B’Fhiú an Braon Fola

The Burning Bush 2

2012-01-19T20:35:00.003-05:00

The Burning Bush 2, which is an online revival of a print journal I edited from 1999-2004 (with, for the first four of its eleven issues, Kevin Higgins), is now online. This new version is edited by Alan Jude Moore, a regular contributor to the old print edition, and it’s full of a lot of great poems, including some by former contributors and others by newer poets who weren’t around at the time but hopefully would have appeared in the old Burning Bush if they were.

The first of the new edition can be viewed online here and downloaded or simply read on-screen in magazine form via Issuu here. I was asked to write an essay for this project, and it can be viewed directly here. The new magazine, like the old, is based in Ireland but has a broad international vision, both in regard to geography and poetics. I think it holds a lot of promise, and if you are so inclined, please bookmark it, link it, etc., etc.

John Goodby, Illennium

2012-01-11T22:35:00.009-05:00

John Goodby’s Illennium (Shearsman Books, 2010) utilizes the cut-up as its primary poetic device, reconfiguring original (and some borrowed) lines throughout the course of this 84-page collection. Its secondary poetic device is the sonnet form; although Goodby eschews rhyme, metre, and the “turn,” each of these Roman-numerated sections consist of fourteen lines. Its primary theme is shame, more often than not sexual (e.g. “dork inability”). Its setting is Wales, often more particularly a pub (the “No Sign Bar”). Various personages, the speaker included, move in and out of the poems, reconstituting themselves in continually changing contexts. The speaker seems to be a poetic persona of Goodby himself, a version, as references to some of his earlier books appear, including his landmark study of Irish poetry, Irish Poetry Since 1950: from stillness into history (2000), which was one of the first critical volumes to treat seriously previously marginal or “experimental” Irish poets. This interest in radical poetics is reflected here in the cut-up form, which recalls not only Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and William Burroughs, but perhaps also the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce. It’s always been (for me) an arresting technique, and Goodby deploys it to great effect.

So, beyond the exploration of the theme, and the nods and references to certain great poets (Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas MacGreevy, Eugene Watters [Eoghan Ó Tuairisc], John Weiners, and others), what I especially like about this collection is, as may be obvious from the foregoing, the language that proceeds out of Goodby’s cut-up process, the lines that unfold over the course of the book. It seems unlikely, however, that Goodby’s process is completely random. There is not so much a disruption in syntax as there is more usually an unexpected object, or subject-verbs that normally don’t combine. Occasionally, the effect recalls the sound of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Often, jargon phrases combine with dream-sense to create poetry maybe not unlike the manner in which “a carp accomplishes the size of its pool” (the latter being one of the phrases recurring throughout the sequence). The primary material is limited, like the size of the tub containing the poor Xmas carp. Yet, despite these limitations and the seeming obscurity of much of the results, units of meaning accrue, as in this example:

LV

Raising Spring from Winter Polly tereus the maypole
-dusted tors The Westbourne
Concealed in rotten smoaks certain
what being a sham meant
that is so anguish there as to brush that hair
In Frenzy The ka of a black Panther
opens wide a urinal gargles
& Oystermouth’s glittery necklace of bay, & furbelow
transgressive-yet-dependent. He loved you
that’s less soft, but one apiece (4)
simonised by tears foreskins and mad Beryls
bodily fluids under bridges. My dream: a revolver
to shoot the nightmare
Call it aimance & she steps inside.

I can’t say I “get” all of this, but a number of motifs emerge, primarily sexual. We have spring reemerging from winter, with the maypoles on tors (hills) likely serving as phallic symbols. Contrasting with this life-giving spring energy, there is the Westbourne (a hotel, a pub?) concealed in “rotten” smoke, wherein (?) is someone, a man, who knows what it means to be “a sham” (possibly due to the aforementioned “dork inability”?), which results in anguish and frenzy. Disturbing visions ensue — “The ka of a black Panther/ opens wide,” “a urinal gargles” — and further sexual images torment — some quick research reveals that Oystermouth in south Wales is situated nearby a pair of breast-shaped hills that define the local shore-scape (thus the light glinting off the bay is like a “glittery necklace” near a woman’s breasts), while “furbelow” just might allude to pubic hair. The protagonist is reduced to masturbation under bridges, wishing for death to end “the nightmare.” The final line renders the piece more ambiguous than ever, though. “Aimance” must be a reference to Derrida’s concept of the relationality implicit in a friendship, and then suddenly “she steps inside.” Does this “she” suggest some kind of salvation, or merely further torture?

I accept the fact that we can’t really know — perhaps both, is the answer. As Burroughs wrote, “Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter.... Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic.” Similarly, Goodby’s Illennium allows for, indeed embraces, differing interpretations. There is much, much more one could go into here, both in terms of theme and technique. But what I really want to say is that I think these poems are surprising and revealing, crazy and captivating, all of which is what good poetry should be, no?

Drew Blanchard, Winter Dogs

2011-12-23T13:16:00.005-05:00

I’ve been meaning to write something about Drew Blanchard’s collection Winter Dogs (Salmon Poetry, 2011). I bought this book at Salmon’s off-site AWP reading in D.C. earlier this year, and now that the year is almost over it seems high time to respond. I like Blanchard’s writing; it’s strong. Take a look at “Not Whiskey” (the first poem of any collection always deserves special attention) which nicely sets things up, both in terms of Blanchard’s ethos and his style: the setting is the West or Midwest of America, because there are bison. But the bison are symbols; they become other things, parts of the landscape (“an electric fence”), other animals (“a fox”), abstractions in the speaker’s mind (“a question about crossing the street”), etc. Then they appear elsewhere, in a bar, “witness a son/ bankrupt” there (the “son” must also be the speaker), and suddenly they are not a number of other things (“box knives,” “a soiled sheet,” etc., and finally “not whiskey, not a time-clock”). Why are they some things and not others? It seems arbitrary, but simply to say there are things present and there are absences, and there is a mind, in a bar, drinking whiskey, trying to make sense of it (sometimes whiskey can help in this, sometimes maybe not). Yet this is not Blanchard saying “oh poor me, drunk in a bar” — this is not confessional realism — this is a speaker in a poem working things out through poetry. The bison, again, are symbols, perhaps images (“The bison, alone again in wandering”), rendered in language that is musical, redolent with soundplay, alliteration. This poem is short, and it’s a subtle one, but it’s a perfect statement of Blanchard’s poetics.

Throughout the collection, similar strategies are deployed. Often, what seems initially like a simple first-person or third-person narrative is transmuted into real poetry. Take “Winter Dogs” (the title poem too is of obvious importance), set in the Mayakovskaya stop of the Moscow metro system. There are (presumably) real-life events rendered here — a old woman with five dogs is begging change, there is a disturbance, and a man throws a bottle at her, allowing “two dogs/ [to break] free into the gray night.” The reader pities for the old woman (who is not unlike one of William Carlos Williams’s old women), and the dogs, but I think there are bigger issues at stake. Through the particulars, the universal. Extending the poem outward, we think also about the harsh economic and political situation in Russia, and, even wider still, how we all struggle in the world. Given that the setting is a metro station named after a poet, the ending must take on a deeper significance. What does it mean that these dogs have broken free? Why only two and not the rest? In terror, they have escaped the tie of their leashes but also of certainty. They have their freedom, but we all know what happens to us in the end.

“Mine Own Baudelaire” employs humor to undercut the “grand” poetic musings the reader may have expected from the title. Exploring the theme of the double, someone who looks just like oneself somewhere else in the world, Blanchard wishes for his to be a Baudelaire figure. Instead, in line at the post office, he actually does see his double (and so do the other customers), a criminal on a ‘Wanted’ poster, the reward for whose capture, incidentally, “was larger than my gross/ income for the entire nineteen-nineties.” Many other poems here (good poems) similarly vacillate between the serious and the vaudevillian. “Liddy’s Prayer Card” is a tribute to the late Irish poet James Liddy (who we have in common as a friend) (and for that matter with whom we also share a publisher); it is a rendering of an actual prayer card that Liddy had changed around (a sort of erasure-and-addition poem), crossing out certain words and writing in other ones to create a new, dirty, but affirming prayer to life. Such a balance of “deep” poetic themes, humor, and religious ritual might come in part from Liddy, but, in this first collection, Blanchard sets out his own stall. Winter Dogs is American, descriptive, imagistic, narrative yet surreal, big yet in love with particularity, and well worth the read.

Future/Now

2011-12-07T01:41:00.004-05:00

Soon available from Salmon Poetry.

Advance listings:
Amazon US
Amazon Ireland and Britain
Amazon Canada
Barnes & Noble

Lars von Trier, Melancholia

2011-11-27T19:45:00.013-05:00

For a guy who says some pretty stupid things sometimes, Lars von Trier is a pretty great artist. I have loved just about all of his films, going back to the Dogme days and up through his previous work, Antichrist. Melancholia does not disappoint — it too is a spectacular film. But I hope we don’t have another Ezra Pound-like figure on our hands, and that von Trier will give up his fascination with Nazism, no matter how “amazing” their aesthetics may or may not have been. It would be nice to be able to fully embrace such a great artist (and there are many one can), instead of (often) having to constantly make that life/work distinction, you know?

But back to the film. Briefly, Kirsten Dunst plays Justine, one of two sisters, the other being Claire (Charlotte Gainsoburg). In the first half of the film, Justine has just gotten married but can’t seem to fully go along with this state of affairs. The reception, at a lavish country manor house, is a disaster due to family issues and especially due to Justine’s own severe depression, and, even though she and her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) have apparently already tied the knot, he leaves her in the wee hours because she just won’t get it together. “I tried,” she later tells her sister, who is bitterly disappointed in her.

Clearly, none of this is real. I would say that the whole thing is deliberately contrived in order to explore the emotional interactions between people in fraught circumstances. Part two of the film concerns the impending doom of planet Earth, which is about to be swallowed up by a formerly hidden planet called Melancholia — the allegorical aspects here are obvious. Justine, severely depressed to the point of barely being functional, has arrived at the same manor home of Claire and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). As Melancholia approaches, Justine’s frame of mind seems to lighten somewhat, while Claire becomes desperate with the anxiety of impending doom.

Such is the plot. I don’t think we are supposed to care very much for any of the characters. If this were meant to be a realistic film, we would probably be exasperated at everyone: Justine (at the very least why not try Prozac or something?), her newlywed husband (he leaves her because she’s having a hard time, and on their wedding night no less?), Claire (yes, the world is about to be swallowed up by a rogue planet, but what can you do?), and John (who commits suicide instead of remaining with his family as the end approaches). However, identification with his characters is not what von Trier is after either.

What von Trier seeks to accomplish, instead, is to instill emotion and wonder in the viewer through the poetic deployment and juxtaposition of his images. And while there is a kind of realism in his Dogme-style use of handheld camerawork throughout, much of Melancholia is composed of surreal imagery that at times is reminiscent of David Lynch or the photography of Gregory Crewdson. Indeed, the opening sequence is a series of still or almost still scenes, and it is one of the most beautiful parts of the film (director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro deserves mention here). Von Trier has called it an “overture,” and it anticipates the motifs of the rest of the film in a brilliant manner. These are a series of moving paintings almost, which, taken on their own, initially seem strange or bizarre, but whose meanings are revealed in the context of the unfolding work.

There are too many dazzling scenes in Melancholia to mention, certainly not only in the opening “overture.” I will note just a few, though, which particularly stand out for me. One is the recurring scene of the manicured lawn/garden of the house with its two rows of trees, one row of which appears to lean in at an awkward angle while the other grows straight. The lawn looks out onto the sea, and when the planet rises there on the horizon, it is quite spectacular. Another is the aerial view of the sisters riding horses together through the grounds of the manor, through mist, through trees. These aerial shots reminded me a bit of certain similar shots in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Finally, as the planet approaches, Justine has disappeared one night and Claire goes off to find her. She comes upon her in the woods, basking naked in the light of the planet, as a witch might do under the full moon — it is as if Justine is reveling in the world’s impending destruction, as if her fatalism somehow redeems and allows her to conversely embrace life, even if only for these brief moments before it ends.

Thankfully, von Trier is smart enough not to give us a twist ending. If everyone had somehow survived, or if the credits came up before the collision, it would have been a huge letdown. However, the earth does indeed end, and we see it, and it is a great filmic moment.

Here is the opening sequence from Melacholia:

Maurice Scully, A Tour of the Lattice

2011-11-08T22:54:00.003-05:00

Veer Books has published a selection of Maurice Scully’s work titled A Tour of the Lattice (Veer Publication 039, ISBN: 978-1-907088-30-8), excerpting portions of Scully’s gigantic poem Things That Happen. I like the book’s spare black-and-white design, and the listing of Veer’s catalogue which comprises the last few pages is a good introduction to this British press which I was not heretofore familiar with. (Scully is, of course, Irish.) Veer describes itself as “publish[ing] a range of unconforming writing in poetry and poetics, including some texts that other publishers might view as experimental.” It looks like it would be worth checking out more of their list in the future.

But, to Scully’s work: Most readers of this blog will know that I’m something of a Scully fan, having written about him many times now. So in a similar spirit to this new “selected” volume, what follows are excerpts from my previous engagements with Scully, which have appeared in a variety of different venues, arranged in the order of the work as it comes in A Tour of the Lattice.

On “Adherence” and “Steps”:

Scully has been called a “Heraclitean” poet, and this description is not off the mark. The ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is probably best known for his aphorism “All things are in flux,” and Scully’s world is indeed a constant flux — he has been said by Robert Archambeau to write “out of an aversion to the idea of the poem as closed system.” Vast and ambitious, his work is composed of long, ongoing sequences… While his is a huge undertaking, there nonetheless remains the sense in Scully’s work of a singular consciousness, the only possible unifying factor available in such a sprawling corpus. From section C of “Adherence”:

A fly cleaning itself precisely
by the window in the sunlight
forelegs back (rest) head eyes
shadows wings brittle-quick & quite
like writing really. Out there. That.

These lines do not truly attempt to convey an image of a fly in itself. Instead they observe a mind observing a fly, and it is from such a fundamental shift that much of Scully’s poetry proceeds.

There is with Scully too an overt critique of the received tradition. For example, a stanza from “Steps”:

PASTORAL
Valleys, villages, coastline. A map
of a stain on the wall. Alive & living,
not a crammed glasshouse of pistillate
verba. Grass bends back. The book
is fat, contains code. The world,
the water planet. The code contained in
this thing in the world, the book, changes
the things, the world....

By retaining a rural subject matter this is a pastoral poem, technically — but a poem that explodes the Heaneyan lyric from the inside. It is only in the consciousness of writing (“the code,” “the book”) that transformation is possible, not in a fossilised way of life or in a represented landscape. In this sense Scully can loosely be called postmodern, the self-reflexivity of the writing being a characteristic of postmodernism. Yet Scully’s work remains utterly vigorous, highly autobiographical, and fully situated in the material world. It is work, in fact, which examines the minutiae of the world (and the human comprehension of it) much more deeply than the romanticising action of the traditional lyric poem can allow. [from Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions, ed. Louis Armand]

On “Tig”:

“Tig” opens with an image of a butterfly migration, an “immense blizzard of wings,” but Scully, as always, wants to get under the surface of the image. It is not only the beautiful forms and colours one sees, but also “...light exuding // over the visible / light intruding...” and there is a comment on the evolution of insect wings, and a rectangle representing a window, “rain on glass to the side of yr face...” Then comes what is more or less the [section]’s central (and recurring) image, a leaf falling from a tree … again seen from a windowpane, a windowpane that is the lens through which the poet sees, at a remove:

different (or) touching a windowpane where
drops gather ( ) difference ( ) &
or different

The window implies a house behind it, which is a central concern here too. A couple of sections have the title “A Place to Stay”: a space where one lives, or from where to engage with the wider world, as in a society, how one approaches society from one’s own space. In Munster Irish, the word tig means “house.” The themes are simple, but the actual process may be complex. The section “Backyard” gives us a crisp picture, “on still pools oakleaf / folded in a muddy crevice” and wonders, “are we just / photographs talking...?” Life is “one elong- / ated crisis (with / modulations)....”

But it is the modulations that are of crucial importance here, otherwise why put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. The falling leaves suggest age; there is an oblique reference or two to death. And modulations in writing. The best thing about Scully, for me, at the moment, is his style, which he’s really honed at this point. It’s got clarity and precision, even the way it looks on the page is made for particular effect, the use of certain marks, and the occasional use of the Irish language and Gaelic literary tradition totally makes it.... Book two opens (nearly) with an observation: “essentially a poem is a flat surface covered in part by groupings of twenty-six quite well-known symbols.” Later an ironic joke:

All that these able writers have said on language has been challenging, provocative, & generally very helpful.

Thank you.

And that’s where it starts to get really good, I mean really turned up a notch. All the images from the first half of the book are reconstituted, repeated, cut up in a sustained burst of energy, like watching a fireworks display, which keeps getting more and more spectacular till the end. [from Fortnight]

On “Prelude”:

Archambeau places particular emphasis on Maurice Scully’s Heraclitean world-view, quoting him as saying, in a paraphrase of the ancient Greek philosopher, “There is nothing static in the world.” Even seemingly impervious stone yields to a vine plant in “Prelude”’s “The Pillar & the Vine”:

the tendril travelling
& the leaf with it
hacks at the

pillar [...]

Most of this piece is written in three-line stanzas, except in two places where the lines break up in disorder, serving to shake the reader out of pattern-induced complacency. “Stone” exhibits an even stronger sense of intentional randomness. “Prelude” is the first book of the five-book Livelihood. Judging by the extract of Book III which appeared in Metre 5 a while back, Livelihood becomes more personal — autobiographical even — than its Book I. Like most of the Wild Honey poets, Scully prefers to work on an epic scale, not only in reflection of the complexity of life, but also, as Archambeau says, “out of an aversion to the idea of the poem as closed system.” [from The Burning Bush]

Winter Tales (Serving House Books, 2011)

2011-10-20T21:26:00.006-04:00

I have an essay (and a couple of poems) in a book collection titled Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging (Serving House Books, 2011), edited by Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy. The title gives you the basic idea of the subject matter. My essay is called “Paul Tillich Never Took Ativan,” which takes as its starting point Tillich’s assertion that “The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate non-being” — in other words, my take on aging here is in reference to its ultimate outcome, but in a specific rather than an abstract way.

Other contributors include Norman Mailer (interviewed shortly before his death), Mario Vargas Llosa, Robert Pinsky, Steve Kowit, Stephen Dunn, Liam Mac Sheóinín, and many more. I like what the editors have assembled, and I think that Serving House is quite the up-and-coming press. A companion volume of women on aging is planned.

(Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, 262 pages, ISBN 978-0983828907)

James Liddy, Selected Poems (Arlen House)

2011-10-13T23:09:00.013-04:00

On this night when the Milwaukee Brewers are trying to battle back for the National League pennant, I think of James Liddy. Arlen House has recently published Liddy’s Selected Poems, a new version of which is long overdue. Anyone who’s followed this blog knows that I am a friend of Liddy (now deceased, 2008) and indeed have written much about him, afterwords in a couple of his Arlen House collections, and edited a festschrift to him, and all. I was really happy to see this new book. I love all of James’s work, older and later. The earlier volume A White Thought in a White Shade (1987) was a sort of new and selected poems too, but is long out of print, and his Collected Poems (1994), though more comprehensive, is also really a selected more than a collected. This new Selected, however, is both a great introduction to Liddy’s work for the present day and a worthy retrospect.

For those who may need context, Liddy is a Wexford poet of the late Irish modernist generation who moved to America toward the end of the 60s — well, led a sort of dual existence, going back and forth, but finally based really in Milwaukee, where he taught at UWM until his death. The editor of this volume, John Redmond, makes both a sound selection of his work from the span his career and contributes an insightful introductory essay. Milwaukee poet (and former Liddy student) Tyler Farrell (who is, like me, published with Salmon Poetry) contributes the concluding essay, which is more of a personal view of the poet.

Redmond begins by acknowledging the difficulty of placing Liddy into neat categories — he is perhaps “an early example of the Americanisation of Irish literature,” but, as he points out, “Liddy had an open, multi-angled view of the world,” and so even this transnational lens is limited. What, then, of his form? Redmond notes that “he began in a relatively formal vein and the hard-earned casualness of his later poetry came gradually.” On one occasion, a well-known Irish poet I was in a conversation with suggested to me that Liddy’s poetry was “loose,” so Redmond’s percipience in this regard is well appreciated. Redmond goes further, asserting that the strength of his later work (especially) indeed lies in his “sudden shifts of thought within agreeably unstable forms” and that “in its hybridity and flexibility, its sincere uncertainty and cultivated mystery, Liddy’s writing points toward a possible future for Irish poetry.” I could not agree more.

Farrell, though he takes a different tack (his central theme being an analysis of Liddy’s many self-penned autobiographical notes), largely concurs with Redmond. He quotes a letter that Liddy wrote to him: “There is no final manuscript, only versions of what a poet might become.” He notes that Liddy “constantly evolved” (yes) and puts forward the example of his editorship of a series of literary journals, quoting him: “I have always wanted to exchange new magazines for old, for I know that magazines can alter the shape of a literary landscape.” The true artist must evolve — for me anyway, it is the essential quality of the true artist. Forgive me for sounding pretentious (?), if that’s how it sounds, but so it goes. Liddy embodies this quality of poetic evolution, and both Farrell and Redmond recognize it. I second them and laud Liddy for this.

Taking this idea to its logical extension, both Farrell and Redmond see Liddy’s later work as his best. Redmond claims that “his development was slow,” but although “he did not stop developing…he wrote his best work in his last decade or so…” Farrell asserts that “some of his most realized poetry [was] with Arlen House” (Liddy’s last and maybe most diligent publisher). I really can’t disagree with this. It is true that, for Liddy, an alive writer who never stopped believing in life and poetry, his work was always ascending, moving forward, both becoming “better” (I put quotation marks around this because at the same time I suppose it’s subjective to a degree which part of Liddy’s work is better, partly coming down to personal preferences etc.) and changing. So, as Redmond sets out in his intro, this book is weighted toward the latter half of Liddy’s career. Again, I must concur. I myself as a poet always like my newest writing the best.

As much as I have to agree with Redmond’s choices as editor, this volume still made me miss some of Liddy’s earlier work. For example, I think Corca Bascinn (1977) is one of the greatest long poems ever written, but here we get only two short verses. I also wished for more of A Munster Song of Love and War (1971) — it is hard to find in the original; yet, along with the aforementioned work, it exemplifies a major period in Liddy’s development (the influence of Jack Spicer’s serial poems). And maybe it’s just a subjective thing, again, but since Gold Set Dancing (2000) was some of the first Liddy material I read (besides the poems he sent to me as editor of a literary magazine), I hoped for more of that book than the three poems included. This is quibbling, though, as quibble every reviewer will with a volume of only selected poems. Redmond does an exemplary job as editor, and both he and Farrell scintillate in their essays. This book is both necessary and important, and as necessary as a short selected volume of Liddy is, it provoked in me the further thought, that someday there should be a true Liddy Collected Poems, everything he ever wrote, or at least published, or at least as much as may be possible.

Review of Kali’s Tongue

2011-09-20T17:19:00.005-04:00

A book I have a piece in, Kali’s Tongue (The Vinyl Press), a poetic response to the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, has received a very nice review on the Sprout Wings blog. Click this second link and read the review....

Fionnchú

2011-09-13T22:50:00.005-04:00

This guy has a really interesting blog: kind of an intersection of Irish stuff, ancient stuff, literature, art, the modern, the postmodern, post-postmodern (?), and punk, always with some arresting images. Kind of like what I do sometimes....

http://www.fionnchu.blogspot.com/

(The image comes from one of his posts about ancient art that seems modern.)

Regarding the recent BlazeVOX controversy

2011-09-08T00:21:00.010-04:00

To briefly recap: An aspiring poet named Brett Ortler recently had a manuscript accepted by BlazeVOX Books and was then asked by its publisher to contribute $250 to the publication costs. The author objected and went public with the email exchange, posting it on the Bark blog. The post set off a firestorm of comments to the blog post itself (many worth the long scroll-through), arguments on both sides, and further blog posts on the subject all over the internet. BlazeVOX publisher Geoffrey Gatza first suggested he would cease publishing, but after a wave of support posted a statement saying that “I feel like I should explain a bit further the co-operative nature of our business model. I am not going to change what we do, but I do acknowledge that perhaps I could communicate what we do a little better.” On another page on the press’s site, Gatza writes, “We will rescind this program [of asking writers for funding] immediately and I am sorry for the troubles it has caused.”

