Allowing for minor editorial interventions, the composition stage for my chapbook / artist's book Muses Walk has been completed. Sixteen new poems are, for better or for worse, written; I've also taken many photographs, some of which will contribute its visual element. I've now moved on to working out the design, before tackling production/printing issues.
In addition to being a response to the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street (it was conceived as such, with the concept behind it discussed elsewhere) I view Muses Walk, which will be home-made and self-produced, as a sort of coda to Spitting Out the Mother Tongue - and the completion, at least for the time being, of my treatment of the conditions I grew up with and their implications. And though I'm only required to contribute three copies to the project (to be delivered by the end of March 2012) I intend to make 50 numbered copies of the book, with the rest made available for purchase at readings etc.
*
I'm currently in the process of putting together a reading/event in Dublin to mark the 5th anniversary of the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street, on 5 March. Time and venue are confirmed, as are most of the participants. I'll be posting more on this next month.
*
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, an anthology of texts responding to the bombing, will be published by PM Press in June. It's edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi, and is now available to pre-order from the publisher's website.
*
Below is a video recording of a panel discussion on Al-Mutanabbi Street at Santa Cruz public library. It's introduced by Beau Beausoleil, who outlines quite comprehensively his reasons for initiating and curating these projects.
Thursday 12 January 2012
Saturday 31 December 2011
on the radio
My poem 'New Year's Eve', from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue, was broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Thursday 29 December, during the mid-morning show Today with Pat Kenny. It was part of a 25-minute section of poems and prose extracts on the themes of winter, Christmas and the New Year, compiled and presented by Niall McMonagle. A podcast of this section of the show is available on the RTÉ website (the introduction to my poem, read by actor Barry Barnes, starts at around 14:45).
Monday 19 December 2011
Review in The Irish Times
Harry Clifton's highly appreciative review of Spitting Out the Mother Tongue was published in last Saturday's edition of The Irish Times.
A couple of extracts:
"The world it inhabits has gone past the point of the national, and begun to relax into its own ubiquity as a fact of life, without the usual anguish of expatriation."
"... he and his poems, so universally at home in themselves, are a straw in the wind, a forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing, of what has happened in Britain with Grace Nichols, Benjamin Zephaniah, Jackie Kay."
Read the full review here.
A couple of extracts:
"The world it inhabits has gone past the point of the national, and begun to relax into its own ubiquity as a fact of life, without the usual anguish of expatriation."
"... he and his poems, so universally at home in themselves, are a straw in the wind, a forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing, of what has happened in Britain with Grace Nichols, Benjamin Zephaniah, Jackie Kay."
Read the full review here.
Wednesday 14 December 2011
the poet was in the shack
The resulting text from my shack intervention at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda last Saturday - part of Thomas Brezing's exhibition 'The Art of Failure isn't hard to Master' - is now on the gallery website. Many thanks and congratulations to all who collaborated in composing this piece. Thanks also to the gallery staff. I enjoyed shacking up with myself for a few hours and interacting with the public from there.
Footage of my reading of the text after emerging from the shack has surfaced on YouTube:
Footage of my reading of the text after emerging from the shack has surfaced on YouTube:
Thursday 8 December 2011
Poem on Occupy Writers
Occupy Writers have published my reverse-narrative poem 'Mayday'.
Read more Occupied Writings, and see the full list of writers who have signed their support to the Occupy Movement around the world, on the Occupy Writers website - with links to other support groups, news and information on how to find your local Occupy group.
Read more Occupied Writings, and see the full list of writers who have signed their support to the Occupy Movement around the world, on the Occupy Writers website - with links to other support groups, news and information on how to find your local Occupy group.
Monday 5 December 2011
POST III: Poetry at the Games
The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin has published the third issue of its online journal POST. Edited by Michael Hinds, POST III: Poetry at the Games is devoted to links between poetry and sports or games, and as such it includes among others a survey of poetry inspired by chess, a (largely) pictorial essay on the poetics of horse racing, a study of sport in the work of Brendan Kennelly, and an examination of the appearance of the word 'bikini' in Ezra Pound's Cantos.
POST is subtitled a review of poetry studies, and is therefore of an academic/scholarly nature. But in addition to essays and reviews it often features original poetry: derek beaulieu's visual poem-games appear throughout this issue, while my sequence 'Masculine Biography Vol 1' (from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue) is also included, introduced in the editorial as "describing a personal history in World Cup-termed fragments".
POST is subtitled a review of poetry studies, and is therefore of an academic/scholarly nature. But in addition to essays and reviews it often features original poetry: derek beaulieu's visual poem-games appear throughout this issue, while my sequence 'Masculine Biography Vol 1' (from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue) is also included, introduced in the editorial as "describing a personal history in World Cup-termed fragments".
