It's all a bit too much

Dear Reader

Ignore the date, today is 17/2/06

My daily blog entries have moved to

Irishpoetry blog

This site you are now reading was kept by me for 8 months as a means to explore and bring to the surface the various disparate voices in my head; part of the process called finding your voice. It started out as a place to put my avant garde poems, and after a while developed into a place for experimental prose. The other sites linked to this blog (click view my complete profile on your immediate right) house the other styles of writing. Scalljah is comedy, Desmond Swords is lyric poetry and As/Is is a collaborative blog I still post on and is where I honed my L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry skills under the silent tutelage of the conveyer belt of Post Modern verse, Sheila E Murphy, who is a natural and very generous poet.
The Poetry Assassin site houses a long unfinished piece I started and now don't know what to do with.

I trained for 3 years at writing school in my home town of Ormskirk on the West coast of the UK, (BA Hons Writing Studies and Drama) before decamping to Dublin to chase the dream of becoming a poet, which seems to be what has happened, as all the separate strands of my imagination are now working as a whole and the voices have joined up as one. I am writing this on 17 Feburary 2006 from my office in Dublin, which is in reality a sweet shop internet cafe in the North inner city. The bulk of the writing below was written on the date above last year, in response to the TS Eliot lecture by the English writing Hungarian poet George Szirtes, who won the TS Eliot prize a year or so ago.

Todd Swift was one of his students on the one year MA Writing course George heads at the University of East Anglia somewhere near Norwich in the UK. Todd Swift is a poetry editor living in London striving for a sort of TS Eliot vibe of wanting to be more Anglo than Canadian; and he publicised himself as the leading Canadian poet of his generation, until I wrote this and spoke elsewhere of Derek Hines, who is a truly inspiring Canadian poet much more worthy of the title Swift claimed. He's now fixed the mistake and only claims to be the leading Canadian poet of his generation (those poets born since 1960).

So the piece below was a satirical rant to prick the pomposity I detected in Swift and just another piece of writing on my journey to self confirmation as a poet, in the Heaney sense. Heaney reckons you exist and survive as a poet in your own esteem and not because such a person or people say you are, print your work, or allow you access to public subsidies.

If you want to read the piece below feel free, but it's really a bit of an in joke and the references may bewilder if you are unfamiliar with UK contemporary culture; plus the style is an avant garde like prose and not to everyone's taste. However I do write in all genres of poetry and prose, which is why it's taken a few years for the voice to come through; as if you want to be a poet the first thing you realise is the factionalism and moaning that goes on from all sides and camps, with most of the talk revolving around the question of what is a real poet/poetry? The only point of agreement seems to be that there are lots of people calling themselves poets but only very few actually are. It is a bit like being at school, but it's the adults playing childrens games of name calling and with the bullying being a lot more subtle and pyschologically done through the written word.

I didn't know if my dream of wanting to be a poet was me fooling myself or if the spark of intuition that set it off was based in something real, so I decided to cover my backside by learning to write in all poetical forms, from strict meter to cutting edge avant garde and slam; and to centre my practice in memorisation, just like the Irish Fili, or "bards" who were in existence for about 2000 years up until Cromwell came to Ireland at the start of 17C and this ancient tradition collapsed. My parents are Irish and I instinctively felt more affinity with this tradition than that of England, and since coming to Ireland have discovered a touchstone text from the middle of the Irish tradition in the 7C which lays out in very simple terms exactly what the poetic art is and how it works.

This text effectively negates the need to engage in the what is a real poet/poetry debate and is the reason for my confidence and belief in my own voice. Most poets stick to one or two forms, but usually free verse, and read from the page. Few can write in metrical form such as a sonnet, and many call something a sonnett when it isn't, just because it's got ten or so syllables in the line. This is a sonnet, and I wrote it last year.

ORMSKIRK

I grew up in the womb of West Lancs, where
skinheads dwelt in bushes by train tracks and
cut childrens' heads off if ever they dared
go under the tunnel after the last
light had sunk signalling it was time to
come home. Playtime finished at sunset when
I was seven, and in the darkness spooks
ghosts, ghouls or Father Christmas could descend
into the night depending on what time
of year it was. Gavin Hesketh once said
he had seen Santa ploughing through the sky
with Prancer and Rudolph making his way
to Nigel McLoughlin's on Ravenscroft
and I believed him, though Dad said he made
it up and what had really flown across
the roof of their house was his mum on her
broomstick. That year Gavin got a Chopper
and we started playing Top Trumps together
in the back of Dad's broken down car
which he parked in the garage. This was where
I would listen to the match from Fortress
Anfield, soaking up the statistics like
sapling roots drawing strength from the depths
of a spring laden earth.

So after five years hard mental work the dream has become real and I have managed to construct a reality of the mind whereby I firmly believe in my calling, much in the vein of Pierre Currie's quote

"You have to make your life a dream for your dreams to become reality"

So please join me at the Irish Poetry blog by clicking the link above, (Latest topic is a Paul Durcan Lecture I attended on 15/2/06 where the full cadre of Irish greats were in attendance from Famous Seamus the Mossbawn Magus to Kevin the Amatuer Drunk) but also feel free to read the text below, written last November.

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New breaking news of undaring lingo from the site of Anglo wannabee Todd, where he bum licks George Szirtes and slags off Stephen Fry, the immensely intelligent and plummy voiced talented global artist.

Wots goin' on?

