Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.
One key qualification for a poet becoming a pseudo-poetic decoration for the Regime – a quality much on display this week – is to know when not to say that a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way, is exactly as terrible as it is because he/she hopes to be published in the future (or again) in the same venue, suspecting, probably correctly, he/she would be less likely to achieve such publication if he/she doesn’t keep his or her beak strategically shut on such occasions.
Indeed, indiscreet beak-opening might make an invitation to participate in an upscale literary cabaret or two less likely. This is what it has come down to.
As I sit/lie on what might turn out to be my death bed – I am doing everything I can to survive and haven’t at all given up hope but really have no idea if I’ll be here this time next year – I find myself laughing at the Irish poetry world.
The phenomenon is not unique to contemporary Ireland, though its Irish branch has particular characteristics, usually involving a special relationship with NATO and the sacred 12.5% corporate tax rate. But such tendencies are spreading like an international fungus. Every part of the English-speaking world has a local variant of concern.
Congratulations after Zbigniew Herbert
A few will be obliterated
but in an nice way.
We don’t like the word censorship,
abolished it yonks ago.
Certain word combinations must be
nudged to the bottom of the basket
until after we’ve all safely
choked to death in our dressing gowns.
Though, worryingly,
they always find their way back out again.
Others, we can leave optional.
You know the drift:
the suffering of academics, their divorces
after the regrettable entanglement with the student;
how it felt to phone the crematorium
to book a spot for their ninety five year old father.
But for having so successfully helped it
deny its own existence
the regime has made you
compulsory.
Your personage will be strapped
into an airplane seat, exported
to Asia and beyond,
like a Bangladeshi made t-shirt in reverse.
Your metaphors and similes will be at the service
of the International Happiness Corporation –
Diversity Department –
currently headquartering here for tax purposes.
You will walk through all the right doors
secretly wearing their logo.
Life will be mostly festivals
of enforced grinning,
during which you’ll pass the hours
counting each others’ teeth.
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.
My split infinitives clearly the work of a man
who dries his clothes recklessly,
sometimes not emptying the lint tray
two cycles in a row.
At the height of my experiments with formal verse
I once drove a Ford Focus
at a tantalising twenty nine kilometres per hour
when the legal limit was thirty.
During my decadent prose-poem phase
I tiptoed past a locked apartment door,
behind which, I’m pretty sure,
there was an orgy going on.
Under the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
I once took one more Paracetamol
than I should have.
In a rare outbreak of concrete poetry,
I yesterday regrouted the shower tiles myself.
Trying to mimic Rimbaud vanishing in Abyssinia,
back when I was young and even more foolish
than this, I once accidentally went
to Dorset.
My contribution to metaphor
in the twenty first century
is at least as important
as the cat yawning.
Risk, for me, is going
to a different garden centre
at least once every five years.
‘It’ had well and truly arrived by March, insidiously working its way into our lives like an unwanted guest who slips through the door unbeknownst. Editorially we were looking at the big picture, assessing the implications of what we used to call ‘the coronavirus’ – before becoming COVID-19 on February 11th – through political, legal and cultural lenses; as well as assessing the direct health impact.
An important contribution came from Duncan Mclean a senior researcher with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland. He looked back on the history of infectious disease outbreaks and how these can bring out the very worst prejudices, a phenomenon he described as the ‘medical scapegoat.’
[I]f sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated.
Moreover, in light of the introduction of special powers in the wake of the pandemic in Ireland, barrister and lecturer Alice Harrison examined how in Ireland infringements on civil liberties, such as the removal of jury trials in response to perceived threats to the state, have tended to ‘seep’ into ordinary usage.
Protecting civil liberties, such as the right to jury trial, may seem less important as long as extraordinary powers are not abused. However, the existence of special powers poses the ongoing risk that they may be exploited by unscrupulous, or even tyrannical, politicians or agents of the state.
Dr Samuel McManus was, however, able to see a ‘silver lining’ to the crisis:
If there is a silver lining to this crisis it is the revelation of how connected we are to each other, in ways we have almost forgotten. We are a species with special concerns. We cannot afford to operate alone as individuals; to do so is to threaten us all. This realisation is putting into stark relief the way we have organised our societies over the past few decades.