Friday 2 December 2011
Cadences Vol 7
Volume 7 (Fall 2011) of Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus has just been published. This issue places particular emphasis on translation and its bridge-building aspect, with an essay by EU official and literary translator Anthi Karra prominent. And apart from the usual content of poetry, fiction and non-fiction texts in Greek, Turkish and English - often translated from one into another of these three main languages of the island - there are translations from the Portuguese, Spanish, Lithuanian and Polish.
The issue also includes my poems 'The Orchard' and 'Το Πίσω Περβόλι' from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue, which were written simultaneously as two versions or branches of the same poem, one in English and the other in the Cypriot dialect of Greek.
The issue also includes my poems 'The Orchard' and 'Το Πίσω Περβόλι' from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue, which were written simultaneously as two versions or branches of the same poem, one in English and the other in the Cypriot dialect of Greek.
Wednesday 23 November 2011
In Focus (Vol 8, No 3)
In Focus is "a quarterly magazine on literature, culture and the arts in Cyprus" and is published in Nicosia by The Cyprus PEN Centre and Armida Publications. Its current issue reproduces the feature on my work originally published in January for 3:AM Magazine's 'Maintenant' series: an interview conducted by Steven Fowler, accompanied by five poems.
In Focus features fiction, poetry, artwork, essays, reviews, interviews and non-fiction pieces. Some of the material is very good - an interview with a maker of theatre masks from a few issues ago springs to mind. But it is of a conservative bent, and with a tone that can appear overly formal, or sentimental.
Editor Panos Ioannides has published work of mine before, and I'm grateful that he has sought our permission to bring the feature to the attention of the magazine's readers. But it's impossible to ignore that a lot of what it publishes is at odds with the gist of what I say in the very interview it reproduces - or with what I hope my work represents. For example, in another interview from the current issue, with the singer Alexia, which pointedly takes place in the city of Ammochostos/Famagusta (since 1974 standing north of the Cypriot divide) there's the following exchange:
ALEXIA: Let's see what song is played at the beach bar of the new tenants.
MARIOS (interviewer): Whatever it is, I hope they won't stay for much longer and that soon we'll get to hear some Greek tunes instead... perhaps some of your music!
ALEXIA: Thank you Marie! Yes, let's hope so!
Then, in an essay that offers a reading of the poem 'The Stone' by Sophocles Lazarou - an intriguing-sounding poem which I'd like to track down and explore further - the essay's author Andreas Petrides writes:
"And if I express myself in this almost dithyrambic tone, dragging out a poem from the past, it is because my soul thirsts every so often for one, albeit fleeting, return to good poetry, beyond the suffocating grip of the modernistic or philosophical, without real inspiration, contemporary constructs."
It's not the case that In Focus juxtaposes differing approaches to writing and art, or contrasting sociopolitical attitudes, to offer a critique or a questioning of each position: I find the majority of what it publishes tending towards the nostalgic, the self-consciously poetic, the insularly nationalistic. Which makes the reproduction of the feature hard to interpret.
In Focus features fiction, poetry, artwork, essays, reviews, interviews and non-fiction pieces. Some of the material is very good - an interview with a maker of theatre masks from a few issues ago springs to mind. But it is of a conservative bent, and with a tone that can appear overly formal, or sentimental.
Editor Panos Ioannides has published work of mine before, and I'm grateful that he has sought our permission to bring the feature to the attention of the magazine's readers. But it's impossible to ignore that a lot of what it publishes is at odds with the gist of what I say in the very interview it reproduces - or with what I hope my work represents. For example, in another interview from the current issue, with the singer Alexia, which pointedly takes place in the city of Ammochostos/Famagusta (since 1974 standing north of the Cypriot divide) there's the following exchange:
ALEXIA: Let's see what song is played at the beach bar of the new tenants.
MARIOS (interviewer): Whatever it is, I hope they won't stay for much longer and that soon we'll get to hear some Greek tunes instead... perhaps some of your music!
ALEXIA: Thank you Marie! Yes, let's hope so!
Then, in an essay that offers a reading of the poem 'The Stone' by Sophocles Lazarou - an intriguing-sounding poem which I'd like to track down and explore further - the essay's author Andreas Petrides writes:
"And if I express myself in this almost dithyrambic tone, dragging out a poem from the past, it is because my soul thirsts every so often for one, albeit fleeting, return to good poetry, beyond the suffocating grip of the modernistic or philosophical, without real inspiration, contemporary constructs."
It's not the case that In Focus juxtaposes differing approaches to writing and art, or contrasting sociopolitical attitudes, to offer a critique or a questioning of each position: I find the majority of what it publishes tending towards the nostalgic, the self-consciously poetic, the insularly nationalistic. Which makes the reproduction of the feature hard to interpret.
