For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People (2018). I tried to read it, I really did, but gave up after twenty pages. Looking back now, I can’t remember exactly what it was that turned me off it. I recall saying something along the lines of not liking the dialogue and the way the characters were realised.
Looking back, I think I disliked the social pressure exerted on me to read and admire Sally Rooney. You see, as a student in Trinity College Dublin, the figure of Sally Rooney loomed large.
Access to campus was restricted while a TV adaptation of her book was filmed. Her novels lined the windows of nearby book shops. Rave reviews appeared everywhere you looked online. She was the voice of the Irish millennial.
All of this, rather than encouraging me to embrace her work, raised my hackles and ensured that I would find fault in anything I read by her.
After laying Normal People aside, my girlfriend read it. After finishing it, she expressed the opinion that it was a good read, but nothing special in literary terms. Then she read reviews of it in well-respected publications, and began to experience a cognitive dissonance so severe I worried about her mental health.
“What is it I’m not seeing? Why is everybody praising it so highly? Am I not seeing something here?” she beseeched.
I tried to comfort her. “It’s the world that’s gone mad.” I said, “Your judgement was correct.”
“But everyone is saying it’s great!”
“It’s all just marketing! The whole industry is a sham!”.
Alas, my words offered scant comfort. It wasn’t until she saw some negative reviews in major magazines that she felt consoled.
‘A lot of press attention surrounded the publication,’ says a novelist character in Rooney’s new novel, ‘mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.’
For my girlfriend and me, the negativity was a justification. Maybe our generation’s aesthetic sense hadn’t atrophied after all. There was still hope.
“Why do you need other people to say something is bad before you can trust in your own judgement?” I asked.
“Let’s stop talking about this.” she replied.
After my girlfriend’s near loss of sanity, I resolved to maintain a safe distance from Sally Rooney. The best minds I knew assured me that Sally Rooney’s popularity was a product of marketing, and that her writing was nothing special.
A New Assignment
My life went on peacefully, untroubled by the exorcised spirit of Rooney, until two years later an editor challenged me to review Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).
“I’m afraid to say I’m not a big fan of Sally Rooney”, I said.
“All the better!” he replied, “She will get enough positive reviews as it is. Write what you really think!”
I left the office elated at first, but then an inner contrarian bristled. That’s right, I’m a contrarian even among other contrarians. If asked to criticise a mainstream work, I’m inclined to defend it.
Buying the book in Chapters, I felt immensely self-conscious at the bestsellers shelf. I scanned the shop before taking the blue paperback from the number one slot.
“If anyone I respect asks why I’m buying it”, I thought, “I’ll tell them I’m writing a review.”
Returning home, I sat down on the couch with the novel and a pen and notebook on hand. Upon reading the first page, I found an adjective that felt awkward, and I noted this down. On the next, I found a sentence I didn’t like, and then a character description that annoyed me. I noted these down too. Then I realised I wasn’t reading at all.
I laid aside the notebook and returned to the beginning. Time passed. A few times, I wanted to reach for the notebook, but resisted the impulse, accepting the text for what it was. Slowly, my ego disengaged, and I started to focus on the scenes, the characters, and the structure of the story. The afternoon slipped away.
On the second afternoon, I became even more deeply engaged. I found some of the ideas expressed by characters exciting. I laughed at parts, enjoying the romantic dynamic between different characters. When I wasn’t reading the book, I looked forward to when I would be again.
The pace of the novel appeared to slow in the final third however. By the end, I had lost some of the enthusiasm sparked earlier. I still enjoyed it, but believe it doesn’t amount to a substantive whole.
Summary
The novel primarily follows two Irish women in their late twenties/early thirties. Eileen works for a low-paying literary magazine, and is terribly jealous of her friend Alice, who is a successful novelist.
Alice lives in a beautiful house by the sea, has money and time to spare, yet never goes out of her way to visit Eileen. The novel alternates between chapters following Eillen or Alice individually, and chapters composed of email exchanges between the two friends.
The alternating structure is used very artfully. In the narrative sections, the narrator is extremely remote and impersonal: ‘He was wearing a black zip-up, with the zip pulled right up, and occasionally he tucked his chin under the raised collar, evidently cold.’ (p.216)
This is a very roundabout way of telling us a character is cold, but it maintains the sense of the narrator’s detachment. This technique is characteristic of Beautiful World, Where Are You. In the narrative sections, we watch the characters keenly, with an interested gaze, but we’re barred from access to their minds; nor does the narrator offer insights into the characters. Thus, for example:
The waitress from behind the bar had come out to mop down the empty tables with a cloth. The woman named Alice watched her for a few seconds and then looked at the man again. (p. 6)
Or,
When Felix saw Alice approaching, he stood up, greeted her, touched her waist, and asked what she would like to drink.” (p. 214)
There’s a clinical coldness to the narrator, but while fulfilling the role of a dispassionate eye, the descriptions of actions remain vague. It lacks, therefore, a truly realist attention to detail.
The rationale for this style seems to receive its most explicit justification around the midpoint, where the narrator says:
Their conversation seemed to have had some effect on them both, but it was impossible to decipher the nature of the effect, its meaning, how it felt to them at that moment, whether it was something shared between them or something about which they felt differently. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.(p. 126)
I am bound to ask: if a realist novel doesn’t offer readers insights into their lives then what is its purpose? Are the experiences of Dublin millennials really so profound that they can’t be explained in words?
The coldness in the narrative chapters emphasises the emotional warmth of the email correspondence between Eileen and Alice. The end of chapter five, for example, shows us an Alice aloof and withdrawn in conversation; whereas the next chapter opens with a forthright Alice telling Eileen: ‘Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way.’
The emails allow floodgates to open kept firmly closed through the narrative chapters. In there, Alice and Eileen share their worries, hopes, and undergraduate analyses of our current predicament.
This is my favourite part of the book by far. Why? Because the opinions expressed by the characters show conspicuous self-awareness on Rooney’s part of her place in contemporary culture, and the role her novels play.
The contemporary novel is irrelevant (pp. 94 – 95); the cult of the author is philosophically groundless and dangerous but is maintained by marketing hacks (p. 55); the oppressor/victim complex in online discourse is more theological than political (p. 74); beauty died in 1976 (p. 75). These are ideas we can agree on, and I am glad to hear them voiced in a mainstream novel.
Ruthless Self-Examination
Beautiful World, Where Are You doesn’t need to be critiqued. It does that for you. At one point, the millenial novelist Alice laments her public image:
I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe she is me.(p. 55)
The ruthless self-examination offers Rooney salvation from her cultural sins. No longer do we need to critique her. She is doing it for us.
Now, you could view this cynically in two ways. First, consider Theodor Adorno’s idea that the culture industry actually feeds off its own critics.
Thus Punk came along and rails against Popular music, and then became the new Popular music. In a postmodern turn, the more you look into the myth of Punk, the more produced and insincere it seems.
The Sex Pistols were a punk-look-alike band, a few handpicked chaps that fitted the image of a Punk band, not a real group of rag-tag lads from the street as in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Nirvana is a similar case. We’re sick of hair metal, let’s make music rock again, and then you’re on the front cover of Rolling Stone. The more you rebel against the industry, the more you’re playing into the angry rocker cliche. There’s no way out.
Top of the Food Chain
So, Sally Rooney’s novel can complain about how banal contemporary novels are, how useless and privileged its author is for spending her life writing such things, and through that self-critique, she secures her position at the top of the millennial novelist hierarchy.
Slavoj Žižek has discussed at length the role played by guilt and self-deprecation in our current discourse, evident in its most extreme form on Twitter.
If we are guilty of all the ills in the world, then we become, paradoxically, important. It all centres around us. Thus, Alice writes of going to a Dublin shop and thinking:
of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – who have never seen or entered such a shop. And thus, this is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! (p. 17)
She is highlighting her sense of guilt, and therefore her virtue, but it also reveals an arrogance. We are at the very top; we must be generous; we must be humble; we must be self-deprecating. Why? Because we are important.
Žižek refers to a marketing ploy used by Starbucks to sell their coffee The chain acknowledges it is more expensive than competitors, but every 10 cent goes to starving children in a far off country.
Therefore, to assuage your guilt about commodifying the planet to the detriment of the developing world, simply buy this particular commodity.
Likewise, if you feel defeated by the state of the contemporary novel, read a contemporary novel that complains about this too. It may be banal, but at least it will be ‘relatable’, and can we ask for anything more?
This is really the key issue. Rooney can articulate what is wrong with the contemporary novel, but can’t seem to write any differently for all that self-critique. The same dross is dished out, but now it’s served with a side of cringing humility.
The aperitif of self-criticism may eliminate the lingering dull flavours, but I’d rather have eaten some good food in the first place.
Possibly Insidious…
I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness exhibited in this novel, especially evident in the emails sent between Eileen and Alice, articulating how I feel about the contemporary novel and the cult of Rooney in a way better than I could myself.
These critiques are, however, ultimately unsatisfying, because they undermine rather than justify the narrative sections.
They don’t spur Rooney on to write superior work, or even anything different. Instead, they simply undermine the banality of the narrative in a possibly insidious way.
Why insidious? Because the critique of the mainstream fitting seamlessly into the mainstream really illustrates the failure of the critique to have any effect on the status quo. It becomes a pose, emotional venting that doesn’t amount to anything; failing to point to anywhere better, or just different.
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You was published by Faber & Faber (London) on September 7th.
In a rousing introductory speech, retired diplomat Philip McDonagh described the publication of Cuban Love Songs as a ‘significant moment for the Irish province of the Republic Letters.’ He spoke of the ‘importance of the Republic Letters for us all’, that space where we ‘can explore intelligently and in a disinterested way both the world and our place in the world.’
McDonagh also spoke about his concerns over the blockade against Cuba. He argued that there had never been a level playing field to allow the Cuban economy to prove itself and looked forward to a better dialogue between Washington and Havana.
Reflecting on a challenging period in international relations, McDonagh wondered:
are we prepared to wait for the gifts of the muses, on political truths that do not depend on what Shelley called the calculating faculty? Are we prepared to work towards restoring the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope?
He said:
we need the poets and the public authorities to come together in something like the Republic of Letters to practise humility and re-evaluate key aspects of our culture, and this must be done of course in freedom … where citizens are prepared to discuss public challenges on the basis of first principles.
There were also readings from Anthony Colclough, Caoimhe Lavelle, Karl O’Neill, Anne Haverty, Luke Sheehan, and Ronan Sheehan.
