I joined here several weeks ago and didn't know what to expect, as my last
two years of writing have been on public access computers in the Chill Out
candy store cum internet shop next to the Hapenny bridge in Dublin. Two
months ago I got wireless broadband, for 18 euro a month unlimited access.
10 euro cheaper than it was costing me to write in public at Chill Out,
which closed at 11pm. Soon after joining I got a very thoghtful e mail from
Mairead asking me to post up an introductory note about myself and never shy
of taking the opprtunity to bore others by sheer weight of blather, I am
allowing myself the pleasure.

My research area is the Ogham alphabet, which represents the printed link
between oral and literate Ireland, but unfortunately all but a few poets I
have met are inerested in this subject. Online it has been seized by the
self styled druidic orders and lifestyle as religion types, aiming for a God
 register which is great fun to mimic and adopt in experimental writing
aimed at trying to locate - if any - the source of this voice. The
originating pool from which its laughable echo is currently heard when
reading the majority of stuff written by those professing an understanding
of ogham.

I will post more about this subject later - more for me to tease out for
myself as much as informing anyon who may be interested in it. Because of
its nature the gap between genuine poetic profundity and textual idiocy is
very small and due to having a slight labotomised computer Mairead may have
recived a long and unintelligable working draft of unreadable text, as it
was sections cut and pasted,. If this was the case and I confused you in any
way Mairead, don't worry - I am only a sound-nut living in Dublin cheek to
underbelly in the Liberties.

~    

Reading the thread today is the spark urging me to write, as I can see that
this is a place for people passionate about da word moan.

~

I trained under Robert Sheppard in Ormskirk - my home town. The most
important thing I learned there was how little I will ever know, as the more
I read and wrote, the more my ignorance became apparent to me. But at least
the light of learning switched on whilst there, during the early part of my
third semester when studying Modernism. I had no academic qualifications and
got on through a six week fastrack course and started a few eeks later. It
all happened so quick. I had just started writing seriously after jacking in
work a few months previously and discovered by accident - online - that my
home town college - now a university - offered a degree in writing studies.

I was in Cork and needed a tooth out so had gone home to get it done. The
fastrack course was due to start in a few weeks and - having always relied
on instinct and lived on a whim - I hold an abstract but forceful spiritual
conviction that there is some kind of unconscious order of unknowable tune
dancing all members ofhumanity  through their life, so came to the
conclusion that doing this course was meant to be, as there were zero
drawbacks and only potential gains by doing so. 

I was at the first stage of writing and had no experience or confidence and
my nightmare scenario was that I was conning myself. Slipping into the
middle years of life as a bum folling myself with the idea notion I could be
a writer. I was a typical mature student, soaking it all up like a sponge,
along wiith my other middle aged working class second-chancer pals who came
in via the fastrack. 

~

At the end of the first year the shoulder chip had lost its spike and I was
work work work, but no intellectual breakthorugh of the sort I was waiting
to happen. The writing studies programme had to be a joint honours, so I
chose drama. A standard course that starts with the greeks and ends with
Annie Sprinkle, Marco B and Ron Athy in the final semester - just before we
set forth outside the grove in what was termed "a self supported learning
state." Our "exit velocity" was mentioned during this time, and it was clear
by then who the duffers and party heads were.

~

But all that was still a year away when the list poem switched on the first
fundamental understanding to illuminate the intellectual breakthrough. 

Robert uses the Rothenberg Anthologies and a Dutch? sounding name leaped of
the page at me, in a poem listing items on a table. What struck me first was
the vitality in the lingo. As though it had just been written. Most of the
other stuff was dateably dead to me, and it took me several reads to suss
out the poem was actually just a list of what was on top of a table.

I can't remember the name and if anyone knows it I would be very grateful
for the author and title please.

We had been asked by the tutor - who was a Victorian themed phd student - to
bring in something - anything - which represented our understanding of
Modernism. This is why I was going through the Rothenberg Vol 1 anthology. I
immediately began laughing when I read this piece and verballed it,
surrendring to the nuttiness of it and when I read it the following day in
class, a few bemused giggles from two colleagues signaled its effective
power to stun. 

~

I got sidetracked, as what I really set out to do was talk about the
"write-through" method. This is where you take a text and reconfigure oit
into a different one using all the same words. This is the first one I did.
Sylvia Plath's "Collossus."

Note - * indicates italics in the priginal. I don't think you can do it on
this list. In fact, it's just occured to me, why don't I set up a chatsite
for this list and see what happens? Any ideas? 

WRITE THROUGH SYLVIA PLATH  

Did she angle wonder on the grasp 
extending reason her creation 
drove wild beyond loathing, 
by constantly digging in hunt for sound
to knit some rock firm sharp picture alive 
like a gem stitched braid 
upon whose surface 
her eye discerned a myriad of texture? 

Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterfly 
wind chanced and framed like a Japanese print 
of bold delicacy 
fittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detail
with every line rehearsing immortal perfection, 
crisp as stalk fresh shoots 

Nosed in did her compass net an imprint of  
discordant shadow in savage butt and jagged antinomy 
absent of balance nature or measure

    ----------- write through--------- 

*
like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line? 
Did she mix thirty years of laboured hours 
in little pails and gluepots 
to create an oracle married in shadow?
Crawl like an ant over immense dead  stones
in the black fluted night 
and proceed to entirely open 
the lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?
Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throat
to bray at Orestiea, 
or some roman mule god with acanthine hair 
scaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?  
Was she never counted by her father
or others who                 
none the wiser
no longer listened 
as she dredged her bawdy bones of mourning  
and pieced together with blank eyes
her pithy historical mouthpiece
left to colour and stroke our ears? 
Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of stars 
which littered her tongue like lysol on clear white plates
climb ladders of weedy cypress jointed
by the wind of a blue sky arching above to 
properley squat at some old forum and consider
landing keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?

~

Thank you for reading this long. Lets get chatting dear reader. I will put
up a poem by Belfast's Mark Madden soon. He is electric live and very fresh
on the page, fully emmiting his frisson of genuine danger in life as it is
in Belfast poems.