Well, I don't know, but I do know that after listening to Fry waffling a langugae chocca full of metrically technical terms striking with deeply felt pertinance, an awareness within the mind I percieve as being at play behind jolly hockeysticks registers, suggestive of fag bashings and public school-centric elites of poesie pontificaters imbued as one in commune with a god given right bestowed upon intellects sharpened on Etonian playing fields, where rugger and buggery are two highly normal mechanisms through which power is naturally manifesting itself to the heavy hitters of a future age, as yet not upon us, but soon to be so UK side.

Holding this mix of thought as a dilineating concentric circular boundary of outer ripples bordering the concentration ring into which I step, all philisophical exploration becomes defunct as a sublime fleeting energy jolts me to create an image of generic redundant public passenger drivers vaguely resembling the fictional character of "Blakey" from the 60's comedy smash sitcom "On the Buses"; and appearing instantly juxtaposed against the backdrop of kaleadescopically swinging heydays painting in an electronic canvas,
"Terry" from "The Likely Lads" shape tweens through time and space, alternating with Blakey in a newly created constantly morphing symbol of cultural identity.

I move beyond the glow of footlights and stride onstage, brought into a conceptual reality by use of an a priori software pulling "secret levers" in the Szitean "universe" where the Scot Don "poet man" Patterson is overdue a critical mauling and the sound patterns I first wrote of over at the ablemuse site where Mark Granier hones his blade of intellect come flooding back to affirm my faith that in the Amergin attributed deposit I will uncover a truth to shut up the gabbling rabble of Swiftean like "talentless popinjays" who concern themselves with fundamentals of poetry, desribed in Amergin as "binding principles of good poetic construction."

And fans of Don, George and "any number of other truly brilliant, talented, hard-working, formalist poets now writing and publishing in Great Britain," will be silenced when writing's whole methodology, particularly within spectrums of critical humanism, changes exponentially in ever shortening amounts of time; so much so that obscure pearls of guff and wisdom, from ancient scribblers to avant-garde show offs will be rustled up from an absence patrolled by light moving in binary coded optical data bits through a controlling movement of fingertips tickling keyboards.

With a seriously stern and straight faced approach to potency I have perceived via the medium of reality TV shows where Gordon Ramsey gives out dressing downs to wanabee carrot choppers dishing up the dips for a restaurant full of Jamie Oliver watchers and readers wanting to be a part of the latest infomercial for the next nights episode, or larger still, pitching ambition to a curve of instant poesie at buckle, they will feast their eyes and ears at a gozzy gawp gawk fest to be recorded on Tuesday at the new pizza restaurant venue adjacent to Eamon Dorans, Temple Bar, Dublin 1; so keep watching this space readers and lovers of the truth Szirtes boy would wet his knickers over where he to know it fully.

PATRICK KAVANAGH CELEBRATION 2005 1/8/05

We had the Patrick Kavanagh Celebration 2005 last Thursday, above the Palace Bar, Fleet Street, Temple Bar. This boozer is where Kavanagh held court with his contemporary hacks, and famously said of -

"The Palace Bar, there was the gabble of poetry to be heard."

The night kicked off with actor/poet PJ Brady doing a 25 minute piece from his one man Kavanagh show, where he plays the man himself. I first saw this show last year, around this time, when I had been in Dublin for a couple of months. I came here after finishing a degree in creative writing and drama, at Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, which just happens to be my home town. By the time I left my writing was all along the lines of mining the depths of my Irishness, and I knew that a crossroads had been reached and really there was only one way to go.

I could stay in England and be an "Irishman" writing about a place I barely knew, or I could go to Ireland and see what happened with the writing. Really there was no choice, as to stay in England and write meant I would have turned into a Joe Horgan clone, prior to his moving to Cork.

When I first got here the usual spiel to anyone asking why I had come, was to roll out the Horgan analogy. Anyone who read his column in the Irish Post (weekly newspaper for the Irish in Britain) would know what I mean. Up until he actually moved to Ireland his column was pretty one dimensional. It would run along the same lines every week -

"My name is Joe, I am a second generation Irish person who grew up in Birmingham. I have a dual identity. I don't know who I am. Life is a bitch when you are a plastic paddy. Low lie the fields of Athenry. Ireland forever."

So imagine my surprise when I was at the Kavanagh poetry prize last year and his name was read out as the winner, as I sat there in the heart of poetry flame HQ, surrounded by all the previous winners and the great and good of Irish poetry, scribbling away in my journal, which in itself was something of a novelty as I was the only one writing. What a way to get nopticed without trying, going to the druidic lair armed with pen and paper, only to realise that you are the only one with that idea.

Just before this PJ was doing a two week run of his show "The Heart Laid Bare," a one man show in which he played Kavanagh. For the first week the audiences had been dire, and there was only himself and his brother Seamus to do all the work, so I volunteered to put up a few of his glossy posters at some establishment events, which I had read were on. Up till this point I had only been to the weekly open mic at Brogans, where the non mainstream poets gathered to warble. I am still with them now, and they are the antithesis of the wine and cheese poetry brigade, a lot more real and less educated.

Last year was Kavanagh's birth centenary and everyone in Dublin was on the bandwagon, somewhat ironically he has become an establishment icon, long after his life, when the Irish literary establishment wouldn't give him the time of day.

