I have three new poems in the online journal Otoliths. They are entitled “Angles,” “Poem Written in Red Ink on Fluorescent Yellow Paper,” and “July 12.” A couple of them might be called political. 
James Liddy died yesterday in Milwaukee. He was a great poet, who for me was also a great personal and poetic friend. This is sad news. I send my condolences to his friends and family.“Translate into Triestino for my Epitaph”
I was bad as I lay back in my mother’s womb,
moreover she was a bad Catholic:
one of the kings of the fairies is dead,
in the suburbs the wives finish wine.
*
“Translate into Hebrew for my Epitaph”
I wake up drunk in the morning
and want to write in praise of Christ
but I grow sober and cold: May I
be able to mount the church steps
without a premonition of apocalypse,
may I hire enough moonlight for myself
so a star floats out of a chalice,
be ready to return to my mother’s womb
for more.
*
I have guest-edited the current edition (number 10) of the online journal The Fifteen Project. It contains poetry by Maurice Scully, David Stone, John Thomas Menesini, Karen Lillis, Alan Jude Moore, Kevin Higgins, Shannon Ward, David Rowe, Patrick Chapman, Todd Swift, Emily Rutter, Liam Mac Sheóinín, Keith Gaustad, and Nigel McLoughlin, and prose by Thomas E. Kennedy. 
[Update, 2/09: Sadly, The Fifteen Project has gone offline, and the above links to it will now take you nowhere. A pity, but I guess these things happen. Thanks again to everyone who was involved in issue 10.]
I have two poems in the new issue (4.1) of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts (which is an Irish Studies journal published by Creighton University). They are entitled “Samhain” and “Grab the Polaroid.” “Samhain” is something of a long poem — four-and-a-half pages as printed here.
There is a lot of other worthwhile material here as well, from the painting on the cover of the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, by the Irish and American painter Elizabeth O’Reilly (click above for the large view), to the poems of dual-language poet Gréagóir Ó Dúill, to James Liddy’s review of Kevin Kiely’s biography of Francis Stuart, and much in between.
This one is worth buying.
Subscriptions:
University of Nebraska Press Subscription Services
An Sionnach is published twice yearly, in Spring (Bealtaine) and Fall (Samhain). A yearly subscription includes two numbers of the journal.
U.S. individual subscriptions are $25/one year and $45/two years. U.S. institutional and library subscriptions are $40/one year and $72/two years.
Non-U.S. individual subscriptions are $45/one year and $81/two years. Non-U.S. institutional and library subscriptions are $60/one year and $108/two years.
An Sionnach is distributed by University of Nebraska Press.
To request more information, email the editor at: editor@an-sionnach.com
The new issue of Blackbird is out, number 9, which contains poems and artwork, with a particular emphasis on mail-art and collage. Editor David Stone (a considerable poet in his own right) collects some very interesting artists from all over the world — Serbia, the US, to Japan, to Finland, and on. Many of the poems and artworks actually use the blackbird as symbol or subject, but not all. This is a quite unique publication. And I have two poems in it myself. 
Ancestor Worship has been reviewed in the latest issue (Vol. 28, No. 1, Fall 2008) of The Irish Literary Supplement, a review of Irish and Irish-related books published by the Irish Studies program of Boston College. For those somehow unable to obtain a copy, I reproduce the piece, which appears on page 24 of the issue, below.
My review of Trevor Joyce’s collection What’s in Store: Poems 2000-2007 can be read at the site of Free Verse, a very good online journal edited by Jon Thompson at North Carolina State University. Please click the first link to go directly to the review, or the ‘Free Verse’ link to peruse the whole numberIncidentally, Free Verse also previously published my poem “Bettie Page”, and the supplement of contemporary Irish-language poetry which I edited.
Ancestor Worship is reviewed at Todd Swift’s blog, EYEWEAR. The review itself is by Toronto-based writer Craig Saunders, and features not only my book but fellow Salmon poet Susan Millar DuMars’ as well.
Tim Miller’s poetry collection The Lit World (S4N Books, 2008) is a compact little book (52 pages), concise and honed. Subtitled “Poems from History,” it intends to inhabit the minds of numerous personages throughout time, and succeeds nicely. Beginning with the Hebrew creation myth, and including other Biblical tales (thus making “Poems from History” something of a misnomer, perhaps), Miller’s accomplished prose-poetry ranges across vast swathes of time. 