The event took place in Merrion Cricket Club and drew a colourful crowd.
As a barrister I am given to quoting from Shakespeare’s plays in closing speeches. This may seem pretentious, but I find his acute observations on the human condition continue to speak to juries, and judges. He remains highly relevant to legal education, and indeed the practice of law. I would go so far as to say that a good knowledge of his work provides a real advantage to any practitioner.
William Shakespeare’s Birthplace.
Stratford-upon-Avon
Recently, I was delighted to have the opportunity to appear in a rare in-person trial in Royal Leamington Spa, which is in Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire. I recalled John Betjeman’s poem about dying in the town, whose name conjures images of Bertie Wooster on a bucolic retreat:
oh, you know that the stucco is peeling.
Do you know that the heart will stop?
From those yellow Italianate arches
Do you hear the plaster drop?
Times have changed. To my chagrin, Leamington Spa is not actually a spa town – any longer at least – but is just a short hop from Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, where I stayed for the duration of proceedings.
Thehouse where Shakespeare was born was previously an ale house and is now a museum. Nearby, in The Holy Trinity Church, lies his grave, which contains a stern warning that his bones should remain in situ.
Unfortunately, the well-preserved Anne Hathaway House was closed for the duration of my stay, but the exterior and gardens were at least visible. Likewise, the complex of theatres – home to the Royal Shakespeare Company – were also no go in this bleak period for the performing arts.
Shakespeare’s era was marked by recurring plague, tyranny and civil strife, themes according to Stephen Greenbelt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) the Bard approached obliquely, for fear of persecution. Under conditions of tyranny, public art may still be an outlet for mockery of the powerful. Thus we find in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
In what follows I recite some of Shakespeare’s lines that inform my understanding of our present world.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (Polonius, Hamlet)
In the light of the bailing out of toxic banks – socialism for the mega rich – and the infliction of austerity, being indebted now brings serious dangers. With so much crime linked to social exclusion and poverty, it is as if we are returning to an era of Debtors’ Prisons, ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s day.
The late David Graeber’s excellent book Debt: the First 5,000 Years(2011) precisely illustrates how debt, and now student debt in particular, is creating a permanent rentier class with no educational outlet for upward mobility, and low prospects of home ownership, at least for those who don’t have access to the bank of Mum and Dad.
The power of bankers in contemporary society should lead to consideration of The Merchant of Venice, which, apart from dreadful antisemitism – Shakespeare often expressed the prejudices of his day – provides a searing attack on the sin of usury, the existence of which is conveniently ignored by far right Christians today.
In the play, Portia (Bassano’s betrothed who finds himself in a spot of bother after taking on a debt on unfavourable terms from Shylock) presents herself in court, disguised as a male lawyer, and pleads for mercy against the enforcement of the bond, which is the extraction of a pound of flesh.
Shylock and Portia (1835) by Thomas Sully
In a famous passage she argues:
The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed, it blessed him that gives, and him that takes, tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown, His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings: But mercy is above this sceptred sway, it is enthroned in the heart of kings, it is an attribute to God himself; and earthly power doth then show likes god’s, when mercy seasons justice…
Shylock responds with a narrow vision of justice that sadly is all too familiar in our time of dispossessions:
I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.
Portia then shifts ground and cleverly argues that the bond should be enforced but:
The bond gives thee there no jot of blood – The words expressly are a pound of flesh … Then take they bond, take thou thy pound of flesh, but in the cutting it, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate … For as thou urge justice, be assured, thou shalt have justice more than thou deserts.
In this morality tale, therefore, Shylock – unlike our contemporary bankers in most cases – is forestalled in his extraction of the pound of flesh. If only such arguments against the extraction of financial flesh were available to barristers defending the disposed today.
Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope
The True Criminals
So who are the true criminals today? Shakespeare offered an answer through the medium of the wise Fool in Kind Lear:
What art mad. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear, change places, and handy dandy, what is the justice which is the thief.
Governments bail out Goldman Sachs and other banks. There are no repercussions for their reckless lending, save in Nordic countries like Iceland. But If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread, they pursue him to the ends of the Earth to extract the pound of flesh.
Similarly, if you become a whistle-blower and reveal the machinations of the powerful such as Julian Assange, then you are turned into a criminal, while Messrs Blair, Kissinger, and indeed Varadkar, are never forced to face the music.
Amanda Knox
The lady doth protest too much, methinks, (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2).
Stacey Schiff’s Witches: Salem 1692 (2015) observes how the hysteria of witch hunts appear to represent a sublimation of pre-existing grievances, and envy. This remains the case for modern day witch hunts such as that directed against Amanda Knox, which have been highlighted by the Innocence Project.
The book makes clear that children can be manipulated into holding false belief, even to the extent that they incriminate themselves. False allegations are also linked to hysterical parents or authority figures. As occurred in Amanda Knox’s case, young minds are easily turned to mush by persistent questioning, fear of authority, and interaction with nefarious police officers and social workers.
This is what is referred to as falsely implanted memory syndrome, on which subject Elizabeth Loftus and Maggie Bruck are experts.
Categorising someone as a witch or a warlock also reflects jealousy if that person holds a gift you do not possess. Seen in Freudian terms, it is a form of transference of perceived inadequacies.
All that glisters is not gold. (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7)
This zeitgeist is one of post-truth amorality, a phenomenon with long antecedents. In King Lear we hear that ‘a scurvy politician seems to see the thing thou does not’; while Henry VI speaks of: ‘Stuffing the ears of men with false reports’, which seems curiously relevant to Covid Times.
Purveyors of nonsense and incomprehensible prose – the structuralists and post-modernists who took over the universities – represent a movement, or grouping, united in their rejection of universal values. Relativism leads to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision and all the integrative forces that tie society together, as Noam Chomsky has observed: ‘if I am missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand.’
The first point to note about the post modernists nonsense is that it has encouraged a distrust of the truth and an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, wherein any old argument, or moral position, is accorded equal weight.
In 2005 the lateDavid Foster Wallace observed that this created an epistemic free-for-all in which any truth is seen from the vantage of perspective and agenda.
Relativistic and structuralist ideas such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language fed into Trump and his aides saying that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida could contradict itself, similarly Trump can jump from one inconsistency to the next.
The work of The Innocence Project is littered with examples of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts or pseudo experts, which have led to wrongful convictions. All too many innocent people are incarcerated on the basis of lies. With the embrace of subjectivity, we are celebrating opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts.
Confirmation bias applies where people rush to judgment, and give into their prejudices, rather than evaluating evidence.
According to Evan Davies in his recent book Post Truth, one aspect of all this bullshit is a desire to believe something unreasonable to be true. Pope Francis sagely remarked that ‘There is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’
There is no such thing as harmless disinformation; trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3)
In general, social media is weaving a web of deceit and destroying the social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears, and character assassination. Pierre Omidyar a founder of eBay argued that the monetization and manipulation of information is rapidly tearing us apart.
Trolls and bots were unleased by Trump, Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica to spread disinformation in the U.S presidential election, undermining democratic institutions and fact-driven debates.
Now the social media platforms have moved on to shilling for Big Pharma – laying the ground for a Screen New Deal – while shutting down alternative assessments of the pandemic, and unprofitable treatments.
It leads me to an unhappy conclusion that we increasingly developing a generation of technocratic fascist, selfish, materialistic ultra-conformists receptive to post-truth deception. The silos they occupy reinforce their prejudices. It is less important now to establish the truth than to ask whose side you are on.
As Cicero, a minor character in Julius Caesar remarks:
Indeed, it is as strange, disposed time but men may construe things after their fashion clean from the purpose of things themselves.
Lies in fact have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction. In The People of the Lie(1983) Scott Peck contends that Evil is untruth, undermining life and liveliness. Such people operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others, and cover up their misdeeds. They prevent the rest of us from making informed choices. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by authority figures. Evil is also surprisingly obedient to authority.
In contrast, in times of stress those who genuinely good people, even in times of acute stress, do not desert principles.
Hannah Arendt presaged our Brave New World.
The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.
Cry “havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, (Mark Antony, Julius Caesar)
The film, Wag the Dog witnesses the beginning of a fake war. Today, apart from military engagements that are generally played out on our television screens – such as Iraq and Afghanistan – there are new types of fake wars. The War on Drugs is a smokescreen that obscures failure to deal with the root causes in poverty and austerity. Now the war on the virus – a disproportionate reaction to a significant but not overwhelming public health crisis – has generated unprecedented panic.
People are told to comply or face gruesome death. But how safe are we really in these circumstances? We will not be safe in authoritarian police states with restrictions on liberty, freedom of movement, privacy and associational or community ties. Nor will we be necessarily safe from a plethora of hastily tested pharmaceutical products, enforced by so-called vaccine passports.
How to subjugate the world population? Create a hyper real sense of emergency. Engender panic, leading to compliance and deference
Should we disassociate ourselves from the unvaccinated? Even putting it in these terms shows how admen dominate the discourse.
The disproportionate response to the pandemic represents a fascist creep. People are desensitized to loss of liberty once they are in fear of their lives, and increasingly dependent on the state for the pile of gruel it so generously provides, having removed any prospect of employment for hundreds of thousands in precarious work.
Meanwhile, the corporate law firms and mega rich have won big in our new version of disaster capitalism usingModern Money Theory to oil the chains of patronage.
Thus, whether centrally orchestrated, or more likely arising out a coalition of vested interests, and made possible through an increasingly uneducated, desperate and compliant population, COVID-19 has brought us the Shock Doctrine par excellence.
Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays. Artist unkown.
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. (Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar)
The problem of evil in our times is embodied in extremism, fundamentalism, draconian laws, high consumerism, and the negation of the rule of law. Today, unselfish communal behaviour go unrewarded, while the innocent are framed.
What is left of compassion, sincerity, truth, community, and optimism? Well at least we can still find it in the poetry of Shakespeare.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owls.
Nor shall death brag thou wander in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’s:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Put simply, love conquers all. Or should. The Bard of Avon has much to say in these troubled times.
Featured Image: Lear and Cordelia by William Blake.
