Hunger (2008)

Steve McQueen’s film Hunger (2008) touches on some of the wider issues surrounding the hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners of war in the H-Blocks in 1981, but focuses primarily on the figure of Bobby Sands, who was the C.O. on the blocks there, and who became one of the central figures in modern Irish republicanism. A brief recap of history is given at the beginning of the film. Republican prisoners are protesting for recognition of their political status and thus refuse to wear prison uniforms or do prison work like common criminals. McQueen employs excerpts of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s public proclamations that “crime is crime is crime” and so forth, and succeeds in making her sound ridiculous simply by letting her speak for herself, in her arrogant, slightly sarcastic tone. Ultimately it is Thatcher who stands behind all of the misery and the horror inflicted on the prisoners. She is like the ghost in the machine, the voice that informs the brutality of the H-Blocks, although it is the screws, the prison guards, who enact her will. It is this will that Bobby Sands will finally have to confront. Though he ended up dead, and Thatcher still lives, Sands has emerged in history as the true victor. And while McQueen is concerned to portray the common humanity of everyone involved in this conflict, he also clearly sees Sands as the film’s hero.

McQueen cleverly takes his time before we encounter Sands (played by Michael Fassbender). It is a non-linear approach (which made me think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line somewhat). The opening scenes are of a screw (a prison guard) suffering the negative repercussions of the oppressor in an oppressing situation. He wants to pretend his life is normal — there is a scene of a breakfast, in painstakingly slow detail. But there is no conversation between the man and his wife, who serves him. Instead, in a moment of brilliance on McQueen’s part, our view is suddenly below the table (yes, we are now viewing the situation from the beneath the dining room table) where we witness some crumbs falling on the man’s lap. The clarity of the shot is shocking. Our perspective is off-kilter but clear. How else are we to view such a fucked-up situation? Something is not quite right here. The house is like a morgue, a dead environment; there is nothing to say. The action that occurs is below the level of human communication; crumbs fall silently. Upon leaving for “work,” the guard checks under his car for explosive devices, as many had to do at that time in the fractured society of the North of Ireland, Belfast, circa 1981. The wife looks worryingly from the window as he gets in and drives off to another day of torturing. Yet these people too are human beings — human beings in a society in conflict, who have consciously taken a side and a role in that conflict.

After the guard enters the Maze Prison (the H-Blocks), the point of view changes. Now we observe a republican prisoner by the name of Gillen being checked into the Maze. He is made to strip naked as two or three screws eye him almost, no not almost, salaciously. The process of undressing is painfully slow and deliberate. McQueen does not let us hurry through this. Being a prisoner of war, the man refuses to wear the uniform of a common criminal so is branded a “non-conforming” prisoner, is given a blanket (which will be his sole garment), and joins the no-wash blanket protest presently underway in the jail. The one and only moment of the film that seems a little off occurs when Gillen meets his cellmate, a long-haired, blanket-clad, fellow IRA man. For some reason, he is cold towards Gillen, when he probably would have been glad for the comradeship. And when the man speaks in Irish, Gillen seems confused, as if he’d never heard the language before. In actuality, even if he didn’t speak Irish fluently, he’d have been well aware of it from his school days and from the numerous Irish-speakers in the republican movement and the wider nationalist community. He would also have been well aware that the prisoners in the Maze spoke it as often as possible (and even conducted classes in it for those POWs who were still learning).

We can easily forgive McQueen this brief lapse. The bleak reality of life as an Irish republican prisoner throughout Hunger is portrayed with precision and a keen aesthetic sense. With few other means at their disposal, the prisoners in rebellion smear their cell walls with shit; inedible food is dumped in a corner and becomes a spawning ground for maggots. The piss from the prisoners’ slop buckets is poured under the door and out into the halls. Someone’s job is to clean it up, and McQueen again tests the viewer’s comfort level by showing this process from start to finish — a prison worker suited head to toe puts down some cleanser, scrubs with a type of broom, inevitably pushes the urine and chemical mixture back under the cell doors. Meanwhile prisoners are routinely beaten, given forced baths with harsh detergents, forced haircuts, and are anally raped under the guise of “strip searches.” The amount of abuse is incredible, but the prisoners, intensely politically motivated, resist. They endure subhuman conditions with nothing but a blanket to wear, they pour urine out their cell doors, they smear their shit on the walls, they smuggle communications written on cigarette paper in and out of the jail, they speak the Irish language, all at great risk to themselves. The amount of physical pain they are willing to endure in their struggle is incredible. The British administration and the screws cannot stop them. This is the crux of it — the British prison system cannot control the POWs’ minds, so they attempt to control their bodies. In the H-Blocks, the body itself becomes the site of the struggle. Ultimately, with no further recourse, this situation will lead to the hunger strike.

But it doesn’t happen right away. An earlier but key moment of the film to my mind occurs when a prison guard, in head-to-toe protective suit and mask, enters a vacant cell to water-blast the shit off the walls. A circular design swirled in shit catches his eye, and he pauses to look at it. It seems to resemble something like a cave painting. The man even takes off his mask for a second to get a better look. Where he initially appears robotic, outfitted as he is, we suddenly get a glimpse of his common humanity. But then he pulls the mask back down and begins the cleaning. The circle design slowly disappears. It is an amazing scene, and one that is resonant with meaning. At the most basic level, McQueen seems to be saying, this is a conflict of the artist versus the machine. The prisoners, even in the most dire of circumstances, are still in their essences artists. Bobby Sands himself was a poet and writer, who smuggled his work out bit by bit on tiny pieces of paper. One of the books he wrote in prison, One Day in My Life, is in part the basis for this film. One thinks of other Irish republican leaders in this context. Pádraig Pearse and Thomas McDonagh, for example, leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, were also poets. Here the artistic urge is expressed in a form of painting, a primal design that alludes to our earliest ancestors. The prison worker seems to puzzle over it for a second, as if asking himself, “Me too?” But he chooses to suppress those feelings, puts the mask back down over his face, and starts spraying the water jets. The round swirl slowly fades as the emerging white wall blanks everything out. It is a destructive impulse, as opposed to the prisoners’ creative impulse.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating the point. For one, this scene forms the design of the movie poster and the DVD cover. The actual disc features the shit circle too, in full brown, as opposed to the poster/cover which shows it in the process of disappearing. A number of earlier reviews of the film criticized McQueen for supposedly aestheticizing the struggle. Similar accusations were made against Francis Ford Coppola when he released Apocalypse Now, that he was aestheticizing the Vietnam War. But I think Coppola’s response also applies here. Coppola noted that Vietnam was a television war, that it existed for many people as television images from the start. McQueen mentions in an interview included in the DVD’s special features that he remembers as a child seeing images of the hunger strikers and of Sands on television, and that this stuck with him (he also mentions that he innately sympathized with the hunger strikers). The hunger strikers knew full well the propaganda value of their almost Christ-like images. Not in any cynical way; they were people who were involved in a political struggle, who were doing everything they could to gain public support not only for the immediate cause of the prisoners, but for the aims of the republican movement on the wider scale (those aims being the defeat of the British government and unity of Ireland). They were conscious of aesthetics, partly for political reasons, but partly also because some were artists too. McQueen is not therefore “aestheticizing” the struggle in Hunger. He is saying that the struggle itself is aesthetic, that in some way it actually is a form of art (Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” comes to mind here). As awful and bleak and brutal as it often was (the initial prison guard character gets assassinated in front of his mother in a nursing home), the impulse to smear a spiral of shit on the wall represents something essential in all human beings. And the impulse to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others, through the deliberate wasting away of one’s own body, as emblemized by Sands, is a tenderness beyond comprehension to most, including me.