Part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project, Louis Zukofsky’s Selected Poems (ed. Charles Bernstein, 2006) is quite a cool and, if I may say, important book. Leaving aside its content, which I’ll get to in a second, it is also a nice little book-as-object, with an embossed cover designed by Chip Kidd and Mark Melnick. I think it’s fitting to mention this, as Zukofsky, being the Objectivist poet and Marxian materialist that he was, would probably have appreciated the attention paid to the volume’s physical characteristics, not only regarding the cover art but to the typographical layout as well. As for the selections herein, Charles Bernstein does a very good job of presenting an overview of Zukofsky’s immense and sprawling body of work, and Bernstein’s introductory essay seems extremely percipient. What follows is not really a review per se, since the book has been available for two years now. It is simply a personal reading of a great and sometimes overlooked poet, with the caveat that others have probably written about him far more knowledgably than I.language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language... Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas (Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism”).
While other, more contemporary, linguists and philosophers have elaborated on these ideas, Hulme’s formulation is succinct and useful to a discussion of Zukofsky, not only because Zukofsky was initially influenced by Pound and Imagism, but because his own poetry elaborates it in its own way. Zukofsky’s work preeminently reflects an awareness of the socially-constructed nature or “communal” aspect of language. He allows it to take center stage, rather than trying to make it bend to his will. He “struggles” with it, in the sense that he disbelieves in language as direct representation, but is nonetheless concerned with what and how it might signify in other ways, and how it relates to the realities of the material world.
At the end of “A”, section 7, Zukofsky writes, “words, words, we are words...” (Selected Poems, 90). This statement is meaningful on many different levels, but one thing Zukofsky is suggesting is that human consciousness creates itself, or is at least partly created, through language. There is the sense in his work of a mind (or minds) being enacted through the medium of poetry. His poetry is correspondingly self-reflexive and overtly aware of itself as language, concomitant with the poet’s awareness that language is an entity unto itself rather than a neutral medium. For Zukofsky, if language is socially-constructed and relational, it is therefore beyond the full control of any one individual: “we are words,” he says in this poem, not “I am words.” What it implies is that language can only represent tentative versions of reality, reflecting subjective and evolving perceptions through time. And so Zukofsky’s poetry reads something like a graph of consciousness in action. Broadening this viewpoint outward, his work implies that the nature of reality itself is a kind of Heraclitean flux, eschewing fixed certainties and embracing change. Thus, while language cannot fully represent the world, in Zukofsky’s work it is capable both of suggesting this state of flux, and of enacting its own materiality through the act of writing. This is where the fun part comes in.
Language can be crafted and constructed into poetry, but for Zukofsky it will always be something other than what it purports to describe. This is clearly exemplified in “A” 7, where he in a sense lifts the veil on representational art. He does not pretend to describe a real horse here (ostensibly the subject of the poem), but rather offers a meditation on the ways in which the poet will struggle (as Hulme describes it) with language in a poem. The section begins with a question: “Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words/ Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but/ They have no manes...” (Selected, 86). Quickly the reader realizes that Zukofsky is not talking about real horses at all, but the words used to refer to them – like “manes” – and that the horse in this case is actually a mere wooden sawhorse, a blatantly hollow representation of a “real” horse. He plays on the notion that the poet can make words be something more than they are:
Trot, trot—? No horse is here, no horse is there?
Says you! Then I—fellow me, airs! we’ll make
Wood horse, and recognize it with our words [...]
For they had no manes we would give them manes,
For their wood was dead the wood would move—... (87)
The only thing is, he’s already undercut the whole venture, and knows full well that these assertions are wholly unbelievable.
In Anew 12, Zukofsky is concerned with the ways human consciousness might be accurately described. This seems to be what he’s writing about in the lines: “It’s hard to see but think of a sea.../ And there are waves—/ Frequencies of light,/ Others that may be heard” (24). As Hulme reminds us, language has a social component; there are always other viewpoints from which we might see or hear. The nature of life and language both, Zukofsky suggests here, is relational: ultimately we exist only to the degree that we are capable of interacting with the material and social world around us, and we do so through language. As in “A” 7, Zukofsky posits many different voices, a multiplicity lying behind the speaker of the poem, rather than one unitary ‘I’. The poem is where these other voices interact, combine, or play off of each other. This multiplicity of voices is also evident toward the end of Anew 12:
...Which is a forever become me over forty years.