An grá is an gráin, say these two words out loud, say them out loud to yourself, out loud to the listening others around, and feel in your mouth how subtle the shift is between them; how the open mouth of love — grá — gets slighted by the brush of your tongue’s curled tip shaping hate — gráin; feel the quick lick it gives the roof of your mouth. It’s that kind of sliver, isn’t it, the one we know to be true; the one that suddenly shifts the friend or the lover to the one we don’t know or want to know. In shape and in sound, there in your mouth, Irish gathers together a distinction of meaning in a unity of resonance. Where the mind of English fragments and scatters, (say them too out loud, say love, say hate), Irish holds in an elemental poetry we need to participate in to sense.
Sometimes what language teaches us can be that visceral.
I am digging words in the Burren when I hit upon this realisation —
tá go leor eile, more abound, Siobhán chirps; an saoirse is an daoirse, an solas is an dolas; seo é an fhilíocht nádur atá le fáil sa teanga! Siobhán is leading us in an archaeological word excavation, amuigh san aer i gciorcal Hedge School, uncovering from Irish some sense of a way of being in the world we have only just forgotten. If we lost it in a generation, we can reclaim it in a generation. Dictionaries are scattered all around, I hold one in my lap, but there is no discussion here of the tuiseal ginideach, we are not being questioned about the modh coinniollach and all mentions of Peig are with endearment and jest. We are just picking words at random and letting the connective threads be woven from there and we weave them without trying. It feels illicit to use a dictionary in this way, and I love it. Here a space is opened of pure play, without the plámás of getting anything right. Here the severed head of Irish we suffered in school is reunited with our bodies — the vibrations in Irish are cosúil le Sanskrit — tugann sí fuinneamh láidir duit. Just feel and the rest will follow; this seems to be the unspoken mantra of the Wild Irish Retreat weekend.
Earlier that morning, the sun rising from behind Slieve Elva, Cearbhuil leads the women down to the hazel wood chun macnamih a dheanamh, to meditate, and we follow, trusting this woman who is keeper of this land; and we go down to the hazel wood, and there’s a stillness in our hearts. We’ve been invited to observe a noble silence and so our passage through the curly tendrils is punctuated only by snaps of twigs, the brush of branches newly leafing and birdsong from birds I have no name for, not in either tongue. And we pause then as Cearbhuil stops and simply says — éist — just listen. No crossed legs, no chanting, nothing specific to learn, we are simply tuning in to what is here, all around us; we are simply letting our civilised bodies contact the coill, and letting the coill touch deep into us. And later, when Cearbhuil leads us again, now through a forage walk on the land chun lón a sholáthar, we listen then too, not just to the names that fall like small prayers to all the invisible Gods, slanlóg, nóinín, neantóg, casairbháin, but to all the reverence is an méad meas atá ann in this woman’s gestures; we’re listening to all the wisdom in her fingers that know when to pluck, what to leave and how to reap without plundering. It is simple, even obvious, and so all the more unbelievable that we need to be shown how to see what is in front of us and all around us; an leigheas is an maitheas ag fás go fiáin. As if nothing has happened, all the goodness and plenitude of the land is still offered— here, the seamsóg extends itself —here, the seamair dhearg —had we but sense and right vision to see. Tá gach rud fós ann, I hear whispered in my head.
I spoke of these Iseas in Croke Park recently, ideas that have been forming around me and inside of me that were inspired by John Moriarty and my experience of hurling. He gave me leave to understand the world for myself, deferring to no one.https://t.co/b5U0XPU5FD
And then on the beach with Diarmuid, the same principles we have absorbed from Siobhán and Cearbhuil without any direct tutelage apply now to the game of hurling; listen, play, be here in your body. There are real players on the trá, none more so than Diarmuid who seems to skip through the sand goat-like, whilst my legs are heavy pillars that have to be heaved and hefted to keep up with the ball. But this game is not about cé mhéad blianta atá ar do dhroim; it’s not about how many times you’ve kitted out in any coloured jersey. Here, now, with the crashing waves of Fanore in our ears, we return to the pleasure of simply pucking a ball. We léim go hard, we scuttle for the liathróid, we roar anseo to each other, and when we scramble too fast ahead of ourselves, get too caught up in a race to get, Diarmuid beckons us to stop and asks us to check in with ourselves; éistigí cad atá ar siúl i do chorp. Stay with the place of ease, cé comh éasca can you make it lads, don’t strain. And while there may be taithí go leor leis an cluiche ar cuid daoine, none of us have much experience in that. Play till you’re played out; win at whatever cost. Something in us knew that wasn’t the way it had to be, but we had no guidance in respecting the rhythm of our nádur; how to join effort with ease, doing with non-doing. And then, as if in an ancient ritual of bowing to our human limitation, when the hurls are finally cast aside, we throw ourselves into an Atlantach fiáin herself; engulfed in the white and the rush of her embrace; tógtha.
Of course, there is much more that could be shared here about cad atá ar siúl leis an Wild Irish Retreats. I could tell you about the food, not just cé comh blásta is atá sé, but how it is prepared with such care and attention; slow cooking at its finest. And even more, how it is served to you, with grace and kind eyes; accompaniments you didn’t know you needed and that nourish far into the depths of you. And the music, and the fire, and the joy of being together at last. But I am not offering an advertisement here. If this sounds like a sale’s pitch, it isn’t. If you think I’m trying to convince you of something, I’m not. The arguments for Irish are many; many more those for how to rescue ourselves from our current catastrophe and our abominable alienation from the land. This is not a proof, nor is it a plea, this is simply a love song; a song of praise. This is just a need to acknowledge my luck of having returned home, after many years away, to find myself among mo mhuintir arís, ag caint as gaeilge, le mo dhá chosa ar an talamh. This is just to sing that it feels like a dream I am still not waking from; to sing because it is hard to say what it has all opened in me, because I feel it to be opening still. I offer these words as a return song then, a homecoming tune for the other way; what these wild Irish legends are demonstrating. There’s nothing you need to know, nothing to do, nothing to fix, there’s just letting go; there’s just peeling back the thick layers of our resistance, our wilful control, so that other dimension of our being can re-surface; the one who did not get us into this mess; the one whose skin trembles and dances with the sheer delight of being here; the one who is fós fiáin. Go down to Clare, go down to Kerry, and be with the Wild Irish Retreat folk if it calls you, if it be within your means. If it doesn’t, if you can’t, find your own way back. But claim it —claim the part of you that can’t be claimed; the place in you no worldly concern, no worry or slight of ill-will can reach; the place in you that is open, playful, fluid flúirseach. You don’t need anything special. Open your mouth, lig amach í; slip back i ngrá
The appeal of exotic cuisines and esoteric diets has done little to diminish bread’s status as the primary foodstuff of the Western world, and many areas besides. Symbolic as the ‘staff of life’ and ubiquitous, the Oxford English Dictionary describes it in wholesome simplicity as a ‘well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading, and baking meal or flour, generally with the addition of yeast or leaven’.
But charges of adulteration have long been laid against the baker, the miller and the farmer. Today, more than ever, bread has departed from the purity of its essential elements: flour, water and usually salt for flavour. In the early modern era, however, fast-acting yeast, derived from brewers’ barm, began to replace the traditional sourdough leaven: simply flour and water containing a live culture similar to yoghurt. The addition of yeast was the beginning of a downward spiral culminating in today’s industrial loaves, products of the insidious Chorleywood Bread Process.
A list of the ingredients, wheat apart, of a familiar brand of sliced white bread reads like pharmacopoeia: Emulsifiers, E471, E472e, Soya Flour, Preservative, Calcium, Propotionate (added to inhibit mould growth), Flavouring, Flour Treatment Agents, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), E920, Dextrose. Such bland uniformity and chemical defilement led the great cookery writer Elizabeth David to muse: ‘A technological triumph factory bread may be. Taste it has none. Should it be called bread?’[i]
The quality of loaves from an Irish market worth €1.9 billion in 2019 should be a matter of public concern, as the consequence for our health of inferior bread is devastating. Perhaps more importantly, the satisfaction derived from the breaking of quality bread approaches the divine.
Wheat
The most commonly used grain (or ‘corn’ as this was referred to historically) for bread is wheat. A grass native to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where agriculture and civilization originate, it is now cultivated across the globe, though often in marginal climatic zones. Worryingly, the last century has seen erosion of the genetic variety of wheat strains, and dependence on artificial fertilization.
From the 1940s Norman E. Borlaug and his collaborators developed new strains of wheat, correcting a structural deficiency in the stalk which couldn’t support heavy grains. Previously the most fruitful plants collapsed under the weight of their own seeds, before maturity. Borlaug’s group developed dwarf strains that could stand up to the weight of bulbous grains, thereby more than doubling yields.
Today, almost every kernel of wheat consumed by man and beast is derived from Borlaug’s selective breeding. But the resulting monocultures require greater use of pesticides than genetically diverse plants, while farmers must purchase hybrid seeds from large corporations.
Animal waste and crop rotation – traditional methods of restoring nitrogen to the soil after each growth cycle – are insufficient for the dwarf strains, which require synthetic fertilization. Wheat is now dependent on human intervention, just as modern domestic turkeys are generally unable to reproduce unless artificially inseminated.
The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer requires natural gas, both for heat and as a source of hydrogen. According to Fraser and Rimas ‘without a secure supply of nitrogen the world would starve’.[ii] Our agricultural model, and perhaps survival, is hopelessly dependent on a finite fossil fuel.
Further, it is said that stressed vines make better grapes. The same principle applies to today’s pampered wheat crop, insulated from any struggle with nature by human intervention. The diverse strains of wheat from yesteryear offered superior nutrition, and more varied flavours.
Two Methods
Notwithstanding the use of unleavened bread in Western (though not Orthodox) Christian ritual, it might be argued that such bread is not deserving of the the name, as the flour is not fermented before baking. Fermentation is achieved using one of two agents: the age-old sourdough leaven method, or through the addition of yeast.
Sourdough is a combination of yeast and bacterial culture, which aids digestion of the grain. This compensates for our relatively short intestines compared to dedicated herbivores like cattle. Human ingenuity has produced what amounts to an external stomach.
Good bread, like Swiss Cheese, contains holes or ‘eyes’ left by carbon dioxide produced by fermentation and trapped by glutinous flour. This is especially apparent in strong white flours with a high gluten content; lower-protein ‘soft’ flour is usually reserved for cakes and biscuits, although it is now used in mass-produced breads.
