When I’m Allowed Leave The Cancer Ward with thanks to Claire Higgins for four of these lines
When I get out of here
I plan to open a factory
that manufactures miniature guillotines
which will be given away gratis
to bullied schoolchildren
to keep hidden in their bedrooms
until I give the signal.
When I get out of here
I plan to finally take that evening class
in Industrial Espionage for Beginners
where I’ll learn to break into laboratories
to steal the antidotes
to Elon Musk and
Ursula von der Leyen.
When I get out of here
things will be given their proper names;
the centre of every town re-titled
Oppression Square, during a ceremony
in which the Mayor (or someone prepared
to dress up as the Mayor)
tells the truth about who died,
how, and why.
Worst of all,
I’ll start a new Irish Literary Awards
to be held annually at an imaginary hotel.
Categories will include: least authentic
poetry collection, most intellectually empty
novel, most cowardly book review,
publisher who made the biggest
eeijt of themselves this year,
most over obvious networker,
most irrelevant but self-important
anthology, most incestuous
“My Books of The Year” list
in which the author chooses
pals who’ve all given him
fab reviews too.
And you’ll sit there constricting
the exact same muscle
Auntie Mary did when she was in fear
someone was about to take
the Archbishop’s name in vain.
Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual after Nazim Hikmet
You will go far young person
if as soon as you enter this building
you follow standard operating procedures
and stop thinking altogether.
We will do the thinking for you.
For the more intellectually curious of you
this will be as difficult initially
as nailing yourself to a chair.
But the appropriate doses
of the right sort of alcohol will ease
you into it.
Before long, you’ll find yourself
not thinking a thing.
In your lunch break, you’ll write poems
that are secretly okay with NATO
and won’t know where they came from.
But we’ll know,
and that’s all that matters.
We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
from which you can choose your opinions,
which we’d like you to massage
so they seem different at first
but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.
For there is no opinion worth having
that someone in here hasn’t already had.
You will be in favour of all the right wars
without having to sweat the niceties
and put the appropriate flag
on your Twitter handle
without us ever having to mention it.
You have no idea yet
the thoughts we have in store for you.
I have been away toasting tables lined
with the pricier variety of imbecile;
humouring old buzzards in Aran sweaters
and cranky caps
until their sweaters collapsed
threadbare off their bastard backs.
I have cut ribbons for guys
floating balloons across the town square
and calling it dance.
I have eaten with people of enormous importance
and forgotten most of their names.
I did not shrivel like the rest of them.
Though they thought they had me
I was not bought and sold at the market stall
where you can get (third hand)
Fianna Fail senators cheaper
than Mayo flags two weeks after
an All Ireland defeat.
I am again what I was before
and secretly always was
though I sometimes had to hide it.
I did not kill the dream I dreamt with those others
not all of whom made it this far.
Tonight I consult their ghosts.
Feature Image: Higgins and Ivana Bacik campaigning during the 2011 presidential race.
Kevin Higgins’s sixth poetry collection under the sardonic title Ecstatic starts with a dedication to the recently married Julian and Stella Assange, and this initial gesture is a perfect set-up for the poetic world we are about to enter.
Prepare to be disillusioned, experience embarrassment for your government, mourn the death of journalism (and common sense at large), only to get to the core of the human condition and be inspired to choose love over gold, fear and power.
Ecstatic is your reality check and a test to face the truth, however ugly, without a flinch. Just like a wedding ceremony in a London high-security prison, in Higgins’s poems our life becomes a celebration of humour, devotion and the beautiful mundane in confinement of global politics and oppressive social circumstances.
The collection opens with the figurative lines: ‘The dread of being together / forcing us back to sleep’. And from there we are continuously forced to wake up and examine the world, look attentively at things that disconnect us, even if it is painful.
This book is asking the reader to question not just their biased views, but the nature of thinking itself.
Kevin Higgins is the Daniel Kahneman of poetry, human behavior and judgement are scrutinized through the lens of his uncompromising language. Sharp as a razorblade, not a line missing, his poems are full of what could be idiomatic phrases but are actually invented by the author: ‘no one hates Holocaust denial more / than the old woman who runs a bed and breakfast / five miles from Auschwitz.’
These harsh truths could be overheard in an honest conversation between two old friends in a local pub, but instead they are now made available to a large audience of readers. We are dealing with the author brave and authentic enough to balance on the edge and take the risks to preserve the integrity of true art, so rare in our conformist times.
Occasionally, it leaves you wondering if the expressions so easily coined all throughout the collection have always been part of colloquial speech, which might be the highest achievement for a poet. Being so close to the vernacular, that at times their voice is hardly distinguishable from that of the people.
