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

Another review of the Liddy Tribute

Another review of Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy has appeared, in An Sionnach 3.1 (Spring 2007). An Sionnach is the journal of Irish Studies published by Creighton University Press. The piece, by Eric Adams, is not only a good overview of the collection, but provides an interesting description of the book launch which took place at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus last year: “There was an energetic silence in the hall—an anticipation of performance. Liddy’s reputation in Milwaukee as a center of gravity which draws in characters from all directions is not dissimilar to the spirit of his poetry.” I think this is also the only review so far to note that the book contains not only the numerous overwhelming praises of Liddy, but also a couple of “attacks” (Thomas McGonigle, Myles na Gopaleen) – both of which are included, as Adams points out, in “celebration of mischief.” A lively piece from a great journal.

(The above photo is the front cover of Arena 3, Summer 1964, edited by Michael Hartnett, James Liddy and Liam O'Connor, who are pictured in that order.)

Dán in An Guth 4

(A poem of mine was published in the Irish and Scottish Gaelic poetry journal, An Guth issue 4, edited by Rody Gorman and published by the Irish press Coiscéim.)

Foilsíodh dán de mo chuid san irisleabhar An Guth 4, a d’eagraigh Rody Gorman. Tá An Guth bunaithe in Albainn, agus tá filíocht i nGaeilge na hÉireann agus i nGàidhlig na hAlbann ann. Foilsíonn an cló Éireannach, Coiscéim, é. Léigh ar aghaidh:


Éire san 18ú Aois

Faoi cheobhrán an Tí Mhóir
ritheann na capaill deargrua amach
i dtreo na gcoillte gearrtha

Roinnt cruamhíle ó shin
tá bothán dubh ar an sliabh
ina bhfuil fear féasógach

Le geamhsholas an tinteáin
déanann sé stáidéar ar leabhair
(ní fhaigheann sé mórán ach fionna)

Sroicheann capall aonair an bun,
dreapann sé suas, suas, suas, agus
buaileann ar an doras le crúb —

“Tar isteach...?”

—Mícheál Ó Beigléinn

Easter 2007

We commonly run through the mythology of the 1916 Easter Rising in our minds: the proclamation of the Republic and the siege of the GPO, the “sanctifying” of the cause of Irish independence in blood, the executions of the leaders, who had been imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Connolly shot while sitting on a chair due to the grievous injuries he had incurred in the fighting. It has been turned into poems, songs, etc. It has become a shorthand of sorts, for whatever you want it to mean. In the last couple decades that has often been something along the lines of: Pearse was a fanatic with a death-wish and a misguided Romantic notion about self-sacrifice, or was really just a “terrorist” who has provided cover to a whole new generation of terrorists. Now that the war in the North is over, it has suddenly become okay again to celebrate Pearse and the other men and women of 1916. Last year’s gargantuan government commemoration in Dublin, the biggest since the 50th anniversary in 1966, seems to have made it acceptable. Certainly this is a good thing. But think of the smaller marches and gatherings which have always taken place, year after year, which didn’t always have “official” sanction. And of those who wore an Easter lily when to do so immediately identified you as sympathetic to the cause of a united Ireland, when it wasn’t always the PC thing to do. And how much easier it is this year, now that Ian Paisley has sat smiling next to a lily-clad Gerry Adams.


I think of those Sundays in Eyre Square, Galway, at the foot of the statue of Liam Mellowes. (For it was in Co. Galway that Mellowes led the only action of the Rising that occurred outside of Dublin.) A lone piper and someone reading the Proclamation. Somewhere around a hundred people or so – not bad for Galway – to show their regard and to hear a B-list Sinn Féin speaker. Then the march to Bohermore Cemetery, where the obligatory plain-clothes Branchman sat in a compact car, trying to observe who was in attendance. The action of memory has him absentmindedly reading a newspaper, but I’m sure that wasn’t really the case.

Undoubtedly, with the recent events in the North we are just a little bit closer to the aim of a united Ireland, but perhaps as far as ever from the ideals of Proclamation of the Republic. The Rising was led by Pearse, the Gaelicist, and Connolly, the socialist. Though it certainly lives, the Irish language still struggles in competition with English. The gap between rich and poor grows seemingly wider, as Ireland, in emerging from its century-and-a-half-long economic slump, has morphed itself into the latest bastion of the nouveau-riche.

As Roland Barthes, the post-structuralist cultural critic, has pointed out in his Myth Today, “Myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back it was not put exactly in its place.” It wouldn’t be too difficult to identify distortions in the 1916 myth, at the agency of both reactionaries and revolutionaries. But on Easter 1916, a real Pádraig Pearse led a real uprising against a real colonial government, which sailed a real gunboat up the River Liffey, and fired real shells at the centre of Dublin. Real men and women took to the streets and battled real British soldiers. Real bullets fired by those same real British soldiers executed Pearse, Thomas J. Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Ned Daly, Willie Pearse, Michael O’Hanrahan, John MacBride, Éamonn Ceannt, Michael Mallin, Cornelius Colbert, Seán Heuston, Seán Mac Diarmada, James Connolly, Thomas Kent, and there was a real rope for Roger Casement. Some were real poets.

I admit to being partial to the symbolism of 1916. It appeals to my personal sense of aesthetics. In that way perhaps I am even perpetuating its mythic qualities (and probably this is unavoidable, for an action in history which has been transformed into an image). But underneath the layers of distortions it might still be possible to arrive at some sort of truth about the Rising and what it meant. One might start by rereading the Easter Proclamation. And then also imagining what it could mean for the Ireland of today. The guns have gone. This is a good thing, and one can only hope that Sinn Féin politicians are correct in their analysis that a united Ireland can now be achieved without violence. The question is what kind of Ireland will it be. The Proclamation remains, and cannot be erased. It’s not just paper, but a seed, a representation of a goal and a statement of intent which remains to be fulfilled.

