Singer songwriter and fellow mutantspace member Francesca Baines sent this poem into me the other day so here it is for your pleasure:
Before My Heart Is A Crowded Street
My heart has not the politeness of pedestrian crossings.
Footfall and tyre grind chime together
With a thumped horn when they almost collide.
Steaming trucks, the bicycle couriers’ boxes
Are pedalling their criss-cross through lanes of bright traffic.
I will always break the lights ‘though amber flames are plenty,
‘Cause you and I like to walk in hand when alleyways are empty.
To the hush of paper bags and drain pipes dripping
We follow slipping rooftops to find each other’s lips. Kissing:
We call a star filled night to contend the city’s rights to the sky.
We call between the cracks for the scaffolds to crumble.
We call along the rust to coax the fire-escapes come fall away
In the dust, kick the bucket, do not retire beside the motorway.
Forget the tower blocks stooping on steel in their subsidence.
Do not relent to this buzz as the best version of silence.
I will always break the lights ‘though amber flames are plenty,
‘Cause you and I like to walk in hand when alleyways are empty.
Where park benches are drenched in dew and you are painted in my morning,
Before the day’s first train of thought departs, wheels yawning:
We are anti-architects before the sun’s first light
Touches brick and mortar, the blank civic disorder.
‘Three Men Talking About Things They Kinda Know About’ is a nonfiction spoken word show about the universal truths that fuck us all up and was written and is performed by the wonderful Kalle Ryan, Stephen James Smith and Colm Keegan. To put it another way; Three men, different histories, same shit.
This weekend the award nominated spoken word show – it won the Bewley’s Cafe Theatre ‘Little Gem’ Award at ABSOLUT Fringe 2011 – will be hosted in the intimate surroundings of The White Lady, as part of the Kinsale Arts Week Festival. The show revolves around three different stories by three different men connected by the same human experiences of love, loss and redemption. Through poetry delivered in their own inimitable styles all three men take you on a deeply personal interconnected journey exploring the universal truths that shape us all.
Some might say three men talking about their feelings is a big story in itself, but the fact that three of Ireland’s most well-known performance poets are joining forces for a one-off show together should make anyone with an interest in the spoken word take note. The show is directed by Sarah Brennan, who brings an experienced theatrical vision and adds a clear female perspective to these poetic male stories.
The three men are well known on the Dublin spoken word scene which has grown and developed spectacularly in the past few years and it is no coincidence that Colm Keegan, Kalle Ryan and Stephen James Smith are at the heart of that movement. As organisers of Nighthawks, The Brownbread Mixtape and The Glor Sessions respectively, they form an informal collective of arts nights in the city that support and promote spoken word performance. They see this show as the next step in the evolution of that buzzing scene, as they join forces and create a new format and platform for their brand of performance poetry to be heard.
If you’re in and about Cork check out the show. It runs from 14th – 15th July @ 7pm. Tickets: €15
In this clip we have Allen Ginsberg reading ‘Wales Visitation’, a poem he wrote while tripping on acid on a visit to Tintern Abbey in Wales. It all happened in 1968 on a TV show called ‘Firing Line’ hosted by the famous presenter William F. Buckley (he had everybody on his show as I keep coming across old clips of him everywhere with everyone).
By all accounts it was an odd acounter with Buckley announcing;
“We’re here to talk about the avant-garde, I should like to begin by asking Mr. Ginsberg whether he considers that the hippies are an intimation of the new order.”
“Ah, why don’t I read a poem?” says Ginsberg
Buckley smiled uncomfortably and sat back as the Beat icon read the poem:
White fog lifting and falling on mountain-brow
Trees moving in rivers of wind
The clouds arise
as on a wave, gigantic eddy lifting mist
above teeming ferns exquisitely swayed
along a green crag
glimpsed thru mullioned glass in valley raine—
Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations,
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible
orchards of mind language manifest human,
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry
flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—
Remember 160 miles from London’s symmetrical thorned tower
and network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self
the lambs on the tree-nooked hillside this day bleating
heard in Blake’s old ear, and the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness
clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey—
Bard Nameless as the Vast, babble to Vastness!
