is encapsulated in the following (part of a mini-sequence that doesn't seem to be going anywhere):

Readings

No one has read my palm.
I won’t let them.

Not that I believe those lines
more meaningful than canals
on Mars, but to display
the soft pink valleys, how they
might read to a strange-eyed stranger:

‘The life-line’s fractured
and there seems to be…’ ‘What?’ ‘No, nothing.’

And how long’s a frayed piece of string?

What brought these things to mind was a recent post (Dec. 21) by Georgiasam. It's longish, meditative, honest and eloquent piece, set off by (among other things) the word 'mystic' in a favorite poem by John Clare and some remarks by the novelist Hilary Mantel, who pointed out '...the similarity, on one level, between psychics and writers (both hear voices, both make the dead speak), she insisted that the authenticity or otherwise of her medium, Alison Hart, was not the principal issue in the book.' To which Georgiasam responds: 'Psychics and writers are indeed alike, with the one simple distinction that psychics are nauseating frauds (cue reprise of the Dara O Briain routine about ‘bogus psychics’, as though the bogus ones were going around giving the genuine one a bad name, as if all psychics are not total frauds).'

The O Briain crack (which I think I've heard before) made me grin. And I almost completely agree with that hand-dusting dismissal of psychics (and the rest of the fairytale wardrobe). The only thing holding me back is just one dancing molecule of doubt; doubt at any absolute certainty besides the utter weirdness of being here in the first place. As Terry Pratchett sardonically put it: 'In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.' Yes, the fact of apparently spontaneous creation is at least as fantastic as any creation myth or Pratchett's fantasy/Disc-World novels. It is not that 'there are more things in Heaven and Earth', so much that the things themselves, the sheer floridness of the flora and fauna, and the apparently unassailable fact that these (and I/we) non-existed for bottomless eternity before the big birthday-bang, the abrupt unfolding, the accelerating burst, the cooling gases, the stardust and 'carbon compounds'... till, hey, here we all are.

This is not, incidentally, an apology for the pseudo-science of 'Creationism', a pathetic bid for respectability whose promoters I really do consider to be 'nauseating frauds'. I am not in effect saying 'gee, it's all so complex there MUST be a Man with a Plan.' There is no reason why our wish for 'something else', for Milosz's bird on a branch to be anything other than a bird on a branch, should actually radiate beyond the tiny human sphere of expectation, desire, faith, forlorn hope... I readily acknowledge that my own molecule of doubt is probably composed mostly of wishful thinking and hedged bets, and perhaps it deserves nothing but contempt. That said, nobody has to answer to anybody else for his or her beliefs (or lack of them). Neither an atheist nor a priest (nor, for that matter, a scientist) should be expected to adequately explain to me 'the million-petaled flower of being here'.

I have met people whom I trust who say they have seen ghosts. My own encounters with the apparently softer edges of science are far less convincing (not that seeing ghosts need convince one of anything). A psychic who read my goat in tea-dregs, a bogeyman's silhouette looking up at me (as if waiting) when I drew aside the bedroom curtains in the small hours, a Courtmacsherry statue of the Virgin that shifted enough to almost give me the finger... These can easily be shrugged off as substandard coincidences; sleights-of-the-eye (or brain). They prove nothing. But when such rare-enough incidents occur they can leave a delicious, lingering tingle. I prefer not to dismiss them out of hand. Meaningless synchronicity, syndromes of the sheltering self... whatever they are, they are there, like everything else, to be savored: like the meteor-lit wood pigeons, the ectoplasmic ribbons of robin-breath.

Who's Averse To Lightness?

2009-11-24T15:13:00.023Z

George Szirtes' blog often kickstarts little meditations or ideas for essays, as with his recent entry on Light Verse. He begins by quoting a nice one by Harry Graham which immediately reminded me of Ogden Nash's:

The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”

Like Szirtes, I often enjoy 'sheer word play, sheer silliness' of all kinds, provided I myself am clever enough to play ball. Much 'silly' poetry is inclined to what Heaney called 'cleverality', and I'm not a particularly clever person; I'm hopeless at crosswords, and any poem which resembles one, be it 'post-avant' or merely deeply up its own posterior.

Some people seem to confuse light with humorous verse, even if the latter has an ironic or serious undertone. Is Carol Ann Duffy's 'The World's Wife' light or comic or both? What about Wendy Cope? She can be laugh-out-loud funny, as in her Gilbert & Sullivan/Ted Hughes parody:

'No, the imagination of a writer (of a writer)
Is not the sort of beat a chap would choose (chap would choose)
And they've assigned me a prolific blighter ('lific blighter) —
Patrolling the unconscious of Ted Hughes.'

But poems like 'Bloody Men' and 'Flowers', although they begin jauntily enough, end on a seriously rueful note.

Wikipedia is not terribly helpful on what it calls 'Light Poetry', as it begins with the rather misleading sentence:'Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous.' It proceeds:'Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature wordplay, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration. Typically, light verse in English is formal verse, although a few free verse poets, such as Billy Collins, have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition. [ ] While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel, or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets, such as Horace, Swift, Pope and Auden, have also excelled at light verse.'

This is fine as far as it goes, except that it needs to acknowledge that humorous poetry can be anything but light. And I would not describe the best of Billy Collins's poetry as light verse. Rather, his mode is the laconic, the off-kilter-elegiac. In fact, Collins can be at his weakest when he attempts frivolity, as with his unfunny parody of Heaney (like a lame stage-Oirish impersonation).

The Princeton is far more thorough (exhaustively so). Its first sentence gives a better summary than Wiki's: 'Light Verse. A name rather loosely given to a wide variety of types or forms of metrical composition, worldly in character and most often witty, humorous, ingenious, or satirical.' Good to acknowledge that 'loosely'. It proceeds to list: 'Vers de Société, occasional verse, satire, burlesque, the mock-heroic, nonsense poetry; such brief forms as the epigram, the comic or ironic epitaph, the limerick, the clerihew; and all types of tricky or ingenious verse as acrostics, shaped and emblematic poems, alliterative or rhyming tours de force, riddles, puns and other forms of versified trivia.'

That last one seems rather dismissive. Trivia? Sounds more like 'verse lite'. And are all epigrams light (and therefore trivial)? Greek epigrams can certainly be very witty, and light I suppose, as in the following (which doesn't seem trivial to me):

'If blocked, a fart can kill a man.
If let escape a fart can sing
health-giving songs.
Farts kill and save.
A fart is powerful as a king.'

Nicarchus, The Greek Anthology (Penguin)

And here's my (VERY free and loose) version of an old Irish epigram:

Payment In Kind

He’ll never trade you a horse
for a beautiful, thoroughbred verse.

He will offer you something hollow
as his heart: an old cow.

Princeton's mention of 'Vers de Société' reminds me of Larkin's brilliantly vicious poem, about loneliness/aloneness/art versus 'society': 'I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted, / Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted / Over to catch the drivel of some bitch / Who's read nothing but Which.' Not at all light. Unlike, perhaps, Larkin's little sketch of Alfred Tennyson 'doing his poetic business' while Mrs Alfred Tennyson got on with running the house and answering all the letters.

Derek Mahon has written some clerihews. Interesting that he once told George Szirtes that he didn't like light verse. I am almost sure that I read an essay by Mahon in praise of Ogden Nash's poetry (though it doesn't seem to be in Mahon's collected 'Journalism', so perhaps I am wrong). People can have different ideas about what constitutes 'light' verse. Edward Mendleson edited a selection of Auden's poetry for Faber, entitled 'As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, ballads, lullabies, limericks and other light verse'. Some of these, such as the limericks, certainly qualify as light verse:

The bishop-Elect of Hong Kong
Has a cock which is ten inches long.
He thinks the spectators
Are admiring his gaiters
When he goes to the Gents - he is wrong.

But the ballad 'As I Walked Out' and the cherishing, loving 'Lullaby' ('Lay your sleeping head my love...') are not what I would call light.

Mahon's poetry is worlds away from 'light', but, though it can often be darkly comic, it invariably treads lightly enough:

‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man’
Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge
And grasped the principle of the watering can.

Another brilliant, more bitterly comic poem, 'Matthew 5 v. 29-30', was excluded from Mahon's Gallery 'Collected', though it had been in the earlier Oxford 'Selected', edited by Edna Longley:

Lord, mine eye offended, so I plucked it out.
Imagine my chagrin
when the offense continued.
So I plucked out
the other; but the offense continued.

In the dark now, and working by touch,
I shaved my head.
(The offense continued.)
Removed an ear,
another, dispatched the nose.

The offense continued.
Imagine my chagrin. [etc.]

My friend Anthony wrote a two-liner in praise of DM, which can safely be regarded as light:

'Wonders are many and none
Is more wonderful than Mahon.'

Short and sweet. And my favourite kind of light verse is usually just as brief, like Thom Gunn's:

Barren Leaves

Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling:
Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.

Which reminds me of Gavin Ewart's even briefer:

Penal

The clanking and wanking of Her Majesty's Prisons.

Or his lovely little erotic:

The Sexual Sigh

The small buttocks of men, that excite the women...
but ah! the beautiful, feminine broadness!

I think that at least some of my own stuff might be described as light (though hopefully not trivial) verse. Perhaps the following three examples, one from each collection:

Advice To Adolescents

Rave to the slackly made and woefully sung
(the worse the better); be moody, unstrung

for days, in love with drum-rolls of doom.
Never tidy your room.

Airborne (2001)

A Blessed Curse
for the Human Race

May your children and your children’s children
marry, again, and again, he or she whose skin
is unmistakably (even in a dim light) that shade
that has you most affronted and afraid,
and may these marriages be
devastatingly happy.

The Sky Road (2007)

There’s Probably No God.
Now Stop Worrying
And Enjoy Your Life
– Ad by The Atheist Bus Campaign

Not only
is there
probably
no god,
but this is
probably
not your bus.

Forthcoming from 'Fade Street', Salt, 2010

Ghost Story

2009-10-31T23:21:00.008Z

Listen hard enough and you wake the dead.

Time Piece

2009-10-17T23:42:00.004+01:00

Nothing on the windowsill in my aunt's bedroom
but this faceless mantel clock: a boxed porthole
looking straight through itself to capture a round

of net-curtained window. Where did I see it last –
on the upright piano? Why did she move it here?
And where did the face go? I could ask, but don't,

the time being perfectly kept.

Dream Vertigo

2009-10-17T12:01:00.004+01:00

Alarming dream last night. I was in a jeep with an old friend of mine, R, who was driving up a steep, slushy, slippery incline. I looked up and suddenly realised where we were headed, towards the distant crest of a mountain, the road as straight as a ski-jump, becoming vertical towards the top. I asked to be let out and he obliged. Then I watched as he continued to race up the mountain, till he skidded and stalled and came sliding backwards, rocketing past me to fly off the edge of a cliff, at which point I jolted awake. I must give R a call.

No More Totem Nos

2009-10-03T19:28:00.006+01:00

... and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again no and then he asked me would I no to say no my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him no and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume no and his heart was going like mad and no I said no I won't No.

My country has finally copped on (no thanks to Cowen & Co). There are times when it is preferable, if not desirable, to be a yes woman/man.

The Holocaust As Joke Fodder: Tommy Tiernan's 'Joyous' Rant

2009-09-26T20:01:00.021+01:00

I heard about stand-up Tommy Tiernan's anti-Semitic 'rant' third hand, from a rather outraged friend. So I was cautious about judging it too quickly. As I said to my friend, I'll wait till I can put it in context. Then I read the article by Brian Boyd in The Irish Time's Friday insert,The Ticket. Context is the very word Boyd brings up, in his second paragraph:

TOMMY Tiernan used to do a joke about the old Christian contention that the Jews killed Jesus: “The Jews say they didn’t kill Jesus. Well, it wasn’t the f**kin’ Mexicans was it?” In the context and confines of a live comedy club, it was a line that always worked well for him. He brought this joke up in a question-and-answer session [with Olaf Tyaransen] arranged by Hot Press magazine at the Electric Picnic earlier this month.

Asked by an audience member if he had ever been accused of anti-Semitism (Tiernan has been accused of many “isms” during his career), he replied that the above line had upset two Jewish people at a show he did in New York.

They approached him afterwards to remonstrate with him about the nature of the joke. The couple’s complaint, he said, was that “the Israelis are a hunted people” and therefore the joke was insensitive.

Only two Jewish people complained? Well, perhaps they were the only ones in the audience.

Boyd then continues his short lead-in to what Tiernan called his 'rant'. I'll give that lead-in, because it does provide a kind of context, which I have come to think is actually as good as (perhaps even better) than the live interview itself:

He spoke about the nature of his material and how it can cause offence: “It’s all about being reckless and irresponsible and joyful. It’s not about being careful ... and mannered. It’s trusting your own soul and allowing whatever lunacy is inside you to come out in a special protected environment where people know that nothing is being taken seriously."

“But these Jews, these f**kin’ Jew c**ts came up to me. F**kin’ Christ-killing b**t**ds! F**kin’ six million? I would have got 10 or 12 million out of that. No f**kin’ problem! F**kin’ two at a time, they would have gone! Hold hands, get in there! Leave us your teeth and your glasses!”

As Boyd admits, the written words are shocking, even with those euphemistic asterisks. 'Context' is being asked to bear an awful lot of weight here.

Tiernan, on his own website, is clearly on the defensive. Here's his 'statement' about the rant and some peoples' reactions to it:

Firstly, I would like to say that as a private individual I am greatly upset by the thought that these comments have caused hurt to others as this was never my intention; yet, the Electric Picnic public interview with Hot Press Magazine has been taken so far out of context that I am quite bewildered.

