Bloomsday; A Celebration of Irish Women Poets 2013

Rebecca O’Connor Domestic Bliss   ‘I place a jug of lavender on the table to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge   while you draw nails to hammer with your fist. Then I draw a hammer , and watch   as you try to lift it from the page. by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,   your father and I wishing we could be so bold. you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder   as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm to mend the roof of your miniature barn.’   -  Rebecca O’Connor Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

Kelly Creighton World Put to Rights   “The dream that burst riverbanks held you; blackstrap molasses, antidote for your poison.   Your plummets spraying wetness like a coin in a cascade woke no-one, not even us.   The church spire grew legs, scaled bricks, ran to your side, spotlighted. I put glass over that glow.   Quiet-huff of your refuge, flailing arms, spluttering snores. Ungainly crooning tunes   to the realms of purity; I found too sickly-sweet. You fought the humdrum, from your seat.   You would sleep outside, would sing, stand on ledges mollified. I won’t sing, no matter what.   Float on, keep your whistles of booze-hounds. When I awaken I will join you, watch for me.”   World Put to Rights is © Kelly Creighton , all rights reserved. Kelly Creighton Kelly Creighton is a poet and writer with work currently and forthcoming in literary journals Ranfurly Review, A New Ulster, Electric Windmill Press, Inkspill Magazine, The Galway Review, Saudade Review, PEN Austria’s Time to Say: No! e-book, Recours au Poeme and other numerous other publications. She has recently finished editing her historical fiction novel Yielding Fruit. Kelly is working on her second poetry collection.

Moya Cannon Viola D’Amore   ” Sometimes, love does die, but sometimes , a stream on porous rock, it slips down into the inner dark of a hill, joins with other hidden streams to travel blind as the white fish that live in it. It forsakes one underground streambed for the cave that runs under it. Unseen , it informs the hill and , like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore, makes the hill reverberate, so that people who wander there wonder why the hill sings, wonder why they find wells.”   Viola D’Amore is ©  Moya Cannon   Bio (source Wikipedia) Moya Cannon was born in 1956 in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal. She studied History and Politics at University College Dublin, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has taught in the Gaelscoil in Inchicore, in a school for adolescent travellers in Galway, and at the National University of Ireland in Galway. She served as editor of Poetry Ireland in 1995. Her work has appeared in a number of international anthologies and she has held writer-in-residence posts for Kerry County Council and Trent University Ontario (1994–95). Cannon became a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, in 2004. Her first book, Oar, (Salmon 1990, revised edition Gallery Press 2000) won the 1991 Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. It was followed by The Parchment Boat in 1997. Carrying the Songs: New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in 2007.

Dorothea Herbert The Rights Of Woman, Or Fashions for the Year 93 – being the Era of Women’s literally wearing the Breeches. – Health and Fraternity!   “Whilst man is so busy asserting his Rights Shall Woman lie still without gaining new lights Our sex have been surely restrain’d enough By stiff prudish Dress and such old fahion’d stuff Too long have been fetter’d and tramelld I wot With Cumbersome Trains and the Strict petticoat Yet should a poor Wife dare her Tyrant to chide Oh she wears the Breeches they tauntingly cried But now we’re enlighten’d they’ll find to their Shame We’ll have the reality not the bare Name No longer will Woman to Satire be Dupe For she is determin’d to figure Sans Jupe And once she is rouzed she will not be outdone Nor stop at this one Reformation alone For mark me proud Man she’ll not yield thee a Jot But soon will become e’en a true Sans-Culote And flourish away e’er the Ending of Spring Sans Jupe, Sans Culote , in short – sans any thing   – Ca va et ca…ira –Liberty and Equality for ever ! “   © by Dorothea Herbert   from, Introspections, the Poetry and Private World of Dorothea Herbert by Frances Finnegan , Congrave Press 2011.   from Congrave Press The “lost” poetry of the celebrated Irish writer Dorothea Herbert, whose Retrospections, first published in 1929-30 more than a century after her death, continues to captivate readers.  By turns amusing and melancholic, the recently recovered poems – and particularly her astonishing mock-heroic epic The Buckiad - are an important contribution to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Irish literature.

Paula Meehan Seed   ” The first warm day of spring and I step out into the garden from the gloom of a house where hope had died to tally the storm damage, to seek what may have survived. And finding some forgotten lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn holding in their fingers a raindrop each like a peace offering, or a promise, I am suddenly grateful and would offer a prayer if I believed in God. But not believing, I bless the power of seed, its casual, useful persistence, and bless the power of sun, its conspiracy with the underground, and thank my stars the winter’s ended.”   ‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan, all rights reserved. Paula Meehan Image from Imagine Ireland Paula Meehan has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being Painting Rain (Carcanet, 2009). A selected volume, entitled Mysteries of the Home, was published in 1996. Her writing for stage includes the plays Mrs Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), and, for children, Kirkle (1995), The Voyage (1997) and The Wolf of Winter (2003/2004). Her poetry has been set to music by artists as diverse as the avant-garde composer John Wolf Brennan and the folksinger Christy Moore.