The film’s pivotal scene is the no-cut 22-minute back-lit shot of a conversation between Sands and a priest named Fr. Moran (played by Liam Cunningham). A number of things stick in my mind about this scene. One of course is the length: 22 minutes (I’ve also read 17 minutes), with no cuts, of intense, incisive dialogue. This is when Sands announces his intention, and the intention of other prisoners, to go on hunger strike. Moran tries to argue him out of it on moral grounds, and a sort of battle of the wills ensues. The other aspects that resonate for me are what clinch the argument for Sands: How do we know Sands has the strength of will to carry this out? After all, other republican prisoners had recently attempted the same thing, and it ended in failure and disarray. Sands conveys his resolve to Moran through a parabolic story from his childhood, a story redolent of poetry. Bobby and some other Belfast lads go to Gaoth Dobhair, Co. Donegal, on a school trip. Off in the woods, they find a fawn stranded in a stream, near death, but still alive. They debate about what to do with it — put it out of its misery, attempt to rescue it? Bobby and the others go into the water. Just then, the priest arrives, orders them all back, and the boys are in trouble. Bobby, however, strangles the fawn to death before the priest’s very eyes and takes responsibility for the whole thing. He gets the priest’s wrath, but he is satisfied that he’s done right by the fawn. He has taken action. The story is conveyed solely through dialogue, yet the viewer feels as if he is watching it unfold. As the conversation comes to a climax, Sands makes himself unambiguously clear — the time now has also come for action, a purity of political action. There can be no more fence-sitting. The hunger strike is going to happen, and you are either with us or against us. In defeat, Moran lets it be known that he and Sands will not meet again, and that is that.

The rest of the film is an awe-inspiring display of both McQueen’s feel for poetic imagery and Fassbender’s intense act of body-modification (which I would venture to suggest surpasses even that of Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull — De Niro only had to put pounds on; Fassender loses them to the peril of his own health — and this further serves to raise the thought: what of the real Bobby Sands, and the physical torments he went through? — and Margaret Thatcher scoffed!).

Despite McQueen’s protestations (no doubt necessary in public interviews) that he explores the trauma endured on all sides of the conflict in the North of Ireland (and in fact he well depicts this in practice; we all know that the oppressor is affected in untold ways by his inflicting of oppression), this is not a film that anyone can be neutral about. As Sands himself says here in no uncertain terms, you cannot remain on the fence about this. You either support Sands and his fellow hunger strikers, or you support British occupation and oppression of Ireland. You either support Sands, or you support anal rape, beatings of prisoners, forced baths and haircuts, concentration camp conditions. You either support Sands, or you support the negation of art and poetry, the negation of humanity. You either see the greatness of this film, or you do not know film.

Review of The Lakes of Coma (2003) archived

The Galway, Ireland, free weekly paper, the Galway Advertiser, has recently archived their back issues. I’m there in a number of different contexts (reviews, letters, literary arguments), but here’s a link to a review of my first book, The Lakes of Coma, from 3 April 2003. It’s nice to see the actual (virtual) newsprint page, but I also reproduce the text here.

*

Exiled from Main Street

The Lakes of Coma by Michael S Begnal (Six Gallery Press, €9)

THE MEDIUM is the message in The Lakes of Coma, a new collection of poems by Galway-based writer Michael S Begnal.

The Lakes of Coma offers fractured images of American urban existence, a dislocated, displaced eye taking in the secret “terror and beauty” of an underbelly world of transvestites, seedy cafeterias, and cracked pavements: “American cities/ inhabited by beasts and grotesques.”

Begnal is a beast of a different kind, a “stray cat in a rolling field” he calls himself in “Let’s Love America”. He writes from a periphery where nobody belongs or welcomes, travelling incognito. “Why am I abandoned?” he asks, but the harsh self-reflexivity of the writing forbids pity. Even the exposed and exposing language in which he expresses himself is subject to defilement. Poetry is “the liar’s accomplice”, another form of disassociation and of measuring his distance from himself. The centre cannot hold. Begnal, aware of the fact, makes poetry of fleeting images and perceptions, the detritus of observed life that rises “furious/ and ephemerally” before his eyes.

Begnal’s poetry is a kind of violent music (he is also a musician). Several of the poems celebrate music and musicians. “Black Flag” describes the raw energy of a mosh pit during a punk gig, and for once a sense of communion: The music “moves you, the crowd flowing”. In “Our Tradition” he sets out his artistic manifesto, affirming a way of living and writing that owes nothing to the past but “continually renews/ itself in the singular now”. He quotes guitarist Sonny Sharrock in a poem of the same name: “I’ve been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song,” said Sharrock, and Begnal’s improvised riffs, his unflinching notation of American life, is a bleak and darkly humorous look at the same terrible beauty.

Kieran Hayes

Alt i JSTOR / Article in JSTOR

Tá alt fúm féin ar fáil sa bhunachar sonraí acadúil JSTOR. Foilsíodh an píosa seo i gComhar, Iml. 60, Uimh. 12 (Nollaig 2000). Scríofa ag Alex Hijmans, déileáileann sé lena hoícheanta filíochta a bhíodh ag Apostasy Café faoi dheireadh na nóchaidí, agus leis an t-irisleabhar filíochta a bhunaigh mé in éineacht le Kevin Higgins, The Burning Bush. Má tá rochtain agat ar JSTOR, seo é an nasc atá uait.

An article about yours truly in the December 2000 issue of Irish-language magazine Comhar is available through the JSTOR academic database. This piece discusses the now long-gone Apostasy Café poetry scene in Galway and the early history of the magazine I co-founded with Kevin Higgins, The Burning Bush. If you have a JSTOR log-in, here is the link to this blast from the past.

Poem in GRASP #3

I am happy to have a poem in the new issue (#3, Spring) of GRASP, which is an English-language literary and arts magazine published in Prague. If you live in that city, you can find it in the book shops. But for those who don’t, you can easily download the .pdf of the whole issue by going here (it’s your choice of the large or small file). A couple quick clicks, and there you have it....

The poetry section of this magazine is really very good, I have to say. Other contributors include Alan Jude Moore, Carrie Etter, Louis Armand, Heather Fowler, Sheila E. Murphy, and more, along with prose fiction, essays, photography, film reviews, etc. Very much worth the look. Further information can be found at the GRASP website.