The things that I said in front of a live audience were in an attempt to explain my belief that one of the duties of the comic performer is to be reckless and irresponsible and that the things that they say should NEVER be taken out of context. If you read the full transcript or listen to the podcast you will see that I preface my rant by saying that it should not be taken seriously and as such, the rant took place as an example of my argument. While it is out of context, which it most definitely is now, it seems callous cruel and ignorant.

This is not the first time that something like this has happened and it probably won’t be the last. However, as a public performer I can only hope that whatever wild, irresponsible and reckless things that come into my head will be taken in the context in which they were said.

According to Hot Press editor, Niall Stokes: “if you see or read it in context, there is a comment in there about people who are fanatical and who can’t take a joke. But to interpret it as anti-Semitism is wrongheaded in the extreme. The way I see it, he is satirising anti-Semitism, while making a more general point that we should all be able to laugh at ourselves.

Tommy Tiernan

That word context, again. I suppose much of this depends on whether you go in for Tiernan's kind of stand-up/rant comedy, as delivered by Tiernan. Boyd obviously does. And Niall Stokes, the editor of Hot Press, also defends Tiernan. He dismisses Fine Gael TD Alan Shatter's statement in the Sunday Tribune, that Tiernan's was “a disgusting and unacceptable outburst” and who thought it "particularly sad that people found this sort of outburst in any way amusing.” As Stokes [quoted by Boyd] puts it:

“If Alan Shatter reads the interview and comes to the conclusion that Tommy Tiernan is prejudiced against Jews, then he is suffering from a life-threatening humour by-pass and needs to get it attended to quickly ... The fact is that the interview turned – as many of Tommy Tiernan’s interviews do – into a spontaneous comic performance in which he improvises around whatever subjects are thrown at him ... What he said was strong, referring to the fact that he’d have killed not six million but 10 million or 12 million Jews.

“But, while you have to read the full interview to understand what was going on and to see it in context, only an idiot could think that he was expressing his own feelings.”

Context yet again. Well, I did better than read the interview. I listened to the whole damned podcast, which is downloadable from Tiernan's website.

Boyd's article presents Tiernan as a hero (what Americans might call 'a maverick'):

Tiernan is not your typical comic, chucking out tepid observational inanities to get a guest slot on a TV panel show. His is an intense and passionately felt style of comedy.

[...]

The attraction, for many, is that he is not just a gag-merchant but someone who dances around the lines of taste and decency. Controversy follows him around like a stalker.

[...]

If you were to take Tiernan’s remarks about the Holocaust at face value, it would be hard not to view them as wicked. But you might also choose to see them in the way he says they were intended. He asks that we consider them in the context of an entertainer reaching around during a live interview for dramatic and extreme imagery. The decision on how to interpret them lies with the receiver.

'Remarks about the Holocaust'? I didn't hear any remarks, just a remarkably vicious diatribe. And if 'the decision on how to interpret [the so-called remarks] lies with the receiver', well, that receiver might interpret them very differently to how they were intended (though the intention seems to me to be far from clear). In any case it is is not humour as I understand it. Listen to the podcast. It's a Tommy Tiernan love-in (at one point the crowd starts chanting 'we love Tommy'). Certainly a 'well-protected environment'. No wonder Tiernan felt he could say whatever he pleased. But, why would he (why would anyone) actually want to say those things? What 'feelings' or 'lunacy' is he actually expressing? Not mine. Yours perhaps? Or yours, over there in the back row?

I must be an idiot, one sandwich short of a picnic, lights on but nobody home. Because I just don't see how raving about 'Jew c**ts' being shoved 'two at a time' into the gas chamber, is funny, in any context. Nevertheless, I listened for a 'context' in the podcast interview. But I am obviously stone deaf.

The Holocaust has left us with some of the most disturbing, heartbreaking and enraging images from the 20th Century. We know what these images are, and I think most people with a modicum of imagination sense what they mean, how they stand as indelible proof of precisely what we are capable of when supreme arrogance rules and we forget how to reach out and touch each other. So we should take such things very personally. Because they ARE personal; they are part of our reservoir of grief, even if we are barely aware of this. Anyone who dips into this reservoir certainly needs more of a context than Tiernan provides, essentially declaring that the mere act of voicing a bottom-feeding scumbag's point of view, stinking and harsh as vomit, creates its own context. If this is true then the likes of Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning are great comedians, pure geniuses. And if you really think Tiernan's Holocaust routine is hilarious how about replacing it with something closer to home? I'm not talking about Catholicism here, which Tiernan mocked on his first appearance on the Late Late Show (afterwards he was apparently detained in the studio for several hours after irate members of the public came looking for him). But priests and Catholicism, like Nazis, are woefully soft targets nowadays. Instead of laying into the perpetrators, how about making a few nasty jabs at the innocent victims of the ongoing clerical abuse scandal, or The Famine or The Troubles? Let Tommy give those a go, and see what 'dramatic and extreme imagery', what 'wild, irresponsible and reckless things', what 'lunacy' he can pull out of his hat.

Spot of Dying

2009-09-19T11:45:00.018+01:00

Conversation between my wife and our five year old son:

Son: Mummy I don't want to die.
Mother: Neither do I.
Son: But you get to choose when you die.
Mother: Really? How do you do that?
Son: You go to the dying spot and jump in.

Death has been on his mind recently. Of course, we have explained already that he won't die, not for a long, long, looooong time, that he's safe, we're safe, etc. Nevertheless, death resurfaces, bobbing into the conversational slipstream at odd moments. What probably brought it up today was the fact that I had let slip that I'd attended a 'removal' yesterday evening, a septuagenarian relation of ours, who contracted cancer of the liver and was gone in eight months: a kindly man, 'a gentleman', as people noted.

If we were religious, we would have been quick to reassure our son (largely the whole point of religions) that he will never die, not really, and that his parents will no doubt be waiting for him when he eventually does die, having wiped our feet on Heaven's welcome mat and joined the party; as Donne so eloquently (and comfortingly) put it: 'One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.'

But neither of us is religious. My wife is cheerily atheist and I am strongly inclined that way (though hedging my bets behind an all-but-hopeless agnosticism). My gut tells me there is nothing afterward, nothing but our cheerless, time-leased apartment in nothingness, the same infinitesimal/enormous place the galaxies are speeding to. So it is a little chilling to hear the d-word being shaped by a five-year-old's lips. But it is also, I believe, natural, and rather healthy. His 'dying spot' could hardly have anything to do with suicide, a concept we have never discussed. It is far more likely what my wife suggests: a way of exerting control over something which he is, some day, in danger of being controlled by. He is right to be indignant, even appalled. But he knows he is well-loved, and I trust it is this (and the assurance that he is here and now, in the infinitely present present) which will allow him to deflate death and stow it in its proper place, for now.

The Butcher's 9/11

2009-09-11T23:58:00.018+01:00

I have attempted three poems generated (I recoil from saying 'inspired') by the most memorable event of September 11, 2001. The following did not begin as a '9/11 poem'. I only really started to think of it in such a context after it was published in The Irish Times last Saturday.

At The Butcher's In Colmenar

A framed, blown-up photograph hangs on the wall:
the t-shirted butcher’s son and his wife, on their honeymoon
in Manhattan, the towers in the background, the date:
September 10, 2001.

Behind the counter, a steel door opens: a glimpse
of pale waxy carcasses, smell so thick I could colour it
black-red: the colour of history. Outside, I breathe
warm streets, damp from a recent shower.

An old man swings past on crutches. What do I know
about history? Dawdling under a nearby orange tree –
its perfect glimmering system – I think
of reaching to pluck one.

Andalucía, 2004

(from my third collection, Fade Street, forthcoming from Salt in 2010)

It took me well over five years to finish this poem (or bring it to a point where I felt it could be safely abandoned). As far as I can recall, I began to make notes, the first sketchy drafts, not long after leaving that butcher's shop, probably the same afternoon. I think what I was trying to get at, initially, were sensations, the texture and colour, particularly the overwhelming smell inside the butcher's . Incidentally, that butcher is highly respected, and his meat is of the best quality; the smell wasn't one of rottenness, but rather of fresh, visceral meatiness (an early image was of finding myself inside a 'meat tent'). I wanted to contrast this with the orange trees on the street outside, which had also made an impression on me.

The big framed photograph on the wall (which my cousin David had pointed out) was an otherwise fairly innocuous tourist snap, made remarkable because of the date, clearly printed in a panel below the image. The photograph may have featured in early drafts, but only in passing; the gist had been largely about the experience of finding myself in a foreign place, the oddness of real oranges growing, unplucked, on trees. That sense of dislocation is ground I (and of course many lyric poets) have covered before, and this time it ended in a cul-de-sac; the poem traveled into nowheresville and got set aside, if not quite abandoned.

Then I took it up again, a couple of years ago, and put it through another series of drafts, eventually focusing more on the photograph, which is now in the opening line (it took me years to realise its importance). Now the poem seems to have found its shape: three simple quatrains, just short of a sonnet, each shifting the location a little bit. I like the fact that an element of that uncertainty, that at-a-lossness, survives from the early drafts. It belongs in there. This is far from being a complex poem, but I think it just might contain something of that blurred little zone of almost-mystery, what Heaney called 'a hole', somewhere inside it. At least, I hope it does.

PS
The photo above (pigs' heads with radio) was not taken inside the butcher's in Colmenar, but one in Bray, in the early 1990s.

My Failed Career

2009-08-30T18:24:00.010+01:00

as a cartoonist.

In the mid 1980s I sent this in to a magazine, where my girlfriend, who had recently broken it off with me, was working. She wasn't on the editorial board, so I hadn't addressed it to her. Anyway, they rejected it, as I imagined they probably would (my first effort, after all). She rang me about a week later, to ask if we could meet. This got my hopes up. Perhaps she wanted a reconciliation (the cartoon was the furthest thing from my mind). No, she wanted to know how I could be nasty enough to send in such a thing. What did I think I was playing at? I was mystified, almost speechless. Surely, if anything, it was aimed at men, perhaps even myself. Had I missed some vital clue, broken some grave protocol?

Eventually, she admitted that it was a fairly accurate portrait... of her current boyfriend. I had heard rumors about her seeing someone. I knew him to speak to, but not nearly well enough to make assumptions about his character. Even if I had, I would never have presumed to parody him (utterly pathetic, someone slagging, without provocation, his ex-lover's lover). Furthermore, he certainly didn't look like the John Travolta wannabe in my drawing; if anything, his attire was the opposite: permanent student-drab, rather like myself. I burst out laughing, and continued till my ex asked me to shut up.

I was stupid, of course. A satirical cartoon, sent to an ex-lover's workplace, is going to damn well look like some kind of message, no matter how obscure or unlikely. And, as luck would have it, this one didn't seem obscure at all.

We've had a friendly enough relationship since, though we rarely meet (she doesn't live in the neighborhood any longer). I hope if she ever reads this she'll forgive me for airing it. I believe the joke was on both, or perhaps all three, of us.

Pottery-Cloud

2009-08-23T16:02:00.011+01:00

Wordle.net is a website that generates 'word-clouds'. That is, it takes whatever bunch of text you want to dump in it and turns this into a randomly arranged graphic word-picture. More interestingly, rather than using all the words in your text, it sorts out the less interesting chaff (definite articles, and, a, etc.) then, for the remainder, "uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size." So you get a snapshot of how often you've used (or overused) a particular word. Sometimes this can be misleading; I altered my text (the MS of my latest poetry collection) when I realised that 'James Joyce' was one of the largest words, which would have given the impression that I had written a series of odes to the master, while in fact the name was simply repeated in one small poem.

If you don't like the fonts/colours or whatever you can get another design by simply clicking the 'randomize' button. So I tried a few till I found this. I like the colour and design, but most of all the random 'poem' top left:

little Ghost
called Life

You can then exhibit these little concoctions in the online gallery or on your blog (the instructions are in the FAQs).

So how about that? Properly postmodern randomness, DIY "visual poems" far better than those I've come across.

Bad Word?

2009-08-19T12:15:00.009+01:00

I like finding handwritten comments in the margins of old books, especially if these spontaneous notes are, potentially, more interesting than the text.

When my friend, the poet and music teacher Anthony Glavin, died three years ago he left me his books. Many volumes of poetry of course, (a library within a library), but also music, art, biography, philosophy… and a good deal of literary criticism.

He often wrote comments in the margins: questioning, reprimanding, elaborating, etc. He also underlined, copiously. Reading or idly skimming some of his books, I have often compared what he has marked or underlined with my own marks/annotations, or ones I might have made had he not got there first. So a space opens for an imagined dialogue, an agreement or argument, a species of communication.

This morning I picked up a paperback copy of E.M. Forster’s ‘Aspects Of The Novel’ (immaculately preserved, the only damage age itself: air and light leaking in from the tea-coloured edges). On the title page, a 20-year-old Anthony had written in black marker, in his elegant, neat-but-unfussy handwriting:
Anthony Glavin.
Dec. 1965.
Eblanaid.

That single word in the third line is interesting. I presume it refers to the long-vanished Eblana bookshop on Grafton Street, a tiny but well-stocked Aladdin’s cave that specialized in literary publications, particularly poetry. Anthony seems to have rendered the name as a verb: Eblanaid, as in: acquired in the Eblana bookshop. This is in keeping with an aspect of his sense of humour, which I greatly miss: obsessive wordplay.

I am not certain what Anthony thought of Forster’s book, since he never discussed it with me, but I imagine him becoming impatient with the rather orotund and professorial style, which employs the majestic plural (perhaps fashionable in 1927), and I can hear him snorting derisively at the vague but elaborate scenarios Forster dreams up with all the enthusiasm of someone warming to a theme that isn’t.

