Louis Zukofsky, Selected Poems

Part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project, Louis Zukofsky’s Selected Poems (ed. Charles Bernstein, 2006) is quite a cool and, if I may say, important book. Leaving aside its content, which I’ll get to in a second, it is also a nice little book-as-object, with an embossed cover designed by Chip Kidd and Mark Melnick. I think it’s fitting to mention this, as Zukofsky, being the Objectivist poet and Marxian materialist that he was, would probably have appreciated the attention paid to the volume’s physical characteristics, not only regarding the cover art but to the typographical layout as well. As for the selections herein, Charles Bernstein does a very good job of presenting an overview of Zukofsky’s immense and sprawling body of work, and Bernstein’s introductory essay seems extremely percipient. What follows is not really a review per se, since the book has been available for two years now. It is simply a personal reading of a great and sometimes overlooked poet, with the caveat that others have probably written about him far more knowledgably than I.

In the early part of the twentieth century (long before postmodern theories of language came to prominence), a colleague of Ezra Pound’s in the early Imagist group, T.E. Hulme noted that

language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language... Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas (Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”).

While other, more contemporary, linguists and philosophers have elaborated on these ideas, Hulme’s formulation is succinct and useful to a discussion of Zukofsky, not only because Zukofsky was initially influenced by Pound and Imagism, but because his own poetry elaborates it in its own way. Zukofsky’s work preeminently reflects an awareness of the socially-constructed nature or “communal” aspect of language. He allows it to take center stage, rather than trying to make it bend to his will. He “struggles” with it, in the sense that he disbelieves in language as direct representation, but is nonetheless concerned with what and how it might signify in other ways, and how it relates to the realities of the material world.

At the end of “A”, section 7, Zukofsky writes, “words, words, we are words...” (Selected Poems, 90). This statement is meaningful on many different levels, but one thing Zukofsky is suggesting is that human consciousness creates itself, or is at least partly created, through language. There is the sense in his work of a mind (or minds) being enacted through the medium of poetry. His poetry is correspondingly self-reflexive and overtly aware of itself as language, concomitant with the poet’s awareness that language is an entity unto itself rather than a neutral medium. For Zukofsky, if language is socially-constructed and relational, it is therefore beyond the full control of any one individual: “we are words,” he says in this poem, not “I am words.” What it implies is that language can only represent tentative versions of reality, reflecting subjective and evolving perceptions through time. And so Zukofsky’s poetry reads something like a graph of consciousness in action. Broadening this viewpoint outward, his work implies that the nature of reality itself is a kind of Heraclitean flux, eschewing fixed certainties and embracing change. Thus, while language cannot fully represent the world, in Zukofsky’s work it is capable both of suggesting this state of flux, and of enacting its own materiality through the act of writing. This is where the fun part comes in.

Language can be crafted and constructed into poetry, but for Zukofsky it will always be something other than what it purports to describe. This is clearly exemplified in “A” 7, where he in a sense lifts the veil on representational art. He does not pretend to describe a real horse here (ostensibly the subject of the poem), but rather offers a meditation on the ways in which the poet will struggle (as Hulme describes it) with language in a poem. The section begins with a question: “Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words/ Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but/ They have no manes...” (Selected, 86). Quickly the reader realizes that Zukofsky is not talking about real horses at all, but the words used to refer to them – like “manes” – and that the horse in this case is actually a mere wooden sawhorse, a blatantly hollow representation of a “real” horse. He plays on the notion that the poet can make words be something more than they are:

Trot, trot—? No horse is here, no horse is there?
Says you! Then I—fellow me, airs! we’ll make
Wood horse, and recognize it with our words [...]
For they had no manes we would give them manes,
For their wood was dead the wood would move—... (87)

The only thing is, he’s already undercut the whole venture, and knows full well that these assertions are wholly unbelievable.

There is no way to make wood into a horse, just as there is no way to make words into a horse. What Zukofsky, as a poet, is capable of doing is exploring the nature of language, which after all is his medium, just as a sculptor or a carpenter might use wood. Therefore, much of this poem is taken up with word- and sound-play – it’s “Not in the say but in the sound’s—hey-hey—” he writes (88). Instead of trying to force the poem to describe a horse, Zukofsky is content to let the sounds of the words interact with thought, and lead him where they may. Language is capable of signification here, but not of the thing directly. For Zukofsky, what it represents is a world in continual flux. A further conclusion that his explorations lead him to is that individual identity is also in flux, and that consciousness is not necessarily composed of a single willful voice, but can embody the voices of many: “Two ways, my two voices.../ ...And the seven came/ To horses seven.../ Spoke: words, words, we are words, horses, manes, words” (90). Implicit in these lines, again, is the conception of language as socially constructed, “a communal thing,” as T.E. Hulme says. It embodies the multifarious versions of reality of the illimitable number of people who have contributed to its formation over time.

Section 9 of Zukofsky’s poem Anew is another example of his poetic, a poetic which sees language as a fluctuating entity. It employs stream of consciousness and sound association, which prevails over any possible closed or prescriptive meaning in the poem. Anew 9 begins with the programmatic statement, “For you I have emptied the meaning/ Leaving the song” (23). Logical meaning, then, is not the focus for Zukofsky; instead it is the material aspects of language – the sound sense of the poem. That is not to say that the poem is devoid of all meaning, however. After the compact manifesto of those first two lines, Zukofsky then humorously suggests that if he’d wanted to he could have posited, for example, a mythological theme: “Or would a god—a god of midday/ Have been brought in by the neck/ For foes to peck at”. But he does not want to impose a tidy mythological structure onto his writing – a strategy utilized for example by modernists like T.S. Eliot – and thereby assign a prefabricated solution for the reader. The imposition of such a mythological structure would be artificial, a reaching after some kind of all-encompassing, explanatory paradigm. Such a paradigm would not be reflective of the nature of reality which, as Zukofsky perceives it, is continually changing and is composed of multifarious voices.

