I never liked Zappa; I felt like he couldn’t compete with the amazing music of his day (and it was amazing, American pop, British invasion) so he was funny–OK, I like funny, but I found the music-part annoying. I had pals who loved Zappa and used to say, ‘listen to this and listen to that’ and I never really cared.

I’m a sucker for pop music; give me 1964 Lennon over 1974 Lennon. Lennon was ruined by Yoko and drugs. I loved fat, working-class Lennon competing with Paul. Thin, tea-drinking, sermonizing, feel-my-honesty-and-pain superior-to-Paul Lennon was basically a bore, like George with his Hare Krishna and Paul with his silly love songs.

Thomas
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i haven’t read much Poe, hardly any, and so the question i asked about wondering if it was the talent of his translators which caused him to become a (the?) founding gob of modernism, (indirectly through french symbolist drug and drink addicts), was not based on having an opinion on the Poe oeuvre, but merely wondering if there was some genius French wordsmith who made a silk purse from porcine ass, and now you’ve dilineated that scenario, a liddle bit of literate history it would have taken me a butterfly route to chance upon (if ever) has been precised down to the bare-faced bones in a line or two gem, resting on a long time spent surfing the texts to make manifest.

Poe is niot unlike Frank Zappa, in the sense that he inspires cult-like loyalty among the disciple-minded like ourselves, currently gassing up a gang of two people seeing through to whatever it is we are doing intuitively as people who share their addictions.

I had a pal who was mad on Zappa, and in the early-mid eighties would host sessions on the stereo in his (at that time) full time attempts at converting they who did graps nor share the Zappa world-view or melt into ecstacy, head nodding, agreeing with every word and sound coming out the speakers. And as i was a tough convertee (to begin with) my pals main modus operandi was to be ecstatic, squeal and siong along at particualr lines which he thought carried the holy ethos most, and generally rant away as i sat there unresponsive and slightly bored, and not a little pissed, (especially if drink were involved) as he did the Zappa routine.

One Saturday afternoon, in his bedsitter in Southport, Lancashire, where saint John would have physically traversed prior to moving away from the local area after it all exploded with Love Me Do and Please Please Me – the conversion process, after several and more years, came good.

You Are What You Is, was the album and after repeated plays, like a virgin with their first long time suitor they had never guessed would be the one, i came to understand and empathise with others (overwhelmingly brethren) enough to passmyself of as a casual disciple.

One who knew of Zappa’s worth and could exchange cordial pleasantries with the hardest of the hardcore in the FZ Church, but whose own musical gods lilted more to disco, hard rock, early rap (when it was rhythm and poetry), Irish ballads and an emerging U2,who at that time, we would never have guessed would achieve the domination they did.

Then Spandu Ballet, Kajagoogoo, Wham, Cyndi Lauper, and an array of rockers destined to BE THE ONE were all saving the planet by devoting their tunes to Saint Bob, who gave his fellow junior Dubliner, Mister Good, the stage on which they launched into a global realm as their competitors in pop bands now long forgotten and whose music dates to that era, looked on, very very happy it wasn’t them acieving the musical Dream.

Thanks very much Thomas, two bores speaking pure, is all one needs for an audience beyond the borders of our relationship, to feel as we do, humanly connected to the higher realms of light in which some eces, knoweldge, manifestation of it imbues them with interest in the Brady Brunch say, or the Waltons, Osmonds at the height of their power, or county Cavan Virginia’s own, Sleepy Rise (Stephen).

He is one a three quarter Cavan and one quarter Dublin quartet of artists who i met when i became the very first poet in residence of the Monster Truck Art Gallery 9and workshops), hosting a weekly drinking and Poetry session in a gaffe that had recently been set up by newly exited graduates of the National College of Art and Design on Thomas Street, five minutes away from the creative space itself where the Art happens, and five from the centre of the city, in Dublin’s Liberties district.

I had been led to this role after receiving a temporary ban from attending the (now defunct) weekly Write and Recite (WaR) gathering, where i had pracised for 14 months prior to the ban and 22 months after it – for bringing the name of this church of poets in Dublin into disrepute, after getting us (unfairly) barred from the Dukes pub, a literary watering hole of fellow artists, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, before they died and who where also barred from their when living.

~

This is Stephen singing Blood On The Splinters at the 2007 Love Poetry Hate Racism gig in the Boom Boom Rooms above Conway’s Pub on Parnell Street in Dublin.

The quality of the sound, being not perfect like on MTV rock shows, means you cannot cognise every word, and does not do true justice to this ballad as it can and has many times existed in reality before my very eyes and ears.

When you hear it sung acoustically with just the gob and his guitar, his voice is an instrument of immense power. He is a young man definitley at peak capacity and loudness, the height of his vocal power as Ron in Bury would concur should this chap have been included on the bill with Silliman on the night of the Tony Trehy’s Text Festival he has just returned from, and where an old sparring partner, Scott Thurston, a pedogoge and poet i knew as a higher adept under the tutealege of the ollamh in that writing grove, Bob Sheppard, prophet of the church of my first learning, and where i was initiated into the apostlistic code of langpo.

I remember the first time I heard Sleepy Rise (stephan) nail this ballad in Naked Lunch, a Poetry night he and two pals from UCD instigated after coming to the gigs i hosted as Poet in Residence of the Art Gallery, and fronted by Virginia Cavan’s own, Mike Igoe – and the hairs on the back of the neck, fulfiloing the Houseman test of psychic spear amply, like a young Liam Gallagher before the ale and fags took 80% of his voice. The sheer force of it beyond putting into words.

Oh there’s blood on the splinters
Of my mind, coz i’ve broken down
This wall just like its one last time
And you never cease to amaze
me, after all my mistakes you could
Learn so quickly – oh i’m not so
god-damn naive, and i’m not a well
Meaning acolyte for a troubled
Day at sea no more, oh no,

That’s why i’ll be walking, walkin
Out the door.

Well i’m not as wise as i was
As a child, and i’m not just the back-
End of a colour from the light

oh but i’m sure that i could ever
Succeed, if i keep working so well
For those faces the summer leaves,

And without this truth, there’d
Be no fallacy, and without this
dream of mine, there can be no
there will be no reality:

~

There is a long tradition of world class Dublin balladeers, who start busking and playing the pubs and go onto world fame, the most recent ones like Damien Dempsey and Paddy Casey, because of their tunes getting featured in those Californian teen shows about teenage angst.

Exactly the same in essence, as Bono telling us of a song that was “written in a hotel room in New York City, around the time a friend of ours, a little steven, was putting together a record of artists against apartheid.

This is a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg.
A man who is sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa.

A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor.