Burdock 2

After a long postal odyssey, the new issue of the Milwaukee-based literary magazine Burdock finally arrived. Edited by Keith Gaustad, Burdock 2 is a good mix of poets, and also includes one prose piece by Jim Hazard. Lots of great poems here. James Liddy with a couple of shortish pieces – “Which was the real President / James Brown or Gerald Ford…?” Jim Chapson’s “The Joke” argues, tongue in cheek we think, for demons as the cause of mental illness. On a slightly related note, one of Burdock’s “burrs” (some of the poems are printed on sticker paper) is from Tim Miller, entitled “Do You Know Autism.” As Miller himself has suggested, you can use these stickers to cover up crap poems in existing anthologies. Not a bad idea at all. Good poems from Susan Firer and Sarah Fox (the latter has a piece about Salvia divinorum! – “Her blood is minty and erotic…”). (Editor Gaustad writes, “There’re women in this issue so one could say things are progressing.”) My vote for best poem title: Fr. Ronald Crewe’s “Chew Any Good Carpets Lately?” Eric Adams’ “Coolgreany Hangover” reminds me of July 2002. Cool cover (not shown) by Kyle Fitzpatrick.

Let’s hope this journal keeps going, because it’s already developing into something great, and should continue to do so. As before, send something at least for postage, say a buck or two, to Keith Gaustad, 1515 E. Kane Pl. #39, Milwaukee, WI, 53202, USA. Submissions taken at the same address (with an SASE), or inquire at burdockmagazine@yahoo.com

Liddy Tribute reviewed in The Irish Literary Supplement

The Irish Literary Supplement has reviewed Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy in its Spring 2007 issue (Vol. 26, No. 2). The piece, by Tyler Farrell, is entitled “The Poet Who Caps Our Being,” and is quite a glowing assessment of both the Tribute and Liddy’s newest collection, On the Raft with Fr. Roseliep. Farrell writes, “The festschrift shows the desire to hail this poet, to give something back to a man who influenced poetry, shaped a new and unique outlook, and struck a blow for the spiritual and the sexual, the Irish and American, the freedoms and the footsteps.” Later he adds, “Many of the works jump off the page and relay much of Liddy’s devotion to writing, life, friends, love and art. It is gossip for the gossip poet and love for the love poet.” My appreciation to Farrell and the ILS.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig

St. Patrick escapes from servitude as a pig herder in Ireland back to his native Britain (from where he had been kidnapped) with the help of sailors who agree to take him aboard. Patrick, or Patricius, says in his Confessio that “on that day, I refused to suck the breasts of these men from fear of God, but nevertheless I had hopes that they would come to faith in Jesus Christ, because they were barbarians.” The breast-sucking appears to have been a custom of ancient Irish society.

Later Patrick comes back, competes with the druids in contests of magic, and lights his fire on the Hill of Slane to trump the traditional druidic fire on the Hill of Tara. (It seems the Irish government is planning to build a highway near/over Tara soon. There’s presently a campaign to stop it, which any right-thinking person should support.)

James Joyce writes about the Archdruid Berkeley’s religious disputations with Patrick in Finnegans Wake. Peter D. Fitz-Hugh examines this section in an interesting article:

Why then should King Leary as the Archdruid’s chosen example of his way of ‘seeing’ the world appear all green? Because the fundamental point about Leary is his Irishness, a true native Irish king, the embodiment of Ireland free and unoppressed, who must therefore be seen as green, Ireland’s national colour, through and through to the Archdruids ‘throughsighty’ (FW611.32). Joyce is also saying that the Wake is a thoroughly Irish work.

St. Patrick represents a major cultural shift in Irish society. Although, of course Ireland didn’t become Christian in one fell swoop, as if in 432 the country was suddenly converted en masse. The original religion existed for probably many centuries more, and numerous pagan sites and practices were preserved almost wholesale in an ostensibly Christian guise.

It has been suggested that poems on the 7th-century figure Mongán in ancient texts such the Imram Brain maic Febaill represent a native pagan resistance to the imported religion, and that “Mongán was a chief [flaith] sympathetic to pagan beliefs…and poets viewed him as their champion and a source of hope as they attempted to hold the line against Christianity” (my translation, from J.E. Caerwyn Williams & Máirín Ní Mhuiríosa, Traidisiún Liteartha na nGael, BÁC: An Clóchomhar, 1979, p. 30).

Many also point out that on another level Christianity was eventually accepted into Ireland with a striking lack of violence or force, with a lot of tolerance for the earlier belief, even subsuming some of it and molding itself to pre-existing customs (though rejecting many others). St. Patrick therefore has a strange double meaning for Ireland.

Irish Times reviews James Liddy Tribute

The tribute/festschrift for James Liddy, which I edited, was just reviewed by David Gardiner in The Irish Times (Saturday, 3 February 2007). Here is the piece:

A poet permeated by the Beat

David Gardiner

Michael S Begnal, Ed., Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy (Arlen House, 2006)
James Liddy, On the Raft with Fr Roseliep (Arlen House, 2006)

Being Irish-American has never really been particularly “cool”. Bob Dylan admits to learning a few things from Liam Clancy about protest songs, and there’s nothing particularly uncool about catching a Flogging Molly or Dropkick Murphys show. But between Bill O’Reilly and Pat Buchanan, the rebirth of cool does not seem to be around the corner.

And yet, being an exile to the US and a dissident voice there is both a truly complex and American stance. Extending back to the Jeremiads of the Transcendentalist writers through to the Beat generation, America can be a place to be (in the adapted words of an Irish poet who spent some time in Berkeley and Boston) lost, happy, and at home.

Two recent works highlight the continuing achievement of James Liddy, an inheritor of generations of American writers who were watching their homeplaces and loved ones transformed and who remains an important continuing influence on a contemporary generation of writers.

Like his tireless efforts on behalf of his peers and younger writers, James Liddy’s work doesn’t pay much attention to what’s cool. He has paid attention to what’s important to poetry – to the life of the word. More than anything, this shows that his studies of, and travels with, the American Beat writers since his arrival in the US in the 1960s have permeated his very being.