As Charles Bernstein writes in the introduction to Selected Poems, “these poems are not representations of ideas but enactments of thoughts in motion, articulated as sound” (xvii). This statement encapsulates Zukofsky’s view of language. On the one hand it implies that language and thought are in flux (“motion”) – a continual process of becoming. At the same time, it deemphasizes the representational capabilities of language, emphasizing instead its ability to “enact” thought materially, as sound. Sound-play in Anew 9 comes to the fore predominantly in the way the poem’s stanzas relate to each other. For example, the beginning of the second stanza echoes the first in rhyme and rhythm: “For you I have emptied the meaning” / “God the man is so overweening”; “Leaving the song” / “He would prolong”. These two stanzas are connected by sound even as they diverge in logical meaning. Linear logic is not evident, which forces the reader to attend to the material aspects of language separate from what it may or may not signify. In the third stanza, Zukofsky presents an image of sunset and coming night, the world in a state of change, moving from light to dark, existence seemingly captured for a brief moment in this state of change, yet poised to move continually onward. He thereby implies that if there is any sort of pattern at all, it can only be one which reflects the nature of reality as he sees it – the world turning, continual flux. Human consciousness for Zukofsky too embodies such flux, and therefore so does the function of language in the poem. His poetry can exist only in relation to the reality of the world, and to the reality of human consciousness in that world, which is created in the action of language itself.

In Anew 12, Zukofsky is concerned with the ways human consciousness might be accurately described. This seems to be what he’s writing about in the lines: “It’s hard to see but think of a sea.../ And there are waves—/ Frequencies of light,/ Others that may be heard” (24). As Hulme reminds us, language has a social component; there are always other viewpoints from which we might see or hear. The nature of life and language both, Zukofsky suggests here, is relational: ultimately we exist only to the degree that we are capable of interacting with the material and social world around us, and we do so through language. As in “A” 7, Zukofsky posits many different voices, a multiplicity lying behind the speaker of the poem, rather than one unitary ‘I’. The poem is where these other voices interact, combine, or play off of each other. This multiplicity of voices is also evident toward the end of Anew 12:

...Which is a forever become me over forty years.
I am like another and another, who has finished learning
And has just begun to learn. (25)

These lines suggest that the self is continually undergoing change, always being created afresh. At the end of “A” 23, Zukofsky writes that “...music, thought, drama, story, poem/ park’s sunburst—animals, grace notes—/ z-sited path are but us” (151). Just as language, according to Hulme, is communal, a product of all who have spoken it up through the present moment, so is the human mind a product of what has come before, of those who have come before, in turn interacting with the things of the material world. But at the same time, language is capable only of representing perceptions of the world which are subjective and evolving through time, not, for Zukofsky, any fixed or determinate meaning. In other words, language is fluid because material reality, at least as perceived by the human mind, is fluid as well.

Ancestor Worship reviewed in Irish America magazine

Ancestor Worship has gotten a review in Irish America magazine. In their latest issue (June-July 2008), Tom Deignan was brief but very flattering. Here is his piece:

Poetry

Formerly the editor of the Galway literary magazine The Burning Bush, Michael S. Begnal is an accomplished poet, whose new collection Ancestor Worship has just been published. Though American-born, Begnal mingles the Irish and English languages in his work, which reflects on ancient history as well as pop culture. Take, for example, this sample from the title poem, which recalls Frank O’Hara: “It’s like when Lennon laid / his New York album on you, / and appeared in pictures / in his new image – / Revolutionary, / sudden Irishman, / Manhattanite.” Begnal’s poems are filled with similar humor and the joys and anxieties of living in the shadow of those who came before us.

(12.00 euros, 80 pages, http://www.salmonpoetry.com/)

PIG: a journal, Issue One

The first issue of PIG: a journal was launched on Saturday, June 21st, in Asheville, North Carolina. This is a great little poetry magazine, which is hand-produced by editor Jennifer Callahan utilizing some very impressive book-arts, silk-screening, and letter-press skills. Not only does it look nice, but it contains some really good writing as well. On a first reading, (and first listening, at the launch), a few standouts for me were Jaye Bartell, Hope Rinehart, Stephen Kirbach, Mark Prudowsky, Mara Leigh, Joanna Furmann – well that’s one-third of the roster right there, and frankly I was impressed in some way or another with just about everything here. I have a poem in it too.

For more info on PIG: a journal check out the above link. For ordering information, contact the editor at pigajournal@gmail.com (also, a note on the title page says that submissions are being accepted through 12/1/08 for the next issue, a themed issue “on the topic of adolescence and childhood”).

Signed copies of Ancestor Worship

Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, Middle Street, Galway, Ireland, now has some signed copies of Ancestor Worship for sale. If you happen to be in Galway, stop in and pick one up. Alternatively, they can also no doubt be ordered through their website (click their link above).

Galway, Ireland, May 29th poetry reading

I am doing a poetry reading in Galway, Ireland, on Thursday, May 29, 2008. All the official info is below. Please come; it’ll be great.

The May Over The Edge: Open Reading takes place in Galway City Library, St. Augustine Street, Galway on Thursday, May 29th, 6.30-8pm. The Featured Readers are Michael S. Begnal, Deirdre Kearney and Dennis O’Driscoll.

Michael S. Begnal is a dual Irish/American citizen, born in the United States in 1966. He spent many years living in Ireland , and was editor of the Galway-based literary magazine, The Burning Bush. He returned to live in the US in 2004. His first collection of poems, The Lakes of Coma (Six Gallery Press), was published in 2003. His work has appeared in numerous journals and in the anthology Breaking the Skin: New Irish Poetry (Black Mountain Press). His Irish-language writing has been published in Comhar, Lá, and the Go nuige seo anthologies (Coiscéim). His second collection of poems, Ancestor Worship, was published by Salmon Poetry last year.

Dennis O’Driscoll was born in Thurles in 1954. His eight poetry collections include Weather Permitting (Anvil Press, 1999), which was a Poetry Books Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Prize, Exemplary Damages (2002) and New and Selected Poems (2004). His most recent collection, Reality Check (2007) was also shortlisted for the Irish Times/Poetry Now Prize. A selection of his essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams was published by Gallery Press in 2001. He is editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006). His next book, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, will be published by Faber & Faber in November. He is a member of Aosdána. He has worked as a civil servant since the age of sixteen.