A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west while they argue and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa.

Am I buggin’ you?

I don’t mean to bug ya…
Okay Edge, play the blues…”

Blood on the Splinters
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Desmond,

This idea, that the ‘French Poe’ was all an accident of talented translators, was worked up by a very bitter Englishman, Aldous Huxley, way back in the 1930s, then repeated by T.S. Eliot in ‘From Poe to Valery’ in 1949, after Eliot, fresh with a Nobel Prize, came out of the closet as a Poe hater, revenging his transcendentalist grandpa, William Greenleaf. The brilliant idea (but a very little one) was most recently taken up by Harold Bloom in 1984 in the NY Review. Poe’s immense French influence (looming over the Modernist tea party with Mallarme) had to be explained away by the clique of modernist pretenders who lacked a stomach for great literature…let’s see, Huxley reasoned…Poe’s highly inflected poetry, by mere chance, sounds better in the uninflected French! And Poe’s ability to travel was somehow construed as a negative! English-speaking Poe is nothing but a mirage, for without his French reputation he is nothing (so says the Huxleian idea) and French Poe is a lucky accident! Voila! The modernistes triumph! They put his annoying (and popular) presence in a box and lower it into the sea.

Thomas
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Thanks for bringin’ in “A Fable for Critics” by James Lowell.

I really don’t know why poets hate critics.

Think of that famous phrase, Carp Diem: Criticize the Day.

And why don’t people like revues? They are filled with song! I don’t get it.

Poe reviewed “A Fable for Critics” (which called Poe ‘two-fifths sheer fudge’) and Mr. Lowell did not come off well.

Poe found fault with Lowell’s anapests, and much else.

Enjoy!

Take it away, Mssr Poe:

To show the general manner of the Fable, we quote a portion of what he says about Mr. Poe:

Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge —
Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge;
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make all men of common sense d—n metres;
Who has written some things far the best of their kind;
But somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the mind.*

* We must do Mr. L. the justice to say that his book was in press before he could have seen Mr. Poe’s “Rationale of Verse” published in this Magazine for November and December last. [This footnote appears at the bottom of column 1, page 191.]

We may observe here that profound ignorance on any particular topic is always sure to manifest itself by some allusion to “common sense” as an all-sufficient instructor. So far from Mr. P’s talking “like a book” on the topic at issue, his chief purpose has been to demonstrate that there exists no book on the subject worth talking about; and “common sense,” after all, has been the basis on which he relied, in contradistinction from the uncommon nonsense of Mr. L. and the small pedants.

And now let us see how far the unusual “common sense” of our satirist has availed him in the structure of his verse. First, by way of showing what his intention was, we quote three accidentally accurate lines:

But a boy | he could ne | ver be right | ly defined.
As I said | he was ne | ver precise | ly unkind.
But as Ci | cero says | he won’t say | this or that.

Here it is clearly seen that Mr. L. intends a line of four anapaests. (An anapaest is a foot composed of two short syllables followed by a long.) With this observation, we will now simply copy a few of the lines which constitute the body of the poem; asking any of our readers to read them if they can; that is to say, we place the question, without argument, on the broad basis of the very commonest “common sense.”

They’re all from one source, monthly, weekly, diurnal…
Disperse all one’s good and condense all one’s poor traits..
The one’s two-thirds Norseman, the other half Greek.,.
He has imitators in scores who omit…
Should suck milk, strong will-giving brave, such as runs…
Along the far rail-road the steam-snake glide white…
From the same runic type-fount and alphabet…
Earth has six truest patriots, four discoverers of ether…
Every cockboat that swims clears its fierce (pop) gundeck at him…
Is some of it pr——— no,’tis not even prose…
O’er his principles when something else turns up trumps…
But a few silly (syllo I mean) gisms that squat ‘em…
Nos, we don’t want extra freezing in winter…
Plough, dig, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, make all things new…

But enough: — we have given a fair specimen of the general versification. It might have been better — but we are quite sure that it could not have been worse. So much for “common sense,” in Mr. Lowell’s understanding of the term. Mr. L. should not have meddled with the anapaestic rhythm: it is exceedingly awkward in the hands of one who knows nothing about it and who will persist in fancying that he can write it by ear. Very especially, he should have avoided this rhythm in satire, which, more than any other branch of Letters, is dependent upon seeming trifles for its effect. Two-thirds of the force of the “Dunciad” may be referred to its exquisite finish; and had “The Fable for the Critics” been, (what it is not,) the quintessence of the satiric spirit itself, it would nevertheless, in so slovenly a form, have failed. As it is, no failure was ever more complete or more pitiable. By the publication of a book at once so ambitious and so feeble-so malevolent in design and so harmless in execution — a work so roughly and clumsily yet so weakly constructed-so very different, in body and spirit, from anything that he has written before — Mr. Lowell has committed an irrevocable faux pas and lowered himself at least fifty per cent in the literary public opinion.

The whole delightful review by Poe can be found here http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/slm49l01.htm

Thomas
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“My friends, in the happier days of the muse,
We were luckily free from such things as reviews,
Then naught came between with its fog to make clearer
The heart of the poet to that of his hearer;
Then the poet brought heaven to the people, and they
Felt that they, too, were poets in hearing his lay;
Then the poet was prophet, the past in his soul
Pre-created the future, both parts of one whole;
Then for him there was nothing too great or too small.
For one natural deity sanctified all. . .”
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Everybodies Talking Bagism
Shagism Dragism Madism
Ragism Tagism This-ism That-ism

Minister
Sinister
Bannisters
Cannisters
Bishops
Fishops
Rabbis
Popeyes
Bye Byes

All We Are Saying
Is Give peace A Chance.

~

grá agus síocháin

(graw agus shee-a-kawn)

love and peace
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Being this side of the puddle, i cannot soeak with any authority on American literary culture, but having been a lurker, looking in through an online perspective for five or so years since leaving college clutching a piece of paper from the academy which qualified one fit for a potential career in full time pretending, and the Poetry component of which related to 20C American poetry — i can but conjure from the swirl within my mind, only provisional scenarios based on what text has crossed before the eye.

When i was studying the lineage of Free Verse and the pre-cursing agents relating to the birth of Modernism, Poe occupied a unique position. Whilst not rated in his home land, the French went a big wow on him, and i always wondered how much of this will be down the talent of his translator/s?

But Poe only had the Poetic everyone else did (and still, do), ultimately 6C BC Greece as the time-frozen window into talking of Poetry.

Watching the spats from this end, mainly through Silliman, who has just returned from his first reading-trip to England and is waxing lyrical about the po-mo carzees in Bury, Lancashire who are working *at the height of their powers* at the pulpit – i have to admit i find it all very comical, but far less limp than the British poetry scene in general.