Kerouac

It’s interesting to remind oneself that Jack Kerouac’s native language was Massachusetts-Québec French. In the recently (2007) discovered manuscript of Kerouac’s aborted 1951 autobiographical novel La nuit est ma femme, he writes, «Je suis Canadien Français, mis au monde à New England. Quand j’fâché j’sacre souvent en français. Quand j’rêve j’rêve souvent en français. Quand je braille j’braille toujours en français.» Following the online article of the newspaper where I first read about it, Le Devoir (5 septembre 2007), there are a number of comments, one of which (Lucien Francoeur) says, «le style révolutionnaire d’écriture pratiqué dans On the road n’est pas possible en français.... Kerouac...n’aurait pas été cet écrivain mondial s’il avait écrit en français ou en québécois.» While I can read a good amount of French, Kerouac’s dialect often tends to elude me, so I suppose I can’t say with any certainty based on this work whether or not he would have been as global (mondial) a writer in French as he became in English. Something rings true, though, about Francoeur’s comment, as much as I also assume the French work itself has got to be good — the reality is English has supplanted French as the dominant world language (with attendant pros and cons). In any case, all of this does highlight the double language consciousness that permeated Kerouac’s world-view and allows speculation about how much this could have informed his more well-known work in English. And certainly it must have been partly responsible for the way in which he situated himself in and against Anglo-American society.

To my mind, Kerouac remains one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. To me, he stands up there with Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Flann O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell — of course this is a subjective list. Joyce’s influence on Kerouac’s work has been well documented by now. But it’s interesting to note that Kerouac praised Lolita: “Just read Nabokov’s Lolita which is one of the classics of world literature and ranks with Joyce, Proust, Mann and Genet in the divine solipsism of modern literature...My opinion of him, earlier formed by critics, was low...and so there you have our marvelously competent American critics” (Letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, June 15, 1962). Although these two writers were different in many regards, I like that Kerouac liked Nabokov. I have not been able to find out if this admiration was reciprocated in any way. Also noteworthy: Nabokov too began life speaking a language that was not the language he would become famous in as a writer.

For me Kerouac’s greatness lies not only in On the Road (though certainly it is located there), but also in works like Visions of Cody — a radical reinterpretation of the same On the Road material, his most experimental work, and probably his masterpiece. He was at the height of his powers when he wrote Cody, and the level of perception conveyed there is completely amazing. Reading the two books as in a way different versions of each other creates a further layer of insight, a sort of metafictional (Kerouac would no doubt hate me using that word to describe him) layer that exists in between the two. As well as that, in Cody Kerouac employs certain techniques that would now have to called postmodern — non-linear narrative, incorporation of tape-recorded conversations, drawings, references to writing itself (“...old Yeats will butler, he really was a cunt man that old Irish sod I love him and dig him, why paterson Williams the carlos poet, so carlos he makes a shroud out of a mill....”), the filmic, linguistic experiment after Finnegans Wake (including passages in French). It’s his most ambitious work, his greatest. Tim Hunt writes a lot about it in Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction (1981).

I would further say that Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy are two more of Kerouac’s great novels. And that Mexico City Blues, Pomes All Sizes, “San Francisco Blues,” and others are among the best works of a certain school of mid-century American poetry, in the line of Williams Carlos Williams. However, there are other descendents of Williams, representatives of other schools, to whom Kerouac, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance poets and so forth did not seem like such a good thing. I’m thinking here of George Oppen (who I also like immensely, in a different way than I like Kerouac), who, in his essay “The Mind’s Own Place” (1963), sets up Beat writing (though he doesn’t specify it by name) as opposed to the imagist precision of the original flush of modernism: “Such an art [i.e. the modernist “skill of accuracy, of precision”] has always to be defended against a furious and bitter Bohemia whose passion it is to assist, in the highest of high spirits, at the razing of that art which is the last intrusion on an onanism which they believe to be artistic. In these circles is elaborated a mock-admiration of the artist as a sort of super-annuated infant...”

As much as I like and admire Oppen’s writing, I think his criticism here only serves to highlight a schism in poetry which still exists today — what I might term the schism between the “scientific” (as exemplified by Oppen and other Objectivist poets) and the “artistic” (a word which Oppen clearly uses pejoratively in his essay when linking it to the Bohemian). Both of these schools of American poetry, these poetic modes of being, however, can justifiably claim descent from Williams himself. Yet Kerouac, with his Beat associations, is seen by many as merely an ultra-Bohemian, “the King of the Beats,” drinking himself to death but not producing much of literary value — at best perhaps the spearhead of a fad with some sociological value, but more usually as someone who helped usher in the worst kind of confessional nonsense. In comments like Oppen’s, I hear the echoes of Truman Capote saying of Kerouac, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” I am reminded of conservative critic Norman Podhoretz’s assertion that Kerouac’s motto was “Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently....” Kerouac’s own champions oftentimes don’t do much to dispel these misconceptions. In a review of Kerouac’s posthumously published play Beat Generation (2005), I criticized A. M. Homes’ bombastic introduction for characterizing Kerouac’s style as “a literary atom bomb smashing everything,” as “everything and the kitchen sink too,” “a kind of demolition derby pileup.” Where Oppen means his portrayal of “a furious and bitter Bohemia” as an attack, Homes means her comments as complimentary! In my opinion, they are both wrong.

Kerouac was dedicated to the craft of writing. That is the first thing. His aesthetic is ultimately a matter of personal taste, a subjective thing. That he exhibited certain Bohemian tendencies, ultimately drinking himself to death, is neither here nor there, except inasmuch as it helps illuminate an evolution from life-affirmation to nihilism. I think that Oppen’s criticisms in “The Mind’s Own Place” are based more on his own subjective tastes in literature, and possibly the circumstances of his own life history. Oppen has decided that he does not want to lead a life of excess, and that is fair enough. But it seems to me that those who make a virtue out of criticizing those who may fall into the “Bohemian” camp usually do so because of their aversion to that sort of lifestyle, rather than on literary merit. Would they dismiss Rimbaud too? Should the artist be any less valorized than the carpenter? I find it wholly possible to embrace both Jack Kerouac and George Oppen, and the different kind of poetics they represent.

But I disagree that Kerouac, for example, lacks precision. If he seems to at times, it is in actuality part of a wider strategy. As Gerald Nicosia writes in his biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe (1983), in regard to prosody, “His one real advance beyond Williams was the apprehension that rhythm develops within the thought process rather than being created by thought. Albeit the distinction is subtle. Kerouac really was moving toward a more spontaneous literary form, one in which errors, malapropisms, babble, and all forms of verbal stumbling fit into a grander context.” Kerouac embraces irrationality as a method when it is called for. Some cannot embrace the irrational, for whatever reason their lives have set before them — another aspect of the aforementioned schism.

Interestingly, William Carlos Williams himself championed Beat Bohemianism, lauding Allen Ginsberg by including his letters in Books Four and Five of Paterson and writing in a March 11, 1952, letter to Robert Lowell that Ginsberg “is coming to personify the place [Paterson] for me” (qtd. in Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, 1981). Ginsberg seems to recapitulate in slightly wilder form what Williams himself has been asserting throughout the whole course of his epic poem, that “unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new / line....” Ginsberg personifies the figure of the artist that Williams posits in Paterson, the future American poet who has finally broken free from old ways of thinking and writing, one who is freed from conventional morality. In 1957, Williams met with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, and Nicosia notes that Williams “praised their writings.” Of course, Williams’ association with Oppen through the Objectivist Press and so forth implies praise for Oppen and his style of writing as well. There need be no mutual exclusivity here.

