Walk with me. Don’t speak.
Come to the place where the walls and stones
Yield their shameful secrets.
Listen. Listen.
Stand and hear the black earth shifting,
As she did then, to deny him his succour,
And as she did when he slipped into her inky embrace.
Three miles south of Carlow town.
In the Lea of the silver stones,
Latched together when we had the strength,
That small hollow where we submit.
Where a whispering call gave way,
To a silent deafening tide,
And where we fade into the geography,
Of this holy ancient place.
This inky earth,
Thick with the toils of a thousand years,
Will now gladly hold this pale handed child,
In its dark embrace.
Only the hunger of the earth
Surpasses that of her children.
Three miles south of Carlow town,
A Holocaust reflected in the silent slate grey sky,
The amputation of all kindness screamed,
In a lone mother’s last breathless farewell;
“Golden haired child,
Son of the earth and wind itself.
The black turf is no cradle,
The rush and reed no shawl”
Come walk with me.
Don’t speak.
Come to the place where the walls and stones yield their secrets.
There is buried treasure three miles south of Carlow Town.
Listen. Listen.
For the purpose of perspective, I should like to carry out a short comparative study of two poems treating the subject of the sea. The first poem I should like to focus on is the great sonnet by Charles BaudelaireL’Homme et la Mer, whose composition dates back to 1852. The second poem is a poem I wrote sometime last year, L’Homme et la Merde, in which I use the poem by Baudelaire, as an obvious starting point, in order to attempt to underline the epic social and ecological shifts which have occurred in the time frame of the composition of both poems.
So, to be absolutely clear, the period of time that separates both poems is one-hundred-sixty-three years. Without further ado, here is the poem by Buadelaire, followed by my transversion into English of his great poem; ….[1]
XIV. – L’HOMME ET LA MER
Homme libre toujours tu chériras la mer ! La me rest ton mirroir; tu contemples ton âme Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame, Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer.
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image; Tu l’embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton cœur Se distrait quelque fois des sa propre rumeur Au bruit de cette plainte indomitable et sauvage.
Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discretes; Homme, nul n’a sonde le fond de tes abîmes ; O mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes, Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!
Et cependent voila des siècles innombrables Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord, Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort, O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
XIV. – Man and the Sea
Man, free, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; when you stand before it And contemplate your fate, before its infinite movement, Your poor mind, brine wracked, couldn’t be more bitter.
Yet, you enjoy plunging into the heart of yourself; Distracted by the immensity before you, and which Makes you forget, momentarily mesmerised by such Sheer force, your own apocalypse riding before you, wave bound.
You are both just as dark and fathomless; Man, like the sea, nobody has reached your depths, yet; Both of you guard jealously your great secrets, Which you both refuse to give up, without some savage consequence.
For innumerable millennia you have both now been struggling With one another for survival, both just as pitiless, Both of you loving, as you do, carnage and violence. O you two blood brothers, eternally vying…
Baudelaire’s poem has all of the hallmarks of late nineteenth century romanticism, written as it was just one year after the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), and just forty-eight years after Beethoven’s composition of the Pastoral (1804) , his symphony number six. All three works are primarily concerned with man and his extremely precarious place in nature.
Ahab’s apocalyptic fate in Melville’s epic account of the hunt for the great white whale has become emblematic of humanity itself, in our own relentless pursuit to harness nature for our own ends, without thinking about the consequences. Beethoven’s storm in the sixth taking on a very ominous nature when listened to today, as our own climate continually shifts into extremes as a consequence of the impact of our society on the planet, and particularly so within the time frame of the last fifty or so years.
Image: Daniele Idini.
Indeed, today we are aware of the extremely negative impact our collective behaviour is having on the planet; be it as a direct or indirect consequence of global deforestation, industrial waste (atomic or other) or the continuing emissions from fossil fuels. We are now all collectively responsible for the state of both the immediate world in which we find ourselves living in today, in other words our own particular microcosm, as well as the greater macro-environment which we communally share, for as long as we humanly can. And, of course, this is the huge question looming over us all today:
If we continue living as we are without each of us making dramatic changes to our lifestyles in terms of how we eat, spend etc. these so – choices we make every second of each day – how much longer will the Earth be able to support us before we are all completely annihilated?