You people don’t mind having a good row, and there is a robustness and able-bodied quality to the chat, the back and forth. Also, the po-mo in America is in a far healthier state because of the huge scale of the university led practitioners working in this form.

In Britain, since what came to be called, the British Poetry Revival, which had its high point when Eric Mottram wrestled control of the Poetry Society’s rag, Poetry Review, for a few years in the mid-seventies, in what the top bore at the British Arts Council called “a treacherous assualt on British poetry” and let the mad-heads affiliated to Bob Cobbing’s Writer’s Workshop, use the photocopier and stationary to disseminate their DIY ethos – the Linquistically Innovative school have been a slightly embittered minority bemoaning the fix that favours oxbridge drips being feted at 21 as the new Messiahs, and who inevitably go off the boil by middle age.

~

As regards the bardic tradition, it is literally only now, in the last few years with the rise of the world wide web, that all the information can be pulled up and re-configured back into a semblance of something half-understandable.

When i started with poet Robert Sheppard, who is the Writing Professor at Ormskirk’s Edge Hill University in my home town, i only had instinct to go on. There is no central repository of material relating to the 12 year bardic course, just interested individuals scattered throughout the world, in all sorts of guises, at a host of various places, like pagan sites, wicca sites, the odd poet and Celtic scholars at universities – publishing the relevant material.

I started blind, knowing nothing much of Irish history and just types Irish History into google and worked from there. The first thing to hit you, is how much of it there is and how it is more a less a living continuum from the earliest Irish Mythology, though compared to Grece it is very compact, and it has a unity lacking in Greece, because it is an island that ran uninterrupted by the calamity of European affairs, until four hundred years ago, so the culture developed without much linguistic intrusion, and those invaders who did come, up till the 16C, more or less assimilated into the culture (with a bit of argy bargy here and there. The Vikings and so forth)

At first, taking on the myth of Ireland, is like banging one’s head against a seive, and i suppose in truth, you would need some pretty strong inner adddiction to keep it up, because it is not the type of system which reveals its workings after even three and four years full time study and practice. Not having Irish, everything being read through translation, the problem at first are the names of the various protaganists, Ogma the Celtic god of Poetry and who the earliest pre-cursor proto-script writing, ogham, is named after, Cuchulainn the Ulster Appollo, Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) the poet-warrior whose tale of poetic attainment in the Boyhood Deeds strand of the tale of his life, encapsualte the essence of how the Irish bardic tradition views the acquiring of mystical wisdom.

Basically there are 350 tales a bard had to learn, 250 primary and 100 secondary (secondary ones were never written down and passed on orally between ollamh and student, only after year seven) and of which just over 200 have survived in print.

In Irish myth, there are four and five mythological peoples who came to the island, prior to the fifth or sixth group, the Milesians, who the annals state came around 1500 BC, and from whom modern Irish people claim descent.

There are four strands to the myth, the Mythological Cycle (as you can read at the link) detailing seudohistorical chronicles of the history of the island and stories of the four and five races of gods and their battles and doings with each other.

The Ulster Cycle, which details the goings on of the Ulster heroes headed by Cuchulain and their main foe the Connacht crew heads by Maeve of Connacht.

The Fenian Cycle or Fiannaidheacht (modern Irish: Fiannaíocht), which details the life of Finn McCool and his antics.

The Historical Cycle or Cycle of Kings, listing the order of all the supernaturally royal personages of note who rules as kings and queens who appear in the other three cycles.

9– Fir Bolg High Kings – which Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating: b. 1569 – d. 1664) has running

1514- 1477 BC,

and the Annals of the Four Masters (1616 AD) put as in power from

1934-1897 BC.

~

7 Tuatha Dé Danann High Kings

Geoffry K has being in power from 1477-1287 BC

The Four Masters 1897-1700 BC

~

105 Milesian High Kings

Geoffrey K – 1287 BC – AD

Four Masters – 1700 BC – 76 AD

~

22 Goidelic High Kings (this is when fictiona nd fact begin to merge)

Geoffrey K – 80 – 448 AD

Four Masters – 76 – 458 AD

~

35 Semi-Historical High Kings (real figures, unsure of thier high king status)

459 – 841 AD

~

20 Historical High Kings

846 – 1318

~

So, a bard had to learn this two hundred list and know all the lineages, as part fo their duties, the primary one being to praise their patron and satirise those who offended them.

This is just a tiny amount of the work involved, and as you see if you go the links, only now possible, to find this info and really, online Poetry which is exciting and all that because the new kids on the block, fresh to Poetry, have far more of a choice who to listen to now, in relation to the reality of all this guff about what Poetry is and aint.

By showing the reality of the bardic corpus, they can be led to real Poetry and not have to listen to actoary bores droning on about their interpretation of what Homer was actually like.

Logan was doing it again in an article i chanced on at Ron’s gaffe, and after 30 years life work, asking himself, what’s the use of poetry critics, and waffling bollix about the Greeks. The poor bore. A babe in arms gurgling fantastic sneery opinion, a very serious and redundant waffler, tell him, please.

thank you very much.
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.
Irish

.
My family’s been gone from Ireland
for at least two hundred years.
Many generations in America,
many pioneers. Many who worked hard
for every buck. But the only Irish left
in me is my name and a poem,
a fear of ghosts
and some damned sorry luck.

.
Copyright 2008 – SOFTWOOD-Seventy-eight Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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Allow me to apologize, as requested. No offense was intended because I share, and so understand, your pride in being Irish (a couple of hundred years notwithstanding). Just having a larf, as they say.

I guess I have two apologies, in fact, because I’m also sorry that you don’t have a sense of humor. I see no reason to call me names just because I was teasing you a little. You sound a mite puffed-up to me. I find it difficult to take very seriously those who take themselves so seriously.

And please don’t ever call me a racist again. I don’t know about England, but that sort of thing is taken very seriously over here. Talk about libel!

I am not very fond of humanity, I admit, but I do not differentiate between ethnic groups, nationality or race. I hate all of you human bastards.

Sincerely,
Great Big Fat Fucker from Offaly
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You and I are alike because we know of treasures which the world does not understand. I know how Poe is misunderstood, you, the 1200 years of written Irish, bardic tradition.

To keep myself sane I’m learning how a lot of things are not understood–John Crowe Ransom and the Modernist scam, ‘man, you should have seen them kicking Edna Millay,’ etc which relate to how Poe is misunderstood and learning is a joy and I’m still learning. But you have a harder task, I think, because Poe is right there–even though ‘they’ don’t see him–all you have to do is buy his books or go to his Baltimore Society website and it’s all there.