A late-seventeenth century French journal succinctly describes the two methods of fermentation in use at the cusp of modernity:
the most commonly used one, called French leaven, is dough made with only water and flour and kept until it becomes sour… The other, which is called yeast, is the foam released from beer when it ferments. French leaven acts more slowly, causes the dough to rise less, and makes a heavier, denser bread. Yeast ferments more quickly, makes it rise more, and the bread it makes is light, delicate and soft.[iii]
These same methods are in use today, though since the breakthroughs of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), brewers’ barm (usually derived from barley beer) has been replaced by cultured yeast with the same fast-acting effect but greater consistency.
Sourdough bread, leavened by a fermented dough ‘starter’ which has ‘caught’ yeast from the air, is denser than yeast bread. This starter contains a lactobacillus culture with sufficient yeast for bread to rise, though it is less active than pure yeast. The acetic note – its extent depending on the culture and method used – emanates from lactobacilli assisting the benign bacteria in our digestive tract.
Lactobacillus
Police Enquiry
In the seventeenth century, bread was a vital element of the diet for the average poor Parisian, who ate an impressive kilo-and-a-half per day. Indeed, the price of bread was one trigger of the French Revolution, inspiring Marie Antoinette’s famous – though apocryphal – solution: ‘let them eat cake’.
The perceived adulteration of bread with barm was, therefore, controversial. A dispute between guilds of bakers and innkeepers over the sale of bread brought the matter to a head. Innkeepers claimed that traditional sourdough Gonesse bread, purchased from out-of-town traders for retail, was superior to the yeasted ‘Queen’s bread’ sold by bakers. This bread, the innkeepers alleged, was a corruption of pure bread, i.e. dough made with only water and flour and kept until it became sour.
This early health scare led to the formation of an expert medical panel to address the issue of the use of barm, mostly imported from breweries in Flanders, sometimes in a state of autolysis. The origin of the adjective ‘barmy’ recalls the distrust, even in beer-friendly Britain, for this puzzling, fizzing substance. At that time, as today, wine was the preferred beverage in France and the inclusion of barm from beer in bread making was considered unpatriotic.
Following the debate between the guilds, a French police inquiry observed that one could take precautions against bread that was visibly poorly baked, but added: ‘It is not the same with fermentation, which makes the dough rise; which refines it and makes it lighter. Because the worst is sometimes what gives bread the best appearance of goodness.’[iv]
This echoes the sentiments of Elizabeth David centuries later in relation to the deceptive scent of baking, as she put it: ‘it is a fact of life that all bread, homemade, factory-made, bakery-made, good, indifferent, gives out a glorious smell, but to buy bread on its smell while hot is asking for disillusion.’ It seems that human senses are not always equipped to immediately discern good quality bread. Quality is revealed not just by sight, smell, or even taste, but through digestion, or rather the extent to which micro-organisms have already digested it. This accords with the oft-misrepresented Epicurus, who argued that one should avoid those foods which, though giving pleasure at the time, afterwards leave one feeling deprived.
Peasants sharing bread, from the Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, France, 14th century.
In condemning the use of yeast, the leading medical expert in the case Gui Patin stated:
To say, as those who defend it do, that they have not seen anyone drop over sick or dead from eating this bread is not a good way to clear it of the faults with which it has been charged. It is like sugar refined with lime or alum, or heavily salted, peppered and sliced meats, or wines in which one tosses lime or fish glue, or other things bad in themselves which men concerned about their health avoid, even if none of these things causes death or threatens one’s health on the day it is ingested.
In spite of this advice the Paris parliament maintained a policy of laissez faire. The preference for yeast may be explained by its faster action than leaven, and in truth many still prefer the fluffiness it imparts. Today in France pain au levain is less common than baguette de tradition française made with yeast, which is now, ironically, a symbol of France. In most countries fast-acting yeast has taken the place of the slow action of traditional leaven. Yet worse was to follow with advances in industrial technology.
Elizabeth David.
Caustic Assessment
Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery, first published in 1977, provides an outstanding contribution to the subject of baking, exploring the history, science and practice of the craft. It offers a caustic assessment of the baking industry that remains as vital today as when first published, though one limitation is that most recipes call for yeast rather than sourdough leaven.
David wrote in the wake of the Chorleywood Bread Process, invented in 1961, and known in chilling Orwellian language as the ‘no-time method’. Eighty-percent of bread in the U.K. is currently prepared using this method, which involves a super-quick fermentation; the slow maturation of dough is replaced by a few minutes of intense mechanical agitation in special high-speed mixers. This sounds miraculous, but solid fat is necessary to prevent the loaf collapsing and a large quantity of yeast is added: David asserts that sixteen times as much yeast is used with the CBP as in some traditional recipes; a bit barmy really.
Such a huge amount of yeast is used in order to speed up the process, and to increase volume by maximizing dough expansion. Powdered gluten may also be added to lower-protein soft flour. Admittedly this has reduced the U.K.’s dependence on the ‘harder’ strains of wheat imported from warmer countries. Writing in the wake of the CBP, Elizabeth David remarked: ‘It will be interesting to see the efforts of the milling industry to sell us bread which is more suitable for cake, or at any rate for cattle cake.’
In fact preparing bread with soft British and Irish wheat strains is possible using artisanal methods, it just requires a longer fermentation period to develop the gluten. Perhaps as a result, over-worked bakers in the past acquired a reputation for being strong, and dumb. But the convenience of modern methods comes at a nutritional cost.
Give Us Our Bread
In the early feudal period a lord of the manor held a milling monopoly over grain grown within his domain. But by the late fourteenth century the situation had changed with the emergence of independent millers, who acquired a reputation for unscrupulous behaviour.
Robin the miller, unknown 15th century artist.
Thus, in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c.1400), millers are lampooned as cheats who over-charge for grinding corn. This is an enduring stereotype revealing resentment against the wealth of an emerging capitalist class of millers, at a time when field crops formed 80% of the diets of poorer sections of society.
Our bread-dependent civilization has tended to generate and perpetuate social hierarchies dependent on the ownership of land, milling technology and the storage conditions required to preserve a year round supply, and sufficient seed for the following year.
Until recently, when health authorities recognised the importance of roughage in our diets, white or, more accurately, a yellowish-shade of bread was more expensive and reserved for the wealthy. This snobbery against darker loaves can be explained by their common adulteration with inferior grains, unground husks, and even indigestible matter.
Relative whiteness indicated purity, though the bran and wheatgerm was never entirely extracted using pre-industrial techniques. The first roller mill was opened in Glasgow in 1872 and since then white bread has been affordable for the masses, who assumed the bread esteemed by their social superiors was of a superior quality. Soon bread was even being bleached to conform to the consumer’s expectation for pristine whiteness, though most bleaching agents are now banned under E.U. (though not U.S.) law.
Oven Ready
The oven is the last piece in the jigsaw of technology and accumulated wisdom required in bread-making. Bread may be baked in a pan over an open fire in the form of ‘griddle cakes’, but a hot oven serves best, filled with steam which gelatinizes the outer layer of bread to give it a firm crust. A critical mass of population and wealth is, however, required for such ovens to be built, and the necessary fuel gathered. Thus, less technologically developed societies usually heat a cauldron over an open fire, consuming grain in the form of soup called frumenty and other stir-a-bouts.
The Second Agricultural, beginning in the seventeenth, which preceded the Industrial Revolution, led to the demise of most domestic bread-making in Britain: the Enclosure Acts denied rural communities access to common land where fuel could be gathered; it was too expensive for urban households to maintain ovens; and coal which came into widespread use billows black smoke unconducive to baking.
George Russell (Æ)
Over the course of the nineteenth century, shop-bought bread became the norm, especially as many women joined the labour force. In Ireland this process occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1913 George Russell Æ observed the effect of the transition in Ireland:
There is no doubt that the vitality of the Irish people has seriously diminished, and that the change has come about with a change in the character of the food consumed. When people lived with porridge, brown bread and milk as the main ingredients in the diet, the vitality and energy of the people was noticeable, though they were much poorer than they are now… When one looks at an Irish crowd one could almost tell the diet of most of them. These anaemic girls have tea running in their veins instead of blood. These weakly looking boys have been fed on white bread.[v]
Cultural Indicator
The story of bread is like a Russian doll, a multi-layered revelation exposing a great deal of our civilization. Perhaps above any other food it requires human ingenuity in agriculture, engineering and cuisine. No wonder it provides the metaphor of transubstantiation.
Sadly, the dominance of indigestible white bread from unmatured dough has been a nutritional and gastronomic calamity. Constipation is the large and rather pained elephant clambering about the room, and bread is now marked with the dreaded sign of fat, as a contributor to the global obesity pandemic. But it shouldn’t be this way: unadulterated sourdough bread combines nutritional benefits with supreme gustatory enjoyment, in the true Epicurean sense.
One issue for us to consider is an over-reliance on hard wheat strains, considering other grains are more suited to our growing conditions. The present fluctuating climate recommends diversity, and as omnivores this is to our nutritional benefit.
The Classical Greek author Atheneaus records seventy-two varieties of bread baked in his time. Today we expect homogeneity. The spectre of food shortages looms, however, due to over-reliance on finite fossil fuels.
Individuals and communities can begin to take control of their own bread supply. Domestic baking is tricky but rewarding. In Denmark all schoolchildren are taught how to bake, a valuable lesson that could be introduced to our schools.
With more time on our hands during lockdown may have shown a willingness to make bread to a reasonable standard. Apart from saving money, this shouldn’t be too labour-intensive as sourdough keeps well without preservatives, and can be baked in batches. For most of us bread is a com-pan-ion for life, and nothing less than the best should suffice.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
[i] Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery Cookbook, Grub Street, London, 2010,
[ii] Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, Empires of Food, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Free Press, New York, 2014, p.2
[iii] Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, (translated by Jody Gladding), pp.111-133
More than a quarter of a century ago a man-child called Kevin retired from politics as he turned twenty seven. He had joined the then somewhat notorious Trotskyist group, the Militant Tendency[i], at the age of fifteen. After twelve years of activism, which began as a member of Galway West Labour Youth the month the Falklands War kicked off and fizzled like the saddest of fireworks in London in the aftermath of Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax, against which he had been a somewhat obsessively focused campaigner, it was over. “Retirement” was the face-saving word he used to describe his departure from politics. From the inside it felt like a personal tragedy. And it was. After more than a decade as a fiercely loyal ‘comrade’, Kevin had had enough of Militant and they had had enough of him. Dialectics being the contradictory beast it is, a total exit from active politics may have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to him right then. But it didn’t feel like that to him. Instead of world socialist revolution, with which history had refused to oblige him, the spectres haunting the little part of Europe with which Kevin was then mostly concerned were, from his point of view, disappointing: Tony Blair and the Celtic Tiger, which got given its name the same year Blair became UK Labour leader: 1994.
