On Saturday the 26th of April, a one-day conference, "New and Experimental
Irish Poetry", took place in University College Cork to celebrate the 30th
anniversary of New Writers' Press.
Trevor Joyce kicked off with his paper, "Innovative Poetry: why do we need
it?" which developed his work in his volume "Pentahedron" (1972, still
available) towards describing a dynamic epistemology of poetic apprehension,
not necessarily in opposition to the mainstream off-the-shelf model. The
talk also introduced Irish experimental poets, a category which few of the
audience had suspected to be non-null. He began with the Wandering Jew,
omniscient but utterly unable to intervene, going on to those poets who
agonise over international news but are unable either to do anything about
it or to change station. The charge was laid that perhaps we have fallen
for our own tourist board’s spiel about how great the Irish are with words
that "we imagine that all we need to do is lay bare our souls in a few
images, neatly segmented through the line-break mechanism into something
resembling emotional sausages, and there we have that sacred thing, a
poem?". Under this philunacy, Joyce and Beckett have been dismissed as
"amiable chancers" whose work on behalf of tourism and lit. has excused all
subsequent generations from the need to experiment by a credit transfer
system while we get back to the serious business of "fixing our hearts to
our sleeves with Victorian safety pins".
In early 1967, Trevor Joyce and Michael Smith founded New Writers’ Press in
Dublin, taking Pound’s call ‘to make it new’ to heart. There was only one
other poetry press, the Dolmen, functioning in Ireland at the time. "Under
Liam Miller it produced typographically beautiful editions … but … it wasn’t
going to cause any trouble to the existing order " dealing almost
exclusively with the Oirish poem, "a rustic variant of the metropolitan
original, designed in London, and was distinguishable from it largely by its
idiosyncratic subject matter: a rural setting, a spiritual folk, a primitive
idyll." "Make it new", indeed!
NWP, over three decades, made available innovative work by many contemporary
Irish Poets. They also published non-Irish poets who were doing interesting
things in English, e.g. Jack Spicer whose Billy the Kid NWP published in
1969. A wide range of work in translation, including Vallejo, Ingeborg
Bachmann, and "the first volume entirely given over to Borges’ poetry to be
published in English anywhere in the world , so far as I am aware". As is
always going to be the case with work ahead of its time, archaeology is an
essential strand in maintaining momentum. In the early 70’s the press
brought to light the 30’s experimentalists, McGreevy, Devlin and Coffey
whose work had been discussed by Beckett in a pseudonymous essay "Recent
Irish Poetry" which first appeared in a small thirties journal and which he
was persuaded to republish in NWP’s magazine, The Lace Curtain, with his own
name appended. The press were unable to publish the work of Montgomery,
whom Beckett had also named, due to withholding of copyright.
It was only at Professor Romana Huk’s conference, "Assembling Alternatives"
in New Hampshire in 1996 that Trevor met for the first time not only
Geoffrey Squires, although NWP had published two volumes of his work, but
also Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills and Randolph Healy, whose
work had hitherto evaded him. Trevor, almost exculpating himself, asked the
audience how many times they had had an opportunity to encounter their
names, let alone their work, before the Cork Conference. Maurice Scully had
started small-scale publishing in the early 70’s. He edited Trinity College
Dublin’s magazine "Icarus", had co-edited a journal called "the Belle" and
in the early 80’s ran the Beau Press which published an annual magazine
focusing on experimental poetry, prose and painting, and was also
responsible for 25 POEMS by Randolph Healy. After then functioned briefly
under the imprint of the Coelacanth Press.
Billy Mills and Catherine Walsh ran hardPressed Poetry, which published 16
volumes of poetry including work by Tom Raworth and David Lloyd.
The point was made that the work of the above writers is not an exclusivist
one, that it does not turn away from the work of Boland or Mahon or Heaney
as being bad in some essential way. Rather these latter poets were
criticised not for being outdated or unfashionable, but "that they are too
proper, that they exclude too much, that they are depressingly predictable
and fundamentally joyless." Taking up an idea of Joan Retallack’s, "these
poets are imitating the images of beauty with which they are already
familiar, and nudging them occasionally towards the mess that is the world,
through a sense of guilt … at perpetrating such works of beauty in such a
foul environment."
The talk concluded with a call to "listen to language" to "involve ourselves
in a dialogue with it, as it presents itself in literature and the poetry of
the past, and of contemporary innovators outside Ireland. … a dialogue with
voices from the past and from elsewhere very much at work in the pets you
will hear today, a dialogue which unwinds differently in each case, on each
occasion, but which does not limit itself at the point where it develops
beyond the boundaries of poetry as we have known it, beyond the images of
beauty."