No, we would not be having this conversation if Kerouac had primarily written in his regional dialect of Québécois French. As it happens, though, he is considered by many as one of the greatest American novelists and poets of the 20th century because of his writing in English. That status is deserved — not particularly because of the literary movement he was associated with or its remaining appeal to those who do not identify with the dull monotony of established forms, both in literature specifically or in society more generally (though I will say there is even some merit in that). Instead it is deserved because of the particular works which he himself wrote, which are brilliant whether or not you take into consideration the particular arguments surrounding them in his time or ours. Jack Kerouac’s birthday is March 12. He would have been 88. At the risk of outing myself as a Bohemian, I raise my glass to him.

Maurice Scully, Humming

I’ve written about Scully’s work many times now, including some pieces that appear online here, here, here, and here. Let those serve as my introduction to Scully; this will be a more immediate, subjective, impressionistic review, if it really is a review at all. What strikes me most about Scully’s latest collection of poetry, Humming (Shearsman Books, 2009, 100 pp., ISBN 978-1-84861-059-0), is that it is his death collection, much more so than any of his others. It is dedicated to his brother Brian who died in 2004. References to other deaths inhabit this book as well, the father, the mother, and then: “Turn the beach upside-down, what do you see? It must be yr sister’s / anniversary? By forces too large for all of us she’s drawn into the cave.” But death cannot be the end for those who live on, until one’s own anyway. In the next stanza, “It must be yr brother’s anniversary. [....] go & do / what you do in life and do it thoroughly, one circle, then another, [....] die, and die well. Good.” Between each stanza of this poem (one of many titled “Ballad”) is a sort of refrain: “ha ha”.

It is an affirmation of life being put forward here, a view that is evident in other sections of this book as well. In another “Ballad,” an “Argument” is put forward: the speaker’s brother has died. This is presented matter-of-factly, almost dispassionately. It is a meditation on the reality of death and aging, our helplessness before it all: “I know the facts are rough. Goodbye.” The only “Response” to this (the second half of the poem), is poetry itself, the reassertion of the poet’s poetic life-vision (and here his form enhances his content):

to
    never
be
    still
des-
    pite
what
    you
might
    think
in
    all
this
    space
ever
    open
to
    light....

A recurring theme in Humming is the description of a Neanderthal grave from 60,000 years ago, a grave which included flowers of cornflower, hollyhock, ragwort, hyacinth, yarrow, and thistle (we know this because of their pollen deposits) — showing that a reverence for death and care for the dead are impulses that go back through eons of time and are present even in non-Homo sapiens human society. Those little grains of pollen float throughout this collection (sometimes as “dots”). In this, Scully simultaneously connects us (21st-century Western society) with the ancients and yet at the same time seems to be saying, So what, this has all been going on forever, we’re not so special.

The latter viewpoint seems to be confirmed in Scully’s scorn for poets who turn death, or something like it, into a career move: “If you dedicate your little book to Mammy and get / a prize — size matters — you know how it is — / a million years of isolation and neglect … as if you / deserve pampering as by right. Just write, right?” But, some wise guy or gal might ask, doesn’t Scully dedicate his own book to his brother? What’s the difference? The difference is Scully has long ago put aside (or maybe never had) any expectation of being acclaimed for it. I don’t think he cares whether or not anyone will be moved by such a dedication, or who can “relate.” In fact, he often seems to purposely frustrate (through his form, his poetic strategies, his frequent use of language that can sometimes seem more utilitarian than “poetic”) attempts on the part of the reader to relate in an emotional way. He just writes; that is enough.

So Scully rejects the “House of Prizes,” the cosy relationships of some sections of the Irish arts industry: “I am 52. How old are you? I’m old enough to take a knife / to any letter from the Arts Council for instance regretting, et cetera / because they know I think by now — now that I’m older than / they are & longer on the job — I know perhaps a fact or two of life.” He does seem to be making a point of this, drawing a line in the sand. The book includes a back-cover blurb from JCC Mays, which reads in part, “The poet is not pushed forward as a surrogate hero, an ideal fictionalised presence in whose identity we lose ourselves: he is, always, just (just!) a person making. We are offered a poetry of witness, not of personality and career-accomplishment.” If the point of life for Scully is just to live (until you die), then the point of being a poet is just to write (to make).

I think this is why a lot of Scully’s work is actually “about” writing itself: “hum of a small plane in the distance     hum of my pen / moving     hum of my half-mind following....” He is a very imagistic poet at times, but his images don’t stand still — they are often commented upon, exploded, turned inside out; they are a kinetic form of imagism rather than the pure imagism of early Pound: “to watch one leaf turn turn back my hand / yr palm whatever skill whatever lack a tapestry / of flowers in the mud unstitching the next step” (from one of several pieces deceptively titled “Sonnet”). But in all of this I wonder if there isn’t still something left of the poet as hero, despite Mays’s blurb comment. After all, Scully is here setting out a very particular point of view, inevitably as against those of others; he is asserting both a unique poetics and a worldview which must be defended against possibly hostile entities (e.g. the Arts Council, careerist poets, audiences who acclaim them) and all the shit of the world (“remember / that he knows that / & will remember it / & calculate / the times to use it / with care / against you / as praxis / to his advantage / meanly, always [....] the next / piece of shit / taken for truth. / Have a nice day.”). Though the poet personality is certainly deemphasized in Scully’s work, the speaker nonetheless suffers the slings and arrows, and despite the degree of human cynicism which creeps in here — it’s damn hard to avoid — he comes through it all to occasional states of ebullience (“I am hey! When clouds break / & sunlight floods on to bright // up-readying flowers beside you / & you look up & smile [buoyant- / ly] — ”), and ultimately to poetry: “Drop by drop, grain by / grain… / POEM”.

Breaking the Skin (2002)

In 2002, the Irish publisher Black Mountain Press (of Ballyclare, Co. Antrim) released an anthology of poetry titled Breaking the Skin: 21st Century Irish Writing, Volume Two: New Irish Poetry (ISBN 0-9537570-2-1). (The first volume collected new Irish fiction.) The editors (Nigel McLoughlin, Matthew Fluharty, and Frankie Sewell) arranged and listed the selected poets according to age, except for the Irish-language contributors who were placed in a separate section at the back of the book (for understandable if debatable reasons). The list of those included in the anthology, ranging in birth-date from1957-75, reads like this:

Mark Granier
Ger Reidy
Gary Allen
John O’Donnell
Adrian Fox
Cherry Smyth
Katherine Duffy
Damian Smyth
Paula Cunningham
Mary Montague
Nessa O’Mahony
Kate Newmann
Aidan Rooney-Céspedes
Michael S. Begnal
Yvonne Cullen
Tom French
James McCabe
Niall McGrath
Joseph Woods
Deirdre Cartmill
Kevin Higgins
Nigel McLoughlin
Nell Regan
Colette Bryce
Caitríona O’Reilly
Mary O’Donoghue
Celia de Fréine
Gearóid Mac Lochlainn
Colette Ní Ghallchóir
Tarlach Mac Congáil
Mary Reid

It is an impressive list by any standard (I consider my own inclusion a lucky break). Virtually all of the contributors have since gone on to publish collections, or further collections, of their own (the standard for inclusion was that the poets being included must not have published more than one full collection at the time), and some, such as Mac Lochlainn, Higgins, French, O’Reilly, O’Mahony, and others, have achieved what could be called a degree of fame (such as it is in poetry).

