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.

Kim Decker Design

Graphic artist Kim Decker has her own website up now, and it is definitely worth taking a look at, at www.kimdeckerdesign.com

Decker created the cover of my book Mercury, the Dime, and has done a lot of other great things as well. The images in this post are samples of her work. There is much more at the website itself....

Small Press Distribution

Six Gallery Press books are now distributed by SPD (Small Press Distribution), meaning that my collections The Lakes of Coma and Mercury, the Dime are now available through that channel as well. Take a look at them at this link, and feel free to order....

Small Press Distribution is a non-profit literary arts organization located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1969, SPD is currently the only distributor in the country dedicated exclusively to independently published literature.

Bettie Page (poem)

My poem entitled “Bettie Page” is included in the latest edition (issue 12, Spring 2007) of the online journal Free Verse. Please take a look....

The journal is edited by Jon Thompson, and is a really great production.

Véarsa Saor: New Poetry in Irish with Translations

Tá mé i m’eagarthóir ar fhorlíonadh fhilíocht Ghaeilge (le haistriúcháin Béarla) san iris ar-líne Véarsa Saor. “Véarsa Saor: New Poetry in Irish with Translations” an teideal atá air. Clúdaíonn sé Louis de Paor, Dolores Stewart, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Niamh Ní Lochlainn, Rody Gorman, Colette Nic Aodha agus Gabriel Rosenstock. Clic ar an nasc deireanach....

I have edited a supplement of contemporary Irish-language poetry, with English translations, for the latest number (12, Spring 2007) of the online journal Free Verse. It is titled “Véarsa Saor: New Poetry in Irish with Translations” and includes the names listed above – some of the best writers in Irish today – and is in my own obviously biased opinion well worth a look.

Two recent book reviews

I’ve published a couple of book reviews lately....

One appears in the latest issue of Poetry Ireland Review (90), and is on Catherine Walsh’s book City West. My review is not available online, but it does incorporate (and improve upon) a piece I previously posted here. The whole issue (edited by Peter Sirr) looks good, though, so keep an eye out for (and if you can, buy) it.

Also keep an eye out for/buy the new issue of the Belfast political and cultural journal Fortnight (453, June/July 2007). It includes my review of Maurice Scully’s most recent volumes, Sonata and Tig. Again, it’s not online, but it is also partially based on an earlier piece that is (to give you a taste)....

Ancestor Worship now out!

My long-promised collection Ancestor Worship is now officially out. It is available from several outlets, but it would really be great if anyone who wanted to have it ordered from the publisher, Salmon Poetry. Please use the above link to order.

I appreciate everyone’s support.

The book is 72 pp. long — a large collection — and includes six poems in Irish.

Here is the back cover blurb, from James Liddy:

“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

And a sample poem to whet the appetitie, which is included on Salmon’s site (see above link), the title poem:

Ancestor Worship

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

it’s not like the imagined

rituals of an old old age

before iron or bronze,

the metal of our mythology,

though the faces look the same

in the rain

but the warm blood that flows through to this age,

dangerous and violent in veins,

hanging heavy like burlap sheets

on a dewy day

the right hook of history,

the slow motion arc of the punch,

the strange figure

on a modern city street

who burrows into your eye

and says, “Who’re you?”

It’s like when Lennon laid

his New York album on you,

and appeared in pictures

in his new image—

Revolutionary,

sudden Irishman,

Manhattanite,
gritty...

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

12.00 Euro / Paperback / 130 x 204mm / 72 pages / ISBN 1 903392 54 3

Translations in Calque

I have some translations in the brand new issue (number 2) of Calque, a journal of translation. My translations are from the Irish of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, Proinsias Nuinseann, and Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin, all 18th/early 19th century Gaelic poets.

Copies can be ordered at this link.

Alternatively, they can also be ordered from: Calque, c/o Steve Dolph, 252 Hampton Dr., Unit B, Venice, CA, 90291, USA. $10.00 each (plus $2.50 shipping).

The editors can be contacted at editors@calquejournal.com

“Blues for Tomorrow” in MungBeing

A poem of mine entitled “Blues for Tomorrow” appears online in the new edition of MungBeing. Appropriately, it is their “Future” issue. As well as my poem, there’s a lot of interesting stuff included here, so do check it out…

David Stone, Bridge Poems

David Stone’s new collection Bridge Poems has been published by Six Gallery Press, and is very much worth getting. I can’t really review it, because I’ve already written the preface for it. So instead I’ll give you that (and an excerpt from Stone himself, below).

Preface

David Stone is unique among poets. Parallels could be drawn, influences named — Baudelaire springs to mind, and perhaps I could say something tricky like, “Stone is an American Baudelaire, transposed from 19th century Paris to 21st century Baltimore.” But then I may just as well say he’s “a postmodern Poe,” or “a modern-day Surrealist.” None of it is sufficient. I will say that Stone draws from many traditions, poetic and otherwise, whether he resembles them or not. The French are important, but so are the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the history of jazz, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Hart Crane, etc. To whatever degree Stone may be “influenced” by this poet or that text, he is worthy of nearly any of them and The Bridge Poems is the proof. For my money (since we live in capitalist societies), Stone is a major American poet and he will surely be recognized as such in time.

Given the title of this book, Crane will loom large. Crane, who, as Stone writes here, “attained water,” and of whom Waldo Frank wrote in the 1933 edition of The Collected Poems, “His vision was the timeless One of all the seers, and it binds him to the great tradition; but because of the time that fleshed him and that he needed, to substance his vision, he could not employ traditional concretions.” And so it is for Stone. His seeming obscurity is not an affectation or a conscious wish to appear “avant-garde.” His highly-pitched language is the struggle to articulate the incomprehensible and the unacceptable. Stone’s work often reads crazily because the world certainly is crazy, and America especially. America is like souls in the underworld. And ghosts speak through poetry.

Michael S. Begnal

Here is a poem from the collection which is perhaps representative:

Jazz Biers

The Dead

wail

in Flanders Field

& grope

mandolins

& conehats.

The Jackal

heckles

groves

of treasure

chests

hidden

in deep

sea vents.

—David Stone