Catherine Walsh read next. Her work, as laid out on the page, allows for a
multiplicity of mutually interacting readings, and it was a joy to hear her
equally mobile voice echo this while maintaining a coherent line chosen for
this context, this audience, and which would in all likelihood only exist
for the duration of this particular reading. They loved it. Wonderful stuff.
Here’s a short example from Idir Eatortha:
***************************
"the grey leaf"
"the green leaf"
"the grey green leaf"
"the greeny leaf"
"the greyey leaf"
"grainy leaf grainy leaf grainy grey green leaf
of a tree"
"off a tree"
"of a tree off on a pavement off of a tree on a
pavement"
"grainy grey green leaf of a tree off of on a
grey grainy pavement green leaf grained dirty
rain trails"
"twee twee"
"if I had a little bird"
"conditional"
"dependancy clause"
"not on"
"where is it?" "well where is it?"
[scraping of shovel on concrete]
[short rapid brushstrokes - hard bristle on concrete]
**************************
Billy Mills next, and he was as in relaxed and expansive a mood as any of us
have seen, the witty juxtapositions and changes of register in his work
emerging easily and lucidly from his unhurried and engaging reading. (He
later said that he was so preoccupied with his later talk that he didn’t
have time to be nervous about his reading. ) In introducing, Billy
mentioned that he doesn’t write poems, but rather sections which tend to be
parts of a larger work.
This from THE PROPERTIES OF STONE
*************************
ARAGONITE
orthorhombic
white, grey,
green or violet
vitreous
transparent to
translucent
‘yt is gud
and lyght to bere’
expanding
such forms
are imaginable
(this little book)
as the surface
of a sphere
occurs
in the shells
of certain animals
(corals & clams)
‘I do not suppose
the truth of all
or so much as
the tenth part
of these
wonderful properties’
volume
proportional to pressure
in inverse
if temperature is constant
& in deposits
around hot springs
************************
Billy’s reading was followed by Maurice Scully’s. There was some time in
hand so Maurice was able to read for longer than scheduled which was
appropriate indeed, given the amplitude of his recent work, Livelihood, a
five-volume-three-interstices sequence which took him ten years to write.
He included as part of his own reading a piece by Jessica Meyer, "Falls
Gems", an act of generosity to which I can only aspire.
This from FIVE FREEDOMS OF MOVEMENT
*******************************
between the paper & the trees where the sun
gets through between the branches to the grass
under a leaf on a curving stem - the pseudo-fairytale
before the "lyric"/two actors play beforehand too -
how’s this? a girl goes by from elsewhere
to set street music its cryptic rhythm against another
how you can live to a different beat an old radio
in a hut on a deserted building site paid little to
live & as to writing/well! but between stations
to pick up the possible & go on with that from there
1
she paces up & down the room. lies down. turns/her love-grief
delicacy in the clammy tropical night. pretends to try to read.
who’s that? pale profile in skeletal light through slats. the
wind in the street playacting along with music
2
gantries through fog enter the city from the port
take the imagination along that track alleyways streets
where nobody not yet chill collar up the script
woodpigeons somehow wads growing with each
breath in yr breast pocket/very popular very human
tight cloth in motion
over the pelvic rhythm. black.
dark the eyes too.
swept past with and eye-kiss
on the street
which they still do
in this city
despite.
which was returned
with thanks & best wishes
this music goes like this hollows twists
pauses developing in places
you follow then
wonder how it works wonder where I
or as if sideways
to right then leans
forward into its own danger against the implications
laughing back on the radio/the flickering batteries
of what I have/pressed & a bit down/well watching/on the site
the tenacious details of daily getting by
for interspersing as no some mist emphasis
counter simultaneous emphases/bustle in the enclave underground/
& a ghost from another station
**********************
After lunch, Alex Davis read his paper "Irish Poetic Modernisms." He began
with Mangan as a precursor of the moderns. He then made some useful
distinctions, which I don’t dare to list without a copy of the paper,
between modernists, high-modernists and symbolists as applied to Irish
poetry in the early parts of this century. By now, my learning curve had
decided to go straight so I must apologise for the sketchy nature of what
follows. Alex went on to discuss more recent developments in Ireland, which
more or less amounted to the menu of the conference. I have asked him for a
copy of his paper which I hope to return to later.
Michael Smith read next, reading his own work and some of the translations
from the Spanish which he has done over the last 25 years.
This is from LOST GENEALOGIES AND OTHER POEMS
*********************
ENTERING OLD HOUSES
for Alice
How good to enter an old house.
To smell the must,
to be brushed by the fragile
tendrils of spider thread
as we search for the lost
treasure trove of our lives
in the jungle of reverting
furniture.
