Yeah, thanks very much Allen.

Sweet Afton's the name of the rolling tabacco that will probably kill me,
and Ralegh was the name of Walt, who was the one on the page of the
Metaphysical poets anthology i had open on my table as i made up another mask.

I am sorry Healy, for going in heavy, at least you have not revoked the
posting rights, and Allen's right, the worst thing is to get all precious
about human emotions. I mean, we love to read what appears as a real flesh
and blood person, with all their faults, and though there is a pressure to
pretend we are all emotional automans and should appear in lingo that is
totally inoffensive, at the end of the day, we all love reading of the hoo
ha's and politcial poetic tussles between the protaganists eeking out a
niche from which to sing their own note, and after reading Cronin's Dead As
Doornails: A Memoir, of his time in the pubs of Dublin with a trinity of
geniuses, realised that it is better not to pretend i am someone i am not,
and that far from it, telling of the spats and scraps and making my poverty,
career in the premier central homeless hostel in Dublin where i went after
getting a 2:1 in the Writing degree, work for me on the page. No shame,
transcend the fear that a poet has to be anyhting other than who they are.

There is a genuinely exciting shift into the new net age in which s/he the
poet can harness all the technology to work in ways undreamt of before this,
what Bernie calls Diologic medium of publishing appeared, and the bardic
stuff was just a mad dream from seven years ago when i first started.

The first thing i copped on when studying, is that for everyone who  claims
to be a poet, some smart mouth will attempt to put you in a box labelled non
poet, performance poet, this that or anything but the stand alone one. And
Heaney says in the interview that this word still has a sacred charge and
everyone wants that appellation. 

So seven yrs ago, 34, zero confidence, no learning, the rest of my life to
enjoy in this new dodge i had took on in what was clearly the last throw of
the dice to gain self respect, and which my biggest fear was that i would
expose myself as a fake a few years in, on the basis of metting one person
who would make me feel thus -- i looked at it logically and thought:

1 - there is no agreement on what Poetry is.

2 - there are two extreme ends of the same spectrum with various schools of
differing belief. One school will deny the other and vice versa, so what's
the best way to become a poet, a real one no one can say isn't?


Well, what tradition is there which we can safely say, was the most poetic?

Bardic, 1200 yrs in print. But no one knows anything of it, and i decided
that the only way i could reach that point of no other poet, no matter what
they thought of me as a person, could deny i was real as they are -- was to
learn as close as possible, what the bards did. And this was connected to
some deeper urge, to learn what i could about the history of Ireland. Both
folks are Irish, the name Desmond which is my surname (Swords my mother's
maiden name) is a very localised one in West Cork and the myth of every
Desmond, is they are the final remnants of the Earls of Desmond who kicked
off the Tudor rebellions and ended up within a few decades, dispossed, with
the final earl, getting chopped down by James Kelly, a kern for the clan
Moriarty, and his head sent to E1 and spiked on the Bridge. But i was just a
Lancashire accented dreamer, my father a carpenter, grandfater a navvie, not
royalty at all.

And so whilst learning American Modernism at third level, parallell to that,
outside the course, i typed in Irish history and so began the swim to the
source of who i am, and after three years, Irish myth, due to only having it
in translation, and it being so comprehensive and quite large, was still a
hazy blur, but i had the rest of my life to take it on, and came to Dublin
to further that aim, and then a year later found the Amergin text, which i
know, though no one will want to have some one like me being the first to be
a smart ass with it -- is a very crucially relevant document which negates
any need for division in Poetry. 

Like finding a key to a door, behind which the answer to the question, what
is Poetry, lies. The camps and the heads of the differing poetic schools, at
the door arguing, and then i turn up and say..hey you're all mistaken, look
here's the key to the door, lets have a gander and see what's behind it.

This is the last thing anyone expected to happen, and as Amergin says in the
text, one of the four human joys s/he who composed it states:


the joy of health untroubled in the abundence of goading when one takes up
the prosperity of bardcraft.

And i am currently, not allowed to speak in most places where other poets
gather and blather, due to this text. On the guardian blokes bog, i have had
about a hundred different masks, after them being cool with me until a poet
who slung me out her gaffe through what s/he thought a craft bit of gameship
and because of which i went to the blokes bog in the first place -- decided
to come to where i was, after s/he threw me out their gaffe, to top me, and
it all backfired for this poet and they now have a ruined rep, due to their
own actions and behaviour with me who they thought was an idiot, i am
guessing, just because of my accent.

Poetry can change the world, eloquence cannot be bought, and as Graves says,
money can by anything but the truth possessed poet and so, thanks very much
Healy, i now you are a very good force for poets and i apologise for pissing
you off, but life's too short to pretend we are untouchables for speaking
out of turn now and then, and at least here there seems to be a bit of
tolerance. The truth as i experienced it, is that if youget cleverer than
the ones who have had a monopoly on English language poetry since Tudor
times when my rellie got his head chopped off and lost his 500,000 Munster
acres, you will be excluded on bullshit and now with Obama in, the whole
dissolving of fear, the whole new Labour charade of equality and fairness
for all unless your name is Windsor and then the rules do not apply.


The party started by Kier Hardie is not the one he would claim as his own now.

To make your dreams come true, you must first make your life a dream -
that's what Marie Curie's hubbie Pierre said, and that is what can happen if
we work, read, write, recite and develop our God given talent, and to be a
poet banned for speaking in your own note, means yr career is assured.

gra agus siochain