That being said, while perfectly attuned to the national discourse, Kevin’s poetry remains culturally multi-layered and intellectually challenging, often metaphysical. With the focus on Higgins’s signature ruthless satire, this collection will make you laugh, bitterly and loudly, and you will hate yourself for it.
Immune to inertia, his wit will keep you on your toes. From absurdist poems verging on the surrealist aesthetic (‘Not time yet / to commit suicide again…’) to the beautifully shameless and staggeringly funny erotica (‘Her spine is a repossessed grand piano / you still play to yourself in your sleep’), this eclectic collection covers a surprisingly broad range of subjects. Its structure develops from the specific to the general, as an extensive metaphor for inductive reasoning.
We are allowed to take a peek at images of personal history, masterfully conveyed childhood memories in Coventry, 1973; share private yet universal grief for lost friendships; embrace the inevitability of aging and sickness; and tenderly reflect on how our lovemaking changes as we grow older.
Via the domesticity made precious and exhilarating, this collection teaches us to be vulnerable and aware of how fragile we are and how little time we have left.
What gives it a special depth are incredibly lyrical poems with the mental imagery of lungs and breath, trees and leaves. Together they create an almost therapeutic effect, like a blues song that helps relieve emotional tension.
This sublime landscape of a rich individual inner experience comes in stark contrast to the social and environmental issues explored further on, and the entire poetic impulse of the book erupts into an anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial sequence concluding with a merciless poem called ‘Past’ that can be read to relate to both a particular life and the chronicle of humanity.
As a poet, on a personal and societal level Higgins is fighting the battle that can’t be won, and he knows it. Nonetheless, this is his job and Kevin proceeds with courage and self-irony to expose hypocrisy in ourselves and our communities.
In ‘Serial Killer Dies’ we are once again reminded of the corrupt nature of any government and our suicidal tendency to let the psychopaths in power decide our destiny; there is no hesitation in it to call things what they are.
Many poignant lines from other poems will stuck with the reader for long and will be widely quoted without doubt, such as ‘someone dies of politically necessary starvation’, or the tragically accurate commentary on the George Nkencho’s resonating case: ‘coming at Gardai with a chemical imbalance, / what some people are calling a machete / and a totally inappropriate post code…’.
For me, as a Russian-born Irish resident, who writes in English, Ecstatic offered consolation and understanding, as well as leading me to acceptance of the familiar world crumbling down time and time again.
I spent my childhood on Coventry Street in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), which is no longer twinned with the English city over the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Now that those links of solidarity are gone due to the psychotic unjustified actions of one man (and criminal complicity of others), severing an eighty-year connection of two hero cities heavily bombed during the Second World War along with thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives, Kevin Higgins’ sixth collection emphasizes even more that there is so much in common between ordinary people of different nationalities and such an unthinkable abyss between us and the ruling class.
The lies and agendas we are buying into, the false narratives and propaganda imposed on us are always a mass product, whereas ‘Truth is a paper-cut / no one but you knows is there.’
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The well made poem puts on its dicky bow,
walks to the top of the hill,
and has what it calls an epiphany.
The well made poem sees every side of the argument,
except those proscribed by the BBC.
The well made poem has between
twelve and twenty five lines,
all roughly the same length.
The well made poem worries
about Afghanistan (and before that
Vietnam) only when the situation there
might lead to the whole idea
of the well made poem
being vaporised
by a device left at the side of the road.
The well made poem plans to bury
GK Chesterton, William Wordsworth, Sir John Betjeman
and, eventually, Sir Andrew Motion
under its sparkling new patio.
The well made poem never mentions
the puppy processing factory
it knows you own, or your preference
for televised inter gender wrestling.
The well made poem believes
nuclear weapons are necessary
to keep poems like it safe
from all the rough language
gathered ungovernable at the border
forever threatening to invade it.
Feature Image: “Baker Shot”, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test by the United States at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Feel free to turn up (or not)
wearing a full suit of armour,
or a hat with a big feather in it
and transparent trousers;
or to come dressed as a future
Bishop of Cork and Ross,
or as the prophet Isaiah’s
discredited older brother.
But this march is no wild ground
on which entrist dandelions
or buttercups will be allowed grow.
The Committee permits
no placards or literature
of a factional variety.
Most egregious those
with crazy words on them,
like “people before profit”.
So as not to put off
those not necessarily
in favour of people
(nor at all against profit)
our gathering will resemble
less a revolution
than a church group
on its way somewhere
to pray for a cure
for rheumatism,
or even better,
no cure;
so we can stand here
in increasing discomfort,
become such fixtures
even well behaved
dogs from Dun Laoghaire
start anointing
our legs as public conveniences.