All the Valley quivered, one extended motion, wind
undulating on mossy hills
a giant wash that sank white fog delicately down red runnels
on the mountainside
whose leaf-branch tendrils moved asway
in granitic undertow down—
and lifted the floating Nebulous upward, and lifted the arms of the trees
and lifted the grasses an instant in balance
and lifted the lambs to hold still
and lifted the green of the hill, in one solemn wave
A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the vale,
a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley,
the length of all England, valley upon valley under Heaven’s ocean
tonned with cloud-hang,
—Heaven balanced on a grassblade.
Roar of the mountain wind slow, sigh of the body,
One Being on the mountainside stirring gently
Exquisite scales trembling everywhere in balance,
one motion thru the cloudy sky-floor shifting on the million feet of daisies,
one Majesty the motion that stirred wet grass quivering
to the farthest tendril of white fog poured down
through shivering flowers on the mountain’s head—
No imperfection in the budded mountain,
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,
grass shimmers green
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
horses dance in the warm rain,
tree-lined canals network live farmland,
blueberries fringe stone walls on hawthorn’d hills,
pheasants croak on meadows haired with fern—
Out, out on the hillside, into the ocean sound, into delicate gusts of wet air,
Fall on the ground, O great Wetness, O Mother, No harm on your body!
Stare close, no imperfection in the grass,
each flower Buddha-eye, repeating the story,
myriad-formed—
Kneel before the foxglove raising green buds, mauve bells dropped
doubled down the stem trembling antennae,
and look in the eyes of the branded lambs that stare
breathing stockstill under dripping hawthorn—
I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside,
smelling the brown vagina-moist ground, harmless,
tasting the violet thistle-hair, sweetness—
One being so balanced, so vast, that its softest breath
moves every floweret in the stillness on the valley floor,
trembles lamb-hair hung gossamer rain-beaded in the grass,
lifts trees on their roots, birds in the great draught
hiding their strength in the rain, bearing same weight,
Groan thru breast and neck, a great Oh! to earth heart
Calling our Presence together
The great secret is no secret
Senses fit the winds,
Visible is visible,
rain-mist curtains wave through the bearded vale,
gray atoms wet the wind’s kabbala
Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain,
rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless,
breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside,
Heaven breath and my own symmetric
Airs wavering thru antlered green fern
drawn in my navel, same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffn,
Sounds of Aleph and Aum
through forests of gristle,
my skull and Lord Hereford’s Knob equal,
All Albion one.
What did I notice? Particulars! The
vision of the great One is myriad—
smoke curls upward from ashtray,
house fire burned low,
The night, still wet & moody black heaven
starless
upward in motion with wet wind.
William Butler Yeats – one of our great literary giants – birthday was yesterday and even though its a belated celebration I thought I’d post up a series of rare poetry recordings he made for BBC radio in the final years of his life.
As the great poet himself said:
I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm, and that may seem strange if you are not used to it. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his ‘Sigurd the Volsung’. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse!’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.
Yeats made 10 radio broadcasts between 1931 and 1937. In the first reading, from 1932, he recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which he once called “my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. ” He recites his verse in a sombre tone that contemporary poet Seamus Heaney once described as an “elevated chant”:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand by the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
The next poem was written in 1889. Yeats described it as thus:
A couple of miles from Innisfree, no, four or five miles from Innisfree, there’s a great rock called Dooney Rock where I had often picnicked when a child. And when in my 24th year I made up a poem about a merry fiddler I called him ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ in commemoration of that rock and all of those picnics.
The Fiddler of Dooney
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.
I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.
When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;
For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:
And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.
The third poem was recorded in March of 1934. It was first published in Yeats’s 1899 anthology, ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’, and tells the story of an old and weary peasant woman.
The Song of the Old Mother
I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their day goes over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress:
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.
The tape ends with a pair of recordings from 1937: another reading of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” followed by two stanzas from the 1931 poem ‘Coole and Ballylee’. The poem was inspired by the Galway estate of Lady Gregory, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre.
Poet, Allen Ginsberg would have been 86 on Sunday. Seeing as I missed his anniversary I thought I’d post up his most famous poem, ‘Howl’, as a little commemoration. ‘Howl’ is a 20th Century classic and sits besides Keouacs ‘On The Road and Burroughs ‘The Naked Lunch’ in the Beat literary canon.
The poem was first read in 1955 and famously became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957 in which it was argued that the poem contained ‘filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language. This version is from 1975.