Let me state that I once had a couple of poems published in one of BlazeVOX’s annual anthologies. I was not asked to pay, though I believe it was sold as an e-book or pdf only, meaning there were no real printing costs except to the buyer. I have never submitted a book-length manuscript to BlazeVOX and so have no first-hand knowledge of the situation described above. In my brief exchanges with Gatza, he has come across to me as a good guy, and his press publishes a lot of innovative stuff, which I like. The practice of asking for money in this way is something I would not agree with, however. And personally, I doubt that at this point in time I would be able to afford to pay $250 to publish with any press, even if I wanted to, though I have always done my best to support the presses with which I have worked, Salmon Poetry (Ireland) and Six Gallery Press (U.S.), whether through buying as many copies of my own books as I could afford, buying the books of other press-published writers, or supporting various other press activities.

I think this is the right thing to do, and, sure, it’s kind of expected (if you can afford it), if not exactly required. Given the sorry state that sales of poetry books are in right now, we need to support those who support us, if at all possible (for some it may not be, and that should be accepted as okay too). In this case, it seems that Gatza was looking for a more definitive, immediate financial commitment. So yes, he can be faulted for not being explicit about this up front, and in his statements he admits that. As far as I’m concerned, there was a mistake on his part for not being transparent and for being a bit confusing with the figures he used to justify it, but it is a mistake that has now been admitted (and even apologized for). Some of the language some people are using to describe the situation, though (“scam,” “scheme,” “Nigerian style”), is a bit extreme. I hope BlazeVOX continues to publish, as stated — presses of this sort are few and far between, and without some source of external funding they are hard to keep up.

There are a lot of things I could say about Ortler’s original post, like is it ethical to publish a private email exchange without (presumably) the other party’s permission? Even if Ortler felt that Gatza had acted unethically, do two wrongs make a right? Further, even after Gatza’s clarification and apology, Ortler seemed intent on rubbing his nose in it, writing in another post, “For all we know, he could be buying pizza and Pepsi” (with the profit Ortler alleges Gatza made from his requests for help with costs, as if he’s rolling in the supposed poetry dough), going on to ask, “Also, is Blazevox really a for-profit company? If so, then what they’ve been doing may be illegal. I’m no lawyer, but might this qualify for deceptive business practices [Ortler’s link] in the state of NY?” Well, I’m no expert on trade practices, but if you read this New York State Consumer Protection “False Advertising and Deceptive Trade Practices” webpage linked here by Ortler, you’ll see it refers to goods sold or “actual damages,” rather than to voluntary donations of the sort Gatza asked for. Ortler was asked for financial help, and he opted to pay nothing. He bought nothing and incurred no “damages” whatsoever. It seems to me, therefore, that Ortler either didn’t read the page he himself linked or is blatantly obfuscating for one reason or another. Or perhaps to give him the benefit of the doubt, he really is just clueless about legal matters (“I’m no lawyer”).

I’ll let you parse through all that’s already been said about this nasty business, in blog comments or elsewhere online, and decide for yourself. But the debate has provoked discussion about some wider issues beyond what Ortler initially wrote, issues about poetry publishing in general, “business models,” the effect of a capitalist economy on poetry, small presses vs. the notion of “vanity presses,” and even the value of MFA programs. I want to comment on each of these, coming from the perspective of my own experience (which of course may be limited and just as subjective as everyone else’s).

To begin, the number of poetry publishers who are able to survive and thrive on sales alone (i.e. without grants, subventions, or other outside sources of funding) are few and far between and dwindling yearly. Some large and long-lived presses may still get by on their back catalogue of major names or their non-poetry bestsellers. If you’re Seamus Heaney or Billy Collins, you sell a lot of books. If you’re not in that category, you probably don’t. We can debate the whys and wherefores of poetry’s marginalization, but that is the economic reality at present. Very few poets can hope to expect a monetary advance or even to have their books on store shelves. Thanks to the internet, at least there are some other outlets (the obvious book-selling websites), but driving people to your links in itself takes a lot of work that the publisher may not be able to do for you. But we all know this, right? If not, we should.

The idea that a poet today can be “discovered” out of obscurity and offered a contract wherein one is treated like a big deal, the idea that the press will be able to afford to pay for everything, the idea that the poet can sit back and watch the sales total up, the interview requests roll in, watch one’s reputation grow accordingly — those days are long gone for most, and for those who still yearn for it, it’s largely a fantasy. Yes, it would be nice not to have to pay anything at all for one’s own book, and sure the lucky few won’t, but for most of us we will pay something one way or the other (usually it’s for copies / postage for mailing review copies). As I said, I personally would not be up for an arrangement such as had been asked for by BlazeVOX, but neither would I be extremely shocked by it. A polite, private demurral might instead have been in order.

The fact that BlazeVOX did ask for help with publishing costs has led some to charge that it is in essence a “vanity press.” At the HTMLGIANT site, Christopher Higgs wrote, “Back in the day, before the internet, there used to be this thing called The Writer’s Market … One of the first rules you would learn by reading The Writer’s Market is that anyone who asks you for money to publish your work should not be trusted … [T]his sort of pay-to-publish policy seriously threatens to diminish the press’s legitimacy in my eyes.” Again, I would have balked at the idea too. But in the current climate of small-press publishing, I cannot say it makes BlazeVOX “illegitimate.” I think Ortler and Higgs would be surprised at the number of writers who have offered or agreed to help out their publishers in the course of history (if the money was there and after already being honestly and impartially accepted). It should not be a condition of acceptance, of course, but these things do occur, at least from what I have heard now and again.

On the other hand, it’s not as if any of this is new. There’s the obvious Whitman example. Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen published themselves, out of their own pockets, with their Objectivist Press. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published his own books with City Lights. Trevor Joyce and Michael Smith published themselves and their friends through New Writers Press. There are numerous other examples. So the ire, the indignation over BlazeVOX asking for something like this strikes me as a bit overblown. Gatza made it clear he is not simply open to all comers who can afford to pay $250; he has an editorial process. Ortler would no doubt be glad to achieve anything close to the repute of Reznikoff or Ferlinghetti (wouldn’t we all?). Indeed, none of the aforementioned poets are stigmatized as “vanity” cases. Mike Meginnis makes some interesting points about this at the Uncanny Valley blog, going so far as to say that poets should actually publish their own books more often (though I would disagree with him when he contends that “If it’s really that bad out there, if publishing must inherently be both exploitative and pointless, then let’s just not do it” — there are other ways of doing it, I would suggest).

The truth is most poetry presses cannot survive without some kind of help. Should they then all fold up shop? No, of course not. If you think they should, if you think that nothing other than the cutthroat capitalist marketplace should dictate whether or not innovative or original poetry books are allowed to see the light of day, then you may as well stop reading this now. Because I don’t. I believe there is a value to poetry beyond what can be quantified monetarily. So aside from those rare profit-making poetry presses mentioned above, the reality is that this whole thing is a gigantic cooperative enterprise (Johannes Göransson has gone into this idea further at Montevidayo). Poets want to be published, obviously, but publishers (many of whom are poets themselves) need to know that the poet is going to do his or her part to support the book where the publisher just cannot. More books, for example, are sold at readings than in bookstores, and these are books that the poet him- or herself has therefore had to purchase from the press (hopefully at a reasonable discount).

The idea is to get our books in print, do our best for them in the present, and hope they resonate someday in the future (how many great writers are recognized in their day, and how many writers once recognized in their day are now considered great?). If there’s no way to do that, if we say that the market forbids us from leaving anything for posterity, then we are sunk. Better to get the books out, granted as “reputably” as possible, than not at all. This might entail something beyond the old model of expecting to be snapped up by a profit-making press. We might criticize Gatza (but let me reiterate that he has rescinded his earlier policy, and apologized!), but we cannot expect our publishers to single-handedly make us stars as we sit on our asses. Most of them are simply unable to. Let us get this through our heads. Equally, it is to be hoped that, if sales were in fact to outweigh costs, the publisher should pay the writer commensurately — this cooperative enterprise is a two-way street, and a contract that spells things out is no bad thing. After acceptance, the writer has the option of agreeing or not agreeing to what is in said contract. Just as Ortler had the option of agreeing or not agreeing to the conditions Gatza put forward after acceptance.

The question of MFA programs is kind of an ancillary issue, to my mind, but it is something that has come up elsewhere in this discussion, in blog posts and the other comments. While I strongly agree with Göransson’s vision of small-press poetry publishing as a cooperative, and with his negative view of the elitist “Great Figure” and “Literary Authorities,” I would have to disagree with him when he says of the latter two notions, “I do think this is an incredibly MFA-based idea of the author … I think this is a view definitely reflecting a common MFA pedagogy based on validation of the teacher, the institution.” Ortler has made it a point to mention his MFA credentials (almost as special pleading?), and Gatza in one of his statements has similarly made a point (possibly in response?) of noting that “I am not a teacher or associated with any college or university” (as if there were money in that, ha!). I think that some people have a lot of misconceptions about what an MFA program is and what sort of status it confers on those who earn such a degree, and so it becomes an easy target. Certainly there are MFA programs that promulgate this sort of elitism. But MFA programs as a whole are in no way a monolith; there is in fact no “common MFA pedagogy.” There are lots of different programs out there, some perhaps “based on validation of the teacher, the institution,” but many others whose focus is something other, or even on, say, avant-garde poetics and destabilizing that older idea of the author as an “authority” which Göransson attacks.

If an MFA student thinks that a degree is his or her ticket to publication fame and fortune, then he or she is probably going to be sadly mistaken. In my experience (I have an MFA and have read up on many MFA programs), no program that I know of is marketing itself that way. Ultimately, the value of the degree depends on the writer him- or herself. I took my degree at North Carolina State University and studied with a number of poets, all of whom I respect immensely, but whose work bears little resemblance to my own approach to poetics. This clash was for me quite fruitful. I learned a lot about poetry as a discipline and a practice, and it challenged me to think about my own poetic stance in greater depth. I didn’t want to be merely reinforced in my assumptions, nor did I want to become a carbon copy of my professors. What would be the point of either? Of course, I came into the program at age 40, having had a lot of experience in the “poetry world” myself and something of a “career” of my own already, however modest. And so I felt that I could go through the degree and get what I wanted out of it for my own reasons. In this, I am maybe an exception; there probably are 22-year-old grad students out there who can’t help but be inculcated with the prevailing ethos of their program, be it positive or negative. On the other hand, how long does it take for one to learn to think critically and independently? So I say again, the value of the degree depends on the writer him- or herself.

If it is an illusion that an MFA is a fast track to publication, then what is it worth? Just as there is a glut of poets in the wider, non-academic world seeking publication, so is there now also a glut of MFA graduates who think they’re the next big thing (well, some may think that), and clearly that won’t be happening for all of them. But for the percipient individual, it certainly can be a forum in which one can develop one’s work if not one’s prospects with big publishing houses. I think MFA programs can also help to educate its students in how to read poetry and how to interpret literature in general. Poets need readers now more than ever, and so we should be glad that MFAs exists. Without them, the readership for poetry is even smaller. Part, anyway, of the problem of poetry’s lack of readership can be solved by investing in arts education. As Brian Joseph Davis recently wrote in The Huffington Post, “This is what arts education does better than anything else: it protects traditions from suffering market fluctuations, challenges forms with new traditions and constructs large buildings named after dead people and equipped with ace sound systems, in which to debate and perform.” The attack on arts education, firstly in America but throughout the whole world, and the promulgation of the corporate model of education, to my mind are two of the major reasons why poetry has fallen into such disregard over the last number of decades. Right now, the tide seems to be continuing in that direction, unfortunately. But if we want innovative poetry to continue to exist in the public arena, we need to oppose this.

Review of Graham Clifford

2011-08-28T14:30:00.010-04:00

I have a review of an English poet named Graham Clifford over at Todd Swift’s blog. Writing this review led me to think about the issue of reviewing friends or acquaintances, but not because Clifford is a friend nor an acquaintance. He’s neither. I’ve never met him and had never heard of him before Swift sent me the chapbook to review. Clifford is someone I probably never would have read otherwise. Lately, though, it sometimes (though certainly not always) has been someone I know or have some connection with who I end up reviewing or writing about (as in my McGrath review below). It is natural that your colleagues or friends will send you their books, and vice-versa. I think it’s also a good thing to have such poetry friends. There are seemingly so few readers of poetry to begin with, and so it’s understandable that you will want some kind of response from somewhere, and usually your literary associates are going to be good readers. We should be thankful to have any readers at all, really. But reviewing someone completely unknown to me again was interesting. Perhaps in retrospect this review is a bit didactic. But decide for yourself if you’ve got the time to click the link.

Niall McGrath, Treasures of the Unconscious & Who I Am

2011-08-05T22:43:00.012-04:00

Interestingly, though unexpectedly, both of these collections by Niall McGrath reference me. Treasures of the Unconscious (Scotus Press, 2009) contains a poem titled “To Michael S. Begnal Founding the James Liddy Society of America,” which, though not stated here, I happen to know is written after a poem by Liddy himself titled “To Joan Navarre Founding the Oscar Wilde Society of America.” Thus, McGrath, who had published both Liddy and me in his journal The Black Mountain Review, humorously notes certain poetic connections. Who I Am (Lapwing, 2009) is a poetic treatment of McGrath’s family history, the concept of which, as the author explains in the notes that appear at the end of the volume, “originally…centred around the idea of ‘Ancestor Worship’, but as others (most notably Michael S. Begnal) have used that title, I searched for another.” One poem in the sequence nonetheless retains the “Ancestor Worship” moniker, and if I have in some small way inspired something here, then I am quite pleased for McGrath to run with it.

I have been aware of McGrath since we were both editors of separate Irish literary journals about ten years ago or so now. We appeared in each other’s magazines, and I was included in the anthology Breaking the Skin which McGrath’s Black Mountain Press published. I don’t know if all this means I can still be an “impartial” reviewer, but who cares; let’s just call this something else if need be, a response from a long-time reader and occasional associate. While we probably have certain philosophical differences, McGrath is an interesting poet to me, and I also see certain commonalities. But to these books.

In both of these volumes, McGrath is sure-handed and at home in the tradition of Northern Irish lyric poetry but is more than willing to extend it or to try other things. Much of his work is focused on the crisply observed details of his rural upbringing, as in the title poem of Treasures of the Unconscious, or in “A Farmhouse Kitchen in Country Antrim.” But then he occasionally presents something unexpectedly crazy, like the poem “2012,” a fantastical portrait of the North post-apocalypse. There are deft formal poems, such as “An Ulster Nativity,” alongside funny formal poems, such as “The Prince of Outer Baldonia and the Pepsi-Cola Kid,” alongside the surreal, television-inspired “Diabolical,” alongside elegiac poems of death. The humour and occasional weirdness leavens the often heavy tone of this collection, not that heavy is a bad thing in itself.

One aspect of McGrath’s work that does really interest me is his treatment of political and cultural identity in Ireland. In previous works of his, it appeared to me that identitarian politics was something he wanted to avoid, though the six-county focus could be seen as political in itself. McGrath, though, it often seemed , wished to rise above the fray of the North’s cultural divide. In Treasures of the Unconscious, the Troubles are briefly referenced as “a feud/ that made international headlines” (“Botanic”) (perhaps with an echo of Paddy Kavanagh’s poem “Epic”), while “Elder” justifiably affirms those Protestants who eschewed bigotry, even while their position in Northern society made them seem complicit in it to some. “Covenant,” which appears in both of the two books (in fact several poems occur twice in these overlapping collections) is about a grandmother who signed the Ulster Covenant, yet McGrath complicates the statement that signing the Covenant embodied: “she’d…learn/ other shades of green;/ and that pledges made in the heat/ of the moment don’t always ring true.”

Such muddying of the waters in regard to Irish identities and even family connections comes to the fore in Who I Am. On one level, this book is intended to solidify poetically the writer’s position in history and genealogy by exploring his family history and personal roots (which comprise both Protestant planters and native Gaelic Irish) — indeed the ancient Gaelic poets were practically obsessed with genealogy, and so this endeavour in itself helps situate McGrath in Irish tradition, if nothing else. However, despite the bold proclamation of the title, Who I Am ultimately seems to me to result in more of a sense of indeterminacy than certainty. One of the poems that perhaps best sums this up is “Name Calling,” wherein the writer, Niall McGrath, a Protestant with a Gaelic name, reflects on “growing up during the Troubles,/ one side suspicious because of the name,/ the other at first open, then clamming up/ on discovering you weren’t ‘one of them’.” But it isn’t even simply a North-South thing or a unionist-nationalist thing — the poem goes on to discuss a sister-in-law from the South whose parish priest refuses to call her by her given name (Deirdre) because it’s too Gaelic and thus pagan-seeming.

In the notes that appear at the back of Who I Am, McGrath states that “the experiences of forebears shape the individual as well as our own experiences.” This is true, I think. Yet, as in my own experience also, it would ultimately appear that assertions of identity can only be partial, contingent on many things beyond ancestors and family lore (as much as these things may touch us, and they do). McGrath himself is aware of this, of course, and this collection sees him opening up to the rest of Ireland, while rejecting the Catholic/Protestant divide that has plagued the country for hundreds of years now (McGrath posits a personal “Vaisnavist perspective”). The final few poems look boldly toward the future. I still couldn’t help but notice an interesting mistake in the text. The title heading on the verso pages of the book reads, “Who Am I,” instead of the intended “Who I Am.” From the author’s perspective this is probably an annoying error, understandably, but the question in a way is maybe just as interesting as the answer.

Poem in The New Yinzer

2011-08-03T00:05:00.004-04:00

I have a poem titled “1877 Point Bridge” up at the journal The New Yinzer — right here!

Salmon Poetry raffle

2011-07-28T17:26:00.005-04:00

My publisher Salmon Poetry is holding a raffle. The prize is of all Salmon’s 2011 titles, signed by the authors. The draw will take place at Salmon’s 30th Anniversary Celebratory Event at the Unitarian Church, Dublin, on 1st November 2011. This is an opportunity to add considerably to your literary bookshelf with some great titles (it is a pretty good prize, I think — 31 books) and to support Salmon Poetry at the same time. 5 tickets for €5, 12 tickets for €10. For further info, including the list of books to be won, and to order tickets, please go here.

Oblivion

2011-07-21T18:03:00.015-04:00

Oblivion is a band I was in in Philadelphia from 1984-86, playing drums. The other members of the original lineup were Steve Lukshides on guitar, Marc Fernich on bass, and Todd Cote on vocals. Lukshides had previously played in YDI, and Fernich had been in Kremlin Korps, while Cote was a fanzine editor and a well-known figure in the Philly hardcore scene. My claim to fame was having been in the band Wasted Talent. Oblivion quickly came to prominence in Philly, playing a lot of shows and beginning to record. These recording were never released at the time, but two songs are now available to download from Amazon here (for cheap, and the sound quality is very good).

Cote left the band in 1985 and was replaced by another well-known figure in the Philly scene, Dave Wynter, while a second guitarist, Fil Černý, was added to the lineup. Fil was originally primarily a metal guitarist, and, as a lot of post-hardcore bands at the time were doing, we had added something of a metal sound to the basic feel of punk rock. The recording sessions were finished with the new lineup, and there was some discussion with a well-known West Coast independent record label about doing an album, which all fell through due to an unfortunate set of circumstances.

By the term “post-hardcore” I do not mean that Oblivion had anything in common with the lame Warped Tour type of bands who are often described by that term today, but simply mean to say that we were coming out of the original hardcore punk scene while attempting to do something just a little bit different from it musically. The primary influence, though, was always punk, and I would say that we took some cues from bands like YDI, Ruin, Black Flag, the Stooges, and Motörhead. Oblivion finally ended in late 1986. (Incidentally, a few other bands have used the name Oblivion, either by itself or as part of their name, but I think that we, the Philly band from ’84 to ’86, were the first.)

Below is a video from Oblivion’s first show with our second lineup in October 1985, introduced by roadie and friend of the band Lou Perfidio, who used to announce us as being “from Kensington” (the Philly neighborhood where he and Fil lived and we practiced for a while). Oblivion is the first band in the segment:

David Stone, The Hogbutcher Poems

2011-06-28T18:46:00.012-04:00

Following on from David Stone’s previous chapbook The Bloodhound Works of last fall, Propaganda Press/Alternating Current has released his newest installment, The Hogbutcher Poems. Though Stone is based in Baltimore, both of these collections are set in Chicago where he has spent time, and the title of this latest must certainly be in part a reference to Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, who famously described the city as “Hog Butcher for the World.”

That said, the term “Hogbutcher” here can have other resonances. Where Stone’s previous chapbook dealt with our present economic upheaval, this new one seems to focus on the environment, the food industry, and our alienation from the processes by which we glean our own sustenance, all of it poisoned and redolent of death. In one poem, “The/ incandescent DEAD/ ...splash/ & crispen/ on the oily griddle.” In another, the water supply is full of sulphur, benzene, radioactive waste. In “In Hogbutcher City,” “Odors/ of death/ ...prepare carcasses/ with seasonings/for family picnics...” “Production Scheduling” is perhaps a comment on the factory farming system — baby piglets are slaughtered according to a production model, and, “Wait, one is alive/ and blinking/ OK, I can fix that/ with my tire iron.”

Stone’s vision is often violent and apocalyptic, but it is little details such as these that make us see the connection between the horror and our daily lives. These are not poems for the faint-hearted, but both subject and form (often clipped, prose-like, philosophical iterations of ideas and images) force us to reexamine contemporary society and the wider world in which we live. Highly recommended.

Addendum: Stone’s previous book The Bloodhound Works has been translated into Serbian by Ivan Glišić as Krvožeđe. Further information can be obtained from: ivangl [at] sbb.rs

Review of Liam Mac Sheóinín, Mid-Eternity

2011-06-16T18:11:00.009-04:00

On this Bloomsday, I am pleased to be able to write a few words about Liam Mac Sheóinín’s novel George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity (Serving House Books, 2011). I know Mac Sheóinín (indeed a brief blurb from me appears on the back cover of the book), so I can’t say this is an impartial review, but my admiration for his work is genuine. As editor of The Burning Bush, I published a couple of excerpts from Mid-Eternity, yet reading it in full book form is quite an amazing experience. Very few people are writing like Mac Sheóinín now. With the ascent of creative non-fiction, memoir, crime fiction, and the like, literary fiction of this sort has largely been shunted to the sidelines. As the Western world’s collective cultural intelligence quotient continues to drop daily, and our universities are turned into degree-printing assembly lines for business majors, fewer and fewer people are being equipped to read a novel such as this. James Joyce himself wrote in Finnegans Wake, “Wipe your glosses with what you know,” but today many people seem to know less and less. All of which is to say that Mac Sheóinín’s Mid-Eternity will not be a bestseller, but nevertheless it is to my mind a welcome addition to the corpus of poetic-prose novels in the mode of Joyce, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Djuna Barnes.

The novel’s main character is an Irish-American Jersey Shore coke dealer named Brian Jordan. It is the late 1980s. Jordan is an anomaly as a coke dealer — he is interested in Joyce, philosophy, linguistics (oh, and anal sex), and intersperses much of his speech with obscure (to those around him) literary references. Jordan runs a bar and a strip club with his partner Dentelupo, is seeing the girlfriend (Rachel) of an acquaintance, and spends part of his time in the local library (à la Stephen Dedalus), where at one point he runs into the novelist Martin Amis — or is it Martin Amis the character in Money? Mid-Eternity is sub-titled “A Menippean Satire,” and Amis certainly is satirized — enough to, as was the power of the poets in ancient Ireland, bring boils to his face. Harold Bloom the literary critic also makes an appearance and comes off only slightly less scathed than Amis. The Bushes, both W. and H.W., tend to be described in simian (the former) and sinister (the latter) terms, and the scene from which the book derives its full appellation is hilarious.

Jordan is also given to visionary moments, which may or may not be encouraged by drugs and Jameson, and further he is seemingly abducted by aliens (Zeta Reticulans), who supply the coke he sells. In a parody of the detective novel — or is it in homage? — there is a murder. Such is the plot. The blurbs tend to portray Mid-Eternity as a rollicking, madcap good time, and they are not at all wrong in that. But I think there is something further going on here. Neither Menippean satire nor the modernist / postmodernist novel is really about plot. Mid-Eternity is about character and language, and puts forward ideas in something of a stochastic manner. “The true writer has nothing to say,” conjectures Jordan in one internal monologue, “It’s the fucking way he says it.” This may not be the first time it’s been suggested but it bears reiterating, and while it may sound coarse as presented, it suggests a deeper and possibly mystic sensibility. Clearly, this is a novel that is conscious of a tradition — not just of the 20th century, but going at least as far back as Scotus Eriugena.