Yet, in recent discussions of Irish poetry, I don’t think I’ve heard Breaking the Skin so much as mentioned. While it received a certain amount of fanfare upon its publication (there were launches in every major Irish city, North and South, and reviews of the book in many local publications and smaller national journals), it somehow failed to get a review in Poetry Ireland Review, Ireland’s journal of record. And I’ve often wondered why it seems so disremembered now, only eight years after it came out, containing as it does so many people who are active and significant to this day. The publisher, while now defunct, was quite respected in its heyday a handful of years ago, publishing The Black Mountain Review along with a number of noteworthy poetry collections. The editors as far as I remember were never on anyone’s bad side (an unavoidable question in the politics of Irish poetry, as in many other scenes I suppose), and did an admirable job within the parameters they set themselves (“a selection of poets Irish by birth or citizenship under 45 who have published one book or who have one collection forthcoming [as of the 2002 publication date],” per Fluharty’s introduction).

I think part of the reason is that anthologies don’t seem to play the same central role they do in for example American poetry, which is often temporarily shaped or at least influenced by a major, seminal anthology (I’m thinking of, say, Don Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1960). Irish poetry doesn’t really seem to like the idea of “new generations” of poets in the same way that America does. To take another recent example, in 2004 the larger, British publisher Bloodaxe Books released an anthology titled The New Irish Poets (ed. Selina Guinness), and while it seemed to want to do something very similar to what Breaking the Skin had just done before it (to the understandably raised eyebrows of some involved with Black Mountain Press), it too now seems to have sunk without much of a trace. (However, the Bloodaxe book does have the benefit of better distribution and a publisher that is still in existence, so who knows, it might actually have the better chance of being revived by future critics.)

Another reason why Breaking the Skin may have been unduly ignored up till now has to do with questions of what could be called the “style wars” in Irish poetry. Though in most instances the book doesn’t push an agenda of radical poetics per se — which has often been part of the discussion in recent Irish poetry, “experimental” versus “mainstream” — it does nonetheless postulate a new generation of Irish poets that is “formally free.” According to McLoughlin in his preface, “influence has been absorbed to the same degree inwards, these are a diasporic generation who have, or currently do, live in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and America. They bring with them and attempt relation to, and study of, their sense of Irishness... They are intrinsically demanding, formally free, taking their inspiration where they find it without apology... The old ideological division between the North and the South [of Ireland] has all but disappeared... These are poets of the world and world poets, but all are unmistakeably Irish — the tradition burns through their work no less brightly for being added to by American, English and European influences.”

It is maybe the blurring of categories, more so than any partisan position in relation to style or poetic ideology (again, there is little in the book that could be seen as overtly avant-garde), that nonplussed some at the time. While it’s a cliché to say this, it’s a cliché that is based in truth, that Ireland is a very tribal society, and so Irish poetry reflecting this in some ways was content to keep the usual divisions going. In fact, in retrospect, the “experimental” versus “mainstream” debate was an easy debate, one that a lot of people were easily willing to embrace, because the Irish poetry world is used to dichotomies. Less immediately understandable is an argument that says this “generation” is distinguished not by one singular radical departure in style, but by the fact that it encompasses a multiplicity within itself in the same time and place(s), and is willing to interrogate preexisting conceptions of Irish identity.

Of course, this presupposes that preceding generations of Irish poets were in some way homogeneous. Actually, I don’t think that’s completely true. While, for example, it is said that post-Independence Irish poets fulfilled a role as bards of the tribe, similarly to the filí of the old Gaelic Order (†1601), no self-respecting 20th-century Western poet, even an Irish one, would fully abrogate the individual responsibility to oneself as an artist and to his or her medium. But it is all about perception, and to exist within perceived established categories and structures is often easier than engaging in a world in which everything is blurred, and the structures one has grown up with are undermined and sometimes seemingly even cast to the wind. To return to my reference to the Gaelic Order, which perished in the onslaught that was English colonialism, sometimes change occurs as the result of such oppression and violence, and is therefore a negative thing that needs to be opposed with equal force if possible (Hugh O’Neill, Tyrell, and others). But sometimes, in other contexts, change is natural and part of evolution and a good thing, which doesn’t threaten individual or national identity (indeed encompasses all on a hopefully equal and distinct [rather than homogenizing] level), and should be embraced by progressive living people. While I admit I am putting this in more grandiose terms than is perhaps called for here, the world-view expressed in the constructive impulses behind the Breaking the Skin anthology, and in most of the poetry itself, is in the latter category. (I realize I’m creating another dichotomy here: change that is bad and change that is good.)

In any case, for many anyway, this other world-view is merely our contemporary reality. And therefore as critics and scholars and poets look at the recent history of Irish poetry, especially now that the economic boom years of the “Celtic Tiger” have been swallowed up in the global bust and everyone wonders what just happened, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Breaking the Skin will once again enter the conversation somehow. Much of the work in this anthology was created in the context of the Irish boom economy, with all the attendant change (good and bad) it entailed, even if not all of the poems overtly gesture toward this. If anyone wonders where were the poets in all this, and from whence came certain Irish poets of the now, many of them are in Breaking the Skin. It is a book whose day may yet come.

(Interested parties could try to track it down at Amazon.com or AbeBooks.com. An interesting review appears here.)

Interview on Finnegans Wake in Abiko Annual 21

I am included in a series of interviews on the subject of James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, originally published in the Abiko Annual with James Joyce Finnegans Wake Studies 21 (2001). The interviews were conducted by the journal’s editor, Dr. Tatsuo Hamada. (The issue also included a critical essay of mine titled “The Wake Will Be Televised,” on Joyce’s engagement with the medium of television in FW.)

Hamada asked a number of notable Joyceans (and some less notable, like myself) a series of questions:

Can we read through FW?
Can we understand FW?
How can we best read FW?
Is there a plot in FW?
What are the riddles or enigmas of FW?
Are there too many sexual matters in FW?
What did Joyce want to communicate in FW?
Why did Joyce invent tough, mighty words in FW?
Did Lucia’s illness affect FW?
What techniques are to be learned from FW?
Is FW translatable?
How do we evaluate our reading of FW?

Follow-up questions were then tailored to particular responses. The results make for some very engaging reading, at least if you have an interest in Finnegans Wake, in Joyce, or in modernist or experimental literature in general. Among other certainly more important things, I was struck by the number (well, a handful) of respondents who admitted to not having read the Wake in its entirety. Clearly it’s a daunting proposition, but is it not still just words on the page, like any book? (albeit 628 pages of often difficult-to-understand words). Well, a commitment such as that is a matter of priorities, of course.

You can go to my interview directly here, and the full list of interviewees (which also includes my father, who was a notable Joyce scholar) is here. Click on the individual names, which are links, to read the others.

Avant-Post archived online

The essay collection Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions (ed. Louis Armand, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2006) has been archived online here. Apparently the hard copy of the book is now out of print, so it is good to see that it lives on in electronic format at least. The book contains an essay by me on experimental Irish poetry and the politics of the recent Irish poetry scene, “The Ancients Have Returned Among Us: Polaroids of 21st C. Irish Poetry.” So, if you never managed to order the book itself, you can now read it all for free online.

A blurb describing the book as a whole reads, “Avant-Post engages the question of whether or not avant-garde practice remains viable under the prevailing conditions of a whole series of ‘post-’ ideologies, from Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism, to Post-Historicism, Post-Humanism and Post-Ideology itself.” Other contributors include Johanna Drucker, Lisa Jarnot, Christian Bök, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Archambeau, Mairéad Byrne, R.M. Berry, Trey Strecker, Keston Sutherland, Robert Sheppard, Bonita Rhoads, Vadim Erent, Laurent Milesi, Esther Milne, and more.