Down the long hallway
a light filters through
leaded panes of a door
that now scarcely opens
to a walled garden
where thistles thick as saplings
conceal the earth below
hiding bones and spoons
and the separated crockery
of generations
Suddenly there is a crack and flutter
of wings.
Pigeons burst to the sky
that spins in a vertigo of memories.
********************
Billy Mills re-appeared to read a paper which dealt with Maurice Scully,
Catherine Walsh, Randolph Healy and David Lloyd. This was splendidly
presented using texts on an overhead projector which sometimes Billy would
read from but mainly would point to treating them as exhibits. The audience
could make quite a few choices as to what to attend to and it worked very
well as an idea, very attractive and lively. Some snippets:
On Maurice Scully:
"The most immediately obvious difference [between FIVE FREEDOMS OF MOVEMENT]
and Maurice’s first book, LOVE POEMS AND OTHERS] is that FIVE FREEDOMS is
not a collection of individual lyrics; it is a single long work in 5
sections, each section comprising a number of more or less short ‘pages’
which weave their way around the themes of movement and money. In this book
Scully moves away from his product orientation and begins to focus on the
processes involved in writing and reading ‘poetry’. Different styles and
registers, and information from a wide range of sources, are interwoven in a
manner which allows them to create contexts for each other, so that, to take
one of the simplest strands, extracts from a letter from the poet’s bank on
pages 9 and 12 illuminate a reference to a book by Lee Harwood on page 35, a
description of the writer at work on page 39, a brief description of one
aspect of his daily routine on page 54, a proto-fairytale on pages 63 and
74, an adaptation of a Linguaphone French lesson on page 68, another passage
on the writer at his desk on page 71, and probably more besides. It is
poetry which, in some ways, recalls Pound’s ideographic method, but with
none of his rhetorical baggage; a more apt comparison might be with Oppen’s
Of Being Numerous.
Ad yet, so ingrained is the industry’s view of acceptable product that one
Dublin publisher "considered (it) & wanted cuts, cuts, cuts. To them the
book was a lot of nonsense with A POEM or two in there worth ‘collecting’",
and the one Irish review I have seen of this book complains that: ‘One can
find presented as poems here (in the sense that the lines end the way lines
in poems are presumed to end) such items as a letter from Allied Irish Banks
and a list of the items on Mr. Scully’s desk.’
A small book could be written about this sentence alone; just look at the
assumptions it makes; that a book of poetry is a book of individual,
isolated ‘poems’ and that it was Scully’s intention to ‘present’ such a
collection of artefacts, if only he had known how, that there is a single
way in which the lines of a poem are presumed to end (with a
noun/verb/adjective? 6 cms. From the righthand margin? Unjustified? Does
anyone know or care what Mr. Dunne intended?), that certain things are not
fit matter for poetry; and all this in perhaps the most influential Irish
poetry magazine in the latter stages of the 20th century."
On Catherine Walsh
"In Catherine Walsh we at last have an Irish woman poet who is not content
to substitute a supposed ‘radicalness’ of subject mater for a serious
attempt at exploring the possibilities of poetry."
"The essential theme of the book [MAKING TENTS] would seem to be the
integration of personal memory, ‘history’ and the natural processes into a
single continuum … as in the following passage in which a memory of
childhood incorporates a family memory of the Black and Tans, and, of
course, the song of the wood-pigeon:
take two cows
Taffy take two
wood pigeons across the river
in the orchard
ka cu coo
khaki kaku
"Apart from her use of her materials, what most distinguishes Walsh’s work
from that of her contemporaries is the deftness with which she places words
on the page … and uses enjambment …and, most of all, the way in which her
work insists that the reader suspend her/his aural, semantic and syntactical
expectations in order to fully comprehend her work."
Randolph Healy read next. Here’s a sample
*****************
Mutability Checkers
The full deck gusts outside the playground
briefly forming an aerial house of cards.
I see a woodlouse chasing a tiger,
and square pegs in square holes.
An atom is the part of your throat that sticks out.
Every Saturday, I am a bicycle.
Famous Dialogues lie on a table.
Enter Socrates, winged by the medium’s
dot to dot. Solvent without solution,
ignoramus champ of all history,
I think of you sending away a would-be
empiricist with a flea in his ear,
then sweeping to the end of the argument —
reality as a series of diagrams.
Secateured titan, I dreamed a random river
whose surface’s inflexions shimmered
with every possible geometry
where all-envisaging blindness hatched
and crossed as chance, swollen with potential,
surged against the given, sculpting a world
where botched and sublime bloomed without design.