He averted to the importance of the state delivering public healthcare, as opposed to profit-driven private institutions:
Some private health care clinics in Dublin are now putting up signs saying they will not accept patients with respiratory symptoms, directing them towards their G.P’s. This is in one way understandable as a means of limiting transmission, but while the public service is taking extra measures to distribute information and organise the response, these private clinics are under no compulsion to do so.
Frank Armstrong also assessed Ireland’s early response to the pandemic, pointing to inherent weaknesses, and other factors likely to mitigate the worst effects:
The pandemic has hit Ireland during a period of political instability after a February general election yielded an indecisive result, with Leo Varadkar’s government no longer commanding a Dáil majority. Notwithstanding the challenge of installing a new cabinet under emergency conditions, it sets a dangerous precedent for a caretaker government to be in power for a prolonged period.
Fans of music and poetry were delighted by the release that month of a first single ‘Murder Most Foul’ from Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It offered a pleasant distraction from the unfolding global pandemic, although it contained a stark message according to David Langwallner
Dylan has released a new seventeen minute-long song, ostensibly about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but which is also a travelogue through American cultural history, with Prince Hamlet and the great, deranged 1960s American DJ, Wolfman Jack, as our guide.
Also, Musician of the Month Judith Ring revealed how she transforms everyday ‘noise’ into music, while exploring the sonic possibilities of different timbres; and Brian Dillon discussed the ideas behind his new solo project The Line. His debut album Matter had been released by Bad Soup Records in February.
You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.
Image William Murphy
On a similar theme, David Langwallner called for A Renewed Deal:
It is clear that we require a Renewed Deal, bringing Keynesian stabilisation measures, including support for small businesses, social safety nets and the shutting down of corporate tax avoidance. The E.U. must desist from imposing austerity under the guise of the Growth and Stability Pact, and reinforce regulatory protection of labour rights and the environment, resisting the lobbying of giant corporations. Courts in Ireland should also recognise a basic human right to housing, including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as healthcare. So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a Renewed Deal to the world.
Coverage of the region in the Western media tends to refer to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ‘the Kurds’ interchangeably. This reinforces a reductive narrative of the SDF as being comprised of fearless but naive nationalists, apparently content to sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of a Kurdish statehood aligned to U.S. interests in the region.
Image: Alexis Daloumis
Even further afield in Indonesia, the Hectic Fish was discovering the dubious pleasures of ex-pat life on the island:
f I end up in prison again, I will enjoy it as much as I did twenty years ago. There is justice at the end of shadows. And there is poetry behind bars. It is bad, but you are worse.
Another anonymous writer The Man in the Black Pyjamas was bemoaning the impact of the housing crisis on the young people of his generation living in Dublin in ‘Gone’:
“The country’s changed,” my friend said as we sat in our small, dawn-lit kitchen at half-five in the morning having toast and tea. A month later the landlord raised our rent by 30%, and four years on now we’re all gone from Dublin. Me and my friends, and probably most of the people out drinking in the sun that day. We celebrated equality and left a day or a month or a year later. Off to London or South America or Asia or the Middle East or back down the country or onto friends’ couches or back in with our parents or into homelessness. I wish I could go back to those days, but it’s all gone now: that Dublin, those people, that hope.
We also had Sarah Hamilton discussing the challenges for aspiring female writers in an interview with Sarah Savitt of Vertigo who said:
Don’t get too carried away, wasting time on followers and trying to build up clout. You need to know the ecosystem. Spend your time instead learning about how to get an agent, which publishers would suit you, reading work related to them. Follow the submission guidelines that are listed on an agent/publisher’s page. It gives you a better running. Most importantly, keep writing. After all this time, it still really is about the words.
Finally, the third hard copy edition of Cassandra Voices was launched at the end of March, and featured the introduction by Frank Armstrong,
That new edition contained a memorable essay by Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist, Caoimhe Butterly on the theme of Displacement:
I knew that I should be there, in whatever capacity was useful – to witness, accompany and respond, to platform and archive journeys that were defined by such profound and often overwhelming displacement, external and internal.
Another anonymous writer The Man in the Black Pyjamas was bemoaning the impact of the housing crisis on the young people of his generation living in Dublin in 