These are the poems famous opening lines:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix…
Another excerpt from our skills exchange members at The Asylum. The work is part of a series of poetry, short stories and sketches taken from local Cork poets and writers. Hope you enjoy them
Nicaragua by Ed Cashman
Hack out the sprawling weeds with the
Blistering hoe,
Throw the tufts into the wheelbarrow.
There’s a magpie high in the trees
And Ronnie’s from Ballyporeen.
Grab the rusted bushman from the shed,
Watch the shiny blade deepen,
Sawdust billow from the wooden horse.
There’s a magpie high in the trees
And Ronnie’s from Ballyporeen.
Go down the acre to pick the spuds,
A bucket at your haunches,
Split at the rim.
There’s a magpie high in the trees
And Ronnie’s from Ballyporeen.
In the kitchen
Your Grandmother slips you a pound note,
Crumpled, sellotaped, green.
There’s a magpie high in the trees
And Ronnie’s from Ballyporeen.
On the Wireless
As you guzzle diluting orange
A voice says the world will end in 1984.
There’s a magpie high in the trees
And Ronnie’s from Ballyporeen.
Where the Mountains of Preudice Slope Down to the E.E.C by Denis Walsh
Oh Enda, this Frankfurt is a wonderful sight,
With the people all working by day and by night,
Their noses to the grindstone they don’t stop for long,
At drinking of pints and singing of song,
At least when I asked, that’s what they did say,
They don’t even stop for an aul cup of tay,
But for all their hard work, they’re wishing like me,
To be back in the day before the E.E.C.
Back in those days in this green land of ours,
We had plenty of relaxing and smelling the flowers,
The only deadlines we knew at that time,
In obituary columns enclosed in a rhyme,
But now we are all enslaved to the clock,
Living on tick and afraid of the the knock,
And mortgage and loan are on top of the list,
Shure we can’t sleep at night in case they are missed.
That’s how it is in this European hell,
We didn’t know when we had it so well,
If we could get back to these days of old,
We’d be far better off, the truth to be told,
Though insular, backward and thick as a sod,
We were humble and pliant and closer to God,
And all the fine notions gone up in smoke,
We were better off poor and forever broke.
This short story, ‘Murphy, The First Irish Cosmonaut’, is from our skills exchange writing series and brought to you by The Asylum. It’s very funny, well written and I hope to get the opportunity to publish more from the author, Patrick Randall. So here we go.
I was drinking Southern Comfort in the Mutton Lane when all of a sudden nothing happened. Outside the rain came down in sheets. “Sammy my boy”, I said, “Sammy my boy, let’s go down to the Hi-B and get smashed drunk.”
Sammy picked up his prune face off the bar and pulled me by the ear down Oliver Plunkett street singing Badín Fheilimí.
We jumped into a taxi and roared for the driver to take us to a brothel. The taxi turned out to be a squad car but the lads were on their way there anyway so they brought us. I noticed the sergeant fiddling with the meter adding two euros to make it iambic. The Guards were fierce polite and recommended us to a Lithuanian pimp who ran all the best girls in Cork.
I was slavering over the thought of catching some exotic venereal disease that I could boast about to the lads back at the city library. We had a v.d pool going and the first one to collect the set would win a weekend for two in Mitchelstown. I’d nothing but crabs to my name and was lagging far behind the other guys in the competition. A dose of syphilis would really get me into the running.
Unfortunately the Lithuanian only had clean girls. The pimp should have looked like a cross between Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver and John Turturro in Miller’s Crossing but the truth is he didn’t. He looked like a Kerry footballer in a nylon suit. He directed us into the Sunset Ridge Hotel and told us to go to room 5. Sammy was fidgeting at this stage worried about his capacity to perform. I told him that I could do his bird if he couldn’t make her. In the end it didn’t matter as the girls never came.
After we finished the girls got up and left, they didn’t even charge us.
“We’re whores” they said “we get paid for sex, not comedy.” Anyway outside it was lashing rain, or would have been had this really happened and it had been raining at the time. As it was we’ll just say it was raining. Pathetic phallacy they call it. That’s what the girls called it too. In the taxi on the way back, which turned out to be an early-morning milk float, Sammy did his party trick of stretching out the skin on his face as far as it would go until he looked exactly like that Le Brocquy painting.
“Put it away you dunce” I warned him. So he rolled it up and I took it home and later sold it to the Fenton Gallery, pocketing 100,000 smackers for it.
