I
think in this day and age, anyone with a book to sell can just set up a
facebook page and do it all ourselves. As Graves informs us in his first of the 1954/5 series of Cambridge Clarke lectures, The Crowning Privilege; 'what can our peers sanction us
with if we are guilty of unpoetic conduct?'
Concluding,
in politer lingo, Sweet F. All m8. Because, unlike other professions,
there is no central governing bardic body, no guild of poets we gain
admittance to by passing an entrance exam. Anyone can (and everyone
does) call themself a poet by self-qualifying in a handful of clicks it
takes to set up a global social-media page and start selling ourselves
straight away as know-alls on the craft and art of poetry we make up as
we go along.
Anyone
can, and everyone does, get grafting write away. There are no set texts
or fixed course of study and you qualify by saying, yeah, i am a poet.
Except of course, now, there is the real filidh / poets' instruction and training programme i personally have reconnected with, all there in black and
white english translation, that instructed 40 generations of rhymers,
and that it is my role in life now i am trained and know what i am on
about, to helpfully inform one's komrades in the Official Tuatha De
Bogmanadon Klan revolution, all about it. Ah, such bliss.
I've no book to sell, just lots of poems in various stages of completion and abandonment.
And
Tho i didn't understand it at the time as being such, a consequence of
being born into and reared the child of immigrants in the English class
system and culture; I always thought, from the very beginning, when i
started my writing studies and drama BA in England and quickly fell into
writing early (unpublished) poems, that the only sure fire way of
making sure a toxically condescending ultra-Oxbreligious English voice didn't intentionally cripple me and
stop me writing altogether - when i first started out a 34 year old
ex-everything - with just one smart and sneery passive-aggressive crack - 'urgh,
you, write poatreh?' - that i wud learn as best i cud, with what
English translations we have, as close to how the bards of yore were
taught on the full 12-14 year filidh curriculum.
Not
only is it real, i thought -- tho it took five years full time
study and writing to construct a skeletal grasp of the totality of tales and texts that make up this body of ancient Irish knowledge and song known as coimgne -- but it also meant
i did not have to 'publish' anything for the 12-14 years i was a student
reading, writing and taking in and on the texts and knowledge that led one thru the seven grades from focloc (beginner), macfirmind (son of
composition), dos (no-one knows what this means), cano (whelp/cub), cli
(ridgepole), anruth (great/noble stream) and the final, five to seven
year stretch of study, from great/noble stream to poetry professor, and,
ollamh.
No pressure.
All
i had to do was find a way to keep on reading, studying, reciting and
writing. And now i have done it, i no longer care about being
'published' because i learned that good writing stands on its own two
feet and doesn't need any marketing to get noticed and create an
audience. All the hard graft pre-web generations had to do, not to
mention rejection; our new online hipster bogcando generations, didn't.
Or
rather, do, but in a different way. I had four years on the Guardian
where i was poetry enemy number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, going thru hundreds of nom de
plumes, and countless other sites that banned me because the jealous
admin/poet didn't like my harmless writing, at all.
The
one constant i found is human nature, and it confirmed and conformed to
all the druidically simple and amazingly ingenious, natural bardic
principles one learns in Amergins Cauldron of Poesy ars poetica text
that so few of us, Dear Reader, are even aware exists.
And
most who are, closing their ears and not wanting to know because, as
Fred points out, they want it all now, the readership, the big prizes
for one slim volume of work four years after starting to write on the MA
at Trinity, handed to us on a golden plates, inner circle greatness.
That can only come by the act and experience of writing, and doing your
20,000 hours, 30 hours a week. The full 12-14 year poetry / filiocht
apprenticeship.
The
first successful online oiwish gobmen and shouty lady poatz, just made a
few right moves, got the right people to anoint em, and bingo, the next
thing is a loada smug poatz all playing the same old editorial ass-kiss
game online, as those that officially anointed em did, and do, in the
paper page scene founded on a concept of 'there can be only an exclusive
handful of us, award-winning poetry judges and mates.'