I am like another and another, who has finished learning
And has just begun to learn. (25)
These lines suggest that the self is continually undergoing change, always being created afresh. At the end of “A” 23, Zukofsky writes that “...music, thought, drama, story, poem/ park’s sunburst—animals, grace notes—/ z-sited path are but us” (151). Just as language, according to Hulme, is communal, a product of all who have spoken it up through the present moment, so is the human mind a product of what has come before, of those who have come before, in turn interacting with the things of the material world. But at the same time, language is capable only of representing perceptions of the world which are subjective and evolving through time, not, for Zukofsky, any fixed or determinate meaning. In other words, language is fluid because material reality, at least as perceived by the human mind, is fluid as well.
Ancestor Worship has gotten a review in Irish America magazine. In their latest issue (June-July 2008), Tom Deignan was brief but very flattering. Here is his piece:Poetry
Formerly the editor of the Galway literary magazine The Burning Bush, Michael S. Begnal is an accomplished poet, whose new collection Ancestor Worship has just been published. Though American-born, Begnal mingles the Irish and English languages in his work, which reflects on ancient history as well as pop culture. Take, for example, this sample from the title poem, which recalls Frank O’Hara: “It’s like when Lennon laid / his New York album on you, / and appeared in pictures / in his new image – / Revolutionary, / sudden Irishman, / Manhattanite.” Begnal’s poems are filled with similar humor and the joys and anxieties of living in the shadow of those who came before us.
(12.00 euros, 80 pages, http://www.salmonpoetry.com/)
The first issue of PIG: a journal was launched on Saturday, June 21st, in Asheville, North Carolina. This is a great little poetry magazine, which is hand-produced by editor Jennifer Callahan utilizing some very impressive book-arts, silk-screening, and letter-press skills. Not only does it look nice, but it contains some really good writing as well. On a first reading, (and first listening, at the launch), a few standouts for me were Jaye Bartell, Hope Rinehart, Stephen Kirbach, Mark Prudowsky, Mara Leigh, Joanna Furmann – well that’s one-third of the roster right there, and frankly I was impressed in some way or another with just about everything here. I have a poem in it too. For more info on PIG: a journal check out the above link. For ordering information, contact the editor at pigajournal@gmail.com (also, a note on the title page says that submissions are being accepted through 12/1/08 for the next issue, a themed issue “on the topic of adolescence and childhood”).
Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, Middle Street, Galway, Ireland, now has some signed copies of Ancestor Worship for sale. If you happen to be in Galway, stop in and pick one up. Alternatively, they can also no doubt be ordered through their website (click their link above).
I am doing a poetry reading in Galway, Ireland, on
Dennis O’Driscoll was born in Thurles in 1954. His eight poetry collections include Weather Permitting (Anvil Press, 1999), which was a Poetry Books Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Prize, Exemplary Damages (2002) and New and Selected Poems (2004). His most recent collection, Reality Check (2007) was also shortlisted for the Irish Times/Poetry Now Prize. A selection of his essays and reviews, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams was published by Gallery Press in 2001. He is editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006). His next book, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, will be published by Faber & Faber in November. He is a member of Aosdána. He has worked as a civil servant since the age of sixteen.
Deirdre Kearney is originally from Omagh, County Tyrone, but has lived in Galway since 1983. She is a participant in the Advanced Poetry Workshop at Galway Arts Centre. Her poems have been published in West 47, Cúirt New Writing 2007, The Ulster Herald, Crannóg, Words on the Web, Tinteán, Australian-Irish Magazine Treóir, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann magazine, the Over the Edge website and Galway Exposed. She has previously read her work at the Over the Edge Open-Mic, Westside Library, The Galway Arts Centre Nuns’ Island Studio, the Poets for Oxfam launch in Galway in 2006 and North Beach Poetry Nights.
As usual there will be an open-mic when the Featured Readers have finished. This is open to anyone who has a poem or story to share. New readers are always especially welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.
Over The Edge acknowledges the financial support of Galway City Council and The Arts Council.
I have two poems in the new issue of Windhover (#42, 2008), a literary, arts, and graphic design magazine published out of
an old man
carrying a satchel,
he is queer,
and he speaks Chinese
A very good review of Ancestor Worship appears simultaneously on the sites of Pif Magazine and Perigree (issue 21). It’s by Liam Mac Sheóinín, and can be read online at Pif (click the first link), or by navigating the Perigree site (Perigree link), or simply by scrolling down here:
Begnal’s latest collection, Ancestor Worship, is as remarkable for its moody details. In “Beautiful People,” “Dead bird blown down the road / as light as its feathers” is a dazzling, fitting inchoate for a poem that ends with the provocative line “the knife dripping with juice.” Like Ginsberg, Begnal realizes a poem must provoke.
