On finishing my three years with Bob Sheppard at Edge Hill University Ormskirk, I moved to the Iveagh homeless hostel in Dublin, in July 2004, to continue my research into bardic lore and try my hand at writing poetry here.

I centred myself in weekly recital at Write and Recite poetry night in the basement of Brogans pub Dame Street, whilst also attending the official Poetry Ireland do's. The difference in poetic quality between these two environments, was one of atmosphere more than anything else, and as Fintan O'Higgins wrote in a piece for Shit Creek Review: Dublin Poetry, 'in both camps the overall experience is like trying to find a few plump raisins in a bowl of rabbit-droppings..'

http://www.shitcreekreview.com/issue4/page37.htm?37

Not long after arriving here, I started gassing online, at the now defunct poem.uk, where the nucleus of poet-bloggers who now chat at poets on fire, engaged in what passed for serious poetic debate.

I remember the talk on royalties was non-existent. It took me another three years to work out that 12-15% return per unit is the industry norm. So, if your books sell for ten quid, it's 1.50 return for each one. Not a lot. You'd have to sell 20,000 per year to have a decent income out of it, and selling that amount would put you up there with Heaney.

A few days before Valentine's day 2005, I purchased 100 sheets of gold-fleck A4 90gsm, for 10 cent a copy, along with an O hand wax-seal for 2 euro, some red wax sticks and a short length of one and a half inch plastic pipe.

On the paper, I printed the only love poem I had at that time, LROVSE, written in a white-hot imbas splurge after one of the final poetry sessions with Sheppard, in which Go Rose was the poem we were responding to - and rolled the sheets round the plastic pipe then sealed it with the red wax O.

I got a cardboard box and some crushed purple-pink velvet from a drapiers, and went mad splashing a tenner on a foldaway chair. I then purloined a milk crate from somewhere and set off into Dublin city centre to go sell my wares.

~

Though I'd only been in Dublin seven months, I was getting the hang of how poetry manifest itself here. There is definitely some poetic magic in operation because what happens is that just at the point you need to see someone, they appear, literally. There are lots of examples I could give, but the general rule of thumb is, the Dublin cosmos delivers what you need, when you need it, and you learn to trust this mechanism; what George Szirtes in his Eliot lecture terms, 'secret levers of the universe'.

At Write and Recite, I'd been hearing about an urban legend called James Kelly, a Kerry poet with a voice of human birdsong, who I had not met but wanted to, because of what I'd been hearing. Kelly shifts his won chapbooks direct to the public, and is the last of the wandering bards, flitting hither and tither all over the island in the summer, to the various festivals. 

On the first morning of going out with my A4 rolled sheets with one poem on them, I went into the homeless Charity canteen, Focus, which does fantastic and nutritous meals for 1.50, and sure enough, there was Kelly, which I took to be a positive sign from the Irish equivalent of Appollo, Ogma, the god of Letters.

I introduced myself and after a chat, we swapped our wares and went our seperate ways. I decamped to the doorway of a closed-down Bewleys on Westmoreland Street, set up my cardboard box draped in the purple-pink crushed velvet, onto which I laid the gold tubes; stuck up some A4 signs advertising the love poem, opened my notebook and waited.

The first customer was a guard, who asked could I write him a poem for his girlfreind, and after taking a few details, her name being Karen and the fact she had red hair, I told him to come back in a few hours and he gave me a tenner for a poem that was very much influenced by Kelly's chapbook.

Your curled red hair like sun-flame
streaming through the ether
of a february day
has captured every moment
of the time it took for love to ripen
and the suddeness with which I fell for you;
sensuous butterfly
who makes my spirit quicken
to the music of the thornbush
and the cherry blossom
sung in spring to the lilting beat 
of love song singing

Karen.

I got a few more poems out of the experience and sold about 60 poems, making about 90 quid profit over the two days.

~


I only did it for the sheer heck of being able to honestly claim that my poetry yielded a 1900% return on the first time out, to the poets at poem.uk, who barred me from their list not long after.

What happened next, in 2008, completely upended my whole realtionship with poetry.

I won 435,000 euro on the Lotto and for the first time in my life, money wasn't an issue. Instead of having to count every penny, I became a normal person, and came to view the whole money and poetry gig, as existing in two seperate realms.

On one hand, poetry brought me to Ireland and everything else that came out of that, in however a roundabout way, I thank poetry for delivering. On the other, to make as much money as the gods of chance gifted me, in the straight world of making 1.50 a book, I would have to sell 200,000 of them.

Because I centred myself in the bardic lore, in which Irish myth is the motor, coupled with a batty imagination, even though there's a logical explanation for how lucky I am, in reality, I think it's a supernatural business, poetry.