But this bardic tradition of yours. Where is it? What is it? How does it tie in? What of Cathay?

And then you always have scholars like Pound who will throw this in your face:

“certain professors who have invested all their intellectual capital i.e., spent a lot of time on some perfectly dead period, don’t like to admit they’ve been sold, and they haven’t the courage to cut a loss” –Pound, “How To Read”

By the way this is the anniversary of the Panic of 1837. see Jill Lepore’s damning of Poe in the New Yorker.

Thomas
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Yeah, all of the above is bang on the nail.

All we can do, is our own thing, and plough our own path and track along within alone to the centre of ourself, i suppose.

I try to stay out of spats, because who really cares about it all, all this Poe this, Pound that. Pound was mentally ill and his hubris and begrudgery got the better of him after he had discovered that Yeats was the Irish poet who knew his trade and that the magic he went to him for, was not gonna transfer on the strenght of being his pal.

Pound is great, or shite, i am easy on it, will agree with both positions equally because i am not that passionate about him. He was a very important force, but his work is too dense for most, and i think this is shifted him into the ranty life, that his first book was the one most remember him for, apart from the cantos composed in a cage.

Depending on the bore, and whim really, i can gas on and say, yeah Pound is the most important poet of blah blah blah and have a giggle making the words appear how i want. I can say, nah, Pound’s a phoney, utter tripe, no talent, merely the manifestation of mental illness, his work has one or two interesting specimens, but he is overated because his poetry being mediocre overall, this allows the mediocre poets to rant on about him being God.

Anyone who is after giving it the holy roller in po-faced pose, unless they are talking of a real tradition which can be proven, like the bardic one, i take what they say with a pinch of salt, because if they know that much, how come they know zip about the 1200 years in print tradition of Ireland?

Because most are talking through their hole, i suspect.
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You sound very very (un)happy my love, and have took it on yourself to..erm, offer encouragement by attempting to tell me who i am. Thank you very much, can i pay you for this kindness, Sir Fitzo?

i was born in England, you are right, to two Irish parents (one Dublin another Achill), three grandparents from west Mayo and one from Macroom, which makes me what i am and what we term in front of the Irish proper, a plastic paddy, and you are right, i am English born, whose spirit is 100% Irish, all those who made me.

But more than this, i am a human being first and anything else, second. Did you know Fitzgerald, tyhat there is such a thing as dual citizenship. Mine is Irish, not English.

Your blog-blurb states your identity as misanthropic (taoist poet), which explains the English-racist tenor in your woefully (in)offensive post.

As a self-declared misanthrope, who is zip to me and i you, are hardly the most suitable to define my identity, now are you lover?

you say i lied and yet bring no proof.

Please do, because at the moment, you’re a misanthropic racist ranter in the eyes of the silent Reader here, not me.

Born eighty miles from Dublin, 12 miles North of the one and only city in England with a ward (Liverpool Scotland road) to elect an Irish Parliamentary Party MP to the English Commons: Athlone journalist, T.P. O’Connor – on the ticket of Home Rule in the 1918 election.

He was returned as an independant Irish Nationalist MP in 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections and became the longest serving MP by the year of his death in 1929, “Father of the House of Commons”, with 49 years 215 days in, batting for the Irish.

There is a bust of him on Fleet Street London, with the words:

“His pen could lay bare the bones of a book or the soul of a statesman in a few vivid lines.”

~

What could be a very very very serious libel on me as a bore who loves to gas bardic lore, if the text you refer to has been lied about on your part – has not been produced.

Did i say i was born in Ireland, please Fitzgerald?

If so, please link me to it or produce it here, and if not, apologise immediately please, and say you are very very sorry for impugning me on the basis of what i have no control over. Where i am born, and also, praise my writing please.

What i do control, is my tongue, and you are still learning, because if you knew anything of what i do, you would say please and thank you, not insult a person, a fellow poetical mind in the body of a man who just happened to enter this world in Ormskirk, Lancashire, and who you are jealous of, it looks to me.

Apologise, and i will forget the matter.

“Brevity is the soul of wit” – is it really, oh, right.

Wm. Shkpr. whose that, warm shack prince?

~

Oh, and Fitzgerald, you American misanthrope, i once thought of you as being humanly warm towards me, but you have a real beef with me as an english born Irish person. Why?

You laughably protest, mightily – presenting me with all the lines of your very limted knowledge on the Kildare Irish pedigree, and not Irish, born in the United States, 300 miles distant, you say (or rather shout YOU, coz you’re really passionate on the subject of moi) that i am not Irish, i have delusions to the contrary and on the basis of being born in (ugh…spit) England, say “YOU ARE ENGLISH!” – ranted to me by you who knows diddly squat about one, Gary love.

You then say, in a short one line, offering me the wisdom of your misanthropic mind:

Yar what ch’are, Des. learn to live with it.

GBF

great big fat fucker from Offaly? what is termed here, BIFFO?

Get over it Fitzgerald. The Earls of Kildare were the ones implimenting English policies, but the 15th Earl of Desmond you refer to, was spotted at dusk and slain at dawn in Galnagenty, the 11′th November 1583 by Daniel O’Kelly – a kern for the Clan Moriarty – who rushed a cabin where the forebear Earl’s party lay. All escaped but an old man, a woman, and boy.

O’Kelly aimed a sword blow and half severed an arm on the old man, who cried: “I am the Earl of Desmond: spare my life”.

O’Kelly cut off his head and sent a skull of my Fitzgerald blood (for 1000 pieces of silver) to London where it got spiked on the bridge.

This “I” demands an apology from you, and the return of my lands and title with immediate effect or I’ll keep you a bondsman in poverty till next years holiday in Scarborough at Summer time – with critical death the distinct possibility, should you jump from a cliff where I unlock.
an intricate song of the seagull whose wings ring in simple melody, a true, kind and continually lilting lullaby lifting the dream of love.
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I like the Write & Recite pub game. It reminds me of Shakespeare.

You’ve got a broad cross-section audience including rowdies, you’ve got a deadline, and your audience gives you five things they want:

1. Give us a story of an English ruler
2. Don’t offend the current ruler
3. Entertain the rowdies
4. Elevate the language
5. Show sympathy for more than one point of view.

It doesn’t really matter what the five things are, so long as they are challenging and they are things the audience gives you.

The reason ‘writing to order’ and ‘writing to a deadline’ and ‘writing for a complex challenge’ work is that Leisure isn’t good for poetry, nor is monolithic opinion, nor is disdain for the rowdies.