Kevin sloped back to Galway from London via the Holyhead ferry that April with a mouthful of bad teeth; he wasn’t much of a one for looking after himself then. Though would march to defend the NHS for other people until his shoes disintegrated; he did not partake of such services himself. Kevin arrived in Galway with no particular plans, apart from a notion that he might do something artistic. Not artistic in the prettifying sense; he had no interest in describing the rocks around Connemara and the like. Indeed, he had little interest in any kind of beauty. Or so he thought. He wanted to express things he had been unable to say during his years as a (partly-self appointed) leader of the vanguard of the North London semi-lumpen proletariat. Mostly, this would involve going into some detail about all the people and ideas and institutions he was against. It was no small list. High on it was his endlessly self-sacrificing former self, who had worked himself some of the way towards a possible early grave, in an attempt to fight the political tide of the early 1990s that was, in the end, more about masochism than socialism. By “doing something artistic”, he meant stuff to do with words – songs, poems, maybe plays, novels… In the last years of his activism, when he was Chair of Enfield Against The Poll Tax in the North London Borough then represented in the House of Commons by, among others, Michael Portillo[ii], he had become increasingly focused on how best to say what needed to be said. It wasn’t enough to say it. It had to be said well. And, if possible, said wittily. He didn’t know it at the time but writing political letters with a satirical bent to the local papers in Enfield in the very early 1990s was his beginning as a poet.
This Kevin, who was of course me, hoped to escape politics via poetry but also harboured illusions that he might somehow find a way of combining the two. It is a contradiction I have been working out ever since. From the inside it has felt more to be a case of this obvious contradiction working itself out using me as a somewhat extreme public example. Of late this contradiction has grown starker and as a result perhaps been somewhat resolved. In the course of my work as a poet, I regularly meet that strange creature, the literary liberal, who ascribes to themselves every progressive and humane value while at the same time apparently finding no place in their imaginations for even the possibility of a world not run in the interests of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Apple Inc. They are the sort of people who, if they didn’t necessarily agree with her, would at least have understood where artist Tracy Emin was coming from when she called David Cameron’s coalition of 2010-15 “the best government…that we’ve ever had”. Politically, Emin may be an ignoramus. But her incontinent mouth is useful in that it makes her spell out what others in the arts are only brave enough to occasionally think. It has been my experience that, post 2008, most established literary creatives cannot imagine as possible a world in which a substantial percentage of the populations of countries such as Ireland, Britain, and the United States don’t live in Victorian levels of poverty. Just look at the queues of homeless being fed each Friday night outside the GPO in Dublin by the charity Muslim Sisters of Éire. Despite such images, the idea of properly taxing the super-wealthy, and making sure they don’t find a way of avoiding that tax, is seen by your average sensible member of the literary classes as a notion only seriously held by annoying teenagers and people who think it’s still 1975. According to this broad school of thought, if it can be called thought, there never was any other possible solution to 2008 but spending less on the lower orders and using that money to bail out JP Morgan, Anglo-Irish, and the Royal Bank of Scotland in the hope that the pre-slump status quo could somehow be restored. So your average literary stuffed jacket, or pants-suit, tends to quietly cut characters such as Varadkar, Obama, and Cameron a huge amount of slack. As long as they give them things like a side of same-sex marriage to go with all those hungry schoolchildren and people sleeping in wet cardboard boxes. The same lit-libs who, should your criticism of things as they now are become too harsh, will leap to list off the (actually very short) list of good things people like ‘Barack’ and ‘Leo’ did while leading their respective countries, and then pull the sort of face one does while having a catheter inserted if you dare suggest some bit of communist craziness such as that, to pay for the Covid crisis, Ireland should consider increasing its notoriously low corporation tax rate from the current 12.5% to, say, 13% for the next five years. An increase of just 0.5%. Once the pain of the metaphorical catheter insertion passes from their hugely tolerant face, it will be replaced by the faraway, superior look of a 1980s Irish religion teacher trying to move past the appalling fact that one of their students just said the word “abortion”. Then they will look at you and say something like:“but you’ve always thought that, haven’t you.” It’s a variant of Mandy Rice-Davies’[iii] “He would say that, wouldn’t he.”
They offered similar responses if they thought one was getting irresponsibly enthusiastic about the movements around Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, or Syriza in Greece in 2015, or the successful anti-water privatisation movement in Ireland or, if they are that particular sort of American, the idea of Medicare for all or a minimum wage of $15 per hour. It’s a way of reducing what the person to their left is saying to a collection of perceived dogmas they no doubt think one has held to fanatically, like some dusty bedsit socialist ten commandments, since Arthur Scargill[iv] were a lad.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Marxism is something I spent several years actively trying to get away from. But couldn’t. Precisely because the ideas that dominate the mostly middle class poetry world, in which I have been immersed for two decades, are so absurd in comparison. It is precisely because of this lack of intellectual seriousness, which looks increasingly obscene set against events; not to mention its by product: the almost comical chancerism and opportunism which literary liberals call “networking”, that has led me to start acting and thinking in an overtly Marxist way again, since around or about 2014. The networking phenomenon lately reached possible apotheosis with one of Ireland’s premier literary resource organisations using its website to advise beginner writers to get a professional headshot taken and some business cards made. It went on to suggest new writers take a course with said organisation which would, among other things, help them in building their “brand” as a writer. Marx predicted capitalism would, in time, magic everything into a commodity. And now an Irish state funded arts organisation proves him right by overtly urging young writers to see themselves as commodities from the start. I am though a different kind of Marxist to the one I was thirty years ago, far less party orientated, far more concerned with the broader movement. I again have people all around the world who I consider comrades. People who, though their faults may be many, try to resist the current fashion for putting oneself up for sale at what usually turns out to be a pretty low price.
From about 2006 to at least 2012 I was what can best be described as a collapsed Marxist. Not collapsed (and also a little bit Marxist) in the sense that Brendan Behan sometimes was due to the presence of too little blood in his Champagne. Rather, still Marxist in the way I viewed the world but collapsed in the sense I could see no way of applying it to the stuff happening around and about me. Socialism, what little remained of it, appeared to have fallen in love with its own marginality. A good minority of those who remained on the socialist left on the eve of the global financial coronary of 2008 seemed to me to be oddballs and cranks who had nowhere better to be; or, at the very least, to have developed an excessive tolerance for such refugees from reality. This perception was hardened greatly by the fact that a couple of stage four literary cranks with leftist pretensions happened to operate right here in Galway. And the pre-2008 Left locally was only delighted to opportunistically clutch said oddballs to its haggard bosom.
Every time the Arts Council declined to fund some bit of pseudo-literary crankery – the sort of events to which no one turns up and then someone runs screaming out the door – the Left lined up to sign petitions and letters protesting this outrage. It was one of those classic romances between two lonelies, driven primarily by the fact that almost no else wanted to know either of them by that point. I know my reaction to it was excessive. It led me for a period to dismiss everything the Left, which at bottom was still my tribe, had to say. Hugo Chavez and Eva Morales[v] clearly weren’t to blame for weird letters every other week in the Connacht Tribune from minor poets with issues. Yet, in my mind, the two became conflated. My reaction did spring from material reality. I felt let down by the obvious stupidity of what was supposed to be, broadly speaking, my own side. Why should I believe a word they said about Venezuela or Bolivia or Iraq when they talked what I knew to be raw horseshit every other month in the local media, and online, about funding for the arts in Galway?
It wasn’t just little local neuroses that made Marxism seem inapplicable in the pre-2008 world of up, up and away capitalism. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his introduction to Marxist Literary Theory in 1997: “Marxism, then [after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991] was taken to be less disproved than discredited, out of the question rather than out of arguments.” This was the intellectual atmosphere in which, by then, twenty eight year old me, who’d spent 40% of his life as an active Marxist, began writing poetry. My first two poetry collections The Boy With No Face (2005) and Time Gentleman, Please (2008), which established me as a poet, whatever ‘established’ exactly means in this context, were both entirely written between 1996 and 2007, years when the neo-liberal strain of the capitalist virus was the only ideological infection in town. To such an extent that one hardly ever heard anyone saying the c word. Capitalism wasn’t a system particular to a time and place, in which we just happened to be living. Rather, it was just how things are, and how they would always be, like the Divine Right of Kings in seventeenth century France. Only more so. For in the mid seventeenth century Louis XIV[vi] for a time faced a formidable challenge across the Channel in the form of the republican government in England, in which the poet radical John Milton was an advisor and was commissioned by Oliver Cromwell to write Defensio Secunda, a pamphlet in defence of Parliamentary government. When I started writing poetry, even to say the word ‘capitalism’, or to write poetry which acknowledged said system’s existence marked one out as some sort of ex-Marxist peculiarity because if you knew the word capitalism you could only have been taught it by socialists. One felt like an alien. I remember attending an open-mic poetry reading at the Apostasy Cafe in Galway in 1998 and talking to an alluring young lady with a gold standard south of England accent. She informed me, without blinking once, that she and the then recently late Princes Diana shared the same astrological sign and that, as a result, she had a profound and personal connection with the late Princess’s soul. I said nothing. But looked at her and then around the room at the assembling crowd and knew that my ideas about the world would, to most people there, have seemed far more eccentric than hers.
Spanish Arch, Galway
These days, I often have a similar feeling of being a strange life form who has somehow landed in the Irish poetry world from another dimension. But I view the fact that I am now semi-detached, some days almost entirely detached, from Irish poetry, while also being in a sense part of its establishment, via the readings I co-organise, the reviews I write, and the workshops I run, as a radical success, and an outcome my much younger self would have enthusiastically endorsed. About eight years ago I began publishing more and more poems, especially contentious political poems, online, usually on political and news websites and blogs, places in which poetry is unusual. I couldn’t see the point waiting weeks or, more usually, months, for a journal editor to get back to me when the poem seemed to demand that it get out into the world more urgently than that. Plus, the internet now offered the possibility of thousands of readers for a poem, particularly through building a connection with people interested in political action as well as talk. In 2013, five years before the 8th Amendment was repealed here, I published my then new poem ‘Irish Government Minister Unveils Monument to Victims of Pro-Life Amendment’ on the website of Dublin Fingal TD, Clare Daly[vii], who has been a friend of mine since our time together in Militant. I wrote the poem shortly after the death of Savita Halappanavar who died after being refused an abortion in our local hospital, which you can see from our kitchen window. The poem has been re-published many times and in 2014 I was passing a small boarded up building at the very bottom of Quay Street in Galway and noticed that someone had, without my knowledge, made a poster of the poem and pasted it onto one of the boarded up windows. The fact that whoever it was went to the trouble of printing the poem out and pasting it there clearly meant that it spoke to them, independently of the gatekeepers who like to think they decide what poetry is. I was happy to bring poetry into the heat of what was then a contentious political battle. I could have sent this poem, which later appeared in my collection The Ghost In The Lobby, to Poetry Ireland Review or some other top magazine. But what would have been the point? I know that there are many poets who take the opposite view and think it better to be read by less people, if said people are of a ‘better quality’.