James Liddy has remained one of the most prolific and active Irish writers since appearing on the scene with his 1962 publication, Esau, My Kingdom For A Drink (Dolmen Press) and with the important, short-lived journal Arena (1963-65), which he published with Michael Hartnett and Liam O’Connor. Since then, he has published more than 50 chapbooks, collections, and prose works, including his Collected Poems (Creighton University Press, 1994) and the first volume of his autobiography, The Doctor’s House (Salmon Publishing, 2004).

Parallels in the sheer volume of writing might be made between Liddy and George Moore, and they could continue – the exile and the autobiographer; the myth-maker of the houses inhabited, from the Doctor’s House to the Snake Pit to the Slovak Bowling Alley; both presenting themselves as one of the first of the “new Irish”; both documenting, as Liddy writes in The Doctor’s House, a life “rotten with literature and art”. Recently, Liddy has stated that Moore gave to Ireland something that was hugely important to modern Irish writing: an imagination that was Catholic, European, and French. To Irish writing, as testified to in Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice, James Liddy contributes an imagination – especially through his collaboration with the late Michael Hartnett – that is Catholic, libertine, and Beat.

The staying power of that imagination is one of the truly powerful literary achievements. When so many of the current generation lapse into a parody of self-promotion prior to their second MFA classroom award, Liddy has persevered in his writing, editing, and teaching career on his own terms across 60 hugely productive years. From the “hegemonic critical bent”, as a conferee might like to say, Liddy would seem to have it all – out in an Ireland that was repressively Catholic; flirtatiously Blueshirt in Dev’s Ireland; an outsider’s outsider from one side and a highbrow’s highbrow from another. Yet, there’s that “other side”. The side that actually likes that big, loud, dumb bully across the water; that writes sympathetically about, of all things, Slovak Bowling Alleys.

One of the chief strengths of the collection of tributes Michael S Begnal has gathered within Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice is that the large collection of contributors does convey something of this Whitmanesque multitude. Among the most notable inclusions are Thomas Kinsella, Liam O’Connor, the late Michael Hartnett, Knute Skinner, Philip Casey, Terence Winch, Una O’Higgins O’Malley, Thomas McGonigle, Dermot Bolger, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Eamonn Wall, Jim Chapson, Zack Pieper, Pearse Hutchinson, Micheál Ó Conghaile, Brian Arkins, and Dennis O’Driscoll. The sculptor John Behan concludes his appreciation, signed “Charles de Gaul airport . . . 3 May 2004”, by quoting Liddy’s poem Patrick Kavanagh’s Dublin, which could easily be claimed as an ars poetica:

We travel through Dublin’s wide streets bearing
white flowers to throw in bunches to our young friends
and sunrise halos from forgiveness to our unknowing lovers
where roof-high breezes out of a green still
on the fields pour along our hands which clumsily confess
the faithfulness too deep for anything but walking.

To remind us that the Dublin in which Liddy began writing was not entirely the bohemian paradise Liddy creates in his work, Begnal includes Flann O’Brien’s review of Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink, which that great figure concluded “is all . . . illiterate schoolboy hysteria, brashness and, where any meaning can be discerned, a total ignorance by Mr Liddy of Joyce’s work and intent . . . Mr Liddy’s eructation can provoke nothing but derision and perhaps the hope that he is young enough to get a touch of the strap from the Brothers”.

Though giving no evidence of what Liddy got the touch of, Eamonn Wall provides a wide and generous context for the “New Irish” writing in the US in his contribution “From the El to Axel’s: Irish Poets Stateside”, in which he places Liddy’s work alongside Muldoon, Montague, Boland, Delanty, and Grennan. Wall comments eruditely that Liddy “is the poet of polkas, bowling alleys, bedrooms and bars who remains always the singer singing the song of the self. The urban America of his poetry . . . is as complex as Kavanagh’s Dublin and Pope’s London. Often, he is out of tune with Irish America and very much in tune with Serbian, Bohemian, Czech, and Polish America”. A previously unpublished letter from Charles Bukowski concludes: “we’re not going to cause any literary revolution, but we hope to say a few things that haven’t, for some reason, been said and to print the good clear strong poem – the poem that drinks beer and smokes cigars and laughs – sometimes. all right. but we have to reject almost everything and people get discouraged. we do too.”

Throughout the collection, Begnal generously selects unpublished works of James Liddy’s, including Her Disposition, which is simply one of his most remarkable poems, in which he imagines his mother, pregnant with him and near WB Yeats at a cocktail party (and which concludes in box, below left). Only John Montague, perhaps well aware of too-early epitaphs, uses the word “encomia” properly in Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice, for it really is a tribute to a career in continuing stride rather than finishing sprint.

THIS CONTINUING PRESENCE is most evident in the new collection, also published by Arlen House, and, rather fittingly, featuring a painting by the early Dolmen artist Pauline Bewick. On the Raft with Fr Roseliep invokes the memory of Raymond Roseliep, another American-Irish writer transplanted to the Midwest – particularly Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, which Liddy refers to brilliantly in his note as the “Little Rome of the Midwest”. As a frequent contributor to Threshold and The Dubliner as well as an extensive correspondent with Christy Brown, Fr Roseliep joins James Liddy’s sizable menagerie of poet-saints, for both his work and what he represents. As with many of Liddy’s recent collections in both prose and poetry, On the Raft is both a poetics and a lives of the poets at a time when, as Liddy writes in one poem, “The Writing Programs/ have won, to write is only to teach to get paid, Muses kick/ America in the ass”.

On the Raft opens with Let’s Invade Ourselves Not Iraq, a poem that starts off with the exchange: “Professor, are you thinking of retirement?/ I haven’t fully explored the drinking age yet”. Liddy is expert at inserting voices in his poems and at subtlety in general – and that oxymoronic structural statement lies at the centre of why his poetry is sometimes under-appreciated. In this poem for instance, Liddy combines the epigrammatic gesture and the combined art forms of conversation and gossip: “Autobiography whispers in Cleopatra’s ear noble unencumbered woman/ what would happen if we weren’t failures?” Throughout a tightly structured movement stanzas rotate twice through consideration of self to others to societal considerations until concluding: “I lay agenbite of inwit beside the glass. / Mars, have mercy, direct wars within”.