The next morning when I woke up, having only slept for 10 column inches, I was still bone-tired. I fixed myself some coffee and sat down on the toilet to gather my thoughts. I wasn’t real, I knew that much. No matter, I thought. No matter at all. The stool seemed real enough and pained me on the way out. I thought in Cartesian circles but it was getting me nowhere.
I needed some good old fashioned Celtic mysticism. From stool to spool I suppose. I will arise and go now, and go where drink is free, I decided. So I went to an art exhibition opening in the Triskel. Exhibition openings are funny in Ireland. They’re rahly rahly mahvellous. I drank sixteen bottles of wine. The artist had put together a series of drawings that represented the juxtaposition of urban and rural with Foucault’s theories on heterotopias. Anyway the exhibition was a great success. The artist promised she’d give me head in the toilet if I bought a picture. She sold out. I went home with a canvas that had one line in biro scrawled waywardly across it and a throbbing knob.
Artists have become a bit like weather girls these days. I took her number and promised to buy a picture from her every Wednesday evening after work when the wife was out. The money from the Fenton would get me through the miserable Cork winter and maybe even stretch as far as the Crawford College’s end of year summer show where it was always easy to pick up some young talent.
I yearned for the simple life away from all this parochial backwater shit-slinging. I wanted a quaint uncomplicated life in New York or Tokyo, where I could work in a call-centre or mug tourists by the train stations, at one with human nature. But something kept me here, some deep-seated lack of imagination and courage. I was an exile that hadn’t got around to leaving yet.
It’s the end of the week and time for another short story – a very short one – poem and drawing from our skills exchange members at The Asylum. Enjoy the work and we’ll be posting up more of their poetry, short stories and drawings next week
A Short Story In Which There Are Only Slightly More Words Than The Title by Dr. K. D. Bonekraft
Stop picking that scab or I’ll cut your damn ear off.
I’ll have two to pick then.
It’s no wonder you’re single. You want an omelette?
I’ve eaten.
What did you have?
Boiled egg. Christ. What’s that smell?
These eggs are rotten. The fridge is bare, how do you stay alive?
I’m eating a lot of of dried cranberries.
There’s none here.
That’s ‘cause I ate‘em all.
It happens.
I miss her, y’know.
I know.
Our skills exchange is delighted to have you back for our Asylum series of short stories. This week we have part two of a story we published last week called ‘Shamie part I’. Hope you enjoy it. We’ll have more from the Asylum later in the week.
He came too in a bed in hospital, a nurse in uniform next to him, a doctor above him, hands on his face straightening his broken nose (he had found that out later). He could hear Shamie’s voice somewhere exhorting someone to go easy and then he went out again. When he woke again, a policeman was sitting by his bed, cap on his lap. Another one was standing at the end of his bed.
They were released from the hospital in the morning into custody, charged with assault and released on condition they appear in court in a month. Shamie had rung Malcolm from the hospital, he had collected them and they were at work by eleven, sore but not sorry. That was the end of it, or so it seemed. A couple of nights later Shamie had left the pub after two pints. He arrived back at the squat early the next day. At work he explained what had happened. The nurse who had attended to him at the hospital had been Irish and he had chatted her up and now he was in love. This was it he reckoned; straightening out time now, horse; cut back on the drink and drugs and with the wild living. “Jesus,” he’d said to him, “you’re only twenty two, no point in settling down yet.” But he was adamant. He even thanked Malcolm for taking them to the pub in the first place. Malcolm had looked at him in bewilderment, and then mimed madness with his forefinger against his temple.
When he’d first met Rose (that was her name) he’d kind of understood why. She was a beautiful woman, small, black haired, green eyed with a gorgeous body and funny as well. From Galway she was and the way that she spoke was beautiful too. He could imagine how Shamie felt because he had fallen head over heels as soon as he’d seen her. Never told anyone of course, not for a long time. He’d told her with his eyes every time they met, couldn’t help himself. Every girl he met at the squat, the ones he picked up in the pub; when he made love to them he could close his eyes and imagine that it was Rose that he was doing it to.
15 years ago a series of Edgar Allen Poe stories were recorded by a number of famous people, musicians, actors and suchlike. The album, called ‘Closed On Account Of Rabies’ has gone out of circulation and is now a collecors item. However, you can get some of the tracks online and below I’ve posted in a series of audio works , stories and poems read by Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Jeff Buckley and Debbie Harry.