Deirdre Kearney is originally from Omagh, County Tyrone, but has lived in Galway since 1983. She is a participant in the Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre. Her poems have been published in West 47, Cúirt New Writing 2007, The Ulster Herald, Crannóg, Words on the Web, Tinteán, Australian-Irish Magazine Treóir, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann magazine, the Over the Edge website and Galway Exposed. She has previously read her work at the Over the Edge Open-Mic, Westside Library, The Galway Arts Centre Nuns’ Island Studio, the Poets for Oxfam launch in Galway in 2006 and North Beach Poetry Nights.

As usual there will be an open-mic when the Featured Readers have finished. This is open to anyone who has a poem or story to share. New readers are always especially welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.

Over The Edge acknowledges the financial support of Galway City Council and The Arts Council.

Windhover 42

I have two poems in the new issue of Windhover (#42, 2008), a literary, arts, and graphic design magazine published out of North Carolina State University. One of the poems is “Sunrise”:

Sunrise

Pink and mottled through the clouds,
an old man
carrying a satchel,
he is queer,
and he speaks Chinese

— Michael S. Begnal

Ancestor Worship reviewed in Pif Magazine and Perigree

A very good review of Ancestor Worship appears simultaneously on the sites of Pif Magazine and Perigree (issue 21). It’s by Liam Mac Sheóinín, and can be read online at Pif (click the first link), or by navigating the Perigree site (Perigree link), or simply by scrolling down here:

Ancestor Worship by Michael S. Begnal

Review by Liam Mac Sheoinín

In his previous exemplary collection, The Lakes of Coma, Michael S. Begnal adroitly reflected on the Michael S. Begnal Cosmos. No less fleshy and turbulent than the first master of American free verse — I mean, the author of Leaves of Grass, the redoubtable Walt Whitman — Begnal continues, collection after collection, to display a Whitmanian genius for litotes. Modern poetry is about understatement. It is about uniting opposites. Perhaps poetry was transformed into a statement of eternal, simple truth by a young Dane enumerating esseric considerations to a severed consciousness. Hamlet argues for continuing his existence when all evidence contradicts his argument. Whitman is a Hamlet healed by words, words, words. Whitman’s verse is a series of addresses to the ghosts of his past. Like Hamlet and Whitman, Begnal argues with phantoms.

Begnal’s central argument seems to be with the craft he loves but also hates. The “Agenbite of Inwit” all deconstructionists must feel post Joyce, post Derrida. To his credit, this young poet seems to have an awareness of the futility of a poet’s enterprise. He actually admitted in The Lakes of Coma, his brilliant first collection, to being “vulgarized by language.” And although I stated in my Abiko Annual #23 review of The Lakes of Coma that Begnal “delights in being a poet,” as expected of a Whitmanian, his verse is polygonal: a series of complex propositions. Mercury, the Dime, Begnal’s long poem published by Six Gallery Press in 2005, is an elegy on the ephemeral claim a race has on a topography. It is a gentle howl, full of lament and acute observation. In Mercury, the Dime, actually written during the early 90s, Begnal brilliantly declares, “It was a Native American that dreamed Route 66.”

Begnal’s latest collection, Ancestor Worship, is as remarkable for its moody details. In “Beautiful People,” “Dead bird blown down the road / as light as its feathers” is a dazzling, fitting inchoate for a poem that ends with the provocative line “the knife dripping with juice.” Like Ginsberg, Begnal realizes a poem must provoke.

The title poem, “Ancestor Worship,” is refulgent with race memory, the entelechy of the Eliotian proposal of melding memory and desire. Paradoxically, “Ancestor Worship,” located at the near equator of the shining sphere of Begnal’s collection, becomes a distant journey into the cavern of the past without ever leaving the present — and possibly with a foot in the future. “Not like the bones of parents / carried out in procession / from their dark vaginal tombs / among the rocks, / mummified skin stretched / and tanned in mockery of death.” The journey ends with a burst of confidence: “ancestor worship / is the only religion / truly compatible / with the fact /of evolution.” This is a foot projected in the future.

The great poet James Liddy, in his blurb of Ancestor Worship, declares Begnal’s latest collection “a journey or pilgrimage.” Liddy maintains Begnal takes us to a place where “no one has been quite there before, along the genealogy or amid the furniture.” I am in total agreement.

Freddy Johnston, in his review published on the Western Writers Centre site, delights in Begnal’s “remaking of language.” Johnston, a very gifted poet and writer, cited Begnal’s use of the phrase “gorted land” as a prime example of the poet’s ability to shift from English to Irish. Johnston explains “gort” is the Irish word for field and “gorta” the Irish for famine. This sonorous echo is Begnal’s wink to the polysemantic brilliance of Finnegans Wake.

Imagery, however, remains the predominate ingredient of Begnal’s collection. Mercilessly eidetic-eidocentric, if you will — Begnal’s saccadic eye turns the page into cinematic experience. This is especially true of his beautiful lament, “Montparnasse Cemetery”:

think of all the bridges on the Seine,
that melancholy snake,
men and women have jumped off,
insignificants splash
in the green murk,
tempted

You can see the “insignificants” being swallowed by their own bile. Few poets are as adept at kinaesthetic image as Begnal. In fact, Ancestor Worship abounds with kinaesthetic magic: “Glass of the window / swims as you look / toward the Both Loiscthe bridge.”

As a Joycean, in particular a devotee of Finnegans Wake, Begnal submits:

There’s no present
just a continual becoming
past

All time in time and all space in space is the underlying theme of Finnegans Wake. So it’s no coincidence that in Ancestor Worship, a subtle work of genius, that magus Begnal succeeds in achieving a temporal-spacial perversion akin to Joyce’s Wake. Thus Galway and environs morphs into the streets of Prague, the royal botanical garden of Madrid, and “In the jet light of dusk tide” back to ancient Gaul and to the glorious defeat of the dying king of every Celt, Vercingetorix.

After joyously knocking my sconce against the formidable, lisible, scriptible Ancestor Worship, I have arrived at the conclusion that if poetry has produced another Heaney during our time, his name is Michael S. Begnal.

