That's a long post for a Background Poet, Douglas.

2009/6/29 Desmond Swords <[log in to unmask]>

> Hello Robin.
>
> Thanks very much for allowing me the opportunity of engaging in some more
> speculative discourse.
>
> I have always viewed online as an extension of my formal learning, and have
> come to understand that the various practices of the ancient Irish bards
> and
> Robert Sheppard's idea of speculative discourse, are essentially coming out
> from the same compositional pool in which extemporised writing leads to
> some
> realisation or understanding as one writes.
>
> Like Columbo in the final scene acting in the moment and a jigsaw falling
> into place, a bit like the Frostean ice that begins with us not having a
> clue what it is we know, but pushing off and beginning in delight,
> extemporise a way to flight and ending up in the general area of poetic
> wisdom.
>
> ~
>
> The manuscript was formerly catagorised as H.3.18, but now has the
> catalogue
> number of 1337.
>
> I wrote to Trinity last week asking if i could have a look but it is only
> for the eyes of Irish language scholars. They informed me the poem is on
> page 53 and was available to look at online at a Dublin Institute of
> Advanced Studies website <a href="http://www.isos.dias.ie/">Irish Script
> Onscreen</a>, but they are only showing four pages, 44, 45, 88 and 89.
>
> ~
>
> I have just now found a full lowdown on the contents at archive.org, in a
> 1921 book <a
> href="
> http://www.archive.org/stream/catalogueofirish00trinuoft/catalogueofirish00trinuoft_djvu.txt
> ">"Catalogue
> of the Irish manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Dublin</a>
>
> The details on what's in MS 1337, is about a quarter of the way down my
> screen, and as i am scrolling down now, page by page descriptions of what's
> in it, see it contains various law tracts, poems, tales and at p53, this is
> the description:
>
> "Amergin Glungeal's (Amergin White Knee's) mystical poem, beginning:
>
> nio coipe coip goipiach, with interlinear gloss. The leaves are of the same
> size as the preceding, and the second is similarly made up of two pieces
> sewn with silk.
> The first has also a defect supplied by a piece sewn with parchment."
>
> ~
>
> The language in the poem has been dated to 7C Old Irish, but the MS itself
> was compiled in the 15C. It will have been transcribed from another source,
> (no longer extant, this is the only copy) which was common practice by the
> scribes - and as you will see if you go to the link, the material in the
> book is very varied including poems, tales and law tracts.
>
> Here's some of the description of the book itself:
>
> "Though bound in quarto form, this volume includes fragments of books of
> various sizes and different ages. The first three leaves are not included
> in
> the pagination. The first of these is mutilated, and on the recto wholly
> illegible. On the verso it contains part of an Irish Law tract. The second
> and third contain part of a Latin Psalter, which seems to have had the two
> versions, namely, that of Jerome
> and the Vulgate, on alternate pages. The first page is almost illegible,
> but
> we can see that it contained Ps. Ixxi. q~2ia in Jerome's version from the
> Hebrew...
>
> Passing to the numbered pages —
>
> Of the first leaf only a very small fragment remains. At the top of p. I is
> a memorandum by Edw. Lhwyd, stating that the IMS. consists of 218 ff. (the
> same number is given on p. 358), and that he purchased it from Agnew
> (hereditary
> liard of O'Neill of Clannaboy)."
>
> I am going to buy a reader's ticket (20 euro a year) for the Royal Irish
> Academy this week so i can access Liam Breatnach's translation  and 48 page
> article on it  in number 32 of Ériu, 1981.
>
> ~
>
> The vatic *eating flesh* you refer to, relates to the druidic rite of <a
> href="http://www.fhaoil-choin.org/imbasforosnai.htm">Imbas Forosnai</a>,
> which Nora Chadwicks 1937 lengthy article (at the link) explains in some
> detail.
>
> Imbas forosnai, along with teinm laeda and dichetal di chennaib, according
> to various bardic tracts relating to the seven filidh (poet) grades which
> culminated with ollamh (phon,ulav - poetry professor) and are all
> extemporised methods which where first took on at level five, cli
> (ridgepole) or six, anruth (noble stream) in the eighth year of the 12 year
> training.