*******************************
Geoffrey Squires read next. His voice is perfectly matched to his work
which regularly finds the kind of insubstantial perception to which even a
very subtle sensibility would be oblivious and then proceeds to ground it in
an earthy realism.
This from his sequence LANDSCAPES AND SILENCES:
******************
While we ate it grew dark and we did not notice
there are many sorts of conversation
most do not end but simply move on
or come round again to where they began
till finally we could not see
what we were doing or even make out
one another’s faces
the voices too tailing off in the boscurity
pausing only before we went in
to look up at the night sky
the now dark heavens
starfold miraculous
*******************
How could we not not what
believe
in what what we believe in
the usual
ideals abstractions
a certain version of ourselves
the words of things
and it would not matter it would not matter at all
would it
except that whatever we do we do partly
for the wrong reason
************************
The next reader was Judy Kravis, a lecturer in French in University College
Cork. Her work was new to me and I have only the promise of copies so it
would be ridiculous to offer any comment at this stage. However, her
unconcealed delight in her own work was infectious and the audience was
wowed by her.
There followed a student reading, which was interesting. We all pretended
not to be intimidated.
Finally, Trevor Joyce retook the rostrum in his capacity as poet. It was
very convincing indeed. The unfettered outlook which he showed in earlier
work has attained a remarkable depth and assurance. Reading his more recent
work, I sometimes feel that the poems are reading me, they act so directly
and unexpectedly on my ‘mind’.
This from Stone Floods:
(Oh, a final note before the poem. Alex Cadogan came over from Swansea to
attend. Cheers Alex. And Harry Gilonis came, adding to the sum of human
happiness in particular with his ‘Irish Modernism’ series, 12 terrific
cards, just the thing for handing out to a student who’s staring into space.)
***************
VERSES WITH A REFRAIN FROM A SOLICITOR’S LETTER
for George Hitching
As when a faded lock of woman’s hair shall cause a man to cut his throat in
a bedroom at five o’clock in the morning; or when Albany resounds with
legislation, but a little henpecked judge in a dusty office at Herkimer or
Johnstown sadly writes across the page the word ‘unconstitutional’ - the
glory of the Capitol has faded.
Benj. Paul Blood
Dear Sir, I was this morning straight
after the news and forecast
hanging from an old appletree in my garden
a small Japanese bell
when I received through the post you importunate
and quite misguided threats
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
An injunction, you say. An obstruction,
you say. You’ve a lot of chat for someone
that’s not even clear who he’s talking to.
Does this help: not only have I
not erected any obstruction
in the form of a barbed wire fence or otherwise
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
but I’m attempting today to rest and recover
from the effects of an obstruction in my own passages?
I have, it pains me to have to spit it out, a strangury,
and you’ve got the wrong man, chief,
I’ve better blockages to worry about
than the one at the back of some godforsaken hotel in Midleton
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
What’s more, my bell is mute.
The inscribed slip that made its tongue
chime in the wind, flew off. It’s not my day.
Far from putting up barbed wire fences,
I’d prefer, right now, to see one of those bright Byzantine
Christs come striding across from the opposite hills
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
fresh from baptizing Adam, vast and very masterful,
lugging a patriarch along with each arm no doubt
from some new-harrowed hell
and scattering from his feet a fine debris
of locks, bolts, spancels, cuffs, gyves, fetters, stocks,
and other miscellaneous hindrances
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
And what would our Neighbourhood Watch do then?
Put the polis on his tail, stay home, and watch that hooligan
as he’d come, breaking contracts, flattening fences
and leaving gates and prisons open behind him.
Yes, he’s the man would soon break down
the calculus that stopped my flow
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
And not like a thief in the night,
but openly I’d have him
eliminate all limitations,
peel walls and roofs away like rind
and with his knife of stars
reveal what soft exotic fruit grew ripe within
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
unchain Prometheus from his rock
to stretch and scratch at last and fire
stones at that bloody bird,
allow Eurydice ascent
to feel the strange dew fall
chill through her faded dress
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
remove the ratchet from the clock, North
from the needle, run the many down to one. (Oh no,
hold on there, God, we can’t have that!
I won’t be one with our friend the illicit
erector of barbed wire barricades,
or this damned notary. Cut!)
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
It’s evening now. The bell’s transformed.
With a laurel leaf lashed to its tongue
it cries out clear in the wind.
I’ll just sit tight till the Ipral sets me up
and I no longer pass blood,
or feel weak when I attempt to stand
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
take idle note of that shrill song:
past flight and hot pursuit
terror passing cold restraint to come
then when I’m up to it again, forgetfully,
turn that stock still.
I trust this terminates our correspondence, Sir
and in this regard time shall be made of the essence
*************************
Best wishes
Randolph Healy
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