The title poem, “Ancestor Worship,” is refulgent with race memory, the entelechy of the Eliotian proposal of melding memory and desire. Paradoxically, “Ancestor Worship,” located at the near equator of the shining sphere of Begnal’s collection, becomes a distant journey into the cavern of the past without ever leaving the present — and possibly with a foot in the future. “Not like the bones of parents / carried out in procession / from their dark vaginal tombs / among the rocks, / mummified skin stretched / and tanned in mockery of death.” The journey ends with a burst of confidence: “ancestor worship / is the only religion / truly compatible / with the fact /of evolution.” This is a foot projected in the future.
The great poet James Liddy, in his blurb of Ancestor Worship, declares Begnal’s latest collection “a journey or pilgrimage.” Liddy maintains Begnal takes us to a place where “no one has been quite there before, along the genealogy or amid the furniture.” I am in total agreement.
Freddy Johnston, in his review published on the Western Writers Centre site, delights in Begnal’s “remaking of language.” Johnston, a very gifted poet and writer, cited Begnal’s use of the phrase “gorted land” as a prime example of the poet’s ability to shift from English to Irish. Johnston explains “gort” is the Irish word for field and “gorta” the Irish for famine. This sonorous echo is Begnal’s wink to the polysemantic brilliance of Finnegans Wake.
Imagery, however, remains the predominate ingredient of Begnal’s collection. Mercilessly eidetic-eidocentric, if you will — Begnal’s saccadic eye turns the page into cinematic experience. This is especially true of his beautiful lament, “Montparnasse Cemetery”:
think of all the bridges on the Seine,
that melancholy snake,
men and women have jumped off,
insignificants splash
in the green murk,
tempted
You can see the “insignificants” being swallowed by their own bile. Few poets are as adept at kinaesthetic image as Begnal. In fact, Ancestor Worship abounds with kinaesthetic magic: “Glass of the window / swims as you look / toward the Both Loiscthe bridge.”
As a Joycean, in particular a devotee of Finnegans Wake, Begnal submits:
There’s no present
just a continual becoming
past
All time in time and all space in space is the underlying theme of Finnegans Wake. So it’s no coincidence that in Ancestor Worship, a subtle work of genius, that magus Begnal succeeds in achieving a temporal-spacial perversion akin to Joyce’s Wake. Thus Galway and environs morphs into the streets of Prague, the royal botanical garden of Madrid, and “In the jet light of dusk tide” back to ancient Gaul and to the glorious defeat of the dying king of every Celt, Vercingetorix.
After joyously knocking my sconce against the formidable, lisible, scriptible Ancestor Worship, I have arrived at the conclusion that if poetry has produced another Heaney during our time, his name is Michael S. Begnal.
St. Patrick’s Day has just passed, and I noticed that Guinness has been running a campaign to make the day an official holiday in the US (as it is in Ireland), something the company is calling “Proposition 3-17.”Sounds great in principle, till you realize that, well first of all, it’s a beer group pushing this — not just Guinness, but really its parent company, the multinational Diageo. So their motivations are obvious, and are corporate rather than cultural. Besides which, there are already way too many idiots going around on Paddy’s Day, acting moronic and perpetuating stupid “Irish” stereotypes. Why encourage those people by making it an official day off? All it means is they’ll be able to start drinking earlier, getting drunker and stupider quicker, leading merely to more vomiting in the streets and fake Irishness.
While those in favor of the official holiday idea no doubt think it means that Irish culture will be somehow promoted on a wider scale, Paddy’s Day in America is more usually marked by ethnic stereotypes (notably, the Irish-as-drunken-louts stereotype). Paddy’s Day in the public sphere means almost nothing now, unless it comes with a true understanding of solidarity among immigrant groups (including those who are non-white) and a wish to undo white supremacy. Beyond that, it has become nothing but an excuse to indulge in drunken stereotypes and Plastic Paddyism.