Walter Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists, who began as a movement of poets, that they sought to construct a literature where “the ‘best’ room is missing”. My grandmother’s house had a best room which always seemed cold because a fire was hardly ever lit in there. It was where her dusty fine China cups resided. When she had the Stations Mass in the house every few years, as was the custom at the time, the priest and the men were always served breakfast afterwards in that best room. These days when I pick up quality literary journals, or read the programmes of literary festivals that consider themselves ‘elite’, I think of my grandmother’s version of Walter Benjamin’s best room and update it to have some poet, who everyone else in that chilly little room agrees is marvellous – for that is the price of admission – taking the place of the priest. If the choice is to either have one’s poems pasted illegally on boarded up buildings or to be well thought of by those who inhabit that room, I’ll choose the former. Though, such binary choices aside, if you run a literary festival, or top magazine, and wish to invite me to dine, I will likely accept and my table manners will be impeccable. I will eat everything you put before me.
Increasingly, though, what first strikes me when I read contemporary poetry is not that it is either particularly good or particularly bad but that it mostly doesn’t matter. It is of course hugely important to the participants in the poetry networking game in the way that the Best Kept Garden competition is of great import to those residents of Midsomer[viii] who participate. Much contemporary poetry seems to me to be paralysed by an absurd respect for existing institutions and, in particular, the sacred institution of private property. This didn’t matter much in the pre-crisis years, when history was supposed to over and socialism in the cemetery. But it matters now. Most of a century ago, the French poet Paul Eluard, who was first a leading Surrealist then a committed Communist, wrote the following, the translation is by David Gascoyne:
Critique of Poetry
Of course I hate the reign of the bourgeois The reign of cops and priests But I hate still more the man who does not hate it As I do With all his might
I spit in the face of that despicable man Who does not of all my poems prefer this Critique of Poetry.
It is impossible to imagine any member of the self-selecting Irish poetry top table publishing such a poem. And the idea that such a poem would ever be allowed pour its glorious contempt from the main stage at any of our posher literary festivals is laughable. In the crisis years since 2008, literary festivals have, among other things, become places Irish Times readers go to be reassured that, despite Trump, despite Brexit, despite the yobbos of the anti-water charges movement, everything is going to be alright. Such gatherings are increasingly the intellectual equivalent of a pampering spa with a seaweed bath, places people with above average incomes – and sometimes sons and daughters of theirs who aspire to be writers – go to retreat from ugly realities and remind themselves how progressive they are.
There are recent poems which resist this trend. ‘The People Died’, from Dublin poet Karl Parkinson’s most recent book, Sacred Symphonies is a most blatant example:: “They died eating Coco Pops, and starting the day with an Actimel/…They died while tweeting lies about immigrants and queers/…They died jerking off to Tik Tok in their one bedroom council flat/…They died of cervical cancer they were told they did not have…” And then Parkinson takes fabulous aim at the current occupants of the best room: “You are the murderers of poetry: / your lines wait like creeps in alleyways, /… your stanzas so boring they make a glory of ironing…” It is those later lines that will most likely debar Parkinson from the room, though he is, in truth, generous in his judgement, for the typical literary networker is in all likelihood far more mercenary than the average creep in an alleyway. Working class poets will be allowed in, as long as they ditch barbed critiques of the Parkinson/Eluard variety, acquire an agent, and join what I call the My Old Man’s A Dustman school. The government funded bouncers who guard poetry’s best room quite enjoy non-threatening verse anecdotes about life among the lower orders, especially when told in a suitably charming inner-city accent.
Other poems, such as Jane Clarke’s ‘Who Owns The Field’, from her debut collection The River (Bloodaxe, 2015) and Ruth Quinlan’s ‘The Corrib Great Southern Hotel’ which appeared in the most recent edition of The Stinging Fly challenge the assumptions of the occupants of Irish poetry’s best room, particularly those who consider themselves to be in favour of equality, and are, as long as that equality remains entirely abstract and doesn’t get in the way of their quiet worship of those who own things. Clarke’s poem is influenced by Kavanagh, for sure. But, to me, the question it politely, but directly, asks has as much in common with the radical realism of 19th century French painters such as Millet:
Who Owns The Field
Is it the one who is named in the deeds
whose hands never touched the clay
or is the one who gathers the sheaves,
takes a scythe to the thistles, plants the beech, digs out the dockweed, lays the live hazel?
Most of those who dwell permanently in Irish literature’s best room will listen to this poem, while sipping sugary tea from a fine cup, and pretend they side, obviously, it goes without saying, with the one who “takes a scythe to the thistles”. In reality, if someone like this turned up at a poetry reading, their skin would crawl just a little. Even if he had the manners to leave his scythe at home. And if someone with such an obvious lack of bourgeois refinement were given a spot at a poetry open-mic to read one of his own poems, they would discover they urgently had to leave. As they swept out the door, probably sporting some sort of cloak with a Celtic design on it, they’d make a mental note to remind themselves to suggest at the next meeting of the arts organisation board they are a member of that “the one who is named in the deeds”, mentioned at the start of Jane Clarke’s poem, be invited onto said board as a representative of the “business community”. Quinlan’s ‘The Corrib Great Southern, 2020’ takes a look at the catastrophe sometimes imposed upon communities by “the one who is named in the deeds”. The Corrib Great Southern was a huge, successful hotel on the eastern outskirts of Galway City. It was originally one of a chain of state owned hotels. As well as being a hotel, its bar and restaurant were much used by people on Galway’s east side, which is not very well served in such matters. Then it was sold off because that was the Progressive Democrat[ix] thing to do. In 2007 it ceased to be a functioning hotel because the dashing local entrepreneur who bought it had better ideas. But then 2008 came and said entrepreneur was much in need of government help, which he got. But the Corrib Great Southern, which you can’t miss as you enter Galway via the Dublin Road, was left to rot. It is now to be demolished but its demolition has been delayed due to Covid. During its almost decade and a half of dereliction, it has been stripped of everything of value, and become a favourite haunt of arsonists:
The scavengers come, Egyptian plovers that pluck debris from between the teeth of this bloated, stranded reptile,
this grounded giant that bequeathed its wings as verdigris sails to the building next door. It has surrendered to waiting for death
by a hundred attempts at arson, until the inferno that cracks its bones back down to the rebar marrow.
Quinlan’s poem is an Irish ‘Ozymandias’. But unlike Shelley’s Ozymandias, whose power was so distant as to be beyond memory – the Pharaoh’s monument to himself sinking into the sand vainly shouting: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” – the developer genius who shut the Corrib Great Southern down in 2007 still stalks the business community like so many other zombies and has lately been chosen as the “preferred bidder” for Galway’s proposed new “Ceannt Quarter” on land currently owned by CIE[x]. This development may, apparently, include some “arts space”. Ruth Quinlan’s poem works in the negative, it doesn’t envisage alternatives, but it takes the first crucial step by graphically imagining this giant local symbol of the existing Fine Fail/Fianna Gael order going up in flames its owners brought upon it.
Most of the poems that have emerged from Irish poetry’s best room over the past decade imagine no such flames. It is a failure of the imagination, a sign in some cases of terminal decadence, that after more than a decade of economic and social crisis most ‘serious’ contemporary Irish poetry appears unable to imagine any possibility other than the ongoing rule of people like the aforementioned “preferred bidder”. For the most part, the question seems not to even cross its mind. The only explanation for this is a Marxist one: the literary wing of Ireland’s establishment, deep down in its faintly pumping heart, agrees that there is, in the words of the late Margaret Thatcher, no alternative. Yes, there will be occasional bleating about the need for better ethics legislation and the like. And poems about the undeniable sins and abuses of the Ireland of yesterdecade are available by the truckload. But when it comes to our actual present day rulers, people like the guy who made the Corrib Great Southern a place fit only for rats and arsonists, a hush falls over most of the distinguished occupants of Irish poetry’s best and, if truth were told, silliest room. The result is a lot of well written poems which mostly seem to me to be beside the point. Contemporary Irish poetry is very brave when it comes to kicking long dead Archbishops.
— Kevin Higgins – poet (@KevinHIpoet1967) April 9, 2021
Of course there is more than one way to get the occupants of the best room not-very-quietly grinding their teeth. While Karl Parkinson does so by reminding the assembled casual jackets and trousers suits just how conservative they really are, poets such as Rachel Coventry and Patrick Chapman do so primarily by appearing to reject the alleged interestingness – held sacrosanct in some of the best room’s better quality armchairs – of the lives and attitudes of the liberal humanists who infest academia, the arts, and ‘quality’ media, for whom having once been against Apartheid, or being for ending Direct Provision[xi], or Repealing The 8th Amendment, were/are less about overturning bourgeois society than about hopefully getting themselves invited on the Marian Finucane Show[xii] (RIP) and perhaps eventually being appointed as a member of the Arts Council by some ‘progressive’ future Minister, probably on the same day the government finally decides to cut the pretence and abolish corporation tax altogether, and to incentivise investment further by offering visiting Facebook executives complimentary use of high end sex workers dressed in Irish dancing costumes.
The North London squatters, heroin users, and lifestyle anarchists who largely populate Rachel Coventry’s debut Afternoon Drinking In The Jolly Butchers (Salmon, 2018) share one thing in common with the people in Karl Parkinson’s poems: if they came anywhere near one of Irish poetry’s quality armchairs, the Gardaí would be called. Coventry doesn’t romanticise – her portraits do not eschew brutality – but neither does she condemn by implying, as others would, that all the characters in her poems need to do to solve their lives is move to Tudor Lawn, and spend their evenings googling the cheapest possible car insurance. In her first collection at least, Coventry is closer to Baudelaire than she is to the aforementioned quality armchairs, the title poem brings to brilliant life the world of people most polite society considers “wasters”, and what’s more shows some of those wasters to be at least as intelligent as your average car insurance googler:
They tell me now each decision
opens a rift between this world and a possible one.