The American Book Review describes Avant-Post this way: “The question at the heart of these sixteen essays — alternately theoretically demanding, impishly elusive, stylistically impacted, and wholly absorbing — is this: what, in the context of contemporary politico-aesthetic practices, is the avant-garde, and how, if at all, can some version of it continue to exist in an historical moment when...everything is permitted, hence nothing is any longer possible?”

Pense Aqui No. 318

I have two excerpts of new work in Pense Aqui No. 318, a mail-art and experimental poetry magazine published from Brazil. This issue includes collage/mail-art work from Brazil, Serbia, France, Finland, Catalonia, Latvia, and the U.S., with poetry by David Stone and myself.

The editor, José Roberto Sechi, has posted photos of previous issues here.

Copies of the new issue may be obtained from:

José Roberto Sechi
Av. M29, N.° 2183
Jd. São João
Rio Claro SP 13505-410
Brazil

In this issue, Sechi also announces the “Sechiisland’s International Library,” an alternative library specializing in contemporary art, mail art, Fluxus, visual poetry, and experimental literature, and asks for donations of books, magazines, catalogues, videos, CDs, etc. to be sent to the above address.

(The above photo is of the covers of two earlier Pense Aqui issues, Nos. 136 and 134.)

Begnal Interview, Two-Handed Engine Press

I am interviewed on the site of Two-Handed Engine Press. The interview appears here, and I also reproduce it below.

Michael S. Begnal, author of Ancestor Worship

How did you become a writer?

I guess the earliest stuff I wrote was song lyrics for the various bands I was in when I was a teenager. Not long after that I started writing poetry in free verse, probably trying to emulate the writers I dug at the time. Many of which I still dig now. But at some point, later, I figured out that poetry is not just simple self-expression, that it’s actually about other things, like, oh, language, images.

What collections do you have out, and published by whom?

In reverse chronological order, Ancestor Worship was published in 2007 by the Irish press Salmon Poetry; Mercury, the Dime came out in 2005, and The Lakes of Coma in 2003, the latter two published by the Pittsburgh-based Six Gallery Press.

Do you read your reviews?

Sure.

Does it matter to you whether they are good or bad reviews?

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t matter at all, in the sense that of course I prefer them to be good reviews. But it doesn’t upset me if someone doesn’t like what I’ve published. Once you put something out there you can’t control how it’s going to be perceived by other people. You can’t stand over their shoulders and tell them how to read it or why they should like it. People’s perceptions of your work can be pretty arbitrary and subjective, and that’s just the way it is. I suppose the worst thing would be simply to be ignored and not have a book reviewed somewhere at all.

Has a review ever changed your perspective on your work?

I still believe in my own writing whether a review is good or bad. Most have been good so far, anyway. I keep waiting for the blistering attacks, but they haven’t happened yet. Maybe next time. One journal gave a bad review to The Lakes of Coma a number of years back, but I can’t say that it did anything to change my perspective. However, a few people whose opinions I respect have made private criticisms from time to time that I have found to be worthwhile.

Do you read a great deal?

Of course. I’m kind of suspicious of poets who claim they don’t read other poets, and I have heard a couple people say that. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Poetry is part of an ongoing history. You can’t know what good writing is if you don’t read it. That said, one must always be as original as possible.

What do you think is the most integral quality to developing as a writer?

Maybe realizing that it’s not all about you, even if it is about you to a certain degree. Realizing that the poetry is in the words on the paper or the words spoken in breath. That while it may be infused with deep feeling, poetry is inherently about form. This is not to say you have to write in a formalist manner. But poetry is intrinsically an artistic mode of expression. If not, then standard prose would be enough, right? Well, speaking for myself I guess. But here’s what I mean. One time Jack Kerouac was asked how he liked fame, and he said, “It’s like old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street.” That was a poetic response. He didn’t say, for example, “I feel lonely and alienated.”

Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?

That is a hard question to answer, because most of the writers I used to think I was being influenced by, I see now aren’t really very similar in style to what I have actually written. But, Kerouac has always been very important to me, and still is. I suppose I used to think that I was writing like him even if it wasn’t ultimately that true. Amiri Baraka is also majorly important. In my mind I think Baraka has been influential in some way, but I don’t know if anyone else would see that. James Liddy, the Irish poet, has permeated my sense of what it means to be a poet. Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, an Irish Gaelic poet who died in 1729, sometimes comes to me in dreams. His work is unsurpassable. So is that of drunken 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Let’s see, when I was 19 years old I met Lawrence Durrell and told him I was a poet, and he smiled this big smile and told me to do it. Also, the music of the Stooges is an endless source of artistic inspiration.

Do you think about your body of work?

Of course. I’m not sure quite how you mean, but I am a serious writer so I do think about those kinds of things.

Do you have a lot of work in progress?

The next collection is done.

Do you have the whole poem figured out before you write it?

The poem comes into being in the process of writing it.

What is a typical day for you?

Wake up, finish off the beer sitting by my bed from the night before, open another one, start writing.... Just kidding. Sometimes I wish that was the truth, though. Occasionally it is, or something like that.

If you could have written one book in history, what book would it be?

Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin.

What would you be doing for a living if you weren’t a writer?

Well, it’s not that writing is a living in itself. But maybe it is if you take into consideration my related gig as a college writing instructor. If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now, I suppose the only other alternative career I could imagine for myself would be if any of the various bands I used to be in had made it big and I was a successful rock’n’roller. If not that either, then maybe the Post Office or something.

Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry) is available here

Begnal video on new Salmon Poetry site

To the left is the author photo of me used on the revamped and updated Salmon Poetry website. The page for Ancestor Worship also includes two videos: one of a reading of the poem “Ancestor Worship,” the other of the poem “My Role in Society.” Just click the previous link, and when you’re on the page you will see the links for the videos, which, when clicked, then pop out and play. These, I believe, are currently the only videos of me reading poetry available online. The page is also updated with the latest reviews of the book and such features as a pop-out, full-size view of the cover. Not to mention, um, a very convenient way to place your order.

The whole Salmon site, by the way, designed by Siobhán Hutson, looks great as well.

Reviews in An Sionnach Vol. 5

I appear in the new issue of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009 (University of Nebraska Press) in two ways. First, my review of Irish poet Maurice Scully’s collection Doing the Same in English (Dedalus Press, 2008) is included, and can also be read here in online form at Project MUSE, the database of “prestigious humanities and social sciences journals.”

Second, a new review, by Keith Gaustad, of Ancestor Worship is published in the same issue. It too can be read online via Project MUSE (here), and I reproduce the text of it below.

Michael S. Begnal Ancestor Worship Salmon Poetry 2007 70 pp. ISBN: 978-1-903392-54-6 €12.00

Reviewed by Keith Gaustad

I realize it may be more interesting for readers to have me write about the poet rather than the poetry. I say this only because the pitfalls of academic jargon are out there, and I’m just the clod to go traipsing through the field looking at the sky. Holy shit! That’s poetry.