Our skills exchange once again welcomes you to The Asylum series of short stories, poetry and sketches. This week we have two poems by Ed Cashman and Alan Maguire and a sketch, above, by Julia Bolshakova. I hope you enjoy the work.
The Accomplice by Ed Cashman
A struck match is shaken out,
Tossed away
As headlights beam along
The bark of limbs
And up the sloping street.
There’s a presence in the alleyway,
Delve,
Draw,
Aim…
Like a poker stuck in the grate,
She’s clung to the worn seat.
Now blood of the quarry seeps into shadows
That fold away the steps of the nightlong fugitive.
This is like clambering through the puzzle
Of a monkey bridge
Or being stretched on a slung hammock.
A panorama in every corner,
A snow drifting luminescence…
Stepping out into a downpour,
It strikes her that stories are like a makeshift raft
But a raft nonetheless.
It gives our skills exchange great pleasure to welcome you to The Asylum series of short stories, poetry and sketches. From now on we’ll be posting Asylum submissions every week so I hope you enjoy the work. All is contributed from the endlessly creative people of Cork.
The people that set Asylum up had the idea that so many people have great stories to tell and that they’d love to see them in print. Once that idea emerged, they decided to solicit the people of Cork for submissions. They put up ads around the city looking for “untold stories, unheard poems and unseen sketches” whether typed or handwritten. They also made it clear that they didn’t worry about spelling, handwriting or perfect English. They wanted to hear from everybody. We don’t think that technology, spelling or technique should be a bar to getting a good story published.
The inaugural story is from writer Johnny McGrath and is called Shamie.
He stepped through the public house door on to the pavement outside. It was quieter here. The smoking room to the rear of the pub would be crowded and here he was on his own with his own thoughts. It was where he wanted to be.
The place had changed in the years he had been away. There was a wide yard in front of the pub, sloping down to the main road. A hundred yards down on the right hand side a side road cut away from the main road. In front of him was the lake, partly obscured by a belt of trees. Beyond that woods and bog land, the railway and another larger lake. A hundred yards up the road on the left hand side was the school house, closed and abandoned now.
He remembered walking the road to school with Shamie when they were kids. Later they had explored the woods and bog land before him. Explorers one week, cowboys the next depending on what movie they had watched that week. He felt emotion rise within him; his eyes filling with tears. He lit a cigarette for something to do, to steady himself. He was all mixed up, the emotions tumbling into one another; guilt, grief, remorse and anger.
He thought Shamie would never see any of this now. Buried on the hill overlooking the village, silent now forever. At least he has brought him home to be laid with the old folks, not abandoned forever in a pauper’s grave in London.
Shamie had gone to London first after his inter cert. He had followed him three years later. Even with a good enough Leaving Cert there had been no work here. London had been eulogised by Shamie in the long rambling phone calls: great money, great women, and great drugs. It wasn’t difficult to sell it to him.
The accommodation wasn’t great when he finally arrived. It was a squat. Two houses under the Westway in Ladbroke Grove full of young Irish men like themselves and a scattering of freaks. Shamie was working with an English guy called Malcolm ripping out and converting old houses all around West London. He got taken on. Apart from the trades they did all the work and got well paid. Sleep was scarce though. Every evening after work it was straight to the pub, then back to the houses for parties that were still going on when they left for work in the morning.
Shamie had been right about the women and the drugs. Girls of all descriptions drifted in and out of his life. Nobody cared; it was the seventies and anything went.
Robert Frost - who would have been 138 years old last Monday – is one of the giants of American poetry, indeed one of modern literatures great poets. So as a belated celebration of his birthday I’ve posted up some rare film footage of Frost reciting his classic poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening‘. He made the recording in January 1959 when he was 84 years old.
I know there are readers of this blog and members of this skills exchange who are fans of Charles Bukowski so everytime I come across his work I post it up. This time round I found a video of Tom Waits reading Bukowski’s poem, ‘The Laughing Heart’.
The performance poetry scene in Ireland has exploded over the last few years with clubs and nights kicking off all over the place to cater for the growing interest and mad delight of this artform. In Cork we have our very own Mutant Cabaret, in Dublin there’s The Brownbead Mixtape, Nighthawks, Tongue Box and in Waterford there’s The Medicine Sessions which is opening its doors later this month. And that’s only a fraction of it