Jordan, and Mac Sheónín himself, have actualized “A world where poetry is legal tender.” For Jordan, it may be in the form of his own wishful thinking, but Mac Sheónín really does create for the reader who understands his references a cosmology based on Joyce, poetry, and all of the above. Finnegans Wake, “the eternal book,” is Jordan’s “passport” to “sráid na réaltaí,” the Zeta Reticulans’ Irish-language term for the otherworld (meaning “street of stars”). The aliens have decided to intervene in human affairs because “your race has, largely, rejected Finnegans Wake.” These are wry strokes, but at the same time is this really so off in its sentiment? Mac Sheóinín is (if it is not obvious at this point in the review) an unapologetic Joycean, and Mid-Eternity takes Joyce as a given first premise. It is a work which builds on this premise; it is in dialogue with Joyce. Joyce is the greatest novelist of the 20th century. The literature of the 21st must of course continue to become itself, but I would be happy for it to spring from Joyce (in some way). And so Mac Sheóinín’s book is significant not only as an eminently worthy 252 pages of writing (and reading), but also because it is a marker of one possible direction for contemporary fiction.

An Túaille Scanrúil

2011-06-12T18:02:00.001-04:00

Is mór an clú atá ar na Pittsburgh Steelers, an fhoireann péile Meiriceánaigh, ar fud an domhain. Comhartha naofa do thacaithe na Steelers is ea an “túaille scanrúil” (an “terrible towel” as Béarla). Feictear an túaille buí seo go flúirseach ag cluichí na foirne agus i ngach áit i mBaile Phitt. Go spéisiúil, tá leagan Gaeilge le feiceáil sa chathair sin anois. Ar an drochuair, tá botún mór déanta air — tá an chomhréir ainmfhocal-aidiacht as ord.

Kali’s Tongue (The Vinyl Press)

2011-05-10T16:17:00.007-04:00

I am included in a chapbook homage to the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. The book is called Kali’s Tongue and is published by a new imprint, The Vinyl Press. Each poem responds to a song on the album. My piece, a mixture of poetry and poetic prose, is on “I Got the Blues.”

Editor Justin Kishbaugh has written this explanatory note:

Kali’s Tongue is the first in series of Vinylist texts that offer poetic interpretations of the songs on a particular artist or band’s album — in this case, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. As a text, Kali’s Tongue attempts to build upon the general public’s willingness to apply meaning to music by using it as a bridge to poetry. Ultimately, Kali’s Tongue sutures the wound that exists between the art of poetry and mainstream consciousness, and seizes upon music’s fundamental imprint to create and present a poetic record of a song’s event and the fuller context, or album, within which it exists.

Copies of this sharply-designed little volume can be purchased at the pop-up bookstore Fleeting Pages in Pittsburgh through the first week of June. It can also be ordered for $5.50 postage-paid. For ordering info, email: thevinylpress[at]gmail[dot]com

“Manifesto” in TINGE Magazine

2011-04-27T00:33:00.003-04:00

My poem “Manifesto” appears in the inaugural issue of TINGE Magazine, the new online literary journal produced by Temple University’s MFA program. TINGE is really well done. My poem is a recent piece. Check it out.

Mairéad Byrne’s The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven

2011-04-24T22:01:00.003-04:00

Mairéad Byrne sent me her latest book The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius, 2010) a while back, and foolishly I let it sit for a long time in the pile of books that I have been letting build up for ages now. Somehow I assumed it would be tough to read, and it is 208 pages, and I’ve just been so busy, etc., etc. Bad choice, and how wrong I was, because I could have been talking about this one, recommending it, rereading it, for so much longer, because it’s that good that you’d want to. On the other hand, I get to right now experience that jolt of discovery, having read the whole thing in a day, and am still in the mode of enthused response.

The poems herein first appeared on Byrne’s blog Heaven (thus the title of the book), and so the question arises, why a book, can’t these poems just all be read online? Well, the reason why a book, or one reason anyway, is because this book is a great little object, an excellently-designed artifact in itself, with a sharp cover (by Stephanie Barber) and layout. On top of that, it has one of the best back cover blurbs ever, supplied by Luke Kennard, who ends by saying, “…it’s a beautiful, angry, generous collection and if you don’t like it you’re a fucking idiot.” Yes indeed.

Personally, I like books better than the internet. I like the feel and smell of them, and am interested in their construction and structures. The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven is divided into sections, rough thematic chapters — “Calendar,” “Everyday Lunacy,” “Found,” “Interviews,” “Numbers,” “War,” etc. Byrne is an experimentalist of sorts, though I realize a term such as this may be restrictive. Her work is actually very wide-ranging, from short imagistic poems like “Fall” (“Now when I come home at night/ I take my pate off/ & watch the gold & auburn trees/ surge & blow”) to imagined interviews with a figure like the poet Charles Reznikoff, to found poems, to political poems (there are a number of anti-war pieces here with titles such as “Rubble,” “Baghdad,” “Headlines”), to the surreal poems of the section “Everything Is Unlikely.”

I suspect that Reznikoff is important for Byrne, because the found poem is to the fore in this collection (as has been the case in other of her books). In this regard, I also see an affinity to the work of Caroline Bergvall, not only in the manipulation of found texts (be it through erasure, addition, collage, cut-up), but in Byrne’s similar interest in the interplay of languages and cultures. “An Educated Heart” is a play on the poem’s title phrase in several different languages (I can see Spanish, Irish, German, French, and Chinese, but I think there are others), sometimes rendered phonetically. “Mount Pleasant” celebrates the neighborhood of the same name in Providence, Rhode Island, which seems to be the location of a number of Latino businesses (e.g. Tiende y Panaderia Guatemalteca) existing alongside places like Family Dollar and Print-It Plus. Byrne herself is Irish, having immigrated to the United States “for poetry,” as her bio note at the end of the book proclaims.

As I stated above, I was initially under the mistaken assumption that this would somehow be a difficult book. And in fact I do happen to like difficult poetry, so that would have been just grand too. As it happens, this collection is quite substantial and by no means trivial, but there’s a whimsicality to it, a conversational feel, which allows the reader to enter into Byrne’s poetry with ease. Her work includes much in the way of personal detail, yet it is not “confessional.” It is humorous but never trite. It is experimental but not hermetic. It is of the world, of life. Byrne’s poem “Donald Hall Would Hate Me” is a sort of manifesto, an ars poetica, and articulates her own approach to poetry better than I can at the moment:

Donald Hall Would Hate Me

if he knew me
I don’t want to be great

it takes me 10 minutes
to write a poem

sometimes
& then

I want to whisper or
shout it about
town

My poems are usually brief
they resemble each other
they are anecdotal
they do not extend themselves
they make no great claims
they connect small things to other small things

I LIKE SHORT!

I just want to kick the leaves
& have done

Part of me in a way feels like I should be doing a more in-depth, disciplined “criticism” of this collection — I don’t want to give this short shrift — but right now I really just want to say how much I liked it. And you probably will too.

Alan Jude Moore review in JSTOR

2011-04-10T11:33:00.006-04:00

Here is another of my book reviews in Poetry Ireland Review, through the JSTOR database. This one is on Alan Jude Moore’s first collection, Black State Cars (Salmon Poetry, 2004). The review appeared in PIR No. 82 (2005). PIR was then edited by Peter Sirr.

If you have a JSTOR log-in, you can read the whole thing at the first link, above.

Begnal in Pittsburgh Magazine

2011-03-27T20:10:00.005-04:00

The April 2011 edition of Pittsburgh Magazine features an article about a recent New Yinzer poetry reading I was part of at ModernFormations Gallery in that city, along with Alan Jude Moore and others.

While I’m not mentioned in the online version, the print version features a photo of me reading on the night. For those with good eyesight, though, I am also in the audience in the photo that accompanies the online article (photo by Jim Judkis, reproduced above) (Kevin Finn is the reader here). In any case, if you’re in the Pittsburgh area, do go out and pick up a hard copy. The article, by Kris Collins, is an interesting overview of the present state of Pittsburgh’s literary scene.

Reading at Duquesne University, Fri. 3/18

2011-03-16T18:43:00.002-04:00

I will be wowing audiences — or at least an audience should hopefully be present — this Friday night, reading poetry as part of the Duquesne University English Department’s graduate Echoes Conference. Also on the bill are John Fried (fiction), Craig Bernier (fiction) and Christina Rawls (poetry). The proceedings begin at 7:00pm at the Duquesne Union Africa Room.

Interestingly, I just found out that Duquesne’s campus includes a building (Mellon Hall, pictured) designed by the great architect Mies van der Rohe. It’s right across from the Union, where the reading takes place.

Begnal i bhFoinse an tseachtain seo

2011-03-07T22:31:00.002-05:00

Chuir an nuachtán Foinse agallamh orm mar chuid d’alt a fhoilseofar Dé Céadaoin faoi Ghaeilgeoirí atá thar lear. Tá cóipeanna ar fáil saor in aisce i bpáirtíocht leis an Irish Independent gach Céadaoin. Mar sin, pioc suas é!

The Irish-language newspaper Foinse will publish an article about Irish-speakers across the world in this Wednesday’s edition. I will be part of this, having been interviewed for the piece a few days ago. Copies are distributed free with each Wednesday’s Irish Independent, so if you’re in Ireland pick one up!

Review of Somhairle MacGill-Eain et al. in JSTOR

2011-03-03T22:06:00.006-05:00

Another old(ish) review of mine in Poetry Ireland Review, this one being from No. 75 (Winter, 2002/2003) — and it’s online through JSTOR. This one is of three books: Dàin do Eimhir by modernist Scots Gaelic poet Somhairle MacGill-Eain (a.k.a. Sorley MacLean), ed. Christopher Whyte, Furnace of Love: A Selection from the Religious Poetry of Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin (the somewhat earlier Irish Gaelic poet), trans. Pádraig J. Daly, and the collection Mis by contemporary Irish-language poet Biddy Jenkinson.

Review of Catherine Walsh, Optic Verve

2011-02-21T17:06:00.003-05:00

I have written a review of Irish experimental poet Catherine Walsh’s most recent book, Optic Verve (Shearsman 2009), now online at Todd Swift’s blog site Eyewear. The review suggests that, rather than engaging in wordplay for wordplay’s sake, Walsh actively critiques the way in which language may be employed in the service of dominant hierarchies, and that the pressures that cause language loss and even media censorship are, as Walsh notes, “a crucial determining factor in how people choose to interact socially, what they aspire to attain.” Perhaps, though, Walsh also explores (enacts?) possible ways around such language oppression. But there’s much more to this, so swing over to the review itself (linked above) and check it out.

Mac Lochlainn review in JSTOR

2011-02-15T22:18:00.004-05:00

Tá mo léirmheas de Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues le Gearóid Mac Lochlainn (in Éigse Éireann Uimh. 73, Samhradh 2002) ar fáil tríd an bunachar sonraí JSTOR anois.

My review of Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues by Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, in Poetry Ireland Review No. 73 (Summer 2002), is now available through the JSTOR database. The full review is available to anyone with a JSTOR log-in.

Salmon’s Off-Site Reading at AWP 2011

2011-01-24T17:14:00.009-05:00

I will be taking part in Salmon Poetry’s off-site AWP reading in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the 30th anniversary of this great press. It takes place on Friday, Feb. 4th, at 8pm, at Pigment Art Studio, 1848 Columbia Rd. NW, Washington, D.C.

This is a blockbuster reading, also including the launch of 10 new poetry collections by Andrea Cohen, Christoher Locke, Allan Peterson, Philip Fried, Drew Blanchard, Drucilla Wall, Simmons Buntin, John Fitzgerald, Alan Jude Moore, and Patrick Chapman.

As well as the above, readers include Kevin Higgins, Susan Millar DuMars, Stephen Powers, Patrick Hicks, Eamonn Wall, Helene Cardona, Devon McNamara, William Pitt Root, J.D. Smith, Pam Uschuk, Adam Tavel, Irene McKinney, Jeanne Wagner, and, as I mentioned, myself.

The event is supported by Culture Ireland. Hope to see you there....

Oh, and Salmon will also have a table at the AWP Bookfair. Its location is Table E26, Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Exhibition Level. My book Ancestor Worship will be on sale, as well as Salmon’s other books, so please stop by. The Bookfair runs every day during the conference.

New Yinzer reading, Feb. 2nd

2011-01-17T11:53:00.006-05:00

Mark your calendar, call the newspaper, there’s an upcoming poetry event! I will be giving a reading in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, February 2nd, as part of “The New Yinzer Presents” series. It takes place at ModernFormations Gallery, 4919 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, 8 p.m. Admission is $5 or, if you can cook, free with contribution to potluck.

Reading with me is Alan Jude Moore, a fellow Salmon poet, who is coming all the way from Dublin, Ireland. Moore is one of the best of the new generation of Irish poets, and this is a great opportunity to hear someone one might not always get to hear. Also reading are Pittsburgh-based poets Ellen McGrath Smith and Kevin Finn. It looks like it’s going to be a good time.

Click here for more details, to check out the author photos, bios, etc.

Review of Best Irish Poetry

2011-01-13T16:17:00.008-05:00

My review of the Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions) now appears at Todd Swift’s blog Eyewear. Books of this type are handy snapshots of the contemporary poetry of a time and place (country, region, etc.), but can’t really pretend to be objective, can they? I mean, so much of it comes down to who’s editing the thing. So, what of the contemporary Irish poetry as seen here through the lens of editor Matthew Sweeney? You are just one click of a link away from finding out....

James Liddy, Fest City

2010-12-22T18:53:00.009-05:00

Photographed above is James Liddy’s latest poetry collection, Fest City. It has just been published by Arlen House (launched last month in Dublin) and features cover artwork by Kyle Fitzpatrick (click on the photo to zoom in). It is also worth noting that it’s Liddy’s first posthumous collection. Because I wrote the Afterword for this book I’m not in a position to review it, exactly, but I will say that for me personally I think it is some of James’s best work.

My Afterword, titled “In James Liddy’s Country,” begins like this:

It’s been two years since James Liddy’s death. But with Fest City I return to Liddy’s country, as I often do through reading his work. Liddy’s country is a wondrously singular place. It is not Ireland, as much as it often resembles it, and it’s not America either, as much as it resembles the latter as well. But that’s one of the reasons why I like Liddy’s country so much – because it reminds me of these familiar places, and yet it’s something distinctly else. Liddy’s country is poetry. A poet has to make his own country. His country is self-created, or recreated, through the medium of poetry. To put it another way, the poet creates himself through poetry. I’m sure that something like this has been said before, but if ever there was a poet who exemplified this dynamic, it was Liddy. In fact, in many ways, his life and his poetry were virtually indistinguishable. Both his everyday speech and his written work, at least by the time I got to know him, seemed to me to occur on a similar plane; it all seemed to come from the same place, from his own country of poetry. His letters too were like poems, with gossip and tidbits of news included. And his poems sometimes read like letters (often they are addressed to particular people), delivered via the Muse from his mind to the page stamped with international postage....

To read the rest, but especially to read these great poems, do please order the book. It is available from Kenny’s Bookshop in Ireland, and distributed in the U.S. by Syracuse University Press.

Wasted Talent

2010-12-09T23:54:00.009-05:00

From 1981-early 1984 I was in a hardcore punk band called Wasted Talent. Without going into the whole history here, we released a tape, a sort of cassette album, called Self Rule, in 1982. In 1983, three of the songs from that recording were included on the compilation album The Master Tape Vol. 2, released by Affirmation Records, a Midwestern label, in 1983.

Wasted Talent is mentioned a couple times in the American Hardcore book by Steven Blush, our symbol/logo (which I designed in my bedroom as a 16-year-old kid) is included in the flyleaf of the book, a flier drawn by my brother for a WT show is reproduced there, and the band is also represented in the American Hardcore film.

Writer of both American Hardcore projects, Steven Blush, has also put up a web page called 24 Hours of Hardcore, which includes streaming MP3s of a ton of hardcore bands (911 songs!), including Wasted Talent. Titles are listed alphabetically (though one can sort by title, band name, year, or album title). Scroll down to the song “Off to War,” and click the link to play. Tracks can also be downloaded.

A blog site called Noise Addiction has a brief history of the band and links to rare Wasted Talent recordings.

[Incidentally, American Hardcore incorrectly lists the band as being from Harrisburg, PA. In fact, WT was from State College, PA.]

The Irish Collapse: Sicíní Coming Home to Roost?

2010-11-23T19:36:00.016-05:00

So the curtain has finally come down on Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” era. I lived in Ireland for a period that roughly corresponded with the worst excesses of its economic boom and witnessed the symptoms — property speculation, rising rents for smaller spaces, an obsession with mobile phones and the newest technological devices, and ridicule of anything that reminded one of Irish nationalism (conflated generally with the bad old days of Ireland before, say, the 1990s). I remember one Easter in the early 2000s, walking down the streets of Galway and overhearing two youths who had picked up a leaflet some group or other had had printed of the text of the Easter Proclamation. The two were reading it out loud to each other, but exaggeratedly and ironically: “...of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom....” Laughter ensued. I can’t say that I blamed these kids, who couldn’t have been more than 17 or 18 at the time and who clearly had come of age in a society quite alienated from the ideals of the 1916 Easter Rising, a society concerned more about car payments and holiday homes than history and independence struggles. But it did serve to provide a stark example in my mind of where Ireland was at at that point in time.

Interesting then to note that, as Ireland’s present-day ruling class and its bankers have driven the country’s economy into the ground and have in essence sold its sovereignty off to the IMF and the European Central Bank, The Irish Times would suddenly gesture toward the language of patriotism, 1916, and of Irish republicanism in a recent editorial titled “Was It For This?” (Nov. 18):

IT MAY seem strange to some that The Irish Times would ask whether this is what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Their representatives ride into Merrion Street today.

[...] A nation’s independence is defined by the choices it can make for itself.

Irish history makes the loss of that sense of choice all the more shameful. The desire to be a sovereign people runs like a seam through all the struggles of the last 200 years. “Self-determination” is a phrase that echoes from the United Irishmen to the Belfast Agreement. It continues to have a genuine resonance for most Irish people today.

The true ignominy of our current situation is not that our sovereignty has been taken away from us, it is that we ourselves have squandered it. Let us not seek to assuage our sense of shame in the comforting illusion that powerful nations in Europe are conspiring to become our masters. We are, after all, no great prize for any would-be overlord now. No rational European would willingly take on the task of cleaning up the mess we have made. It is the incompetence of the governments we ourselves elected that has so deeply compromised our capacity to make our own decisions....

There are a few things I would observe about this. For one, yes it does seem a bit strange. The Irish Times, similarly to most newspapers, of course has its own agenda and republicanism is not usually part of it. Though I have always considered The Irish Times the Irish newspaper of record, something like the New York Times, it has always seemed to me fairly anti-republican, in fact, and very D4 upper middle class. Nonetheless, this editorial pretty much hits the nail on the head, I have to say, even though it’s about 15 years too late. Ireland has indeed been sold out, but I don’t recall the IT being quite so vocal in its patriotism when, for example, the government twice re-ran referendums on European Union integration treaties when it didn’t like the initial “No” results.

Irish Times columnist John Waters responded to his employers’ apparent hypocrisy with a piece called “No Use Whining or Talking about the GPO N ow” (Nov. 19):

Emerging from the mists of the 1950s, and finding ourselves with an undeveloped economy and no clue how to make it function, we decided to sell off our natural resources and bits of our sovereignty in return for folding stuff. Then we hit on the idea of offering Ireland to the multinational industrial sector as a cheap location in which to operate, no questions asked, which meant that our people could be provided with jobs without any expenditure of indigenous effort. Then we joined the euro and thought it no more than our due when Ireland was flooded with German money looking to turn a trick.

Surrendering all levers and mechanisms by which we might have continued to exercise control over our own collective destiny, we lay back and subjected ourselves to the whim of world capitalism.

Now the casino has collapsed on top of us, why should we be surprised, still less embarrassed? When you place your fortunes in the hands of transnational gamblers, you should expect to see stars every once in a while.

The point is this: we are not the masters of our own destiny and have not been for many years. That’s how we wanted it. It is a bit rich, if I may use that term in this rather inapposite context, for those who led the charge to have us give away everything true and useful about ourselves to now be whining about the loss of sovereignty.

When you have conditioned people for years to turn their backs on the past and think and speak only about “Ireland Inc”, it might be wiser and more edifying to say nothing about the GPO.

Good point. And as someone who has myself spoken out over the years in my own humble way against the course Ireland has taken, I reserve the right to do so again, even if it entails reviving some degree of contrast with earlier history. Not that anyone would really have had reason to listen to me, an unknown poet, but back in 1998, I wrote a letter to the same Irish Times, which attacked “this age of encroaching European blandness.” I noted that Ireland was in some ways still dealing with the effects of British colonization and rhetorically asked whether the country was now “really going to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire of EU hegemony” in a vain attempt to demonstrate what I felt to be a mixed-up notion of “self-confidence.” I say it was a rhetorical question because clearly the answer was already yes. My letter then went on to bemoan Ireland’s plan to join the euro: “Isn’t anyone bothered that we’ll be giving up that particular Irish sensibility that sees fit to put animals like the horse, the salmon, and the bull on the country’s coins in exchange for utterly characterless maps of Europe?”

Though my concerns in this most likely glanced-at-then-quickly-forgotten letter were partly articulated in the realm of aesthetics, and infused with an obvious cultural-nationalist perspective, I sensed that what Waters speaks about in his more recent column would probably come to pass. Nationalism has no intrinsic value for its own sake I now realize, but arises in response to political, cultural, and/or economic oppression by outside forces. It can be a quite powerful bulwark against said forces. (This is not to say that I no longer see inherent value in Irish culture, language, and so forth, because obviously I do.) Only now have those forces become apparent to The Irish Times, it seems, in this new context of sudden economic collapse, as the IMF’s and the ECB’s “representatives ride into Merrion Street.” But I would suggest that in Ireland such forces had never truly disappeared, and as the IT correctly observes, inhabit the minds of Ireland’s own native ruling class and probably certain sections of its people. They are not only outside, but in.

I have long thought that Ireland is still going through a series of phases in response to its former colonization. During the period of 1916-1922, after hundreds of years of exploitation and cultural disembowelment, it asserted and gained its political independence. The nationalism that was theretofore valid and inspiring began to ring hollow when Ireland quickly became an economic backwater and was essentially raising its children for emigration. Suddenly by the 90s, through some rather dubious strategies (as Waters succinctly describes above), Ireland became the “Celtic Tiger” and the country was transformed into a bastion of nouveau riche who shallowly imagined that a few years of success could erase everything. It was always inevitable, I thought, that there would be a shocking return to hard times, and that perhaps this would force people to reassess, and maybe then would Ireland finally be itself having weathered this new turn. Something like thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Well, whatever about such grander theories. The immediate problem now is that Ireland is pretty much screwed for a while. It has been pimped out to German banks and to the EU. Instead of punishing the property speculators, the bankers, or the people who secretly made the decisions which got the country into this situation to begin with, it is the average person who will now have to suffer in the government’s soon-to-be-imposed austerity measures, which seem likely to include deep cuts in health care, social welfare, the minimum wage, etc. That is, if the government lasts that long. It looks like it will be brought down sooner than expected. But then what? Fianna Fáil obviously deserves to be voted out, if not run out, of office, but its inevitable replacement of a Fine Gael-Labour coalition won’t be any better. Fine Gael is simply Fianna Fáil Lite, and they have had their own corrupt politicians over the years, their own cronyism. Labour long ago ceased being the party of Connolly and Larkin and have in recent decades been nothing more than a prop to one or the other of the two big Civil War parties.

It can only be hoped that the anger and resentment the Irish people currently feel will somehow evolve into a new politics, perhaps elevating one of the smaller parties — Sinn Féin, perhaps — into contention. Or perhaps some completely new party or movement can yet spring up. If Sinn Féin is in the mix, though, they cannot continue to rehearse their previous platforms which have worked in the North (as sympathetic as I have been to them) if they want to make a difference in the Republic. The old opponents have morphed. They are no longer an easily, politically identifiable British Empire, but instead, as they are the world over, the shadowy forces of uncontrolled corporate greed which operate both extra-nationally and indigenously. The recent protests were good to see, however, in an Ireland which has been asleep for far too long.