AS IN LIDDY’S other collections and memoirs, this work is filled with casual mention and allusion. A fragmentary list of those who appear would include Willie Redmond, Charles Bukowski, Patrick Kavanagh, Michael Hartnett, Kay Boyle, Robert Duncan, Bob Watt, Whitman, Pound, Eliot, Graham Mackintosh and Joe Dunn (both White Rabbit Press), Jack Spicer, John Ryan, George Stanley, Baudelaire, John Ashbery, Edward Carson, Oscar Wilde, John Kerry, and, of course, Pope Benedict XV. In one of his best breathless recitations, On Cooking & Jack Spicer, Liddy writes out a litany of the White Rabbit Press (San Francisco) that is an invocation and a catalogue, ending: “These are the lives of the poets. Transparencies. When we dead white rabbits arise we will cook up literature again”. Samuel Beckett wrote in Dublin Magazine in 1934 that “all poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer”. Going a step further, Liddy repeatedly presses prayer into the service of poetry – his secular invocations, litanies, loves, and devotions ride upon that beatific line.

On the Raft with Fr Roseliep opens with an epigraph from Jack White. In a collection filled with allusiveness – to Fr Roseliep himself, to the Beats who fly throughout his work like so many saints on a Byzantine frieze, to the fellow-poets of Liddy’s many cities on either side of the Atlantic – it makes sense that there’s another name at the start, as it begins:

‘This album is dedicated to, and is for and about the death of the sweetheart. In a social plane, impossible to exist, and in memories, past defeating present. We mourn the sweetheart’s loss . . . ’

The note of melancholy began for Liddy with his very first work, found its first brilliant articulation in one of his most important works, Baudelaire’s Bar Flowers (White Rabbit, 1975), and continues here. This persistent melancholy, though, is that of a true and puckish lover and is discovered only by – in good readerly Beat fashion – taking the poet at his word and entering into his world, searching out this Jack White, or (if you’re one of his many students, or the current generation of writers), you may already know that Jack White is not one of Liddy’s universe of writers but the lead guitarist and writer of the band The White Stripes, whose liner notes from the album Elephant (2003) continue:

We mourn the sweetheart’s loss in a disgusting world of opportunistic lottery-ticket holders caring about nothing that is long term, only the cheap thrill, the kick, the for-the-moment pleasure, the easy way out, the bragging rights and trophy holding.

A new generation should continue to know Liddy’s work so as to know that we have not lost the sweetheart – though the cry must continue from Arena through to Elephant and beyond.

David Gardiner is associate professor of English, and director and editor of Creighton University Press and An Sionnach, publishers of The Collected Poems of James Liddy.

VICE, The Fiction Issue

Vice magazine, first time I’ve seen an issue in a good six months or something, maybe more. Since I don’t currently live in New York, L.A., or London, I only get them when a friend gives or sends me one. (Guess I should check the website more often, since you can actually download them for free.) But one thing I immediately noticed was a letter in this issue’s Mail section – a gushing, over-serious ass-kiss (“This is not an ass-kiss,” it begins) from a 37-yr-old man who actually deems it necessary to stipulate, “I am not a part of Vice’s demographic.” The letter-writer is, “however, always drawn to your magazine because it shows a side to society that us comfortably numb old farts can peer into and then ponder the world around us.” It then goes on to laud Vice for its “bold and important” articles, “courage,” the “issues” it “highlights,” etc. The title the editors have given this short missive is “Averting Midlife Crisis.” Inexplicably (for anyone who has ever read the magazine around, say, the early 2000’s), they don’t make fun of this guy in the slightest and actually go so far as to answer, with no real trace of irony, “Thanks, old-timer.” Perhaps Vice has in a sense entered its own mid-life crisis. But then one could hardly expect it to maintain the same relentless style of attack after ten-plus years. But to see them openly accepting a comment about a “demographic” at all, much less tacitly admitting that a 37-yr-old guy might not be part of it, was a bit weird.

It was always well-known that advertising was a major part of the magazine, but it used to be that it was more just a vehicle which enabled them to do their own uncompromised and uncorrupted thing. Now we’ve got product placement in the “Tidbits” section. Believe it or not, underneath the item on the Clone-A-Pussy kit is a blatant promo for Canon’s Elph camera: “Call it brand loyalty but it seems like the Elph just keeps getting better and better...” Is it just me or does this stick out like a sore thumb? Well, at least they actually gave Jay-Z a bad review. On second thought, part of the reason seems to be because he’s too old! And meanwhile, Li’l Wayne gets the thumbs up (unbelievably termed “best rapper in the universe”) for lyrics like this: “Bitch I’m paid / that’s all I gotta say / can’t see you little niggas / the money in the way...” They actually quote this as a testament to his genius. Well, put me in the “old” category too then, because I’ll take almost any half-decent old-school rapper, or anyone who can come up with something at least slightly more original to say, over this. (I agree with them on the Clipse album though. As far as commercial rap goes, it’s not bad.)

But this is Vice’s Fiction Issue and a lot of the sorts of articles that normally would have been included aren’t here, in favor of short fiction pieces. So in some ways it’s hard to compare it to other issues, and it’s not got a lot to do with any supposed demographic. I was really surprised by the high quality of the writing they’ve published. Not because I’m down on Vice, because, let’s face it, despite my above criticisms it’s still the best magazine out there and the only one I would read on a regular basis with any real interest. Really it still is. And despite the occasional clunker, they always seem to come back with a great issue. Surprised just because frankly I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, being as preoccupied as I am with poetry and “non-contemporary” fiction. I have, however, read 57-yr-old Richard Hell before – his novel Go Now was pretty good I thought – and his piece here about early sex is too. Also included is a story by the almost 45-yr-old Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club. Sam Brumbaugh (40) conjures a weirdly claustrophobic sense in “Baron in Vegas,” a story about a guy selling his dead semi-famous uncle’s guitar to something like a Hard Rock Cafe. Harmony Korine’s (only 34) fictional (?) conversation between Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Clint Eastwood, though, comes off as rambling and a bit dull, but then probably how it would have gone down in real life. Another filmmaker, Neil LaBute (44) (who, unfortunately, directed that awful remake of The Wicker Man) has a really good story here, about an office racist. He gets into some pretty twisted shit (no pun intended) (you have to read it to know what I mean). And I have to mention Eileen Myles (57), a really interesting figure, a punk poet who’s been doing a lot of great stuff since the 70’s – “Tapestry” is no exception, a brief chronicle of certain erotic adventures, which she likens to “a procession of beaver shots.” Speaking of poets, when is Vice going to do a poetry issue? Or have they already and I missed it?