There were two events, one was a Kavanagh manuscript exhibition at the National Library and the other was the launch of Peter Fallon's translation of Virgil's Georgics with Seamus Heaney doing the intro; perfect places to catch poetry buffs. The Kavanagh manuscript launch was on at 6.30 and Fallon at 7pm, 5 minutes away in the college of surgeons. I arrived at the library and asked if it was OK to put a poster up, and the security man said fine, no problem. After I had put one up I thought it would be an idea to ask whoever was doing the spiel if they could mention PJ's show. I ended up talking to the third in charge oppo, who came out with the classic reason, after being asked if she could ask the main honcho to mention the show -


"I don't think it would be appropriate in the circumstances"

I couldn't help but inwardly laugh, thinking "what circumstances are they? This is a Kavanagh do, my mate has a Kavanagh show running, surely the circumstances couldn't be more apt?" However, being new to Dublin and still enthralled with the place, I moved on to Fallon and thought I would play it by ear. When I got there I decided to forget asking for the mention and just put the poster up in the wine and cheese drawing room where all the faces were to mingle post book launch. The room was an imposing space with fading oils of augustine personages hung on the walls, but the sash windows had been faced with interior double glazing, making an excellant flat surface for the poster. After the library vibe I thought it best to completely cover all bases, and so got persmission from the security man to put it up. So after the launch as the crowd mingled I went to put it up, but half way through a man who was involved in the launch came over in a very agitated state and we had the following exchange -

"You can't put that up here"

"It's OK, I got permission to put it up"

"What, from security?" (somewhat disbelievingly)

"Yes"

"Well, erm they probably think you're with us. You'll have to take it down."

By this time I was inwardly laughing more than I had been at the library, as he was obviously very highly charged, probably because of the high profile nature of the event, so I said "no problem" and started to slowly unsellotape the two thirds affixed poster, which is when the funniets thing happened. He physically interjected and said

"Here, let me help you"

But then quickly realised he was drawing attention to himself through his behaviour and stopped then shuffled off to fulfill his role of chief smiler, handshaker and chit chatter of poetry related pleasantries with those present. He had inadvertantly given me more publicity than I could have hoped for, and so now all eyes were on the man who he had been having the frisson of exchange with. As you will be aware, at the wine and cheese do's any news is big news, no matter how slight, so I felt somewhat pleased with my efforts. I had not gone out to create a fuss, but still the fuss came and could not have been better scripted. I had been to my first establishment spalshes, back to back and all in all a good evenings work had come of it. I ended up spotting a mobile notice board just outseide the drawing room and decided to put it on there. When I had done so I turned round and six feet away having a time out moment with Fallon, was Seamus Heaney, who I had not seen. I smiled in surprise and vacted the building, feeling I had made a good impression of things.

At this point I had not seen the show, and was going with my instinct that it would be good, as I knew PJ from the Tuesday night sessions. I ended up going on the second to last night and it was a full house, in the same place we did the Kavanagh celebration. He really brought Kavanagh to life, as the man himself, or so I imagined. A man who lived in near poverty for most of his life, before his memory was sanatised by the collective forces which took control of his identity. On the final night there were a few RTE producers in the audience and since then PJ has made a number of radio programmes with RTE. One as the Kavanagh expert on RTE's "The Enchnated Way" which is hosted by Pat Boran, and another one about his life as an actor and poet.

Last Tursdays bash was all about bringing established and emerging poets together on the same bill, and the night was a great success. After PJ, Leanne O'Sullivan read as did Maurice Scully, along with the usual suspects from the Left Bank Tuesday Sessions, and now they have that little bit more belief in themselves than before.

TIME IS SHORT AND TALK IS CHEAP

"...From Los Angeles this is Sundown Lounge show number 5...."

is a poetry podcast I listen to here at the publishing cybergallery and I would direct you to stay abreast of things in cyberspace and keep checking the inbox, because strange things are afoot in the world of verse at this moment and new voices are being discerned on the web publishing megaphone of blogdoms, where informed opinion is rustled up quicker than pot noodles in temples of takeway eternity and presented with sheens of pukkability impossible to dismiss or, in some cases when the word joining dazzles, be affected by on the digital plains of audio.

I am thinking

Sundown

is the best poetry podcast of the 31 I have turned up, tuned into as a dropped out lover of all things which can be thought related to text without too much effort, and used to access regions of intelligence ascended to through zones leading to rarefied esoterical pastures one can truly believe exist only as the surrounding demense of a monastry with well ordered bee hive cells, or the suburban gateway of a buddhist temple city where kaleidoscopic cultures whirl potential meaning to zen like hidden calms on frequencies few sensible or insensitive deep thinkers are capable of attaining in the midst of this beyond modern 20.05 time, where confusion supreme reigning over the land man planet of gadgets, gizzmos and whatsits we don't understand, is ruling existence, keeping us fixed on the spot and trained on the mark with a machine like aiding hypnotic precise strength of cleverness which only the next generation of artificially assisted human robot strength minds will be able to fully resist.

So step into the circle of my concentration and let me begin with the words of a wise man, long gone and living only in pieces of myth attached to a programme note on this mosquito quick piece of whit-williamesqueness I wish to sheep dip in the disinfectant dye filter of sense here at the helicon height kip temple to all things inner working wherever the act of language unravelling is to be found. I am also thinking that with a true post modern scene of audio, the crucial shift begins towards a future where more will listen to poetry, which logic dictates must effect, at the very least, an increase in the populace for the spoken and written word of good writers/performers and MC's wanting to spread textually transmitted information.