At the top of page 21 (by which point Forster is well into his “ramshackly” rambling about scholarship, pseudo-scholarship and genius), I found what amounts to a condensed, scathing review: “The novel as abstract, unrelated creation, separate as a stone or hypothetical ant-heap on a far distant planet. Rubbish!” Later, at the bottom of page 37 (in blue marker this time) Anthony has written “Beckett; Krapp & Malone”, followed by an exasperated double-question mark, and with an arrow jabbing upwards at the belly of this sentence: “All these devices are legitimate, but none of them contravene our thesis: the basis of a novel is a story, and a story is a narrative of events arranged in a time sequence.”

However, it was a much smaller note in the margin of page 57 that caught my imagination and set me to writing this blog. Forster begins a paragraph thus: “So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.” As you can see from the photo above, Anthony has underlined “understand” and written in the margin “bad word”.

Is it a bad word? Coming at the end of that sentence, it might seem a little inadequate, and perhaps erroneous. After all, we can claim to understand death, both as a concept and viscerally, shatteringly, through grief. And if we live long enough, at some stage in our lives, usually around middle age, Martin Amis’s “information” arrives, that confrontation with mortality which (for any halfway contemplative person) is part of the package, a truly ‘done deal’. Would you deny that the speaker in Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, waking “in soundless dark” in the early hours, understands his “unresting death, a whole day nearer now”?

Anthony was not religious, so his objection to Forster’s chosen word rested solely, I believe, on what he considered its inappropriateness. But would any word be appropriate, or adequate? What word or words might better encapsulate our ignorance of what Larkin called (in his actual last words) “the inevitable”? I thought of one word but I am not convinced that it is much better, and it may well be worse. I won’t say what it is yet, only that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to find a full rhyme for it.

Between page 11 (where the book begins) and 57, Anthony left some kind of mark on 16 pages, whether it was half a page of meticulous notes or just one underlined word. After that, perhaps he became too bored to finish the book, or perhaps he skimmed it or put it down and forgot to resume it, because those two words in the margin of page 57 are his final written verdict on ‘Aspects’. The rest of its 115 pages are unmarked, pristine.

Here’s Forster’s sentence again, with the last word removed:
“So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot ____________.” If you can come up with a better word than “understand” I invite you to comment and fill in the blank.

Don't End With History Or The Sea*

2009-07-14T19:49:00.006+01:00

a poet warns us, or you’ll make each thing
"sound like everything else."

Here, above Blackrock, everything slopes
to that great, warped lens.
Buildings stand in the way, borrow the light.

Stars, of course, and mountains, heavens and hells
can rattle like anything else.

Days, nights, when there is nowhere better to look,
I sometimes drive there, park at a low wall
in Sandycove or Seapoint,
to write or just sit, long enough to take home

equilibrium, one little bucket of history
slopping gently on whatever scales
register these things.

*the poet is Kenneth Koch

A Private Performance

2009-05-24T10:42:00.012+01:00

Just now, over a late breakfast, I listened to Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage & Sir Les Patterson) talking on Desert Island Discs.

When he was a young man in Sydney, ages before his Dame Edna persona began to emerge, Humphries did a spell as a 'performance artist' (he also went on to play Estragon is Australia's first ever production of a Beckett play). One of his artworks was the following. He would take a seat among 'the captive audience' on a morning train (he didn't say during the rush hour but I imagine it might have been). He was probably fairly inconspicuous (though again, he didn't say), just a man sitting on a train. At a certain station he would open the window and someone (his accomplice) would hand him a grapefruit. At the following station another person would lean in and hand him some toast; next it would be an egg, cup of coffee etc., until, presumably, all was assembled and he could begin breakfast.

He called this a 'private joke' (between himself and his accomplices). Apparently the audience was captivated. I can believe it. I love the gentle, Charlie Chaplin deliberation, the gradual, unspoken unfurling, the subversive silence. This is what most (if not all) performance art/installations etc. should aim for, the private public performance, the invitation to participate in something that only needs your dawning awareness to make it complete, since it is nine tenths complete already (i.e. its end is clearly in sight, wedded to its beginning). The assembling breakfast beautifully opposes Patrick Kavanagh's idea of Tragedy ('underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born'). Hats off to Humphries.

Seven Songs For Puthwuth

2009-05-05T14:25:00.031+01:00

Puthwuth has 'blogtagged' me to write something about seven songs/pieces of music I am listening at present. Since I don't listen to nearly enough music (no excuses, I just don't seem to get round to it), I have simply selected what I have listened to most recently or last recall listening to or will listen to again in the near future.

The picture above is a closeup of my grandfather's portable gramophone. He died in 1984. Note his last DIY job on the handle; either twine or Sellotape (or both) was his solution to most mending jobs: door knobs, cutlery, tools...

As far as I recall, Grandfather only ever played one record on his gramophone, Phil Harris's 'The Darktown Poker Club', and that is the only record I found inside the lid/holder when I inherited it. Maybe once a year (Christmas?), grandfather would ceremoniously open the little black box, slip the winch into its hole (visible above the handle), wind it swiftly for a few seconds, slip the record out of its brown paper sleeve and lay it on the brown felt turntable, push the little dial to set it spinning at 78 rpm, pluck the steel arm from its cavity and settle that big, tarantula-tooth needle in its groove, immediately encasing the room in a husky hiss I can almost smell, as if the gramophone was, like its owner, a cigar-smoker, our outlines beginning to blue and soften in the layered clouds of that poker club from the 1940s:

"Bill Jackson was a poor old dub,
Who joined the Darktown Poker Club
But cursed the day he told them he would join.
His money used to go like it had wings
If he held Queens, someone had Kings
And each night he would contribute all his coins..."

Fionn Regan's 'Put A Penny In The Slot' (from 'The End of History')
I heard this for the first time on RTE Radio (Tubridy played it as an intro to his programme). I was enjoying the song, but what made my antennae twitch was a reference to 'Naylor's Cove' in Bray (the only reference to it in a song as far as I know: and I now have a poem with that title). When I heard the name Fionn Regan I realised that I recognised it. I don't know Fionn, but I know his mother, A. We hung out together when I lived in Bray in the 1990s, and we both worked in the local Signal Arts Centre (the name was my idea) near the station. A was a designer, and she and I won an ad contract for the Dept. of Health around that time, for their AIDS awareness campaign. The only time I got a foot in the advertising door, which swiftly clicked shut again.

Pink Floyd's 'Great Gig In The Sky' (from 'Dark Side of the Moon')
This was the first album I ever bought, prodded by my friend/cousin Pat. I have started listening to it again and it holds up wonderfully. I love the following track for its gutsy, wordless sensuality.

Bob Dylan's 'Shake Shake Mama' (from 'Together Through Life')
I've only just bought this album (the first new release I've bought by Dylan in decades, maybe the first ever). So far, I love 'Shake Shake Mama', 'It's All Good' and Beyond Here There's Nothin'.

Arthur MacBride by Paul Brady
I have a vivid if somewhat blurred memory of attending a performance by Planxty at UCD in the 1970s, during which Paul Brady sang this version, or one very like it. I have sat with the wean on my lap listening/watching this a few times. He seems to like it, asks questions about the sergeant, drummer etc. A great relief from Thomas The Tank Engine and the excruciating 'Lazy Town' (you don't want to know).

Leonard Cohen's 'Who By Fire' (from 'New Skin For the Old Ceremony')

Yes, I am one of those, a Cohen-Head. Cohen seems to sharply divide people (Listeners of Love and Hate). Paul Muldoon has written in his 'Sleeve Notes' that Cohen's "songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called poems I’ve read.” He elaborated on this (in an interview with Sven Birkerts, published in Ploughshares):

“It does seem a little excessive, I suppose, but I’m going to stick to it. I’d say ‘Suzanne’ or ‘Bird on the Wire’ or ‘Joan of Arc’ are much better constructed, are built to withstand more pressure per square inch, than most poetry we meet in most magazines and, alas, find collected in most slim volumes. . . . Cohen has a fine ear, too, something that’s rare enough even among quite highly respected poets. So, I’d go so far as to say that, despite the fact that they’re involved in a project which is not strictly ‘literary,’ writers like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell or Warren Zevon score an extraordinarily high number of successes. The fact that they are involved in musical enterprises to boot means that they are likely to ‘mean far more,’ if only because one’s more likely to be exposed to them. There’s nothing strange about this, I think. Nothing mysterious. It’s a function of the impact of popular culture, particularly on the second half of the twentieth century, and it’s one of the reasons my comment on Cohen might seem not in the least excessive to many people of my generation.”

On the other hand, some people simply can't stand him, such as my old friend, the piano teacher/poet Anthony Glavin. But then, Anthony probably wouldn't have had time for much of the music I listen to (folk music, for example, got a big thumbs down).

I first heard Cohen's delectable drone when a friend, Dominic, played me 'Songs of Leonard Cohen' on an enviously high-tech hi-fi (with real, proper speakers) sometime in the 1970s. Soon enough, I knew many of the songs by heart and would actually 'sing' them (didn't need to be pissed though it helped) at the slightest non-provocation, sometimes just sitting by myself at the top of a 46A. The one Cohen album I remember actually buying was 'New Skin For The Old Ceremony', partly because I loved the song below, apparently taken from an old Yom Kippur prayer. As far as I can tell, the song simply considers various ways in which we might step off the planet. I am delighted to have a ticket for the next Cohen concert in Dublin (a birthday present from my wonderful wife).

I'll finish with the voice of a certain Louis Prima (as King Louie, the orangutan king of the monkeys in Disney's 'The Jungle Book). Phil Harris is also in there, as Baloo the bear. Again, this is one I often listen to/watch with the wean. Listen out for Baloo/Phil Harris finally surrendering to the beat with "I'm gone man, solid gone..."

Louis Prima and Phil Harris in 'The Jungle Book'

And now I will pass the blog-baton to Paul Perry, The Cat Flap, Andrew J. Shields, Nightwriter, Baroque In Hackney, John C. Falstaff.

Unbalancing Act

2009-04-20T16:07:00.017+01:00

Christmas, Bournemouth, 1960, Wimbledon Hall Hotel,
Mark in his red corduroy trousers –
red tie cardigan with red and blue stripes
playing with the owner and daughter.

The world is off-centre, tipsy.
I’m three and three quarters, lips slightly parted, gaze

sliding away. Someone has hubcapped my head
with a drinks tray – the owner

who helps me straddle a balloon, his cuff-linked hand
on my leg, keeping me steady

between rows of ladies watching something to the right –
razzmatazz! – a whole warming up decade.

The nearest of two bare-armed girls –
in matching polka-dot dresses and bobbed hair –

sits with her back to me, captivated or bored.
Her slender forearm is raised

to put a morsel in her mouth, kiss
her fingertips; unaware we’ve been slipstreamed,

wedded by light, how her big dress
is the bigger picture, flared, almost touching the floor.

My Portrait Of Jo Brand

2009-03-08T14:18:00.010Z

Wikipedia requested permission to reproduce the above image on their page on Jo Brand, the well-known stand-up comedian. There were two drawbacks: no fee and (rather more seriously) a requirement that I alter the copyright status of the image to CC (or Creative Commons), since their policy only allows them to use images which can be downloaded for free.

Wikipedia, for all its faults, is an amazing resource, so it was nice to be asked to contribute something. Also, any image on their pages will obviously get far more hits than those gathering dust in some barely-known writer/photographer's Flickr gallery, and they made it clear that they would happy to provide a link to my work.

After a chat with a person I know who is well-versed in copyright law, I opted for 'Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons'(Cc-by-3.0), which allows me to keep some control over the manner in which my image is used.

I remember taking this portrait of Jo in Belfast in 1994. I think it was after or before a show, though I can't actually remember her performance. I've always found her droll-with-daggers-drawn humour hilarious (""men are fantastic – as a concept"). So it seems unlikely that I would have forgotten the one live performance I'd attended. It's possible that we had to leave before her show, to get back to Co Antrim, where I was doing an MA in poetry/creative writing with Jimmy and Janice Simmons.

Jo was a delight to photograph, funny, obliging, utterly unselfconscious and seemingly happy in her own skin. Much as I might have imagined her to be, judging from her performances. Great stand-up comedy has, in my opinion, quite a lot in common with great poetry readings (and I don't mean poetry "performances"). Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy come to mind (and maybe Paul Durcan, on a good day). There is a similar sense of confidence (but not overconfidence, nothing gauche), a clarity of delivery and, especially, a genius with timing. It really is "the way you tell em", with poems or jokes. If Jo ever glances at her page in Wikipedia I hope she likes the picture.

Recycled Ra

2009-02-17T00:41:00.004Z

That aside, some recyclable verse:

New Year's Afternoon

I ram bottles into the bank,
listening for the weak tink!

or the solid gratifying smash –
a breakthrough, a full-blown wish.

The Bull Wall

2009-01-02T11:08:00.002Z

Blessed be the sadhappy walk in the rain
to the end of the pier and back again.

Praise be to friends, new-leafed and old
and those who’ve let go their hold.

Hail to the painstaking
good, slow, awkward work of lovemaking

that is never done.
Hallelujah what is hard or easily won.

A Soft Day from Airborne

Happy Newish Year and whatever you're having yourself.

To All You Web-Walkers Out There

2008-12-24T23:17:00.005Z

Happy Christmas, and may the new year find you as alive and well as you wish.

Kind Of An Odd Moment

2008-12-15T16:44:00.011Z

I salute Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference. That is, I salute the strength and clarity of his gesture (his politics may be another matter altogether).