Eileen Sheehan All About Climbing   “After he slaughtered her he dumped her body in the market square   where merchants and citizens continued their trading   averting their eyes from the sight of her broken corpse; the limbs skewed at grotesque angles.   A fly alighted on her eyelid its blue-green body gleaming like a jewel.   A mouse nibbled flour from under a fingernail.   A goat strayed from its pen sniffed at her body lay down beside her.   Her house cat navigated the alleyways of the rural town till he found her.   A rat curled to sleep in her armpit.   Then the last slice of moon slid down from the sky, lodged in the small of her back.   From high in the hay loft an owl let out it’s long note across the dark   and that was the sound she heard as she woke; the sound that led her to walk to the foot of the mountain.   Now she carries the moon on her back and she climbs.   Her days are all about climbing; all about purpose;   committed to restore the moon to the sky: hang it aloft.   So she climbs in her blood-red shoes, her tattered garments:   there is no slipping back.”   © Eileen Sheehan   from the collection Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books) Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her third collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

Mary O’ Donnell Hungary   came to me in stamps. “Magyar Posta” ice-skaters, delicate as Empire porcelain, a fish, an astronaut and rocket, a silvery boy on 1960s skis. I understood only difference. Now, flying home from Budapest, I touch the pages of my poems, freshly minted in translation. Now I really don’t get them, but did I ever? The words will make me briefly native to a coffee-slugging morning reader on the Vaci Ut, who may not understand, even in his own tongue. The lines shimmer as night slips through the tilting crowded cabin. Again I press fingers to page, blind, as if by touch I could capture a fish, an astronaut, a rocket, or those elegant, ice-cutting skaters. Outside, clouds I cannot see busily translate country to country.” Hungary is ©  Mary O’ Donnell   Mary O’ Donnell Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection “The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called ‘Crossing the Lines‘. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin.

• Bloomsday 2012

A Gentle Nihilism: Throats Full of Graves by Gillian Prew

A gentle nihilism; on reading of Throats Full of Graves  by Gillian Prew. Published Lapwing Publications, Belfast 2013.

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My first instinct about naming this reading of Gillian Prew’s poetic-work was to entitle it requirements for poetry. I wanted to focus on what happens to the reader when she approaches a book of poetry that is minimal in its intent, and full of quietude as of necessity.

The necessity inherent in Prew’s expression is dysphoric, that she has pared down her use of symbol to the bare skeletal minimal inviting the reader to partake in a world-view that is bleak and damaging by virtue of its unspoken violences. Motherhood as a type of encroachment and its effect on one’s independence. The violence of the body as witness in its own decay.

Threadings of symbols run through Throats Full Of Graves, small creatures, mirrors, the encroachments of nature and weather. Prew picks up and examines these images in single poems and in series throughout the book.

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Prew’s understated and wistful approach to the decay of the body is masterful and nowhere more evident than in Beyond This Skin: 

“These thin breasts each a grief
plump-robbed and plucked dead
like two starved birds.

Beyond this skin the world weeps for its swept-up beds
and its loneliness;
its hearts blown like empty stones.”

(from Beyond This Skin, by Gillian Prew)

Prew’s  imagery recalls Sylvia Plath’s Medean Edge: the mother as vessel of and progenitor. The mother attempting to recall her individualism and usefulness after child-bearing. This is a theme often left unexplored in poetry. I am including an excerpt from Edge here :
 

 Edge

 
“Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose .”
 

from Edge , by Sylvia Plath from Ariel (Faber and Faber 1965)
 
Prew does not explore Medean rage, her tone is elegiac throughout. She invites the reader to explore the ravage of time on femininity, the experience of mothering as a type of loss to woman’s identity in which memory plays useful tricks.

Prew’s search for joy and self-identity pervades the book as a sub-theme but it never overwhelms the reader.

While Reading The Spines Of Books

” Up, is a diary of clouds. The sky
tucked into them. There is the
meaning of a bird. There is a quiet belief.

Down, we are bare bones of an isolated incident
and we cleanse ourselves in mere water.

We are played; music unable to hear itself.
Deaf instruments that skirt shine but
want to build monuments : cold stone and dates.

We do not need war to be a broken soldier.

The time we have taken
– rehearsing our exit lines in black seconds.

Here, in the spines of books,
it is an expensive place to die. “

While Reading The Spines Of Books is by Gillian Prew from Throats Full Of Graves.