The dead man is the acquaintance of poet and man of letters Samuel Johnson and his name is Richard Savage, an 18C vagrant poet, whose poem "the bastard" contains the following

"Nature's unbounded son, he stands alone,
His heart unbiased, and his mind his own."

They seem to be the most encorouging I could find in this chaps one poem ouvre, who I had cause to seek out after forgetting the name of the poet I wanted to quote but whose name I could not remember. He was a 1920's union labor poet of italian roots who wrote and ode to Mussolini, in which a man gets lynched, and a line in it saying those who do the hanging have the most fear as the person about to be murdered is prepared to "die for a light he will never see."

--------------------------


Saul Williams in Dublin earlier this week. I forgot all about him coming, after noting it down to remember to catch him when I read he was coming 2 months back. St Paul de Bono told me that he and god (aka Mike from county Meath due to his flowing locks) were there and god started ranting about something to Saul. Mike is the only person I have met who can genuinely freestyle. To witness true extemporisation for the first time is an enlightening experience, as whatever is going on is something never seen before in any other person.

He can only do it when other people toss in words at random and if he had the right set up and devoted himself could be the new Saul himself. I asked St Paul if he moved away from god when he started ranting and he said he wasn't standing close to him in the first place, as he was on the other side of the room telling him to shut up, unknowing it was Mike until later.

He said Mikle was saying something about the "trinity," which could have been a reference to any number of things, but one which my instinct suggests is the trinity of Ireland's names - Eriu, Fodhla and Banbha - who were 3 daughters of a Tuatha De Dannan godess, Ernmas, and who the Milesian invaders agreed to name Ireland in honour of.

There are also other aspects to the triple godess myth which need not be addressed here, and which Saul would no doubt not have been particularly interested in hearing about as he was starting up to do his spot of magic making.

However what I wanna ask the philosophy students here in my empty class of poetic play (the stude dudes shootin' 'n surfin' the breezewaves of PoMoism), is, how much of contemporary deep thought is concerned with all things neoligsitic for the ego of the coiner, and how much is it about securing knowledge which can be transmitted in plain terms to all literate adults?

A question the deepest thinking of deep thinkers could immediately respond to with another question and so investigate instead of replying to the original question on its own terms.

I came up with a thesis about this after questioning and reading a wealth of thought from a number of deep thinkers, and it was founded on the idea that at some point open inquiry ends and a choice of faith is made, which forms the basis of the poet's poetics as they progress through their worlds of verse.

And swinging this concept to talk about the english poets of the recent past and their anglophile school of quietitude equivalents stateside all having similar trajectories, part of which is education and what part it plays in the creation of poetic myth.

If you are ivyleague or oxbridge associated then these are potential brownie points and intro opportunities most other poets don't have. But many poets who didn't have fags to bully at school do buy into the whole reasoning of the best or most "true" poets coming from a right stock; believing that true poets are those whose accents are of certain socio-economic registers which are associated with a David Niven as Winston Churchill desirabilty in the minds of those feet whose birth perch was a few rungs lower on the socio-economic ladder of life.

Pension plan poets like old fart Auden, the humourless laugh merchant of pinprick pomposity who others so wish to emulate in hope of acquiring irony in order to laugh at their own jokes. Poets like Larkin, who smoothed off the sound of Coventry in his voice and rose into the middle-class, but whose tin bath in the outhouse lineage, meant he could never be a poet who could draw on the experience of bullying fags at school, and so carry true the flame english court poets started on the back of Spenser and rose through Ben Jonson to culminate with the propaganda genius of Milton. This imititive process of graft, transplant and propogation of greco-roman learning laid the foundations of the future direction all western poetry was to undergoe for the next 400 years, rooted in the minds of men who were well over 1000 years away from a living culture they were rediscovering. They looked to greece and rome and decided to try and connect their nations poetical heritage to them, and now the myth is so secure no one bothers looking outside this myth for any more accurate ones a bit closer to home, even though there is a lot more accessible poetic theory right on the doorstep, which doesn't require yeat's like density to tap into. No need for a pHd in impenitrible thought in order to grasp it.

Unfortunately once the greco-rominisation reinvention was started, it caught on, descending into the dreary period of sophistication when clockwork regularity of the augustian age made pope and the rest hep swingers of an enlightenment era, bitching and dissing each other in the battleground of print, which has continued up until the present time. However the Quietitudal schoolies wiv an inflection of socio economic accent others percieve as aristocratic and who like to think they rule the roost at poetry flame HQ, are on the wane, as the publishing change upon us is in the process of asisting in the demolition and exposing of this greco roman myth heritage baloney. New interaction and reply methods are opening up and the respond time to criticism is shortening considerably as poets hone their critical skills in the numnerous webtraining centres, thus circumnavigating the usual print path publishing was for so much of the past, indeed for the whole 500 year entirity of the "contemporary" english/american tradition.

The old duffers clutching the past of yesterdays security in the classics will be unable to compete in the instant age upon us and will sink into doterage raging or muttering incomprehensible dialectics of a fiction based never was reality which served as personal myth and so is difficult to relinquish without major head space renegotiation, which may well be impossible to many, if not most of the old timers wanting to stay abreast of change.

Luckily some of reclining into our years with a fairly scored card of respectability through numbers of interested readers who attend our academies, or schools of loosely bound readers and affiliates in the arena of chinwag, and in this vein of casual talk I would like to continue, hoping that some of the new blog laid backness will rub off in a sheen of form in which the tales spinning can be spun.