When you cede control of your monetary policy to the EU, you become prey to the more powerful forces that control it, and this is exactly what we’re witnessing now. Not that Ireland should cut its EU ties, and it’s probably true that a small country like Ireland cannot go it completely alone, but it's worth observing that the country became economically successful while the punt was still in existence. The euro is not necessary. The present economic model of the EU has shown to be wanting, and it was a lie that countries would have to give up sovereignty in exchange for economic certainty. Ireland did all of that, and this disaster has happened anyway. In light of this, the economist Paul Krugman has briefly laid out a possible scenario for exit from the euro:

I used to be a full believer in the Eichengreen theory of euro irreversibility, which said that no nation could even discuss leaving the euro, because it would lead to the mother of all bank runs. But as I wrote in April,

But now I’m reconsidering, for a simple reason: the Eichengreen argument is a reason not to plan on leaving the euro — but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands.

Krugman goes on to write that we’re not at “crisis-level yet. But the ghost of a possible ejection from the euro is starting to become visible.” This is apparently not an isolated opinion, as Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has today noted, “It’s our common currency that’s at stake.” Only time will tell if such a thing might happen, but for Ireland, things are pretty bad. I guess, though, it would ring hollow for me to invoke the spirit of 1916 since The Irish Times has already beaten me to it, or even as a poet to say that Yeats would be rolling over in his grave or something — because this is a new situation, a unique point in history and time. But it sure appears that the chickens and the stylized Celtic birds which used to grace the old 1-pingin coins may finally be coming home to roost.

Pharoah Sanders live!

2010-11-19T19:26:00.007-05:00

Caught the Pharoah Sanders show at the August Wilson Center last week (Nov. 13), and how really great it was. I was surprised firstly by how bop-focused it was. While my sense of Sanders is overwhelmingly tied to his late 60s and early 70s free-jazz work on Impulse! (and also from his intense free stuff with Coltrane in the mid-60s), his bop sensibility on the night was impeccable. I know this is not news to anyone who has followed his post-Impulse! career. That’s not my favorite period of his career, but this performance maybe made me rethink Sanders a little bit. Pharoah’s band, consisting of his touring pianist William Henderson along with the Pittsburgh rhythm section of Dwayne Dolphin (bass), Roger Humphries (drums) and George Jones (congas), held it down solid, and I suspect their own bop sensibilities at least fed into (if not drove) the vibe. I say this partly because, in the advance article in the City Paper, Pharoah suggested that he would go with the flow of his band: “We’ll just get together and start playing....I might just call a key: F-sharp minor, and that’s it. Everybody just blows. It’ll always be right.” So I initially expected the set to be freer, more spontaneous. Instead it was very directed and very much in the bop mode, and it only makes sense that Sanders would play to the band’s strengths.

I was surprised secondly also by how Coltrane-centric this set was (again, I probably shouldn’t have been, since Sanders has recorded late-period tributes to Coltrane). The band opened with a marathon version of “My Favorite Things” (at one point, I thought, incorporating the theme of Coltrane’s “Afro Blue,” which resembles it in a way) and finally closed, as an encore, with “Giant Steps.” Henderson’s piano-playing was often reminiscent of McCoy Tyner, utilizing his signature block chords throughout most of the evening. That said, there were also some quite original progressions on his part, Monk-like in their mathematicality, but in what I guess I should call even a Henderson-like mode. Broadly speaking, though, this was very Coltrane Quartet of the early 60s — bop structures but with free, exploratory solos.

Pharoah himself was not quite as guttural or shrieking as in his earlier days. But the tone of his tenor is so uniquely his own, and that in itself was what was revelatory about the show, to hear it live, in front of you, rather than the ultra-intense bursts of energy contained on albums such as Tauhid, Jewels of Thought, Izipho Zam, Black Unity, or Village of the Pharoahs. Those bursts were still there in this set, however, from time to time. Pharoah would occasionally toss them out, or alternatively work up to a certain level, where, it seemed to me because he is so immensely talented and skilled, he can just let go and let the spirit move him (so to speak) to heights of beauty. Equally beautiful were those rare moments of squawk or overblown notes. Pharoah has always been so good at playing overblown notes that he can even play them melodically. At a couple of points in the set, also, he stopped blowing into his horn but continued to work the keys, allowing the air that was inside to be moved around by them, finally producing a quiet but unmistakable feedback-like sound. It was an inspired stroke, almost as if he was saying that he himself was but a vehicle for something else, the music, which is in the breath of life, existing on another level, actually outside of the person, occasionally allowing itself to be directed, though, and brought out into our world.

At age 70, Pharoah seemed to tire at times and would wander off-stage to take a break while the band did their thing(s). Well, who can fault him? But it was always a great moment of anticipation fulfilled when he’d walk back out, tenor at the ready, to renewed applause from the audience, and begin playing again. While the backing band was great, it was Pharoah we had all come to see. In the second half of the set, he once or twice stopped playing to dance around and dig his musicians, and the crowd would urge him on, some yelling, “Go Pharoah, go Pharoah!” And then he’d move back to his spot and blow some more. This was what it was like to hear and to see the greatest living tenor player. Perhaps Archie Shepp is a close second, but that accolade has to go to Pharoah Sanders now, and this show was proof.

Begnal Poem at Dark Sky

2010-10-28T16:50:00.005-04:00

I have a poem titled “Dear _____,” online at the site of Dark Sky Magazine and Books. I really like this journal/publisher/blog and so am very pleased to appear there. Many thanks to them. And do go check it out, maybe leave a comment, etc.

David Stone, The Bloodhound Works

2010-10-25T17:58:00.004-04:00

I’ve written a lot about David Stone’s work already (see here, here, and here), but I just received his newest chapbook in the mail, and it is another great installment in the corpus of one of our most original poets. The Bloodhound Works (published by Propaganda Press/Alternating Current) is subtitled “Selected Poems 2009,” and marks Stone’s response the present economic upheaval the world seems to be undergoing. While his bio at the end of this 4¼ x 5½” pamphlet states that Stone “lives on some scraps from the financial crisis,” many of the poems themselves evoke it: “Bus passengers/ crashed in orbit./ Marauders and pirates/ scanned the premises of hell./ The bloodhound/ found the trail/ of body parts/ and blood/ in lit streets/ and open fields/ and demanded food/ on the diner/ parking lot” (“The Bloodhound’s Work”).

“Dithyramb”

2010-10-07T18:40:00.005-04:00

A poem of mine titled “Dithyramb” now appears at Todd Swift’s online journal/blog site Eyewear. Read it here.

Coltrane

2010-09-23T22:41:00.026-04:00

Today is John Coltrane’s birthday —

we mythologize and love our heroes
and propagate their images,
quantum leaps of evolution —

The best musicians, writers, artists for me are the ones who, either steadily over time but perhaps in radical bursts, change their style or approach, each work in part an attempt to surpass the previous. If you’re just going to be content to repeat the same old thing over and over, what’s the point.

For me, Coltrane exemplifies the artist who strives to surpass himself. It was no accident that one of his albums was titled Giant Steps. Call it arrogance, or call it the truth. In actuality, Coltrane from what I can tell was greatly humbled before the gift of his own talent, and felt it was his duty to explore it to the furthest extent possible. Sometimes that meant disappointing or exasperating fans, but for those who were willing or able to go along with him....

Coltrane, in this regard, has an analogue in Joyce — each of his works was a radical advance on what came before — each great in its own right, but compare the style of Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. Compare Blue Train to A Love Supreme to Live in Seattle — each great, but representative of the time and of the artist at a particular stage in his development. The only constant is change, and in that regard the art reflects life.

There are some who see staying the same as some kind of virtue, wanting to remain the same as long as possible, who therefore look to the past and wish to live in the past as a refuge. While I think there must always be some kind of core sense of who one is which is carried forward (and yes there are also great artists who do one thing all the time and do it really well, such as the Ramones or Charles Bukowski), the inability to evolve to me means a kind of death.

Death means things are fixed finally in time and that there are no more possibilities, no hope of the future. Coltrane is dead, but what he and his art represent — life and its concomitant change, the possibility of striking away what is stale and stultifying and taking up new and further explorations, the progression of the same artist only in a different form —

2 Poems in Poets for Living Waters

2010-09-01T17:27:00.006-04:00

Poets for Living Waters, edited by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, is “a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history.” Its site states that, beyond its current Web existence, a print anthology is also planned.

I am pleased to have two poems now online as part of this very worthwhile project. The poems are titled “Yellow Wave” and “The Black Gulf.” I was also asked to contribute a “Statement,” which came out as a third poem of sorts, a short, manifesto-like prose-poem perhaps.

It’s satisfying to note the high quality of the other work appearing on the site as well, most of which is cutting-edge, progressive, and veers away from the maudlin or hysterical hand-wringing that one might perhaps expect from lesser editors. Not that people shouldn’t be angry about the spill itself (they should), but what I mean is that there’s some really good, and often experimental, poetry here.

Poem in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

2010-08-28T11:53:00.002-04:00

A poem of mine titled “Submerged Town Reappears” is published in today’s edition of Pittsburgh’s newspaper of record, the Post-Gazette. It appears in both the print and online versions of the paper.

Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers

2010-08-25T02:04:00.009-04:00

Harmony Korine’s latest film, Trash Humpers (2009), is one of his best, and is his most experimental and non-linear work yet. Its setting is similar to that of his earlier film Gummo (1997) — American waste — but is even more extreme and crazier. I suppose “setting” is a questionable term in this case, as Trash Humpers is barely scripted if at all (apparently some segments were loosely scripted, but most of it was improvised). The filming took place in Korine’s native Nashville, in its back alleys and abandoned parking lots, highway service roads and overgrown backyards. It depicts three people, sometimes four, two to three men and a woman, in old-people’s masks or make-up, who go around doing just what the film’s title implies — simulating sex with garbage cans, dumpsters, and other objects, sometimes fellating tree branches or plants. When not involved in this, they smash objects like cinder blocks, tv sets, and fluorescent lights while drinking bottles of cheap wine. But don’t make the mistake of looking for a “story.” There is none. Part of Korine’s brilliance is his having freed himself from the tyranny of linear narrative. There are recurring elements, motifs, but thankfully no story (not that story can’t be done well, but here it would inevitably be hokey). In this regard, Trash Humpers as an abstract film evokes life more faithfully than any conventional film can. It is a series of unrelated events connected by nothing more than the chronology in which they have occurred. From what I have read, the scenes as we see them are presented in the order they were filmed. Perhaps, though, the mere presentation of these random scenes can be said to create a kind of narrative in itself. If so, so be it. At least it is organic and, dare I use this word, real.

Certain scenes verge on disturbing. The characters take a hammer to a baby doll’s face, repeatedly, or drag it behind a bicycle. It sounds innocuous enough, tacky even, but through the repetition of these scenes an odd sense of pathos begins to develop for the doll, which is heightened by the later introduction of a real human baby. In another scene, shot in a room of a house, a kidnapped man is killed in a very realistic-looking manner. These are not necessarily nice people (nor were the kids in Gummo). But in their seeming nihilism, there is meaning to be found. I hesitate to make this an essay on the meaning of the film, because I think the meaning is supposed to be, at least according to Korine, secondary to his filmic concerns. As with the films of David Lynch (who also tends to deny any underlying meaning in his work), though, it is there. It has to do with being an outsider in American society, being excluded from it, as one of the characters articulates towards the end of the film, asserting that most people would envy the freedom their lifestyle bestows because their own lives are mundane and predictable. (Ironically, ironically, however, the character who posits this is wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt.) In all this Trash Humpers is vaguely reminiscent of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972) and Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), both of which also depict small but tightly-knit groups of people who reject societal mores by acting in their own particularly bizarre ways — but who are ultimately seen to be flawed people.

Korine himself has said the following about the characters in Trash Humpers: “It’s kind of like an ode to vandalism. There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction. You could say these characters are poets or mystics of mayhem and murder, bubbling up to the surface. They do horrible things, but I never viewed them as sad characters. They’re comedic, with a vaudevillian horror element to what they do. They dance as they smash things and set them on fire. They’re having a great time.” And it’s true. There’s a great and satisfying sound when the fluorescent bulbs explode, when the cinder blocks hit the tarmac, when the firecrackers are set off. There’s a visceral, unsettling effect to the shrieks added to the soundtrack, to the roughly-cut videotape on which the film was made. Korine’s medium here, video, is a critical element. Obviously, this wouldn’t be the film that it is if it wasn’t filmed/cut on video. In many ways it has the feel of contemporary home-shot video escapades made famous by tv shows such as Jackass. But beyond that, the video itself adds an aesthetic aspect that takes Trash Humpers to a whole other, lyrical level. Just as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) was deliberately shot on expired film stock, Korine’s medium here is crucial. Streetlights burn their light into the videotape like midnight suns. The strange flowing water in an industrial yard reflects clouds and sky in an unexpectedly heightened dream-like manner that almost seems counter to the cold, clear expectations that video implies.

Well, let me get to the point. As a statement, this is one of the best avant-garde films of our era, and possibly all time. Korine is our most ambitious director, our most experimental. Lynch has to be considered here too. But what sets him apart — this point John Menesini recently made to me — is that Korine is the quintessential American director. Not quintessentially American in the sense of Walt Whitman, but I would suggest more in the sense of William Carlos William (“The pure products of America/ go crazy—”). In the conversation with Menesini, I countered by saying, But Lynch’s themes are also quintessentially American. John said, Yeah but there’s something European in his technique; and I guess he’s right; Lynch is a descendent of surrealism. I love surrealism, but okay, that gives him a European influence. Nothing wrong with that (and maybe there’s even a kind of surrealism in Trash Humpers too?), but it leaves Korine as the one who is probably more naturally immersed in the American idiom. Korine’s America, though, is (almost) at a dead end. These characters are people with nothing much that is positive or generative to offer (the real baby that appears later in the film is stolen/kidnapped; old people humping trashcans is the antithesis of sex). Where Williams ultimately sees some kind of ongoing potential in the American people, Korine seems to be suggesting that America has become the wasteland (to continue the poetic metaphor, the wasteland of T. S. Eliot) that Williams rejected (in, for example, “Spring and All”). But Korine is not his characters, and I think the ultimate statement of Trash Humpers is that there is unexpected beauty and art in the overlooked back places of America, and that it takes a filmmaker like to Korine (or a poet like Williams) to find it. And is there not something generative and life-affirming in the act, in the improvisation? In a kind of filmic destruction which has imbedded in it the potential for subsequent new creation?

Jandek (Pittsburgh Thursday)

2010-08-08T19:34:00.021-04:00

On Thursday, August 5th, Jandek played a show in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It was a good venue for a show — an outdoor patio enclosed by a tent-like structure. I have now seen Jandek twice (and have written about the other show here). For an ostensibly reclusive musician, he actually plays out relatively often now. I suppose he has had to wrestle with the opposing concerns of maintaining his personal privacy and getting his music out to a live audience. I think it is possible to strike that balance, and from what I could tell the Pittsburgh crowd mostly left him alone. When he finally exited the stage after playing for two-and-a-half hours, there were no autograph hounds, no groupies rushing up to meet him. The kind of person who would go to see Jandek knows what he is like, and hopefully respects the fact that he doesn’t want to be bothered.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before the music started, I was in line to buy drink tickets and overheard one local fan remark to another, “I never thought this day would come.” There was real appreciation of this show. There was also a something of a “scene” element to the crowd — every “outsider” music fan in Pittsburgh must have been in attendance — still, there was a range of different people there too, including also poets, aging revolutionaries, a couple of children, parents, fellow musicians, artists (one woman, wearing a large bow tie, was later to be observed sketching the band as they performed), and perhaps a few curious onlookers. All of this being said, it was not quite a capacity crowd, which meant that there was a comfortable lack of jostling or jockeying for position closer to the stage.

Jandek suddenly took the stage, walking through the crowd, at about 8:15 PM. Whereas he played guitar when I saw him last year, this time he played keyboards. The backing band consisted of Pittsburgh musicians Dean Cercone on guitar and percussion, Spat Cannon on upright bass, and Andrew McKeon on drums. The quartet opened with an instrumental, and there seemed to be some concern about whether Jandek would sing or not. After this intro, though, Jandek intoned lyrics to every piece. He does not sing per se, but rather reads in an idiosyncratic manner over (and in complement to) the music. The subject matter seemed largely to deal with the ways in which people alienate and are alienated from each other in contemporary society.

Musically, I would describe this performance as ambient, but not in an electronic sense. Yes, Jandek’s keyboards occasionally had a synthesizer sound, but mostly they sounded like an analog piano or sometimes an electric organ. Spat Cannon’s bass, as previously mentioned, was the big old-fashioned upright instrument and hinted at jazz. McKeon used brushes (and their wooden nub-ends) on the drums. Cercone’s guitar playing — often executed with a drumstick — reminded me at times of Thurston Moore’s, though this is possibly a superficial observation. The sound was generally atonal — the band seemed to play in response to each other rather than together (which I do not mean as a criticism), but occasionally there were convergences. At one brilliant point, Cercone suddenly matched the note of Jandek’s held, off-kilter vocal with his guitar. Cannon occasionally fell into a hypnotic, rhythmic bass figure, which Jandek would briefly entrain with. But overall the sound was jagged and disjointed, which accorded well with Jandek’s words. After a whole two-and-a-half hours of such improvisations, Jandek unceremoniously began to pack up his things and walked off the stage, back out through the crowd, to the musicians’ rooms somewhere downstairs in the Arts Center building.

The show was organized by the novelist, poet, and publisher of Six Gallery Press, Che Elias. Pulling off the unwieldy event was a small triumph on his part, and at one point, not long into the set, while there was still some daylight and before the colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling of the tent were turned on, I observed this image: The sun had started to go down and hung low on the horizon; it had suddenly become visible (but for only a few minutes) at a long angle through a window flap to my left, bright red-orange so low you could look upon it and not have to avert your eyes in pain or blindness; it was this brilliant bright glowing pre-twilight red orb, glowing right above Che’s head as he stood there momentarily rapt in this music of Jandek which he had helped to bring to this place and point in time. For me, the image sums up the feeling of the night.

Philip Lamantia

2010-08-01T21:40:00.016-04:00

Above, a poem by Philip Lamantia. “Memoria,” from Semina 3, 1958. Source: http://writing.upenn.edu/library/images/semina/index.html

Lamantia’s selected poems is Bed of Sphinxes: New & Selected Poems, 1943-1993 (City Lights, 1997).

Some more Lamantia poems here, and some other writings (including poems) here. But his very best poems (at least the best ones in my opinion) don’t seem to be online.

Lamantia is commonly categorized as both a Beat and a Surrealist, with good reason (published in View and by André Breton in VVV at age 16; took part in the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1955). But these categories don’t matter so much as whether his poems are any good, and what they’re like, and what it’s like to read them. Titles of Lamantia poems can perhaps suggest what he’s like: “Man Is in Pain,” “In a Grove,” “Hypodermic Light,” “The Ancients Have Returned Among Us,” “Interior Suck of the Night,” “Isn’t Poetry the Dream of Weapons?” Isn’t it?

BP: Wanted for Murder?

2010-07-18T20:32:00.005-04:00

The BP oil disaster goes on, and so too does the consequential mass killing of animals caught up in this. It is to be hoped that the lawsuit against BP by Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center will be successful. They are taking the suit on the basis that the Endangered Species Act prohibits the harming of endangered animals. And, clearly, BP’s actions have harmed many.

While the suit is inherently bound by current law, I would like to suggest that on the ethical level, BP may perhaps be guilty of murder. While current law does not recognize an animal as a person (and therefore does not recognize the killing of animals as murder), the day may not be too far off when it does. In 2008, for example, a Spanish parliamentary committee agreed that the rights of life and freedom should be extended to great apes. More recently, and more directly related to the Gulf disaster, in January of this year a team of scientists declared that dolphins are second in intelligence only to humans and have called for them to be treated as “non-human persons.” Dolphins and other whales are now known to have a cognitive sense of themselves as individuals, to have complex social structures and culture — they can teach each other new innovations and skills — and, importantly, to have the capacity of language. The time has come for us to realize that we don’t have the right to slaughter creatures such as the dolphin simply because we are “people” and they are “animals.”

Let’s not forget that this disaster resulted first in the deaths of 11 crewmen, in the initial BP-leased Transocean oil rig explosion. It remains to be seen whether BP will ultimately even be held responsible for their deaths in any way. So the idea that they might legally be considered murderers for the deaths of the countless dolphins, sea turtles, sea birds, and other animals that are dying due to the pollution of their environment is far-fetched at this point in time. But when, for example, the Love Canal disaster unfolded, the responsible companies (Hooker Chemical and Occidental Petroleum) were eventually sued by the EPA and also settled numerous residents’ lawsuits. Certainly something like this will have to happen in the case of this BP Gulf oil disaster (prosecutions, hopefully). And perhaps, sometime in the foreseeable future, we will also come to view this situation for what it really is.

Begnal in London’s Poetry Library

2010-07-13T21:33:00.005-04:00

My poem “Silver Ghosts” is Poem of the Week at the site of Britain’s Poetry Library/Southbank Centre in London. That poem and two others are archived in the Poetry Library (“free access site to the full-text digital library of 20th and 21st century UK poetry magazines from the Poetry Library collection”) with the journal Iota. The poem is linked right on their homepage through Sunday. It can also be accessed directly here. Check it out....

Blue Canary 17

2010-07-08T16:55:00.006-04:00

Blue Canary 17, possibly the last issue of the Blue Canary, is out now. It is a tribute issue to James Liddy, the great Irish and Milwaukeean poet who died in late 2008. Editor Jeff Becker explains, partly humorously, that he published this issue for the fun of proving James wrong (James had told him, “When I’m gone, there won’t be any more Blue Canarys”). The front cover features a photo of Liddy (very similar to the one shown here) on Kilpatrick Strand, Co. Wexford, 1996. The back cover has one of him a child, circa 1944, and there are a couple other interesting photos in there as well. But of course it is the poetry and the prose reminiscences that make this essential for anyone who knew Liddy or who has read his work. The editor has arranged these pieces quite interestingly, I see, so that there seems to a progression or a linking of themes throughout the issue. For example, a poem by Liddy himself notes that “Jesus’s commands bring up the question: seduction and conversion merge” — and then several pages later in the magazine there is a cartoon by Bill Meyer depicting Jesus and James in bed together in heaven, post-coitus (yes, really). Fr. Ronald Crewe’s religiously-minded piece notes that Liddy, though a Catholic, “was not perfect,” and then immediately following is Paul Vogel’s portrait of Liddy’s less-than-perfect side (which I will only say is hilarious reading). It is editorial acumen like this that makes this Blue Canary so good. If it were merely a drab, respectful encomium, then it would really not do Liddy justice. (None of which is to say that any one contribution undermines the other, as Liddy was a multi-faceted person, as most of us are.) The journal, like James himself, will be missed. To obtain a copy, I recommend contacting Woodland Pattern Bookstore in Milwaukee.

The Stooges (some thoughts on three recent releases)

2010-06-28T17:50:00.009-04:00

The question of which band is the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time has perplexed humankind almost since the invention of the form itself. While a quite convincing case could be made for the Rolling Stones, for me there has never been any doubt — the Stooges are the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time. For many years, though, they have existed strictly as an underground phenomenon (the original group having disbanded in 1971, and the reformed group in 1974), despite Iggy Pop’s later fame. So in a way it’s been weird to see all the recent Stooges activity, the reunion, the re-releases, the demos and live shows being given the official treatment, their acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Weird, but good for them, and good for Stooges fans that more of their work has been made available.

The 2010 Rhino Handmade Collector’s Edition of the first album, The Stooges (1969), is notable primarily for the inclusion of the track “Asthma Attack,” which has never been available up to now. It brilliantly exemplifies the Stooges’ free jazz side, which came to the fore on their next album, Fun House (1970). In fact it is very similar to “L.A. Blues.” Some may see the noise jam as an inferior form, a throwaway cut on an album, but I think “Asthma Attack” is a great piece of music, and while it sets a tone for things to come, it also harks to what the band sounded like before they got a record contract and decided to write some actual songs. The vocals on “Asthma Attack” consist of the word “Tonight” sung several times, followed by a coughing evocation of a real asthma attack, followed at various points later by Iggy improvising (he always was an amazing improviser of lyrics). At times toward the second half of the piece, Ron Asheton’s guitar recalls Sonny Sharrock, who played on Pharoah Sanders’s Tauhid album, which Iggy has noted as an influence on the group. It would have been really interesting if The Stooges included “Asthma Attack” as its closing track, à la the sequencing of Fun House.

