You’ve lived beyond your relevance—
Another song, another age,
Another line while in a trance,
Routine by prompt, an empty stage.
The art lives past the life, and all
They want is what you did when young,
The bright first thing, the curtain call,
When fireworks flew and bells were rung.
Yet still the audience appears.
The props are now collectible,
But all creation’s in arrears,
And art is imperfectible.
A shiver slices to your core.
Your fans will get the eulogy
Before you end the trilogy
You started many years before:
A snowball with a granite shard,
The encore to an emptied hall,
The dance all done, the classics played.
Back then it was not so hard
To be the major act, enthrall
Your fans, at least the ones who stayed.
A fad will rise, a bubble pop
With the slightest touch. The greatest hits
Came out before you called it quits,
And “timeless love” was set to stop.
You won the day but lost the war,
Remembered as the one who did
That thing, you know, the thing he did,
The thing he does for one more tour,
The thing he did, the thing he did before.
Feature Image: The Chimera, by Louis Jean Desprez, 1777-1784. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Well, here’s a pile of puke on a bank of snow,
Yoga-pants-purple, budget-cocktail-blue,
Lava lurid as a toy volcano,
Day-glo confetti frozen stiff as glue.
The fire hydrant’s calked in hardened gum.
A Phillies Blunt’s in a bottle of Pepsi
Inside a purple Shark Week Slurpee,
And it looks like someone pissed all over them.
A ghost-ship umbrella is partway jammed
In the snow heap’s side; its tattered black sail
Of nylon flutters; a stroller is crammed
Into a dumpster nearby. I’m stuck, a snail
Inside a crusted, slowly draining tank.
The chill in me is deeper than I’d like,
My pockets packed with lint, the blue snowbank,
Spiked with pink spokes of a Barbie bike.
Lingerie spills from a cast-off backpack.
The neon tubes are dismal, dark at dawn:
DRAFT BEER now drab, the BAR sign simply black,
Latimer Deli’s knife-steel grate still down.
The stained-glass windows of McGlinchey’s Bar
Are dead. The only thing that holds a light
That’s real is melting snow, the run of bright
Rills altering to echoes in the sewer.
Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.
It is high time we re-examined how the government is being advised to bring the population to the promised land of ‘living with the virus.’ At this stage other forms of advice should be sought. Presumably the government is already receiving significant inputs from the business sector, but other important viewpoints are not part of the conversation.
Dr Billy Ralph was even more critical of the damage that had been done to the fabric of Irish society over the course of the pandemic:
Policies were adopted by an unelected government on the erroneous advice of experts listening to other experts, who predicted an enormous death toll from Covid-19 that has not come about anywhere on the globe. These same experts are now doubling down on initial errors and inflicting incalculable harm on the delicate fabric of society.
Image (c) Barry Delaney.
Meanwhile, prompted by warnings from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that 85,000 could die over the course of the pandemic photographer Barry Delaney revealed the grim foreboding he felt back in March:
The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.
This proved a false alarm, but it gave way to a period of creative impotence in his photographic practice:
As lockdown eased more and more people descended to summer in Dun Laoghaire around the Forty Foot. To swim, to escape, to even have fun in our new Covid world.
Gradually I began to photograph this migration, at first people were cautious, masked, socially distancing on the newly opened beach, but as May turned to July people began to summer properly. The beaches became crowded, like normal, not the new normal; no one wore masks. The virus didn’t spread outdoors, or so we believed.
Image (c) Barry Delaney
Classicist Ronan Sheehan, meanwhile, drew attention to the etymology of the terms in common use during the pandemic:
Epidemic: from Greek ἐπί epi ‘upon or above’ and δῆμος demos ‘people.’
Pandemic: from Greek πᾶν, pan, ‘all’ and δῆμος, demos, ‘people.’
Virus: from Latin ‘poison, slime, venom.’