Even trivial stuff a tea or a latte splits us endlessly so now you and me as we turned out are galaxies apart from the last time we agreed the last time you asked me
shall we have another one?
In the late eighties and early nineties I lived a few miles up the road from Coventry, though I didn’t know her then, and participated in such discussions, though in those days my answer was always a political one because back then I knew everything. I can see the jukebox in that pub, I can taste the chicken and chips we’d get on the way back to someone’s gaff as our great debate continued. This poem made me miss the people I knew back there; and this is a rare thing, for such people hardly ever turn up in contemporary Irish poems, to which such hardened ‘wasters’ are, generally speaking, not admitted.
Ever since the publication of his early collections almost thirty years ago, Patrick Chapman has been quietly working to ensure his more or less permanent exclusion from the best room. An early collection was titled The New Pornography (Salmon, 1996). Clear evidence that Chapman, despite his gentle, unthreatening manner was a likely bringer of unseemliness rather than a potential poet-priest of the sort Official Irish Poetry is always on the lookout for. In a short poem from that collection Chapman disturbs the peace of post-Cold War liberal euphoria by writing in ‘The Communist’:
I am buying dead atlases – drawn up Before a port wine stain became our map – To stack them, thousands tall, Like bricks in some new Berlin Wall.
Back then, in their super-confident high summer of the 1990s, the liberal humanists could safely chuckle at such a piece of literary mischief. Now, given the considerable nostalgia for Stalinism in Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, and indeed elsewhere, the liberal humanist is less likely to chuckle than s/he is to start spluttering conspiracy theories about how Hilary was robbed by Putin and Putin’s evil side kick: Julian Assange. Chapman, though, is, like Coventry, more in the school of Baudelaire (with bit of JG Ballard thrown in to bring things up to date) than he is in the school of Brecht/Swift. His 2007 collection Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights (Salmon) is entirely made up of love poems, each of them written to a different person, and one of them titled ‘Mercy Fuck’. Chapman’s most recent collection Open Season On The Moon (Salmon, 2019) includes ‘Zen Strangler’:
to kill is an act of three perfect moves it takes rare precision to
execute in one instant the trained assassin must break the windpipe
there is no second attempt either the target is ended or not
a killing has no tenses no rhyme no season the master moves like
lightening strike be gone he cannot make a proper kill if he’s not
always prepared he sits in his Zen rockery all day everyday
meditating on the moment his hands are so attuned to even
the slightest flutter of a cherry petal…
The poem’s mockery of the Zen pretentions of many wealthy European and North American post-Christians is emphasised by the fact the poem is written as a series of Haiku (or near Haiku). After reading it, I closed my eyes and visualised Elon Musk reciting Chapman’s poem, while rattling a tiny tambourine, during his 4am daily meditation. Poetry’s best room is littered with ageing post-Christians who have a great fondness for eastern promise of the sort disturbingly, and brilliantly, lampooned by Chapman. He shouldn’t expect to be invited into the sanctum any time soon.
Dave Lordan is a rarity in Irish poetry, an open revolutionary socialist who is also a poet of sublime skills. His work combines the beautiful brutality of the Brecht/Swift school with the couldn’t-give-a-shit shrug of the Baudelaire school. Lordan’s first collection The Boy In The Ring (Salmon, 2007) won both the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Strong Award for Best first collection. In 2012, after the publication of his second book Invitation to a Sacrifice (Salmon, 2010), Lordan was awarded The Chair of Ireland Poetry Bursary. The title poem from his 2014 collection Lost Tribe of The Wicklow Mountains (Salmon, 2014) provided the lyrics for a song which featured on Christy Moore’s 2016 album Lily. Having won every award available to a new Irish poet, and also achieved a readership (and listenership) that stretched well beyond the usual, Lordan appeared to be on his way to being allowed rest his glutes in one of this fine armchairs.
Lordan’s initial mainstream success was a way literary Ireland could demonstrate the enormity of its own tolerance. But as the political situation here became more unstable with the emergence of the anti-water privatisation movement in 2014-16 – a movement which as well as defeating water charges also put an at least temporary stop to austerity – the tolerance of the arts libs was at an end. The alternative literature blog, The Bogman’s Cannon, which Lordan co-edited with Karl Parkinon throughout 2015 and 2016, relished in the (to us) thrilling new political situation. This provoked the raw hatred of many government funded arts liberals, and a few of those who aspire to be government funded. These people are, of course, all for equality as long as equality is something to be parcelled out to those in need of it by committees of people like themselves. But the anti-water charges movement was viewed by most arts libs as being a rather aggressive movement of smelly people which, like Republicanism in the North, needed to be put back in its box so that civilisation could continue. The way Lordan combined activist socialism of the non Ivana Bacik variety with the business of being a poet, made it essential he be ejected. It is a loss because it now means that the official list of best Irish poets now writing is basically a lie. But then such lists often are a lie. And Lordan’s exclusion from it puts him in esteemed company. The brilliantly innovative Scottish poet, Tom Leonard, author of the hilarious satire on the BBC ‘The Six O’Clock News’ (1970) was similarly not invited to sit at the top table for many years, before his death in 2018, for reasons that appear to be entirely political. American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), whose gloriously dismissive poem ‘More of A Corpse Than A Woman’ I often use in workshops, was a leading young poet of the 1930s but fell dramatically out of favour during the political witch-hunts of the late 40s and early 1950s because of her communist sympathies. Closer to home, Thomas Kinsella suddenly became much less famous after the publication in 1972 of his poem ‘Butcher’s Dozen’, an unceremoniously Swiftian attack on the Widgery Tribunal’s[xiii] obvious cover up of the massacre by the British Army of civil rights protestors in Derry. A giant historical example of such politically motivated marginalisation of a poet was that inflicted on John Milton after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Milton was jailed for a time and in serious fear of his life, given his role as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary during the Commonwealth, in which capacity he wrote the legal justification for the execution of Charles I. His great epic ‘Paradise Lost’, itself an allegory for the failure of his faction to turn England into a Republic, was published in an almost underground fashion in 1667. And the monarchists still haven’t forgiven Milton; as recently as 1936 that well known bestower of kisses on royal and high Anglican bottoms, T.S. Eliot, was arguing that Milton was a “bad influence” on the poets of subsequent centuries. Eliot pretended that his hostility to Milton was politically disinterested. Just like the high priests and priestesses of the (entirely government funded) best room today like to let on that their non-election of Lordan is a matter devoid of politics. It is in the company of such giants that Lordan’s poetry must eventually take its place. But for now the poetry quangocrats still wield their bit of power, like latter day Zhdanovs[xiv] , only with far inferior politics and without those superb buttoned jackets. Though there is dissent from the prevailing wish of most of the occupants of the best room that Lordan, and his poetry, should just cease to exist. Áosdána member and almost universally respected poet Thomas McCarthy recently had this to say:
I feel ashamed that he [Lordan] is not more widely celebrated. He really deserves to be. His is a very new voice, developing a new method, less attached to Auld Decencies and old venerable names in poetry but more attached to the pulsing, angry, precise moment; sometimes emotionally overwhelmed by the very choice of hard material, but overwhelmed in the best way as he’s dealing with new sensibilities in an exiled Joycean way; and new, detached, bleak insights into the sheer cruelty of Irish life and how this life has betrayed a generation – a generation of demotic provincials as well as the educated travelled young of the cities.
Another poet who has equivalent skills and similar politics to Lordan, though a somewhat milder poetic persona, is Ciarán O’Rourke, whose debut The Buried Breath was published by Irish Pages in 2018. O’Rourke is a more controlled, less brash, poet than Lordan. For me, the tone of some of his work calls to mind the surgical accuracy of great Eastern European poets such as Zbigniew Herbert or, at times, the fabulist lyricism of Neruda, rather than the louchness of Baudelaire or the brazen attempt to appeal to a wide non-literary public of writers of the Brecht/Swift school. O’Rourke is a profoundly literary poet. The Buried Breath includes translations of Virgil and Catullus and “variations” on poems by Rubén Darío, Antonio Machada, and Roque Dalton. On evidence of his poem ‘The Revolutionist’, if the Fine Gael[xv] wing of poetry’s best room, those now permanently attached to its grandest chairs, ever get to organise McCarthy style ‘investigations’ into poets suspected of being secretly okay with Ireland’s corporate tax rate being increased to 13%, O’Rourke can expect a subpoena:
And so I say the earth is beautiful,
and belongs like poetry or bread
to all of us, who despite love’s
poisoned battleground are believers still
in the pungent roots that smell like tears,
in the streaming grain or tomorrow’s skies,
in the billowing verb of the blood we share –
we who have faced the hungry future singing,
the earth belongs to all of us, like poetry, like bread.
There is a revolutionary call to, if not arms, then certainly action implicit in O’Rourke’s poem. This will not go down well among the shakers and movers in the room. And it’s not that they think revolution is impractical or utopian; it’s that the bulk of them don’t want to even begin imagining a time when “the earth belongs to all of us, / like poetry, like bread” because they think the earth, and poetry, should belong to people like them. The word “us” is used by the average poetry networker far less often than the word “me”. It would be wrong to say that such people have no politics at all, they do; mostly still subscribing to the pre-2008 mirage that, if only Ireland could have a few more tribunals of investigation into political corruption and past abuses by the church, then it might, as the IRA and the Catholic Church vanish, become something called a Modern European Democracy, which mostly seems to mean some imaginary version of Belgium or Denmark which exist only in the heads of Irish liberal humanists. This imaginary Modern European Democracy would continue to be a loyal colony of the European Union, loyally nodding its agreement to things like the starving of Greece into submission in 2015 and would be prepared to allow a few more of its citizens to die of Covid (possibly including me[xvi]) rather than go outside the EU structure and buy the Russian Sputnik vaccine. The Modern Democratic Ireland they imagine would also continue to gratefully present the annual bowl of shamrock to whatever corporate shill or assorted maniac inhabits the White House that St. Patrick’s Day. Most crucial of all its corporate tax rate would remain – for all eternity world-without-end Amen – 12.5%, and a lot less for Google.