In order to frame the question better, I should like to introduce the second poem now L’Homme et la Merde, which I wrote shortly after having been diagnosed with chronic ulcerative colitis early last year.
For the purpose of clarity, the medical condition known as colitis is a terrible affliction caused to the intestine and the bowels, in which the sufferer loses all control of their system, causing unimaginable horror and distress. It is classified as a disease and it is on the increase in countries all around the Western hemisphere; interestingly in Asia, where people have a radically different type of diet, and lifestyle, people suffer from it far less. In my own case, the elimination of gluten is what stopped, eventually, the horrendous impact that this sickness was causing to me and my family.
I wrote a lot of poems of a very scatological nature, while suffering from colitis, although the poem L’Homme et la Merde is, without doubt, the most troubling of them. This poem reflects an apocalyptic vision of the future of our seas, if we do not do something now to change the way in which we are living.
This can be indicated quite simply. For example, one June weekend, here in Skerries, north county Dublin, the front beach had to be closed to swimmers due to a possible leakage of effluents into the sea. It was a terrible thing to experience, as the sun was out that June weekend, and people had come from all parts of Dublin, and possibly beyond, to enjoy a day by the sea. Instead, they had to be informed by the lifeguards that if they wished to swim in the sea, they would be putting themselves at risk of getting very sick due to the effluent which was now polluting our once beautiful coast.
— Irish Wildlife Trust (@Irishwildlife) June 10, 2019
In fact, in Skerries it is a well- known thing – the risk of contamination – as for a couple of years now the town has lost its blue flag due to such incidents related above. But this is just one story, and on a local level. Now add to it every coastal town in the inhabited world, as you can be sure that we are not alone. Imagine the collective damage that is being done?
Why, during the twenty first century, are we still allowing sewage, and other toxic matter, to be pumped into our seas? This is just a basic question, yet which needs an immediate response. Particularly when one considers how the harnessing of bacteria, found in faeces, can create biofuels potentially saving billions; plans are already afoot in Washington D.C. in an attempt to create alternative ways of making energy in order to generate electricity in the city, using faecal matter![2]
And that is besides poisoning ourselves: our bodies are not designed to tolerate enormous quantities of gluten. What hope do we possibly have of saving the planet around us if we cannot preserve our own health?
Ignorance, it would appear, is our greatest enemy. And, here is the hope, as this is something we can all start changing, immediately. All we need is the desire.
L’Homme et la Mer-de
Sheep, a ghastly consommé, to the swirling form of cupcakes. These vertiginous constellations, floating like malignant nebula In the solid throne at the end of your hall… Shit, excrement, stools, Call them what you will. Yet, these grotesque floaters
Will be the very last trace of you. How apt, being a member Of a species which would appear to be shit-infected. Le mot de Cambrone; MERDE Le merde qui est partout.
The shitty structures which we maintain and perpetuate. Up to our necks in it. Won’t be happy till we’re literally Drowning in it.
“Now man,” through these sweetened dumplings Nature seems to be whispering to you, “Embrace The imperium of your turbulent, khaki -coloured oceans.”
[1] O’ Neill, Peter: The Enemy, Transversions from Charles Baudelaire, Lapwing, Belfast, 2015.
[2] Shaver, Katherine ( 2015-10-07 ). “ D.C. Water begins harnessing electricity from every flush”. The Washington Post.
Two words that strut confident of
their own historical inevitability.
Everyone in time meets them,
though hopefully not both
ringing your door bell
the same day,
unless your name is
Nagasaki or Vietnam;
or you’re the first village
no-one’s ever heard of
successfully abolished
from thirty thousand feet
by a transgender person
pressing a button;
or you’re the first Somali in history
proudly turned into a pile of burning mince
by a drone designed by a woman of colour;
or you’re the wrong type of Australian
whose computer told us the names
of the obliterated
and so can only leave prison
in a fair-trade white cardboard box;
or you’re me, delighted
to expire unvaccinated rather
than spark a diplomatic kerfuffle
by sticking in my bicep
something as sinister sounding as Sputnik
without written permission from Brussels
who’ll surely deliver
a keynote speaker to my grave
to thank my corpse for its contribution,
and find a plausible way of saying:
I’m down here, getting acquainted with the snails
so they can be up there, polishing their idea of themselves.