>
> I first came across this term in the final year at college, as part of the
> parellel study to American modernist poetry, the 40% ex-curricular part of
> a
> learning programme which self-evolved by instinct and which was basically
> trying to fathom Irish myth.
>
> I couldn't get my head round the myth, and at that point after three years,
> there wasn't even a skeleton dilineating itself, no datums, no solid base,
> no comprehensible shape - just dry academic stuff or online druid types
> talking in that floaty self-help tenor which is big on creative
> intepretation for self-empowering and getting through the hell of office
> life, but low on poetic insight or scholarship.
>
> Starting blind with zero knowledge of Irish myth, for someone of 35 out of
> formal education for 20 years, trying to make sense of what i was exposing
> myself to, all of it online, was not unlike hitting a tea strainer against
> one's head, trying to sieve into some order the seemingly incomprehensible
> material, where it is very easy to get the wrong end of the stick, because
> the various characters can have two and three Gaelic names, and there are
> all sorts of false trails and misleading data - like imbas forosnai.
>
> Chadwick tells us imbas forosnai is glossed by Whitley Stokes, from
> Cormac's
> Glossary in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, as:
>
> ""Imbas Forosna, 'Manifestation that enlightens': (it) discovers what thing
> soever the poet likes and which he desires to reveal. Thus then is that
> done. The poet chews a piece of the red flesh of a pig, or a dog, or a cat,
> and puts it then on a flagstone behind the door-valve, and chants an
> incantation over it, and offers it to idol gods, and calls them to him, and
> leaves them not on the morrow, and then chants over his two palms, and
> calls
> again idol gods to him, that his sleep may not be disturbed. Then he puts
> his two palms on his two cheeks and sleeps. And men are watching him that
> he
> may not turn over and that no one may disturb him. And then it is revealed
> to him that for which he was (engaged) till the end of a nomad (three days
> and nights), or two or three for the long or the short (time?) that he may
> judge himself (to be) at the offering."
>
> ~
>
> Imbas itself is also a (bardic) word which means poetic fizz, the mental
> jizz and excitement one gets when composing on the fly, caught up in the
> writing.
>
> However, when i first read Chadwick's article in 2004, i was just plain
> stumped, because it was not exactly the sort of caper we were doing every
> Friday with Bob Sheppard when consulting Rothenburg and Joris's Milenium
> anthologies.
>
> The rite itself i think is a red herring, because there are two substrands
> of imbas forosnai Chadwick goes onto speak of and which i mentioned above:
>
> teinm laeda and dichetal di chennaib, which Celticist Rudolph Thurneysen
> (1857 - 1940), glosses as "illumination of song, and "extempore
> incantation"
> respectively.
>
> Thurneyson was part of a group of scholars associated with the Celtic
> revival, when all this stuff was first getting translated into English and
> being neglected since the Gaelic collapse. The intellegensia of Trinity
> college, famously thinking that what was in Galeic manuscript and the
> poetic
> tradition, a rude course pagan load of rubbish with nothing to offer the
> civilized folk like themselves.
>
> Along with D. A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin, with Bergin being considered as
> the most learned, Thurneyson and the scholars all moved in the same Dublin
> milleau as Yeats and his cronies.
>
> There are various bardic tracts on the seven filidh (poet) grades of
> Medieval Ireland, and in the one titled Uraicecht Becc (small primer) there
> is a maxim:
>
> "...three things which dignify the dignities of a poet, "teinm laeda"
> 'imbas
> forosnai" "dichetal di chennaib."
>
> ~
>
> So, to recap
>
>
> teinm laeda - illumination of song
>
> imbas forosnai - manifestation of knowledge which enlightens
>
> dichetal di chennaib - extemporised incantation
>
> ~
>
> As i say, i first came across these three extemporised methods in 2004, but
> it wasn't until last year some understanding began taking shape, as i was
> approaching the eighth year of my own trawl through the myth. By this time
> i
> had a definite skeleton, the shape of the whole corpus was in place, after
> the head-banging began paying off around 2005 as the mist began forming
> into
> a recognisable body, more by sheer persistance than anything else, with the
> main points, the curriculum and what it consisted of, clear in my mind.