Anyway, I could go on, because almost every story in here is really, really good. Sorry for those I left out, but after starting off criticizing, all of the sudden I notice all I’m doing now is saying how amazing this issue is. But alright, one last kudo – as always the photography is great too, not least the cover pic of the Strand Bookstore by Roe Ethridge (age 37). Enough.

Maurice Scully, Tig

Got Maurice Scully’s latest book, Tig (Shearsman Books, 2006, 102 pp., ISBN 978-0-907562-96-2), which is the conclusion to his massive meisterwerk entitled Things That Happen. Tig follows Five Freedoms of Movement (1987, 2001), Livelihood (2004), and Sonata (2006). At present I have not gotten my hands on the penultimate volume Sonata, so I’m looking at Tig as its own thing, and am not at the moment all that worried about how it ties in with the rest (although I have read the others, Livelihood being the bulkier volume).

But now that I see the gigantic scheme of all this, I am reminded of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, which, like Things That Happen, is a large continuing poem written over the course of decades. And though I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far, Scully, at the very least, is obviously a poetic kindred spirit to Williams.

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

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

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

But it is the modulations that are of crucial importance here, otherwise why put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. The falling leaves suggest age; there is an oblique reference or two to death. And modulations in writing. The best thing about Scully, for me, at the moment, is his style, which he’s really honed at this point. It’s got clarity and precision, even the way it looks on the page is made for particular effect, the use of certain marks, and the occasional use of the Irish language and Gaelic literary tradition totally makes it. It has got purpose, and he says so:

I’ve had quite enough
Creativity

Free Expression, Genius & all that.
Quits.

Let’s communicate.

That’s the end of book one. Book two opens (nearly) with an observation, “essentially a poem is a flat surface covered in part by groupings of twenty-six quite well-known symbols.” Later an ironic joke:

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

Thank you.

And that’s where it starts to get really good, I mean really turned up a notch. All the images from the first half of the book are reconstituted, repeated, cut up in a sustained burst of energy, like watching a fireworks display, which keeps getting more and more spectacular till the end. For me, Scully is one of the very best Irish poets alive today. Tig reconfirms it; and this book is worth your while.

Eric Basso, deux livres

Eric Basso is a poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born in Baltimore in 1947. His output is prodigious, though I had not read him until I received these two well-made books. Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature, 1973-1989 (Leaping Dog Press / Asylum Arts Press, 2006, ISBN 1-878580-58-2) is exactly what its subtitle says it is, a collection of critical essays. Although “critical” is perhaps not the right word, because these are more along the lines of explorations of the subjects Basso chooses to discuss, his responses to them, rather than the sort of critical writing one would find in a review, for example. His prose is clean and readable, while exceedingly erudite.

Although he does not restrict himself, his main interests clearly lie with the French – Romantics, Symbolists, and moderns. Occasionally, I feared I would find myself lost. I am of course familiar with the likes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, et al. But I must reluctantly admit that Villiers was merely a name to me, and de Nerval little more (de Nerval of the famous pet lobster). As for Jarry, I am again shamefully deficient: although I did once see a staging of an Irish-language version of Ubu Roi, I remember only a tiny bit of it. But not to worry, for Basso actually makes all this stuff accessible in the context of his essays. The pieces on de Nerval and the (English) Elizabethan playwright Cyril Tourneur I found particularly enlightening – the collection is certainly capable of broadening one’s scope. With the above, I would add that the piece on the painter Géricault (whose study of severed limbs graces Decompositions’ cover) is exceptional.

Basso occasionally verges into the philosophical, as in his discussion of Mallarmé’s courting of “Void”: “Thus we have the conscious mind, always at one remove from its core of being, able to conceive an idea of—but unable to know—itself, by such ignorance, reducing all notions of personal identity (which implies consistency) to a nebulous comedy of ever-changing masks.” But it is not always this...rarefied, and of course it was Mallarmé who became obsessed with nullity before his descendant Basso. And, while he sometimes appears to be in love with needless, antiquated diacritical marks (“rôle” for “role,” “reënter” for “reenter,” etc.) and a florid font style, he is able to convey the “abstract” concept relatively clearly and efficiently.

But for me personally, the best essays in Decompositions were the ones that took up writers I was more familiar with myself – Kafka, Céline – and I found Basso to be about as on the mark as anyone can be in his reading of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, certainly an arduous task for even the most knowledgeable Joycean. He makes a couple of possibly overlooked points here. One being that (referencing Harry Levin) the Wake is relatively poor in visual imagery, with the emphasis instead on its bizarre wordplay. Therefore, rather than the massive dream that some have proposed FW to be, Basso suggests something along the lines of “hypnagogic trance”: “Certainly, true dreams seem more coherent, if only to suspend our disbelief, to keep us sleeping in ignorance of a veiled chaos.” The implication is that the Wake is the “veiled chaos” revealed. Later in the essay he writes, “The elucid language of Finnegans Wake is the architectonic transmutation of culture, myth and romance on the grand scale, like the sacred books of the past...”

However, Basso is quite interested in dreams, and thus Revagations: A Book of Dreams, Volume I, 1966-1974 (Leaping Dog Press / Asylum Arts Press, 2006, 386 pp., ISBN 1-878580-57-4). It is hard to “review” a book of this nature. You are either interested in it, or you’re not. For some, the material of the subconscious will be worthy in and of itself; for others, the dreams of a stranger with whom one has no personal connection will seem boring. I myself am in the former camp, for the most part. Oddly, Basso’s dreams even reminded me of my own in places. His introduction draws heavily from the French – no surprise there, knowing his preoccupations now – with much discussion of Valéry’s, Victor Hugo’s, and de Nerval’s work, as well as that of the English Romantics like Shelley.