Feature Image: Original #banksy ‘Civilian Drone Strike’ in East London ahead of London arms fair opening.
Another night fifth in a row
unsettled but unfrozen
thinking I get it I get it
(I don’t, but I have skin and nerves):
Whatever sustains someone doing what you do,
I mean never mind the privations! that unseen hand,
Shoulder cupped, steering towards the leper colony –
the Big Bewk saints, the Seenitalls, Tell-you-what-I’d
do-if-I-were-yous…
(enthusiasts who sleep one to a room
and who if we just roll up that sleeve
for a couple hundred spare months)
yes that too. If we just….
And you break away and plod on
As they foretell your grit will kill you.
Well this too, a mile away: Perpetual Motion!
Wind or tide or compressed chipboard or wherever they’re
frisbeeing the tax breaks this current? cycle?
into laps of pals slash creditors ABCing
a redesigned polity, where battery tech –
Sorry – Nology – excuseme, will…
(impilmentated across the economy)
Will save…
The child in the lithium mine, fingers
deformed, the first knuckle gone.
Overheads, always overheads.
But we’ll outsource to Europa
when the talent pool is Exhausted.
Which will take a while yet.
Half a mile away:
Our Vegan Monday grinners,
Off setting off in the fake jeep,
Eerie silence til the gas kicks in
Over Charlemont bridge, arc of
Our hero stolidly crossing,
Dashboard screams, driver jolts,
keels, (rest of car buried in phones)
“Watch where YOU’RE going!” he starts
To shout
As the eyes turn
the whole corpus twists
toward him and through him –
an air-conditioner chill then gone,
no trace in the rear-view.
He tells himself he dodged, but…
This has been happening
More often lately. Overtired, that’s all.
Newstalk. And an early night tonight.
They sleep eight hours.
Belatedly, worry entered their guts
once they had genetic skin in the game, but
Ours will be fine: Business Cantonese, crypto,
Young Scientist, fun size beers (better
they’re in the house than eff-knows-where) and
The Talk About…
They sleep nine hours.
A theatrical yawn.
Back to the salt mine, conference call.
I get it in the sense that I wouldn’t either,
I think you’re right, and if I had your honed instincts
and scalpel humour—
But on days such as this, fifth and counting
Surely a den of thieving fuckers is better
than another wet gutter screaming match
with a fifteen hour night?
Husband your fuel and your wits. Arm yourself
with a rock or a crunched up can
in your goto pocket. Breathe out, finish anything you’ve left,
stride towards the LED light.
Don’t be late, they’ll lock you out to die.
“you’ve made your point
you holy few
you’ve made your point!”
Jesus Christ, like.
I mean Jesus Christ, they’d fling you in
the Liffey stamp “buried at sea” on the docket—
Quickly – pick three: Psychiatric History, Known to Gardaí,
Mintil Hilth™, Engagement Izzyous – which is why –
Refusal, Reluctance, the cracks – and again this is
Again why – yet another – yet
Another No Fixed Address – sponge, waste, nosh Abel
for…For?
Well, whether the brown liar was once his thing,
He wasn’t using: he wins. He haunts at his pleasure.
Remember that as ever decimating rootless scum
was an inexpensive way to impress upon sit-in
students down a year of Law, sneering at
the empty Jay One cancellation threat: –
“Australia America Canada New Zealand,
we will see them all while you’re here minding
Your handicapped kids, you inbred bogscum” but
but what if – surely a contingent?:
Cracks invisible under carpeted floors,
The weight of Relying On You, son,
And such a long way down.
“We know you’ll get your act together.