As for Dublin’s fuck v. no-fuck, my advice is fuck all schools. Don’t trust divisions of any kind in Letters; movements, trends, schools, scholarly or street, view them all with suspicion; welcome rather than reject; reject the schisms & the one-sided fanatacisms; assimilation is the only technique, with the well-ordered nor the random rejected, so that every school rejects you but the mass who is going about its business applauds.

I have no faith in Allen Ginsberg or the Beats. Poetry isn’t going to make men free or give women rights, or any of those things. Edna Millay did more for women simply by writing as well as she did, than have all feminist poetries combined.

Don’t stumble into poetry. Make a list of what you want to do.

Poetry is not prose reduced, or William Shakespeare chopped into William Carlos Williams; poetry is prose expanded, prose made luxurious (and luxury does not mean difficulty).

I saw some humorous greeting cards today geared towards middle-aged middle brows: “Feng Shui is Chinese for ‘move your husband’s crap into the garage’” and “Latte is French for ‘you paid too damn much for that cup of coffee’” and “Middle age is when your hair goes from grey to black” and “I try a lot of diets because I go hungry on just one.” The latter reminded me of the fad-hungry Ezra Pound and his numerous schools. My final rule is: More Poe, less Pound. What school did Poe belong to? None. Bingo!

Yours,

Thomas
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“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
Wm. Shkpr.

.
Oh, and Desmond, me Liverpool lad…I once accused you of being English and you protested mightily, presenting me with all the lines of your glorious Irish pedigree. But you lied to me.

I am not Irish…I was born in the United States.

And YOU are not Irish, either, despite your delusions to the contrary…you were born in (ugh…spit) England. YOU ARE ENGLISH!

Yar what ch’are, Des. learn to live with it.

GBF

P.S. Wasn’t it the Earls of Kildare (i.e., the Fitzgeralds) who actually removed the head from that 15th Earl Gerald of Desmond in Cork?

Erin go Bragh!

Limey!!!!!
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One in which we (as Robert Graves wrote in his first Oxford poetry lecture) may put up our:

“..brass plate, so to speak, without the tedious preliminaries of attending university, reading the required books and satisfying examiners…responsible to no General Council, and acknowledging no personal superior, can never be unfrocked, cashiered, disbarred, struck off the register, hammered on ‘Change or flogged round the fleet if s/he is judged guilty of unpoetic (writerly) conduct. The only limit legally set on his (and her) activities are the acts relating to libel, pornography, treason, and the endangerment of public order.”

~

The sense v scholarship binary, in essence is correct, but it is one of those things which, whilst encapsulating the essential divide between slammer and Princeton Poetry Professor, is condicive to causing division and carries a negative charge.

So, instead of there being just poetry, inclusive, everyone knowing what it is, we have the wine and cheese brigades and the spit and sawdust mobs, scholar v sense, in the respect that those starting with an open mic slammer ethos think:

Just do it. Write poetry and recite it at any chance. Sense.

The wine and cheese scholars however, start from the premise that Poetry is about the Word, Logo, in a Book, the bible, the Holy Word of God (themself speaking for a god within who, because they are so clever and Poetry’s a one person gender-neutral sport of impeccable rightness, fitting and befitting of the ancient gods who gifted us it – naturally, to speak of this very very serious and important topic, one must sip wine, intonate and enunciate with immense precision, from (prefferably) a pulpit (reading in church) as a poet-Priest, not as a drunken slammer lashing out the logos and giving it socks in a dingy basement boozer, where hecklers from the common mob with smart wise-cracks not showing due deference to the word of the Poetry god/s the scholars have as their hand to draw in a flock at the poker game of showing what God says through us to whoever’s listening.

I think that because, as Graves states, there is no across-the-board and shared agreement of the very definition of poet, poem and Poetry, thus the binary-trad SoQ and Real Poets of the avant po po-mo crazee white space merchants Ron da Silly mahn represents, in what is perfect poetic event. That Ron is the poet who fronts this end of what essentially is one whole spectrum, whilst his sworn enemies of promise, the Motions and Duffy’s of this village, front the other, Romantic hango’er the stars of yesteryear, trying to grab Homer for their own badge, being deeply intellectual and very sucessful poets selling more books to the philistines reared on A Team reality shows fronted by Simon and the gang, picking winners, setting the frame and all in all, as Dublin poet and playwright Fintan O’Higgins has it in a very witty article about the (then) contemporary poetry scene in the birth-place of Joyce, here in the (Shit Creek Review) Poetry in Dublin article, at one of the sexier online rags run by Australian poet Paul Stevens and with a contributing editor, the Gloucester poet Angela France, who was shortlisted for this year’s Strokestown competition. This is the Shit Creek Review Blog.

He articulates to the general reader in razor sharp wit, the very binary Brady describes, using the local of Dublin, to speak of the underlying universal theme it mirrors.

“There is no shortage of button-holers in pubs only too eager to spew their creations at you, and you will have no difficulty finding a room in a library where a polite gathering of poetry-lovers spend a pleasant hour trying not to cough too audibly on the dust that whispers from the reader’s mouth. (The distinction between the types of poetry available is one of atmosphere rather than quality; in both camps the overall experience is like trying to find a few plump raisins in a bowl of rabbit-droppings, but this is normal, I think.) It is rare, however, to find a forum where the general merriment of the drunken idiots meets the intellectual rigour of the dried-up academics; but it is not impossible.”

The thing is, both sides have the raisons and rabbit droppings in equal measure, and what poetry exists in either camp, does so without the scaffold of any theory, coming from either Pound or Homer, as it just is. This is the most important thing.

Both sides, not hanging round with each other, relying only on gossip, rumour and whatnot to demonise one another with, hence the artificial binaries, SoQ v linguistically innovative crazee bald heads.

Amiri Baraka, in an interview i first read five years ago, in Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka at Black Collegian.com, sums up the basic three-point manifesto levels of his own Poetic, which most other poets also have in the sense, Pounds ABC, Heaney’s Wordsworth owl-calling in the woods metaphor, also exactly the same as Baraka, expressed differently, but the poetic intelligence, the real load, the genuine Poet, plain for all to hear and know.

Now, i know Baraka is not everyone’s fave Poet, but the man, rightly or wrongly (rightly really), is not only one of the last people standing of what went on in the Village with Al and Ginsey, Jack and the chaps, but also in a position not unlike Yeats, in the respect that he was the spokespoet of his community in a time when they were attaining an escape from servitude dressed up as some natural moral civilised order *whitey* had conned himself into accepting as reasonable, Slavery, coz, well, that’s what people can get like, innit?

