My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about
Patrick Kavanagh.
O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth
And I can see those fucking potatoes,
The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan!
Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected
To this kind of shit?
Isn’t Life bad enough without having to force poetry
About bleeding potatoes down their bloody throats!
And then, just as I am almost in despair,
And I’m a bloody poet myself,
Her voice pipes up again, and she adds;
“Although, Epic isn’t half bad, at least he mentions Homer!”
And, I see again my reading of the poem through her eyes,
When I too saw the ancient importance ricocheting
In Paddy Boy,
As she too recognised the importance of Homer
And his epic take on Life.
Staring across the kitchen table at her,
With not a potato in sight,
I somehow saw the great blind ancient hovering above us
Monumentally human, whispering to us both
Across the infinite.
Svelte limbs, aquiline and flow, her enjambment;
The whole pelvic girdle hypnotically balances,
Famously compared to a serpent which dances,
And which has all full-blooded heterosexual males entranced…!
And, there you have it! The Feminists declare,
“No more male gazing here!”
Where are we? How did we get here?
Whatever happened to coup de foudre, colpo di fulmine ?
It was a Friday night, I had been sitting, drinking with colleagues,
When you entered the public bar dressed in your finery;
The cream- coloured micro-skirt, the flesh coloured tights,
The pliant leather of your black knee high boots!… Colpo di fulmine!… my ass jumped off the bench, reflexively!
We have known each other now for 25 Halloweens.
I have always loved museums, no doubt having a kind of prophetic disposition I realised the somewhat terrible and prodigious potency that was entombed in their almost sterile yet paradoxically life-affirming grace. Loss, chronic loss, is the ultimate domain of all humans.
It seems to me that the problems here below on Earth have reached such an escalatory saturation point that we have been probing space, and for quite some time now, in an almost frantic bid to escape, but, as William Shatner recently said, and I merely paraphrase, space is just full of more cold, dark and hostile matter.
The tremor of the tympany, the delicate frisson which all ten digits can bring, the storm of sounds trembling just as you are standing alone, right there on the brink…
Slow read. Be not fraught with the weight and trouble of your servitude, but rather cherish the day and be more aware of it harbouring amplitude.
Feature Image: The National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, Dublin, sometimes called the Dead Zoo.
Bridge of Be-ing, all arches mirrrored upon
The river running – Heraclitean ;
Looming above… turret trumpeting,
All Barnonial excess, pure 19th century.
And aligned in sheer proximity the great monolith
Of glass and concrete, its emphasis
Presenting a sheer 20th century existentialism.
Seen from the quays, it’s pure Baudelaire!
The candelabara of Street lamps whose
Illuminating auras burnish the passerby
Ghosting them with their luminance, and lustre.
Fate drops like a Stone in the water
Troubling the stillness with ripples outward,
And whose faces Flow forever onward into the Dark Pool.
There is a philosophy born of storm to encompass Be-ing,
And it assails in the tumult of the unending assault of the days.
To storm troop on and over into the assailment of the heavens;
God forbid, what is left of them those splintering fragments!
As in the woodwinds onrushing conducive to the Heart-fires
Still governing, just about, out from the holocaust of Thought.
Essence at the forefront of being, attuning to the tumult
Of the Sway, like anyone finding their ground.
Such as the down and outs rolled up in sleeping bags
On the public benches on the boardwalk,
Those pupae, or premature mummies,
Whose alarm clock would be police siren,
Heineken clock and other hallucinatory prey,
And whose breakfast would be coloured by the sweet aroma of Hashish!
Thought’s colour broodingly bleeds through to the skull,
Seeped to pour and stream into the brain.
The bridge is moored there through its anchor
Above the liquified riverbed afflux.
The skeletal fragments of a backdrop,
Etched architecture of a Gothic replica.
Its organic structure today looms out of the fog
Which to the stoner is a mesmeric enterprise to induce Funk!
Through the viral air of a city masked,
Its denizens the very harbingers of their own Hell,
Introduces the notion of Dantean comeuppance.
Tramping along on Bachelor’s Walk,
Crossing the widened Carlisle over Gandon’s hump,
Only to reach Eden – the irony sits well.
Roman Noir “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” Raymond Chandler For Daniel Wade
John A. Maher, Private Detective, peered out
The window of the fourth floor of Lafayette,
His vantage point on par with a Gargoyle!
