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From Martin Mc Guinness to Gerry Adams:


Have you ever seen
a Manhattan sunset
....

Gloriously crimson
it was
Blackening
Awesome
Skyscrapers

....

Far Away

From Bloody
Foreland.

From one dark lord to another I suppose. The entirety of the poem, can be found in a book by Gerry Adams, called An Irish Voice. The Quest for peace. He claims Martin Mc Guinness sent it to him by postcard. In the poem, Mc Guinness attempts to propagate the myth of the Irish revolutionary poet in harmony with nature, but you don't have to be a pop psychologist to detect an almost vampiric craving for blood, as Mc Guinness, ironically enough, flies in over New York in September 1995. Nevertheless it's hardly surprising, that this black and crimson coagulating blood shadow, forms such a dominant motif, given the role Mc Guinness has played in an organisation responsible for the deaths of 1800 people. That guilt is absent should not surprise us either, Mc Guinness is no Macbeth; in fact, in retrospect, the poem is almost a portent, of terrorists flying towards the twin towers, a few Septembers later, eager to suck the necks of skyscrapers.

Some found poetry, by journalists at the press conference of their favourite darklord.

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

The recently released film, V for Vendetta, staring Natalie Portman, contains the following catchy little lines:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot
I see no reason why Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot...

To some it's only a vague nursery rhyme from their youth, but actually the lines belong to part of a vast collection of historic chants/rhymes and songs either celebrating the Guy Fawkes plot or heavy propaganda glorifying his execution. You can find them all, with multiple variants of the above verse, here.

I first came across Soundings by James Mc Cabe, in issue 60 of Poetry Ireland. It's a moving lament for a dead emperor (Augustine Martin) - and by inference, an empire: poetry. It opens and closes with a common enough idea, which nevertheless always gets me; that of sculpting and giving extension to words on a blank page, embossing them into something more than their semantic essence, giving them added dimension - a kind of proto-concrete poetry, without the fuss. Elsewhere in the poem, Mc Cabe also skillfully plays with sound and silence, and this I like too, but this solemn and weighty poem, has more to offer that mere device. It invokes Rome, and its decline and fall, and in doing so, the glory of the old poetry, that unsustainable empire, which could not prevent its own death, nor understand why that death was necessary and inevitable. As I interpret it, the narrator, looks out on the monsters, the cold, and the barbarians, not yet realising that it is in fact, a new poetry, not a hostile world, which is massing on the battlefield against him. It is sure to defeat him, and of course it too, in its turn, will be defeated by imaginary monsters, and imaginary silences. And so to me, the poem reveals this truth: Poetry has no right to hegemony nor should it have.

Beginning:

The little battalions of words march out
Onto the white battlefield of silence

Close:

For years like legionnaires
We fought along its cold northern borders.
October like a funeral of leaves
Took you on its shield, our dead emperor,
The wind blowing through our heavy armour,
And the horses of sound on a white field.

Also: Gerald Fiebig has translated it into German. You can find the complete poem there also.

These cute poem cards can be found in the oriental museum at Durham University. It's essentially a line matching game, which doesn't quite do it for me, but it's probably worth a look see if you're in the vicinity of the museum.



From the blurb:

Lacquered Wood
19th century CE
Japan
16cm x 10cm x 4.5cm

This box contains poem cards. Half the cards show an imaginary portrait of a poet and the first line of a poem. The rest of the poem is found on the remaining cards. The object of the game is to match the pairs of cards together by remembering the poems and the poets.

Oh it seems innocent enough, but George Sand's letter and Musset's tamer response, have hidden within them a dirty little secret. Read every second line of Sand's letter and find the acrostic in Musset's verse to raise a smile. (Thanks Chris)