And here is a brief, interesting taste of Basso’s own nocturnal travels: “An old-neighborhood girl, whom I am to marry, is vacillating between me and two unknowns. She looks nothing like I remember her, much younger and far more attractive.... We walk down a cobblestone alley, near the back of St. Bernadine’s. The atmosphere gradually becomes more European. A pub, below street-level, at the end of the alley. I’m still wearing my baseball umpire’s cap and sunglasses. As we approach, Dan tells me to remove the sunglasses, that it is illegal to go incognito into a public gathering.... The pub is dark, crowded. Thick wooden tables heavily marked with graffiti, a cloud of smoke through which we see barmaids coming and going.... I hail one of the barmaids with a sweeping gesture: ‘Coke for everybody!’....”

I may have been there too one time.

Susanna Roxman, Imagining Seals

Susanna Roxman, a Scottish-Swedish poet, recently sent her book Imagining Seals (Dionysia Press, ISBN 1-903171-19-9). I guess in a nutshell I would say that it’s written in a straightforward, lyric style, with a partiality to Classical mythology (some of the poems deal with themes like Eurydice and Orpheus, Circe, etc.). But Roxman has an interesting voice and brings a certain originality to her work on the whole. For example, in “A Roman Officer in Winter Quarters,” a poem with historical subject matter, she gets psychological, using expressions such as “It’s like lying awake in darkness between two dreams about rage” and “An overwhelming winter moon / floods me with sleep-inducing water.” But for me, the more interesting pieces were the ones that presumably come from the author’s real life experience, say snapshots of Edinburgh on a rainy evening, cigarette butts, and empty beer bottles slowly filling with water (“Rain in Edinburgh”). Or “The Haunted Hut,” rendered in rather stark terms:

It looks like a TV set,
the deserted Lappic hut,
screen facing west

but walls covered with torn turf...

The couple of dream poems (one identified as such, one not) also stood out to me, but I have been known to appreciate subconscious materials at times. I have also written about seals myself, now that I think about it, so I should say something about the title poem, “Imagining Seals” (which can be read at the link). It might be true that “something otherworldly and weird / clings like wetsuits to these creatures” (I liked the ironic “wetsuit” description), and it is certainly true that seals have very expressive faces, which quite obviously reveal some kind of thought or emotion, making you wonder at the whole idea of sea mammals – it’s astounding sometimes, really, when you see them sticking their heads up out of the water by the shore, looking at you. What I didn’t like about the poem was the cliché of “Seals live effortlessly by lunar logic, / are psychic, understand cycles...” and are “serene and healing” and all that. Maybe they are, maybe they do, but this New-Agey sort of thing is played, big-time. At least the poem sort of saves itself with the oblique ending, “Mostly, though, your mind is not on seals.”

This varied collection is certainly worth a look, in any case. Apparently the publisher does not have a website yet. £6.50, Dionysia Press, 127 Milton Road West, 7 Duddingston House Courtyard, Edinburgh EH15 1JG, Scotland.

A United Ireland, Pt. 2

Further to my previous post on the possibilities of a united Ireland, I recently read this Irish Times article about Ireland’s fast-growing census figures. If the predictions that the island will reach 8 million people in twenty years’ time (up from the present 5.5 million) is anywhere near correct, it makes planning for housing on an all-Ireland basis utterly necessary. There is apparently talk of creating a new metropolitan area out of Dundalk and Newry (which, for those who don’t know, are towns that are presently on opposite sides of the Border). Some kind of a united Ireland will really become a necessity as the population of the island of Ireland continues to grow. Economic and structural necessity means planning for housing (for one thing) on an all-Ireland basis.

The British government already recognizes the necessity of working closely with the Irish government on the North of Ireland. They have already stated outright that if the various political parties can’t agree to govern under the recent St Andrews Agreement (2006) for the implementation of the Belfast Agreement (a.k.a. Good Friday Agreement, 1998), that the two governments will forge ahead and implement the Agreement themselves. (This intent is specified in section 12 of St Andrews.) It is also quite possible that the two governments, without being hampered by wrangling with the parties, would be quite content to go even farther than the parties themselves can currently agree to amongst themselves. So in regard to the two governments’ position, a kernel of joint authority already exists, whether or not anyone wants to call it that. The principle of giving the Irish government a role in the governance of the North has long since been ceded by the British, and it certainly doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. Strand Two of the Agreement is all about North-South relationships. And whatever they call it in the short term, things will likely continue to move in the direction of closer North-South integration. A united Ireland might not come about in one dramatic fell swoop, as republicans had originally hoped, but in my opinion a united Ireland seems inevitable.

Deep down the British government might, one suspects, even prefer a united Ireland. Near the beginning of the Irish peace process they issued the Downing Street Declaration (15 December 1993), another joint statement with the Irish government. Section 4 of this Declaration reads, in part:

“The Prime Minister, on behalf of the British Government, reaffirms that they will uphold the democratic wish of the greater number of the people of Northern Ireland on the issue of whether they prefer to support the Union or a sovereign united Ireland. On this basis, he reiterates, on the behalf of the British Government, that they have no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland. Their primary interest is to see peace, stability and reconciliation established by agreement among all the people who inhabit the island, and they will work together with the Irish Government to achieve such an agreement, which will embrace the totality of relationships. The role of the British Government will be to encourage, facilitate and enable the achievement of such agreement over a period through a process of dialogue and co-operation based on full respect for the rights and identities of both traditions in Ireland. They accept that such agreement may, as of right, take the form of agreed structures for the island as a whole, including a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means on the following basis. The British Government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish. They reaffirm as a binding obligation that they will, for their part, introduce the necessary legislation to give effect to this, or equally to any measure of agreement on future relationships in Ireland which the people living in Ireland may themselves freely so determine without external impediment. They believe that the people of Britain would wish, in friendship to all sides, to enable the people of Ireland to reach agreement on how they may live together in harmony and in partnership, with respect for their diverse traditions, and with full recognition of the special links and the unique relationship which exist between the peoples of Britain and Ireland.”