Prew contains and works her images beautifully throughout this book. She allows herself  to pace it according to what she feels is necessary revelation. Her obliqueness is tenacious and requires the reader to engage. I was very taken with her series Six Pieces in Search of Unity which occurs just past the mid-section of the book:

“take down
your loud voices from the walls. No one
wants to see them they are blinding. Or
cover them with sheets as if they are yet
to be unveiled as if they are fresh as motion
as if silence still counts for something
when people are trying to die.”

from Six Pieces in Search of Unity by Gillian Prew

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•  Throats Full of Graves by Gillian Prew
• Lapwing Poetry Website 
• Purchase Link for Throats Full Of Graves (Lapwing)

Poems from ‘We’ll Sing Blackbird’, by Rebecca O’Connor

Domestic Bliss   ‘I place a jug of lavender on the table to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge   while you draw nails to hammer with your fist. Then I draw a hammer , and watch   as you try to lift it from the page. by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,   your father and I wishing we could be so bold. you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder   as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm to mend the roof of your miniature barn.’   Life After Death   My thoughts are all opposed to that streak of red fox in the field, black clods of thought that cling to the spade that lifts them to throw them back into the hole they made.   The fox is an apposite thing, lived in without reluctance, as is the greenfinch, even as it hits the window and knocks itself out cold.   My child knows this. He won’t allow himself forget his father warming the bird’s wings with his breath, its sudden swift flight as two foxes   .trot through Fayre’s Field ahead of the hearse.   Domestic Bliss and Life After Death are © Rebecca O’Connor. Published in We’ll Sing Blackbird A Moth Edition 2012.

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Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

•  www.rebeccaoconnor.net
• Bio from www.writing.ie

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Sanctus by Kimberly Campanello

Sanctus And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? – James Joyce I. At the English pub in Indianapolis, we discuss technology. He says he can already hear the robot’s footsteps on his grave. In the worst neighborhoods, the prairie is coming back. Cattails are pushing up through old sidewalks and nearly all the important species of sparrows have returned. A Future Farmer of America—in other words, a 14-year-old white kid from the pesticide-drenched heartland—slips backwards from a mall railing and falls to his death among the Super Pretzels and Dippin’ Dots down in the food court. I get reminded of incest dreams and the two I’ve had, one for each parent. My mother calls and gives me the run-down on which of her friends is on a morphine drip and which is in remission, and she tells me that when I get back to Miami I should get a job and always keep a full tank of gas. The homilitic style of evangelical Christianity is the same in Ghana, San Diego, Little Havana, and on Ellettsville, Indiana’s Hart Strait Road where in the abortion scene of the Halloween morality play she yanks a skinned squirrel soaked in beet juice from the screaming girl’s crotch and holds it up with food-service tongs before tossing it on a cookie sheet. You’ll have a clean slate if you accept Jesus, right now. We’ll all have a clean slate, if you accept Jesus, now. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. The body of Christ. Amen. Don’t drop it. Use a metal plate with a handle that could guillotine a communicant’s neck. And on the third day, I drank poitín at an Irish pub in Bloomington, Indiana, in fulfillment of the scriptures. Take this, all of you, and drink it. This is the bloodshine of the newest and most everlasting covenant. Don’t drop it. II. Death is a real bummer. We live through and for our parents and still Freud was wrong. You should hurry up and put your face right in it for an hour and that is definitely a sacrament, more so than that night in Garrucha at the misa flamenca, though the music was nice. Even the Sanctus didn’t offend me. Finally, I would add that the world is falling apart, always has been, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent, etc., and that my favorite sounds are when you say things like, Everything is fine, or, That cunt is mine. I hear them and I clench and unclench and I. love. you. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Tell me it’s too much. Amen. Let us kneel down facing each other, holding razors. Lather up my head and I will lather yours. I am worthy to receive you. I am your mirror. On which a razor lay crossed. We’ll shave it all off. If our knees can handle it, let’s stay like this until it grows back, softer than before. If they can’t, let’s make love, and say, These are our bodies, which will not be given up for any of you. Let us say our own word and we shall be healed. Sanctus is © Kimberly Campanello, from Consent. Published Doire Press, 2013

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Kimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart, Indiana. She now lives in Dublin and London. She was the featured poet in the Summer 2010 issue of The Stinging Fly, and her pamphlet Spinning Cities was published by Wurm Press in 2011 . Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, UK, and Ireland, including  nthposition , Burning Bush II, Abridged , and The Irish Left Review .

