dublinka

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.

I had forgotten how much poetry there is in Ambrose Bierce's Devils Dictionary. An unholy amount given the nature of the author one might think. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines as he puts it himself. Perhaps he foresaw blogs? Still, they bring the odd smile.

FAMOUS, adj.
Conspicuously miserable.

Done to a turn on the iron, behold
Him who to be famous aspired.
Content? Well, his grill has a plating of gold,
And his twistings are greatly admired.