Mike Begnal or Michael S. Begnal to fans and critics, has a new book from Salmon called Ancestor Worship (2007). He sent me a copy because, as a friend, he knew I’d like it. However, how does a poet living in North Carolina formerly of Pennsylvania and previously of Ireland know someone who has never lived anywhere but Milwaukee? Answer: James Liddy.

Begnal came to Milwaukee to take on the prestigious position of the James Liddy Chair at the Irish Cultural Center of Milwaukee. It was my understanding that this was a newly created post. What the determining factors were for the selection of the James Liddy Chair, only the dear now late Liddy seemed to know...and maybe Professor Gleason. I don’t recall what poems of Mike’s that Liddy gave me to read in advance. Liddy knew I wasn’t on the up-and-up or on the who’s who, so if I were to accompany him to a reading, as the driver, often he would hand me a book or a copy of a poem to update me, so that if cornered I could produce at least one poem title to pronounce as my favorite.

Assuredly, one of the factors that determined Begnal’s earning the seat of the James Liddy Chair was that Begnal wrote poetry in the Irish language. The Chair is, after all, a part of The Irish Cultural Center. So I sat down on a nice comfy couch in a nice comfy room on the Marquette University campus to hear for the first time what the Irish language sounded like. Interestingly enough, it sounded very sarcastic. Most of the poems felt uneasy. The poet told us that we probably didn’t really care what the Irish language sounded like, and that’s why he hurried through them to get to the translations, so we would understand what they meant. His demeanor was, how can I say this, punk rock inside a library.

I found myself chuckling a little during the performance and even thinking, “He means you, blue hair!” when glancing at the old, blue-haired ladies in attendance who did not linger for the reception. It was certainly a to-do. I found myself chatting with Begnal after the reading. The next day we drove around with Liddy on a tour of the city, and then later I drove him to the airport without Liddy. It’s not often you go to a poetry reading at the Irish Cultural Center and make friends with the poet reading for the first-ever James Liddy Chair and end up chatting about early ’80s hip-hop and the few ’80s California hardcore acts I was familiar with. I even got an autograph on my copy of The Lakes of Coma, Begnal’s first book.

If the reading was legendary for all the wrong reasons, so be it. I’ve been able, thanks to the miracle called the Internet, to stay in contact with Begnal, even solicit him for poems for my own humble magazine, Burdock. I even once attempted to write a paper for Liddy based on our conversations about poetry. Needless to say emails do not translate to essays. I think I ended up writing about Sylvia Plath, or something else, instead.

The lesson: dialogue is important. Conversation, however technologically slanted, yields insight. And after having conversed with Begnal for a few years now, I think I understand what made that first impression tick on as it has. During conversations with him, and after reading Ancestor Worship, I think I have a better understanding of his reading that shocked and appalled people: there is frustration rooted in the passage of a culture. To realize that Irish is not an active language in the real sense, that most people in Ireland don’t speak it, and that Ireland only exists in America as a cultural artifact, is the hidden argument of Ancestor Worship.

The argument comes to the surface in the poem Begnal chose to translate out of the Irish, “To the Gaelic People” by Ó Longáin. One of the footnotes states that Ó Longáin’s poems are “urging/inciting...didn’t stir them in the slightest.” A sort of status check in 1800 for the poet, but for a long time both struggles went on. But now, with independence gained for the country, the language of ancestors is threatened.

It’s not just Ireland, though. Time, it seems, moves even quicker now. And what may have been a cultural movement in the ’60s translates to a fashion statement today. We may understand history as it is or we understand it through plastic. I read this in “Old Men’s Bar.” If we read this poem simply for its imagery, that is enough:

Sexless trio in the middle
of cunt colored painted walls,
dead wives,
creeping stink of age,
glasses of beer,
raincoats,
galoshes,
neckties

That the walls started out “salmon pink” in the poem is nicely done, intentional or not. That the poet becomes wary of his position in this bar is where I get my theories about the book:

(I’m furtive—
if they caught me they’d raise a shaking fist)

Does this refer to the pitfalls of dual citizenship? Can you belong to two tribes when so much of Ireland is rooted in the tribal, the notion of clan? The voice in the poem does not seek separation. It is felt. It already exists. These men, who may have seen a history the narrator can only learn of secondhand, exist separately from the narrator. They are living ancestors. So much of the pub culture is meant as an exchange, and yet, there it is in the pub. And an American can’t approach it with any comfort for fear of what? Rejection? Perhaps the answer is exile. The book ends with “Another Exile”:

The line bending,
curving,
the burden being lightened

That Begnal’s book begins with “Expatriation” tells us everything we need to know about this subtext. Other ideas exist in the pages of this book, but this next excerpt seems to explain a lot of what may be the thesis of the book. Presumably, it’s the author’s entry into the rituals of worship, and it contains lines that describe the narrator and the terrain he will be navigating for most of the book:

and I too’m “American” now,
sauntering the local lanes,
land of ghostly progenitors,
cold stone,
bitter defeat

The poems in Ancestor Worship strive to define worship in a different way. A history-obsessed American often has science on the brain, whereas an Irish mind once had druids, fairies, and monks, who kept everything alive for a time. Begnal has little choice but to approach this in an American fashion. That is to say, the tribal element will be overcome. Is this another sort of catholicism (universal appeal)? I hear composition teachers (they are my ancestors too) saying, “Beware the rhetorical question in your essay.” But I adopt Begnal’s ideas and ask why do we want to hear everything our way, in our language?

That first time I met Mike Begnal was a strange experience, and my initial review of Begnal’s book was a bit off, so I felt I had to get a little more personal with this review. This is a side effect of Ancestor Worship, not the book but the concept it is named for — you feel compelled to make strange events known to multitudes.

(E-ISSN: 1944-6535, Print ISSN: 1554-8953)

Samhain 2009

Yellow and crimson leaves lining the sidewalks and streets, rust-orange leaves of vines clinging to tree trunks and brick buildings, old concrete staircases overgrown with weeds and roots — I will be reading at Kiva Han Café (Craig St. and Forbes), Pittsburgh, on Saturday November 7th, 8:00 p.m. Also reading are Che Elias (novelist, poet, and publisher of Six Gallery Press) and Kevin Finn (poet and musician).

Reading 10/26 at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh

I will be reading at Duquesne University on Monday October 26th, at 7:00 p.m. The event is part of the Coffee House Reading Series, which is organized and sponsored by Duquesne’s English Department. It takes place at the Barnes & Noble Café in the Power Center (1015 Forbes Ave., at the corner of Hooper). I am reading in conjunction with a fiction writer by the name of Bill Kirchner, about whom I have heard good things.

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In other news, I was recently interviewed on internet radio. The show, hosted by Mike Marcellino, is called Notebookwriter and runs as part of the Red River Writers Live show on BlogTalkRadio. The interview, which took place on October 7th, is archived and can be listened to here.

Three Poems in Iota 85

I have three poems in Iota 85. Iota is a British poetry journal that has been around for a pretty long time. I remember encountering it in a different form in the late 90s, when it was an A5 folded-over and stapled production and I think always rendered as iota with a small i. It had a certain recognition in Britain and Ireland as one of the stalwart small press poetry journals. Recently the magazine has passed into the hands of a new editorial team associated with the University of Gloucestershire (headed by Nigel McLoughlin), and has reincarnated itself as a high-quality perfect-bound book with color cover and French flaps.

