dublinka

Ok thats it for now folks. Dublinka is going into hibernation for all of 2008. Other projects are calling. You can still send mail, but replies are likely to be very very slow. Thanks to all who made it possible. You know who you are!

Byron pops up in the beguiling Into The Wild. One of the movies of the year for those of you who haven't caught it yet.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea and the music in its roar
I love not man the less, but Nature more.


The lines are from Childe Harold. Catch the rest here.

Abby Oliveira, of the poetry chicks (a specious nom de plume which also takes in Pamela Brown and Jenni Doherty) is author of the sardonic and bitter Saddam is Hanged, a blunt reminder to its audience of the pointlessness of capital punishment. You can get the tone from the first verse below, which if it stays with you, and I think it might, will rescue from any dull and inane new years celebrations.


Ring the bells!
Revellers rejoice!
Hang gay garlands in the streets!
Meet your neighbours,
Sing, shake hands!
For Auld Land Syne
Saddam is hanged.

You can find the poem in the trios' promo Alphabetitudez Loose Lettters Vol.1.. Look out also for Milk and Black coffee., in which Oliveira recounts the story of her savage beating "when I was six years old and playin' in the play-park alone...". Its gritty, frightening and depressing. But like Saddam is hanged, it creates a public and necessary space, through which we, the theatre of the oblivious, should pass.

In passing the collection of micro stories, Wonderful of Worders (edited by Jenni Doherty) contains the great observation by Perry Gretton:


Truth says Keats is beauty, beauty truth.
But truth is no match for vanity,...no match at all.

Dedalus have just released the Collected Poems of Francis Harvey. In addition to presenting new work it culls work from a number of collections such as In the Light on the Stones (1978), The Rainmakers (1987), The Boa Island Janus (1996), and Making Space (2001).

After opening the book, you find yourself wandering across rugged landscapes, in the presence of a deeply authentic voice, which at times is given to wry remarks or incidental observations, before fading into ellipsis. This is not then a collection of poems, as you first thought, but the passing of a long conversation, which was ongoing before you opened the book, and which will continue long after you shut it. In some respects then it recalls Edgar Lee Masters and the spoon river anthology. But this time the voice is largely singular, and the presence, not underground but fleet of foot and gigantic. It's hard to forget some of these poems. They are not radical in composition; they are quite traditional. They range from the naturalistic, Snow Again:


...the small print of a bird, A footnote
to nothing on the white page of the lawn.

To the small town snapshots, Referendum

...it was a clean thing to kill Brits
with guns but that he'd take a horsewhip
to any son of his he caught with a condom.

For Harvey you discover, is a chronicler and cartographer of Ulster and in particular South Donegal. Perhaps no other Irish writer has claimed a space as well as this poet. Not even Kavanagh. He knows its skies, its islands, its headlands, its beaches, its fence posts, its rocks, its trees. He knows its small towns and its people. Each poem stands alone, but all build into a masterful composition. No one is spared from this work of art. Even the poet himself, is snared in the dripping amber of this poetry.

In Wittgenstein, the poet retorts that there might be someone who...could teach him the private language of the heart? and in Theorem he states that One way or another, I know what they think of Euclid in Lettermacaward in West Donegal. Such writing is not so much an anti-intellectual stance, but rather the insistence of recognition for a world, which happily ignores the abstract in favour of happier thoughts such as those found in Epistemology, where Age has not yet sucked all the sweetness out of a voice that reaches me faintly as I lie in bed reading in the room above., or grittier problems, as in The Sheets: Daddy she'd try, Daddy, stop, stop, it's your Flossie! Her arms stretched under him like a cross. Giving voice to these people, Harvey sounds the opinion that like a bird in Living Art, this world is, a...living abstract botched by Mondrian. The simpler philosophy of the people the poet documents, is, we may infer from his introspective poem Getting through: I am what I am. - The response God used in the Bible when Moses asked for his name.

Do not go to Donegal without this voice. It is half shepherd, half sheep. And quite Beautiful.

Today's Guardian is running a story on the conviction of Samina Malika -the supposedly self dubbed, but conveniently media friendly label, 'Lyrical Terrorist'. Malika was found guilty under anti-terror legislation for possessing information useful to terrorists. On interest to Dublinka is that her poetry was cited in court as evidence against her.

Malik, wrote at least two poems entitled How To Behead and The Living Martyrs:

The Living Martyrs, read: "Let us make Jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine".

The second poem was called How to Behead. "It's not as messy or as hard as some may think/ It's all about the flow of the wrist," it read.

On first impressions you might indeed be tempted to think of these as gory evidence. But the sad reality is, that if poems now count as terrorist fingerprints, you could probably, with a little probing, arrest most poets in the country - for an array of crimes. And imagine how many nationalist folk/terrorist singers you could fill the Old Bailey with...The paper merely reports the lyrical 'evidence' however, and simply files it under its now burgeoning 'terrorism' folder - as can be seen by looking closely at the url:http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2207426,00.html

Has the Guardian ceased to think about what it reports?

The Science Fiction Poetry Association have released their annual selection of Halloween Poetry. Liz Bennefeld, has once again like last year come up with a nice piece called: At Allantide. It's a reference to the old Cornish custom at Halloween, of keeping apples under your pillow, in order to dream of your future lover. It's vivid, gothic, and spooky, and resonates with quakerish imagination. There too, Karen Romanko (author of image above), has an eerie underwater poem of murder and reclamation. A link to Sue Burke's Gods in Galcia, a wonderful composite prose poem, can also be found. See extract below:


A bronze statue of the Spanish writer Ramón de Valle Inclán, recently erected by students of the local university where he had studied a century ago, sits on a bronze bench on a park hillside. With his trademark long beard, arms crossed, wearing spats, frail and thin, he watches the distant, lichen-encrusted granite spires of the magnificent cathedral in the city of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northwestern Spain. "In this petrified city, the idea of Time flees," he wrote. "It seems not old but eternal. It has the solitude, the sadness and the force of a mountain."

Like many Joy Division fans, director Anton Corbijn clearly favours the proposition that Ian Curtis, was a poet of first rate distinction. Unfortunately he promptly sets about undermining this idea by making our hero recite the terminally uncool Wordsworth, and worse never really takes us into the little folders of angst that, who but who, at one time, doesn't possess. Little wonder that Time Out New York speaks of smudged poetry. That said a passing, shot of some book spines and a reference to the Hollow Men, breaths some life into our understanding of the intellectual background of Curtis, who's lyrics in his best songs, which are all on play here, remain exceptional in their simplicity and depth:

Mother, I tried, please believe me. I'm doing the best that I can. I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through. I'm ashamed of the person I am.


All in all though you'd be much better getting the book which inspired the film Touching from a distance, because unlike the film, it has the missing goods. In passing Dublinka readers might, enjoy the casting / guest appearance of John Cooper Clark playing himself, and reciting Evidently Chickentown.

After yesterdays demonstration in Dublin and around the world, I think its kind of appropriate to point you to this you tube footage of a poem by Burmese Poet Aung Way. Apparently Aung Way dedicated his poem to the quest for peace with the monks and call for the joint action with the monks toward the struggle for the freedom of Burma from dictatorship. Only a little bit of the dialogue is in English but you can get the spirit of the movement by the images, tone and music.