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

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

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

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

“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. . .”

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