The production is excellent, but I have to say that the poetry between those flaps is pretty damn good too (and not just because I’m in it). Irish poet Howard Wright’s new work, which leads off this issue, is especially strong. I published him a few times a while back in The Burning Bush, but here in Iota he’s better than ever. Just about every poet I’ve happened upon so far in this issue has been interesting to me in some way or another. The magazine includes not only poems, but reviews and interviews (George Szirtes is one of the poets interviewed), and a section for listings of poetry events (predominantly taking place in Britain). Such high-quality work, coupled with its high production values, would have to have Iota on its way to being considered one of the top British poetry journals, I would think? Copies can be ordered through their website (linked above).

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In other news, an interview I did with the New York punk band Chesty Malone and the Slice ’Em Ups is online at Punk Globe.

New (York) Mets uniforms?

The Mets have announced, or sort of announced, that they might be making a uniform change after this most dismal of seasons. Reportedly, the possible changes involve dropping the traditional pinstripes, and going with a cream-colored uniform like the one they wore this past August. Here’s David Wright in that uniform, being escorted out to to his position at third by the Mets trainers, as is his usual fashion. The bat-boy then comes over, bows, and gives him his hat, bows to the four corners of Citi Field, and sprints back to the dugout. David picks up a pinch of Citi infield dirt, ceremonially smears it on the front of his uniform, and rolls up his sleeves so that you can see the sleeves of his orange undershirt. The crowd over at the third-base side, known as “David’s Army,” roll up their own sleeves in an exaggerated manner, in tribute to their hero, and high-five each other. Some are simply wearing orange Mets t-shirts with the number 5 on them. Wright, number 5, is the famous Mets singles hitter.

So anyway, yeah, this or something like this might be the new Mets uniform. Some people say who cares. And anyway isn’t this a poetry blog, mainly? (Well actually this is a very poetic post, to be honest....) Others are alarmed at the fact that it seems the pinstripes are going to be ditched. I agree; keep the pinstripes. Bizarrely, a couple of people have actually suggested a blue alternate jersey, like the Mets should rock this blue solid look, like the Cubs do sometimes (the Mets should imitate a team that hasn’t won the World Series for over 100 years)(don’t get me wrong, I would actually like to see the Cubs win; that would be a great moment to see, but hopefully not in a blue jersey). Thankfully, at least it’s pretty clear now that no one likes the black jersey or the all-black hat. That’s capitalistic bullshit. They see through that now, finally.

So really, why have an alternate jersey at all? A black this, a blue that, an alternate this or that? No. There should be one home jersey and one away jersey. For the home jersey, the (maybe off-)white pinstriped 1969 classic Mets jersey, no drop-down black shadowing, no stripes on the sides, no trim. Just a classic button-down jersey, white with pinstripes. The one Tom Seaver is wearing in 1970 on Camera Day at Shea Stadium, holding this weird toy. (As photographed by Stephen Hanks, Camera Day at Shea Stadium, 1970, found online....) Tom Terrific knew where it was at. Riding the subway out to Shea in the 70s meant seeing all the newest graffiti, what early tags were getting up, what early 3-D style. He knew how the New York fans were feeling. But anyway, that is the home uniform they need. And for the away jersey, grey with the classic NEW YORK lettering like they have now, but with no shadowing. That is my considered aesthetic opinion. What to do about Oliver Pérez is a whole other thing.

David Stone, Under the El

In my view, David Stone is one of our most original experimental poets, though he is not sung in the halls of academe or in the HTML code of poetry blogs as often as he should be. That situation will change eventually, I think, as time goes on and Stone’s small press collections, chapbooks, and pamphlets get collected into more readily available volumes.

One of these chapbooks, though, quite available now, is Stone’s latest, Under the El, published by Alternating Current/Propaganda Press. It includes the long poem “Under the El,” set in Chicago where familiar Stonean elements congregate: “& on the asphalt/ a turkey vulture dines.” Shorter poems return to the setting of Baltimore, that apocalyptic city where Stone now lives: “another murderous day/ in this sad city/ where teachers/ are raped by students/ & more beatings on the buses/ & on subways” (“The Subway Glance”).

This is a poet who takes up death, history, war, and urban America unflinchingly, but whose language is therefore a little weird — stripped down to short declaratory sentences, as if desperately clinging to some sense of basic grammatical order. Unlike some experimentalists, whose language often reflects the disorder they find (by all means a valid and often beautiful response), philosopher Stone seeks beautiful logic in the illogical, if only in a ritual sense (as in “YK,” his Yom Kippur poem). There is always a subject and a verb, often an object, though each might not be the expected.

A poem that succinctly illustrates what Stone does is “The Fire Engine”:

The Fire Engine

The fire engine
skidded through
the intersection
& crushed
a compact car.

Earth whisked
wizardous rants.

Breathers reiterated
the aroma of death.

The cell counters
apologized
in Socrates’ tank.

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Jim Carroll, 1949-2009

I heard today that the great poet Jim Carroll died, and it was one of those weird moments where you say “Wow, that’s crazy, because I was just talking about him” – and indeed I was just telling someone the other day what a great poet he is (was), and pulled out his Catholic Boy album, and we briefly talked about the cover, how he’s standing there with these older people who it seems may be his parents, yet at the same time his cock is let’s say rather prominently noticeable through his jeans, and anyway “People Who Died” among others is a great song.

Like Patti Smith, Jim Carroll made the transition from being known primarily as a poet to also being known as a punk singer. I got into his writing after first digging his music (particularly Catholic Boy). Living at the Movies still stands as a landmark collection of poetry, drawing on the tradition of Arthur Rimbaud and the Symbolists, as well as the conversational New York vibe of Frank O’Hara (as in for example the opening of “To the Secret Poets of Kansas”):

Just because I can’t understand you
it doesn’t mean I hate you...like
when you go on continuously how you
cannot tolerate skyscrapers or cab drivers

                maniac faces on Fifth, well

it means nothing to me I
just ignore as so often...

Well Rimbaud and O’Hara, I suppose these are not original comparisons, but if you are as good or even almost as good as them, then you’re in good company. And Jim Carroll is. The New York Times obituary calls him a “poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs.” He was also the son of a bar owner. Most people probably know of Carroll because of the film The Basketball Diaries (still to my mind Leonardo DiCaprio’s best role). The film is good; the book is better. Better still his poetry. This is his short poem “Song”:

Song

In minute gestures
                    that jet wetly slight
        right above your eyes
                                        each morning
I watch the sun cross over the reservoir
        all day sometimes
                     a few hours soaked into air cotton
like cloud syringes drawing up blue
                          like darkness when it’s through

Of course, offering a couple short extracts does not do Carroll justice. But when a poet dies one immediately thinks of his words, just as when a rock star dies (again he was both, though “star” might be stretching it) perhaps you play the music. Though Carroll was 60 years old, I can’t help thinking of the lines from his song “I Want the Angel,” which go, “And those who died young, they are my heroes/ They are my heroes, they took the walk/ Where the heart made sense and the mind can’t talk.” Here (below) is Jim Carroll doing “People Who Died,” and hopefully he wouldn’t mind me writing a new verse, maybe, at least in my head, something like “Jimmy had a heart attack, 60 years old, he looked like 55 when he died, he was a friend of mine...”