In any case, Bush didn't seem particularly fazed. Looking only mildly alarmed in the clip I saw, he ducked nimbly and came out wise-cracking: "I didn't know what the guy said, but I saw his sole." Ho ho! And (to the rest of the assembled reporters): "You were more concerned than I was. I was watching your faces." And then of course: "I'm pretty good at ducking, as most of you know," [adding quickly]"I'm talking about ducking your questions." Bush elaborated further: "I mean, it was just a bizarre moment, but I've had other bizarre moments in the presidency. I remember when Hu Jintao was here. Remember? We had the big event? He's speaking, and all of a sudden I hear this noise — had no earthly idea what was taking place, but it was the Falun Gong woman screaming at the top of her lungs (near the ceremony on the White House lawn). It was kind of an odd moment."

I wouldn't call the Muntazer al-Zaidi's protest a bizarre moment, nowhere near as bizarre as GWB's presidency. An odd moment? Yes, an oddly eloquent moment, a moment of unusual clarification, further elucidated by his shout, which apparently translates as: "This is your farewell kiss, you dog!" In other words: Shoo!

Muntazer al-Zaidi is now apparently being hailed as a hero in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City, where thousands took to the streets on Monday, chanting, "Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head." It has a ring to it, doesn't it?

Bush has claimed that he "didn't feel the least bit threatened by" the incident. This may be true. Mailer has described Bush (accurately, I believe) as someone "who has never been embarrassed by himself." Perhaps Bush is simply too unimaginative to feel either embarrassment or, most of the time, fear. No wonder the other journalists looked "concerned". They may have had faster brains, and been able to compute the possibility that a shoe in such circumstances may not be simply a shoe, a whole shoe and nothing but a shoe; they may have recalled Richard Colvin Reid (or Abdul Raheem) who was tackled on board an airplane in 2002 while attempting to ignite his heel (which was stuffed with plastic explosives).

Apparently shoe-throwing (and/or showing someone the sole of your shoe) is a sign of "extreme disrespect" in the Middle East. Makes sense to me. Now, if only we could persuade everyone with a grievance (in Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) to settle all with their shoes. A new tactic for the new year: Socks And Awe.

Not Just Another Goodnight

2008-11-05T00:43:00.002Z

It is now 1.20 a.m. I wish I could stay up into the small hours to watch the results come in. But I have to get up early (7.30 is early by my standards) and I don't want to be exhausted going in to teach my weekly poetry workshop in the IWC on Parnell Square. Exit polls look VERY promising so far.

Lest we forget, here are the (slightly tweaked) words of that anonymous "senior advisor", speaking from the midst of Fortress W, reconstituted as a 'found poem' (or a lost one):

REVISION FOR A SENIOR ADVISOR

We're an empire now and then.
We acted.
We created our own
reality
and while you were studying that
reality,
judiciously,
as you will,
we mislaid the second act
to create other new
realities, which you
could study too.

Tomorrow, things will be different. America (and thereby the rest of us) will have a new reality. One of those horribly vague, politician-friendly abstract nouns, Hope, has become something small and real: a sweaty palm, with two fingers strained into an X.

The Reality Street Book Of Sonnets

2008-10-09T14:07:00.023+01:00

I was delighted to receive a note to collect a parcel last week (parcels are almost always welcome). I guessed it was The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (edited by Jeff Hilson) which Ron Silliman had blogged about a couple of weeks ago, and which I had subsequently ordered from Alibris. But I was surprised that it got here so quickly, barely a week after I ordered it.

As I suspected, I will probably find most of it unreadable, since it is chock-full of the kinds of poets who are horrified by more than a slim whiff of 'referentiality'. So, for example, there is a good helping of "visual sonnets", some of which are clearly abstract paintings/sketches (so one wonders why they would wish to be anything else) and others which are painstaking assortments of words/letters, sometimes in different fonts, like a child playing vacant games of scrabble with nobody.

David Miller's three 'visual sonnets' ('Untitled', naturally) are composed of a series of loose, horizontal brush-strokes, like stand-ins for text. Hilson remarks on their "affinities with Chinese brush-painting" in his introduction (they remind me of Pound's self-censored lines in The Cantos). No harm in allusions, intended or otherwise, to Chinese art, Pound or, for that matter, the sonnet. If I found these in a gallery I could take or leave the sonnet reference, as a witticism perhaps, while judging the paintings on their own merit as visual artworks. But in a supposedly ground-breaking anthology, whose serious introduction makes clear Hilson's poetic/political bias, I trust I am being asked to consider these works as "linguistically innovative" sonnets, despite the absence of anything vaguely linguistic. I'm reminded of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's one-legged Tarzan sketch: "Need I say with overmuch emphasis that it is in the leg [i.e. text] division that [these] are deficient?"

But I am always curious as to what the advance-rear-guard is up to. After all, the efforts of its practitioners present a kind of funhouse mirror to what my kind are slogging away at, poor benighted fools that we are (imagining that poetry has some primal allegiance to meaning/song: pathetic really). Also, I remain fascinated by the sonnet, and the way different poets work with it, or against it.

So far, I have only leafed through the anthology, but already I have found four which may well prove to be my favourites (if only because they set out their stalls so clearly). Two of these, by Ron Padgett, simply repeat the first line, without variation, 13 times. In the case of the first sonnet, the title, 'Nothing In That Drawer', is also the first line, so there you have it. Or do you? Well, it does make a different impression if you see the whole sonnet printed on the page, like a stack of empty drawers, so here's the first nine lines, including the title, just prior to the turn (the drawers with the Emperor's invisible spare socks, underwear and porn mags):

Nothing in That Drawer

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.

The second,'Sonnet/Homage To Andy Warhol', is harder to quote from properly. As I have said, it replicates the first line 14 times. This should give you an idea what it looks like on the page:

Sonnet/Homage To Andy Warhol

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Behold: the sleeping sonnet (Warhol's seven and a half hour film, 'Empire', might well induce this state). I am afraid my quote may contain typos, as I find it very difficult to count the actual number of zeds in the original, so there may be a few too many, or too few. My apologies to the author.

I also enjoyed the two prose-sonnets by Harryette Mullen. As with Padgett's, this was partly because I was able to comprehend them, or at least tell where they derived their original structure from. They are both variations, riffs on one of Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady' sonnets (my favourite as it happens):

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

And here are the first seven lines from one of Mullen's sonnets, called, appropriately,

Dim Lady

My honeybunch's peepers are nothing like neon. Today's special at
Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her
racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater
Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in
Shakey's Pizza Parlors, red and white, but no such picnic colors do I
see in her mug. And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is
more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes.[quote ends]

Both of Mullen's sonnets are twelve lines (or eleven and a bit), perhaps because the long prose sentences bulk out the form so much. Apart from Shakespeare’s sonnet, her variations were apparently influenced by the Oulipo method. Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or Potential Literature Workshop. Among a number of procedures developed by the Oulipo school is the “S+7” method, where each noun in a given text, such as a poem, is substituted by the noun to be found seven places away in a chosen dictionary. Mullen has taken the idea of substitution, but, rather than adhering to the dictionary, seems to have carefully chosen many of her own words and phrases for comic effect, perhaps lifting a few of them from ads, etc. Both sonnets are from her recent collection, ‘Sleeping With The Dictionary’. Her second, 'Variations On A Theme Park', carries the comic deconstruction (or demolition) further. It begins with the lines: "My Mickey Mouse ears are nothing like sonar. Colorado is far less / rusty than Walt's lyric riddles..." and continues into a traffic pileup of images and metaphors, some of which may make more sense to American audiences. However, the sense of humour is maintained, partly because the narrative skeleton remains intact: we know where she is going, but we want to go there anyway, if only to see how see how wild and unwieldy it gets. Unlike many of the other sonnets in this anthology, both of Mullen's made me grin, something I will always salute.

So this is one book I'll be returning to again, and again. Who knows what I might find in there? There might even be sonnets that I like enough to commit to memory (ignoring their vociferous protests).

By the way, the photograph above is, in case you hadn't guessed, a sonnet: a vispo Shakespearian – note the rhyming couplet.

The Shark In The Machine

2008-09-29T12:54:00.034+01:00

Under the title Confrontation, Apropos Damien, George Szirtes recently discussed Damien Hirst on his blog, in the light of the recent Sotheby’s auction. I agree with much of what he said, but not everything, and I am grateful to him for making me think harder about my attitude to Hirst and the YBA phenomenon. So I have taken some of his remarks as an entry point for a little meditation on the cuddly wide boy and what his work means, or doesn’t.

*****

George writes that Hirst’s Shark “is startling … like a demon in Bosch, or even Michelangelo. Or the dog in Goya.” He goes on to say: “I am not comparing the shark to Goya… in terms of value but in terms of psychological location. Not that Goya's remarkable painting is anywhere near his greatest work... it is rather, stripped down vision and confrontation...Hirst's shark is a similar kind of confrontation.

...Confrontation is... a proper area for art. There is a process of reorientation within the world that is the natural product of all substantial art. It is like the discovery of a room in the soul that did not exist before and from whose windows everything looks different. That view - that difference - is something you have, thenceforth, to take into account."

But then, as George says, "there is a catch to the idea of confrontation... Confrontation as convention - the frayed and boring formula of the artist "challenging" the viewer - is so much rubbish unless the artist himself or herself is equally confronted and challenged."

And the artist cannot "challenge from a position of superiority, in didactic fashion. That old call to the artist - épater le bourgeois! - is pointless unless the artist too is scandalised. The 'bourgeois' is so used by now to being "challenged" that he finds it cosy. You don't confront or challenge a dog by feeding it...

...Hirst's first works were genuinely confrontational, not through aura, through what one knew, was told, or expected of them, but because they acted that way as physical objects. But you can't keep doing that in the same way. Not all the irony in the world can bring about that reorientation. What you have left to play with is aura. Aura and money. And so you carry making the two the same thing till you can no longer tell the difference between them.”

******

I think there is more than one catch for any confrontational object that aspires to being a work of art. Hirst’s shark may have been startling once upon a time, though it has always seemed rather old hat to me, a sad little echo of Duchamp, Warhol, Beuys, 'International Yves Klein Blue'... Perhaps it is apt to compare it to Goya’s dog (or a demon from Bosch or Michelangelo) in terms of “psychological location” as “a process of reorientation within the world”, though I have my doubts. Certainly the dog and the demons (many of them fish-demons by the way) instill a strong sense of dislocation, and perhaps the shark does this too.

But is this kind of confrontation/displacement enough? While I accept that the shark may be startling, I have difficulty believing that it really opens "a room in the soul that did not exist before". Is it really that different from something one might come across in a waxwork museum or sideshow? Of course, I realise that its being in a gallery-space is part of its essential quiddity, its raison d'etre, but again, is that enough? We encounter many startling things in the course of a life, things on a par with and far exceeding the shark in their ability to startle or shock. But these encounters do not present us with reflective, coherent worldlets, nor do we expect them to. That experience is reserved for art, and works of art should be required to deliver it.

I agree that great art has often been confrontational (though I think humility is an underrated virtue in artists). As George says, confrontation is “a proper area for art”. Mere staged confrontation though, without any distillation or engagement, is not art. It is not even in the same arena. It pushes just one button, twangs one, threadbare chord. If a person has any imagination at all, it is the easiest thing in the world to dream up a confrontational work, a semi-shocking installation or what used to be called “a happening”. In fact, I can think of one Hirst himself might put together, as a properly confrontational terminus to his dead animal series. He could simply exhibit himself, inside a large glass tank, naked on Tracy Emin’s unmade bed, literally doing what his entire oeuvre, up till then, had only accomplished figuratively.

In contrast to Hirst’s shark, neither the demons nor the dog are merely confrontational. Take the demons in Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. They are part of a complex and ingenious tableaux, an imagining of the late Medieval machinery of Hell. They are nightmarish, allusive, hallucinatory and blackly comic (Bruegel’s are even more so), eddies from the muddy swirl, our irrepressible, writhing mortality; as Milosz puts it: 'If not for the existence of Earth, would there be a Hell?'. The demons are also exciting, possibly the Medieval equivalent of a good horror flick (the Exorcist or Alien of its day). It is difficult to know what a person in the Netherlands of the 15th Century might have felt when confronted by them. What they do retain is an undeniable power, and their busyness and cruelty (and distortions and deformities) have a contemporary resonance.

Goya’s dog is something else entirely. It is from part of a series of murals called ‘The Black Paintings’, which Goya apparently painted on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo (‘House of the Deaf Man’), a country house outside Madrid he occupied in the early 1820's. Curiously, Goya was in fact stone deaf by this stage.

The murals are, I believe, badly damaged. There may be essential parts missing, lost when they were removed from the walls, mounted and framed for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, after which they were donated to the Prado. Furthermore, their provenance is now seriously being questioned, with Goya’s son Javier (who occupied the house after his father died) being put forward as the one who may have actually painted the murals.

As it is (as far as I can judge from the reproductions), the dog painting emanates a kind of desolation: the trusting creature is emerging (from earth or water or simply abstract paint) into a kind of scorched emptiness, putting its nose above the parapet into – what? Nothingness? Hell? George Szirtes' “potent bareness”?

It is almost inevitable that we will read too much into such an image. We are approaching it post Beckett, with the existential floodlights blazing. What is remarkable to me is how much expression Goya (or whoever) was able to put into such a tiny profile, almost a silhouette: a dog’s dark head, its one (bewildered? terrified?) eye. The image has a mystery, horror and compassion way out of Hirst’s league. Whatever this singular vision means, if it is supposed to be viewed as part of the ‘Black’ series or was even visited and contemplated by anyone other than Goya while he was alive, it is clear to me that it has been filtered, and has come through the wringer of a unique imagination.