See, there are levels. Can you understand the levels of what knowledge is? The first level of knowledge is perception. Perception is nothing but a sponge. Everything you are around, you pick it up. You might not even know it, but your mind is just picking up stuff like a blotter. The second level is rationalization, you actually name it. Oh, that was this. But the highest form of knowledge is use. For example, I can say I know about the piano. I know all kind of stuff about the piano, about music, but then they say: can you play? I say, oh, no I can’t play.

~

Poetry in its current understanding is not unlike the shadow in Plato’s cave, the reality of it 9as i understand it to be) is that because modern English (language) poetry started with on-the-make courtiers in Tudor England, writing for a King or Queen, starting from scratch, looking to 6C BC Greece as the ultimate poetic template (2000 years dead and 3000 miles distant) rather than going to Wales and better still Tudor-times Gaelic Ireland, learning the language and seeing how that (at that point) 1100 year in print tradition that linked to druidical practice – was rigged up; the clever courtiers wanting only to serve King and country (and makes lots of lovely lolly) decided – no.

No, that 1200 years-in-print tradition is all fake, not like the new one we are going to invent from scratch, out of 2000 year old info coming into this new and exciting print-world (the equivalent of the online paradigm in Tudor times) in a way which gives us the clearest picture yet of Homer and Aristotle and Socrates and Plato.

And as Baraka continues

“You can conceive all kinds of things and give them names, but of that myriad of perceptions and rationales, how much of it can you use? A lot of stuff you do that is reaching out is really you trying to clarify stuff for yourself.
essentially both sides are right and wrong”

~

Genie out the bottle, but only a mirror of what’s already happened, after all, modern English poetry’s only a babe in arms, 500 years, not even half way of a tradition all but forgotten.

The music of what happens, poetry, life, Art.
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Now if you can trace your lineage to Taliesin I’ll surely stop and listen.

Terreson
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I am glad I have your love, and with yours, I hope to learn all you care to share on the Bardic tradition.

Because I love you, I shall get right down to it.

At random, then:

There is a certain ‘once the genie is out of the bottle…’ about all this. Once guerilla warfare became the norm, marching in straight lines as the Red Coats had done just would not do. The ancient tongues abound in spondees; you can’t be Horace in English even if you study Horace for a thousand years.

It finally comes down to common sense v. scholarship.

Or, if you wish, the democratic impulse, the people seeking happiness v. tyranny, the seeking of power that would selfishly (or for mere whim) control people for its own ends.

Art and religion, just like inventions of science, can make people happy, or ruin them. The religion that provides faith can be the religion that starts wars. We all know how scientific invention can help or harm. Art, likewise, is two-edged. Art from and for the people is joyous; art tainted with scholarship becomes divisive, tyrannous and poisonous.

The scholar Ezra Pound–and beyond all else, this is what he supposed himself to be–took poetry away from the people and made it institutional; he took it from common sense and joy and handed it over, bound and gagged, to the high priests of tyranny.

To read Pound’s 1929 essay, ‘How To Read’ is like breathing the stuff of a vaccum cleaner spewing in reverse.

Can anyone peruse this essay and take it even slightly seriously?

Today, we live in the ruins of Pound.

The first order of business, as I see it, is to go back (not a terribly great distance) and clean up his mess.

Thomas
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I was born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, 12 miles from the centre of Liverpool, a mile from the border with Merseyside.

Both my parents are Irish, Jeremiah Desmond and Pauline Swords. My father lived in England till five, then Scotland till ten, then Mayo till 14 then Macroom till 19 then Liverpool where he met my mum.

My father’s father Cornelius Desmond was from Macroom in Cork, and his mother Winfired Masterson, was from Achill island in far West Mayo.

Mu mother’s from Dublin and moved to Liverpool at 13. Both her parents, John Swords and Sarah English, were from Bohola in far West Mayo (population 250).

Bohola was were Olympian Martin Sheridan was born (1881-1918). Sheridan won 9 Olympic medals (5 gold, 3 silver and 1 bronze) for his adopted country, the USA, in discus-throwing, high and long jumps, shot-putt and pole-vaulting at St. Louis (1904), Athens (1906) and London (1908). (These figures include 2 gold and 3 silver medals won in Athens which was not regarded as an “official” Olympics.)

Bohola is known for turning out successful business people and the place the O’Dwyers emigrated to New York from. New York City Mayor (1946-50) William (1890-1964), who was later President Truman’s Ambassador to Mexico.

Paul O’Dwyer (born Bohola 1907 – d. Goshen, New York 1998), American lawyer, liberal Democratic politician, and champion of the underdog with an international reputation for civil liberties, served as President of New York City Council.

~

I dunno if “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor was actually royal in the European sense, as he claimed lineage to William Brewster, the Mayflower Pilgrim preacher and colonist leader who was the son of the estte baliff of Scrooby Manor in North Nottinghamshire, and a possession of the Archbishop of York.

But in the American sense, he’s as royal as it gets. You being realted to a founding Pilgrim, makes you Your Highness in my book.

And no, i do not think you less of a poet because of the words etymology in English. This would be an outrageous claim to make. My own area of research is just one of those anomolies.

It is only now, with the world wide web, that one can relatively easily, locate information which prior to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau inventing it out of thin air 20 years ago, meant fidning out the information pertaining to ancient poetic cultures such as Ireland’s, was only for the very dedicated or the very rich. All the

The bardic tradition ran for 1200 years in print in Ireland and Scotland and a bit less than that in Wales. There was a set and definite course of study one could undertake, which rant for 12 years and went from grade one focloc (sapling, poet-beginner) to grade seven ollamh (poetry professor) and so this is a very relevant area for any poet to have a legitimate curiosity and interest in.

However, because it got more or less forgotten over the last few hundred years, for various political and cultural reasons related to English culture ruthlessly asserting itself over the native Gaelic ones in Britain, the truth of the bardic course has more or less been forgotten and now, no one is that interested.

My whole reasoning when i decided i wanted to specialise in poetry, shortly after converting to writing at 34 and falling into a Writing Studies and Drama degree at Edge Hill University in my home town of Ormskirk, Lancashire – was this.

I want to be a poet.

OK.

But the problem is, in the poetry world (more a village of comepting bores really) there is no agreement on what Poetry even is, and there being no formal qualification and agreement, how can i do it in such a way, as no one can poo poo my dream and say, you are not a *real* poet, type of carry on. People like WB Logan sneering and being a wise-mouth. How can i do it so even the top gobs have to bend before me, or at least treat me as an equal?

Well, i thought, what is the one tradition which was more or less real Poetry?

Bardic.

But no one knows about that.