In fact, it would also have been interesting if the album had used the full uncut versions of the songs, some of which are included here, instead of the more familiar shortened and faded-out versions. “Ann,” for example, continues for about twice as long as the faded-out version on the original album. There’s a version of “We Will Fall” here which also continues on a bit further, with some extra flourishes of John Cale’s guest viola, and other nice tidbits such as outtakes of “Real Cool Time” and “Little Doll.” But all of that said, this Rhino package leaves something to be desired. For example, the versions of the John Cale mixes are slow. For some inexplicable reason, Rhino decided not to speed-correct these tracks, as they did do for the ones included on their 2005 re-release, and that is a serious mistake. I’m not a huge fan of the Cale mixes (the guitars are too low, and while the echo on Iggy’s vocals is interesting, it all comes off as Cale’s attempt to make the band sound more arty and less brutal), but not rendering them at the proper speed makes their inclusion here almost worthless. The vinyl 7” version of “Asthma Attack” is a nice touch, but since the track had to be split onto two sides, who’s going to actually listen to it over the intact CD version? This is still a must-have because of “Asthma Attack,” but something of a lost opportunity in other respects.

Last year, Easy Action released You Want My Action, which contains the only known recordings of the Stooges in 1971. These four very similar live shows (including the two now-famous Electric Circus shows in New York City) display some of their best material ever, in my opinion, and it makes the fact that they were dropped by Elektra Records before they could make a studio album of it all the more a travesty, and a tragedy. The 1971 version of the band is truly a missing link, including both Ron Asheton and James Williamson on dual guitars. The set’s opening song, “I Got a Right,” was later recorded as a demo when the reformed band was rehearsing for the Raw Power album in 1972. But these 1971 songs sound amazing. They are violent and aggressive like all of their material, but also have some of the groove of Fun House. “You Don’t Want My Name” and “Fresh Rag” are mid-tempo songs and with a garage-rock feel over which Ron and James lay down some blistering guitar solos. “Dead Body/Who Do You Love?” is somewhat slower and is perhaps reminiscent of the song “Dirt,” being based on a single repeated bass riff. “Big Time Bum” takes it back to a faster metallic vibe, and then the band moves into “Do You Want My Love?” which, with its intensity of guitar playing and feedback, almost achieves something of an industrial feel — but with a chugging rock’n’roll beat underneath it.

Because of the extremely low-fi nature of these 1971 recordings I have found that the best way to listen to them is turned up loud on computer speakers, with your head right between the two speakers. This almost makes it seem like you are there and somehow gives more separation between the two guitars. The vocals are, unfortunately, often less audible and buried in sludge. Still another reminder of the loss, the fact that these songs were not properly recorded before the band imploded right after this tour. The album that they could have made in 1971, and which I envision in my mind, would have been a masterpiece. You Want My Action at least gives a big hint at what could have been.

This year, Legacy Recordings released a repackaging of Raw Power (1973) which brings the album back to its original David Bowie mix, after the debacle of Iggy Pop’s 1997 remix (which I think pretty much sucked, and buried Williamson’s leads). That is Disc One. Disc Two is a live show from October 1973 recorded in Atlanta, here titled Georgia Peaches. There are lots of live recordings from 1973-74 out there, but this is indeed one of the better ones, both in terms of sound quality and playing. The opener, “Raw Power,” comes in sounding almost like a raw Velvet Underground track or something, and then the band plays “Head On” which was always one of my favorite Stooges songs from this era. Here it almost seems as if Scott Asheton is playing an all-snare-drum shuffle through the main riff (but I think it might actually be some kind of hiss that gives this impression), and Scott Thurston’s boogie-woogie piano adds a crazy aspect to it. Ron Asheton on bass drives everything forward, and Williamson’s guitar sounds heavy. Iggy is full of rage, and at the end of the song a girl in the audience is heard to say, “I don’t think he likes us!” Then we hear Iggy shouting at someone, “Hey you wanna get your little fucking face punched out, little cracker boy? Come up here! Come up here little [word unclear, ‘bitty’?] boy, I’m sick of your shit!” It’s similar to the atmosphere on Metallic K.O., but here there’s more of a sense of musical cohesion. One of Iggy’s improvised lyrics in “Gimme Danger” goes, “And if I gotta live in danger, just to live a real way, then I’ll break the law and die tomorrow, but I’ll live my way today.” This pretty much sums up the Stooges’ attitude, from day one on through to the end.

The bonus tracks on Disc Two are “Doojiman” (an outtake from the Raw Power sessions and essentially a single blues riff propelled by “1969”-like tom-toms and Iggy’s screaming and scatting), and a rehearsal tape of “Head On.” There is a deluxe version of the Raw Power package which includes a further disc of rarities, outtakes, and songs recorded only live or in rehearsals. I didn’t get the deluxe version, but I have much of the material on other discs, and it is worth having. Like the 1971 collection, it makes you wonder at what might have been. It’s too bad the Stooges weren’t able to record a follow-up to Raw Power before they broke up in early 1974. Their new material was great stuff, as this package demonstrates. The post-Stooges Iggy Pop and James Williamson album Kill City, which I hear is slated for its own re-release treatment soon, is great in its own way, but it’s not the album that could have been made with the Asheton brothers in 1973 or ’4.

Post-script: A couple of nights ago I sat in Kelly’s Bar drinking pints of beer (and at one point a Pimm’s Cup), and suddenly the bartender went over to his iPod and switched the song to the Stooges’ “1970” (from Fun House). Then immediately after hearing those initial Ron Asheton guitar chords, he turned it up some more, and it was loud. And it sounded good, the bass thick and heavy, the drums piercing. And “1970” is the song in which Steve MacKay’s tenor saxophone first appears, when his soloing starts and Iggy keeps yelling “Blow!” and things on the album suddenly get even crazier. It filled the bar, and it felt good to drink beer to, and I was reminded once again that listening to the Stooges is a good thing. It is always a good thing. And aren’t these moments what justify living?

We Are All Dead Pelicans

2010-06-12T18:50:00.013-04:00

The above photo could almost be beautiful, if we didn’t know what it is — a result of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This catastrophe continues to get worse and worse every second of every day, and now that it has emerged that the pipe is apparently ruptured underneath the seabed, it is likely that the gushing oil will simply continue to spew out indefinitely — for months, perhaps years — further destroying the ocean, the marshlands, the beaches, the animals that inhabit these environments, and the fishing and tourist industries of the regions affected. Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you already know how awful it is.

The question now is what to do about it. I am far, far from being an expert on this, but a few things seem clear. One is that, as a basic first step, offshore drilling has to be banned permanently. If this is not a wake-up call to the dangers of offshore drilling then I don’t know what is. Almost incredibly, though, we now have Republicans like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and disgraced Senator David Vitter calling for the immediate resumption of drilling. Other right-wing Republican figures such as Rand Paul and Sarah Palin, as well as “independent” billionaire Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg, have actually come out in defense of the BP murderers. In the face of such an enormous and unfolding catastrophe, their stances would seem nothing short of insane. Sadly, they are not insane. Quite to the contrary, they know full well what they are doing and why. To them, corporate profits simply rank higher than any possible concern for environmental destruction, animal suffering, or lost livelihoods. Vitter and Jindal, for example, claim that they are motivated by the need to save jobs in Louisiana’s oil industry, yet seem to care very little for jobs in the fishing or tourist industries. Palin’s husband Todd Palin has actually worked for BP as a production operator. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here....

As always, it’s all about corporate interests. Can anyone really be surprised? No, but this shows how hard it really will be to accomplish any real change in regard to oil policy, even when we see so starkly the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels. It would be nice to think that, for example, a boycott of BP could be effective, and perhaps it is a good way to register one’s anger, but I suspect ultimately it will come to nothing. Remember how horrible the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska was (and still is to this day)? I remember hearing stories on the news of people cutting up their Exxon credit cards and boycotting Exxon, but that corporation is still going quite strong. A lot of people were angry about Shell Oil’s activities in Nigeria and its involvement in the execution of Ogoni anti-Shell activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, but none of the subsequent anti-Shell boycotts have really done anything to change things or to affect Shell’s massive profits.

As understandable and necessary as it is, boycotting only one oil company is short-sighted — those who drive cars will still have to buy their gas somewhere. All oil companies are just as bad as each other, and they’re all in cahoots, along with the Congress-people and government officials who enforce (or rather don’t enforce, as the ongoing BP mess is revealing) the regulation of the industry. President Obama initially seemed like a ray of hope with his touting of a clean energy bill and so forth, but before this BP thing he had come out in favor of off-shore drilling as a sop to the Right, and to the disappointment of many of his supporters. While Obama is clearly preferable as a president to any Republican one could currently imagine, his story is yet another demonstration of the virtual impossibility of effecting change through government, when government itself is in the back pocket of the industry causing all the damage in the first place.

So watching all these horrible pictures on the news of animals dying, of fouled beaches and marshes, while people like Jindal, Vitter, and Palin run around trying to defend big oil — well, things seem bleak to say the least. We can have no faith that even Obama will do much to change this fucked-up state of affairs. Real change will only come when enough people have made it known that they will not stand for it. It will only come when a critical mass of the people forces this country to change its energy policy, when we in a sense boycott all oil companies and change this economy from one dependent on oil to the green-energy economy that Obama pushed for as a candidate. That means there will be no quick solution to any of this, but rather an ongoing process of demonstrations, publicity, elections, more demonstrations. Thankfully there are some groups out there such as Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, League of Conservation Voters, and many others who have been proactive in this regard. In New Orleans, a group called the Krewe of Dead Pelicans has been organizing protests in response to the spill. More of this, much more, is needed. Or we may all end up like dead pelicans, in one way or another.

“‘To Be an Irishman Too’: Jack Kerouac’s Irish Connection” in JSTOR

2010-05-09T01:29:00.008-04:00

My article on Jack Kerouac and Ireland — “‘To Be an Irishman Too’: Jack Kerouac’s Irish Connection” — from the journal Studies, Vol. 92, No. 368 (Winter 2003), is available through the JSTOR academic database here.

An abstract from the Studies site describes the piece like this:

Jack Kerouac’s assumption into the literary canon in America may have taken longer, because he tended to be regarded as some sort of all-American rebel-without-a-cause. But the “all-American” epithet is simpliste. French-Canadian, Kerouac had Breton ancestors; these in turn hailed from another Celtic stronghold, Cornwall — and traced their own distant forebears to Ireland. (“Kerouac” may be a synonym of “Kerwick” or “Kervick” — Ó Ciarmhaic: “dark son”). The Celtic oral tradition (speculates one biographer) may have something to do with his natural storytelling ability and extraordinary powers of memory.

As one of the working-class settlers south of the Canadian border, Kerouac knew what it was to be marginalised and discriminated against — and any Irish heartstrings in him were struck by the similar plight of the U.S. descendants of Ireland's post-Famine immigrants. (He also identified with Mexicans and black Americans — experiencing themselves as an underclass).

Explicitly, Kerouac accords recognition to his Irish heritage in the matter of literary influence. He renders homage to Joyce — and (among the novels) actual instances are to be found of experimental wordplay, as well as of multiplicity of authorial voices. He also alludes to Yeats’s isle of Innisfree — casting Ireland in the role of a fount of creativity. (The hero of one of the novels applies similes from the Irish landscape to the girl he loves — a landscape which, in real life, Kerouac had only managed to admire from a passing ship).

Meeting him in New York, Brendan Behan had no doubt that here was a soul-mate. Kerouac's influence is felt in the work of contemporary Irish writer Colum McCann, and is openly acknowledged by Cathal Ó Searcaigh. James Liddy quotes Patrick Kavanagh as saying that “the only people in America that are alive are men like Jack Kerouac” — and comments: “Both Kavanagh and Kerouac have in their language the sparkle of epiphany”... So Kerouac would seem not only to have picked up some Irish echo from “way back”, but to have made it resonate anew in Irish sensibilities.

Hunger (2008)

2010-04-27T00:24:00.015-04:00

Steve McQueen’s film Hunger (2008) touches on some of the wider issues surrounding the hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners of war in the H-Blocks in 1981, but focuses primarily on the figure of Bobby Sands, who was the C.O. on the blocks there, and who became one of the central figures in modern Irish republicanism. A brief recap of history is given at the beginning of the film. Republican prisoners are protesting for recognition of their political status and thus refuse to wear prison uniforms or do prison work like common criminals. McQueen employs excerpts of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s public proclamations that “crime is crime is crime” and so forth, and succeeds in making her sound ridiculous simply by letting her speak for herself, in her arrogant, slightly sarcastic tone. Ultimately it is Thatcher who stands behind all of the misery and the horror inflicted on the prisoners. She is like the ghost in the machine, the voice that informs the brutality of the H-Blocks, although it is the screws, the prison guards, who enact her will. It is this will that Bobby Sands will finally have to confront. Though he ended up dead, and Thatcher still lives, Sands has emerged in history as the true victor. And while McQueen is concerned to portray the common humanity of everyone involved in this conflict, he also clearly sees Sands as the film’s hero.

McQueen cleverly takes his time before we encounter Sands (played by Michael Fassbender). It is a non-linear approach (which made me think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line somewhat). The opening scenes are of a screw (a prison guard) suffering the negative repercussions of the oppressor in an oppressing situation. He wants to pretend his life is normal — there is a scene of a breakfast, in painstakingly slow detail. But there is no conversation between the man and his wife, who serves him. Instead, in a moment of brilliance on McQueen’s part, our view is suddenly below the table (yes, we are now viewing the situation from the beneath the dining room table) where we witness some crumbs falling on the man’s lap. The clarity of the shot is shocking. Our perspective is off-kilter but clear. How else are we to view such a fucked-up situation? Something is not quite right here. The house is like a morgue, a dead environment; there is nothing to say. The action that occurs is below the level of human communication; crumbs fall silently. Upon leaving for “work,” the guard checks under his car for explosive devices, as many had to do at that time in the fractured society of the North of Ireland, Belfast, circa 1981. The wife looks worryingly from the window as he gets in and drives off to another day of torturing. Yet these people too are human beings — human beings in a society in conflict, who have consciously taken a side and a role in that conflict.

After the guard enters the Maze Prison (the H-Blocks), the point of view changes. Now we observe a republican prisoner by the name of Gillen being checked into the Maze. He is made to strip naked as two or three screws eye him almost, no not almost, salaciously. The process of undressing is painfully slow and deliberate. McQueen does not let us hurry through this. Being a prisoner of war, the man refuses to wear the uniform of a common criminal so is branded a “non-conforming” prisoner, is given a blanket (which will be his sole garment), and joins the no-wash blanket protest presently underway in the jail. The one and only moment of the film that seems a little off occurs when Gillen meets his cellmate, a long-haired, blanket-clad, fellow IRA man. For some reason, he is cold towards Gillen, when he probably would have been glad for the comradeship. And when the man speaks in Irish, Gillen seems confused, as if he’d never heard the language before. In actuality, even if he didn’t speak Irish fluently, he’d have been well aware of it from his school days and from the numerous Irish-speakers in the republican movement and the wider nationalist community. He would also have been well aware that the prisoners in the Maze spoke it as often as possible (and even conducted classes in it for those POWs who were still learning).

We can easily forgive McQueen this brief lapse. The bleak reality of life as an Irish republican prisoner throughout Hunger is portrayed with precision and a keen aesthetic sense. With few other means at their disposal, the prisoners in rebellion smear their cell walls with shit; inedible food is dumped in a corner and becomes a spawning ground for maggots. The piss from the prisoners’ slop buckets is poured under the door and out into the halls. Someone’s job is to clean it up, and McQueen again tests the viewer’s comfort level by showing this process from start to finish — a prison worker suited head to toe puts down some cleanser, scrubs with a type of broom, inevitably pushes the urine and chemical mixture back under the cell doors. Meanwhile prisoners are routinely beaten, given forced baths with harsh detergents, forced haircuts, and are anally raped under the guise of “strip searches.” The amount of abuse is incredible, but the prisoners, intensely politically motivated, resist. They endure subhuman conditions with nothing but a blanket to wear, they pour urine out their cell doors, they smear their shit on the walls, they smuggle communications written on cigarette paper in and out of the jail, they speak the Irish language, all at great risk to themselves. The amount of physical pain they are willing to endure in their struggle is incredible. The British administration and the screws cannot stop them. This is the crux of it — the British prison system cannot control the POWs’ minds, so they attempt to control their bodies. In the H-Blocks, the body itself becomes the site of the struggle. Ultimately, with no further recourse, this situation will lead to the hunger strike.

But it doesn’t happen right away. An earlier but key moment of the film to my mind occurs when a prison guard, in head-to-toe protective suit and mask, enters a vacant cell to water-blast the shit off the walls. A circular design swirled in shit catches his eye, and he pauses to look at it. It seems to resemble something like a cave painting. The man even takes off his mask for a second to get a better look. Where he initially appears robotic, outfitted as he is, we suddenly get a glimpse of his common humanity. But then he pulls the mask back down and begins the cleaning. The circle design slowly disappears. It is an amazing scene, and one that is resonant with meaning. At the most basic level, McQueen seems to be saying, this is a conflict of the artist versus the machine. The prisoners, even in the most dire of circumstances, are still in their essences artists. Bobby Sands himself was a poet and writer, who smuggled his work out bit by bit on tiny pieces of paper. One of the books he wrote in prison, One Day in My Life, is in part the basis for this film. One thinks of other Irish republican leaders in this context. Pádraig Pearse and Thomas McDonagh, for example, leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, were also poets. Here the artistic urge is expressed in a form of painting, a primal design that alludes to our earliest ancestors. The prison worker seems to puzzle over it for a second, as if asking himself, “Me too?” But he chooses to suppress those feelings, puts the mask back down over his face, and starts spraying the water jets. The round swirl slowly fades as the emerging white wall blanks everything out. It is a destructive impulse, as opposed to the prisoners’ creative impulse.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating the point. For one, this scene forms the design of the movie poster and the DVD cover. The actual disc features the shit circle too, in full brown, as opposed to the poster/cover which shows it in the process of disappearing. A number of earlier reviews of the film criticized McQueen for supposedly aestheticizing the struggle. Similar accusations were made against Francis Ford Coppola when he released Apocalypse Now, that he was aestheticizing the Vietnam War. But I think Coppola’s response also applies here. Coppola noted that Vietnam was a television war, that it existed for many people as television images from the start. McQueen mentions in an interview included in the DVD’s special features that he remembers as a child seeing images of the hunger strikers and of Sands on television, and that this stuck with him (he also mentions that he innately sympathized with the hunger strikers). The hunger strikers knew full well the propaganda value of their almost Christ-like images. Not in any cynical way; they were people who were involved in a political struggle, who were doing everything they could to gain public support not only for the immediate cause of the prisoners, but for the aims of the republican movement on the wider scale (those aims being the defeat of the British government and unity of Ireland). They were conscious of aesthetics, partly for political reasons, but partly also because some were artists too. McQueen is not therefore “aestheticizing” the struggle in Hunger. He is saying that the struggle itself is aesthetic, that in some way it actually is a form of art (Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” comes to mind here). As awful and bleak and brutal as it often was (the initial prison guard character gets assassinated in front of his mother in a nursing home), the impulse to smear a spiral of shit on the wall represents something essential in all human beings. And the impulse to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others, through the deliberate wasting away of one’s own body, as emblemized by Sands, is a tenderness beyond comprehension to most, including me.

The film’s pivotal scene is the no-cut 22-minute back-lit shot of a conversation between Sands and a priest named Fr. Moran (played by Liam Cunningham). A number of things stick in my mind about this scene. One of course is the length: 22 minutes (I’ve also read 17 minutes), with no cuts, of intense, incisive dialogue. This is when Sands announces his intention, and the intention of other prisoners, to go on hunger strike. Moran tries to argue him out of it on moral grounds, and a sort of battle of the wills ensues. The other aspects that resonate for me are what clinch the argument for Sands: How do we know Sands has the strength of will to carry this out? After all, other republican prisoners had recently attempted the same thing, and it ended in failure and disarray. Sands conveys his resolve to Moran through a parabolic story from his childhood, a story redolent of poetry. Bobby and some other Belfast lads go to Gaoth Dobhair, Co. Donegal, on a school trip. Off in the woods, they find a fawn stranded in a stream, near death, but still alive. They debate about what to do with it — put it out of its misery, attempt to rescue it? Bobby and the others go into the water. Just then, the priest arrives, orders them all back, and the boys are in trouble. Bobby, however, strangles the fawn to death before the priest’s very eyes and takes responsibility for the whole thing. He gets the priest’s wrath, but he is satisfied that he’s done right by the fawn. He has taken action. The story is conveyed solely through dialogue, yet the viewer feels as if he is watching it unfold. As the conversation comes to a climax, Sands makes himself unambiguously clear — the time now has also come for action, a purity of political action. There can be no more fence-sitting. The hunger strike is going to happen, and you are either with us or against us. In defeat, Moran lets it be known that he and Sands will not meet again, and that is that.

The rest of the film is an awe-inspiring display of both McQueen’s feel for poetic imagery and Fassbender’s intense act of body-modification (which I would venture to suggest surpasses even that of Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull — De Niro only had to put pounds on; Fassender loses them to the peril of his own health — and this further serves to raise the thought: what of the real Bobby Sands, and the physical torments he went through? — and Margaret Thatcher scoffed!).

Despite McQueen’s protestations (no doubt necessary in public interviews) that he explores the trauma endured on all sides of the conflict in the North of Ireland (and in fact he well depicts this in practice; we all know that the oppressor is affected in untold ways by his inflicting of oppression), this is not a film that anyone can be neutral about. As Sands himself says here in no uncertain terms, you cannot remain on the fence about this. You either support Sands and his fellow hunger strikers, or you support British occupation and oppression of Ireland. You either support Sands, or you support anal rape, beatings of prisoners, forced baths and haircuts, concentration camp conditions. You either support Sands, or you support the negation of art and poetry, the negation of humanity. You either see the greatness of this film, or you do not know film.

Review of The Lakes of Coma (2003) archived

2010-04-15T23:24:00.006-04:00

The Galway, Ireland, free weekly paper, the Galway Advertiser, has recently archived their back issues. I’m there in a number of different contexts (reviews, letters, literary arguments), but here’s a link to a review of my first book, The Lakes of Coma, from 3 April 2003. It’s nice to see the actual (virtual) newsprint page, but I also reproduce the text here.

*

Exiled from Main Street

The Lakes of Coma by Michael S Begnal (Six Gallery Press, €9)

THE MEDIUM is the message in The Lakes of Coma, a new collection of poems by Galway-based writer Michael S Begnal.

The Lakes of Coma offers fractured images of American urban existence, a dislocated, displaced eye taking in the secret “terror and beauty” of an underbelly world of transvestites, seedy cafeterias, and cracked pavements: “American cities/ inhabited by beasts and grotesques.”

Begnal is a beast of a different kind, a “stray cat in a rolling field” he calls himself in “Let’s Love America”. He writes from a periphery where nobody belongs or welcomes, travelling incognito. “Why am I abandoned?” he asks, but the harsh self-reflexivity of the writing forbids pity. Even the exposed and exposing language in which he expresses himself is subject to defilement. Poetry is “the liar’s accomplice”, another form of disassociation and of measuring his distance from himself. The centre cannot hold. Begnal, aware of the fact, makes poetry of fleeting images and perceptions, the detritus of observed life that rises “furious/ and ephemerally” before his eyes.

Begnal’s poetry is a kind of violent music (he is also a musician). Several of the poems celebrate music and musicians. “Black Flag” describes the raw energy of a mosh pit during a punk gig, and for once a sense of communion: The music “moves you, the crowd flowing”. In “Our Tradition” he sets out his artistic manifesto, affirming a way of living and writing that owes nothing to the past but “continually renews/ itself in the singular now”. He quotes guitarist Sonny Sharrock in a poem of the same name: “I’ve been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song,” said Sharrock, and Begnal’s improvised riffs, his unflinching notation of American life, is a bleak and darkly humorous look at the same terrible beauty.

Kieran Hayes

Alt i JSTOR / Article in JSTOR

2010-04-10T15:57:00.008-04:00

Tá alt fúm féin ar fáil sa bhunachar sonraí acadúil JSTOR. Foilsíodh an píosa seo i gComhar, Iml. 60, Uimh. 12 (Nollaig 2000). Scríofa ag Alex Hijmans, déileáileann sé lena hoícheanta filíochta a bhíodh ag Apostasy Café faoi dheireadh na nóchaidí, agus leis an t-irisleabhar filíochta a bhunaigh mé in éineacht le Kevin Higgins, The Burning Bush. Má tá rochtain agat ar JSTOR, seo é an nasc atá uait.