Pic by Brian Kavanagh

Glendalough, at Iseult Gonne’s grave

Glendalough, at Iseult Gonne’s grave subside the rocks archback silica of bird leans into a granite stylus a grave bed green sea-bed of flowering heads. shatter of tree hacked-through/     windmills beside an sruthán geal gold coins in-stream-glitter out to me. a small a cloud there her gulfstream ruffles my feathering (toll the …) blood-thickener sloughs blood against. let her eat the disease                      a gelid-thaw clysters the blooms     all that glisters is not white / and not laden with small-griefs Glendalough is © C. Murray

Transverse threads, two women poets and Homer

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The weft of  Margaret Atwood‘s The Penelopiad is contained in and revealed through the chorus-line voiced by the twelve maids who were hung by Telemachus on Odysseus’ orders after they returned. Margaret Atwood runs the chorus-line throughout her Penelopiad,  the maids sing their songs at ten intervals in the book. I was struck by a comment that Atwood makes in her notes about the maids. She states that :

‘The Chorus of Maids is a tribute to such uses of choruses in Greek Drama. The convention of burlesquing the main action was present in the satyr plays before the main drama.’ (Margaret Atwood, Author Notes for The Penelopiad pp. 197-198)

I am always interested in how women writers burlesque the heroic perception of the classics through use of device and structural under-pinning. In this instance I have been reading Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Alice Oswald‘s Memorial. Atwood and Oswald approach Homeric themes in a sidelong fashion to get to the meat of the oral-tradition. Their poetic focus is decidedly on the lament. Atwood gives voice to the subversive and unquiet maids of The Odyssey. Oswald creates a dirge through interweaving the names of  fallen warriors of The Iliad. Both Atwood and Oswald use the lament as the kernel for their thematic variations from and approaches to Homeric mythos. The poets use repetition to add texture to their laments thereby shaping and focusing the small forgotten voice  toward expressing a universal grief.  This is a not heroic poetry, it is a poetry of keening and loss.

Oswald’s Memorial has drawn quite divided critique. I mention in particular Jason Guriel‘s  reductionistic approach to the book in which he refers to it as ‘a rose-fingered yawn’. This slighting throwaway remark does little to evoke interest in how women poets actually write, nor does it sufficiently disguise Guriel’s critical-ennui. I would point the general poetic-reader to Michael Lista’s critique of Memorial in order to garner a more balanced view of the work.

Atwood’s twelve maids defiantly do not not burlesque the main action of The Penelopiad. They are the main action of the book. Penelope reveals herself to be a tedious bore whose lack of wit and guile are vaguely repellent. I wanted Atwood to get her toe out of the water and focus on the maids who enliven the text with their songs and shantys.  The central pivot of The Penelopiad revolves round the nasty relation between Penelope and Helen rather than on the texturing of the maid’s burlesquing. In this, Atwood’s approach to Homer is a bit of a missed opportunity. The strength of the book is in its sub-theme which Atwood had not developed into a  fuller rendering. 

Oswald did not make a similar mistake in her approach to Homer’s The Iliad.  She has broken-down the book and re-made it a powerful dirge. The fact that this has led to an inability by her critics to get to what she is doing only strengthens the work in my view. The index for Memorial comprises an unnumbered litany of names from The Iliad. Oswald weaves their names into the text whilst interspersing their histories with individual laments for the warrior-groupings. These laments vary in length , they are devices to allow the mourning voice through. They are not separate to the main action of the book but are organically interleaved into and caught up in the theme and direction of this epic poem-dirge.

‘Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth And watered it and that wand became a wave It became a whip a spine a crown it became a wind-dictionary It could speak in tongues It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers And then a storm came spinning by And it became a broken tree uprooted It became a wood pile in a lonely field. Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth And watered it and that wand became a wave It became a whip a spine a crown it became a wind-dictionary It could speak in tongues It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers And then a storm came spinning by And it became a broken tree uprooted It became a wood pile in a lonely field.’ Page 31, Memorial, by Alice Oswald

It interests me that contemporary women poets are approaching Homer through the use of the lament. They are voicing the silent mourning that occurs when the glory of battle is over. Atwood is giving voice to the abused girls whose life-experience is of enslavement and of mis-use. Oswald does not state that the mourning voice in Memorial is that of a woman, but the cadence of the mourning poems that intersperse her text suggests the chorus, the lament.

In terms of contrast in poetic approaches to direct  engagement with classical literature, one could point to how Ted Hughes re-told the twenty-four Tales From Ovid (Metamorphosis) or look at Heaney’s Beowulf. The fact that critique ignores the poetic engagement of women with the classics of literature only points to critical-disengagement, or at best to a narrow conservatism. It is time that The Chorus (that most pertinent part of Epic) is re-read, and given its place in the overall texturing of great poetic works. What would T.S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral be without the integrity of the women’s voices?