(Liam Mac Sheóinín is a contributing and review editor for The Irish Edition and Abiko Quarterly. His first novel is forthcoming from Six Gallery Press. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Award in 2007.)

Paddy’s Day, or Easter?

St. Patrick’s Day has just passed, and I noticed that Guinness has been running a campaign to make the day an official holiday in the US (as it is in Ireland), something the company is calling “Proposition 3-17.”

Sounds great in principle, till you realize that, well first of all, it’s a beer group pushing this — not just Guinness, but really its parent company, the multinational Diageo. So their motivations are obvious, and are corporate rather than cultural. Besides which, there are already way too many idiots going around on Paddy’s Day, acting moronic and perpetuating stupid “Irish” stereotypes. Why encourage those people by making it an official day off? All it means is they’ll be able to start drinking earlier, getting drunker and stupider quicker, leading merely to more vomiting in the streets and fake Irishness.

While those in favor of the official holiday idea no doubt think it means that Irish culture will be somehow promoted on a wider scale, Paddy’s Day in America is more usually marked by ethnic stereotypes (notably, the Irish-as-drunken-louts stereotype). Paddy’s Day in the public sphere means almost nothing now, unless it comes with a true understanding of solidarity among immigrant groups (including those who are non-white) and a wish to undo white supremacy. Beyond that, it has become nothing but an excuse to indulge in drunken stereotypes and Plastic Paddyism.

Paddy’s Day has become so commercialized, so stereotyped, and so ridiculous that I don’t wear green, don’t even celebrate it anymore, except maybe in small groups of like-minded friends, or inwardly in my own head. (Or in Ireland, where although the celebrations are quickly becoming equally as annoying, at least there is some organic connection between Irish society and the day that’s in it.) Going out and seeing people wearing green plastic leprechaun hats, with shamrocks (or, even worse, four-leaf clovers) painted on their faces as they vomit in the gutter is really not that fun. An official holiday would only add to the sheer stupidity that St. Patrick’s Day has unfortunately come to represent. (And by the way, the Irish symbol is the shamrock, not the four-leaf clover. The shamrock has three leaves, not four.) Don’t get me wrong, I like to drink, myself, sometimes too. But I prefer not to be surrounded by walking insults when I do so.

A much more meaningful holiday for Irish people should be Easter. Leaving the Christian aspect aside, for Ireland the 1916 Easter Rising represents the struggle for independence, liberation from imperialist domination, aspirations of a cultural rebirth, linguistic rebirth, and an overarching celebration of the spirit of freedom. Not all of these things have yet been realized, but it means that the struggle is ongoing and that everyone still has a part to play. As I wrote in my last year’s Easter message, we are closer than ever to a united Ireland, but it has not yet been achieved. Nor have the wider ideals of the Easter Proclamation, in which “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.”

Despite the proclamation of “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible,” the gap between rich and poor seems to grow apace, multinational corporations exploit the economy and natural resources, the Irish language is still discriminated against, and even the Irish government is willing to bulldoze thousands of years of Irish history at the Hill of Tara to make way for a motorway that might shave a few minutes off the daily commute to Dublin. But the Easter Rising, led by Pearse and Connolly, represents an opposition to all of these political, economic, and cultural injustices. Easter, therefore, can still be a powerful symbol of resistance, and a powerful representation of Irishness that is far from the leprechaun-and-green-beer stereotypes that are ubiquitous on Paddy’s Day. Instead of a fake plastic hat or some shamrock face paint, it is far preferable in my opinion to wear an Easter lily. Caith lile na Cásca in ómós do laochra marbha na hÉireann — agus i streachailt in éadan éagóracha an lae inniu!

Reading 3/18 in Columbia, SC

I will be giving a poetry reading on Tuesday, March 18, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. The reading is part of their Poetry Initiative series. I will be reading with Marjory Wentworth (SC Poet Laureate), Ed Madden, and Julia Koets.

The event takes place at the Richland County Library, which is located at 1431 Assembly St. in downtown Columbia. It begins with a reception at 6:30 p.m., and the readings begin at 7:00 p.m. A book-signing will follow, and all of our books will be on sale, including Ancestor Worship. Looks like it’s going to be an interesting night....

Burdock 4

Issue four of the Milwaukee-based literary journal Burdock is out, and it contains some wild stuff, including poems as stickers — yes, some of the short poems here come printed on sticker paper, ready to be stuck up some place they are (no doubt) not welcome, like police stations or Wal-Marts. There are three solid poems from one of Milwaukee’s best up-and-coming young poets, Zack Pieper. One is the simple and ironic “The American Dream”: “The In-/ Exhaustible/ Search/ For more/ Meaningful/ Sex.” Burdock favors the short poem, to be sure, but includes a few which run to the length of a full page, while Eric Adams’ prose goes to two.

Mostly, however, it is a magazine of short blasts and grit, with a few deserving nods to Kerouac and Ginsberg, whose influence on the Milwaukee scene is notable here. For me, some of the other standouts were Jason Groth’s untitled exegesis of a strip club (“The air is violent breasts shoulder driven into sad agate eyes…”), Dolly Lemke’s autobiographical “Birthday Cake,” Karl Saffran’s send-up of the Beats, Tim Miller’s “The Bulgarian Town of Batak” (which deals with a Turkish-propagated 19th-century genocide — “infants who died sliding down the length of a Turk’s bayonet…”), and David Brannan’s and Tyler Farrell’s Catholic explorations. Wait, that’s nearly the whole issue…

Editor Keith Gaustad has some nice things to say about Ancestor Worship: “Ancestor Worship reads well and the poems do not all work around one theme. The strengths of Mike’s writing are his ability to celebrate a place using brutal starkness and at times a rough honesty, the kind that puts you on the wrong side with friends. I suppose if things were never ugly then they’d never seem beautiful. Putting that all in one poem can be risky, next thing you know you’re an essayist, unless you keep a bit of love in the language and Mike has that from his ancestors, some of whom were old-school rappers and some were Irish revolutionaries. From KRS-One to W.B. Yeats, Mike B channels genius from all of the greats shedding light on the divided who are obliged to their fates. Word.”