What the demons and the dog have in common is an engagement with the human predicament. They are in it, along with us, up to their eyes. Far from merely being ironic/confrontational displacements or quasi-surreal gestures, they are, in their own contexts, utterly real. And a measure of this reality, this engagement, is something necessary to all works of art, minor, good or great. I do not think Hirst’s shark possesses this. It is a coldly removed installation, similar to his recent diamond-studded skull, as impersonal as the money it generates.

Then, there is that title: ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death In the Mind of Someone Living’. I am not sure whether we are meant to attach this title to the shark as a deadly serious ‘message’, smirking ‘irony’ or both. In any case, when I think of the shark, that ridiculously pompous sentence keeps replaying itself like a jingle: ‘The Physical Impossibility of Silence In the Lungs of the Attention-Seeking Toddler’. It seems to me like a thoroughly dead giveaway, a little window into Hirst’s tiny imagination and gargantuan ego, as po-faced as the other, more recent and more twee: ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.’

What Hirst’s dead animal installations say to me, overwhelmingly, is: Look at the one that didn’t get away! Look at what I’ve imprisoned! Look at my acquisitions! Is it really likely that Hirst was challenged or confronted (much less scandalised) by whatever inspired his tanked shark? I strongly suspect that the idea of the shark, Hirst’s overwhelming desire to make a big splash, looms far larger than the thing’s mere physical presence, startling though this may be. It’s the audacity of it, the bigness and the brashness. And behind this is Hirst’s complacent voice, somewhat distracted, already moving the punters on to the next sensational exhibit. Hirst is really little more than a collector of novelties. He couldn’t give a toss what these ‘mean’, other than how this might increase his notoriety and (obviously) wealth. I have heard him in interviews. His crassness is painful to listen to and has much in common with that of the speaker in Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’:
…..Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me. [my italics]

“Aura and money”, as George says. There, I completely agree with him. Rather than opening windows in most people's souls, I think Hirst's shark (along with his other gimmicks) opens windows of opportunity for the more egotistical, wannabe dilettantes, in exactly the same way that the Big Brother fishtank became THE destination for a hoard of DIY celebs. A direct line to the inner-infant scream: Meeee!!! All you need do is to tune in and 'get it.'

NB
Discussion continued HERE

Reginald Shepherd 1963-2008

2008-09-11T22:57:00.006+01:00

I was stunned to hear that Reginald Shepherd has just died, though he had been gravely ill for some time, and had even written about it in some detail on his blog.

He was an extraordinary poet and critic, his blog always a real pleasure to read. After an argument on the net, stemming from a misunderstanding, we made up and became friends, exchanging emails on a fairly regular basis. I will miss him.

In a post titled 'Why I Write' Reginald stated 'I write because I would like to live forever'. I have come to appreciate the braveness and honesty of that declaration, a shout, a challenge, a gauntlet thrown at the inevitable. And now that inevitable has arrived, tragically early (he was 6 years younger than me, and probably had a great deal more to say).

If you have not encountered Reginald's poetry or prose, here is the first part of YOU, THEREFORE, addressed to his partner Robert Philen:

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name...

You can read the poem in full here: http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179292

REGINALD'S BLOG: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/02/why-i-write.html

The poet and critic Katy Evans-Bush kindly informed me of his death this evening, though I had already come across the news a little earlier on Andrew J. Sheilds blog.

A Note On The Weather

2008-09-07T00:56:00.004+01:00

Amazing clearing in the weather this evening.

Looking out to sea from the railway bridge in Blackrock, I watched a rainbow build itself from a feint section, a pillar levitating just beyond Howth Head. Or rather, I did not watch it grow, but each time I glanced back at it it had strengthened, till it claimed an enormous wedge of sky, the air charged with grainy bluegoldgrey. The deepening richness was musical, steepening chords, a glissando, a choir.

Other people had stopped on the bridge to watch: a woman with a labrador, another man with a camera, the woman in the knitted cap in the photo, who turned to me as I was leaving and said: "It's like a compensation." So it is.

Led By The No(se)

2008-06-17T16:16:00.000+01:00

The two posters above say it all: portals for a herd of lead-booted, goose-stepping ironies. Only a moron would miss the contradiction.

Obama And The Balking Heads

2008-06-04T23:34:00.004+01:00

Well, they weren't really balking. But one of them saw fit to report that someone (an MP? a spokesperson for the government?) had grumbled that they would love to know what Barack Obama thinks of the rest of the world "but nobody seems to know." Not the point, people. The point is, he THINKS!

Ascending

2008-05-19T18:51:00.001+01:00

crow
throws
a doveshadow

Photographing Clouds

2008-05-11T15:01:00.002+01:00

Is to pretend to corner, square
a bulge on the breeze, to put your finger on
something you can’t, contour
of an answer.

Above Gullfoss Waterfall

2008-05-06T14:54:00.002+01:00

Put these together.
A flimsy yellow/red barrier
half-blocking the one road into the interior.

This is lowered, the guide tells us, for most of the year.
Beside it, like a stark-shadowed spear
a triangled exclamation mark stands on a pole.

What it adds to: almost the whole
country closed off. Turn left, squint over there:
a black ridge smoothed and blanked: claws of a glacier.

How Odd Are You?

2008-05-04T22:16:00.008+01:00

Above is a new poster from the Metropolitan Police, warning the public to watch for 'odd' photographers; part of their counter-terrorist campaign (two other posters with matching graphics focus on houses and mobile phones). Below are two parodies of it, one by LOLcat, the other by an unknown artist.

I'm sure there must be many more by now. The poster is MADE for piss-taking, a rich platter for visual gags and stand-up comics. Note the sombre green/brown and scary blood red. I bet the designers toyed with the idea of having grey/green or white backround, with that one 'odd' camera highlighted in red. But the overwhelming flood of dark red is much more effective, more alarming, more visceral: the colour of 'carnage'.

Notice also the choice of that word 'odd' . A more obvious, and appropriate, choice would have been 'suspicious'. Odd? A huge swarm of snappers (from the millions of kids flashing their mobiles to the standing army of semi-pros fiddlings with their digital SLRs) would appear odder than odd socks if you paused to scrutinise them. But it seems the Met wishes to cast, far and wide, a truly gross net.

The campaign is reminiscent of WW2: 'Careless Words Cost Lives' etc. Also Orwell's 1984 of course The Big Sibling is watching (watching the watchers in this case). Yes. We know. CCTV is everywhere, and is instrumental in catching the odd murderous little scumbag. And okay, maybe a raised public awareness, an extra vigilance, is called for when dealing with certain politically brainwashed lowlives. The problem is simple. Almost everyone has a camera, and a good many are inclined to more sophisticated compositions than tourist monoliths/landscapes or group shots of grinning pals. In other words, many people now gravitate to the 'odd' shot, though even the oddest has more than likely already been snapped to extinction (i.e. ordinariness). There really isn't all that much Odd left. Will the operators take that into consideration when they get those calls? Will the police? They may be forced to. If people react as hysterically as those posters urge them to, the poor old Met will be swamped.

Here are just a tiny fraction of the decidedly ODD photos I took, and the phonecalls they might have generated if such a campaign took off over here:

He's in the alley behind our house. I don't know what he's up to. No, wait. He's taking a photograph of...a lamp post! Please get here quick!

There he is Guard. He's still at it, taking photos behind that poor man's back. Or maybe he's an undercover cop. That man is acting a bit odd, come to think of it. What's in that briefcase?

I'm just walking past him now. He hasn't shifted. He's photographing people in our lobby mirror. He is definitely shifty. Bald little bastard. With an odd shoulder bag. I'd strip search him immediately, though he'd probably enjoy it by the look of him.

Is that the Emergency service? There is a man with a camera in the parking lot. He's taking photos of our church! No, he isn't bothering anyone. It's well after the last service. But look at the time! It's dark and cold, and he's standing there in a parking lot. He can't be a normal tourist, not by the cut of him. Ordinary photographers don't act like this. Do they?

High On Clouds: Dublin / Reykjavik

2008-04-29T12:47:00.003+01:00

Finally piercing it, the sphagnum-grey, heading for the sun's blue romper room

Over Scotland
tilted into the shine
specked by black
keyhole islands
no
cloudshadows

sea-mauled edge, salt
bite of a bay, rime
of a town

puckers and long fissures
cooked scar tissue
tipp-exed with snow, roads
that might actually get somewhere

Blogtagged

2008-04-24T19:00:00.003+01:00

I had never heard of this term till yesterday (it sounds rather sinister and Big Brotherish), but I have now been blogtagged by the Divine Ms Baroque (she who must be obeyed). All I have to do is reveal six random things about myself. Since this may be my one and only celebrity-style request, it would be churlish to refuse. So here are the six, illustrated:

1. My Other Genre

Alien is one of my favourite movies. I love a good ghost, horror or sci-fi flick.

2. Reshuffle

After a four year hiatus, I've finally resumed running/fast walking, and have suddenly discovered what the iPod Shuffle my wife gave me as a birthday present over a year ago is REALLY for: Bowie, Bach, Santana, Tori Amos, Négresses Vertes... I'm rediscovering them all.

3. Hairy

I used to have VERY long hair, right down to my waist
(now it's the Roddy Doyle look, what Billy Connolly called 'the Millennium Comb-over').

4. Superstition

There is one particular drain-cover I drive over nearly every morning. If I can get it to make a satisfying 'clunk' I tell myself the day will end on a happy note.

5. Clouds

If there was a vacancy for a cloudwatcher (a vacancy for vacancy) I'd fit the bill.

6. Tartness!

When I finish a G&T I eat the lemon.

Handholds 2

2008-04-09T17:05:00.003+01:00

There: the voices thrown
from Thingmote’s mound

Here: moved earth, the grind
of gears on Nassau Street

There: what netted the names
in the maps’ blood vessels

Here: names to be given:
Skateboard Alley, Fr. Noise Quay,
Out Of Our Heads Walk…

There: Pale walls, the beerbarrel
clatter of weaponry

Here: a soiled pink blanket
in a doorway, a nation at the gates,
real estate

There: footholds, the splash of feet
on the hurdle ford

Here: old ladders in a skip,
new holds, rungs in the air

from a sequence, HANDHOLDS

Night Chorus

2008-04-03T15:55:00.003+01:00

I have occasionally heard the odd bird calling at night, but hadn't thought much about it. I was originally a nightbird myself, and right into my early 30s would frequently stay up till dawn, taking strolls around shuttered Dublin or pitch dark Bray Head with similarly inclined friends, chatting into the small hours about all kinds of wonderful nothings. So far as I know, the avian world might have room for its own oddballs, delinquents, perverts etc.

According to the New Scientist, what I have been hearing may be the early signs of an evolutionary shift, as birds species begin to adapt to urban living by singing at night. Apparently, their little voices tend to get drowned by the persistent human cacophony: especially the grey zooshing of early rush-hour traffic. Birds are also altering their calls, singing louder to be heard above the din.

Has anyone heard it yet, the Night Chorus? Patience; the musicians are tuning their instruments.

Cultural ID

2008-03-13T23:25:00.010Z

makes me think of my dark
overgrown little back garden,

more moss than grass, the granite wall
shawled in ivy. Enough space

for the washing to do its line-dance
and, slendering upwards,

a tall-storied old ash
keeping time with time.

'Well, that was one way of putting it, hopefully not too obliquely or in too much of 'a worn-out poetical fashion'. I went into more detail on the Poets On Fire forum, when they were discussing 'Englishness' a while back:

Welsh, Irish, English, Celt... I don't think it's really a question of whether such things exist, but rather what they might mean. In a very real sense I believe we are all mongrels, but some of us (such as myself) more so than others.

My mother was born in Belfast but grew up in Burnham on Sea. I was born in London but brought up in middleclass Dublin. My father was Canadian. My wife is part-Jewish. I have lived for periods in the city of my birth (which I have a great affection for), but never doing anything particularly useful, much less cultural: living in crowded lodgings in Golders Green on the dole, or in squats in Camberwell (which was interesting, actually). I have an English brother and quite a few English cousins. I suppose my cultural ID is more Irish than English, though I carried two passports for a while. I like having one foot (or little toe) in the Big Sister island. After all, I speak the lingo; Béarla is my mother tongue.

Perhaps because of my own comfortably muddled roots, I can only understand peoples' anxiety about their cultural background theoretically. I can't get even mildly worried about whether I am more Irish than British or vice versa. I don't think this makes me a better-adjusted human being; I have plenty of other shortcomings, and I am very curious about my family trees' tangled roots. I just find that any tendency to 'national pride' is mitigated by my awareness of how anyone's birth is, in the end, an accident of geography. This latter fact seems to me a bigger and perhaps more important truth. I was delighted to discover I had an English brother, but I'd have been delighted if he was Irish, Jewish, Canadian or Eskimo.

It can be interesting to try to pick through national characteristics. I remember reading Dervla Murphy's 'Wheels Within Wheels', in which she described how her staunchly law-abiding parents took in a young IRA man on the run and provided him with a safe house. She considered subversion and distrust of authority an Irish, as opposed to British, characteristic. It probably was then, in the early half of the last century. But is it still? I don't know. I can sympathise with immigrants, who are understandably insecure, being defensive about their cultural background, (though NOT when that defensiveness becomes offensive and aggressive). But I find it a little strange when well-rooted people metamorphose into flag wavers and drum beaters or attempt to pestle blood and soil into some magical mystery paste.