My Approach to Literary Networking after Francois Villon
Most days I’d rather be bundled
into the courthouse between
two hairy policemen,
with a highly debatable anorak
dragged over my face, and
blamed for killing Kirov –
the crowd lobbing big thick
spits and battering the van
as I’m carted off –
or be stopped at the Canadian border
travelling on a makey up Polish passport,
the remnants of a Dutch industrialist
and what I think was his second wife settled
unhappily in my glove compartment;
or attend my mother-in-law’s funeral
having been fitted with a wooden nose
because (everybody knows)
the other one fell off due to
third stage syphilis;
than ghost about the joint provoking
nods from gabardine coats
of great import and longevity,
grunts of approval
from fully clothed minor male poets.
Feature Image: Joseph Stalin and Sergei Zhadanov at the funeral of Sergei Kirov in December, 1934 (unknown author).
Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream.
Illegal for them to lick it.
Fine to bake granny
a gleaming fruit cake,
as long as you only email her
a high resolution photo of it.
Okay to give your son or daughter
a bright new football.
Illegal for them to kick it.
Permissible to purchase for yourself
a new set of golf sticks or a tennis racket.
Illegal to hit anything with them
outside the confines of your own
downstairs bathroom.
You can’t have a friend around for a meal
unless both of you have been
fitted with gum shields.
And should you go for a socially distanced walk
with a lover
butt-plugs are now mandatory.
Every living room is its own flat-pack factory
singing the happy song of us,
hammering together our coffins.
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.
It’s been difficult finding the words to express my worsening mood and deepening depression. I’m referring specifically to my subconscious responses to altered public behaviour and the marks left by social reaction to Covid-19. For the first time in my life, I’m noticing increasing anxiety and, with the stress, a direct link to declining health. I’ve been struggling with this worsening dynamic over the last month or two, trying to get to grips with it. Trying to better understand its cause. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
2/7/1986 President Reagan with William F Buckley in the White House Residence during Private birthday party in honor of President Reagan’s 75th Birthday
on the other hand, is hardly even capitalist in outlook. It is really an offshoot of a more authoritarian leftism combined with a fundamentalist, morally self-righteous neocolonialism informed by ‘Christian’ values. It is associated in particular with the administrations of George W. Bush, with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle its most prominent ideologues.
There are thousands of content moderators, who are paid to view objectionable posts and decide which need to be removed from digital platforms. Many are severely traumatized by the images of hate, abuse and violence they see on a daily basis so that we, our families and children get to see ‘WARNING: The following post or content may be disturbing to some viewers.’
From Spain, Connor Blennerhassett brought a report on the ordeal suffered by vegan activist Juan Manuel Bustamante, who spent sixteen months in jail on trumped-up terrorist crimes: ‘a Kafkaesque nightmare that saw him pass through five of Spain’s most notorious prisons, often locked up in solitary confinement and denied a vegan diet by his captors, who also beat him. It ruined his family’s finances and lead him to attempt to take his life after his release.’
Icaria, Greece
Over in Greece Frank Armstrong found a hardening of borders, and attitudes, in the wake of the pandemic, and drew wisdom from the writings of Albert Camus:
Albert Camus in The Rebel (1951), identified an enduring tension between a Caesarian Marxist project that permits all manner of atrocity on the journey to earthly paradise, and an approach he identifies with Ancient Greece, characterised by moderation, incrementalism and respect for tradition. He suggests:
The profound conflict of this century is, perhaps, not so much between the German ideologies of history and Christian political concepts, which in a certain way are accomplices, as between German dreams and Mediterranean traditions … in other words, between history and nature.
Vietnam. Image (c) Hectic Fish
Also, for the first time since his arrival, Hectic Fish was also able to travel around Vietnam, he proceeded to the territory of the Mnong accompanied by a copy of Rachel Carson’s The Marginal World ‘the otherworldly essay that opens The Edge of the Sea.’
The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.
There was also fiction fromSarah Johnson with ‘The Candidate for the Roberts Prize’ where ‘The significance of discovery lies exactly in the degree to which it can be appreciated and put to use by the human community.’ And Glenda Miller’s ‘The Club’ in which an experience of cancer prepares her for the agonies of the birthing process.
Next election onwards, there’ll be a second vote for those who turn up with, under their arm, a print copy of one of the larger newspapers and answer a few unobtrusive questions to prove they’ve consumed it correctly.
A third for those who also present receipts that show they’ve dined sufficiently in restaurants with at least four stars, and a note from the maitre d that they know their way around the cutlery.
A fourth for the lucky few in possession – to boot – of a ticket for one of those pampering spas at which one temporarily discards worldly things to have one’s darker parts irrigated of all subversive thoughts.
So when all’s said and counted, people who shouldn’t matter can go back to not mattering.