And this was the craic Brady. Imagine, imagine i thought, having the rest of my life ahead of me, i have just started writing at 34, fell into it by accident, last roll of the dice for a man for whom nothing had worked out, never became the success i always wanted, dreamt of, Steven Spielberg never came to the ice cream parlour, building sites and burger vans i worked to spot my talent and whisk me off to La La land – but i am so thankful i am finally falling into what at that point felt, this is mean to be – and imagine, i thought, learning what the real bards did?

No-one, no smart wise ass is gonna be able to freeze you out at the reading, say *oh yes but of course, I’m po-mo and if you look as this that and a million and one ifs buts and maybes i am making up, then of course darling, poetry is whatever erm, sorry whatsisname, Dickhead? no, no, he’s just a faux poet, not like us, what, what owl bean?

So Thomas my mate, that was the gig.

Three years studying under Robert Sheppard, heir to Britains only real Concrete poet, Bob Cobbing, the official course, beginning with Pound’s ABC and ending with Bernsteins, I Don’t Take Voice Mail, and all the while, outside the course, 40% of my learning running along the ancient gear.

But it’s a long hard road and traditionally, it was only in the eighth year, when you hit grade six Anruth (great stream) one could go public. It takes a long time to make sense of the material. 350 stories in the corpus, 250 primary, 100 secondary, only 200 primary left. All sorts of smoke and mirror, double and triple names of the same characters and the full coprpus of Irish myth to get familiar with.

And all leading to imbas forosnai, the extemporised compositional method whereby the act of writing is like the final scene in Columbo, as we write we work out the score and knowledge is pulled out from within, the study, all the stuff that’s been going in, starts to join up and return outward on the page.

A long road Your Highness and lots to speak of.
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The critic is the murderer?

That’s more hyperbolic and self-pitying still.

This is the Romantic myth that a criticism killed Keats. Keats’ poetic reputation was in fact helped by some very real and politically motivated attacks.

You see, I think you’re missing the point when you say that opinions of poetry are “subjective.” Sure, every point of view is “subjective.”

One person’s opinion of a poem will always be “subjective.” But this fact, which I grant, does not alter the fact of scientific and political progress. It does not alter the fact that new knowledge is produced by a gradual accumulation and working out of subjective experiences. Even if we grant that all opinions of poems are “subjective,” this does not alter the fact that some “subjective” opinions are stronger than others, and that certain opinions prevail (beyond our own subjective opinions) to create that knowledge which shapes the accumulation of new knowledge in the future. The good critics are aware of this. Between subjective opinion and objective truth is a ladder–surely you would not keep poets at the bottom of the ladder?

Look at it this way, Gary: when you argue (or write poetry) you do not argue your point BECAUSE it is your subjective opinion, but for OTHER reasons, reasons which you feel support your point. Subjectivity is only the container. You lean too much on it.

Thomas
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Now you’re making sense!

“Kilcolman castle was the Earl of Desmond’s prior to this dynasty ending, and Spenser got it in the immediate aftermath of the Desmond Rebellions which ended with earl Gerald’s head and body parting ways.”

You’re an Irish lad, then?

Funny, my dad, born in Richmond, VA of English ancestry, was telling me a story just today about his adult ed poetry teacher who is Irish Catholic. She didn’t like that my father praised the Rupert Brooke “forever England” poem. “It’s not a pro-war poem!” my father insisted to the class. Oh those English are so clever.

I had an older gentleman in a class I taught on Poe once who loved everything Irish; he used to say things like, “Did you know the Beatles were Irish?” He said America was Ireland’s revenge against England.

I’m intrigued by your ancestry; all I’ve got is a connection to Zachary Taylor (d. 1850) who scholars dug up suspecting he was poisoned; Poe (d. 1849) has been examined for the same. America was another name for an old fight, especially the period leading up to the Civil War, when Britain and France were wary of the world’s upstart. For a long time there was a feeling among many that the U.S. was not going to make it, that she would go back to Britain as a colony.

It wasn’t all that long ago when America was David to Britain’s Goliath.

Am I “royal” because I’m related to Zachary Taylor?

Am I less of a “poet” because of “poet’s” etymology in English.

English has many languages as its source.

What sort of political animal makes claims for a “poetic class?” A fascist? A royal? A communist?

I don’t like the old just because it’s old. The past exists now.

Thomas
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What i’m on is nought but the eighth year of studying bardic law and practice, practice, practice, fail, fail better and eventually end up on the podium talking sense because one took the very long route in which prize, winner, media hype and what is in essence, irrelevance – played no part in the decision one took to become a bore who could bore and ignore the abundence of goading we inevitably recieve when taking up the craft of Poetry.

The very word itself, Poetry, in English is very simple to understand and handle. It roots etymologically to the Greek word for making.

However, in other poetry traditions and cultures, the Irish culture for example poetry in Gaelic is dan, which is a bit trickier.

The Gaelic word for Poetry is dán, which ultimately routes to the Tuatha Dé Dannan, which translates to “the people of the goddess Danu.”

Danu being a pan European river goddess, the Danube, the Don (etc) and many more route to. Ultimately routing to the primordial Hindu water goddess Dānu, of the Rigveda texts (compund word meaning praise-verse knowledge) the Vedic Sanskrit hymns and one of the four canonical texts of the Vedas, some of its verses still recited at spiritual events and among the worlds oldest Religious texts in continued use, since time immemorial, chaunted at the waters edge.

The English word poem however, is far less challenging intellectually, to situate with confidence and clarity, as its etymology is simple. As stated it is from a Greek word, poiēma, from poiein – to create

The definition of dán however, is a tad more complicated. complex and dare one say it, sophisticated than your common class no nonsense poem, that does exactly what it says on the tin.

Because Gaelic poetry began around the time or shortly before Old English, and has a proto cross-over language of runic-like ogham that was in use by the poetic class in a then druidic Ireland, during the pre-to-literate penumbra of the 3 – 5C when the switch from oral to literate culture was occuring.

Indeed, there are ancient texts on the nuts and bolts of poetry, only recently translated which are immensley significant and vastly important, and whose existence (though you may find it impossible to believe) not even seriously significant senior (and junior) poets composing today at the top prophetic torque major poets are traditionally associated with – are actually aware of. Gasp ! shock ! wow !!

Anyway, dán means a bit more than poetry as it means in English, as this definition shows:

“..dán – poetry, gift-talent-vocation, fate-destiny (“a man can’t drown whose dán’s to be hanged”)”

So a poem in this tradition, is also, a lifetime from first to final breath. The poem of our life.

Anyway, gassing over at a senior colleagues online lounge where the sole purpose is attempting eloquent expression, to speak your soul so to speak, as in be yourself, where there is little in the way of artist ego-clashes because the language the laureate there makes, stands on its own two feet and unlike most of his peers, he has carved out a spot online as the most senior (what a young buck called Tom Chivers terms) digital native.