>
> Illumination of song, i think is fairly obvious, extemporised song, just
> start making it up and leading somewhere.
>
> There is a young fella here in Dublin we call God (aka mike), because when
> he first turned up at the <a
> href="http://www.shitcreekreview.com/issue4/page37.htm?37">Write and
> Recite</a> open mic which ran for three years from 2004 - 7, and where the
> radz attended weekly to compete, laugh, find friendship and emnity and
> everything one associates with a weekly poetry group (and which there is a
> very witty Fintan O'Higgins' article about, at the link) - God had long
> flowing golden locks and hence his nickname.
>
> God has a unique gift i have never witnessed in anyone else. You say a word
> and he starts riffing on it, extemporising and it is really a privilege to
> witness because it is genuine and so, illumination by song, if i had never
> seen God do it, this form would have remained some abstract bardic practice
> existing only on the pages time forgot.
>
> Reading round other scholars, it is also clear that dichetal di chennaib
> has
> an association with bones, holding objects and i read it glossed somewhere
> as
>
> extemporisation from the tips - which at some point a light went on and i
> thought
>
> extemporisation from the tips - of the fingers or tongue.
>
> Obviously taking creative license, but all this gear, we can never
> reconstitute bardic practice back to life or know exactly how it worked in
> that society, because it is so different now. The way i see it, it is *up
> for grabs*, a template whose curriculum offers the sad and lonely spammer
> trying to have a laugh, the perfect way into boring the rest of the bores
> in
> this game of appearing to know what Poetry is.
>
> My whole thinking when first starting out as a bloke who was 20 years
> behind
> the competition who started writing at the age of four and knew they wanted
> to be poets by their first holy communion - was "how can i be a poet
> without
> anyone pissing on my chips, who will make me feel inferior with that
> condenscending mindset?*
>
> This was because though poetry took me early on in my decision to try my
> hand at the writing gig, it was obvious that the whole of poetry is riven
> with camps, cliques and wars between the bores, which though essentially
> comedic, when the theatrics are in full swing and the battles are raging, a
> la Earls Court with Cobbing, Mottram and the straights - it's all so
> depressingly serious.
>
> So no matter what you did, there would always be the threat of someone
> saying, ah yes, but that's not *real* *true* poetry though is it?
>
> And i thought, what's the most *real* poetry to have been that we actually
> know about?
>
> The bards, i thought, knowing nothing of them, just that this misty word
> was
> about as British as it got vis a vis poetry, and so i started from there
> and
> it soon became apparent that this wasn't a one semester module to be
> getting
> knowledgable about, but a lifetime's study.
>
> But i had the rest of my life ahead of me, just happy i had found writing
> before i died, that i didn't have to be silent as well as a bum. That if i
> was going into my approaching middle age as a penniless failure, one last
> throw of the dice to chase the dream i had always harboured, which at this
> point had, the potential i had as a 16 year old shakespesperean actoary lad
> loving life, had shrivelled to a tiny pin prick only i knew was there.
>
> When Jono the whipping boy in fifth form, began wounding me at will in the
> local pub with his gob, when i was previously the Oscar Wilde of my gen - i
> knew it was time to act.
>
> So, i thought, imagine knowing the reality about the bards, that will
> guarantee no one could put a dampener on my dream of being a poet, and what
> appealed to me was just the sheer hell of it, devoting the rest of my life
> to finding out what was so clearly head distortingly complex and not worth
> bothering with, no one was bothering with it. Why would you?
>
> What for, becoming a poet on the basis of knowing the bardic lore, when the
> game was so obviously played along the lines of showbiz, get a name for
> yourself by appearing in this rag and that rag going higher and higher up
> the foodchain until..until what?
>
> Who's the one to beat? Who is the most real of the ture and real poets?
> Well, that's the gig, beat the best and hey presto, beam me up scotty.
>
> arghh, too much heroin tonight, mixed with the painkillers and rentboys, i
> am getting carried away.
>
> More later..
>



-- 
David Bircumshaw
"Nothing can be done in the face
of ordinary unhappiness" - PP
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
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