‘…he took a cable which had seen service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high-up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when the long-winged thrushes or doves get tangled in a snare…so the women’s heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.’ The Odyssey, Book 22 (470473)

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• The Killing of The Suitors
• Jason Guriel on Oswald
• Michael Lista on Oswald
• My Blog on Critique

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Transverse threads, women poets and Homer by C. Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Poems by Mary O’Donnell

Marriage Advice, 1951 Glossy women made her tremble, every word shiny and sure, we’re going to give Jenny a make-over, Jen, the decaying building, the clueless relic. They made her sweat, even more, those women with Dior skirts and nipped-in waists, who warned the night before the wedding about being prepared. But it was 1951. Next day, she tried not to faint at the altar although the neighbours whispered, later forced herself to stuff some morsel of the wedding breakfast through her lips, like bad language or something a woman never did masticate, masticate, chew, chew, swallow, the fist of the still-hidden child walloping her gorge as the best man rose, twinkle-eyed, yellow card in hand, a twist of jokes she’d be bound to appreciate.   Marriage Advice 1951 is © Mary O’Donnell   Waiting It has grown, not darkly, like mould, that sunless green. Sitting provides the habit of air. Children – trees, coats, limbs, the bounce of long hair as they troop the school road –   means stillness, expansion, despite unspeakable radio news on the murder of infants in temperate suburbs. Muffled, gloved, I grow in a car at the end of an eight-year planting, half of me   mulling the latest distant shooting. I would like to book a flight, transplant skills, solutions, get there fast. Instead, I wait, the smell of cooked dinner impregnating denims, boots, my cap, which she   inhales as she steps inside the car. I hold myself together beneath iced winter branches in grey couteur, feel an invisible frieze of buds stirring slowly, steady in deep cold. . Waiting is © Mary O’Donnell

Mary O’ Donnell Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection “The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called ‘Crossing the Lines‘. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin. Mary O’Donnell Index of Women Poets

A New Ulster

A New Ulster Poetry and Literary Ezine

What distinguishes A New Ulster as poetry journal is evident also in Bone Orchard Poetry and in other Ezines that are led by artists and writers who respond with alacrity to a need for publishing platforms for new and established writers. When I started this blog  five years ago, I did a yearly review of what is offered to the poetic writer in the way of publishing platforms. The developing commitment of literary editors to the usage of online tools, such as Ezines, BlogZines, online-publication, and traditional publication was at an exciting point.  Jacket2, Harriet the Blog (The Poetry Foundation) and Poetry Ireland were busily adapting to and testing the poetic waters, as was UBUWEB . Editors have been using social-media tools to ensure that poetry is read, I find it strange that there appears to be an inherent distrust of the medium in some quarters here in Ireland. Under-utilisation of open-source systems and social-media strikes me as ungenerous.

The years began providing exciting new magazines and platforms and an increase in poetic-writing is showing itself in publications like Burning Bush 2, And Other Poems, Anon Publications,  Bare Hands and Southword, to name a few. The other side of the coin is how traditional publications are adapting to internet and using social-media to advance poetic-writers and audience. It may have been bold to claim a poetic-renaissance but I am sticking to it.

A New Ulster a publishing platform led by Amos Gideon Grieg and Arizahn, is that wonderful poetic-hybrid of traditional and internet publication that uses a wide variety of social-media platforms to generate audience and writer alike. Because the publication is writer-led, the editors bring in their skills as poet and fiction-writer, and their (hopefully not exhausted enthusiasm) for new forms and methodologies of communicating  literature with their readers. 

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Poets featuring in a New Ulster include :

• Issue  1 : Judith Thurley, Micheal Mc Aloran, Colin Dardis, Csilla Toldy, Cliff Wedgbury and J. S. Watts
• Issue 2 : Micheal Mc Aloran, Alistair Graham, Heller Levinson, Inso, Jogn Liddy, Geraldine O’Kane, Aine MacAodha, Brian Adlai, J. S. Watts, Peter Pegnall and Peter Fahy.
• Issue 3:  David McClean, Neil Ellman, Angela Topping,  Nancy Ann Miller, Christopher Barnes, Stella Burton and more.
• Issue 4 , added as link
• Homepage of a New Ulster
• Aine McAodha on Poethead

ox,

Ilya Kaminsky on Paul Celan, Poetry Magazine

Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky

Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013.  A Publication of the Poetry Foundation

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Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley)

Later, I went on to acquire the book, Paul Celan  Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner which has a chapter entitled, ‘A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith’, detailing Felstiner’s approach to the translation of Todesfuge. I blogged my reading of Todesfuge  here .

In many ways I do not feel as if I will ever finish with the reading of that poem. I feel that this blog space is too limited to write about Paul Celan and his dedicated translators including, Ian Fairley, Pierre Joris, and John Felstiner. However, when an interesting article or translation of Celan emerges I link to it here. Poetry Magazine (January 2013) has an article on Celan’s poetry, including some discussion of Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge. The text of the Felstiner translation of Todesfuge is included in Of strangeness that Wakes us by  by Ilya Kaminsky.