Louis MacNeice ruminated on Ireland and his Irishness (or lack of it) in various passages in his prose and poems. Here's excerpts from section XVI of his Autumn Journal, published in 1938:

Drums on the haycock, drums on the harvest, black
Drums in the night shaking the windows:
King William is riding his white horse back
To the Boyne on a banner,
Thousands of banners, thousands of white
Horses, thousands of Williams
Waving thousands of swords and ready to fight
Till the blue sea turns to orange.
Such was my country and I thought I was well
Out of it, educated and domiciled in England,
Though her name keeps ringing like a bell
In an under-water belfry.
Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English,
As members of a world that never was,
Baptised with fairy water...'

..........................................................

'Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?
The blots on the page are so black
That they cannot be covered with shamrock.
I hate your grandiose airs,
Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger,
Your assumption that everyone cares
Who is the king of your castle.
Castles are out of date,
The tide flows round the children's sandy fancy;
Put up what flag you like, it is too late
To save your soul with bunting.
Odi atque amo:*
Shall we cut this name on trees with a rusty dagger?
Her mountains are still blue, her rivers flow
Bubbling over the boulders.
She is both a bore and a bitch;
Better close the horizon,
Send her no more fantasy, no more longings which
Are under a fatal tariff.
For common sense is the vogue
And she gives her children neither sense nor money
Who slouch around the world with a gesture and a brogue
And a faggot of useless memories.'

This was written out of a very different world, of course, in which McNeice could speak of a North

'...veneered with the grime of Glasgow,
Thousands of men whom nobody will employ
Standing at the corners, coughing.
And the street-children play on the wet
Pavement - hopscotch or marbles;
And each rich family boasts a sagging tennis-net
On a spongy lawn beside a dripping shrubbery.'

Were the English all that sentimental? Not when it came down to the brass and bloody tacks; not when they became impatient. These days the street children will have found other things to amuse themselves with, and the rich families other things to boast of than sagging tennis nets.

But certainly there was a truth in MacNeice's lines, stated more boldly than many mid 20th Century Irish writers would have dared. Some of that truth is still relevant and applies to many of the Irish, here and elsewhere, myself included (I never had much of a brogue, but I had some of the gestures alright, and still do).

As for Paddy's Day, I haven't attended the Parade in I don't know how long. Last year was apparently a fiasco, with herds of hyper-aggressive shitfaced young ones terrorising the more docile crowds. So I'll take a back seat as usual. Let the revels get underway with a vengeance, let the poleaxed teenagers piss in the streets, let them turn the clouds to broccoli, the beer to bile; let St. Patrick Adze-Head Moses part the waters of a kelly-green Chicago River for his bogwood chariot drawn by twenty purple and emerald donkeys braying 'Be it so! Be it so!'

Odi atque amo: translates (apparently) as 'to be in love with is also to hate'or 'I hate you and love you'.

Antichrist Given The Green Light

2008-03-07T15:38:00.003Z

The Antichrist may well be “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist” according to Cardinal Giacomo Biffi (pronounced Beefy?), who has been chosen by Pope Benedict XVI to deliver this year’s Lenten meditations to the Vatican hierarchy. The Cardinal believes that Christianity stands for “absolute values, such as goodness, truth, beauty”. If “relative values” such as “solidarity, love of peace and respect for nature” became absolute, they would encourage “idolatry” and “put obstacles in the way of salvation.”

So the likes of Trevor Sargent and John Gormley are Golden Calves, drawing the faithful down the cindery path to damnation. Think of all those wind turbines popping up in the landscape, each one a travesty of the true cross. And all our little efforts at Greeness (recycling paper, keeping a compost bin etc.) are incremental pieces of the greater 'Absolute Evil'. How can a respect for nature become absolute? Depends on what you mean by 'nature' I guess; as it depends, in a label like 'family values', what you mean by family. I wonder what absolute goodness looks like when it's at home, apart from the Pope that is. Would the Cardinal's absolute truth and beauty be similar to Keats's? Is that all we need to know? Roll on that old red wheelbarrow, on which so much depends, endlessly.

I enjoy these kinds of warnings though, the voice of doom that gives everything a loooong shadow. In a similar vein, I enjoy a good horror story, the kind where we might find the unwary city slicker taking a wrong turning through middle America, tuning in to the voice of some lean, hollowed out preacher spitting hellfire; or coming across those Wayside Sermon posters you see up North, as in the photo above, taken near Bangor.

Apparently, according to a Vatican source, Cardinal Biffi may have been chosen because his “verbal fireworks” would keep his listeners awake. I can see it: the sleepy cardinals of the Vatican hierarchy shuffling in to listen to their Lenten meditations, one of them nudging his neighbor: 'Hey, cheer up, I hear old Biffer is going to give a killer sermon tonight, Abortionists, filthy pacifists and homosexuals, and his favourite, the Satanic ecumenists... should be worth staying awake for.' Straight out of Fellini's Roma (remember the Vatican fashion catwalk?). And who can grudge them their bit of fun?

I suspect the next Antichrist will be a poet, the next Heaney maybe. We'll be able to spot him (or her) though. Unlike Les Murray's, each book will be dedicated to the other guy. It won't be TOO obvious: 'To the greater glory of Stan' perhaps or simply 'For Lucy'. Keep watching this space.

Bloggers' Night Out

2008-03-06T18:21:00.006Z

Since my very own Skyroad was shortlisted in the photoblog category, my wife and I registered to attend the Irish Blog Awards, held in the bowels of The Alexander Hotel. Sam put on her finery, so I dressed in what passes for mine, the good blue jacket and black shirt. We needn't have bothered. Though many had dolled themselves up, code was decidedly casual. Most of those attending were about half my age. It reminded me of a student gig, the kind of thing I'd have queued for at UCD about a thousand years ago.

A wide, long conference room, with two screens, one halfway down to make sure the people at the back got a look. Onto these were projected the Blog Awards logo set on a blown-up webpage. We assumed that they would be displaying excerpts from people's blogs on these screens, but no. Oddly, (it seemed to me) we were treated to large snippets of GW Bush, taken from some press conference or other. His voice had been painstakingly dubbed into making dumb comments (Bushisms) that related to the different blog categories, interludes which served as intros to the announcement of the winners and the presentation of prizes (a trophy, a DVD player and bottle of Champers for each winner).

Since Twenty Major, for the third time, won in two categories (‘Most Humorous Post’ and 'Best Irish Blog'), I finally got a glimpse of him: a fine strapping lad, as I might have guessed. He has paid tribute to the event and its organisers on his blog, in a post that is, unusually for him, an expletive-free zone.

We left relatively early, but, altogether, it was an interesting night, and I was very pleased to get shortlisted, to know that some people (other than photographers on the Blipfoto site) have actually looked at my photojournal.

The Irish Blog Awards have been running for three years now. Apparently, although Ireland hasn't yet shown a great interest in blogging, the audience for these awards has been growing rapidly each year; the large conference room certainly seemed reasonably crowded (50% more than last year according to Twenty Major).

Given that practically every young person now has a Facebook page or some kind of online profile, I wonder how long it will be before the Irish Blog Awards bursts out of its enthusiastic youthful shell and becomes something very different, with more razzmatazz and louder media coverage, some kind of bloggers' equivalent to the Oscars, and if, when it eventually does, how this will affect the blogs themselves. Will some of the raw energy and inventiveness be lost? Maybe not; maybe, in fact the opposite: people who are oddly snotty about blogging will finally see that there is just as much (if not more) quality reportage, criticism, political analysis, humour, photography etc. etc. as can be found on the other media-tentacles.

Goggle Time

2008-02-21T14:53:00.006Z

From a Q&A 'therapy' session in the Daily Telegraph:

Kate Weinberg: Name something or someone you truly believe in.

Simon Armitage: The Ordnance Survey.

Kate Weinberg: Who, in the whole of history, would you most like to sit next to on a long-haul flight?

Simon Armitage: Icarus. Just for the look on his face when the sun starts coming up.

Foundation Year, Dún Laoghaire, 1974

2008-02-11T22:21:00.000Z

Faces with mouths agape, gorged
on shadow, the self portraits were a scream –
the minimalist wire tree (one branch for all)
“…the absolute spit of De Gaulle.”

Where I'm Coming From

2008-01-11T23:26:00.000Z

A week in Costa Caleta, Fuerteventura (the Canary Island shaped like a Kentucky fried chicken leg).

We had decided to take a break and get out of the country when we got the chance, so just three weeks ago we quickly booked this short break. It was ages since I had gone on one of these family, make-like-a-basking-lizard holidays, never with my most recent family, my wife and three year old son. It was his first flight. Despite his abhorrence of loud whooshing noises, he coped remarkably well with being pinned in a giant hair dryer for four hours. A portable DVD player and Shaun the Sheep helped (also his Thomas The Tank Engine stickers):

A week is short, especially given the disparity between Fuerteventura (just 60 miles from the Sahara) and my wintery home planet. Finding myself landed in that sunny, t-shirted, Croced and shorted otherwhere, I might have come by (slightly banjaxed) transporter; my quantum-entangled atoms barely had time to shimmer themselves back into their old constellation before the episode finished and I was back in my old, unenterprising existence.

Fuerteventuro Airport

We rented a car and spent four days traveling all over the island. Wonderfully strange, yet strangely familiar too. Little vegation, apart from scrub and palms of all shapes and sizes, fat and stumpy or tall as five story buildings. Volcanoes were active on the island as recently as the 19th Century, when they decimated its grain production. Parts of the midlands are like a heated-up Connemmara crossed with Mars, potholed roads branching into what seems like Bord Na Móna bogland but is actually chocolate-brown lava-rock, assembled in places into orange-lichened drystone walls, mammary hills (some with perfect nipples), slumped and humped mountain ranges (couchant and zoomorphic as the Twelve Bens) rising above clinker and ash deserts. All looking pristine and newly baked, fresh from the the geological kiln.

On the wild South West coast we pulled into the little seaside village of Ajuy and dined on grilled squid and filleted sea bream on the bone (chips and the all-important ketchup for him); beside huge, whumping Hokusai waves creaming on gritty black sand. We then went looking for the ten-year old wreck of the American Star. We never found it, but we did manage to locate its remote (but much-visited) cove, Playa de Garcey, at the end of a long, stony track. Again, that black, volcanic sand, deserted but pocked with many footprints; wedges of craggy rock, even louder, more furious, unrolling, wrecking-ball waves, the air blurry with spray.

Then up north, past industrial-looking Puerto del Rosario, we found the white Saharan beaches of Corralejo, with their wedding cake hotels, reminding me of the holidays I took with my mother and grandparents in the archaeologically distant 1970s.

Here are some of the photographs, many taken from the car (I wasn't driving).

Geological Breast, Near Morros Altos (or somewhere thereabouts)

Down South, Morro Jable

Sunset, Beyond Morro Jable

Heading Back North West (probably from La Pared)

Playa de Garcey

South West (somewhere)

Somewhere Between Somewhere And Somewhere Else

North: Near Corralejo

Heading Back South: Sunset Near Puerto Del Rosario

Clink

2007-12-26T15:39:00.000Z

peace or whatever comes closest, whatever’s left dawdling on the horizon

your full moon on the day before Christmas being Auden's (or, if Plath's, only in that execrable stuff you’ve been scribbling)

simmering family angers coming to boil in the bag

your middleaged familiar, Puff The Magic Dragon of Extinction, keeping to the back of the cave

the child giving the Thomas The TWank Engine and Lazy Town DVDs a rest and opting for Shaun The Sheep (or something similarly non-mind-contracting)

elastic flesh full of itchy surprises and flesh in tatters grating into the long sleep

spectacular kick-the-books-off-the-shelf sex or, if that is no longer on the menu, compassionate skin & tonic, whatever you’re wanting

the absent friends, the dead as doornails, the terminally lonely, the happily alone, the mastered by depression, the getting on with it, the coping, the coped with

tomorrow being less boring but not nearly as interesting as the Interesting Times we live in

nobody calling just now (maybe later)

Angels & Apostles In Paddy's Pet Shop

2007-11-27T11:53:00.001Z

Dark Mutter

2007-11-15T10:38:00.000Z

Everything tends
to its own ends.

The Theatre of Poets: Green Jeans, Beer Mats & The People's Prick

2007-11-08T17:22:00.006Z

Puthwuth's last post was on the subject of readings. Not the common or garden readings where the question is (as Paul Durcan put it) "to clap weakly or weakly clap." No, rather those readings that stay in the memory because something goes awry. Ron Silliman, in his November 5th blog entry, also talks about readings. Last month he spotted a giant panda in his audience. He recollects an incident from the more distant past, where he witnessed:

"...Denise Levertov, the MC at a large, vastly overcrowded anti-war reading at Glide Church in San Francisco, getting genuinely hysterical onstage at the sight of The People’s Prick, an attendee who turn up in a six-foot tall bright pink terrycloth dildo costume. She threatened to shut the evening down on the spot and it took several of her peers to talk her down from this position, her own body visibly trembling with anger. She did not view this little bit of agitprop attendance – a direct antecedent, I suppose, of the panda who showed up at my reading last month in Ashland – in the spirit of women going topless at rock concerts, common enough at the time, but rather in the sense of the penis as an ever-present assault on women."

Great stuff: a new slant on Shakespeare's famous stage direction: Exit, followed by a panda (or penis).

Four incidents from my own experiences of giving poetry readings, the first two from The Foggy Dew pub, a popular venue for readings in the 1980s and 90s.

1.
As soon as I begin to read a sulky man in a denim jacket (perhaps angered by my West Brit accent) shouts: "Why don't you write a poem about Bobby Sands?" Another man (with a proper Dublin accent) asked why he doesn't write one himself, or if perhaps he would like to recite one? At that, the heckler heads for the door, his parting shot: "What are you, Fine Fail, Fine Gael or Sinn Fein?" My rather melodramatic reply: "I'm a human fucking being." The barman walks over to me with his hand out, grinning: "Good man! Good man!"