In an earlier post I informed you I was beginning Robert Graves's "white godess" book, in which he comes up with a superb argument of such immense mythological densisty as to be a work whose claims are subsumed to irrelevance by the sheer breadth Graves's mind displays.

It is his own private faith more than any definitive his poetic tome's attempt to answer once and for all what is what in poetry and why it is so, which interested me and brings to mind my own navel gazing days of true wonder happening during my teens, after discovering the mental complexity levels I could access when running with the concept of zero. I don't know if this was the deepest experience of thought I ever had, but it was up there in the top few profound episodes of near enlightenment, somewhere not much higher above one specific method of composition I acquired to create a certain strand of poetry, which is to listen to poems and snatch words at random in order to create new works.

When I write in this way, entirely at readings, the poem is not just the words of others, as I always insert my own in between the snatched ones, so the poem is 90% mine, but built using 10% of aural words, grabbed by instinct; so instead of reading a load of words randomly until one hooked, doing it by audio.

This is also a great way to keep occupied at readings, because, as we all know, some readings can be rubbish. So instead of feeling cheated as I sit there reaching deeper into the well of farce acting meant to disguise boredom, I can stay bright, alert and content in the knowledge that I do not have to fake being occupied with the reader/performer onstage.

Here is one I will give the ABC of how it was done

Langpo Mo

I went to see Maurice Scully at a monthly lunchtime reading in thew Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin, which is run by an old Dublin poet/charachter called John McNamee, who is old school independent whose main poetic overlay is a thick posturing cloak of imperviousness to what I imagine he considers upstart newbies like myself.

As Maurice went to work I rode and jammed the ebb and flow of riffs emanating in my mind as he spoke, instinct picking words with a rapier quickness of faith I have learned to cultivate over time, and which is now well developed and securely incorporated into that particular compositional method of my practice I sub label a derivitive of Langpo, the Bernstein founded school of post avant breathtaking boldness which can legitimise poetic forms whose musical equivalent is found in John Cage's silent piece of work concordant with early futurist shin digs at cabaret voltaire.

Next, I left the Scully jottings to ferment, then a few days later attended an event where Seymour Parpet the child learning maestro spoke and I sat behind Heaney keeping notes, unaware of his presence until close to the end, when the figure 4 feet away occassionaly shifted into slight moments of a tight angled profile, the sum of which added to a gradual realisation of the magnitude of the reputation the man in front oozed, sitting down with two empty spaces either side of him, his face palm clamped and betraying the features of a man at ease listening to the onstage blather and unaware the mind positioned directly behind was ensconsed in creation, until he rose and turned to leave as I finished my scribbling, eyes cast down upon the page I was working on.

Amiri Baraka

Ron Silliman

had Amiri Baraka under the spotlight on Monday 8/9/05 and Friday 12/8/05 and he really polorised opinion, with claims of racism and all round devilry by a couple of white poets.

Whilst not holding enough knowledge on Amiri Baraka's life and his trajectory which would allow me to engage in a debate with those possessing more, my current position on him is that he is one of the most significant American poets of his generation. I first came across him during a class in writing school when we listened to a tape of some of the poets from the Jerome Rothenberg Millenium anthology and it was he and Charles Bernstein who stayed with me, Baraka immediately. There were two poems, Black Dada Nihlismus and "Dope," which Baraka delivers in an evangelical preacher style and has the lines

Must be the devil
Must be the devil

Richard Nixon aint the devil
Jimmy Carter aint the devil....etc

These poems are ten years apart and what struck me was that the first one sounded like an angry racist whose style of delivery didn't hold my interst, but the second one, Dope, was like it was a completely different poet. Obviously what had happened is that Baraka had improved beyond recognition in those ten years. There are no other poets I can remember from that session now apart from the two mentioned which, in my mind, only serves to bolster the instinctive opinion I formed during the class.

I had to write about one of the poets in the anthology and so chose Baraka. At the same time I was also immersed in the Foster biographies of Yeats, and when I started reading on Baraka I was struck by the obvious basic similarities which could be drawn between these two, seemingly poles apart poets. Both were committed nationalists to historical causes and where in the thick of the action as important events played out during their prime years. Yeats to his tinted celtic vision of an Anglo Ireland whose lowborn and highbrow where harmoniously rooted together by a common past in an idyl of "beautiful and lofty" ideals, held in trust by an aristocracy of artists (with Yeats as Supreme Commander) who knew what was best for peasant and toff alike; whilst Baraka's vision was that of an idealistic and educated young black man in a time of American history when to be black could get you killed by workers paid in tax dollars. And whilst there are perspectives that can come up with a million and one sophisticated arguments with a sophistry that can almost prove black is white and vice versa, as an apologia, the bigger picture of simplistic truth, it is my current position, is that Baraka was totally justified in buying into the 70's during the turbulence of these times. It is easy for the white middle class acadmy poet to poo poo him, but the fact is he is a leader in his community and someone whose greatness will grow once he is gone.

I have never been to the states, but from what I hear there are deep divisions along racial lines, obviously because there are huge numbers of black people whose history is rooted in the democracy of slavery, and Baraka may be an uncomfortable voice to certain sections of white America because he isn't content with what, as he sees it, the way "Whitey" runs the show. Baraka is a language artist and the reason I think he is great is because when I hear him read live he gives you a perspective which is not even remotely close to being in your head, in a style of language which may sound uncomfortable to some, but has so obvious an integrity that it has the poewer to make you question the assumption you make when creating your own world. Another reason Baraka makes me think Baraka's a significant poet is hiss pitch perfect ability at delivering poems.