Burdock 4 also includes two of my own newer poems. And a cool cover by Anna Shovers (above). To obtain it, contact Keith Gaustad at burdockmagazine@yahoo.com…

Begnal reviews Nigel McLoughlin's Dissonances

My review of Irish poet Nigel McLoughlin’s collection Dissonances is now online at Todd Swift’s blog/review site, EYEWEAR. (Click the link to read it...)

Two poems in the Notre Dame Review

I have two poems in Notre Dame Review 25 (Winter/Spring 2008). The poems are entitled “Shade” and “Red Horse.” It’s a good issue, and also includes work by Charles Simic, Frank Rogaczewski, Mary Jo Bang, numerous other poets, and a fair smattering of book reviews and criticism. An Editor’s Note states that NDR has been publishing more and more criticism lately, and that this issue is something of a criticism issue, which can only be a good thing. Take a look at their nd[re]view website for ordering information (or just to check it out), or write to: Notre Dame Review, 840 Flanner Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556. Single copies are US$8, a one-year subscription is $15.

The Lakes of Coma (hasn’t gone away)

The Lakes of Coma
MICHAEL S. BEGNAL
(Six Gallery Press)

“First collection, I think, for this Irish-American poet.... There’s a cool post-beat kind of feel to a lot of the work here but without the lazy mannerisms that such a style often implies.... Michael Begnal is a talented young poet and worth watching out for.” —Tony Frazer, Shearsman

To order from Small Press Distribution, click here.

Order from Amazon.com here.

Order from Amazon.co.uk here.

At the AWP Conference in NYC...

I will be at the AWP Conference in New York City, which takes place from Wednesday the 30th to Saturday, February 2nd, at the Hilton New York. My publisher, Salmon Poetry, will have a table at the Bookfair. Its location is Table 327, Americas Hall I, 3rd floor of the Hilton. 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.

Salmon is also sponsoring a reading to celebrate the anthology Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007, in which I have a few poems. It takes place at the Bowery Poetry Club (which is a bar!), 308 Bowery, Manhattan (at the foot of First Street, between Houston & Bleecker), Saturday night, February 2nd, 10:00 p.m. The readers will be myself, Simmons Buntin, Patrick Chapman, Susan Millar DuMars, Phil Fried, John Hildebidle, Kevin Higgins, John Menaghan, Eamonn Wall, and Emily Wall. Hope to see you there!

John Thomas Menesini, e pit ap h (Six Gallery Press/Convergence)

First thing – I know Menesini and so won’t pretend I’m in any way impartial here. That said, I’ve been amazed by his writing from day one, and continue to be. e pit ap h is his second collection (published by Six Gallery Press, who I have also published with – a second disclosure), which follows on from The Last Great Glass Meat Million (2003), and as great as that latter book was, this one might even be better. It’s tighter, more focused, more intense, more outraged. As James Liddy writes on e pit ap h’s back cover (and I quote the whole blurb because I really think it gets to the heart of Menesini’s poetry), “John Thomas Menesini is a lyricist turned satirist, a descriptive poet turned Beat, and a protest writer with a strong intimate tone. He is outraged by contemporary mores and makes no bones about it (and maybe takes no prisoners). He uses the body and body parts as a medium for outrage. He has a good wildness.”

Some of this outrage (and some of this satire) can be seen in “Political Science Fiction,” where

us sen rick santorum
picks his teeth with the splintered femur of some dead faggot
who died at the hands of good old boys
what tried to preserve decency
in dirt yard towns

and where “governors show each other their enflamed asses in acts of challenge/ hippo shit spray/ open yawp...” Thankfully Santorum was recently voted out of office, but those like him still cling to power. Menesini is not always overtly political, but there is often a sense in his writing of interrelations between the political and the personal. The neo-con politicians we have become so wretchedly familiar with are symbols of a deeper malaise in America, and it is this deeper malaise that preoccupies Menesini. As in “Karl Rove My Lover,”

now the terror lurks in toolsheds...

and I’m left on sidewalks
in all the heat
with vomit on my cuffs
giving out rites

The emphasis is not actually on Rove himself now, but the terror he represents manifested in one’s own literal and figurative backyard, i.e. the consciousness of a personal terror, the terror of one’s personal consciousness and memory. It’s Karl Rove as BOB from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Like Lynch, Menesini is obsessed with the small town America from which he comes. One could almost even call him a regionalist, dealing heavily with the dead landscapes of Western Pennsylvania and the myriad dead towns it is home to, or with the cityscape of Pittsburgh. But “regionalist” often implies parochial and traditional, and Menesini is anything but. A working-class poet, to be sure, but with a sense of bohemianism, of surrealism, decadent Catholicism, and a sheer ability to channel language in unexpected and original ways. As he writes in “Musing When I Should Have Been Cleaning Toilets,” “‘being’ wears a filter” – the filter of language, with which, on some level, the poet mediates the world.

So Menesini is not afraid to give reign to wild streams of consciousness, knowing that it is indeed “a good wildness” (as Liddy put it), and that such a technique contains the potential for true revelation. These revelations are not always pleasant, but often brilliant. For example, in “Telegrams from a Burnt Place”: “orange is so close to brown it burns// brown ‘is’ the blood grit mud puddle broke tooth/ kickball wet sock tied up punch face/ dad yell street light oven burn wall sweat...” (And note the inverted commas on the verb ‘is’.) A personal favorite is “Wonder Woman is an Allegory for Fuckin’,” where Menesini’s main concerns, both personal and political, are fused into one sustained, surreal burst of controlled energy, a graph of the poetic mind in action. e pit ap h gets my vote for sleeper best collection of 2007. (Order from Small Press Distribution or Amazon.)

Destruction at the Hill of Tara

A major part of Ireland’s cultural and archaeological history is under threat from the construction a toll motorway (the M3), which is slated to run right by the Hill of Tara and to destroy thousands of years of important archaeological remains in the surrounding area. There have been many protests, falling on the Irish government’s apparently deaf ears. (Ironically, the new Minister for the Environment is John Gormley of the supposedly environmentally-conscious Green Party, who still claims to oppose the construction of the M3, yet seems to be doing nothing of substance to stop it from going ahead. It is to be hoped that the Green Party is roundly rejected by the Irish electorate the next time around.) A new protest is scheduled for January 8th in Dublin, and in other cities around the world. The following information is taken from the website of TaraWatch. (The Save Tara campaign also has a lot of information on its own site.)