Here Kaminsky discusses Celan’s alleged hermeticism , which the poet himself denied. He looks at the issues of expressing the experience of the Jewish poet Post-Holocaust and at Adorno’s exhortation that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust’.

Poetry had to be written after the Holocaust, as art had to occur. Weil or Tuominen would describe poetry written in cataclysmic times as a poetry of necessity. 

The expression of the WWII diaspora poet in the great Todesfuge becomes, in Felstiner’s words an encapsulation of or/ the Guernica of Post-War European Literature. Those readers of Celan who come to Poethead to link to Celan’s works will be intrigued by Kaminsky’s discussion on Celan’s poetic-process, his approach to language, to the creative-process, and to his expressing of  human catastrophe

On Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge Kaminsky says,

‘In my private library, this is one of the great translations of the twentieth century. But the word “translation” to my mind is misleading. This translation (or any great translation, for that matter) is not a mirror. While one appreciates Felstiner’s haunting use of German words interspersed with English, this striking and powerful juxtaposition of languages doesn’t happen in Celan’s poem.’ (Of strangeness That Wakes Us )

The sheer brokenness of the mother-tongue in Celan’s expression is precisely what allows for linguistic multi-layering within a translator-approach to the poet’s work. It is precisely this that Felstiner divines and uses in his translation, and whilst it may not appeal to the purist, it is that seamless juxtaposition and use of the German that gives the Felstiner translation its evocative quality.

Get Poetry Magazine and read the entire Felstiner translation which is embedded into his wonderful article on Paul Celan.

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Note:  I linked a Pierre Joris essay on Paul Celan here in August 2010, regarding Todtnauberg , as well as numerous references to Celan’s work. Essays on Celan and his translators are too all-encompassing to limit to (or add to) existent blog-posts. I recommend that readers with an interest in Celan  visit Poetry Foundation, Pierre Joris’ Nomadics blog, and Jacket 2 for further discussion on the work of Paul Celan.

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YouTube of Todesfuge.

Text Translation of Todesfuge

My blog on Todesfuge

‘Seed’, by Paula Meehan

” The first warm day of spring and I step out into the garden from the gloom of a house where hope had died to tally the storm damage, to seek what may have survived. And finding some forgotten lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn holding in their fingers a raindrop each like a peace offering, or a promise, I am suddenly grateful and would offer a prayer if I believed in God. But not believing, I bless the power of seed, its casual, useful persistence, and bless the power of sun, its conspiracy with the underground, and thank my stars the winter’s ended.” ‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan, all rights reserved. ‘Seed’ is taken from  Mysteries of the Home by Paula Meehan, which will be re-issued in February 2013 by Dedalus Press. Dedalus release notes for Mysteries of the Home are added here. Mysteries Of The Home was first published in 1996 by Bloodaxe Books. It will be re-issued under the Dedalus Press imprint in February 2013. Thanks to Paula Meehan for suggesting the poems and to Dedalus editor, Pat Boran, for facilitating my queries regarding having a poem by Paula on Poethead. I had wanted one for some time and I am delighted to add Paula Meehan to my Index of Women Poets.

Poems from Mindskin by Antonella Zagaroli

from Fan-Locked (2001-2004) ‘The sun embroiders the hinges on the door Fan-locked the woman with the curdled breast mirrors the colours one by one mortifies their harmony with blood between her thighs She’s jealous of every new whim kneads her tongue with hankerings for salt Replies without eyes to a world in silence ‘ Fan-Locked is ©Antonella Zagaroli, this translation is ©Anamaría Crowe Seranno

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‘A Ray. Wind on the waterfall The rain doesn’t burst down Slowly the grey ink gets closer, exhausted in the whirlwind, from the white crest a ventricle a womb an island is newly born slides into the lake to gather itself, perspire And there’s no downpour yet The earth continues to spread out ‘Fan-Locked is ©Antonella Zagaroli, this translation is ©Anamaría Crowe Seranno

.

from Prose poetry from THE BLUE FOX (2002).Les Amoureux.. ‘At the hour that rises between water and harvest yellow a seagull glided over the robust net of the fisherman Anchise It had come from far away with no break Its wings had withered, salt had dissolved their strength Only thanks to its ever vigilant eye had it entered the clearing of sheaves. Anchise at that time of day would pause to look at the sky and had noticed the bird for the solemn and cautious way it hovered So it seemed from the flight path and angle which set the bird apart from others It must have been the leader of a flock though not of seagulls, of exotic migrants from beyond the waves . . . . . . The bird touched the water as if stroking it happy to be pulled along dived through the surface and let go exhausted it aimed at the highest cloud labouring to maintain height with its wings glistening blue from the sea then whirled back towards land. Anchise, the white and nimble guardian of everything around him, gauged the elements of that sea orchestra.’ © Antonella Zagaroli , translation is © Anamaría Crowe Seranno

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Antonella Zagaroli’s Mindskin is translated with an introductory essay by Anamaría Crowe Serrano. Thank so much to Antonella for the poems and for facilitating their publication on Poethead, which has just reached 100,000 hits. I  printed out the entire Mindskin .pdf file, and I have enjoyed every second of reading it. It was very generous of Antonella to allow me the  crops and I had a lovely time selecting pieces from her work for this blog. Thanks to Jen Matthews of SouthWord Publications for suggesting Antonella for my Poet in Translation.