Most 60 year old poets are not keen to spam away online, but this chap is and I go there to work at being myself, digging all the time in search of reality, rock bottom ID, who i am. And i discovered last week, that i am actually a royal person myself (yeah i know, sounds mad, but it’s true) due to my father’s family who were at one point four hundred years ago, the most powerful royal family in Ireland, before the line ending with the removing of the 15′th Earl Gerald Desmond’s head from his body and which ended up spiked on Tower Bridge.

Now you may think it’s a fairy story, but it actually isn’t, it is all there in black and white, written out and clear proof that I am as blue blooded as Hal and Liam.
Even better, Edmund Spenser ended up in Kilcolman castle, where he wrote the Faerie Queene, after his Present View prose trieste which argued for the “pacification” of Ireland by a scorched earth policy, to remove Irish culture and get them all being English.

Kilcolman castle was the Earl of Desmond’s prior to this dynasty ending, and Spenser got it in the immediate aftermath of the Desmond Rebellions which ended with earl Gerald’s head and body parting ways.

So my poem, dán, fate etc, means I am the first royal poet to know it, since, ooh, i dunno, Dame Mandy? Which is nie to know, that the dream of poetry can come true, if we beleive our own song, listen to our own bird and chirp, chirp, dig and flit, boil and druidical knowledge, imbas foronsai, ask WB Logan – yo, or Boberto P, or anyone yiz wunt, how comes they dunno ’bout what one does here in Kilmainham, a year eight cli or anruth, hey, hey. Tell me that one Brady me arl mucker?
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Thomas:

I’m sober now.

I think you’ve misread my poem. (Hope you’re not a critic.)

The operative (no pun intended) line in my poem is “Later that night, after his murder,”. The coroner, and his subsequent dissection, are incidental, mere aftermath. The critic is not the coroner…he’s the killer. My point is that a bad review can deep-six a career…and a life. With so many books, why bother with one somebody has already told you was terrible? But I contend that any opinion of poetry is subjective. What one hates another may love. However, one bad review may deny all those others who might have loved it the opportunity to find out. Call it contemporary laziness. Who has time? We seek recommendations.

Franz Wright’s famous response to Mr. Logan probably saved his career, even boosted it. He did not lie down and just die. This is because poets are always smarter than critics. If not, well, then they’d be critics, wouldn’t they?

GBF
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>Where does poetry stop and sociology begin (or vice versa)? With the figure on its cover of two silhouettes forming a vase (or vice versa), the anthology titled American Hybrid has appeared.
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Pinsky at his blog, is very particular about what choice of comment to publish, immensley so, hugely. Yes, Robert is a very fine senior Poet making an amazing amount of choices, from across the spectum as a professional verse-maker wroughting not only ditties which penetrate to the heart of Art’s whole project of history and Civilisation and generally reflecting the cosmic mind behind the hand behind the author writing it all, who some call God, and others the unconscious order of unknowable tune, for example — but also Pinksy makes hugely significant choices as a human being, deciding what comment best serves the Art of it all in his head.

Indeed, of the blogposts that i read, i only read one, a short line more or less saying the author of it was in love with everything and agreed with all being propounded.

Commentators though, come and go, what we need to specualte and situate as professional bores who actually work as that, talking sense based on scholarly rigour and a sense of truthfulness which bestow gravity and the authentic load of the real live Poet.

Boberto in this capacity, as a bore of immensly significant consequence in this, the however many hundred thousandth year of human sentience – as a leader, a speaker for us, and for all who came before us, what the Australian poet and light entertainment genius Clive James would feel comfortyable reffering to in his own Australian-English vernacular, as the rellies, which means Relative.

So we must bear this in mind when we chat our opinions at the rarest form of gas, under the guise and label of Criticism, because if we don’t, what happens is,one’s poetic probity can be called to answer charges of derilicting the duty of those in our guild tasked with talking at length in commentaries which an editor would have no problem defending as a choice for publication, because of, not only the gravity and logic in the writing itself as a beyond po-mo artefact of post post-modernist text in which spaces are investigated at quantumn level – but also because of the reputatation of the Poet.

Bob on and being plumb, divinging within and finding the real you, is a game of blowing halloo to yourself aurally and putting effort in by actually sitting down on what is known in Liverpool and Dublin as, one’s ass, or arse and actually doing a bit of jolly hard pretend, whilst also tap, tapping the keypad and dancing along to tease out the thought of you who is you and not, Bob say, or Jane Hirshfield, who is also in the game of having a reputation.

Same as Boberto and WB Logan, in the sense that she is a Poet who knows it and others too, know of all three, this triumvirate of poets, which is known technically, as a threesome.

Approachiong each topic with equal rigour and a thoroughness which mark one out as a show off unafraid to do exactly what’s expected – we pretend to care and know everything in the world ever, that we are really, really clever and warm and nice and lovely, lovely civilised people only after world peace – by harnessing and engineering into our work, the sincerity of spirit we all have as sentient luvvies, be we a piece of curtain in a disused Woolworth supplier factory never to see the light of day hung above a lintel of the fenêtre, (which is the French word for window, actually) or a very well liked poet who the readers trust because of their authenticity, like Bob.

Sloppy Bob

Poet In Residence
Of a phone booth

Just outside the window
Every other Sunday
In the summer months
Four till five

AM.

Block-bookings taken
up to about nine
Or sometimes ten
Depending on the weather.

You can also find me
Playing darts and pool
Daily, in the Blue Sphinx

Where they’ll put your car-
Keys behind the bar
If you’ve had too much to drink
Smoke
Sniff

Or if you’re having a bad trip
On a dodgy pill the chaps
From the project tower blocks
Have been knocking out.

I’m very reliable
When I’m not on drugs
High as a kite on crack or smack
Which if I’m honest at the minute’s erm..quite a bit.

I’ve got special OAP rates
Great discounts for schoolchildren
And I do private tuition
In the comfort of your own home.

I don’t smoke
Wash
Drive
Or perform live in situations
Which are non PC -

Tolerate discrimination against minorities
Majorities
Or, any section of society
Who feel threatened
By the pernicious influence
Of poets who are shit; like my ex,-mate

Peter. He’s got no grasp of meter,
His line breaks aren’t that great,
his rhyme schemes are very weak
And his central conceits, are crap.

We’ve not been speaking
Since he robbed my midweek spot
Down the job-club
After the co-ordinator of the poetry workshop
And me, had had a falling out
About, the best way to teach
The unemployed of West Drayton how to rhyme
Effectively
When they’re on an interview for a job

Bobbie laarrghhh.
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