Thursday 17 November 2011
Scrutinising Ireland's President-Poet
It was amusing to read the comments that predictably flooded in from indignant folk, mainly out of or related to Ireland, following Carol Rumens' deconstruction of Michael D Higgins' poem 'When Will My Time Come?'. "Mean-spirited", "churlish", "nasty" and "mad woman" were some of the epithets used with reference to the article or its author, both in the chain of comments below the piece and on other forums.
The first I knew of Rumens' piece on The Guardian website (which I often read) was from a parochial defence of Higgins in the following Saturday's Irish Times (which I often don't). For what it's worth, I feel there's an issue with Rumens' article in that its title (possibly not her own choice) and first paragraph question the very claim that Higgins is a poet, rather than what he writes or his approach. (Interestingly, on her own website Rumens begins her welcome note with "I hate attaching labels to myself. Am I a poet? I hope so but how can I be sure?") But this kind of ultra-defensive reaction a critical piece elicited from people interested in poetry was rather revealing.
What was particularly notable was how, even in such minds, the poetry got relegated to insignificance the moment its maker attained a national office - even one of a largely ambassadorial nature. Few, if any, confronted the poem itself or its deconstruction. This lack of belief in the relevance of poetry brought to mind a disparaging comment made about Barack Obama by one of his opponents in the run up to the 2008 US presidential election: "he's a poet, not a fighter".
Michael D Higgins has been a politician and a public figure for a long time, with a real, active and well-documented championing of human rights and the arts. His poetry is viewed as something he does in parallel, and harmless - though published by relatively mainstream presses. As far as I'm aware there's been little serious critical attention given to it (the pats on the back of the sure-isn't-he-great-writing-poems-too sort don't really count).
Isn't the very reason he has now been voted president of a state enough to make his words and how he has used them ripe to be scrutinised - harshly, if necessary? It's not OK for arts bodies, other poets etc just to publicise and celebrate the fact that they have a president who has also written poems. I hope, without holding my breath, that in publishing the "offending" article Carol Rumens and The Guardian end up causing a critical shift beyond their initial intention.
The first I knew of Rumens' piece on The Guardian website (which I often read) was from a parochial defence of Higgins in the following Saturday's Irish Times (which I often don't). For what it's worth, I feel there's an issue with Rumens' article in that its title (possibly not her own choice) and first paragraph question the very claim that Higgins is a poet, rather than what he writes or his approach. (Interestingly, on her own website Rumens begins her welcome note with "I hate attaching labels to myself. Am I a poet? I hope so but how can I be sure?") But this kind of ultra-defensive reaction a critical piece elicited from people interested in poetry was rather revealing.
What was particularly notable was how, even in such minds, the poetry got relegated to insignificance the moment its maker attained a national office - even one of a largely ambassadorial nature. Few, if any, confronted the poem itself or its deconstruction. This lack of belief in the relevance of poetry brought to mind a disparaging comment made about Barack Obama by one of his opponents in the run up to the 2008 US presidential election: "he's a poet, not a fighter".
Michael D Higgins has been a politician and a public figure for a long time, with a real, active and well-documented championing of human rights and the arts. His poetry is viewed as something he does in parallel, and harmless - though published by relatively mainstream presses. As far as I'm aware there's been little serious critical attention given to it (the pats on the back of the sure-isn't-he-great-writing-poems-too sort don't really count).
Isn't the very reason he has now been voted president of a state enough to make his words and how he has used them ripe to be scrutinised - harshly, if necessary? It's not OK for arts bodies, other poets etc just to publicise and celebrate the fact that they have a president who has also written poems. I hope, without holding my breath, that in publishing the "offending" article Carol Rumens and The Guardian end up causing a critical shift beyond their initial intention.
Thursday 10 November 2011
The Art of Failure isn't hard to Master, by Thomas Brezing
Thomas Brezing's exhibition The Art of Failure isn't hard to Master opens on Saturday 12 November 2011 at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, Co Louth, and runs until 11 January 2012.
Brezing's painting 'Skylloura', which provides the cover for my book Spitting Out the Mother Tongue, will be on show.
There's a full programme of public events planned around the exhibition, two of which include my participation:
On Saturday 26 November, at 3pm, I will be taking part in a panel discussion with title 'the influence of literature on art and art on literature'. Artist David Newton will be contributing chair, with the panel also including Thomas Brezing and artist Mary Kelly. (A full colour catalogue accompanying the exhibition, with essay by Cliodhna Shaffrey, will be launched at this event.)
And on Saturday 10 December I will be present in the gallery from 11am until 2pm, in the Artist's Shack, for an intervention, where I intend to engage the public into the surrealist game 'exquisite corpse' to produce collaborative poems around the works in the exhibition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