2.
A certain Dublin poet slurs and bellows his way through a huge wad of pomes, with no sign of letting anyone else take the stage. Another very drunk Dublin poet (well, if he isn't one he should be) tells him to shut up and sit down, then picks up a beer-mat and begins to read the back of it (about brewing, hops, copper vats, etc.) as if it's a poem, pausing meaningfully every so often. His timing is as perfect as an experienced stand-up comedian; the night suddenly turns into one of the best readings I've had the pleasure of attending.

3.
A poetry reading at IADT (or was it still called Dún Laoghaire School of Art and Design?) in the late 1980s or early 1990s, where I had recently worked as a life model, one of Quentin Crisp's 'naked civil servants'. I read to a fairly large group of students, a generous audience by the standards of most readings. I am confident that it is going well. The atmosphere seems easy-going, I crack a few jokes, there are no hecklers, the students ask some pertinent questions during the brief Q&A session afterwards. Before I leave, a couple of students approach me to say thanks or ask some final question. Finally, as I am in the corridor, one last smiling girl hands me a folded slip of paper, "a poem" she has written. I tell her I'll read it, and I do, when I get home. Though written as a short poem (I wish I'd kept it), it amounts to a series of criticisms: of my age (I was in my early 30s I think, already an old codger in her book), of my feeble attempts to ingratiate myself with the students by cracking limp, self-deprecating jokes, of my balding head and pathetic attire (my "green jeans", in particular, had offended her sense of sartorial elegance, perhaps justly). And I had thought her smile had been shy! Well, I think, fuck you very much, and I wish she had handed it to me earlier, so that I might have asked her to read it to the still-present audience of her peers, or I could have read it to them myself (either of which would probably have been a grave mistake).

4.
I am asked to give a reading in Dublin (I forget where, a LONG time ago). When I arrive, it becomes clear that I am a warm-up for a local rock band. The audience have had a few pints by this stage and are getting impatient. I become so pissed off with the heckling that I find myself shouting back at them (without quite realising what I am saying): "What do you want me to do, strip?"

"Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

Peter Sirr on his Cat Flap blog, recounted his experience of being hired by Dublin City Council to give a reading in St. Catherine's Park, off Thomas Street in Dublin:

"I was, though, a bit wary about reading in St Catherine's Park. Park is probably a bit of an exaggeration; it is in fact the graveyard at the rear of St Catherine's Church in Thomas St, with the entrance in Thomas Court – not by any means a major thoroughfare. I used to drop in with the mutt to give him a bit of greenery until I realised it seemed to be used exclusively by dealers and users. I find it hard to visualise it being packed with poetry lovers on a Wednesday lunchtime. And indeed there is no-one in the park except for one of the organisers and two sound technicians who have brought an impressive bank of equipment in their Dublin City Council truck, which sits in the middle of the park, taking up about a third of it. The podium and mike are set up and waiting. It's five minutes after the advertised time and there's still no-one. A woman comes in and sits at the other end of the park. This is briefly interpreted as the act of an audience member and there is the real possibility of delivering the reading to a single distant auditor, though the sound equipment will safely carry my voice all around the Liberties. The woman, however, proves not to have come in search of poetry and faced with the prospect of enduring some, promptly flees the park.

The users who were evicted when the sound men came to set are out there somewhere, waiting for us to leave. There is some talk of reading to the organiser, or reading, as it were, speculatively, in the hope that people in the area, magnetised by my amplified poems, will pour into the park. Em, don't think so. Eventually the effort is abandoned and the cheerful soundmen – 'it's all the same to us, we get paid anyway' – load up the truck, and we all drift off. Through Pimlico and The Coombe and back home."

The worst kind of audience isn’t hecklers, users, Pandas or giant sexual organs (indeed the latter two may be among the best). Nor is it, I think, the absence of any audience at all (Durcan wrote a great poem about the experience of giving a reading to an empty hall). No, the worst kind of audience is probably Jonathan Pryce and Tim Curry in that film The Ploughman's Lunch (remember?). Pryce is a grovelling, cold-hearted, ambitious little shit and Curry is his pal. They find themselves at a rather solemn poetry reading (presumably not a very good one) and cannot contain their mirth. They let it all hang out, sniggering then laughing uproariously, veritably rolling in the aisles. It's a very funny scene, as I remember it: the sorely puzzled expressions of the other people, including the poet, the sense of two utterly different worlds colliding. It hasn't happened to me yet. I hope that if it ever does I'll be able to handle it, either by joining in or decking the bastards.

Return of The Cat People

2007-09-27T14:53:00.000+01:00

Toby is a tom-kitten: chocolate-grey, slightly fluffy, a bit yowly and attention-seeking in the mornings, given to sudden manic dashes, but otherwise sleeps most of the afternoon, and he doesn't seem to mind the wean too much. Most importantly, he's a people kitten. That is, he likes being stroked and making like a lap-cat.

My wife's brother saw him wandering around on a traffic island off the main Wexford road. When he pulled in and approached, the kitten ran away. He gave up after a little while, only to realise that the kitten was following him back to the car. So he gave the critter to my wife for her birthday. She is delighted. So am I. So is my mother. I like the name Toby, too, though it can get mixed up with the Toby from Thomas The Tank Engine, our son's current favourite (DVDs, toys, t-shirts, shoes, pyjamas...).

It is about 16 months now since I found my wife's cat Sophie stretched out by the side of the road. She was already past middle age (her 'grand climacteric') when she came here and she did well to survive a few years on this manic rat-run through the leafy suburbs. We're planning to keep Toby indoors for a while, till he grows up a little, and hopefully grows somewhat calmer, at which point we'll encourage him to use the back door (giving onto the the safe, weedy gardens), rather than the front, with its steps straight down onto the cars' sacrificial long, grey altar.

This may be the only time I post anything that could be said to belong to that greeting card genre, 'The cat poem', but this seems a fitting occasion. Here's four. The first two (of which only the second is 'about' a cat) are by me. 'A Familiar' is from my recent collection, The Sky Road:

A Familiar

Shadowy desire,
for ages now we’ve been keeping
a place for you. Are you dead?

No, I’m still here.
Feel and you’ll find me sleeping
at the end of your bed.

Pet Cat

Our fingertips know what to ask for.
After helping dress the day
in its familiar surfaces
(clothes, doorknob, steering wheel, bannister-rail...)
they need you like sleep.

Entering the flow of your fur –
tingly pure electric gift –
each short stroke
is an unconscious cadence shaped
by the rising angle of your tail.

Turned on, your idling motor
is the absolute sound of pleasure.

Show us how to trace the current,
teach us to purr.

Of the following two poems (both addressed to elderly cats), the first, by Edward Thomas, is probably the stronger. It is certainly the tougher. Its rural sourness is kin to the later (R.S.) Thomas's poems about the Welsh countryside; a poem about trees contains the injunction: "Cut them down". The cat in Edward Thomas's poem is a world away from cosy 'Old Possum's book; the drowned kittens remind me of Heaney's 'scraggy wee shits' and the 'god' in the final line sounds coldly ironic. But it's the final poem, by John Keats, that I am fondest of, even if it does border on the sentimental:

A Cat

She had a name among the children;
But no one loved though someone owned
Her, locked her out of doors at bedtime
And had her kittens duly drowned.

In Spring, nevertheless, this cat
Ate blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales,
And birds of bright voice and plume and flight,
As well as scraps from neighbours’ pails.

I loathed and hated her for this;
One speckle on a thrush’s breast
Was worth a million such; and yet
She lived long, till God gave her rest.

To Mrs. Reynolds's Cat

Cat! who hast pass'd thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy'd? -- How many tidbits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears -- but pr'ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me -- and upraise
Thy gentle mew -- and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists --
For all the wheezy asthma, -- and for all
Thy tail's tip is nick'd off -- and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter'dst on glass-bottled wall.

"Pr'ythee do not stick thy latent talons in me!"

A great fuckoff line, no? An invitation to a list on a glass-bottled wall.

The Duck's Tribunal

2007-09-25T14:08:00.000+01:00

Overheard on the radio. A Dublin woman in a vox pop about Bertie and the Mahon Tribunal: "If he fell into the Liffey he'd come out dry."

When A Pigeon Is Not A Pigeon

2007-09-17T13:20:00.000+01:00

"Pigeons on the grass alas" wrote Gertrude Stein.

James Thurber wrote a retort to this in his little piece "There's An Owl In My Room". Here's a couple of extracts:

"It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn't that fine, either. White rabbits, yes, and Scotch terriers, and blue-jays, and even hippopotamuses, but not pigeons. I happen to have studied pigeons very closely and carefully, and I have studied the effect, or rather the lack of effect, of pigeons very carefully. A number of pigeons alight from time to time on the sill of my hotel window when I am eating breakfast and staring out the window. They never alas me, they never make me feel alas; they never make me feel anything."

He goes on:

"From where I am sitting now I can look out the window and see a pigeon being a pigeon on the roof of the Harvard Club. No other thing can be less what it is not than a pigeon can, and Miss Stein, of all people, should understand that simple fact. Behind the pigeon I am looking at, a blank wall of tired gray bricks is stolidly trying to sleep off oblivion; underneath the pigeon the cloistered windows of the Harvard Club are staring in horrified bewilderment at something they have seen across the street. The pigeon is just there on the roof being a pigeon, having been, and being, a pigeon and, what is more, always going to be, too. Nothing could be simpler than that. If you read that sentence aloud you will instantly see what I mean. It is a simple description of a pigeon on a roof. It is only with an effort that I am conscious of the pigeon, but I am acutely aware of a great sulky red iron pipe that is creeping up the side of the building intent on sneaking up on a slightly tipsy chimney which is shouting its head off."

I empathise with Thurber, and I am of a like mind where pigeons are concerned, but I cannot agree with him (alas). I've come to realise that all things, pigeons included, are as alas as one finds them. I don't find much alas in pigeons, but a woman I worked with did; she hated them with all the spine-tingling horror most people reserve for hairy-jumpy spiders, bats and rats. She hated the arrogant way they assumed ownership of the streets and pavements, only lifting off at the last possible moment; the way their unclean wings whizzed past her ear. She told me how once she had had to hail a cab in a pigeon-infested area (Leicester Square, I think, where they used to be Legion). When a cab stopped she proceeded by waving her umbrella like a sword, shouting "Shoo! Shoo!" to clear the way. The smartass cabbie leaned out of his window and said: "Shoe? Sorry love, but that looks more like a brolly to me."

'Prosperity' IS The Real Thing

2007-09-09T00:03:00.000+01:00

I may come back later and add more, but I just wanted to put in a plug for the new Irish drama, 'Prosperity', which I watched last Monday. I was glad to see that the Saturday Irish Times gave it a thumbs up. Lenny Abrahamson (director) and Mark O’Halloran (writer) are the team who gave us 'Adam & Paul', the unfolding of a grim, blackly comic day in the life of two Dublin junkies. Beautifully written, directed, acted and edited, that film was remarkable for its quiet but relentless focus on the wanderings these two individuals. Yet, up till the very end, nothing remarkable happens; yet the whole adventure is remarkable, human in the fullest sense of the word.

My cousin, who edited 'Adam & Paul', alerted me to 'Prosperity', which she has also worked on. The first one-hour episode, like 'Adam & Paul', involved quite a bit of wandering. Subtitled 'Stacey' (the name of the main character, a teenaged mother), it follows her through her day; leaving her hostel with her baby, visiting the mall (where she gets chatted to by a friendly security man), meeting her edgy, scuzzy boyfriend Dean (the dad), getting a talking-to by her bitter but wiser sister, meeting a guy with a beat-up face ("walked into a door") who asks if he can 'borrow' one of her cans of beer... and so on.

But this run-through tells you next to nothing. The directing, script and acting are perfect. There is an unobstusiveness, a tact and clarity that make 'Prosperity' the freshest thing I have seen in ages.

It is uncomfortable to watch in places, such as the scene in the cafe where Dean kisses shy, introverted Stacey deeply and intimately for far too long. Whether this is to humiliate her or get her aroused enough that she will ask her sister to babysit for an hour so that he can fuck her, or both, is not clear. You recoil because you have been given enough time to feel Stacey's vulnerability, her carefully applied mask, a makeup of silence and indifference. But this is as things should be; we should be able to feel Stacey's discomfort here and elsewhere, such discomfort being very much a part of who she is.

Watching 'Prosperity', there is a sense of something refined, a dramatic clearing where the usual paraphernalia has been removed. The characters are given real space to move in, 3D space, living space. The framing and focus are absolutely right. There are many close-ups. We notice Stacey's jewellery, the new hair-clip she buys, which a girlfriend remarks on but which is, naturally, way off the boyfriend's radar (Dean probably wouldn't have noticed if she'd dyed her hair green).

The similarities with Ken Loach's films have been noted. Some might think it pretentious that one of the reviewers in the IT mentioned Joyce's Ulysses. But I believe it is perfectly apt: that leisurly, wandering pace, deep-focus space and time in which odd details crystalise. I was reminded of Beckett. There is the ear for demotic speech (and more importantly, demotic silence), which he and Joyce shared. There is the waiting, mirrored by the resignation waiting in the wings, the black comedy. I was also reminded of Robert Altman, especially the first film of his I saw, 'Nashville', those parallel lives converging but in no hurry to do so.

The first episode of 'Prosperity' is, truly, a work of art. I am looking forward to the next, on Monday, 9.30, RTE 2. You should be, too.