Lismullin Henge • Gabhra Valley, Ireland
by Jarrett A. Lobell (Archaeology magazine)

Early last year, archaeologists working on the route of a controversial highway near the village of Lismullin, Ireland, stumbled across a vast Iron Age ceremonial enclosure, or henge, surrounded by two concentric walls. The 2,000-year-old site is just over a mile from the Hill of Tara, traditional seat of the ancient Irish kings and site of St. Patrick’s conversion of the Irish to Christianity in the fifth century A.D. The discovery of the massive henge, measuring more than 260 feet in diameter, confirms the long-held belief that the area around the hill contains a rich complex of monuments.

The extraordinary amount of archaeological remains on the Hill of Tara — burial mounds, religious enclosures, stone structures, and rock art dating from the third millennium B.C. to the twelfth century A.D. — makes it Ireland’s most spiritually and archaeologically significant site. Construction of the new M3 highway, meant to ease traffic congestion around Dublin, threatens not only the Hill of Tara’s timeless quality, but also newly discovered archaeological sites in the surrounding valley.

Lismullin, seen in an aerial shot taken during excavations (above), and other sites that stand in the way of the new road are now approved for destruction. Although archaeologists and concerned Irish politicians are rallying support worldwide for the protection of the Hill of Tara, the iconic site remains in great peril. At press time, the European Commission had initiated legal action against the Irish government over the M3, charging Ireland with failing to protect its own heritage.

Demonstration

TaraWatch is calling for 300 volunteers to participate in a demonstration/video production, in protest of the M3 motorway works at the Hill of Tara. The demonstration will take place in the Garden of Remembrance, Parnell Square, Dublin, at noon on Tuesday, Jan. 8, which was the day the National Roads Authority was supposed to hand over possession of the National Monument at Lismullin to SIAC Construction, before it was done early just before Christmas.

There are two different Tara songs that will be performed, either by the original artists, or on tape, for purposes of making a video. Professional dancers will help choreograph some movements, with props such as 300 white crosses, so it should be an interesting demonstration, creating some powerful music and images. Participants should be available to attend a rehearsal on Sunday the 6th of January at 4.00pm at the Garden. Please sign up anonymously, here.

Protests will also take place on 8 Jan. in Belfast, London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Melbourne and other cities. For more information please email info@tarawatch.org.

Art and Revolution

Poetry Ireland recently updated their website, and I discovered that they’ve archived an opinion piece I was asked to write for Poetry Ireland News in 2004. The article is called “Art and Revolution”, and deals primarily with poetry in a social or political context. It sprang partly from criticism leveled at me for (supposedly) having an anti-political agenda when I was editor of The Burning Bush. That criticism (I felt) was always misplaced, but it led to a worthwhile debate, of which this article was one part. While most who were involved in that debate have long since moved on from it, it makes for an interesting backwards glance.

Kevin Higgins reviews Ancestor Worship

Kevin Higgins has reviewed Ancestor Worship in today’s edition of the Galway Advertiser (which is Galway, Ireland’s free weekly paper). It can be read at this link, and I also reproduce it below. Much thanks to Kevin and the Advertiser.

An Irish-American Poet in Galway

By Kevin Higgins

I FIRST met Pennsylvania-born Michael S Begnal 10 years ago at an open-mic poetry session at Apostasy Café on Dominick Street when readings often went on towards midnight.

Mike was a Sinn Féin supporter with a big interest in experimental poetry, especially the Beats; I was a recovering Trotskyist who had just discovered TS Eliot. They weren’t exactly idealistic times. However yesterday always seems less cynical than today.

Later we launched The Burning Bush magazine, harbouring illusions of overthrowing the ‘literary establishment’ (I have since realised that the literary establishment exists mostly in the minds of unpublished poets and old men on park benches). The hoped for revolution didn’t happen; our exact aims were rather vague!

Yet The Burning Bush created a space where people could disagree without descending into crankiness. Mike, in particular, used the magazine to open up Irish poetry by promoting linguistically radical poets such as Alan Jude Moore, Trevor Joyce, and Randolph Healy.

It is fashionable to complain about America, but the American influence on the Galway poetry scene — from Jessie Lendennie to the late Anne Kennedy to Mike Begnal to North Beach Poetry Nights — has been profoundly positive. Mike’s contribution, from the Apostasy days to his return to the US in 2004, was important, making the publication of Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry) a cause for celebration.

As the title suggests ‘Irishness’ is one of its big subjects. From Expatriation: “I too’m ‘American’ now,/sauntering the local lanes,/land of ghostly progenitors,/cold stone,/bitter defeat”. Begnal is not any old Irish-American; he’s acutely aware that he is addressing an issue about which the greenest clichés are forever being spoken. His interest in his Irish roots is altogether more profound than that of the typical elderly Bostonian in golfing trousers boarding a tour bus outside Jurys.

A number of the poems here are written in Irish. And in the title poem, Ancestor Worship, a distinctly separatist — almost supremacist — tone is struck at the end: “like LeRoi Jones’s move to Harlem,/broke with his white friends,/changed his name://ancestor worship/is the only religion/truly compatible/with the fact/of evolution”.

The three-page The Conquest of Gaul successfully combines the political and the erotic: “breasts still sway and shake and/bodies soak in camaraderie/the soaked flesh intensely perishable/lust lush will outlast the brick/of the industrial estate”.

The weaker moments in Begnal’s poetry are when concrete images give way to too many abstract concepts. He is at his best in View from a Galway Window: “the faint smell of sewage,/some girl ditches her dog/and a fat woman/heads for the beauty parlour,/open for Saturday business/this Bealtaine,/but all I see are/Mormon missionaries/sent severely from Utah.”

This is not an easy, crowd-pleasing, collection, but then it is not trying to be. It is though, often witty, often caustic, and for me evokes the recent Irish past in a starkly unsentimental way.