An article about yours truly in the December 2000 issue of Irish-language magazine Comhar is available through the JSTOR academic database. This piece discusses the now long-gone Apostasy Café poetry scene in Galway and the early history of the magazine I co-founded with Kevin Higgins, The Burning Bush. If you have a JSTOR log-in, here is the link to this blast from the past.

Poem in GRASP #3

2010-03-18T16:11:00.007-04:00

I am happy to have a poem in the new issue (#3, Spring) of GRASP, which is an English-language literary and arts magazine published in Prague. If you live in that city, you can find it in the book shops. But for those who don’t, you can easily download the .pdf of the whole issue by going here (it’s your choice of the large or small file). A couple quick clicks, and there you have it....

The poetry section of this magazine is really very good, I have to say. Other contributors include Alan Jude Moore, Carrie Etter, Louis Armand, Heather Fowler, Sheila E. Murphy, and more, along with prose fiction, essays, photography, film reviews, etc. Very much worth the look. Further information can be found at the GRASP website.

Kerouac

2010-03-12T22:33:00.021-05:00

It’s interesting to remind oneself that Jack Kerouac’s native language was Massachusetts-Québec French. In the recently (2007) discovered manuscript of Kerouac’s aborted 1951 autobiographical novel La nuit est ma femme, he writes, «Je suis Canadien Français, mis au monde à New England. Quand j’fâché j’sacre souvent en français. Quand j’rêve j’rêve souvent en français. Quand je braille j’braille toujours en français.» Following the online article of the newspaper where I first read about it, Le Devoir (5 septembre 2007), there are a number of comments, one of which (Lucien Francoeur) says, «le style révolutionnaire d’écriture pratiqué dans On the road n’est pas possible en français.... Kerouac...n’aurait pas été cet écrivain mondial s’il avait écrit en français ou en québécois.» While I can read a good amount of French, Kerouac’s dialect often tends to elude me, so I suppose I can’t say with any certainty based on this work whether or not he would have been as global (mondial) a writer in French as he became in English. Something rings true, though, about Francoeur’s comment, as much as I also assume the French work itself has got to be good — the reality is English has supplanted French as the dominant world language (with attendant pros and cons). In any case, all of this does highlight the double language consciousness that permeated Kerouac’s world-view and allows speculation about how much this could have informed his more well-known work in English. And certainly it must have been partly responsible for the way in which he situated himself in and against Anglo-American society.

To my mind, Kerouac remains one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. To me, he stands up there with Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Flann O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell — of course this is a subjective list. Joyce’s influence on Kerouac’s work has been well documented by now. But it’s interesting to note that Kerouac praised Lolita: “Just read Nabokov’s Lolita which is one of the classics of world literature and ranks with Joyce, Proust, Mann and Genet in the divine solipsism of modern literature...My opinion of him, earlier formed by critics, was low...and so there you have our marvelously competent American critics” (Letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, June 15, 1962). Although these two writers were different in many regards, I like that Kerouac liked Nabokov. I have not been able to find out if this admiration was reciprocated in any way. Also noteworthy: Nabokov too began life speaking a language that was not the language he would become famous in as a writer.

For me Kerouac’s greatness lies not only in On the Road (though certainly it is located there), but also in works like Visions of Cody — a radical reinterpretation of the same On the Road material, his most experimental work, and probably his masterpiece. He was at the height of his powers when he wrote Cody, and the level of perception conveyed there is completely amazing. Reading the two books as in a way different versions of each other creates a further layer of insight, a sort of metafictional (Kerouac would no doubt hate me using that word to describe him) layer that exists in between the two. As well as that, in Cody Kerouac employs certain techniques that would now have to called postmodern — non-linear narrative, incorporation of tape-recorded conversations, drawings, references to writing itself (“...old Yeats will butler, he really was a cunt man that old Irish sod I love him and dig him, why paterson Williams the carlos poet, so carlos he makes a shroud out of a mill....”), the filmic, linguistic experiment after Finnegans Wake (including passages in French). It’s his most ambitious work, his greatest. Tim Hunt writes a lot about it in Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction (1981).

I would further say that Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy are two more of Kerouac’s great novels. And that Mexico City Blues, Pomes All Sizes, “San Francisco Blues,” and others are among the best works of a certain school of mid-century American poetry, in the line of Williams Carlos Williams. However, there are other descendents of Williams, representatives of other schools, to whom Kerouac, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance poets and so forth did not seem like such a good thing. I’m thinking here of George Oppen (who I also like immensely, in a different way than I like Kerouac), who, in his essay “The Mind’s Own Place” (1963), sets up Beat writing (though he doesn’t specify it by name) as opposed to the imagist precision of the original flush of modernism: “Such an art [i.e. the modernist “skill of accuracy, of precision”] has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant...”

As much as I like and admire Oppen’s writing, I think his criticism here only serves to highlight a schism in poetry which still exists today — what I might term the schism between the “scientific” (as exemplified by Oppen and other Objectivist poets) and the “artistic” (a word which Oppen clearly uses pejoratively in his essay when linking it to the Bohemian). Both of these schools of American poetry, these poetic modes of being, however, can justifiably claim descent from Williams himself. Yet Kerouac, with his Beat associations, is seen by many as merely an ultra-Bohemian, “the King of the Beats,” drinking himself to death but not producing much of literary value — at best perhaps the spearhead of a fad with some sociological value, but more usually as someone who helped usher in the worst kind of confessional nonsense. In comments like Oppen’s, I hear the echoes of Truman Capote saying of Kerouac, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” I am reminded of conservative critic Norman Podhoretz’s assertion that Kerouac’s motto was “Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently....” Kerouac’s own champions oftentimes don’t do much to dispel these misconceptions. In a review of Kerouac’s posthumously published play Beat Generation (2005), I criticized A. M. Homes’ bombastic introduction for characterizing Kerouac’s style as “a literary atom bomb smashing everything,” as “everything and the kitchen sink too,” “a kind of demolition derby pileup.” Where Oppen means his portrayal of “a furious and bitter Bohemia” as an attack, Homes means her comments as complimentary! In my opinion, they are both wrong.

Kerouac was dedicated to the craft of writing. That is the first thing. His aesthetic is ultimately a matter of personal taste, a subjective thing. That he exhibited certain Bohemian tendencies, ultimately drinking himself to death, is neither here nor there, except inasmuch as it helps illuminate an evolution from life-affirmation to nihilism. I think that Oppen’s criticisms in “The Mind’s Own Place” are based more on his own subjective tastes in literature, and possibly the circumstances of his own life history. Oppen has decided that he does not want to lead a life of excess, and that is fair enough. But it seems to me that those who make a virtue out of criticizing those who may fall into the “Bohemian” camp usually do so because of their aversion to that sort of lifestyle, rather than on literary merit. Would they dismiss Rimbaud too? Should the artist be any less valorized than the carpenter? I find it wholly possible to embrace both Jack Kerouac and George Oppen, and the different kind of poetics they represent.

But I disagree that Kerouac, for example, lacks precision. If he seems to at times, it is in actuality part of a wider strategy. As Gerald Nicosia writes in his biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe (1983), in regard to prosody, “His one real advance beyond Williams was the apprehension that rhythm develops within the thought process rather than being created by thought. Albeit the distinction is subtle. Kerouac really was moving toward a more spontaneous literary form, one in which errors, malapropisms, babble, and all forms of verbal stumbling fit into a grander context.” Kerouac embraces irrationality as a method when it is called for. Some cannot embrace the irrational, for whatever reason their lives have set before them — another aspect of the aforementioned schism.

Interestingly, William Carlos Williams himself championed Beat Bohemianism, lauding Allen Ginsberg by including his letters in Books Four and Five of Paterson and writing in a March 11, 1952, letter to Robert Lowell that Ginsberg “is coming to personify the place [Paterson] for me” (qtd. in Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, 1981). Ginsberg seems to recapitulate in slightly wilder form what Williams himself has been asserting throughout the whole course of his epic poem, that “unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new / line....” Ginsberg personifies the figure of the artist that Williams posits in Paterson, the future American poet who has finally broken free from old ways of thinking and writing, one who is freed from conventional morality. In 1957, Williams met with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, and Nicosia notes that Williams “praised their writings.” Of course, Williams’ association with Oppen through the Objectivist Press and so forth implies praise for Oppen and his style of writing as well. There need be no mutual exclusivity here.

No, we would not be having this conversation if Kerouac had primarily written in his regional dialect of Québécois French. As it happens, though, he is considered by many as one of the greatest American novelists and poets of the 20th century because of his writing in English. That status is deserved — not particularly because of the literary movement he was associated with or its remaining appeal to those who do not identify with the dull monotony of established forms, both in literature specifically or in society more generally (though I will say there is even some merit in that). Instead it is deserved because of the particular works which he himself wrote, which are brilliant whether or not you take into consideration the particular arguments surrounding them in his time or ours. Jack Kerouac’s birthday is March 12. He would have been 88. At the risk of outing myself as a Bohemian, I raise my glass to him.

Maurice Scully, Humming

2010-02-10T20:17:00.011-05:00

I’ve written about Scully’s work many times now, including some pieces that appear online here, here, here, and here. Let those serve as my introduction to Scully; this will be a more immediate, subjective, impressionistic review, if it really is a review at all. What strikes me most about Scully’s latest collection of poetry, Humming (Shearsman Books, 2009, 100 pp., ISBN 978-1-84861-059-0), is that it is his death collection, much more so than any of his others. It is dedicated to his brother Brian who died in 2004. References to other deaths inhabit this book as well, the father, the mother, and then: “Turn the beach upside-down, what do you see? It must be yr sister’s / anniversary? By forces too large for all of us she’s drawn into the cave.” But death cannot be the end for those who live on, until one’s own anyway. In the next stanza, “It must be yr brother’s anniversary. [....] go & do / what you do in life and do it thoroughly, one circle, then another, [....] die, and die well. Good.” Between each stanza of this poem (one of many titled “Ballad”) is a sort of refrain: “ha ha”.

It is an affirmation of life being put forward here, a view that is evident in other sections of this book as well. In another “Ballad,” an “Argument” is put forward: the speaker’s brother has died. This is presented matter-of-factly, almost dispassionately. It is a meditation on the reality of death and aging, our helplessness before it all: “I know the facts are rough. Goodbye.” The only “Response” to this (the second half of the poem), is poetry itself, the reassertion of the poet’s poetic life-vision (and here his form enhances his content):

to
    never
be
    still
des-
    pite
what
    you
might
    think
in
    all
this
    space
ever
    open
to
    light....

A recurring theme in Humming is the description of a Neanderthal grave from 60,000 years ago, a grave which included flowers of cornflower, hollyhock, ragwort, hyacinth, yarrow, and thistle (we know this because of their pollen deposits) — showing that a reverence for death and care for the dead are impulses that go back through eons of time and are present even in non-Homo sapiens human society. Those little grains of pollen float throughout this collection (sometimes as “dots”). In this, Scully simultaneously connects us (21st-century Western society) with the ancients and yet at the same time seems to be saying, So what, this has all been going on forever, we’re not so special.

The latter viewpoint seems to be confirmed in Scully’s scorn for poets who turn death, or something like it, into a career move: “If you dedicate your little book to Mammy and get / a prize — size matters — you know how it is — / a million years of isolation and neglect … as if you / deserve pampering as by right. Just write, right?” But, some wise guy or gal might ask, doesn’t Scully dedicate his own book to his brother? What’s the difference? The difference is Scully has long ago put aside (or maybe never had) any expectation of being acclaimed for it. I don’t think he cares whether or not anyone will be moved by such a dedication, or who can “relate.” In fact, he often seems to purposely frustrate (through his form, his poetic strategies, his frequent use of language that can sometimes seem more utilitarian than “poetic”) attempts on the part of the reader to relate in an emotional way. He just writes; that is enough.

So Scully rejects the “House of Prizes,” the cosy relationships of some sections of the Irish arts industry: “I am 52. How old are you? I’m old enough to take a knife / to any letter from the Arts Council for instance regretting, et cetera / because they know I think by now — now that I’m older than / they are & longer on the job — I know perhaps a fact or two of life.” He does seem to be making a point of this, drawing a line in the sand. The book includes a back-cover blurb from JCC Mays, which reads in part, “The poet is not pushed forward as a surrogate hero, an ideal fictionalised presence in whose identity we lose ourselves: he is, always, just (just!) a person making. We are offered a poetry of witness, not of personality and career-accomplishment.” If the point of life for Scully is just to live (until you die), then the point of being a poet is just to write (to make).

I think this is why a lot of Scully’s work is actually “about” writing itself: “hum of a small plane in the distance hum of my pen / moving hum of my half-mind following....” He is a very imagistic poet at times, but his images don’t stand still — they are often commented upon, exploded, turned inside out; they are a kinetic form of imagism rather than the pure imagism of early Pound: “to watch one leaf turn turn back my hand / yr palm whatever skill whatever lack a tapestry / of flowers in the mud unstitching the next step” (from one of several pieces deceptively titled “Sonnet”). But in all of this I wonder if there isn’t still something left of the poet as hero, despite Mays’s blurb comment. After all, Scully is here setting out a very particular point of view, inevitably as against those of others; he is asserting both a unique poetics and a worldview which must be defended against possibly hostile entities (e.g. the Arts Council, careerist poets, audiences who acclaim them) and all the shit of the world (“remember / that he knows that / & will remember it / & calculate / the times to use it / with care / against you / as praxis / to his advantage / meanly, always [....] the next / piece of shit / taken for truth. / Have a nice day.”). Though the poet personality is certainly deemphasized in Scully’s work, the speaker nonetheless suffers the slings and arrows, and despite the degree of human cynicism which creeps in here — it’s damn hard to avoid — he comes through it all to occasional states of ebullience (“I am hey! When clouds break / & sunlight floods on to bright // up-readying flowers beside you / & you look up & smile [buoyant- / ly] — ”), and ultimately to poetry: “Drop by drop, grain by / grain… / POEM”.

Breaking the Skin (2002)

2010-01-20T02:27:00.013-05:00

In 2002, the Irish publisher Black Mountain Press (of Ballyclare, Co. Antrim) released an anthology of poetry titled Breaking the Skin: 21st Century Irish Writing, Volume Two: New Irish Poetry (ISBN 0-9537570-2-1). (The first volume collected new Irish fiction.) The editors (Nigel McLoughlin, Matthew Fluharty, and Frankie Sewell) arranged and listed the selected poets according to age, except for the Irish-language contributors who were placed in a separate section at the back of the book (for understandable if debatable reasons). The list of those included in the anthology, ranging in birth-date from1957-75, reads like this:

Mark Granier
Ger Reidy
Gary Allen
John O’Donnell
Adrian Fox
Cherry Smyth
Katherine Duffy
Damian Smyth
Paula Cunningham
Mary Montague
Nessa O’Mahony
Kate Newmann
Aidan Rooney-Céspedes
Michael S. Begnal
Yvonne Cullen
Tom French
James McCabe
Niall McGrath
Joseph Woods
Deirdre Cartmill
Kevin Higgins
Nigel McLoughlin
Nell Regan
Colette Bryce
Caitríona O’Reilly
Mary O’Donoghue
Celia de Fréine
Gearóid Mac Lochlainn
Colette Ní Ghallchóir
Tarlach Mac Congáil
Mary Reid

It is an impressive list by any standard (I consider my own inclusion a lucky break). Virtually all of the contributors have since gone on to publish collections, or further collections, of their own (the standard for inclusion was that the poets being included must not have published more than one full collection at the time), and some, such as Mac Lochlainn, Higgins, French, O’Reilly, O’Mahony, and others, have achieved what could be called a degree of fame (such as it is in poetry).

Yet, in recent discussions of Irish poetry, I don’t think I’ve heard Breaking the Skin so much as mentioned. While it received a certain amount of fanfare upon its publication (there were launches in every major Irish city, North and South, and reviews of the book in many local publications and smaller national journals), it somehow failed to get a review in Poetry Ireland Review, Ireland’s journal of record. And I’ve often wondered why it seems so disremembered now, only eight years after it came out, containing as it does so many people who are active and significant to this day. The publisher, while now defunct, was quite respected in its heyday a handful of years ago, publishing The Black Mountain Review along with a number of noteworthy poetry collections. The editors as far as I remember were never on anyone’s bad side (an unavoidable question in the politics of Irish poetry, as in many other scenes I suppose), and did an admirable job within the parameters they set themselves (“a selection of poets Irish by birth or citizenship under 45 who have published one book or who have one collection forthcoming [as of the 2002 publication date],” per Fluharty’s introduction).

I think part of the reason is that anthologies don’t seem to play the same central role they do in for example American poetry, which is often temporarily shaped or at least influenced by a major, seminal anthology (I’m thinking of, say, Don Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1960). Irish poetry doesn’t really seem to like the idea of “new generations” of poets in the same way that America does. To take another recent example, in 2004 the larger, British publisher Bloodaxe Books released an anthology titled The New Irish Poets (ed. Selina Guinness), and while it seemed to want to do something very similar to what Breaking the Skin had just done before it (to the understandably raised eyebrows of some involved with Black Mountain Press), it too now seems to have sunk without much of a trace. (However, the Bloodaxe book does have the benefit of better distribution and a publisher that is still in existence, so who knows, it might actually have the better chance of being revived by future critics.)

Another reason why Breaking the Skin may have been unduly ignored up till now has to do with questions of what could be called the “style wars” in Irish poetry. Though in most instances the book doesn’t push an agenda of radical poetics per se — which has often been part of the discussion in recent Irish poetry, “experimental” versus “mainstream” — it does nonetheless postulate a new generation of Irish poets that is “formally free.” According to McLoughlin in his preface, “influence has been absorbed to the same degree inwards, these are a diasporic generation who have, or currently do, live in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and America. They bring with them and attempt relation to, and study of, their sense of Irishness... They are intrinsically demanding, formally free, taking their inspiration where they find it without apology... The old ideological division between the North and the South [of Ireland] has all but disappeared... These are poets of the world and world poets, but all are unmistakeably Irish — the tradition burns through their work no less brightly for being added to by American, English and European influences.”

It is maybe the blurring of categories, more so than any partisan position in relation to style or poetic ideology (again, there is little in the book that could be seen as overtly avant-garde), that nonplussed some at the time. While it’s a cliché to say this, it’s a cliché that is based in truth, that Ireland is a very tribal society, and so Irish poetry reflecting this in some ways was content to keep the usual divisions going. In fact, in retrospect, the “experimental” versus “mainstream” debate was an easy debate, one that a lot of people were easily willing to embrace, because the Irish poetry world is used to dichotomies. Less immediately understandable is an argument that says this “generation” is distinguished not by one singular radical departure in style, but by the fact that it encompasses a multiplicity within itself in the same time and place(s), and is willing to interrogate preexisting conceptions of Irish identity.

Of course, this presupposes that preceding generations of Irish poets were in some way homogeneous. Actually, I don’t think that’s completely true. While, for example, it is said that post-Independence Irish poets fulfilled a role as bards of the tribe, similarly to the filí of the old Gaelic Order (†1601), no self-respecting 20th-century Western poet, even an Irish one, would fully abrogate the individual responsibility to oneself as an artist and to his or her medium. But it is all about perception, and to exist within perceived established categories and structures is often easier than engaging in a world in which everything is blurred, and the structures one has grown up with are undermined and sometimes seemingly even cast to the wind. To return to my reference to the Gaelic Order, which perished in the onslaught that was English colonialism, sometimes change occurs as the result of such oppression and violence, and is therefore a negative thing that needs to be opposed with equal force if possible (Hugh O’Neill, Tyrell, and others). But sometimes, in other contexts, change is natural and part of evolution and a good thing, which doesn’t threaten individual or national identity (indeed encompasses all on a hopefully equal and distinct [rather than homogenizing] level), and should be embraced by progressive living people. While I admit I am putting this in more grandiose terms than is perhaps called for here, the world-view expressed in the constructive impulses behind the Breaking the Skin anthology, and in most of the poetry itself, is in the latter category. (I realize I’m creating another dichotomy here: change that is bad and change that is good.)

In any case, for many anyway, this other world-view is merely our contemporary reality. And therefore as critics and scholars and poets look at the recent history of Irish poetry, especially now that the economic boom years of the “Celtic Tiger” have been swallowed up in the global bust and everyone wonders what just happened, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Breaking the Skin will once again enter the conversation somehow. Much of the work in this anthology was created in the context of the Irish boom economy, with all the attendant change (good and bad) it entailed, even if not all of the poems overtly gesture toward this. If anyone wonders where were the poets in all this, and from whence came certain Irish poets of the now, many of them are in Breaking the Skin. It is a book whose day may yet come.

(Interested parties could try to track it down at Amazon.com or AbeBooks.com. An interesting review appears here.)

Interview on Finnegans Wake in Abiko Annual 21

2010-01-02T16:40:00.011-05:00

I am included in a series of interviews on the subject of James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, originally published in the Abiko Annual with James Joyce Finnegans Wake Studies 21 (2001). The interviews were conducted by the journal’s editor, Dr. Tatsuo Hamada. (The issue also included a critical essay of mine titled “The Wake Will Be Televised,” on Joyce’s engagement with the medium of television in FW.)

Hamada asked a number of notable Joyceans (and some less notable, like myself) a series of questions:

Can we read through FW?
Can we understand FW?
How can we best read FW?
Is there a plot in FW?
What are the riddles or enigmas of FW?
Are there too many sexual matters in FW?
What did Joyce want to communicate in FW?
Why did Joyce invent tough, mighty words in FW?
Did Lucia’s illness affect FW?
What techniques are to be learned from FW?
Is FW translatable?
How do we evaluate our reading of FW?

Follow-up questions were then tailored to particular responses. The results make for some very engaging reading, at least if you have an interest in Finnegans Wake, in Joyce, or in modernist or experimental literature in general. Among other certainly more important things, I was struck by the number (well, a handful) of respondents who admitted to not having read the Wake in its entirety. Clearly it’s a daunting proposition, but is it not still just words on the page, like any book? (albeit 628 pages of often difficult-to-understand words). Well, a commitment such as that is a matter of priorities, of course.

You can go to my interview directly here, and the full list of interviewees (which also includes my father, who was a notable Joyce scholar) is here. Click on the individual names, which are links, to read the others.

Avant-Post archived online

2009-12-19T19:47:00.005-05:00

The essay collection Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions (ed. Louis Armand, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2006) has been archived online here. Apparently the hard copy of the book is now out of print, so it is good to see that it lives on in electronic format at least. The book contains an essay by me on experimental Irish poetry and the politics of the recent Irish poetry scene, “The Ancients Have Returned Among Us: Polaroids of 21st C. Irish Poetry.” So, if you never managed to order the book itself, you can now read it all for free online.

A blurb describing the book as a whole reads, “Avant-Post engages the question of whether or not avant-garde practice remains viable under the prevailing conditions of a whole series of ‘post-’ ideologies, from Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism, to Post-Historicism, Post-Humanism and Post-Ideology itself.” Other contributors include Johanna Drucker, Lisa Jarnot, Christian Bök, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Archambeau, Mairéad Byrne, R.M. Berry, Trey Strecker, Keston Sutherland, Robert Sheppard, Bonita Rhoads, Vadim Erent, Laurent Milesi, Esther Milne, and more.

The American Book Review describes Avant-Post this way: “The question at the heart of these sixteen essays — alternately theoretically demanding, impishly elusive, stylistically impacted, and wholly absorbing — is this: what, in the context of contemporary politico-aesthetic practices, is the avant-garde, and how, if at all, can some version of it continue to exist in an historical moment when...everything is permitted, hence nothing is any longer possible?”

Pense Aqui No. 318

2009-12-15T17:03:00.004-05:00

I have two excerpts of new work in Pense Aqui No. 318, a mail-art and experimental poetry magazine published from Brazil. This issue includes collage/mail-art work from Brazil, Serbia, France, Finland, Catalonia, Latvia, and the U.S., with poetry by David Stone and myself.

The editor, José Roberto Sechi, has posted photos of previous issues here.

Copies of the new issue may be obtained from:

José Roberto Sechi
Av. M29, N.° 2183
Jd. São João
Rio Claro SP 13505-410
Brazil

In this issue, Sechi also announces the “Sechiisland’s International Library,” an alternative library specializing in contemporary art, mail art, Fluxus, visual poetry, and experimental literature, and asks for donations of books, magazines, catalogues, videos, CDs, etc. to be sent to the above address.

(The above photo is of the covers of two earlier Pense Aqui issues, Nos. 136 and 134.)

Begnal Interview, Two-Handed Engine Press

2009-12-01T13:13:00.007-05:00

I am interviewed on the site of Two-Handed Engine Press. The interview appears here, and I also reproduce it below.