I personally learnt how to write populist performance poetry as a direct result of listening to him. I chose to write a paper on him because of the recording of "Dope," but I couldn't find a text of it so I got another book out and came across a poem that has the lines

jesus aint gonna save yer
jesus aint gonna save yer

Cops aint afraid of jesus
Pushers aint afraid of jesus
Capatilist racist imperialists
aint afraid of jesus

jesus pinky finger got a egg rubywhich actual bleeds
jesus at the Appollo doin splits
and helping Nixon trick niggers...etc

The word Jesus only appears in upper case once, and when you give the poem a close reading you realise that the subtlety in what he is saying is sublime to a point beyond which most poets could hope to acheive. One theory is it could have been because he was taking part in imporatant events with large numbers of people, being at the centre of change; whilst many of his contemporaries would have been writing on the periphery of social upheaval as bystanders offering views and opinions, but not involved to the extent where they are effecting change themselves.

I took this poem in the rehearsal room and tried to get inside it, or more accuratly inside Baraka's rhythms and thought pattern. Itried first to imitate Baraka's evangelical preacher character, but I could only reach a certain level of personal truth faking a black American accent, so I stopped and thought it through. All of a sudden it occured to me that I could try it out in the style of a black guy from Toxteth in Liverpool, 12 miles from where was born and reared, so a lot closer than to my reality of being than a carwash in Alabama. Toxteth is a tough inner city area which is the centre of Liverpools black culture. Liverpool was built on slavery and Toxteth can trace many of its current residents right back to those dark days of Imperial history and anyone who has heard an angry black person from "Tockie" will testify that the voice alone is capable of instilling fear to anyone on the planet.

That was the key. The poem was alive in that accent, as alive Barakas, and so I used the energy of that register to write my first performance poem.

oods a passing cloud
takes time to cross the landscape,
a week or two and then
BOOM
catch you later

or puttin' it into speak ease
when it's gone
it's gonna come back round
maybe not today or tommorer
but someday, and sooner
not no later than a month or two
whilst the wait space shift
swings along, here to there
bubblin' days in babble

churnin' out the word and song
and that, rat a tat tat beep bop
ALOHA what's cooking
On the mobile life's a blower

Take a pause
talk to one another
gotta stop and call up numbers
fix in frames
rake in plunder
rig some games before we're
six foot under the cold wet clod
we're all gonna call home
SOMEDAY

and sooner, not no later
than 4 or maybe 5 score max
so, in between times
gotta find a way to createwhat we're gonna be sayin...etc

This is about a third of it. After writing it I memorised it and decided to try it out at a local poetry night in Liverpool. It went well and as I was going home through the city centre I decided to take the Baraka poetry test as I was passing a racous sounding Irish bar called Flannagans. In an interview Baraka says that if you think your poems are any good, go and try them out on

"The men who do be diggin' holes in the road. These men are not statues without feeling, but flesh and blood. Dare that" -

Baraka Interview

Which, when I consider it is perfectly fair comment and, although there are perspectives that can give another million and one reasons why this is tosh reasoning with no bearing on "serious" poetry, I would steadfastly endorse his statement. And this is what I did in practice, although not as the wo/men were digging holes, but to them during their leisure time. I went in the bar and asked the band if I could do a poem. The singer said OK, obviously thinking I was a spacer and I did it, and it went great, an experience which was good for me as a poet, as if I had not pushed myself to do it I would be unaware of that particular area of opportunity available and doable for poets who want to challenge themsleves.

Baraka is one of the few modern poets I have heard who could hold their own in a slam environment, which I also think is where poetry is currently undergoing a shift towards.

The one thing you get from reading the piece is that Baraka was very much aware of the responsibility he had been given through his upbringing to stand fast and remember the history of black America. When he was a child before the civil rights movement he recounts a story his grandmother told him as a boy, about a black boy who had had his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth after being accused of raping a white woman, and he rhetorically questions why she would tell him this at such a young age, and replies

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

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

And so Baraka obviously views his work as being part of a tradition greater than himself, the one singular person, and which I take as a main sign of Baraka's integrity as a poet. His wider ideals subsume, or at least disguise, all aspirations of establishing himself as an aristocratic nucleus of a commercial grouping of poets, in the mould of a latter day Pope or Dryden, and to which much of the ethos of contemporary Western poetry has returned.

The up to the minute urban hipster witted poet-artist, who shops upmarket, aspires to dine in Mayfair partaking of literary dinners with those who s/he imagines to be mandarin class keepers of a Bloomsbury flame; the light of which modern art has deemed to be linquistically scientific and can therefore be plugged into as a basis for any hidden romantic notions harboured of a geneaolical proof of job choice. Career poets since teen angst days, when A level results are material for epic dirges in the Juvenilia segment of the definitive edition of a collected works, printed 40 years after passing on dignified, in a country cottage home gifted by a nation to its poet laureates, for a lifetime service to poetry written in the English language.

A poetry which embodies and celebrates the continuation of a myth that Britain is great, as long as each subject knows their place within the three tiers, and changes accent at university when transferring up or down the sublime class strangle holding together the charade, in many great place minds, of performing better at poetry written in English than all else, of being the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes poetry, and of holding the most important poetic history because of having an excellent speaking voice the divinely appointed head monarch would be proud of enough to tap a sword on the shoulder for.

