Yearly Archive for 2009

Carlo Izzo, in “The Poetry of W.H. Auden,” says that poets of a particular generation possess inevitable similarities. “It has always been like that: poets of a generation have a family air.”

Patrick Kavanagh was born three years before Auden, in 1904. Kavanagh can hardly be regarded as a bona fide member of the Auden Group, but he is certainly a satellite member of the modernising generation of English-language poets to which Auden belongs.

The ethos of The Bell editors, like Geoffrey Grigson at Faber in the UK, was to encourage work that reflected the true socio-economic picture of a resurgent Ireland: possibly “unpleasant; depressing; suggestive of a phase that other countries are sick of. There it is. We have to accept it.”

Continue reading ‘I’ll tell you the name of the greatest living poet’

Walking to work, forward, looking forward, never backward – I hear the sound of a girl approaching on a bicycle with poorly inflated tyres. It sounds like she is wearing black and has that nice light brown hair so common and yet so frequently dyed a more extraordinary shade. She passes and I realise I am right. She continues (apace). I never see her face.

At work, 8:15, an office, I call Marty.

“Could I start a religion?” I say.

“It’s too early,” he says, and hangs up. I would say Hello? and look at the telephone receiver, but I hear the tone. I do work; work so dull it is perfect. Perfect like a coma, but more useful. Daydreaming is infinitely better than dreaming. Dreams are the floor-sweepings of the brain.

Continue reading ‘Is this regression? Or, Break-up break-down break-dance breakfast: mental notes, Or, A lounge in space 193′

Artist’s note: This piece was completed using pen and ink. I did a rough story board first to get the positions of the panels right, then I sketched out the main piece in pencil and inked over it in pen. All the text was cut and pasted at the end. I found once I got to art college I stopped drawing, so this zine became a perfect way for me to start again. I’m very influenced by the DIY ethics of the underground music scene, as well as existentialist writers like Paul Auster and Robert M Pirsig.

Continue reading ‘Repeater’

Exit, the music festival in Serbia that began as a rebellion against the isolationism of the Milošević regime, is based in a Roman fortress in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, which still isn’t large enough to sustain an airport.

Belgrade is just an hour’s bus journey away, but to fly there is prohibitively expensive, so most western Europeans get a plane to Hungary or Croatia and train it the rest of the way.

Except for me. My journey was murkier, involved the city of Graz, a lost sixteen hours, then an abandoned train station in a provincial town in the dark, where I was unsure what country I was in.

I finally boarded a train with some fellow festival-goers. I got talking to a Slovenian from Ljubljana. “In the nightclubs now, there are the homosexuals. They come to me and say ‘You are nice. I like your bottom.’ But I am tolerant. I do not beat them. The girls do not like it if you beat.”

Continue reading ‘Beauty from disposable music’

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Perhaps it began with the trip to Kinsale in January of this year. I had been promising my friend Ulick I would visit him for several months. He was doing a course in permaculture at Kinsale College of Further Education. Permaculture is about practical sustainability, the idea of living a self-sufficient life. Every time I hear this word, self-sufficiency, I am drawn to the image of a dacha in the Russian taiga with the soil as black as crude oil and the crackling of a freshly shovelled wood-chip fire; images drawn from Tarkovsky’s films or perhaps, not so strangely, the paintings of Finnish mythology by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. A Finnish man once asked me about Irish nationalism and art; why, in the nineteenth century, architecture never played the same role here as in other emerging European nations. I suppose my answer was something about colonialism or religion, but I do not remember.

I did not decide to go to Kinsale until just before my journey. It was a week before university was to start. The weather was cold and grey but it was not raining. I got the train to Cork and slept. On arriving at Ceannt Station, I struggled onto the platform and from there to the bus depot. I was weighed down with my top-heavy rucksack. It was mostly full of new books I had received over Christmas.

It would be an hour before the bus to Kinsale was to leave and so, even with my cumbersome luggage, I went to Eason’s in search of poetry, my obsession at the time. I had spent the previous two months reading and writing poetry, rooting it out, looking for “nourishment” as I called it. In one working week in December, I had written four poems I was happy with – a record! Never before had I written with such vigour and, on this creative high, all the things I saw, heard and tasted, were printed in my memory as ideograms, waiting to be placed into poems.

My uncle Barney described great poems as being like sweets you could suck on forever. On Christmas Eve, we sat in O’Flaherty’s pub in Buncrana discussing poetry. The photo of the night, posted on the internet several weeks later, shows him and me sitting close together. My hair is greasy and plantlike: clumps of hair whisp in every direction. My right hand is holding a half-empty pint glass while I gesticulate with my left. Barney’s hands are on his lap, out of sight, and his dark-reddish hair is silvering over the ears.

“I can’t write poetry, Michael,” he said. “But I can appreciate it.” His Donegal accent has an American twang. He has lived in San Francisco since 1979. His favourite poet is Thomas Hardy, but he told me to read Gary Snyder.