The river split the city like a fissure, before him.
It was a city divided by accent and money.
On the northside, speech was contracted to the point
Of almost unintelligibility, which he liked
Never quite trusting language himself.
While on the south, it was all accent darling,
Barring the odd enclave. Maher moves through it all
Monosyllabic, stony-faced and with mild amusement.
Humans are weak creatures, so prone to error.
And some are driven to crime; one needs a hard fist,
Copious amounts of alcohol, and a certain penchant for metaphysics!
Dublin, that old whore, with her piss -stained pavements
Abruptly transforms into a woman of a certain station.
Such are the, at once, brutal and subtle shifts where
In an instant, Hell aligns in an altogether strict
Congruence… Like when you climb aboard
The final commuter train of the week on a Friday
Evening on Platform One at Pearse Station.
And, as the train finally pulls out, leaving
Behind her the contents of a working week,
Passing images are reflected back to you
Through the compartment windows, revealing
Dune and marram at Portmarnock, to a passing
Lagoon at Malahide, and then the panoply of imagery
Miraculously washes away all of the whoredom from your mind.
The Great Burnishment
Your Pirelli calendar moment must last, at least, twenty score years;
Nobody makes this very important point entirely clear.
So, try to remember, while cavorting in the Sun,
That the memories must endure, and for everyone!
Call it, if you will, the great Burnishment.
When like two figures from a fabled myth or play,
You roam the most remote shores and the very
Earth appears made for you both alone.
It is the cliché – you look on her then and on those mythic shores –
With the aroma of wild rosemary, myrtle and Goat;
Desire bears you both ever onward with its emblazoned sail.
Fast forward two decades now and she stands before you in your kitchen,
And the initial violence of the sun from that first day,
Tell me, do you still feel its impact burning your skin?
The Flies
The two house- flies, Beckett and Joyce, buzz about you
And the TV screen. There they land, buzz again
Before flying off to Memphis copulating
And multiplying on the wing. As a sign of virility,
The Egyptians displayed them on their amulets.
That great race, unlike our own, had a great respect for insects!
Even the Greeks showed a similar respect,
When having a BBQ they offered a sacrifice to Shoo Fly Zeus.
The crabby meat men, in this way, could eat their own
Undisturbed by patrolling swarms and Oxen that had fallen
Were replaced by Lotus Eater, and burning eucalyptus in the Sun.
Now, you look at the books of both these modern sages
That you have been reading for an eternity,
And still you hear the flies buzzing across the pages!
The Vico Road
From the vantage point of Strawberry Hill,
A Victorian Villa recently selling for a cool 5 million,
A place more evocative of Raymond Chandler
Than anything remotely Irish. I am reminded,
Again, of the Neapolitan philosopher who
Peopled his New Science with giants. In fact,
While lunching there on one of the picnic tables,
I had a slightly hallucinatory vision of Gulliver
Striding in 18th century breeches, and croppy hair
Over the Sugar- Loaf Mountain, while
The Lilliputians below discussed the ongoing
Business in the property sector: vulture funds
And NAMA; hedge funds in Texas,
Where the multi-headed Cereberus roars.
Poems in the Manner of the Devil After Alexandar Ristović (1933-1994)
If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
The bounty of bedlam,
Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
Or Last Suppers.
Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
See the world now through the light of wine.
Do you have confidence in the morning?
Do you have faith in toast?
Each morning, do you spread marmalade
Under the clouds in the sky?
Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
To honour the martyrdom of little buns.
These trees that surround you,
Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
Holding peaches up to the clouds?
Where have all the flamingos flown?
Into the jaws of baboons in hell.
Columns, arches… shit!
Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.
But know also this,
That within all of this madness
There is one alone who sleeps quietly
Nestled in dreams like a bird
And she dreams of housing owls
While presiding over countless committees.
Break Fast
The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
It had a very simple olive pattern,
The kind you might find in a good café
Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
The kind you might find your hands floating over
Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
In order to settle the bill.
Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
The whole panoply of artifacts,
Suddenly is in freefall before you,
Like that last joke you heard before leaving.
The Familiar
Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
Over the same old living space. Here, then,
Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
And, in memory! The ontological shifts
Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
The words vibrating, each particular element,
Each particular word, key, shape or movement
Given the proper attention it deserves.
Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!
Janus
I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.
So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
Physically and you will have the opportunity
Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!
Putinize – a verb designated to describe
The systematic annihilation of either a person,
A place, an animal or a thing so that the object
Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.
Kyiv
After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
to either madness or so- called reason.
Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O’ Neill’s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of Beckett and Baudelaire (to whom the flaneur label is most regularly attached), O’ Neill puts his own unique slant on Dublin, and he is not alone.
Henry Street Arcade is a bilingual edition, with O’ Neill’s poems in English appearing alongside their French translations by French novelist and poet Yan Kouton. This is an indicator that O’ Neill is a poet who must, out of necessity, operate always between dualities.
Henry Street Arcade forms the end of his Dublin Trilogy, a triumvirate of poem sequences centred around Dublin, which include The Dark Pool and Dublin Gothic. The collection’s title comes from the name of a commercial passage located just off O’ Connell Street, built in the style of a Parisian arcade. A loose sequence of a single day in Dublin is gradually formed, in the title which directly addresses the arcade, O’ Neill asserts:
It evokes the cave which according to Vico, In Scienza nuova, Plato singles out as the origin Of civilisation.
Like Baudelaire and Joyce before him, O’ Neill’s aesthetic lies in transplanting ancient, iconic mythologies into a contemporary setting, underscoring its timelessness with regards to the human condition. In his case, it is a freewheeling mix of classical and literary understandings, now set to the backdrop of Dublin’s streets and architectural mismatches, that frames his poetry. He gives us a city in a state of uncertain but unstoppable transition, one in which the ideals of Ireland’s revolutionary past seem to hold little relevance to the social ills that continue to plague the very city – itself in the grip of lethal capitalistic freefall – in which they were first enacted. This constant collision between mundane, everyday reality and the author’s eye for both myth and observational capacity lends it a finely-tuned tension.
In ‘Portrait of a Woman on a Train’, he writes: “Her handbag/Hangs from the gentle scaffold of her arm/The murderous black leather having been tattooed/With bolts of burnished gold, also bearing/The holy runes of some designer’s name. What inside does the urban Pandora bring?’
O’ Neill almost seems to revel in this dualism. His own philosophy can perhaps be surmised with a line from the poem ‘Portrait of a Woman’: ‘Beauty must always be contrasted with banality.” His continual pairing of the two also becomes a way of interrogating whether making sense of the city is even a worthwhile endeavour.
As an ultramodern metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and multicultural receptivity, the social blights of homelessness, poverty, addiction and waste also remain on full display. Even a crushed coffee cup: ‘The premium of price per individual coffee/Reflecting back the macro environment of the/Property world which the cafe finds itself in.’ – is indicative of a society in extreme disrepair.
A later poem, ‘Heraclitus’, describes: On the high street, in broad daylight, Bordello chic is promoted in plain view. And for all to see – though they pass by unseeing! Our age is one of casualised distraction – the ubiquity of screens, whether from phones, laptops, tablets in the majority of peoples’ lives, necessary for both business and pleasure – conference calls and dating sites, social media as well as the commercial necessity for businesses to have and maintain an ‘online presence’.
Running through Henry Street Arcade is a desire for a sense of mystery – arguably essential to the poetic imagination – to be returned to an age, as O’ Neill describes it, ‘of blinding all-seeing, all knowing/All encompassing… nothing!’ He urges the reader to ‘Reappraise/The splendour of the shades and the shadows.’ This is not a call to return to a state of benightedness – it is a call to acknowledge that there is still a place for beauty in a world that seems to be increasingly accelerating.
By Peter O’ Neill trans. Yan Koutan. Editions Du Pont de L’Europe, 95p, €12.00 ISBN: 978-2-36851-573-0
Une Charogne (1859) is among the most important poems of the 19th century, containing all of its author’s ground-breaking aesthetic. Our own aesthetically challenged century could learn a lot from it, in terms of the aesthetic of rupture, spleen and discord.
It is Baudelaire’s response, in a sense, to the early Romantics, such as John Keats for example, and particularly concerning notions of beauty. Baudelaire, like Mary Shelley and Shakespeare before her, found more engagement in what could be described as the dark horror of existence, which had always existed in literature, particularly in writers such as Dante Alighieri, in whose work Dame Francis Yates saw the keys, or genesis, of the Gothic novel: in particular in the last Canto of the Inferno when Count Ugolino is forced by starvation to eat his sons locked away in a tower. However, Baudelaire’s genius was to take such an aesthetic into the everyday. In this this way he was a true revolutionary and visionary.