He really does raise the question of what it means to be a poet in these times, when the idea of poets, poetry and its role in society is undergoing change, away from page poetry and back to its root of a poetry of memorisation, employing the core skills which where central to the poets of pre-literate times.

Gofraidh Fionn O Dalaigh, who is considered one of the finest pre-17C Irish poets of gaelic times spent 20 years reaching his Ollamh status and came from a family of poets who could date themselves back since the time of christ, and over the course of a generation, this gaelic society, which had evolved reletively stable since druidic times, was annihalted with the arrival of Elizabeth Regina number one and later, Cromwell. Ireland has a very strong claim to being the most important home of poetry in Europe, and the poetry of memorisation is currently being dismissed by the old guard "reader" poets as irrelevant and less "serious". The older crowd have often been raised on an initial diet of Romantic English poets during their youth, and so have imitated and perpetuated this tradition; and often times once they discover Ireland's true poetical roots, it's too late to change and re-organise the apoligia, especially if you have a large backlog of critical writing. It is ironic that the O'Dalaigh and O'Higgins poet families would recognize the world slam champ Buddy Wakefield as one of their own more than a poet standing with a text in front of them, in the sermonizing environments of a traditional reading.

Inhabiting the word means you are able to figure why, and foreground poetry of memorisation as being, superior to the non habitation of limiting your practice to voice of page poetry and, in my opinion, could be likened in difference to walking and driving.

Chaining yourself entirely to the page means you can only go so far as a poet, and limits the boundaries of definition you hold on that word. The poet Baraka is not a poet whose horizons stop at a certain point of theory, or are too inaccesseble as a result of any accessorising intelletual framework integral to the appreciation or understanding of it.

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

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

He argues that poetry is nothing but music and rhythm. He thinks that "words fly on the rhythm" saying that the rhythm comes first, words second.

I have a friend Noel Sweeney who composes in this way, and completely mentally. He composes everything in his mind and fixes it orally before he writes it down. He says that there can be no other words than those which come, and this method of composition is the closest to the way the fili and bards did so in the fenachas schools in Ireland pre-17C, before they were annihilated over the course of a generation.

This method of composition had been used for a good 2000 years, evolving out of the pre literate druid times when Irish society was ordered orally. Basically the oral laws where contained by framing them mnemonically into poems. Not poems about "wandering lonely as a cloud" or why "...text say devil slip recourses to star table knot wrap, willowing before the axis of Langpo..." but civil codes concerning amounts of compensation for various outcomes, laws on marriage defining the various cohabitation and pro-creation statuses and much much more. The understanding of pre-literate cultures really gives an insight into this question of the poets role, and is a project I am currently researching.

There is a guy called Vincent Salafia, who is an Irish lawyer, spearheading the Fenechas Project, which is an effort to raise the awareness of old Fenechas/Brehon Law, which was in operation for over 1000 years up till the 17C, and so is only reletively severed.

As much of the oral culture was distilled pretty uncorrupted onto the page, in the original Irish vernacular, from the 5C onward when Ireland adopted writing, there is a wealth of material which only a very few people are aware of or read.

Much of it is in poetic form and is currently being disseminated online by various universities and scholars.

Here are some links. The first one gives a good overview and the second is a yahoo list where the fenechas material is discussed by scholars and laypeople.

Vincent Salafia Brehon Law Introduction

Yahoo Fenechas Project Discusasion List

I am afraid that the time has come to end the facade, let the truth out and inform the reader that I am indeed, as the more discerning may have guessed, making it all up and have never been, or come close to being, the greatest mind of my generation. Indeed, the intellectual strains of my muse's lute reverberating throughout the lower rungs of academia and beyond into the wider world where the common herd spool out their lives, is but only the base born dust of a fictional reality which is far more "fart" than "Barthes" and much more "bullshit" than "full hit."

The restrictive tension of being a fantasy post avant garde academic desperate to coin neologisms that may get picked up and used by other academics is all a bit low pressure and not condusive to writing anything of worth, so I am committing suicide and reincarnating Jan as a newborn slate on which to experiment. Bob Sheppard, my old tutor and intro merchant into poetry has a theory about poetics based partly (or wholly, I'm not too sure) on the dead philosopher Levinas. Not that I am very familiar with any of his ideas, as philosophers bring to mind the first time I met Brendan Kennelly last September, in the lobby of Trinity's English department.

I won't give the full account of this auspicious event, but needless to say I was there on the sniff for a free education. Indeed I had managed to whip myself into believing that Brendan was going to be my mentor and PhD supervisor, as I sat on my arse in Trinity's grounds supping Royal Dutch Export and churning out oral magic to the spellbound student masses eager to witness a true poet at work. Alas this was not meant to be, as I found out when Brendan suggested I go West in search of a man whose number he ferreted out of a small battered book. This chap was on the West coast attempting to set up a bardic school and his main activity was (he told me after a miniscule pause halting the flow of info) "..thinking." And it is this micro second silence, that spoke volumes, which I think of whenever the word "philsopher" crops up.

But this is by the by. Bob Sheppard has a project of inquiry which comes under the label -

POETICS - which is? Bob Sheppard says this

"Poetics is a discipline, though a flexible one, but more importantly: it is a discourse, though an intermittent, mercurial one. It is a way of letting writers question what they think they know, a way of allowing creative writing dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or reflection. It often surfaces in hybrid forms or in the creative work itself.Poetics exists for oneself and for others, to produce, "a permission to continue". Poetics is a speculative discourse, not a descriptive one."