Assuming we can take this at their word, it essentially means that the British position regarding the North of Ireland is now officially neutral, and that they will even help institute a united Ireland, as long as it is through consent. They specifically state that they have “no selfish strategic or economic interest” in holding on to the North, which pretty obviously shows that they see it in a different category to the rest of the U.K. They don’t, for example, go around making joint statements with the Irish about not having a “selfish strategic or economic interest” in England, Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall. And they also make a conspicuous distinction between “the people of Britain” and “the people of Ireland.” A British government source at the time interpreted the Downing Street Declaration as meaning, “We step back. We’re here for historical reasons but if the people of the island as a whole want to go in a different direction then we’ll accommodate that” (quoted in Brendan O’Brien, The Long War, Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1995, pp. 299-300).

Current trends in the U.K. could soon impact the Irish situation as well. The Scottish independence movement is once again picking up pace, and a recent poll clearly suggests that the British themselves would prefer an independent Scotland, and for the U.K. to break up. If Scotland were to become independent, it is hard to see how a union between the North of Ireland and England, for example, could remain much of a viable prospect. The logic for the union would, in that case, be blown to smithereens much more effectively than any hypothetical IRA bomb. (Here is the Scottish Nationalist Party’s website, which includes links regarding its vision for Scottish independence.)

Perhaps I am going against the orthodox republican movement’s views on this, but I don’t think a unitary 32-county Irish state is immediately required. I think the way it will probably work is that, in the short term and for a while yet, the Six-County North will continue to exist as a regional entity, but that a growing all-Ireland economy, cooperation in the health, housing, and education systems, etc. will create closer integration by default. And reflecting this, the British and Irish governments will continue to work ever closer as regards the North, to the point where a united Ireland becomes virtually a de facto reality, with the Six Counties set off as a region of joint cooperation, where the euro and the pound eventually co-exist, and as do Irish and British nationalities, with bilateral connections to both the Republic of Ireland and the U.K. The embryonic structures are already there – the North-South Ministerial Council and the North-South Bodies set up under Strand Two of the Good Friday Agreement.

What I am suggesting might happen, though it’s hard to predict the future, is a moving closer of North and South as a result of material and economic realities (this aside from the political and identitarian issues of the peace process). The connection to Britain would most likely not immediately cease, or perhaps ever completely cease, just that in the short term the connection to the South would continue to increase. What’s wrong with retaining the Northern Assembly, for example, even as these ties to the South grow?

Irish unity could even coexist with “British unity” until such time as it would be necessary to, or there appears to be a critical mass in favor of, holding a Border poll (if the U.K. doesn’t break up on its own first). The section of the Belfast Agreement on “Constitutional Issues” expressly provides a mechanism for a referendum on a united Ireland “if at any time it appears likely to [the Secretary of State] that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.” Such referenda can be repeated at seven-year intervals, per Schedule 1, Paragraphs 2-3.

Of course, such a referendum, if it were to happen, would not be called until the unionist community might come to the conclusion that the economic and material realities on the ground (which make closer North-South ties necessary) don’t in any way detract from their British nationality. Indeed, the benefits of these ties are an all-island economy which brings greater prosperity to everyone (or, at least as much as in any other capitalistic society). Economic or material reality ultimately overtakes political ideology. It is not a matter of coercing unionists into an arrangement that they are uncomfortable with, simply that both British and Irish nationality should be allowed to coexist in the North, if the two communities cannot agree on a shared national ethos. Nobody wants to deny unionists their aspiration to remain part of the U.K., but equally then the aspiration of nationalists and republicans in the North to be an official part of the country of Ireland must also be granted as of right. Why should one be valid but not the other? The answer is a coexistence of national arrangements, unless a common one can be agreed. Why should a double-standard be vaunted?

As for the political connections to Britain and the South of Ireland, there’s no real reason to say that, for example, at some point in the near future some MPs from Northern Ireland can’t go to Westminster if they want, while others go to the Dáil instead. Or even at times to both. Why should it be unworkable? The Irish Seanad already allocates a number of seats to representatives from the North. And Sinn Féin representatives presently abstain from sitting in Westminster, yet the U.K. parliament functions just fine without them. So all of this would simply be an officialization and expansion of practices that already exist. Allowing Northern representatives to sit in the Dáil is an issue that has indeed been raised. It hasn’t been enacted yet, but again I think it’s a matter of time. Given that the Good Friday Agreement already recognizes rights of those born in the North to Irish citizenship, there is an onus on the Irish government to give representation to all of its citizens in the legislature. I am not a member of Sinn Féin or any political party myself, but SF has put forward a compelling plan for Northern representation in the Oireachtas. (For that matter, SF’s complete practical plan for Irish unity is well worth a read – and other facets of their proposals for reuniting the country can be found here.)

Of course there are objections to any move toward a more united Ireland. There is the economic argument: the North is heavily subsidized by the British government and many of its jobs are in the public service sector. Well, while an immediate British withdrawal would be great from a strict republican point of view, what I am suggesting in the shorter period is not some sudden withdrawal, or full-scale annexation of the North by the South, which could lead to chaos. What is envisioned in the shorter term is the British government continuing to have its connections to the Six Counties in parallel to all-Ireland structures. The Northern economy would continue to be supported by the U.K., but would have extra input from the Republic of Ireland. The North is part of the island of Ireland, and the rest of the island is a natural market, at least as natural as Britain and probably more so. The South is more than capable of filling the gap over time, while the British market would exist as usual. The EU is a common market anyway. And the Irish economy has been relatively booming for the last decade and a half. For that matter there will probably even be U.S. investment involved.