NHI review of Ancestor Worship

New Hope International has reviewed Ancestor Worship. This interesting piece, by Gwilym Williams, can be read here (scroll down that page), and I have reproduced it below. My thanks to Williams and NHI.

MICHAEL S BEGNAL: ANCESTOR WORSHIP

Man’s best friend may be his dog but in Michael S. Begnal’s case it’s his ancestor.

The Irish-American Mike Begnal, as his blogspot calls him, has been rummaging around in his ancestry in various places including naturally in Ireland. Half a dozen of the poems in this publication are in the old tongue. And intriguingly the book’s cover shows an ancient document listing the death of an abbot of Kells in the year 1128.

The place to start then would appear to be with the 14th poem in the book, the title poem, ANCESTOR WORSHIP. This one might provide an insight into what it’s all about, this book of 70 or so pages containing “some of the poems” published in publications such as Poetry Scotland, Poetry Wales, Poetry Cornwall, Poetry Ireland Review, Electric Acorn, The Blue Canary and many more; some 3 dozen publications in all.

ANCESTOR WORSHIP is the basic starting point for it is, whatever your point of view:

the only religion

truly compatible

with the fact

of evolution.

It’s a brutal acceptance of the then and now:

the faces look the same

in rain

Begnal asks, demands to know:

who burrows into your eye

and says, "Who're you?"

Other variations on the theme can be found in poems like IRISH CITIES. In his Derry hotel room Begnal is in a reflective mood. On the face of it a simple matter of nostalgic pondering:

like Waterbury, Connecticut,

where not I'm from

but my father

and all his fathers

since famine time

Note how Begnal suddenly slips in his justification there. The stay-at-home slouch must plainly starve or eat humble pie. Begnal’s ancestors are nothing if not adventurers. No further justification for upping sticks is required. But it comes anyway. And with a star and stripes flourish:

like wave-battered Brendans

and populated,

planted the system within

disseminated,

the Go Nation

I could now go to some poetic place like Prague with its 4 poems but I settle for Paris and MONTPARNASSE CEMETERY. Begnal invites me as his reader to:

think of all the bridges on the Seine

that melancholy snake,

men and women have jumped off,

insignificants splash

in the green murk,

tempted

and having considered this and other Parisian matters I’m eventually taken along to the cemetery to discover the final furious truth:

cemetery toilets smell

like fermenting forest piss,

and flies congregate in gangs,

waiting to eat your shit

It matters in the end not one jot that in the first line of the first poem in the book that:

blue sky envelopes Galway

for like the old abbot from Kells we’re all going to the same place as our departed relatives.

This is an intriguing collection to discover, unearth, and to contemplate. The poems can safely be read in any order and it's probably a good idea to do so. I tried jumping about at random from one to the other building and demolishing connections. It was great fun if fun is the right word. Like a favourite bone I suspect it’s something that can be constantly returned to and chewed on with familial contemplation. The only disappointment I felt was that Bagnall couldn’t see his way to translating those half dozen Irish poems of his:

agus Joyce bainte den tenner

-- Gwilym Williams

Fred Johnston reviews Ancestor Worship

A review of Ancestor Worship has come out, from the Irish poet and novelist Fred Johnston. It appears on the site of The Western Writers Centre in Galway, Ireland, of which Johnston is the director. The piece is quite favorable, and much appreciated. It can be found at this link (scroll to the bottom of the page), and I also reproduce it below.

SHIFTING STONES

ANCESTOR WORSHIP. Michael S. Begnal. Salmon Poetry. ISBN 1 903392 54 3. Pbck. €12.00. 70pp.

Of the most recent brace of poets to emerge from Galway, Irish-American and Irish-language enthusiast, Michael S. Begnal is by far and away the most accomplished and the most interesting. During his time here he edited the enthusiastic magazine, The Burning Bush - where some have tried to shift heaven and earth (and every inch of newsprint in the region) to ‘confirm’ themselves as writers, Begnal has simply worked at his task. His work has appeared widely; a first collection appeared in 2003, The Lakes of Coma, while some other work appearing in Galway at the same time and after was likely to induce one. He has written on the writer James Liddy and Liddy, naturally, returns the favour with a fulsome jacket blurb. He credits the Galway Advertiser’s Markings page, once edited by this writer and cancelled because it was too, eh, racy for local cultural consumption. Like most young American poets, he has pilgrimaged to Prague. Seven poems as Gaeilge appear here, if you don’t count the as Béarla ‘Burned Hut,’ which echoes the Irish-language An Teach Dóite, which in English is the name (‘The Burned House’) for Maam Cross, outside Galway; one has to praise the remaking of language in such a word as ‘gorted,’ created into English from the Irish ‘gort,’ a field, or even ‘gorta,’ famine (to my mind there is a connection linguistically between the two words) in the line of his first poem, ‘Expatriation’: “...like the oblivion of Boston,/cast from your gorted land...” Begnal is no bauble-eyed romantic seeking some preposterous ancestral ‘truth’ in Erin the Green, though he is ardently nationalistic, or was, an echo of which can perhaps be heard in his ‘The Conquest of Gaul’ or in ‘Black, White and Green,’ and his translation, ‘To The Gaelic People’; these poems travel, to Mexico, Paris, and elsewhere, seeking to put down roots like some mediaeval Irish wandering mendicant “...suffering the slings of myself,/ my vast torpidity/and inevitable disgust/at the exclusion practiced [sic]/by myself/and others...” (‘Water Cress’) Note to Salmon proof-reader: this is not the US. ‘Practice’ is a noun, not a verb; the verb-form is ‘practise.’ One’s hat is off to Salmon and Begnal for publishing his Irish language poems sans traductions into English, as so many Irish language poets seem to have a need to do - and by so doing, merely point up the dependence of Irish upon English. Irish poetry could not survive, one would think to read them, without the English language. Begnal seems to offer the poem and leave the interpretive work up to the reader bare-facedly, which is fine. With the occasional shortness of breath, these poems are wonderful, experimental, courageous, in-your-face, melancholy, lyrical, all by turns. The collection in full is a voyage of personal and imaginative discovery - circumnavigating identities. The production of the book is equally gorgeous with the ‘manuscript’ for cover by Siobhán Hutson. More will be heard from Begnal, there can be little doubt of that. Meanwhile Galway’s scribes will continue, some of them at any rate, to scratch and scrape at the remaining stony grey acres of imaginative creativity. Excellent. Salmon Poetry at her best.