Paddy’s Day has become so commercialized, so stereotyped, and so ridiculous that I don’t wear green, don’t even celebrate it anymore, except maybe in small groups of like-minded friends, or inwardly in my own head. (Or in Ireland, where although the celebrations are quickly becoming equally as annoying, at least there is some organic connection between Irish society and the day that’s in it.) Going out and seeing people wearing green plastic leprechaun hats, with shamrocks (or, even worse, four-leaf clovers) painted on their faces as they vomit in the gutter is really not that fun. An official holiday would only add to the sheer stupidity that St. Patrick’s Day has unfortunately come to represent. (And by the way, the Irish symbol is the shamrock, not the four-leaf clover. The shamrock has three leaves, not four.) Don’t get me wrong, I like to drink, myself, sometimes too. But I prefer not to be surrounded by walking insults when I do so.
A much more meaningful holiday for Irish people should be Easter. Leaving the Christian aspect aside, for Ireland the 1916 Easter Rising represents the struggle for independence, liberation from imperialist domination, aspirations of a cultural rebirth, linguistic rebirth, and an overarching celebration of the spirit of freedom. Not all of these things have yet been realized, but it means that the struggle is ongoing and that everyone still has a part to play. As I wrote in my last year’s Easter message, we are closer than ever to a united Ireland, but it has not yet been achieved. Nor have the wider ideals of the Easter Proclamation, in which “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.”
Despite the proclamation of “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible,” the gap between rich and poor seems to grow apace, multinational corporations exploit the economy and natural resources, the Irish language is still discriminated against, and even the Irish government is willing to bulldoze thousands of years of Irish history at the Hill of Tara to make way for a motorway that might shave a few minutes off the daily commute to Dublin. But the Easter Rising, led by Pearse and Connolly, represents an opposition to all of these political, economic, and cultural injustices. Easter, therefore, can still be a powerful symbol of resistance, and a powerful representation of Irishness that is far from the leprechaun-and-green-beer stereotypes that are ubiquitous on Paddy’s Day. Instead of a fake plastic hat or some shamrock face paint, it is far preferable in my opinion to wear an Easter lily. Caith lile na Cásca in ómós do laochra marbha na hÉireann — agus i streachailt in éadan éagóracha an lae inniu!
I will be giving a poetry reading on Tuesday, March 18, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. The reading is part of their Poetry Initiative series. I will be reading with Marjory Wentworth (SC Poet Laureate), Ed Madden, and Julia Koets. The event takes place at the Richland County Library, which is located at 1431 Assembly St. in downtown Columbia. It begins with a reception at
Issue four of the Milwaukee-based literary journal Burdock is out, and it contains some wild stuff, including poems as stickers — yes, some of the short poems here come printed on sticker paper, ready to be stuck up some place they are (no doubt) not welcome, like police stations or Wal-Marts. There are three solid poems from one of Milwaukee’s best up-and-coming young poets, Zack Pieper. One is the simple and ironic “The American Dream”: “The In-/ Exhaustible/ Search/ For more/ Meaningful/ Sex.” Burdock favors the short poem, to be sure, but includes a few which run to the length of a full page, while Eric Adams’ prose goes to two.Mostly, however, it is a magazine of short blasts and grit, with a few deserving nods to Kerouac and Ginsberg, whose influence on the Milwaukee scene is notable here. For me, some of the other standouts were Jason Groth’s untitled exegesis of a strip club (“The air is violent breasts shoulder driven into sad agate eyes…”), Dolly Lemke’s autobiographical “Birthday Cake,” Karl Saffran’s send-up of the Beats, Tim Miller’s “The Bulgarian Town of Batak” (which deals with a Turkish-propagated 19th-century genocide — “infants who died sliding down the length of a Turk’s bayonet…”), and David Brannan’s and Tyler Farrell’s Catholic explorations. Wait, that’s nearly the whole issue…
Editor Keith Gaustad has some nice things to say about Ancestor Worship: “Ancestor Worship reads well and the poems do not all work around one theme. The strengths of Mike’s writing are his ability to celebrate a place using brutal starkness and at times a rough honesty, the kind that puts you on the wrong side with friends. I suppose if things were never ugly then they’d never seem beautiful. Putting that all in one poem can be risky, next thing you know you’re an essayist, unless you keep a bit of love in the language and Mike has that from his ancestors, some of whom were old-school rappers and some were Irish revolutionaries. From KRS-One to W.B. Yeats, Mike B channels genius from all of the greats shedding light on the divided who are obliged to their fates. Word.”
Burdock 4 also includes two of my own newer poems. And a cool cover by Anna Shovers (above). To obtain it, contact Keith Gaustad at burdockmagazine@yahoo.com…
My review of Irish poet Nigel McLoughlin’s collection Dissonances is now online at Todd Swift’s blog/review site, EYEWEAR. (Click the link to read it...)
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