Vaccine: from the Lain ‘vacca,’ meaning cow, a named conferred by Louis Pasteur in honour of Edward Jenner who pioneered the concept by using cowpox to inoculate (mid-15c., ‘implant a bud into a plant,’ from Latin inoculatus, past participle of inoculare ‘graft in, implant a bud or eye of one plant into another,’) against smallpox.
Exponential: from Latin exponere ‘put forth.’
David Langwallner continued his Public Intellectual Series with an account of the English radical historian E. P. Thompson:
His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies.
We have entered a dark era dominated by the religious right, involving literal and historical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. A return to eighteenth century values is upon us, including the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, neglecting to remember that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, if that. Let’s not forget that the United States required a Civil War to end the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery that was not even mentioned in that document, apart from in the three-fifths clause that represented a African-American slaves as three-fifths of a white person for electoral purposes, in order to maintain a balance between slave and non-slave owning states.
We received two submissions from underwater photographer Daniel McAuley that month, the first featured shipwrecks, which become reefs:
With the combination of a long history of maritime traffic and often quite ferocious seas, it comes as no surprise that the Irish coastline is strewn with shipwrecks, many of which date back hundreds of years. Each one provides a fascinating porthole on a bygone age, telling stories that are often of historical significance, as well as allowing divers a chance to encounter what are often quite intriguing new environments for marine life.
The next introduced us to the seals living along the Irish coastline, now threatened by fishermen disturbed by a competitor as over-fishing reduced catches.
The playful nature of seals reminds any snorkeler of a dog looking for affection from its owner. So listening to news stories where people are saying the best solution to the problems afflicting the fishing community is to take a high powered rifle to these playful creatures filled me with rage and frustration around the management of our coast, and what the future holds for it.
I’ve been passionate about music from an early age, and my love of the post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation found a crossover with the further reaches of sonic exploration coming from the Fine Art approaches to sound as a sculptural medium. I then discovered improvised music and was smitten. The possibilities just seemed wide open. There was a directness and a simplicity that was really appealing. It was also a much quicker route to producing music by sidestepping years of training. Of course, it’s not just musical ability you bring to the table, it’s imagination and intelligence too.
By DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0.
In poetry Kevin Higgins appears to have been inspired by the forthcoming elections:
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
donated by a casino owner who knows people
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
because it was the only available metaphor for hair
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
against an old coat with holes in it.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
While Ernest Hilbert mused on ‘Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,’:
The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
Into the restaurant. The manager’s
Frantic, alone today. The line’s
Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.
I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.
The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?
Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
Here, drip some in my drink. See this?
Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.
Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,
Shed their imperial haute couture—
Already in sweatpants, they hail their cabs
Behind the Grand Palais before
Applause dies down inside around
The vacant runway. Afternoon sunlight’s
Lambent overhead on friezes of Lutetian Limestone.
Violinists grimace at their scores—
Haydn, Hollywood, the B’s and Broadway hits,
Rehearsal house-lights hard above,
Rosin fine as cocaine settling on the boards.
They’re not arrogant. They’re bored.
They’re paid to make the beauty go.
Why else? We all make beauty pay.
Gourmands’ are all aglow as it arrives—
Voila, another flambé. Cherries, drenched
In century-old brandy, burn like coals.
The waiter itches to check his phone. He grins.
I’m given to hyperbole, I know,
But something’s got to me. It’s all around.
You have to learn to make it pay you back.
The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
Into the restaurant. The manager’s
Frantic, alone today. The line’s
Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.
I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.
The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?
Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
Here, drip some in my drink. See this?
Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.
Crypt
The cities burn above me as I sleep.
I’m walled by trophies looted long ago
Along the routes of conquest, centuries
Of funereal remains, gold that’s dimmed
By dust and bound by web, as valueless
As the dirt that slowly takes it back again.
I wake and wonder where I am. I move
My arm and bottles clink. I raise my head
Enough to see I must have drunk them all.
I’m underground. I know because the light
That works like stars in chinks is far
Above me. Even in this dusk I find
There’s something left inside a bottle here.