Count Ugolino and his sons in their cell, as painted by William Blake circa 1826.
Une Charogne is the perfect example of his aesthetic. The poet starts off describing a carcass which he has seen rotting on his way home, and which he associates with a former love which he felt for his girlfriend. The reader, however, is only made aware of this in the very last verse of the poem. The remarkable contrast of topics is so unexpected that even one-hundred-and-sixty-years on the poem continues to shock.
The poem, typically, follows the genre of memento mori, Baudelaire’s originality lies, however, in applying what were rather banal motifs associated with death – such as skulls placed alongside everyday fare like fruit and flowers – and then to insert affairs of the flesh, and, of course, the heart.
Only readers who have experienced real heartbreak themselves, what the Ancient Greeks described as the Orphic mysteries, will have any real appreciation of the fantastical act of catharsis that is taking place, how the poet wonderfully evokes his former passion for a beloved, and then inverts Love with its counterpart Hate; thus upturning the apple cart of feelings for the beloved which have been transformed into their opposite; diabolical hatred and disgust; perhaps more so for himself, for being duped by such feelings in the first place!
As indicated, anyone who has been in Love and who has then lost – inevitably harbouring a sense of betrayal – will recognise, and feel, the powerful emotions driving the poem forward. The poet’s dedication and craft at the description of the whole process continue to inspire awe.
Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, by Francis Bacon,1963.
Francis Bacon Interviews
Regarding my transversion, I was helped enormously by using the interviews conducted by David Sylvester with the twentieth century British painter Francis Bacon. Bacon was a keen reader of Baudelaire, and one who followed the French poet’s dramatic overhaul of the Romantic spirit. One only has to consider Bacon’s entire corpus of imagery, the violent palette of colour, the decomposing matter of flesh, and the ‘smoky bacon’ of decomposing Love!
I find that this unique aesthetic contradicts directly the flimsy narrative of many contemporary literary journals which are marred by politically correct censorship; the overwhelming and ever-present narrative of all-inclusivity and sensitivity to Others that has now reached idiotic proportions.
What do I mean by that? Take for example the narrative of Une Charogne below. Anybody reading the poem with a half a brain will understand there is a very definite mask wearing taking place on the part of the poet. The diabolical humour is just that, a very nasty joke. But one which is very human.
When one has been jilted the immediate response is to seek revenge. Exact some hate! This is simply being human, and to deny the presence of this impulse is simply perverse. All is fair in love and war. A person who has betrayed you with another having vowed to love you forever is now in the arms of another.
Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (1848).
Fail Again
There is, I would say, no greater pain on this Earth than the agony of abandonment. It is the hardest possible task for any human being to accept graciously that loss, and then to move on. It reflects the instruction of Samuel Beckett in Worstward-Ho: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
Life onwards will be mere monochrome. A travesty in a sense. This is the exact sentiment that lies behind Baudelaire’s Une Charogne. The poet is damned, damned by the Other. And so he will exact his revenge. The poet finds it in the poem, alone, in its very composition.
I would liken this Art to extracting puss. It is an act of catharsis. Again, a very Greek notion. Francis Bacon was also a great fan of the Ancient Greeks, like Baudelaire before him.
I have made the point repeatedly: if there is not a little poison in the well there is no sweetness to the water. I have met all too many high-minded moralists who plead constantly for whatever Other is currently in fashion.
These latter-day saints among the chattering classes are hypocrites, who sanctimoniously bottle up their resentments. I have been a witness to a deformed humanity spurting out in the most toxic manner imaginable. Believe me, it is not a pretty sight! — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! (— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!)
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Broken Word
On the philosophical plane the poet has completely sublimated Friedrich Hegel’s (1871-1831) dialectic of the Master and Servant. To speak in the terms of Baudelaire’s countryman Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) – of a different generation but observing an unaltered humanity – he is killing symbolically the Other in the world of the Real. This for Lacan, as for the poet, is entirely symbolic.