Lettre de George Sand à Alfred de Musset


Je suis heureuse de vous dire que j'ai
bien compris l'autre soir que vous aviez
toujours une envie folle de me faire
danser. Je garde le souvenir de votre
baiser, et je voudrais que ça soit
là une preuve que je puisse être aimée
par vous. Je suis prête à vous montrer mon
affection toute désintéressée et sans cal-
cul, et si vous voulez me voir aussi
vous dévoiler sans aucun artifice mon âme
toute nue, daignez me faire une visite.
nous causions en amis, franchement
je vous prouverai que je suis la femme
sincère et capable de vous offrir l'affection
la plus profonde comme la plus étroite
amitié, en un mot, la meilleure épouse
que vous puissiez rêver puisque votre
âme est libre. Pensez que l'abandon où je
vis est bien dur et souvent bien
pénible, en y songeant, j'ai le coeur bien
gros. Accourez vite et venez me le
faire oublier. A l'amour que je veux vous sou-
mettre. (relire une ligne sur deux)

Musset s'empressa de répondre :

Quand je mets à vos pieds un éternel hommage,
Voulez-vous qu'un instant je change de visage ?
Vous avez capturé les sentiments d'un cœur
Que pour vous adorer forma le créateur.
Je vous chéris, amour, et ma plume en délire
Couche sur le papier ce que je n'ose dire.
Avec soin de mes vers lisez les premiers mots :
Vous saurez quel remède apporter à mes maux
(Relire le premier mot de chaque vers)

I'm off on vacation for a week, but I'll leave all 1800 of you regular monthly visitors, in the hands of the fantastically insane jollyroger poetry and piano pub. Make of it, what you will.

Antonin Artaud's The death of Satan and other mystical writings fell into my possession by chance today. It's one of those rare, curious arcane poetic writings, from a half sane - half intoxicated writer, who sought to dissolve himself in the mythologies, rituals and conceptual artifacts of various world cultures. The whole short text (culled from notebooks and translated by Alastair Hamilton and Victor Corti) seems at first meaningless. Even to Artaud the ideas are difficult - one segment, is punctuated with 'what does this mean?' before he attempts further elaboration. But with repeated reading, a refined mysticism can sometimes be seen playing in the ruins of his desperate struggle with ideas. I'll try to hunt down a French text, but here are some quotes from the English text:


Power eats power:
Without war, no stability.

everything that stops us living is a mere refraction of Satanic thought, ruined by the ( ? ) of the human.

I struggled to try and exist, to try to consent to the forms (all the forms) with which the delirious illusion of being in this world had clothed reality.

A truly Desperate man is talking to you, who never knew the happiness of being in this world until he left it and became absolutely separated from it.

I knew it, but could not say it, and I can start to say it now, because I have left reality behind.

Artist Charles Patrick is responsible for these wonderful color poems. I really like them. Firstly they remind me of those old sci-fi movies with AI machines the size of a house. And secondly, they're a great way to break out of, or to extend language, and create a synestetic poetry. At times he uses color squares exclusively, and at other times he combines letters with them. Either way, the effect is stunning. If you feel like having an original you can buy one from him. Alas I can't even afford a print. Sigh.

Dairena ní Chinnéide's wonderful bilingual gaelic/english offerings are well worth a look at. Aside from her newer work, I particularly like An Bhaibaire or The Whistler, which conjures up that old world Ireland, which refuses to leave the imagination, and in rare places, the land itself. It's also interesting to see how the gaelic alliteration is transposed into english. Sometimes being kept, at other times lost. There's an extract from it below. Draíochtach.

An Bhaibaire
(Do Mhichael Hurley)

Is an bhaibaire
Ag luascadh lena ríl
Is na síoga ag déanamh
Col-seisear le ceol
Na sean- mhná tráthnóna.

And the whistler
Sways to her own rhythm
With the faeries doing
A six-hand reel
To the old womans music
At evening time.

For sale on intercol:

China 'Poetry Playing Cards'. c1970. 54 cards each depicting a Chinese figure in traditional costume and the text in Chinese of a famous poem or fable. Full colour quaint drawings. Original box. Excellent condition as new.

But probably gone by now... These are decorative, but the idea of poetry playing cards remains fascinating to me. It suggests the possibility of creating an interesting hybrid culture. I've posted other poetry game variants elsewhere on Dublinka, but the perfect game, like the perfect poem is still elusive. How do you incorporate the freedom of poetry into a competitive card game? You could try simple snap, or matching variants, but that's too easy. Think batman, think.