Michael S. Begnal, author of Ancestor Worship

How did you become a writer?

I guess the earliest stuff I wrote was song lyrics for the various bands I was in when I was a teenager. Not long after that I started writing poetry in free verse, probably trying to emulate the writers I dug at the time. Many of which I still dig now. But at some point, later, I figured out that poetry is not just simple self-expression, that it’s actually about other things, like, oh, language, images.

What collections do you have out, and published by whom?

In reverse chronological order, Ancestor Worship was published in 2007 by the Irish press Salmon Poetry; Mercury, the Dime came out in 2005, and The Lakes of Coma in 2003, the latter two published by the Pittsburgh-based Six Gallery Press.

Do you read your reviews?

Sure.

Does it matter to you whether they are good or bad reviews?

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t matter at all, in the sense that of course I prefer them to be good reviews. But it doesn’t upset me if someone doesn’t like what I’ve published. Once you put something out there you can’t control how it’s going to be perceived by other people. You can’t stand over their shoulders and tell them how to read it or why they should like it. People’s perceptions of your work can be pretty arbitrary and subjective, and that’s just the way it is. I suppose the worst thing would be simply to be ignored and not have a book reviewed somewhere at all.

Has a review ever changed your perspective on your work?

I still believe in my own writing whether a review is good or bad. Most have been good so far, anyway. I keep waiting for the blistering attacks, but they haven’t happened yet. Maybe next time. One journal gave a bad review to The Lakes of Coma a number of years back, but I can’t say that it did anything to change my perspective. However, a few people whose opinions I respect have made private criticisms from time to time that I have found to be worthwhile.

Do you read a great deal?

Of course. I’m kind of suspicious of poets who claim they don’t read other poets, and I have heard a couple people say that. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Poetry is part of an ongoing history. You can’t know what good writing is if you don’t read it. That said, one must always be as original as possible.

What do you think is the most integral quality to developing as a writer?

Maybe realizing that it’s not all about you, even if it is about you to a certain degree. Realizing that the poetry is in the words on the paper or the words spoken in breath. That while it may be infused with deep feeling, poetry is inherently about form. This is not to say you have to write in a formalist manner. But poetry is intrinsically an artistic mode of expression. If not, then standard prose would be enough, right? Well, speaking for myself I guess. But here’s what I mean. One time Jack Kerouac was asked how he liked fame, and he said, “It’s like old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street.” That was a poetic response. He didn’t say, for example, “I feel lonely and alienated.”

Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?

That is a hard question to answer, because most of the writers I used to think I was being influenced by, I see now aren’t really very similar in style to what I have actually written. But, Kerouac has always been very important to me, and still is. I suppose I used to think that I was writing like him even if it wasn’t ultimately that true. Amiri Baraka is also majorly important. In my mind I think Baraka has been influential in some way, but I don’t know if anyone else would see that. James Liddy, the Irish poet, has permeated my sense of what it means to be a poet. Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, an Irish Gaelic poet who died in 1729, sometimes comes to me in dreams. His work is unsurpassable. So is that of drunken 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Let’s see, when I was 19 years old I met Lawrence Durrell and told him I was a poet, and he smiled this big smile and told me to do it. Also, the music of the Stooges is an endless source of artistic inspiration.

Do you think about your body of work?

Of course. I’m not sure quite how you mean, but I am a serious writer so I do think about those kinds of things.

Do you have a lot of work in progress?

The next collection is done.

Do you have the whole poem figured out before you write it?

The poem comes into being in the process of writing it.

What is a typical day for you?

Wake up, finish off the beer sitting by my bed from the night before, open another one, start writing.... Just kidding. Sometimes I wish that was the truth, though. Occasionally it is, or something like that.

If you could have written one book in history, what book would it be?

Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin.

What would you be doing for a living if you weren’t a writer?

Well, it’s not that writing is a living in itself. But maybe it is if you take into consideration my related gig as a college writing instructor. If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I suppose the only other alternative career I could imagine for myself would be if any of the various bands I used to be in had made it big and I was a successful rock’n’roller. If not that either, then maybe the Post Office or something.

Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry) is available here

Begnal video on new Salmon Poetry site

2009-11-20T14:16:00.007-05:00

To the left is the author photo of me used on the revamped and updated Salmon Poetry website. The page for Ancestor Worship also includes two videos: one of a reading of the poem “Ancestor Worship,” the other of the poem “My Role in Society.” Just click the previous link, and when you’re on the page you will see the links for the videos, which, when clicked, then pop out and play. These, I believe, are currently the only videos of me reading poetry available online. The page is also updated with the latest reviews of the book and such features as a pop-out, full-size view of the cover. Not to mention, um, a very convenient way to place your order.

The whole Salmon site, by the way, designed by Siobhán Hutson, looks great as well.

Reviews in An Sionnach Vol. 5

2009-11-07T13:42:00.007-05:00

I appear in the new issue of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009 (University of Nebraska Press) in two ways. First, my review of Irish poet Maurice Scully’s collection Doing the Same in English (Dedalus Press, 2008) is included, and can also be read here in online form at Project MUSE, the database of “prestigious humanities and social sciences journals.”

Second, a new review, by Keith Gaustad, of Ancestor Worship is published in the same issue. It too can be read online via Project MUSE (here), and I reproduce the text of it below.

Michael S. Begnal Ancestor Worship Salmon Poetry 2007 70 pp. ISBN: 978-1-903392-54-6 €12.00

Reviewed by Keith Gaustad

I realize it may be more interesting for readers to have me write about the poet rather than the poetry. I say this only because the pitfalls of academic jargon are out there, and I’m just the clod to go traipsing through the field looking at the sky. Holy shit! That’s poetry.

Mike Begnal or Michael S. Begnal to fans and critics, has a new book from Salmon called Ancestor Worship (2007). He sent me a copy because, as a friend, he knew I’d like it. However, how does a poet living in North Carolina formerly of Pennsylvania and previously of Ireland know someone who has never lived anywhere but Milwaukee? Answer: James Liddy.

Begnal came to Milwaukee to take on the prestigious position of the James Liddy Chair at the Irish Cultural Center of Milwaukee. It was my understanding that this was a newly created post. What the determining factors were for the selection of the James Liddy Chair, only the dear now late Liddy seemed to know...and maybe Professor Gleason. I don’t recall what poems of Mike’s that Liddy gave me to read in advance. Liddy knew I wasn’t on the up-and-up or on the who’s who, so if I were to accompany him to a reading, as the driver, often he would hand me a book or a copy of a poem to update me, so that if cornered I could produce at least one poem title to pronounce as my favorite.

Assuredly, one of the factors that determined Begnal’s earning the seat of the James Liddy Chair was that Begnal wrote poetry in the Irish language. The Chair is, after all, a part of The Irish Cultural Center. So I sat down on a nice comfy couch in a nice comfy room on the Marquette University campus to hear for the first time what the Irish language sounded like. Interestingly enough, it sounded very sarcastic. Most of the poems felt uneasy. The poet told us that we probably didn’t really care what the Irish language sounded like, and that’s why he hurried through them to get to the translations, so we would understand what they meant. His demeanor was, how can I say this, punk rock inside a library.

I found myself chuckling a little during the performance and even thinking, “He means you, blue hair!” when glancing at the old, blue-haired ladies in attendance who did not linger for the reception. It was certainly a to-do. I found myself chatting with Begnal after the reading. The next day we drove around with Liddy on a tour of the city, and then later I drove him to the airport without Liddy. It’s not often you go to a poetry reading at the Irish Cultural Center and make friends with the poet reading for the first-ever James Liddy Chair and end up chatting about early ’80s hip-hop and the few ’80s California hardcore acts I was familiar with. I even got an autograph on my copy of The Lakes of Coma, Begnal’s first book.

If the reading was legendary for all the wrong reasons, so be it. I’ve been able, thanks to the miracle called the Internet, to stay in contact with Begnal, even solicit him for poems for my own humble magazine, Burdock. I even once attempted to write a paper for Liddy based on our conversations about poetry. Needless to say emails do not translate to essays. I think I ended up writing about Sylvia Plath, or something else, instead.

The lesson: dialogue is important. Conversation, however technologically slanted, yields insight. And after having conversed with Begnal for a few years now, I think I understand what made that first impression tick on as it has. During conversations with him, and after reading Ancestor Worship, I think I have a better understanding of his reading that shocked and appalled people: there is frustration rooted in the passage of a culture. To realize that Irish is not an active language in the real sense, that most people in Ireland don’t speak it, and that Ireland only exists in America as a cultural artifact, is the hidden argument of Ancestor Worship.

The argument comes to the surface in the poem Begnal chose to translate out of the Irish, “To the Gaelic People” by Ó Longáin. One of the footnotes states that Ó Longáin’s poems are “urging/inciting...didn’t stir them in the slightest.” A sort of status check in 1800 for the poet, but for a long time both struggles went on. But now, with independence gained for the country, the language of ancestors is threatened.

It’s not just Ireland, though. Time, it seems, moves even quicker now. And what may have been a cultural movement in the ’60s translates to a fashion statement today. We may understand history as it is or we understand it through plastic. I read this in “Old Men’s Bar.” If we read this poem simply for its imagery, that is enough:

Sexless trio in the middle
of cunt colored painted walls,
dead wives,
creeping stink of age,
glasses of beer,
raincoats,
galoshes,
neckties

That the walls started out “salmon pink” in the poem is nicely done, intentional or not. That the poet becomes wary of his position in this bar is where I get my theories about the book:

(I’m furtive—
if they caught me they’d raise a shaking fist)

Does this refer to the pitfalls of dual citizenship? Can you belong to two tribes when so much of Ireland is rooted in the tribal, the notion of clan? The voice in the poem does not seek separation. It is felt. It already exists. These men, who may have seen a history the narrator can only learn of secondhand, exist separately from the narrator. They are living ancestors. So much of the pub culture is meant as an exchange, and yet, there it is in the pub. And an American can’t approach it with any comfort for fear of what? Rejection? Perhaps the answer is exile. The book ends with “Another Exile”:

The line bending,
curving,
the burden being lightened

That Begnal’s book begins with “Expatriation” tells us everything we need to know about this subtext. Other ideas exist in the pages of this book, but this next excerpt seems to explain a lot of what may be the thesis of the book. Presumably, it’s the author’s entry into the rituals of worship, and it contains lines that describe the narrator and the terrain he will be navigating for most of the book:

and I too’m “American” now,
sauntering the local lanes,
land of ghostly progenitors,
cold stone,
bitter defeat

The poems in Ancestor Worship strive to define worship in a different way. A history-obsessed American often has science on the brain, whereas an Irish mind once had druids, fairies, and monks, who kept everything alive for a time. Begnal has little choice but to approach this in an American fashion. That is to say, the tribal element will be overcome. Is this another sort of catholicism (universal appeal)? I hear composition teachers (they are my ancestors too) saying, “Beware the rhetorical question in your essay.” But I adopt Begnal’s ideas and ask why do we want to hear everything our way, in our language?

That first time I met Mike Begnal was a strange experience, and my initial review of Begnal’s book was a bit off, so I felt I had to get a little more personal with this review. This is a side effect of Ancestor Worship, not the book but the concept it is named for — you feel compelled to make strange events known to multitudes.

(E-ISSN: 1944-6535, Print ISSN: 1554-8953)

Samhain 2009

2009-11-01T00:12:00.003-04:00

Yellow and crimson leaves lining the sidewalks and streets, rust-orange leaves of vines clinging to tree trunks and brick buildings, old concrete staircases overgrown with weeds and roots — I will be reading at Kiva Han Café (Craig St. and Forbes), Pittsburgh, on Saturday November 7th, 8:00 p.m. Also reading are Che Elias (novelist, poet, and publisher of Six Gallery Press) and Kevin Finn (poet and musician).

Reading 10/26 at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh

2009-10-15T19:44:00.010-04:00

I will be reading at Duquesne University on Monday October 26th, at 7:00 p.m. The event is part of the Coffee House Reading Series, which is organized and sponsored by Duquesne’s English Department. It takes place at the Barnes & Noble Café in the Power Center (1015 Forbes Ave., at the corner of Hooper). I am reading in conjunction with a fiction writer by the name of Bill Kirchner, about whom I have heard good things.

***

In other news, I was recently interviewed on internet radio. The show, hosted by Mike Marcellino, is called Notebookwriter and runs as part of the Red River Writers Live show on BlogTalkRadio. The interview, which took place on October 7th, is archived and can be listened to here.

Three Poems in Iota 85

2009-10-01T18:16:00.011-04:00

I have three poems in Iota 85. Iota is a British poetry journal that has been around for a pretty long time. I remember encountering it in a different form in the late 90s, when it was an A5 folded-over and stapled production and I think always rendered as iota with a small i. It had a certain recognition in Britain and Ireland as one of the stalwart small press poetry journals. Recently the magazine has passed into the hands of a new editorial team associated with the University of Gloucestershire (headed by Nigel McLoughlin), and has reincarnated itself as a high-quality perfect-bound book with color cover and French flaps.

The production is excellent, but I have to say that the poetry between those flaps is pretty damn good too (and not just because I’m in it). Irish poet Howard Wright’s new work, which leads off this issue, is especially strong. I published him a few times a while back in The Burning Bush, but here in Iota he’s better than ever. Just about every poet I’ve happened upon so far in this issue has been interesting to me in some way or another. The magazine includes not only poems, but reviews and interviews (George Szirtes is one of the poets interviewed), and a section for listings of poetry events (predominantly taking place in Britain). Such high-quality work, coupled with its high production values, would have to have Iota on its way to being considered one of the top British poetry journals, I would think? Copies can be ordered through their website (linked above).

***

In other news, an interview I did with the New York punk band Chesty Malone and the Slice ’Em Ups is online at Punk Globe.

New (York) Mets uniforms?

2009-09-30T01:57:00.029-04:00

The Mets have announced, or sort of announced, that they might be making a uniform change after this most dismal of seasons. Reportedly, the possible changes involve dropping the traditional pinstripes, and going with a cream-colored uniform like the one they wore this past August. Here’s David Wright in that uniform, being escorted out to to his position at third by the Mets trainers, as is his usual fashion. The bat-boy then comes over, bows, and gives him his hat, bows to the four corners of Citi Field, and sprints back to the dugout. David picks up a pinch of Citi infield dirt, ceremonially smears it on the front of his uniform, and rolls up his sleeves so that you can see the sleeves of his orange undershirt. The crowd over at the third-base side, known as “David’s Army,” roll up their own sleeves in an exaggerated manner, in tribute to their hero, and high-five each other. Some are simply wearing orange Mets t-shirts with the number 5 on them. Wright, number 5, is the famous Mets singles hitter.

So anyway, yeah, this or something like this might be the new Mets uniform. Some people say who cares. And anyway isn’t this a poetry blog, mainly? (Well actually this is a very poetic post, to be honest....) Others are alarmed at the fact that it seems the pinstripes are going to be ditched. I agree; keep the pinstripes. Bizarrely, a couple of people have actually suggested a blue alternate jersey, like the Mets should rock this blue solid look, like the Cubs do sometimes (the Mets should imitate a team that hasn’t won the World Series for over 100 years)(don’t get me wrong, I would actually like to see the Cubs win; that would be a great moment to see, but hopefully not in a blue jersey). Thankfully, at least it’s pretty clear now that no one likes the black jersey or the all-black hat. That’s capitalistic bullshit. They see through that now, finally.

So really, why have an alternate jersey at all? A black this, a blue that, an alternate this or that? No. There should be one home jersey and one away jersey. For the home jersey, the (maybe off-)white pinstriped 1969 classic Mets jersey, no drop-down black shadowing, no stripes on the sides, no trim. Just a classic button-down jersey, white with pinstripes. The one Tom Seaver is wearing in 1970 on Camera Day at Shea Stadium, holding this weird toy. (As photographed by Stephen Hanks, Camera Day at Shea Stadium, 1970, found online....) Tom Terrific knew where it was at. Riding the subway out to Shea in the 70s meant seeing all the newest graffiti, what early tags were getting up, what early 3-D style. He knew how the New York fans were feeling. But anyway, that is the home uniform they need. And for the away jersey, grey with the classic NEW YORK lettering like they have now, but with no shadowing. That is my considered aesthetic opinion. What to do about Oliver Pérez is a whole other thing.

David Stone, Under the El

2009-09-25T16:08:00.007-04:00

In my view, David Stone is one of our most original experimental poets, though he is not sung in the halls of academe or in the HTML code of poetry blogs as often as he should be. That situation will change eventually, I think, as time goes on and Stone’s small press collections, chapbooks, and pamphlets get collected into more readily available volumes.

One of these chapbooks, though, quite available now, is Stone’s latest, Under the El, published by Alternating Current/Propaganda Press. It includes the long poem “Under the El,” set in Chicago where familiar Stonean elements congregate: “& on the asphalt/ a turkey vulture dines.” Shorter poems return to the setting of Baltimore, that apocalyptic city where Stone now lives: “another murderous day/ in this sad city/ where teachers/ are raped by students/ & more beatings on the buses/ & on subways” (“The Subway Glance”).

This is a poet who takes up death, history, war, and urban America unflinchingly, but whose language is therefore a little weird — stripped down to short declaratory sentences, as if desperately clinging to some sense of basic grammatical order. Unlike some experimentalists, whose language often reflects the disorder they find (by all means a valid and often beautiful response), philosopher Stone seeks beautiful logic in the illogical, if only in a ritual sense (as in “YK,” his Yom Kippur poem). There is always a subject and a verb, often an object, though each might not be the expected.

A poem that succinctly illustrates what Stone does is “The Fire Engine”:

The Fire Engine

The fire engine
skidded through
the intersection
& crushed
a compact car.

Earth whisked
wizardous rants.

Breathers reiterated
the aroma of death.

The cell counters
apologized
in Socrates’ tank.

Order Under the El through one of the links here, or through the mail for $5 (plus $2 U.S. shipping; $3 out-of-U.S. shipping) via cash, check, or money order made out to Alternating Current, P.O. Box 398058, Cambridge MA 02139, U.S.A.

Jim Carroll, 1949-2009

2009-09-14T19:39:00.024-04:00

I heard today that the great poet Jim Carroll died, and it was one of those weird moments where you say “Wow, that’s crazy, because I was just talking about him” – and indeed I was just telling someone the other day what a great poet he is (was), and pulled out his Catholic Boy album, and we briefly talked about the cover, how he’s standing there with these older people who it seems may be his parents, yet at the same time his cock is let’s say rather prominently noticeable through his jeans, and anyway “People Who Died” among others is a great song.

Like Patti Smith, Jim Carroll made the transition from being known primarily as a poet to also being known as a punk singer. I got into his writing after first digging his music (particularly Catholic Boy). Living at the Movies still stands as a landmark collection of poetry, drawing on the tradition of Arthur Rimbaud and the Symbolists, as well as the conversational New York vibe of Frank O’Hara (as in for example the opening of “To the Secret Poets of Kansas”):

Just because I can’t understand you
it doesn’t mean I hate you...like
when you go on continuously how you
cannot tolerate skyscrapers or cab drivers

maniac faces on Fifth, well

it means nothing to me I
just ignore as so often...

Well Rimbaud and O’Hara, I suppose these are not original comparisons, but if you are as good or even almost as good as them, then you’re in good company. And Jim Carroll is. The New York Times obituary calls him a “poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs.” He was also the son of a bar owner. Most people probably know of Carroll because of the film The Basketball Diaries (still to my mind Leonardo DiCaprio’s best role). The film is good; the book is better. Better still his poetry. This is his short poem “Song”:

Song

In minute gestures
that jet wetly slight
right above your eyes
each morning
I watch the sun cross over the reservoir
all day sometimes
a few hours soaked into air cotton
like cloud syringes drawing up blue
like darkness when it’s through

Of course, offering a couple short extracts does not do Carroll justice. But when a poet dies one immediately thinks of his words, just as when a rock star dies (again he was both, though “star” might be stretching it) perhaps you play the music. Though Carroll was 60 years old, I can’t help thinking of the lines from his song “I Want the Angel,” which go, “And those who died young, they are my heroes/ They are my heroes, they took the walk/ Where the heart made sense and the mind can’t talk.” Here (below) is Jim Carroll doing “People Who Died,” and hopefully he wouldn’t mind me writing a new verse, maybe, at least in my head, something like “Jimmy had a heart attack, 60 years old, he looked like 55 when he died, he was a friend of mine...”

Six Gallery Press reading, 8/29

2009-08-22T19:15:00.002-04:00

I am participating in a Six Gallery Press reading in Pittsburgh next Saturday, August 29. It’s taking place at Modern Formations Gallery, 4919 Penn Ave. Doors open at 8:00; I’ll be one of the later readers. The full list of participants is on the flier, above. I don’t know if they serve alcohol there or not. Hope so. In any case, I’ll try to be interesting. See you there?

Dánta i bhFeasta

2009-08-17T17:33:00.005-04:00

Agus sinn i measc mhí Lúnasa (mí a dhéanann comóradh ar Lugh, léirithe ar clé), cad eile ach go mbeadh eagrán Lúnasa 2009 (Imleabhar 62, Uimhir 8, ISSN 0014-8946) de Feasta againn. Is “reiviú den smaointeachas Éireannach” an t-irisleabhar seo, agus le Comhar is na nuachtáin Lá is Foinse imithe ón saol, tá tábhacht ar leith a bhaineann le Feasta anois — ní hamháin do léitheoirí na Gaeilge, ach mar cheann de na hardáin is deireanaí atá fágtha le haghaidh tráchtaireachta Gaelaí ar an saol mór.

Is onóir dom bheith foilsithe ann. Tá ceithre dhán de mo chuid san eagrán seo — “Gan Codladh go Gaillimh”, “Lá Bealtaine thar Sáile”, “Fuisce” agus “Ollamh”. Tá costas clúdaigh €5 ar Fheasta, agus is fiú an léamh.

Órdaigh ó: An Siopa, 6 Sr. Fhearchair, Baile Átha Cliath 2, Éire / Fón: 353-(0)1-4783814 / Ríomhphost: feasta@eircom.net

Burdock 6

2009-07-28T14:01:00.003-04:00

The sixth issue of Burdock, the Milwaukee journal edited by Keith Gaustad, has been out for a month or two, and I am just now getting around to noting it. It’s the all-women’s issue, assisted by Dolly Lemke and Jon Lohr, is packed full of good poems, and is worth acquiring. Email Keith at burdockmagazine@gmail.com and he’ll work something out.

Here is the list of contributors: Susan Firer, Izzy Oneiric, Peggy Munson, Catherine Averill, Joann Chang, Julie Strand, Stevie Curl, Emily Rutter, Jessi Harrison, Becca Klaver, Jennifer Kraft, Meghan M. Lee, Y Madrone, Meg Reilly, Abigail Stokes, Dolly Lemke, Zenobia Frost, Janelle Crawford, Mary DeMars — that’s a lot of women!

You can read their complete bio notes online at www.teppichfresser.blogspot.com, and get further information about Burdock and its associated Teppichfresser Press there as well.

Yes, that’s right, Milwaukee....

Kill Poet Press 7

2009-07-16T13:43:00.004-04:00

The new issue of Kill Poet Press (issue 7, subtitled Drawn and Quartered) is online and I’ve got a poem in it titled “Bat.” It also appears in print, and the whole journal can be purchased for a mere $6.00 through the Kill Poet store.

Sky Saxon, 1937(?)-2009

2009-07-05T02:55:00.012-04:00

Sky Saxon died on June 25th. If you’re not familiar, he was the singer of the Seeds, the great 60s garage punk band probably best known for the song “Pushin’ Too Hard.” Saxon’s eulogizers tend to dismiss the Seeds as “rudimentary” (as if the best rock’n’roll isn’t), and even in their day they were sometimes considered disposable. But if you actually listen to them with fresh ears you see that this isn’t the full story. Listen to the guitar solo in “Pushin’ Too Hard.” It might be easy enough to play the notes, but how many people actually get that sound, especially now, and who would use it? Listen to the singing on “Painted Doll.” That’s a great voice, and actually kind of reminiscent of 50s doo wop, in an ostensibly “limited” 60s psychedelic milieu.

Not long ago, when Ron Asheton died, critics were coming out of the woodwork describing the Stooges too as a “rudimentary” group. I've got news for you — that’s the point; that’s a good thing. In the Stooges’ case, a basic song structure provided the foundation for some pretty amazing and intense playing, especially by Ron Asheton. I’m not saying that the Seeds were as good as the Stooges, but for anyone who likes rock’n’roll, the Seeds have their place in the pantheon of 60s punk, the often overlooked genre perhaps best anthologized on the Nuggets compilation albums.