Sitting up, I take a swallow and get it down
Before I choke, and spit out warm urine.
I half-remember falling off the edge
Of the world. Then nothing else. I barely breathe,
The air’s so thick and sapped of oxygen,
A gas of churned-up worms and sporous loam.
I want to learn the way back up. I try
To name the things I see—sextants, I-Phones.
An avian chorus summons me. What years
Have gone? I fall toward sleep again. The soil becomes
A lake that’s darker than the night. My dreams
Are long as centuries, of wars and new words,
All telling me “you are gone,” but I’m still here,
Curled up, and cold, in my crown of amethyst.
Apollinaris, Medicus Titi Imperatoris hic Cacavit Bene
I check my e-mail. There’s nothing there for me.
I check the wall. Not much, some recipes
I’ll never cook, some boasts, some oaths, some jokes,
Advice, little different from graffiti
Scrawled on Roman stone two thousand years ago,
Small bursts of unofficial human hopes,
And on we go, unchanged, forever griping
Era to era—it’s almost comforting—
Election slogans packed in ash at Pompei,
Billboards on the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek,
Winged lions tagged on the Great Enclosure,
Signs of the Khufu Gang left in Giza,
So many words, like air exhaled to air,
Like tiny helium hearts escaping
In a delirium of approval up a wall,
Or displeased emperor’s thumb aimed down.
In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.
In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.
The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.
And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.
As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower (1928), ‘Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul’; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; ‘And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.’
Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’
New Year
At the beginning of 2020, I’d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.
Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.
A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth ‘because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.’
One senses here a Yeatsian slight disdain for a modern radio audience. Or could he have felt as George Orwell imagined the poet feels ‘On the air’: ‘that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’? Surely, Yeats cannot have hoped that his ideal reader or audience would be listening, that freckled fisherman in grey Connemara cloth whom he imagined in ‘The Fisherman’(1919): ‘A man who does not exist, | A man who is but a dream’.
What struck me most about Yeats’s reading was its incantatory style. Before he started, he was careful to explain: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis on their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it….It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse, the poems that I am going to read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’
I can’t imagine that many poets today would read with quite Yeats’s emphasis on the rhythm, and even a hundred years before Yeats’s reading, William Hazlitt in 1823 could express suspicion of ‘a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.’
That said, I was at first somewhat disappointed when I heard Seamus Heaney read out his poems in such a casual, almost faltering, manner, at a literary festival to which I was once taken in my youth. It didn’t quite match my expectations from the work I had read alone to myself, and it was certainly nothing like the crackly elevated recordings I had heard of Wallace Stevens, or even Tennyson and Browning, which retain something of that still, small voice I seem to hear in the poems I love.
It was also something of a revelation working with Paul Curran a couple of years ago, making a recording of him reading out some poems of mine for a radio documentary. As we sat under duvets in the improvised studio of a back bedroom of the producer’s house, I was taken aback by the care with which Paul was able to draw out nuances of meaning during repeated takes of the same poem. I knew I would have to smarten up my act at future poetry readings.
But, then, Paul Curran is an actor as well as a poet. You should be able to hear him read a couple of his poems on the Cassandra Voices website soon.
To be honest, I am slightly suspicious of the strongly performative element of a lot of contemporary poetry. Poetry is not quite rap or folk song. And why get some actor to read out your poems, when it’s so endlessly fascinating to hear the poet herself read her work?
I would say that my work’s shape on the page is as important as its shape in my ear as I mumble it out during the often-long hours of composition. Its heritage is, after all, a literate and courtly one, when manuscripts might be passed around a small readership, to be read aloud perhaps in coterie groups. Of course the roots of that tradition are ultimately in folk song and ancient incantation.
All poems are complimented by compelling imagery, mostly from the photographic library of Arts Editor Daniele Idini, and I am looking forward to hearing many of these poems, hopefully, read out or recited by their poets so that we can make audio files available for you too.
Edward Clarke is Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. To submit a poem for consideration e-mail Edward@cassandravoices.com