-- Fred Johnston

Begnal, Lisk, Salerno reading at NCSU, Thursday, November 1

I will be giving a poetry reading on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, NC, on Thursday, November 1st, at 7:00 pm. It takes place in Tompkins Hall room G118 (that is, room 118 on the basement floor of Tompkins). I will read alongside Tom Lisk and Chris Salerno, who, like myself, have recently published new collections of poetry.

The reading is sponsored by the online journal Free Verse, which has published my poem “Bettie Page,” as well as the supplement of Irish-language poetry I edited, entitled “Véarsa Saor: New Poetry in Irish with Translations.” Free Verse editor Jon Thompson will make the introductions.

This reading is free and open to the general public, and everyone is welcome.

Begnal cancellation for Ancestor Worship launch

Unfortunately, I was not able to make Ireland in time for the launch of Ancestor Worship (see previous post) on Friday. Due to heavy rain causing “low ceilings” in New York on Thursday the 11th, my American Airlines flight to JFK, from where I was supposed to connect to an Aer Lingus flight to Shannon, was cancelled (after having boarded the plane and then sitting on the runway for two hours). The second flight they put me on kept getting delayed for the same reason, until I ended up missing the last Aer Lingus flight of the night, meaning there was no way I could get to Galway in time for the launch on Friday the 12th. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. Apologies to those who came out on my account.

However, the event did go on, as Dave Lordan, Knute Skinner, and Billy Ramsell were also launching books at the same time, and it was by all accounts a great success. My friend the poet Alan Jude Moore (pictured at the launch) stepped into the gap and read some poems from Ancestor Worship, and I’m told he got a good response. My thanks and appreciation go out to Alan, and to Kevin Higgins and Susan DuMars of Over the Edge who set up the event, to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, and also to Salmon Publishing. I still plan to get to Galway for a reading sometime in the near future.

Ancestor Worship book-launch, Oct. 12

Ancestor Worship is being launched in Galway (Ireland), this Friday the 12th.

Over the Edge hosts the launch of four new poetry collections at Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop:

Ancestor Worship by Michael S. Begnal (Salmon Poetry), Fifty Years: Poems 1957-2007 by Knute Skinner (Salmon Poetry), The Boy in the Ring by Dave Lordan (Salmon Poetry) and Complicated Pleasures by Billy Ramsell (Dedalus Press) will be launched at Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, Middle Street, Galway on Friday 12th October, 6pm.

All are welcome, and refreshments will be served.

For further details contact: 087-6431748 or e-mail over-the-edge-openreadings@hotmail.com

Ancestor Worship
Poems by MICHAEL S. BEGNAL
--------------------------------------------
12.00 Euro Paperback 130 x 204mm 72 pages ISBN 978-1-903392-54-3 September 2007

“Unusual routes become strategies. Mike Begnal is Irish-American, he writes in English and Irish, he can invent a hybridisation of style. Ancestor Worship is an extension of this, it can take on a new romancing and deciphering: ‘the warm blood / that flows through to this age, / dangerous and violent in veins...’ Likewise a journey or pilgrimage can be undertaken somewhere, from ‘olive-green felt couch’ to ‘olive sky’. The essential is no one has been quite there before, along the genealogy or amid the furniture.” --James Liddy

The Salmon Anthology

Following on the heels of my collection Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry), I also have a selection of three poems in the new anthology Salmon: A Journey in Poetry 1981-2007. This volume in a way summarizes the 26 years of Salmon Poetry’s existence, collecting the numerous Irish and international poets it has published in that time. Jessie Lendennie is the editor. Including detailed biographical notes for each poet and a complete bibliography of Salmon’s publications, the book is well worth purchasing.

The list of poets featured is: Nadya Aisenberg, Nuala Archer, Leland Bardwell, Marck L. Beggs, Michael S. Begnal, Marvin Bell, Eva Bourke, Ray Bradbury, Rory Brennan, Heather Brett, Patricia Burke Brogan, Simmons B. Buntin, Sam Burnside, Catherine Byron, Louise C. Callaghan, Seamus Cashman, David Cavanagh, Jerah Chadwick, Patrick Chapman, Mary Coll, Roz Cowman, Vicki Crowley, Theodore Deppe, Mary Dorcey, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Egan, Mícheál Fanning, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Mélanie Francès, Philip Fried, Erling Friis-Baastad, Paul Genega, Frank Golden, Michael Gorman, Mark Granier, Robert Greacen, Angela Greene, Maurice Harmon, Clarinda Harriss, Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, Michael Heffernan, Kevin Higgins, Michael D. Higgins, Rita Ann Higgins, John Hildebidle, Ron Houchin, Ben Howard, Gerald Hull, Fred Johnston, John Kavanagh, Anne Kennedy, Thomas Krampf, Jessie Lendennie, James Liddy, Dave Lordan, Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Joan McBreen, Jeri McCormick, Stephanie McKenzie, Ethna McKiernan, Ted McNulty, Máighréad Medbh, John Menaghan, Áine Miller, Patricia Monaghan, Noel Monahan, Alan Jude Moore, Tom Morgan, Jude Nutter, Jean O’Brien, Clairr O’Connor, Hugh O’Donnell, Mary O’Donnell, Ciaran O’Driscoll, Mary O’Donoghue, Desmond O’Grady, Sheila O’Hagan, Tom O’Malley, Barbara Parkinson, Mary O’Malley, Gwyn Parry, Angela Patten, Paul Perry, Mark Roper, Tom Sexton, James Simmons, Janet Shepperson, Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons, Robin Skelton, Knute Skinner, Jo Slade, R.T. Smith, Olaf Tyaransen, Eithne Strong, Jean Valentine, Breda Sullivan, Richard Tillinghast, John Unrau, Peter van de Kamp, Michèle Vassal, Eamonn Wall, Emily Wall, Gordon Walmsley, Gary J. Whitehead, Sabine Wichert, and Ann Zell.