Baudrillard – perhaps the most Baudelairean of late twentieth century French thinkers – was to make of this his unique discourse point. He believed that we had lost our capacity for creating metaphor, so enamoured were we by the hyperreal; that is to say the literality of living we now observe in a mediated age where news is constant, and so ever-present. The Hegelian Now repeated ad infinitum is a poet’s nightmare. This explains why we are living in a period of atrocious, purely confessional poetry. The so- called ‘Spoken Word’ where the Now is Ever Present!
I AM
The spoken word speaks – BEING poetry itself! Such is the utter fallacy.
This is the poetry of idiots.
If you do not kill your enemy symbolically, you will never kill him. Such is the Real. Not reality, but the symbolically Real, which for a poet IS the only reality.
Have you ever considered where Populist monsters spring from?
Take a leaf out of Baudelaire’s black book, write your words in Hate, as much as Love. Be the totality that is You. And you will be a better artist, and Human, for it.
XXIX.- UNE CHAROGNE
Rappelez -vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d’été si doux : Au detour d’un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux,
Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique, Brûlante et suant les poisons, Ouvrant d’une façon nonchalante et cynique Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.
Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture, Comme afin de la cuire à point, Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint ;
Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe Comme une fleur s’épanouir. La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe Vous crûtes vous évanouir.
Les mouches bourdonnaient sur se ventre putride, D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons Des larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide Le long de ce vivants haillons.
Tout cela descendait, montait comme un vague, Ou s’élançait en pétillant; On eût dit que le corps, enflé d’un souffle vague, Vivait en se multipliant.
Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique, Comme l’eau courante et le vent, Ou le grain qu’un vanneur d’un mouvement rythmique Agite et tourne dans son van.
Les formes s’effaçaient et n’étaient plus qu’un rêve, Une ébauche lente à venir, Sur la toile oubliée, et que l’artiste achève Seulement par le souvenir.
Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète Nous regardait d’un oeil fâché, Épiant le moment de reprendre au squelette Le morceau qu’elle avait lâché.
Et pourtant vous serez semblabe à cette ordure, A cette horrible infection, Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, Vous, mon ange et ma passion !
Oui ! telle vous serez, ô la reine des graces, Après les derniers sacrements, Quand vous irez, sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses, Moisir parmi les ossements.
Alors, ô ma beauté ! dites à la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers, Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine Des mes amours décomposés !
XXXIX. – The Exquisite Cadaver
Remember the ideal object which you discovered~
That beautiful summer morning, Dear soul:
By way of the path where you found that exquisite
Cadaver lying on a bed of pebbles,
Her legs in the air, like some old tart,
Burning and stewing in poisons,
Her belly slit, almost nonchalantly,
Pouring forth all manner of noxious gasses.
The sun burns down on the decomposing
Body, as if searing a steak,
Rendering back a hundred- fold to Mother Nature,
What she herself had first conjoined.
And the sky looks upon the superb carcass
As it would upon a flower of Evil,
The rigor mortis encroaching to such a point
That the very earth around it has been scorched.
Great Blue Bottles swarm in convoys,
Buzzing out of the gaping cave, Cyclopean…
While a treacle of feasting larvae thickly drip,
Making of the stain a macabre Persian carpet.
The process of decomposition rose before me,
Falling in waves, and which I perceived in a kind of
Pointillism, so that, wave-borne,
The corpse seemed to come alive and multiply before me!
This alternate universe was announced in atonal chords,
And hit me with all the fever of a jungle humidity,
Or, like the sporadic grains, scattered by a winnower,
Whose rhythmic movements spun me in a dervish.
The effaced shapes and forms were as if but a dream
From a preliminary sketch, slow to arrive,
And which the artist, not being able to rely on memory,
Had then to resort to the magnetism of specific photographs.
Behind the rocks an unnerved dog
Looked at us both with a ravenous eye,
Trying to deduce the auspicious minute
When he could rip apart some rotting flesh from the bones.
And yet, You now would appear to be not so dissimilar to this horror,
This putrid infection,
At one time Star de mes yeux,
You my one time, all consuming passion!
Yes! After the last rites have long ago been pronounced upon us,
O You, my once graceful Queen,
When will you now, in your own time,
Wallow with these bones upon the grass?
So, my great Beauty! Whisper then to the vermin
How you will cherish their kisses,
While I guard for eternity this sublime image,
Of all of our decomposing Love.
Feature Image: Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, 1863