Perhaps you’re just overthinking, your—”
Fogged vocation? or, The base fear:
marooned and slowly draining amid the dying
amongst the dying in between the bonesunk husks,
our holy dying knackers dying at midday without a fuss,
town on a weekday, going peaceful after years howling
into their mobiles their streets those trams,
dying for no reason, dying without ever even
presuming to arrogate a version of what same
Artsblock Stephen Heroes claim’s birthright
to lose, yet perhaps too they’re just
dying for a lungful of a dreamt cracked Rome:
nicotine and subway vents and rumour.
Harlem, The Bowery, The Hands That.
Twenty years later the bootlace daredevils’
Conspicuous Return: Lo! It Can Be Done Son, says
the cute one, a quiet deal on a struggling licence
(add strip lighting, carvery, Guinness mid-strentt’)
While the others…
Vanished Camden or Rockaway or Justfuckedoff,
never left the tower no matter how far they fled
from the ripped places those ripped up were next sent,
those banished home staring at the wall of unsaid,
sleepless over decisions unmade, failed
stabs at intercession with mute smiling friends
that went early on,
back when the junk suddenly dropped from the sky
like manna – sufficient for each day
turns out most people don’t want to die,
so explain it to me again.
*Concurrent to the events depicted in noted docu-drama Rambo III, western cities were flooded with cheap Afghan heroin. Dublin – largely unfamiliar with opiates –came out of it badly.
The cloud moves, low, across the landscape,
leaving a slick of rainwater on the backs of cows.
It passes through the mind of a priest
and into the eyes of a fourteen year old girl.
It is a pestilence. A curse upon the territory.
In the villages they are rasping for bread.
No chickens hobble through the shit-strewn lanes.
Damp is a curse which slowly infiltrates
clothes, rafters, firewood, children’s skin.
The crops are sunk. The sheep are full of worms.
You dole out sermons on disintegration.
An aged woman is driven from her home
and burnt to cinders on a makeshift pyre.
The chancel windows cast brightness inward,
towards the stunted candles of the choir.
THE RAM IN THE THICKET
It was a boutique hotel in the Dolomiti
and each door could be locked from inside by a golden key
and each key was hung with a sculpted animal.
Hummingbird, hedgehog, fox or snake.
The hotel offered a view across the lake.
My room was cramped. Pushed up against the table
was a bookcase which was nearly waist high.
In it stood a copy of Fear and Trembling.
The pale lettering along the spine reminded me
of the ubiquity of schizoid features.
I took it with me to the loo.
Outside the rain was spitting.
The lake surface was thatched with miniature waves.
As I read about Isaac being tied down by his dad,
I heard an angel bellowing from heaven,
“Abraham, ease off, untie the boy.”
There was a denouement, there on the mountain.
The angel came down. The angel flew.
A sharpness in my intestines.
PLAN FOR THE FUTURE
I’ve worked it out and we’re going to be just fine.
Your job will pay for mango and mine for baby wipes.
My heart throbs dyspeptically when I think of our son.
Where is he now? Does he wear leather and carry a scar?
I’m less than a man. I don’t even know how to drive.
On the other hand I’ve worked out how to arrive on time.
I was sobbing all morning as my heart went out –
unlike the flames on Grenfell, which raged until lunch.
Inside the staircases, lift shafts, flats, nothing withstood.
Tears became gas. Screams caught fire and burned.
Everything that wasn’t blame became ersatz.
It’s hard to stay focused. Our dreams are so grotty.
And the housekeeper creaks on the upstairs floor.
I picture her stroking her long Hispanic body,
which opens, closes, then empties itself completely.
SICKERT
My arm across your body.
These fingers ending in a brush.
How the light falls on my shirtsleeve,
causing the outline to crackle.
In the background a green overcoat
hangs from a glass
partly obscuring your neck and shoulder.
It’s mine. I’m clothing you.
You turn steadily toward me,
like a satellite dish
hacked into
by enemy agents.
What, I wonder, do you withhold?
And how do I prise you open?
HIATUS
Death coiled in one lung.
(Don’t cough!)
Like a tilted ampersand
in a bed of alveoli.