The Sky Road Hits The Road

2007-05-22T17:26:00.000+01:00

My second collection of poetry, The Sky Road, was launched yesterday by my good friend, the poet Yvonne Cullen. Poetry Ireland organised the venue, the old Unitarian Church on St Stephen's Green in Dublin, a lovely, solid, cosy little church, with very nice stained glass windows. I noticed on the way in that someone had left out a number of glossy, well-produced pamphlets of The Gospel according to Mark; an auspicious sign.

The turnout was good (for a reading), the wine flowed freely, and I think most people enjoyed the event; at least I didn't detect any ominous symtoms, such as that dreaded sense of anticlimax, the uncertainty to (as Paul Durcan put it) "clap weakly or weakly clap." After the reading, Sam generously took the wean home to bed, and a crowd of us went to the hotel nearby for grub and booze (I ordered steak). My two ancient friends/cousins Pat and Dave, caught the LUAS (a kind of tram) with me back to Sandyford, though we got off too early and ended up walking in a persistent drizzle till we got hold of a taxi.

As with my first collection, Jessie Lendennie of Salmon Poetry and her designer Siobhán Hutson, accepted one of my own images for the cover. I am particularly pleased with this one (from a photo I shot nearly 15 years ago, of a couple asleep on a Wicklow bus). I believe Siobhán's design and choice of font is perfect.

The book is now available in Dublin bookstores (e.g. Books Upstairs on College Green) and on the Salmon website: HERE

Here's three poems from the collection:

Before And After
for Samantha and Simon

1

Watching sea and sky
darken and simplify,

I think of what’s now in hand –
the stubby, white plastic wand

you drew from your handbag to show
(in its recessed, thumbnail window)

two, clear-blue lines,
one light, one darkly defined:

a skipped heartbeat, a stone
out of sight, over the known

peaceable old horizon
I had rested my eyes on.

*

Now he is sounded, swept
into webbings of light,

restless, more and less real,
metaphors on a roll,

none clearer than the top
of his skull: oval, a raindrop

let go, falling on course,
eye to eye with the Earth

dreaming up sun, moon, stars
in its hammock of waters.

2

Stroking his forehead, I found it
by accident, that soft spot
under the skin, where the young bone
knits... knits... knits...

His lopsided, premature smile
is a quiver of pain. He is all
there, solid, a touchstone
in touch, a part of the main.

3

This is how I find he has nosed
his spreading taproot down
into my days.
I come to
in my old pose, at a window,
lightly swaying from foot
to foot,
as if nursing more
than a paperback (his warm bulk);
surprised to find our rock-
abye rhythm – the day itself,
gentled,
cradling my old head –
even in prose.

On My 100th Birthday
for Barry, Chris, Dave, Dom, Johnny, Pat, Ronan, T.P., Willy and the rest

There will be time for one
last night on the town,

a warm lounge branching off
a dark side-street

and later, much later, a fleet
of missed buses, unhitched lifts

(to one of those all-nighters
of our dreams),

leaving us, as we were,
not quite at a loss,

possessing our keyless chain
to the closing city,

its warren of locked doors
and washed-out stars –

as if we could sing ourselves sober
as if we could talk ourselves drunk

or, after all, make tracks
through the abandoned heart

of the dim-lit 70s,
as if that was the way – where was I?

My shout. And then we’ll go
get ready to make a start.

The Kiss

is wakening there in the roots of bright green moss

coppery cool, our soft hands parted for rumours
of newts, mud-backed, with sunrises on their bellies,
air flicking and flicking its dragonfly lures;

in the first big fear – Fire – I took in hand
with one fat yellow crayon, slowly, deliberately
scribbling the bland page to a big-mouthed roar;

in the lines of a first poem stumbling into my head
on a blood-hammering climb up a steep hill into the blue
sun: the small song of the beast that might love the impossible...

in the high of takeoff, cloud-wrapped tissuey light
of Dublin, tilting and shrinking, ungathered history
of rucked ashgreen, spilt houses, the lost thread of the road;

in Hubble’s random ‘grain of sand held at arm’s length’
blown to a three-page spread in the National Geographic,
a black beach grainy with old lights, starspawn, the firmament;

in the sure touch of certain rounded stones, Bray beach
blue with the last dark, clicking under my shoes,
and, Yes, the dancehall swirl of the first girl whose tongue tipped

my own, intimate, blown kiss at the cosmos.

One Of The Houses

2007-05-08T10:30:00.000+01:00

ONE OF THE HOUSES
JAMES JOYCE LIVED IN,
ONCE

James Joyce ivy
on James Joyce plaque,
James Joyce pebbles
on James Joyce dash,
James Joyce knocker
on James Joyce door,
James Joyce dust
on James Joyce floor,
James Joyce windows
with James Joyce glass
waiting for James Joyce
clouds to pass.

The Shadow of The Witch

2007-04-27T10:39:00.000+01:00

I turned 50 a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit like the fabled Millennium, and the fabled Y2K Bug that never bit; another number, milestone, speed limit, the busy flickering of ghostly symbols in a deserted station. The universe of numbers is just another kind of dream, since we keep waking to the perpetual present where they don't (can't) count. As Eliot put it:

'... the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm."

Or, perhaps more pertinently:

'Fifty today, old lad?
Well, that's not doing so bad:
All those years without
Being really buggered about.
The next fifty won't be so good,
True, but for now—touch wood—
You can eat and booze and the rest of it...'

from 'Ode To Me' by Kingsley Amis

I first came across this in a Penguin selection of Kingsley Amis's poems, which I'd bought in a bookshop near Charing Cross tube around 20 years ago. Far from his best poem, but the first few lines stayed with me for some reason (a few lines later the poem becomes a right-wing rant about 'The Soviet sphere' invading England like Mordor encroaching on The Shire).

The son, Martin, also wrote lines that stayed with me, the closing paragraph from his novel 'The Information', about a writer waking to middle age:

"The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night."

That "nun with witchy buckles"... Another incarnation of the woman on the creaky bicycle from 'The Wizard of Oz'. And the man in Amis's book is only FORTY!

For myself, I guess the Information is arriving alright, but in dribs and drabs: no revelationary torrents yet, thanks be to Nothing. I imagine few peoples' lives become as "clear" to them as Philip Larkin's "lading list". Sometimes birthdays can provide miniature clearings (or the illusion of clearings, which about amounts to the same thing). Ten years ago, I opened our front door and caught my first glimpse of the Hale-Bopp comet. Here's the poem I wrote about it:

A COMET AT 4 a.m.

One late last look
before bed, and there
it is, finally, a flared
slightly bigger star
plunging but held,
dissolving in the bluey dark
above sleepshut houses and gardens.
Brightest on April the first,
the day before I turn forty.
Birthday candle, fuse-light,
your failing exclamation mark
will work its way
to the back of the mind,
where I’ve let in these words, minutes
tailing from the earthly core
of a spring morning, here
on the doorstep.

Ten years later, the signs are less rueful. I am married to a wonderful woman and we have a beautiful little boy. Though we woke up Monday morning feeling crap (a stomach bug), we recovered somewhat by late afternoon. My wife brought me a little chocolate birthday cake with one candle and a balloon blazoned with the number in question. Our appetites hadn't recovered yet, but our son had fun blowing out the candle and playing with the balloon (and eating plenty of cake).

That evening we celebrated my birthday in style, with cousins and friends, in Layla, a great Turkish restaurant on Pembroke Street. Someone called for a speech, so I made one (about 10 words, amounting to "thanks everyone"). When they asked for a poem the only vaguely appropriate one I could think of (which I know by heart) was James Fenton's blackly funny 'God, A Poem'. I'm pretty sure this has been widely anthologised, but for those who haven't come across it, here's the opening stanzas:

"A nasty surprise in a sandwich,
A drawing-pin caught in your sock,
The limpest of shakes from a hand which
You'd thought would be firm as a rock,

A serious mistake in a nightie,
A grave disappointment all round
Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty,
Is all that you'll get underground."

So here I am, 50 and still aboveground. I am not yet at that point where, were I to drop dead, people might dust off the platitudes about me having had "a good innings", but I am long past the point where phrases like "so young!" could have any real meaning (no matter what people say about 50 being "the new 40").

Larkin has some resonant phrases for this time of life. In his poem 'The Old Fools' he mentions "extinction's alp", a familiar landmark that "stays in view wherever [younger people] go", but is hidden from the "old fools", since for them it has become "rising ground". Hopefully, I am not one of Larkin's ideal readers, those men "whose first heart attack is coming like Christmas." But I am now in the foothills of Heart Trouble and Cancer Country, even if the lie of the land doesn't seem that threatening. Strange. Death and I are now on speaking terms, though I don't share Emily Dickinson's or Stevie Smith's affection for what Hemmingway called "that old whore". I am in no great hurry to get back to where I am going. Anyway, what's to look forward to? The tunnel of light is here and now, not at the bricked-off end.

The contradictions are gathering, fast and thick. I want to keep living, as long as possible, yet I also want to keep at least a modicum of what makes living worth while: memory, reasonable mental and physical health...all the things you eventually forfeit for longevity, till all you're left with is enough small change to cross the river (sorry; the metaphors, also, are gathering fast and thick). Death or life? Provided extreme pain or depression doesn't make an appearance, there is no contest is there? And if there is a contest, a weighing up? As an old friend of mine once put it, “you might as well stick around for the lightshow.”

The Mask of Images

2007-03-30T13:37:00.003+01:00

In his often-quoted introduction to Robert Frank’s series of photographs, ‘The Americans’, Jack Kerouac wrote:

'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'.

“Sucked a sad poem..." I’m not sure I even like the phrase, but I’ve never forgotten it. And I am unlikely to forget the gist of the following passages, from Roland Barths’ 1980s book 'Camera Lucida' (Barths admits from the start that he is ‘not a photographer, not even an amateur one’):

‘We might say that photography is unclassifiable. Then I wondered what the source of this disorder might be.

The first thing I found was this. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid…’

‘Show your photographs to someone – he will immediately show you his: “Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child,” etc.; the photograph is never anything but an antiphon of “Look”, “See”, “Here it is”; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis and cannot escape this pure, deictic language.’

‘The photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both… This fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects – of all the objects in the world: why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other? Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurrences; it aspires, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of a language; but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does.’

Sucking a sad [or noble] poem, or souring like neglected milk.

It is good to keep such opposing perspectives in mind. As much as we may be sucking sad (or occasionally happy) poems out of the world, we are also doing the opposite: blowing images into the world, each one another piece, another pixel of that ongoing, worldly collage. Were the final work ever assembled (on some Day of Aesthetic Judgment) it would no doubt already cover the planet. More likely, it would plaster the planet, in the way that a child plasters a balloon with gluey strips of newspaper that will harden into the mold for a papier-mâché mask.

Still, I keep taking photographs, more so than ever these days, with the digital Canon 10D I bought a couple of years ago (vastly outdated now of course, technology on its ever-accelerating treadmill).

What am I at anyway? Why add more images to the mask? The simplest answer is probably twofold: firstly, that this outlet, this means (for framing the world at every turn) is so tantalisingly available; secondly, that I have always been particularly obsessed with the visual; so that my writing is steeped in it. I could ask the same questions of my efforts at poetry. Why more images, metaphors, secular thanksgiving? Most of the stuff written by others and myself is mere wallpaper for our little, laboratory-bubbles of time; they will break on the surface (that calm, unshakable meniscus) without so much as a sigh.

Perhaps this all seems a little moribund and deflationary. Let me make clear that I love photography, almost as much as I love poetry. The first time I got a loan of someone's SLR in 1979 (while working as a KP in Captain America's Restaurant in Grafton Street) I was smitten. I held in my hands a device by which I could frame whatever came within the sphere of my way of looking, my slant, my 'eye'. John Berger (possibly quoting someone else) called photographs 'quotations from appearances', unlike paintings, which are 'translations'.

Photography has become wholly accessible now (to anyone in the First World, that is). We are all adept at pointing and snap/quoting. Does this make it any less exciting? Perhaps it does. But there is still ample room for delight: Mary Ellen Mark's travellers, Koudelka's gypsies and urban landscapes, Salgado's workers, Parr's tourists... For myself, I try to keep a line open to my initial thrill, that first, real buzz in Captain America's.

Can a photograph be a work of art? Even Barthes, for all his scepticism, admits that there is a photographic aesthetic; this is bound up of course in the essential quality of the photograph and its subject (Referent). As Barthes puts it: '...this stubborness of the Referent always being there would produce the essence I was looking for'. Yep. That's what photography is, a great buffalo wallow of referentiality.

Photography, like poetry in some respects (Barthes compares certain kinds of photographs to haiku), is about looking and memory, about the concentrated glance. In that sense, it is primal; we were framing moments of the world long before we had cameras or film.

And before humans happened along the world photographed itself, and keeps doing so, through any odd little hole (in a tree, a cave, a keyhole..): accidental pinhole cameras. Such as the one I was introduced to in the poem below; about a visit to my old friend's little terrace house in Glasthule, Co Dublin:

ART HOUSE
in memory of Trevor Scott

His hall was a narrow dark cubicle. “Do you see it?”
On one wall, a square of soft light – a postcard
cinema – was showing part of a door
and window, the redbrick terrace house from
across the street. Oh. I was inside a camera
obscura, a keyhole lightshow. On cue
an upside down girl in a lilac raincoat walked
past. And the secretive universe blinked.

I see. This is how things take in
each other, how the rays of day enter
a keyhole, dressing a dark, unadorned wall;
how the great indoors composes itself, for itself,
standing as it wants to stand, silent, unadjusted,
on its head, at the apple of its own eye.

(from my collection, 'The Sky Road', published by Salmon in May 2007).