The work of contemporary Irish poets such as Parkinson, Quinlan, Coventry, Chapman, Lordan, and O’Rourke has helped me stay, to some extent, sane as I have moved ever further away from poetry’s best room over the past decade. Revolutionary songs such as Dominic Behan’s ‘McAlpine’s Fuseliers’ and Moving Hearts’ ‘No Time For Love’ have also been a sustaining resource. For me, they are two of the best Irish political poems since the Second World War. Similarly, working with my poetry workshop groups has been a great source of sanity retention. Whatever their subject, there is something inherently liberating, revolutionary even, about the first few breakthrough poems a poet writes. Though that revolution will slowly be overthrown if, having become aware of its existence, the poet decides they must do what needs to be done, say what needs to be said, to get into the best room. I have also found valuable allies among the dead, who have one huge advantage: they never argue back. Particularly crucial in this regard have been the examples of my personal hero Swift, Bertolt Brecht, and of on my zanier, more disgraceful, days, Andre Breton and Baudelaire.
During that time some first rate new Irish poets have established themselves and being given their due recognition. A standout is Ailbhe Darcy who in her T.S. Eliot Award nominated second collection Insistence (Bloodaxe, 2018) – particularly in her formally audacious twenty page poem ‘Alphabet’ – is prepared to at least countenance the entirely plausible notion that we just might all be doomed:
We are not doomed yet juggle the numbers
some of us are doomed but not the 3 of us
or not the three of us just yet
or maybe 1 of us, the smallest,
the 1 of us still learning numbers,
who doesn’t know what 2 of us are keeping to ourselves…
The spiky wit that is Martina Evans has, since the publication of her The Windows of Graceland: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2016), begun to get something like proper acknowledgment. She writes brilliantly about things like having a tooth rather brutally pulled and lowers the tone in a way of which I entirely approve by giving her poems titles such as ‘Fine Gael Form a Coalition Government with Labour, March 1973’. In many ways Evans is the poet Paul Durcan could still be, if he hadn’t spent since around 1989 slowly becoming a poetic teddy bear for Conor Cruise O’Brien[xvii] fans who can’t decide between voting Green and converting to Anglicanism, and are hoping Fintan O’Toole will give them some spiritual guidance on the matter.
Elsewhere, new reputations are inflated by the incessant behind the scenes puffing of the best room’s Lord and Lady Archbishops. In the words of Alexander Pope: “Slight is the subject, but not so the praise”. The new poets go up like helium balloons only to wait to be replaced by the next helium balloon who’ll be along soon. And this is by no means an exclusively Irish phenomenon. In January, liberal humanists worldwide were brought to a state of simultaneous almost orgasm by the poem Amanda Gorman recited at the Biden inauguration. The New Yorker called Gorman’s poem “a stunning vision of democracy”. Jane Hirschfield got altogether more carried away, saying:
“The Hill We Climb felt to me just the perfect answer for this moment, its needs and its questions…New politics need new persons, and new poets…Amanda Gorman has invented something new here and in earlier poems, a kind of hybrid form: half poem, half spoken essay (a word that means, first, “to try” and has to do with thinking your way forward sentence by sentence). Her writing sits at a cloverleaf intersection, moving between lyric intensity and interiority, spoken-word and hip hop’s combination of fluid rhyming and fierce examination of the world around us, and carrying the benevolence, eloquence, and hope-offering that can come from both podium and pulpit (at their best).”
Well, indeed. Objectively, ‘The Hill We Climb’ is a rhythmical collection of warmed over Obamaesque platitudes; devoid, so far as I could see, of one single original metaphor or simile: “we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. / We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first / put our differences aside”. It goes on. But you get the idea. The politics underpinning it are also banal in that it seems to imply, and more than imply, that all America now needs do is return is to business as usual as it was between 2008-16, when Barack Obama presided over the largest ever transfer of wealth upwards from the pockets of the 99% into the bank accounts of the 1%. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos[xviii] in 2013, Obama himself agreed that “95% of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1% of the earning population”. But none of this matters because Gorman now has a modelling contract and has been interviewed for Time magazine by Michelle Obama.
In the past, the saving grace the occupants of poetry’s best room could claim for themselves was that they and they alone were a kind of insurance against bad political poetry which was all and only about being on message. No more. The inauguration poem was every bit as bland as the poetry promoted by Commissar Zhdanov in his heyday and, if truth were told, probably a little worse. But from the best room it provoked mostly liberal humanist cheers or, in a few cases, silence, because, to paraphrase the character CJ from the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin[xix], they didn’t get where they are by publicly contradicting Jane Hirshfield.
Stranded in this strange world, what then is one to do? Keep going in the opposite direction. In the autumn of 2014 I received a Facebook message from Rhona McCord, who then worked for one of the left wing TDs in Leinster House. She jokily asked me where my poem about the exploding anti-water charges movement was? I started writing and the result was ‘Irish Air: Message From The CEO’, a modest proposal in which an apparently insane government spokesperson outlined plans to start charging people for air. The poem was shared on his Facebook page by MEP Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan[xx] on the morning of one of the huge anti-water charges demos and went almost viral. It later appeared in my New & Selected Poems. In 2015, the day after Ed Miliband’s defeat by David Cameron in the UK general election a visiting friend read from his phone that Tony Blair had an article in that Sunday’s Observer newspaper arguing that UK Labour need to move back to the centre ground i.e. to be more for colonial wars and protecting the interests of the haves and the have mores than they already were. I said that I would rather make love to John Prescott[xxi], a large man who is not my type, than read Blair’s article. Then I posted a comment to that effect on Twitter. Danny Morrison, the former Sinn Féin publicity director and spokesman for Bobby Sands during his hunger strike, replied that me declaring my preference for being taken by Lord Prescott, if the alternative was reading what Tony Blair had written, belonged in a poem. I subsequently wrote ‘Blair’s Advice’, a poem which spoke in the voice of the sort of deranged pro things-as-they-were-in-1997 centrist who has been a permanent fixture on the political scene of late. The poem was published on The Bogman’s Cannon, where I was satirist-in-residence at the time. It also appeared on the UK based site Socialist Unity. Within a few days The Morning Star newspaper got in touch to ask if they could also publish it. And then when it appeared there, the Irish Times asked it they could run the poem, and a short piece about it, on their online pages. In accepting Rhona McCord and Danny Morrison’s suggestions/challenges to write the poems that became ‘Irish Air: Message From The CEO’ & ‘Blair’s Advice’ I was doing the opposite of what Seamus Heaney once famously did. It was with Danny Morrison that Heaney had the exchange on a train during the dirty protests, which preceded the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes, that is infamously poeticised in Heaney’s poem ‘Flight Path’:
So he enters and sits down
Opposite and goes for me head on.
‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write
Something for us?’ ‘If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’
And that was that. Or words to that effect.
Seamus Heaney
In the book of interviews with Heaney, Stepping Stones by Dennis O’Driscoll, published in 2009, Heaney admits: “I make the speaker a bit more aggressive than he was at the time.” Such exaggerations are what poets do. All of us. For us that is not a sin. Though our victims may not always see it that way. In a 2006 interview with Gavin Esler on the BBC to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of his debut collection Death of A Naturalist, Heaney had this to say about his tendency to resist giving support to any given political cause: “Once a writer is levied or enlisted you have lost your self respect, which is a writer’s only passport to the future”. There are different ways in which a poet can be enlisted, though. Almost every major English speaking political corpse this side of Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa has chosen to publicly quote Heaney’s “hope and history” line. That is not his fault. But it is proof that, despite wishing to maintain one’s political neutrality, one can be enlisted nevertheless. Not writing poems “for us” can lead to a poet being co-opted by them.
Since 2014, I have written many poems which are “for us” rather than for them. But I am not worried about becoming a party hack. A good section of the left least is at least suspicious of me, for the shots I took at them in poems between 2008 and 2014. But when I write what Dave Lordan has called “interventionist poems” I don’t write poems to support particular little political factions. I write them to support, and just as importantly to record, the progressive movements of our time. The Repeal the 8th Amendment movement, the Ant-Water Charges movement, the Corbyn movement, the Bernie movement, Black Lives Matter, the radical end of the Extinction Rebellion movement, and whatever comes next.
The occupants of Irish poetry’s best room are most of them pretty clearly enlisted in the broadly centrist faction who’d like things to calm down and to see some decorum restored to our public discourse so that Eamon Ryan and Joan Burton no longer get laughed at on Twitter. I have no such desire for calmness or decorum. Indeed, my satirical poems aim to make the laughter louder and, hopefully, a little more stylish. I still write many poems which are not at all overtly political. But many of them are far too disgraceful to be considered applications to be let into the best room.
I am happy where I am. The last few years have been politically thrilling times. And the chance to respond to them in poems has been a dark joy. Covid times have been particularly tough for me, though. One of my favourite things in the world is poetry world gossip. It’s one of the things I have most missed. And it’s just not the same online. I look forward to the next few years when I fully expect most of the little liberal poets, every one of them desperate for an invitation to read one of their poems to the President of somewhere, to slowly turn into the late Marion Finucane, still kicking the occasional dead Archbishop every so often as they go, just to prove how edgy they are. Respected pillars of things as they absolutely must be (above all our unmentionably holy 12.5% corporate tax rate). Or, if they are too male for their atrophy to take that particular physical form, they’ll likely become versions of the guy who entered Neachtains Bar in Galway about thirty five years sporting a big ‘left wing’ beard with a good dose of grey in it. Teenage me was there with a slightly older friend who turned and whispered: “that guy probably thinks he’s a Trotskyist but also thinks that, right now, the best we can hope for is Garret Fitzgerald[xxii].” The next few years are, in the words of Miranda’s[xxiii] mother, going to be “such fun!” I can’t wait.
[i] Trotskyist organisation which worked inside the Irish & UK Labour Parties, particularly during 1970s & 80s
[ii] Member of Margaret Thatcher’s later governments
[iii] Welsh-born model best known for her her role in the Profumo affair, which discredited the Conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963
[iv] President of the UK National Union of Mineworkers during their 1984-5 strike
[xxii] Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) for much of 1980s who presided over mass unemployment, austerity, the return of emigration, and attempted liberal social reforms
[xxiii] Main character in eponymous UK television comedy farce 2009 onwards
The first point to note about the post modernists nonsense is that it has encouraged a distrust of the truth and an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, wherein any old argument, or moral position, is accorded equal weight.