Breathe gently.
A skull beside an inkwell.
Not quite an ‘objet’,
but artfully positioned.
We look back.
Tick… tick…
Primo goes to it.
Mounts the handrail.
96.5cm. For a short man,
navel height.
To fall he has to climb.
The Lamps of the Virgins from Bearers of the Broken Vessel
At dawn, weaving through hills,
go Daughters of Jerusalem in white,
faces illumed by the flames
of their lamps.
They sing a song about lovers,
become a string of dancing lights.
At dawn, before babes awakened
and bawled to take suckle,
their mothers lit fires
and filled the girl’s lamps.
“Where are you going?”
asks a sister too young for a lamp.
“To remember, to remember,
the daughter of Jep-thah.”
“Why are you crying?”
“The daughter of Jep-thah
ran dancing,
shaking her tambourine.
She was the first
to greet her father,
returning victorious in battle.”
“But why are you weeping?”
“We go to the hills like she did,
with our friends.
We go for one who is soon
to kiss her father goodbye
and leave to be married.”
Jep-thah, whose mother
was without blessing,
had not trusted Yahweh
to hand to him his victory.
He had sworn an oath:
in return for winning my battle,
I will give Yahweh a gift-
the first soul
who runs out from my house-
as a burnt offering, whole.
The daughter of Jep-thah
ran dancing,
shaking her tambourine.
She was the first
to greet her father,
returning victorious in battle.
Jep-thah tore his cloak
and fell to the ground.
“I love you, my daughter.”
She knelt,
put a kiss on his forehead,
“I love you, my Abba.”
On hearing what Yahweh
was promised,
Jep-thah’s daughter did not flee.
She avowed,
“Here I am, Yahweh, I’m yours!”
But first, with her friends,
she climbed up in the hills
to grieve,
singing, “My love will not perish
in flames.”
She would never know the tug
from the cry of a babe.
At dawn, a soldier’s widow weeps,
looks out her latticed window.
She sees the flickering lamps
dance on the hill and remembers.
She puts a kiss on her babe’s
waking warm cheekand sings to her daughter
of Yahweh.
Feature Image: William Blake, Wise And Foolish Virgins, 1826, Metropolitan Museum, New York.
To Payney, Tinpan, JJ, Tom P., Tom C., Col, Ry, Peewee
I know the car I would most love to own:
Well red, early seventies TR6,
That beautiful, British-built, roadster mix,
Boldly bearing the boxed badge of renown –
Great jewel in Triumph’s commercial crown –
Two point five litre, manual, straight-six,
Mint restored, flying new like a phoenix,
To be roared, roof down, roared round my home town.
Not for the dropping into overdrive –
Instrumentation alive on the dash –
Nor for near-by-gone auto heritage.
More for the pace and the raw expressive
Chase and catching of oneself off guard – Flash! –
Much unfussed by life’s high, rising mileage.
Paul Curran was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975. He holds a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and a Masters Degree from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. He has worked widely as a professional actor. His Only Sonnet loosely follows the pattern of the seasons, comprised of 100+ ‘alternative’ sonnets; Repeat Fees and its 80 sonnets and longer poems was published in July 2017.
Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat after Alexander Pope
About my person, I at all times carry
a bowl of re-heated cocktail sausages
and a completed application form asking
that I be better funded next year. I only read novels
which interrogate the relationship
between gout and Islamist terrorism,
translated from the obligatory French;
and poets whose words make me sink
more comfortably into
my brown swivel chair.
It’s taken five hundred thousand Euro
strategically invested by a range
of government agencies
over the past three years to give
the literature loving public
me sitting here in this office, knowing
the name of the third most
popular poet in Mongolia;
a country I had to visit
three times last year,
at your expense, to ascertain
the correct pronunciation
of said verse-maker’s name.
My most ardent followers,
a hairy-palmed crew
of professional online smoochers
who append themselves to me
on the off-chance, like maggots
around an untreated wound,
each with an avant-garde masterpiece safely
locked way inside his or her head. My own favourite writers? By far
those who are on nobody’s
side but their own.
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