The
first were our shared literary enemies, the O'Bigggins of the
over-hyped O'Boglands' canon shooting blanks. Duffers believing
themselves to be the mutts' nuts, the bluntest satirists in Awyerlendz,
and Poetry Lords of the Diva De Bogmanadon Klan, ranting and shouting,
demanding cynosure and twinkle, praise and understanding for their
horrendously needy egos lording it over all of us.
I never bothered with all that. After i found Cauldron of Poesy in
2005, Amergin Glúingel's seminal ars poetica, first translated in 1978, by late Galwegian acadmeic, PL Henry - the authentic drudic poetic, in a
7C voice, 120 lines of the 172 attributed to Amergin - i knew i didn't
have to. Because its contents, wise and authentically druidic, are
worth more than any acceptance from every poetry editor on the planet
combined.
Who
cares what these editors that aren't even aware of what i know and
love, think of what i write? I cudnt give a monkeys, and never have.
Mayo stock. My paternal Grannie was born and reared in a one room stone bothy with her nine siblings, on the lower slopes of Sraheens bog on
Achill. I cud be the new John F Deane. My uncle lives in Bun an Churraigh, same place John grew up. We share the same God. He has asked
me to succeed him, to inherit his mantle, and do it for Mayo. I am not
going to let JFD down, Fred. This is serious. We cannot larf.
And
now i have finished the 14 years, i can put up a plaque and start
taking people on on any published page in our shared contemporary global
existence. Engage in any critical debates about poetry and dán, and
never fail to learn something positive and, hopefully, keep myself happy
doing so. I spent many years practising critical debates online, all
over the internet, at every single site i cud find. Most of which, at
some point, banned me, for nothing more than wanting to joyfully learn
the bardic curriculum.
The
Foetry Poundation famously closed itself down to comments after Foetry Hall of Shame creator and contemporary American poetry legend, Portland
Community College librarian, and the man who exposed who was bunging who
on a hitherto, as here, hidden behind the scenes
judge-mates-bunging-judge-mates way of deciding whose poetry was the
best Award Winning in the American noughites poetry prize-scene; Alan Cordle - along with partners in rhyme from the Foetry exposure days,
Interdisciplinary Studies Advisor in the MFA Poetry of Lesley
University, Cambridge, MA; Thomas Graves; along with 60s Rhodes Scholar
and literary mystic taught by Leavis in Oxford, now octogenarian
shamanic healer in SE Asia, Christopher Woodman -- & myself - the sole non-American - living in a Kilmainham attic
penthouse-bedsit, at the time, before i moved to the Iveagh flats;
unconsciously and independently, were all drawn by fate/poetry and dán,
to find ourselves in the inaugural Obama campaign year, druidically
assembled in 2008/9 there, at the inner temple of the Foetry Poundation,
home and soul of poetic modernism, on the comment section of Harriet
Blog. And we exposed the Foetry Poundation for what it was.
Anyway,
now, everybody, we can all start to talk about what is the real imbas forosnai that writes the best dán and
poetry, instead of all the pompous spontaneous claptrap we can all
invent when we get going as a fully (un)qualified rhymer without any
real bardic training. .
I
just want to learn by rehearsing in print, the real truth of the
filiocht / poetry program. Not what Ezra Pound or The Best Contemporary
Hipster Poet In Ireland According To His/Her Publising Cronies W***king
One Another Off Shout Loudly IS YAWL, on our low-grade home-bog
social-media shark-tanks where eff all happens except us all boasting
how great we are via the mouths of our pals in doggerel barking mad-dog
sh*** on the Bogland of Poesy.
As
a consequence of my amateur unpublished fourteen years unencumbered by
all the bullshit everyone else buys into, the Award Winning nonsense; i
learned well how to speak across the board with anyone at all. Belinda
McKeon i have not read, but she looks nice enough in her photie. I
wonder if she is after a good and knowledgeable friend on the page. I
can be her pal in letters. I am sure she is very nice, but i will read
her and get back to you with my critical opinion. Thanks very much
Fredriko ka ka. Ere, av a birra tha besht.
Desmond Swords
