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Poem of the Day on UpStart blog

My poem 'Ginsberg in Fingal' was Friday's Poem of the Day on the UpStart blog. As noted there, it's taken from my chapbook Round the Clock, and was composed out of lines from Ginsberg's poem 'America', written in January 1956.

It places the figure of Allen Ginsberg at a specific location (Fingal, a relatively wealthy county in Ireland and home of Dublin airport) and a particular time (late 2000s), and gives this figure a voice. As such it's a straightforward dramatic monologue, or 'persona poem'. But this persona's voice wasn't an invention: at the time of composition correspondences between impressions of contemporary Ireland and 1950s America seen through Ginsberg's poem were too intriguing to ignore.

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