Another objection is: unionists will react to any political moves towards a united Ireland, and violence will ensue. Well, first of all, if people condemn the IRA for its (now ceased) campaign of violence, then to threaten unionist violence is as equally wrong on a moral level. Hopefully over time unionists will understand that the connection with Britain need not be ended, and that an Irish national connection, for those who want it, need not be a threat to their British national connection and identity. Both can coexist. It should not be a question of coercion one way or the other. But there must be equality of national aspirations, or the conflict will probably go on endlessly. I am talking about freedom of choice – the freedom of nationality, to play a full part in the nation of one’s choice, be it Ireland or the U.K. or both, from within the Six Counties. Not simply a recognition or toleration of “cultural identity” under one country’s rule but not the other. For too long unionists have had the idea that their interests can only be served by dominating the other side. I am making the humble suggestion that it will be better for everyone if both communities’ national interests are fulfilled side by side, and no one dominates over anyone else. Until such a time as a common national ethos can be agreed, people in the North should have full rights to be part of either country, from within the North. Or again even both, depending on one’s choice. And then perhaps when everyone is on an equal footing in this respect there will even be some common commitment to the Six County/Northern Ireland entity.

But the immediate issue is the attempt to get the Assembly and Executive up and running again, which was the purpose of the St Andrews talks. That is, to get people to engage with each other through the mechanisms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, and to fully implement this Agreement, which after all was voted for by large majorities in concurrent referendums on both sides of the Border. These referendums were the only significant time since the landmark 1918 all-Ireland election (which, incidentally was won in a landslide by Sinn Féin – they won 73 seats out of 105) that the people of Ireland have voted as a whole, and thus take on an importance that cannot be easily denied.

It appears that Ian Paisley and the DUP have now actually agreed in principle to share power with Sinn Féin. Time will tell if this comes to happen, but to even entertain such a notion would at one time have been considered ludicrous. So progress is indeed being made. One sticking point is policing, but my personal impression is that SF wants the Assembly and Executive to work, and so will attempt to deal with policing as best as possible. However, at the time of this writing, there is still a lot of work to be done to make the PSNI even somewhat acceptable to republicans. SF has set out an approach to the issue. But it is a difficult task, especially from the point of view of one who has in the past, say, been a target of RUC violence, or whose relative has been killed by a plastic bullet, or whose community has been on the receiving end of state oppression, etc. With this kind of history, even reaching the level where the PSNI are only hated as much as the regular police force in any regular country is difficult.

The police in the North have always been perceived – and with good reason! – as a sectarian enforcer of British/unionist policy. A lot of work remains to be done to set the PSNI on the right path, and as long as only the British government has sovereignty over the North, there will be some who refuse to recognize what they see as a British-only police force. Indeed, there is criticism of Sinn Féin’s approach to all of this from within the republican community (much of which can be read at The Blanket website). Time will tell what happens with this, and if SF is in a position to endorse policing, which is the real-politick condition for agreement on revivifying the Assembly and Executive. The time-frame seems to be January 2007, to decide whether there is sufficient agreement to continue with these. I have mostly been talking about “big picture” issues here, because the more immediate debates are fast-moving and hard to predict. Whatever the outcome of all this, I am convinced that the two parts of Ireland will continue to move closer together, making a united Ireland in one form or another an eventual reality.

Black Mountain Review 14

Just received what is likely the final issue of the Black Mountain Review (that is, the Irish one, not the famous American one of the 1950s and 60s). It’s a shame that it’s folding, because it was a steady, well-produced journal focusing firstly on the North of Ireland, but then also the whole of Ireland and the world as well. I myself have appeared in its pages many times. I guess, however, many a good literary magazine’s days are numbered (and sometimes that is even what ought to be). BMR had a seven-year run, and began roughly at the same time as The Burning Bush. The associated Black Mountain Press has also published some very important books of poetry and prose, not least of which was the forward-looking anthology Breaking the Skin: Twenty-First Century Irish Writing. It is to be hoped that the Press can still continue in some way.

BMR 14 includes a range of poetry and short fiction, with some criticism mixed in, much of it part of this issue’s special feature on “Oriental writing” (I thought “Oriental” was becoming a politically incorrect term?). The piece that most caught my attention was British poet Kevin Bailey’s article “The Problem with Haiku.” I was very interested to read that there is currently a new generation of British poets coming to the fore who have been consciously influenced by the haiku and other Asian forms, as were the Imagists of the early 20th century at the instigation of Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and others. In fact, Bailey goes so far as to call contemporary poets such as Chris Powici, Daniel Healy, Harry Guest, Gary Bills, et al. neo-imagistic.

One thing I would take issue with, perhaps – Bailey claims that “the entropy of the British literary establishment quickly snuffed out the Imagist movement.” He immediately goes on to question his own assertion by citing a “filtered-down” imagism in the work of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and the later Hardy. Which is not off the mark, but is to ignore the fact that Imagism (along with Symbolism in France) essentially gave birth to the whole of Modernism, and thus poetry as we know it today. Free verse itself, the clear, crisp image, the move away from Romantic abstraction – all of this comes right out of the Imagist movement. Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Wallace Stevens, etc. all started their careers as Imagists. Granted these were American, and Bailey here wants to concentrate on British poets; he wants to make that distinction. I don’t know if you can, at least not completely. Did Modernism too fail in Britain? What then of the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Herbert Read, and other British poets who directly took up Imagism and Modernism? In any case, Bailey’s article is quite elucidating, especially in regard to the more recently emergent writers he discusses.

Other things that struck me were the poems of Greagóir Ó Dúill (who has recently made the switch from writing in Irish to writing in English), Gary Allen (a very strong poet from Ballymena), Nigel McLoughlin’s translations of new Cathal Ó Searcaigh poems, “Ferro et Flammis” by Paul Maddern (on the clash between English and Native American cultures at Jamestown, Virginia, c. 1609), and Cosima Bruno’s article on contemporary Chinese poetry. BMR also included a reviews section, an important feature which some journals neglect. This magazine will truly be missed. But kudos must go out to its editors Niall McGrath and Sonja McGarr, who in their editorial at least hold out some small hope of a rebirth “in the next few years.”