About Mindskin

‘Poetry, Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian and introduced by Anamaría Crowe Serrano. Antonella Zagaroli is a poetic phenomenon. She writes prolifically, applies poetry to psychological studies, runs poetic workshops and organizes poetry, art and awareness events in health-care centers, schools and libraries. Her work is fluid and constantly evolving. Mindskin offers a generous selection from two collections of poetry (La maschera della Gioconda/The Gioconda’s Mask and Serrata a ventagli/Fan-locked), a volume of prose poems (La volpe blu/The Blue Fox) and an epic poem (Vinera minima/Minimal Venus).’

(
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982384978/mindskin-a-selection-of-poems-19852010-.aspx

Related Links

• Mindskin by Antonella Zagaroli
• Translations on Poethead
• Jennifer Matthews

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‘Roxy’ and ‘Nanna Slut’s Long Close Summer’ by Kit Fryatt

Roxy

“Bonny Sandy breaks my heart
no coming to couch the night
& his blade red wine
.
& his thrapplejammer white wine
bonny Sandy brooks my hurt
this ae night
.
ilka night
& the horns of young green wine
bonny Sandy brakes his hart.
.
Love whinges & crines. The bonny knight
in ague sweat & his ain shite, unhurt.”

© Kit Fryatt , all rights reserved.

 nanna slut’s long close summer

‘ Dance the lamb
                             & ra-ra
                                        &lamb
                                                &ra-ra
mutton hunks
It’s a shame the way we carry on 

The streets stink tonight; my skullpan’s pounding
for rain or riot, I’m not so young, scarred from mound
to sternum, childless pale citadel of bravado and competence;
though if it gets too tasty I’ll hitch my mobile home
and flit this meatpacking warehouse district
but for now I’m hanging in there, for a sniff at the grinding bliss
the brazen looter children have, this year’s corn kings─
with sordid cold, blanket, galvanise tray, comes the morning in.

Dress the lamb
                          & rare-rare
                                          lamb
                                                    .rare-rare
mutton bird
It’s a shame the way we carry on

Come sisters, these Lammas shiftless we could use, straw
men to our hags, the blintering braggarts will fight our wars
and decorate our palaces, symbolize in their dying
everything that comforts people, and stupefies.
The estate we lost thirty grand years ago, tonight we take
ground, we rise, inhale, we’re scary cunts, tonight we tear
spoil through locked wards, mindless, knowing that
our chicken limbs may splinter, falter; like, a freedom act
like, do whatever you want
 mate
                          &do
                                   .the mutton flap
It’s a shame ‘

© Kit Fryatt , all rights reserved.

Kit Fryatt writes and performs poems at Spoke, Wurm in Apfel and Can Can. I met her at the Mater Dei launch of Post III Magazine and being well-impressed with a card-carrying poet, I begged some poems for my Saturday Woman Poet blog. I got three unpublished poems , which would be considered over-generous, so I am publishing two of them today and returning the third with the proviso that if they are published online, they are Published work. Thanks to Kit for her generous contribution to Poethead. Copyright of the above poems remains with the author.

Two Poems by Kit Fryatt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at wurmimapfel.net.

‘Necessity’ by Simone Weil

“The cycle of days in the deserted sky turning
In silence watched by mortal eyes
Gaping mouth here below, where each hour is burning
So many cruel and beseeching cries;
 
All the stars slow in the steps of their dance,
The only fixed dance, mute brilliance on high,
In spite of us formless, nameless, without cadence,
Too perfect, no fault to belie;
 
Toward them, suspended our anger is vain.
Quench our thirst if you must break our hearts.
Clamoring and desiring, their circle draws us in their train;
Our brilliant masters, were forever victors.
 
Tear flesh apart, chains of pure clarity.
Nailed without a cry to the fixed point of the North,
Naked soul exposed to all injury,
May we obey you unto death. “
 
Simone Weil‘s : Necessity
 
“The cycle of days in the deserted sky turning
In silence watched by mortal eyes
Gaping mouth here below, where each hour is burning
So many cruel and beseeching cries;
 
All the stars slow in the steps of their dance,
The only fixed dance, mute brilliance on high,
In spite of us formless,nameless, without cadence
Too perfect, no fault to belie;
 
Toward them, suspended our anger is vain.
Quench our thirst if you must break our hearts.
Clamoring and desiring, their circle draws us in their train
Our brilliant masters were forever victors.
 
