B’Fhiú an Braon Fola: 2023

Sunday, June 04, 2023

B’Fhiú an Braon Fola

Séamas Ó MaoilEóin, B’Fhiú an Braon Fola (Sáirséal agus Dill, 1958). Leabhar iontach. Beidh an teideal seo aithnidiúil don léitheoir glic. An Iarmhidhe abú.

Sunday, March 05, 2023

The Stooges, Big Time Bum (1971)

In an alternate universe — the Stooges’ third Elektra LP, Big Time Bum (1971) — my best imagining of the Side One center label.

In reality, Elektra Records dropped the Stooges in June 1971, and the planned album was not recorded. However, in a March 1971 issue of Billboard, Mike Gormley had reported that “The Stooges begin recording their third Elektra LP Monday ([March] 22) in Los Angeles. The working title for the album is ‘Big Time Bum’.” A bit of wishful thinking on the band’s part, or publicity intended to prod the label, perhaps. The intended album title is confirmed in Iggy Pop’s interview with Jeff Gold (in Total Chaos [2016/22]).

Four live recordings of the Stooges’ 1971 set are currently known to exist, collected on the Easy Action You Want My Action CD box-set.

Sunday, January 15, 2023

i.m. Kevin Higgins

It is with sadness that I mark the death of Kevin Higgins (on 10 January 2023), a friend and at time/s very close literary collaborator. Kevin and I came together in Galway in the late 1990s after meeting not at the Apostasy Café (Kevin was leery of that scene at first), but a writing group he was hosting at a hotel bar not far away (at what is now called the House Hotel). Pat Jourdan was attending both and suggested I come along, and so I met Kevin that way. Soon, in late 1997 I believe, he joined the open-mics at Apostasy, and there we among many had a platform for sharing new work. Within this milieu, we gravitated toward each other as serious poets who wanted to do something beyond the coffeehouse (which is not to say we were the only ones, of course). In 1998, with John Menesini, we put out a shared chapbook titled Aphrodisiac Jacket: The New Galway Poets Anthology 1. In late ’98, Kevin and I cofounded and coedited The Burning Bush literary journal, publishing the first issue in Spring 1999. Kevin suggested I create the cover art, so long as the paper was red, a nod I think to his previous involvement in politics.

In this period, Kevin had ostensibly retired from politics, but he soon jumped back into socialist activism and concomitantly quit The Burning Bush in 2000 after four issues (I continued the magazine up through an eleventh issue). Kevin had his own reasons for this (it was certainly not at my instigation, but I suppose to do with his own need to position himself as he felt necessary at the time), though our “split” and subsequent arguments were I think much exaggerated in the minds of some (that is, among the tiny group of people aware of this sort of thing within the Galway arts scene). All along, I continued to publish Kevin’s work, poems and polemical essays, in every issue of the journal. We did exchange views robustly in typed and mailed letters (this was before either of us were regularly on the internet), and I think ultimately Kevin’s prompting helped me to work through some of my own political misperceptions, though I couldn’t quite recognize or admit it in the moment. Talking about it after the fact, however, we both agreed that this process forced each of us to question ourselves and push ourselves further; indeed, we each finally took on some aspects of the other’s thinking about literature and even politics — there was a kind of convergence in the end. “It’s a funny old world,” Kevin once said to me about that. I have to thank him for being such a sharp debating partner; our “antagonism” here really turned out to be a kind of mutual support. As that phase of our relationship came to a close, I remember a tea or coffee at Café du Journal at which we expressed our hope that we were still good with each other, still friends: “Are we okay?” I remember Kevin asking. “Yes, of course.”

Both Kevin and I had manuscripts accepted by Salmon Poetry at the same time, circa 2000. His first collection The Boy with No Face appeared in 2005. Though he went on to publish many more books, both poetry and essay collections, it is this initial one that still resonates for me the most, as it is the most personal in terms of my own memories of him. So many of the poems in that collection I knew first from the poetry readings, the little magazines, the work shared around the bar or lounge or coffeeshop table. We remained in touch over the years and decades. Kevin and his partner Susan DuMars hosted me for an Over the Edge reading (the series they cofounded in Galway in the early 2000s). I attended others at which I did not read. Our communication had long since become warm, its tone familiar; we were old friends who, even if we did not talk or email regularly, could immediately lapse back into a mutual understanding. That kind of friendship, rooted in but going beyond our investments in poetry (and politics), is rare indeed.

I last saw Kevin just this past November (2022), in his room on the Claddagh Ward of University Hospital Galway (“the Regional, to the old heads,” as Kevin clarified as we were making the arrangements of day and time). In his battle with leukemia, complicated by sarcoidosis, he was stalwart, braver than I imagine I could be, still deploying his very wry sense of humor, but also so sincere at the same time. At this point, there was much hope; he was doing better. It was a great two-hour or so conversation. I will miss him deeply. One thing I will say is that I think he would want his memory to stir us to action and to work, to write and to agitate, to fight against, as he put it in “The Leader,” “the sort of man who hasn’t read / Mein Kampf just yet. But he’ll be here, / like the old man buying The Racing Post / who growls about ‘invaders’ or the skinhead / with the petrol bomb whose hour is striking now” — or against, as the title of another poem in The Boy with No Face has it, “The Hidden Hand” of free-market economics, the capitalist interests which underlie both liberalism and the resurgent Right, whose hour is indeed seemingly striking now.

Kevin’s final poem, “I Always Thought I’d Live,” published posthumously in the Irish Times, is heart-wrenching but defiant to the end: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2023/01/12/i-always-thought-id-live-poet-kevin-higgins-writes-final-poem-just-days-before-he-dies/

And here is the statement by Uachtarán na hÉireann/the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins (no relation), on Kevin’s death: https://president.ie/en/media-library/news-releases/statement-by-president-higgins-on-the-death-of-kevin-higgins

My sincere condolences to Susan, and all who knew Kevin.