He reckons it's a good idea to write about what it is you think the process of writing is, using an anything goes technique. This can be, he admits, a hit and miss technique in his own writing and he comes across as though the jury is still out on the whole process to some extent, but being an ex student of his I saw the benefits first hand. Jan Manzwotz therefore seems to be moving in the direction of becoming the Poetics of Desmond Swords. I don't know how many other people "get" "poetics" but I have implemented a full understanding of it, and as this is the case have no need to explain what it is, although I'll give it a brief stab.

The act of creating poetics is writing what's on your mind in relation to the work you label "poetry." Reading Sheppard and his definition on poetics can be heavy duty, and it is tempting to dismiss the majority of it as academic gobble dee gook which no one outside the academy is going to read, but the essence of his theory is based on sound intuitive reasoning, which he has developed over many years of teaching.

So that's the intro over and the time has now changed, a shot has been fired across the bows and the experiment of Jan Manzwotz will continue.

The first time I wrote under this monicker was after I had been to see my sister and neices. One of them Caoimha, was 4 at the time, but as she is a complete spacer living in a dreamworld, she comes out with some great lines, which I steal off her. My sister Helen thinks I'm a shilling short of a sixpence when I speak to Caoimha with an open notebook and sharpened pencil at the ready, but I can see the pure force of her imagination, untrammelled by the years. The day in question she was drawing a picture and I asked what it was and she told me that the scrawl was a "girl in the sun" which was the first line of my first Jan Manzwotz effort. I wrote it in Ballydoyle library, straight off the top of my head, in an imitation of what I imagined was avant garde language poetry, written by an academic. After I had finished it I wrote, again without stopping, a piece of "poetics" or literary criticism in post avant garde mould, but basically taking the piss, and I found that this is a style which can be improved with practice. By sailing close to the wind of meaning and perception it is possible to encounter the various corruptions of language fragmenting just below the surface context, in direct relation to the concretizing of whatever implied explicity of context is manifest in the initial syntactic scansion; d'yer get me?

Basically it is possible to craft utter bollocks which may bamboolze the reader into believing what's in front of them should be read as being highly laden with meaning and somehow artistically "scientific." This is a very unfashionable view to explicitly state within the academy, and for very good, very obvious reasons. No one is going to bite the hand that feeds, or construe as essentially meaningless the pivotal motion which their whole working life is centred on.

Jan Manzwotz was essentially playful, much in the same way as Charles Bernstein is, but as Bernstein is a real poet with a firm and intact reputation and Jan Manzwotz is just a figment in the mind of a chip shouldered smooth graduate awaiting greatness, I will have to update his database and operating system in order for him to progress and gift a wider insight of actually serving me a purpose byond having the odd pot shot at formless shapes from the academy. And as he was spurned into being by a toddler, so it is fitting he now starts kindergarten in the one man school of poetics called Desmond Swords.

SHOW THE BIZ

Tonight's the big night
showbiz is coming
to take me away
and shoot me to the stars.

Who's that in the corner?
Is it the head of Sony,
Decca,
Music for Pleasure?
Here to make my fantasies breathe
and become as real
as the stout swill
my foot has just stepped in?

And what about her?
The blonde just sat down on the couch
ferreting around
in her minimally chic otter skin suitcase?

Is she fishing out the contract?
My pact with the devil?
I don't mind signing on the dotted line
as long as I'm made to feel wanted.

Drone of bore

The lasting stone of desire
swelling to pip full strip back the cracked ones
has now settled into the soul singing sensational
squall of a strong blow
where bafflement can begin
dripping the amber climate
of unitary sense
outside the gyre spinning
clockwise love
ticking with the hands of strife
in reiki rainbow centres
and freaky trip out
places like the front room of Alan's
where we bargain with the beginner fiction writers
who populate cyberspace
seeking conection.

And when Empedocles is thrown in the
slow bake of which nots and where fors
slowly start to take shape as the chill out
dumbed ups of W1 covent Garden
swill the air with the sound of
an elite corp of strangled notions
teetering on the bring
of every drivel laden cliche
imaginable to man and beast
who feed on the slop shop filler
wheeze is all gettin' a taste of
next week when Windle Sparkance
gets launching the transmigrationals
of an old demonic grace.

And the slant kill republican's
are gonna blog Sparky's start
in word star world with a bikini riot street jive
'n jingle up the lingo with bamboo eggs
cheese needle skewered
and cracked by the sandwich jazz of a
top table fin clutching bongocero god
whose gonna wrap up the day with
an extemporised slap fest
of bird chirping imitational grace
that's gonna get the pigeons
in a lather and Windle filled with the vibe
that words worth the weight
of hearing should be allowed to simmer
before getting set free to sail the air
and anchor in the listeners ear.

This was written as part of an ongoing (ad) continuim, where certain very interesting and exciting aspects of Empedoclesian theory is decanted into verse, in order to counter certain ideas currently being put forward by other members of staff here at the university. These ideas relate to the metrical supremacy of Parmenidesian thought at the expense of Empedocles, which is obviously an outrageous claim, as the hexameter Empedocles deploys is both supple and responsive to the material which it addresses, forming the backdrop to a large section of Western thought which can be traced directly through Lucretius to Plutarch and the metaphysicals, culminating with the superbly clear and light prose-poetry we encounter in Yeats' Vision, which I am currently using as the raw material for a "write through" project in which I will create 12 slim volumes of disposable poetry, which I hope will question the stasis in much modern poetry today.