Punk as we conceive of it today of course originated with the CBGBs scene in mid-70s New York City (the Sex Pistols, as great as they were, and that whole British scene, were slightly later aspirants). But in the 60s, while the Beatles et al. ruled the charts, there were kids picking up guitars and putting bands together whether or not they were fully “trained” musicians. Oftentimes the very lack of training made for a good result, and the Seeds encapsulated much of that sound, adding their own nuances to it. In the early 80s, American hardcore punk bands were doing something of the same thing. It was about sound and intensity (and speed), not about virtuoso playing. After a few years, when hardcore bands had learned to play better, the scene went in a different direction because people wanted to be more intricate. Some good stuff was still happening, but it wasn’t the same as that initial wave of Minor Threat, etc.

The idea being that at various points in time there must always be a return to the basics of rock’n’roll, which is volume and intensity and soul, and a handful of chords, without a lot of artifice. When the Seeds were at their best, that is what they represented.

Two Poems in Natural Bridge

2009-06-26T23:27:00.013-04:00

The publications just keep coming lately. I’m on a lucky streak, I guess. The latest is two poems in Natural Bridge (ISSN 1525-9897), which is the literary magazine of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. This issue (No. 20, or 21 — both numbers are given on the cover — at any rate it’s Spring 2009) is guest-edited by the Irish poet Eamonn Wall. It features a few familiar names, such as Galway stalwarts Kevin Higgins and Susan DuMars, as well as a couple of other familiar Irish writers such as John Liddy. On a quick skim-through, Matt Rasmussen’s poem “Oh Stethoscope” also jumped out at me for its concise yet strange sense of language, and WCW-like short-line layout.

My two poems are titled “Dead Rabbits” and “Kells,” and these particular pieces continue the Irish or Irish-American themes of Ancestor Worship, I suppose, but from a different perspective. In time and place, if nothing else — yes yes y’all, the endless process of change called life. (I promise, though, I’ve been writing about other things than Ireland lately too....)

Order Natural Bridge through the first link above (although as of this posting they have yet to update their site), or for $8 from: Natural Bridge, Department of English, UMSL, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO, 63121.

My Eugenio Montale

2009-06-09T22:04:00.010-04:00

You didn’t know I could work my way through Italian, did you? Well, I have a translation or two of the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale in a brand-new anthology of his work entitled Corno Inglese, edited by Marco Sonzogni. The book is being launched on Wednesday 24 June 2009 at 6:30pm, at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Dublin, Ireland (located at 11 Fitzwilliam Square). Below is the full notice of the event from the Italian Cultural Institute’s website. Though this book-launch is free admission, due to limited seating places for this event must be reserved: RSVP (01) 662 1507 or 662 0509. (If you’re in Dublin on the 24th, please consider attending, and let me know how it goes.)

***

Dr. Marco Sonzogni has assembled a team of illustrious translators to increase the awareness of the works of Eugenio Montale in English speaking countries. Their efforts have culminated in the volume Corno Inglese, published by the Joker Edizioni in Novi Ligure.

This elegant and precious collection (15x21, 270 pages) is destined, thanks to the value of the translations, to become an important travelling companion for the many students of Montale.

We are proud to have contributed to the realization of this worthy and considerable enterprise which collects the best of Montale’s poetry translated in English.

It is an exceptionally comprehensive, original and relevant collection, covering Montale’s entire oeuvre, from his early poems to the posthumous collections. As well as a printed edition, Corno Inglese will be published as an e-book.

*

The collection of the translations included in this volume began in 1996, the centenary of Montale’s birth. The number of translators has expanded from a small constellation of stars (from Samuel Beckett to Paul Muldoon; from Robert Lowell to John Updike) to a galaxy of interpreters and interpretations from all over the world. This new anthology gathers a diverse band of translators who reveal the essence of Montale’s poetry.

The poems appear alphabetically by translator rather than in chronological order; challenge to convention is intended to engage the reader in a freer and fresher reading of each translation independently of the canon of the originals.

If there is “a Montale for everybody”, as fellow poet Giorgio Caproni has claimed, then Corno Inglese confirms this.

--Marco Sonzogni

***

To purchase the book, go to the Joker Edizioni website (the first link, above). If you look for me in the index of translators, I am listed alphabetically under my name in Irish, Mícheál Ó Beigléinn.

Poem in the Suisun Valley Review

2009-05-25T18:24:00.012-04:00

I have a poem in the new issue of the Suisun Valley Review (Spring 2009, Issue 26, ISSN 1945-7340). This journal is impressive, with a glossy cover and perfect-bound format. It is produced and edited by students at Solano Community College in California who take English 58, “a course in the contemporary literary magazine.” Sounds like a pretty progressive college, and it comes through in the magazine itself, which includes not only poetry and short fiction, but photography as well.

There’s some really great material in this issue, and it is well worth the $6 cover price. An immediate stand-out for me was a poem by Ashaki M. Jackson (who describes herself in her bio as “an ethnographer by proxy” and a social psychologist “in her spare time”). Her poem is “Revival,” and stylistically it reminded me a bit of myself. My own poem is “Thylacine,” and if I may say so it is one of my favorite poems that I’ve written in the last couple years. It takes up two pages of the journal; thanks to them for giving me the space....

Order the magazine at: Suisun Valley Review, English Department, Solano Community College, 4000 Suisun Valley Rd., Fairfield, CA 94535, USA, or query by email at: suisunvalleyreview@gmail.com. There’s also lots of info on their blog (the link above) and their MySpace page.

Léirmheas de Joe Steve Ó Neachtain i bhFeasta

2009-05-16T23:34:00.005-04:00

Tá léirmheas a scríobh mé den leabhar filíochta is déanaí Joe Steve Ó Neachtain foilsithe san irisleabhar Feasta. Is é an t-eagrán atá i gceist ná Móreagrán na Bealtaine 2009 (Imleabhar 62, Uimhir 5, ISSN 0014-8946), agus tá sé ar díol sna siopaí leabhair i láthair na huaire. Príomhiris liteartha na Gaelige is ea Feasta, agus tá Pádraig Mac Fhearghusa ina eagarthóir air.

The scholar, Austin Clarke, and others

2009-05-07T02:44:00.016-04:00

Poet and critic Robert Archambeau has posted a pleasant “end of semester” post on his Samizdat Blog. Toward the end of it, he includes Austin Clarke’s “The Scholar,” which I had not come across before (my knowledge of Clarke being shamefully somewhat less than it should be). But since I happen to be a big fan of Seán Ó Tuama’s anthology An Duanaire, 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (The Dolmen Press, 1981), I immediately recognized the Clarke piece as a loose version of “Aoibhinn Beatha an Scoláire,” the now-anonymous 17th-century Irish Gaelic poem. Archambeau highlights Clarke’s use of consonance, assonance, and half-rhymes, which is indeed pretty amazing. And it goes along with what I do know about Clarke, that he was very big on bringing the techniques and metres of Gaelic poetry over into English. Here is the original poem, followed by Clarke’s English version:

Aoibhinn beatha an sgoláire
bhíos ag déanamh a léighinn;
is follas díbh, a dhaoine,
gurab dó is aoibhne i nÉirinn.

Gan smacht ríogh ná rófhlatha
ná tighearna dá threise;
gan chuid cíosa ag caibidil,
gan moicheirgne, gan meirse.

Moichéirghe ná aodhaireacht
ní thabhair uadha choidhche,
’s ní mó do-bheir dá aire
fear ná faire san oidhche.

Do-bheir sé greas ar tháiplis,
is ar chláirsigh go mbinne,
nó fós greas eile ar shuirghe
is ar chumann mná finne.

Maith biseach a sheisrighe
ag teacht tosaigh an earraigh;
is é is crannghail dá sheisrigh
lán a ghlaice do pheannaibh.

*

The Scholar

Summer delights the scholar
With knowledge and reason.
Who is happy in hedgerow
Or meadow as he is?

Paying no dues to the parish,
He argues in logic
And has no care of cattle
But a satchel and stick.

The showery airs grow softer,
He profits from his ploughland
For the share of the schoolmen
Is a pen in hand.

When mid-day hides the reaping,
He sleeps by a river
Or comes to the stone plain
Where the saints live.

But in winter by the big fires,
The ignorant hear his fiddle,
And he battles on the chessboard,
As the land lords bid him.

Even if you don’t speak Irish, you can see that Clarke is attempting to imitate the form of the original, down to the loose or half-rhymes of lines 2 and 4 in each stanza, and the not-quite-regular pattern of alliteration. But what I found particularly interesting was what Clarke did with the translation itself, because he actually subverts the meaning of the poem to a great degree. For comparison, here is Thomas Kinsella’s rather more literal translation from An Duanaire, closely reflecting the original:

The Scholar’s Life

Sweet is the scholar’s life,
busy about his studies,
the sweetest lot in Ireland
as all of you know well.

No king or prince to rule him
nor lord however mighty,
no rent to the chapterhouse,
no drudging, no dawn-rising.

Dawn-rising or shepherding
never required of him,
no need to take his turn
as watchman in the night.

He spends a while at chess,
and a while with the pleasant harp
and a further while wooing
and winning lovely women.

His horse-team hale and hearty
at the first coming of Spring;
the harrow for his team
is a fistful of pens.

In the original, the emphasis is on the seeming ease of the scholar’s life, his relief from the drudgery of other occupations, the apparently privileged position he holds. The feeling is of spring, of art, of freedom, of sex, even a sense of hedonism, of libertinism in late-Gaelic society. It harks back to the role of the file, the poet, in classical Gaelic society, once on a par with the chief or king. But given the poem’s time period, probably the 17th c., maybe shortly after the disaster of Kinsale, perhaps there is a hint of a rose-tinted perspective here, or at least the unspoken sense that things were quickly to change. The poets who immediately followed, and up through the early 19th c. — Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin — decried their reduced circumstances and bristled at the poverty they, poets, had been reduced to (by English despotism).

Austin Clarke’s version of the poem is of his own time period (post-independence, ultra-conservative Ireland). The emphasis here is on summer as a temporary respite from the duties of the job. As Archambeau smartly points out, there is a “devastating turn at the end, when the easy flow of pastoral escapism comes to a screeching halt, and the scholar once again finds himself, as we all do, working for The Man.” This does not happen in the Gaelic or Kinsella’s version. In these, there is no rent at all; but in Clarke, as winter looms, the concluding line is “the land lords bid him.” In the original, chess is a pleasant diversion, but as Clarke has it, it is a battle. And there is no outward libertinism in Clarke’s version — the line about “winning lovely women” disappears altogether, it being the 1930s, the Catholic Church’s moral despotism holding sway in Irish society. There is no one but “the ignorant” to listen to the scholar now.

As the ideal life depicted in “Aoibhinn Beatha an Scoláire” is soon dissipated in the wind of 17th-c. English colonization, so is any hope of real intellectual freedom frustrated in 30s Ireland, in Clarke’s version. An interesting side note to this is that my father had a brief correspondence with Clarke in 1970-71. These two letters are now part of the collection of the University of Delaware Library, and the info on them can be seen here. If you scroll down, you will note that under the heading “Scope and Content Note” it lists “censorship in Ireland (including Clarke’s own work),” among other subjects.

On a review of a Ryan Adams poetry book

2009-04-26T14:43:00.006-04:00

There’s a very funny review of the Ryan Adams poetry collection Infinity Blues (Akashic Books), published in the Independent Weekly, and here in their online version Indyweek.com. The piece, by Grayson Currin, is a great example of a reviewer tearing a book to shreds in a really smart, clever way. I have not read the collection myself, so I can’t judge whether all of the criticisms in the piece are warranted. To give the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they may not all be. As I understand it, Adams was something of a controversial figure in the Raleigh-Chapel Hill-Durham area, where his music career began with Whiskeytown, and there’s a chance that some of that could have tinged Currin’s piece (this is pure speculation too, as I don’t know much about Currin or his motivations). However, it seems quite possible that Currin is mostly right, because there is so much bad poetry out there that what he describes feels oh so familiar:

The poems are petulant, myopic and petty, as their star is either whining about the unbearable torture of life and love or regretting something he once felt.... What’s more, Infinity Blues chokes on its lazy, lavish use of postmodern devices: Adams tosses around unorthodox forms, line and character spacing, indulgent repetition, and inconsistent capitalization so often that they accomplish nothing except to render an exhausting read. Adams writes like an undergraduate who picked up volumes of Charles Bukowski, E.E. Cummings and William S. Burroughs at the used bookstore last semester, and now — back at home and missing his girlfriend — is trying those oversized clothes on for size over spring break....

Currin situates the publication of this book in the context of our contemporary society’s celebrity obsession, and wonders whether such work would have been published at all if Ryan Adams were not a well-known musician. It made me think about all the deserving poets out there who struggle to get any publisher at all, who don’t have the benefit of a music career to get them noticed. On the other hand, Akashic has published some great writers and is an important independent press. Akashic would no doubt beg to differ with Currin’s review, and I am guessing would stand by the Adams book as a valuable piece of literature in its own right. In a strange way, then, Currin’s piece ends up a recruiter to Infinity Blues itself: whether Akashic got it wrong, or Currin did, I can’t tell until I read it.

Pense Aqui No. 301

2009-04-07T14:19:00.006-04:00

I have two poems in Pense Aqui No. 301, a mail-art and experimental poetry magazine published from Brazil. This issue includes collage/mail-art work from Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Canada, the U.S., Holland, Italy, Japan, Argentina, Serbia, with poems by David Stone, Adolf P. Shvedchikov (in Cyrillic font), and as mentioned, myself.

The editor, José Roberto Sechi, has posted photos of previous issues here.

Copies of the new issue may be obtained from:

José Roberto Sechi
Av. M29, N.° 2183 — Jd. São João
Rio Claro SP 13505-410
Brazil

(The above photo is from an earlier issue, No. 275.)

Otoliths 11 print edition

2009-03-26T14:07:00.005-04:00

Otoliths issue 11 (Southern Spring) is now out in a print edition, in two books. I have three poems in Part One (“Angles,” “Poem Written at Work,” “July 12th”). Though the poems are online, the print edition is a great thing too. It can be ordered here.

The full details are:

156 pages, 6” x 9”, perfect binding, black and white interior ink.

Otoliths issue eleven, part one, contains work by Anny Ballardini, Halvard Johnson, dan raphael, Doug White, harry k stammer, Eileen R. Tabios, Cara Benson, Angela Genusa, Craig Rebele, Gregory Braquet, David-Baptiste Chirot, Vernon Frazer, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Stephen C. Middleton, John Moore Williams, Marcia Arrieta, Raymond Farr, Felino Sorriano, Charles Mahaffee, Jeff Harrison, Steve Wing, Robert Gauldie, Philip Byron Oakes, Iain Britton, Thomas Fink, Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason, Bill Drennan, J. D. Nelson, Julian Jason Haladyn, Charles Freeland, John M. Bennett, Jaie Miller, Naomi Buck Palagi, Tom Beckett, Paul Siegell, Geof Huth, Martin Edmond, Andrew Topel, Michael S. Begnal, and Michele Leggott.

Begnal featured in Eyewear

2009-03-20T13:40:00.005-04:00

I am the latest Featured Poet (here) on Todd Swift’s blog-site and review, Eyewear. Swift’s piece includes my poem “The Fluctuations,” and I hope you will all check it out. Maybe even leave a comment or something. (The photo above is the one used there.)

A United Ireland?, Pt. 3

2009-03-17T23:10:00.014-04:00

Since St. Patrick’s Day is a day arbitrarily linked to Ireland and all things Irish, I humbly offer some thoughts on the recent killings in the North of Ireland perpetrated by the “Real” IRA and the Continuity IRA:

Let me begin by stating that I am in favor of a united Ireland, and indeed have written about this in the past, here and here. In principle I do not believe in the partition of Ireland. The 1918 all-Ireland election, in which Sinn Féin won by a landslide, a result on which Ireland declared its independence, only to be rejected by the British government of the time, should have led to a free united Ireland, if said government was serious about democracy (apparently it wasn’t). Instead, it led to the War of Independence (a.k.a. the Anglo-Irish War) and partition.

The roots of the conflict in the North go back a long way (much farther than 1918 for that matter). In retrospect, did anyone really believe that a gerrymandered sectarian state (“Northern Ireland”), with “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people” could work out? Or that it should? But, if we’re talking “should,” i.e. the principles of democracy and right and wrong, then there should be a united Ireland right now. But there isn’t, and thus, at least from the Irish republican perspective, there is a conflict. And thus there will in the interlude continue to be some group in Ireland, be it large or small at various points in time, willing to use violence to achieve the goal.

The question is (actually is twofold), is this an effective means of achieving the goal on the practical level, and is it morally right on the human level? In the 1990s, after three decades of the Provisional IRA prosecuting an armed campaign against British rule in the North, violence had finally come to been seen by Irish republicans (at least the majority of republicans as represented by Sinn Féin) to be a futile method of struggle at this time, in this generation. If anything, the armed struggle had actually become counterproductive to the goal it set for itself (a united Ireland), and I see absolutely no reason why it would be a different result this time around.

In terms of effective tactics, I think the recent dissident actions are setting back whatever (albeit minimal) progress toward a united Ireland we have had in the last number of years. I am frustrated by the pace of change too. But even if the dissidents were able to gain some popular support (which doesn’t seem likely at this point), and draw out the loyalist paramilitaries and the British army, what would be the result? Another stalemate, with people dying ultimately for no reason. I’m not a pacifist, but when people are dying for no reason then clearly it is wrong. And clearly it won’t bring about a united Ireland. So all that the dissidents have done and are doing is in vain, and totally pointless.

Recently, Des Dalton of Republican Sinn Féin laid out the dissidents’ reasoning, saying that

the “root cause” of the renewed violence in Northern Ireland [sic Yahoo] was Britain’s involvement on the island, which republicans want to unite.

“They’re one of the few EU members who continue to occupy the territory of another EU member. So, that will create abnormal relations between those two countries. So there will quite obviously be consequences of that,” he said.

He added: “There is a conflict in Ireland over many decades — centuries. The root cause is the British presence. So long as that exists there will be resistance to it.”

Most Irish republicans would not disagree with this analysis, but again the question is the response to it. Will the recent killings of the two British soldiers and the PSNI man help bring about a united Ireland? No. Quite the contrary. However, the dissidents hope to spark a crackdown, which would in turn perhaps create some sympathy for their movement. For example, the arrest of Colin Duffy brought “masked youths” onto the streets of Lurgan the other day. (There are suggestions that Duffy is being scapegoated, and if so then these riots could simply be expressions of justifiable anger). I’m not going to tell others how they should feel about the police, but will such a response really help to bring about a united Ireland, either? Probably not.

What will? The prospects are not immediately promising, and, again, progress has been frustratingly slow. I personally have no especial solution to the issue that hasn’t been elsewhere elucidated much better than I am able to here, I a mere poet. But there are some signs of hope.

Tim Pat Coogan recently published an opinion piece which attacked the dissident actions and again raised the issue of demographic change as a driving force toward a united Ireland. In this piece, he cited the Department of Education’s 2008-2009 Schools Census, which gives statistics showing that Catholics currently number 50.9% and Protestants 40.7%. “These schoolgoers have one thing in common,” writes Coogan. “They will all be entitled to vote when they reach 18. A Catholic majority therefore is not a Six-County electoral mirage. It is a clearly visible prospect on the political horizon. In the circumstances, there is a clear-cut political, as well as a moral, imperative for the republican extremists to allow life rather than death to achieve their objectives.”

There is also the economic argument, recently (12 February 2009) articulated by Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin:

Irish unity is not just a dearly held republican aspiration. It is an economic imperative. In short, Irish unity makes economic sense. A considerable market of six million people exists on the island of Ireland. Over three million workers across Ireland have fuelled extraordinary economic growth in the past 10 years. Despite these developments, the continuing partition of Ireland creates impediments to economic development. These impediments cost individuals and businesses on a daily basis. They cost the island economy hundreds of millions each year. The identification and removal of these costs will create efficiencies, employment, wealth and opportunity across Ireland.... In future, Ireland north or south cannot afford to develop the island in a disjointed manner.... To ensure seamless and strategic economic development, the island of Ireland must plan and implement as one.

I think that this is true, and that both economic and demographic dynamics in Ireland will continue to push the two jurisdictions together, while hopefully in the meantime some trust will have been built between the two and various communities.

Again though, this is a slow process, and as an illustration of this, though they are the largest nationalist party in the North, in the South, Sinn Féin (using them a gauge) has only 11% support (according to the most recent poll I’ve seen). Though, it is quite possible that that number has more to do with SF as a party than with the South’s attitude toward a united Ireland, which a recent poll shows is generally favorable. Speaking realistically, however, there is on many levels widespread apathy toward the idea of a united Ireland in the South, and of course it is still outright opposed by unionists in the North (much fault has to be placed at the doorstep of the British government, who could be doing a lot more to act as persuaders to the unionists). If there was a magic, immediate solution, I guess I would be for it. But I have to admit that at the moment I can only say that time will have to take its course, just as time is on our side. Killing policemen etc. only slows the inevitable result and causes needless human suffering.

Jandek (Chapel Hill Sunday)

2009-02-24T00:57:00.015-05:00

On Sunday, February 22nd, Jandek played at Gerrard Hall, UNC, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with John Darnielle (better known as the Mountain Goats) on keyboards, Anne Gomez on bass and saxophone, and Brian Jones on drums. Jandek played electric guitar, and, on one song, harmonica.

I have listened to Jandek albums before, so had a rough idea of what one might expect, but the albums I heard were strictly guitar and vocals. This show was amazingly heavy and loud. At times it recalled (to me) Sonic Youth or late 60s/early 70s Miles Davis. The volume was incredible, but the sound remained clear. The vibrations penetrated the body and rattled the eardrums, literally, like you would hope for at any raw rock’n’roll show.

Jandek’s idiosyncratically-tuned guitar had an almost industrial sound at times (again I couldn’t help but think of other musicians for context, maybe Neubauten, though he predates them somewhat), and his sound shone through even in the setting of the backing band, who were all clearly versed in the history of free jazz and other avant-garde music. He tended to build a sort of hypnotic groove, which the rhythm section punctuated and built on, while Darnielle’s keyboards seemed mostly to add background color. Jones’s drum playing was savage and aggressive and impressive, and occasionally included a bit of xylophone.

The electric piano came to the fore a bit more on the harmonica song, sounding suddenly something perhaps like a Wurlitzer. Jandek’s harmonica playing was blues-based, and provided the backbone for the rhythm section to once again take things to another level. Throughout the set, in fact, it was obvious that Jandek had encouraged Gomez and Jones to cut loose and go all out, even when it meant they dominated certain parts of the songs. He seemed to enjoy being part of an improvisational band allowing for everyone to take their turn. The band would often build to a crescendo led by the rhythm section, then release it, letting Jandek’s guitar take over once again.

Gomez not only played bass and, on two songs (if I remember correctly) saxophone, but added screamed vocals to one. Here she counter-punctuated Jandek’s lines with intense shrieks, which reminded me of Linda Sharrock on the first two Sonny Sharrock albums. Her sheer talent in all three of these modes was obvious.

But of course, Jandek remained the focus of the performance. He stood, often with his back to the audience when not singing (or really, intoning) lyrics into the microphone, and got loose to the rhythm of his own playing, dressed in black and wearing what must by now be a trademark hat. In some ways he appeared a classic bluesman, in spirit. In sound he is unique despite my inclination to contextualize him. His sound is naturally dissonant, and hypnotic. His lyrics are often more like poetry than song, and he tends to deliver his words rather like delivering lines of poetry. I would like to read a book of his.

Jandek, who is sometimes referred to as the representative from Corwood Industries, seemed like he could be in his late 40s even, or 50s. But I suppose he could be 60 too — it was hard to tell. There was no talking on stage during the set (for that matter there was no stage), and he never said anything to the audience either. However, it seemed like he briefly said something to the other musicians as they were walking off at the end of the show. But otherwise there was no talking at all. Lyrical themes ranged from the body as the ultimate definition of identity, to a satire of the excesses of the rich, to the notion of being “stable” versus “unstable,” to change as the only constant in life.

Much has been made of Jandek as an enigma. That he gives no interviews, and nobody knows anything about him, or even knows his real name for sure (it is surmised to be Sterling Smith), has created a sense of legend about him. I don’t really care about any of that stuff, though on the other hand I guess it is interesting in a lot of ways. But what matters more to me is if his music is any good, and it certainly is, and this show was really great.

[Photos of the show by rchurch74 on Flickr]