Tear flesh apart, chains of pure clarity
Nailed without a cry to the fixed point of the North,
Naked soul exposed to all injury,
May we obey you unto death.”
 

This poem from Poetry and Poetics ed Joan Dargan, Simone Weil; Thinking Poetically SUNY, 1999 was first published on Poethead on March 8th 2008 to celebrate International Women’s Day and is republished here to mark the nearing end of Weil’s Centenary year.

I will look at the images in notes attached to comments but just want it read by those inclined to poetics. There is a 180 degree turn from Verse 1 to Verse 3 (line 3, V3.3) . I will look at it in relation to a poem by Paul Celan in notes.

Poems by Eileen Sheehan

an elegy of sorts   for want of an ash-tray I rest my cigarette on this grey plate, a remnant from some depleted set, now serving as candle-holder   the cigarette tip sizzles as it hits a pat of wax   I inhale and taste the tallow as red seeps down the paper stains the filter   a last molten drop from a crimson candle, lit as votive for an injured cat   the cat now buried in a sunny spot by the back wall   a favoured place of his for grooming   somewhere there was a point to all of this which now evades me   like that raw evening, placing his still-warm body in the grave, how everything but the weeping failed me   © Eileen Sheehan , from the collection Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books)

What She Sings Of   Once in a time he was the sky clothing me, the warm earth supporting me, the all-in-all of every night and day to me.   He was salt waves washing me, he was wind caressing me, fire igniting me, the first and last of every cause that moved me.   He was fish that jumped for me, bird that sang for me, beast that nourished me, the craving and cure of every need inside of me.   Now he is a bright ship pulling away from me, white sail gone from me, his rough wake drowning me, he is shimmer of scales growing out of me;   soon I will sing to him, comb out my hair for him, draw him back to me, lure him down to me.   © Eileen Sheehan   first published in The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry)

Eileen Sheehan Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her third collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

 

Poems by Michèle Vassal

Drunk as Brendan Behan “Lovers    lovers their empty skins hang limp in opiate closets pulsing between insinuations of naphthalene and the barbitural scent of forgetting, they swing embittered and toxic, mothy costumes of a play that lingers only on faded posters and skin. On the wrong side of midnight drunk as Brendan Behan I scooped up a last high king kneeling on Clontarf road          battled out knees sanded to the bone by the wet grit of ancient wars         singing         something about not worrying about a thing amongst Viking corpses on the steps of the Bank of Ireland where Wood Quay used to be we kissed ourselves an island.   I clinched a burned out arsonist        hands shaking      climbing railings in Stephens Green      ..fucking left an aftertaste of phosphorus         reeking red        like inhaling the soul of a cracked match.   I chased a light eyed dragon heart caving in to the count of nine elliptic filigree of sins I kept twitching inside a reliquary of abalone dreams whilst the rosary of Chopin’s Polonaise undid itself in silver beads. I slashed my defeats in the wrists of actors snorted stars on the mercurial mirrors of their well rehearsed eyes and DT-ed on night’s poitín when I drank neat the distilled dew glistening on the mouths of girls.”   © Michèle Vassal, published in A Taste of Hemlock, Salmon 2011

Dublin 75   Nineteen seventy five and Mary worked Fitzwilliam square genuflecting at closing time for wretched men in nylon shirts too drunk to know too drunk to care that whilst on bended knees she thought only of communion.   From the Liberties to the Green   Dublin vomited poets and patriots under the gassy glare of streetlights leaning on convoluted shadows and not quite balladed out saints and scholars spewed up Spancil Hill and Dirty Old Town, like a bad pint In nineteen seventy five love smelled of stout and vinegared chips.”   © Michèle Vassal, published in A Taste of Hemlock, Salmon 2011

Michèle Vassal Michèle Vassal is from Barcelonnette, a small town in the French Alps. She moved to Ireland, aged seventeen, to learn English and stayed there for thirty years. Her collection, Sandgames (Salmon 2000), received first prize at Listowel Writers’ Week and some of her poems were short-listed for the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Awards. She has been widely published internationally, in both French and English. Michèle currently lives and writes in France. Youtube Salmon Amazon Amazon

Links

The Health of Poetry

Reblogged from clarepollard:

I was honoured to present the first Hippocrates Young Poets Award on Saturday, for a poem on a medical subject, to 17-year old Rosalind Jana for a brave, beautiful piece about her treatment for scoliosis of the spine. The award, sponsored by NAWE, was part of an International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine at the Wellcome Centre, organized by Donald Singer and Michael Hulse, and came at the end of an inspiring afternoon.

Read more… 1,150 more words

From Clare Pollard