Update on di s/m ID flyting.

(Written spontaneously on becoming aware by a s/m poet-friend, at 5am Friday morning, of a recent (free) e-book, Poets for Corbyn, and its negative Times review (behind a paywall), not having read this offering from the UK Poets Pantocracy, and knowing nothing of its contributors or contents.

It was, briefly, a published comment on a poet-friend's -(and someone i am yet to meet in real life)- Facebook update, for an hour or so, until the update, and twelve or so other attempts at publishing one-line comedy comments communicating concordance with the thoughts of the contributing poet-friend i am yet to meet - fb account holder - were all deleted.)

~

Desmond Swords: It would have to be a poem for Corbyn, that came and stole the show on its own feet.

That, unfortunately, rarely, if at all, comes out of a collective online poetic creative-writing group-protest in which we all agree how great our shit is. And in which our level of sincerity is measured in how emotionally displeased, distressed, or verbally angry we write and sound to the Reader.

But if there woh a talented norvun shoal rhymer, speaking in the authentic working class self-ennobling tone ye can learn by cleaving to the Auraicept na n-Éces. Well, hello sailor. The poems most would write, would be, satirical poems (i suspect)? Tho there's nowt to stop us from writing a love poem to England and in it casting Jez as an honest man of the people, like some Medieval moral poem.

But satire, going on the general tone of the prose, would be, i suspect, what most would be thinking of writing. I thought that just now, as i was writing. Waffling on more for exercise and my own intellectually onanistic engagement and hand-relief (sorry), not really giving a toss who gets in, because i think, as i have said before on these pages, that the working-class need me to lead us.

Until you recognise, that, perhaps, that working-class English guy in Dublin, why don't we ask him to be our leader; well, i'm afraid Dave is in for the foreseeable, because you are all far too culturally close to the problem of the class-system and need someone like me, 48, heavy-smoker, overweight, borderline alcoholic, luvs talking a lot and making people look silly, looking for an audience of the English working-class - to rally round my writing like ye did when Liam and Noel wuz banging ten lines an hour and four ***** a night.

It'll be a poem that ye need to connect with evrywun. Rather than one thousand poems from English rhymers spewing our doggerel for jezza, that, unfortunately, is the usual fare in these jaunts.

Is there one poem that floated to the top of the poets against the Iraq war? Or, as i suspect, a lot of experimental writing of uneven quality with nothing burning into the readers mind as a powerful Yeatsean 1916 message that hits home?

The cool detached dispassionate mature phase, archly poetic side-stepping the usual banalities and speaking in a voice that comes from a practice one had to be at it for seven years, before it being took on at the eighth year; imbas forosnai, glossed in the first Irish dictionary, the 10C Sanas Cormaic, and which, as ye all know, is a state of cerebral magic that 'sets forth whatever seems good to the poet and what s/he desires to make known. It is done thus.'

And which is the name of my new banging spoken word collection, using bits and pieces of the best contemporary poems in the world, written thru into my own shit.

And everyone believing it is the shit. Like Kate fukin Tempest, yeah. I'm just fukin like kate tempest coz i'm edgy, raw, burnin man, ye know, really powerful message 'bout teinm laida, extemporised song, and the other sub-strand of the trinity of apical filidh compositional form, dichetal do chennaib, breaking open the bones of knowledge and in the marrow prophesying from the ends of the fingertips. This is what we seek, methinks.






Guido 'hasn’t enjoyed poetry so much since read Dr Seuss to his children.'

The Rupert Murdoch Times: 'Much of it is ear-bleedingly awful.'

~~~

I originally posted it to the rhymer's s/m, not knowing they had contributed to the collection, and within the hour they deleted the update, along with the twelve or more comments on it.

The second time one's writing has been the subject to deletion there. I myself when i began sporting anonymously in letters beneath the line on the Guardian in 2007 as Ovid Yeats, operated a three-strikes and you are out rule. I would twice ignore any other anonymous people that wrote unsolicited angwee responses addressing my writing, and, the third time it happened, would respond full force in kind and unleash with both satirical barrels the third time they tried engaging with me satirically.

Ovid Yeats: 22/3/2007 - /1/8/2007.

Human Love: 20/9/2007 - 17/10/2007.

Practicing Artist: 6/11/2007 - 22/12/2007

Then began a cat and mouse game, that involved me being slung off by the anonymous CommuntiyModerator, and immediately creating a new account and going straight back on. I remember really upsetting the Editor on 7 May 2009, reaching a next level with despenser, defending a famous poet from the English golden circle, Faber and Faber poet, David Harsent, from the very serious collective s/m trash-talk assault he was getting from the regulars in the comment section of a snarky piece he'd written about the then yet to become ennobled (Sir) Andrew Motion, the then UK Poet Laureate: There's nothing poetic about the poet laureate.

In fact, i see looking at it that Jack Underwood is there, CJUnderwood. 

(Ah, yes, i remember now this name from my early days on the Guardian, but never linked it, until now, with being the Jack Underwood recently thrashed by Sean O'Brien.)

I agreed with the trolls, but as an intellectual exercise, found an uber polite, kind, respectful voice that successfully countered the trolls vicious trashing of Harsent, and i had a great time being a new bestie on the page with this senior fellow, reading, i suspect, and something happened. I writing as despenser lasted a day, two comments. The final paragraph of despenser's toxic offensive shit to the English rose Editor of the time:

Imbas, is an Irish word that encapsulates the sense of poetic and writerly intuition that leads to discovering the calm space in the centre of the storm, in the purest sense, which in Gaelic literary culture prior to its implosion four hundred years ago, relates to a mythical well called Seigas, which at one time symbolized the whole enterprise of textual creation. Now however, attempting to speak of such things is a very dangerous business for the online writer especially, as it brings out the worst in those who would rather Seigas well was not talked of.

Desmond Swords

After lasting a day and slung off for writing my real name, i returned the same day as OhGodNotHimAgain, but knowing that i could never sign my real name to any of the writing as that would get me instantly slung off. Just my name, Desmond Swords. A combination of my father and mother's surnames.

The writing worked, i was left alone, until the final straw came four months later, in a harmless piece of writing responding to a Robbie Williams story, that ended on the line so highly offensive to the editor it got me deleted and blocked again: 

I have just been reading up on the story so far, and am wondering if he needs me to write songs for him to sing, Bobsicle: Williams and i, one day he could be making me millions.

Of course, it didn't stop me. Scores more names had preceded it and, over the next four years, scores more followed. Indeed, one of my recent compliments came from the observation made by a senior English poet, that I 'had a different name every week'. Sometimes you'd get thru five a day. They'd delete the accounts entirely, and so the majority of these short lived one and two comments written in name after different name after different name, were altogether wiped from the public record; but now and again one turns up. A handful of the ones i have recently stumbled across and saved as bookmarks are

Deasmhuman O'Claimhin: 28/3/2008 - 3/4/2008

Hyperborean: 14/1/2009 - 21/1/2009

laurelandhardygod: 25/6/2010 - 5/7/2010

TWilkinson: 16/10/2012 - 14/11/2012

Amazeballs: 27/4/2013 - 24/6/2013

After taking a year's break i returned with my current one on 30/6/204

gwionb.