Jo Bangles

My play ‘Jo Bangles’ will be given a public reading by the accomplished actor Mary Mcevoy in the Mill Street Theatre next Friday at 8pm. Tickets 6 euro. Mary forms one half of the partnership that is Esca Riada theatre group. Her creative partner is ex-Abbey Theatre director Caroline Fitzgerald. The reading of Jo Bangles is part of the pre-production process for the play, which we all hope will be in full production in the first half of 2009. See the press release below.

PRESS RELEASE
Esca Riada Theatre Company
In association with the Mill Theatre.
16/09/2008

Esca Riada and the Mill Theatre Host the Best in New Writing with the Best of Irish Acting Talent!
Esca Riada Theatre Company in association with the Mill Theatre Dundrum will be holding a festival of new writing at the Mill Studio Theatre! Readings of seven new plays will take place from Tuesday 30th September to Friday 3rd October at 8 pm. Readings on Friday 3rd October will be followed by a post reading discussion, a unique opportunity for a public audience to interact with the artists during the creative process!
Cast
Mary McEvoy, Gerildine Plunkett, Bosco Hogan, Mark Lambert, Isobel Mahon, Elizabeth Moynihan, Garvin Gallaher, and Sean Murphy amongst others.
Writers
Jenifer Johnston, Iris Park, Isobel Mahon, Ivey Banister, Dave Lordan, and Nell Regan.

All readings are under the direction of Caroline FitzGerald.
Esca Riada Theatre Company was founded by Caroline FitzGerald and Mary McEvoy to promote and produce new Irish plays.

September 30th to October 3rd 2008
Mill Theatre Dundrum – Studio – 8 p.m.
Tickets €6, Bookings 01 296 9340

Powerscourt

Glory before the fall

The Killing Cure

Kiss Me I’m ripe for ya

On the edge of the pond

In Neptune’s Pond

Mahmoud Darwish RIP

The great Palestinian and World Poet Mahmoud Darwish has passed away. In my opinion he was far and away our greatest contemporary poet, a Neruda for our times. Below is a review I wrote for the Stinging Fly of his latest work The Butterfly’s Burden, published by Bloodaxe.

Review of ‘The Butterfly’s Burden’ Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah, Bilingual Arabic- English edition November 2007

‘(to a critic): Do not interpret my words
with a teaspoon or a bird snare…
(Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege)
Mahmoud Darwish’s writings are aimed less at impressing scholars and reviewers than at sustaining the longing for justice of what western commentators sometimes patronisingly refer to as the ‘Arab street’. He sees himself as a medium through which the traumatised historical experience of the contemporary Middle-East gathers itself up and reflects upon itself. His poetry is not for capturing, dissection and labelling, but for participating in. Darwish’s intended audience praises his work best by using it, by reading it and sharing it, and so proving its efficacy as a moral and spirtitual sustainer.
The Middle East offers a huge and highly literate audience for poetry, an audience that, in the intensity of its literary engaement as well as its size is beyond the wildest dreams of western poets . The structural distinctions of middle-eastern poetry, it’s rich music , it’s incantatory style, its many song-like devices, and its mutually enriching synergy of language and symbolism drawn from both sacred and secular traditions, leading to layer upon layer of evocationa and suggestion, can all be accounted for by its long-term and evolving engagement with a mass audience. That audience finds its inter-generational experience of ‘shock and awe’, of partition, dislocation and enforced exile reflected in a poetry suffused with metaphysical longing for various semi-mythical homelands and states of peace and visionary union with the other. That longing for joyful union, with its ever-present erotic overtones, often appears in poetry cloaked in the guise of conceits such as ‘the stranger’ or ‘the beloved’, figures which provide a focus for the complex mixture of political, spiritual and erotic cravings thrown up by historical trauma.
Darwish’s return to Ramallah in 1996 after decades of the enforced wanderings common to many an ecriture engagee of the 20th century prompted the desirous outpourings of ‘The Stranger’s Bed’, the first in the trilogy of books excellently translated here by Fady Joudah, himself an award- winning poet, under the overall title of ‘The Butterfly’s’ Burden’.
‘The Stranger’s Bed’ is putatively a book of powerfully erotic love poems addressed to an unknown lover. But in the throes of a Blakean excession, inspired by the unnamed ‘stranger’ the desire of the lover overflows his being to circulate and oscillate among everything within his fields of vison and comprehension.

‘There is no limit to me
if I want.
I widen my field with a grain of wheat
and widen this space with a Turtledove.
Let my body be my country’
(Drought)

‘A bit of night near you is enough for me to get out of Babylon and into my essence- my other. No gender for me within me
and all of you is you. And what overflows from you is I the free and Kind’.
(Sonnet 111)
Love is presented as a state of endless openess and dissolution in which things are in a continous flow of mutual penetration and redefinition. Meaning and identity, self and other, life and death, fathers and daughters, soldiers and victims, all give way and swap places before Darwish’s synergising vision. Nothing stays withing its own bounds. Everything flows.

‘when you walk barefoot rhyme abandons copulating speech, and meter breaks in the climax of experience
(Sonnet 111)

and I move into you as astronomers move
from one planet to another.
My soul looks upon my body through your ten fingers….

….echo in echo and I moved into you
as a name moves from one creature to another’
(Wedding Song)

Darwish shares this elucidation of world in ceaseless flux with another great work of of the anti-imperialist canon, Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth. As Neruda does in his classic work, Darwish transforms the experience of exile into a visonary condition . Arising from a ground of permanent homelessness, rootlessness and instability, Exile affords the poet an affinity with and insight into the quantum indeterminacy and flux which is at once the reality and the mystery of existence..
But Darwish does not write merely in order to proclaim to the world the undoubtedly superior powers of his own personal perception. Indeed, ‘the personal is political’ in the Middle-East in a way which may be incomprehensible to those who have not directly experienced war . There is no academic reverie of pure intellect, no Kavanaghesque parish idyll into which the middle-eastern poet can dreamily wander in order to evade the impact of world politics. In the Middle-East the personal becomes political in the form of an electrode attached to your extremities or a bomb-burst through the roof of the local hospital.
Darwish’s figuring of a borderless and boundlessly eroticised imaginary stands in defiant contradiction to the armed imposition of unnatural borders and the continual repartition of the middle-east according to the priorities of Western Imperialism. His foregrounding of mutabilty and the transforming power of desire and the poet’s language is aimed at provoking a consciousness of and a hope for a political metamorphoses, at fuelling the desire for a future free of waterboarding and cluster bombs, and yes, needlessly and deliberately massacred infants:

‘another day will come, a womanly day diaphonous in metaphor,
diamond and processional in visitation, sunny, flexible, with a light shadow…
(Another Day Will Come)

This daily reality of state terror in Palestine makes itself felt in ‘State of Siege’, a series of short poems written out and reflecting on the carnage and encirclement that followed on the great Palestinian uprising of the year 2000. These short, aphoristic lyrics effectively communicate the alternate moods of frustration, resignation, anger, vengeance and despair which are the lot of the besieged. They offer us a vivid psycho-geography of what it is like to live, among thousands of others, literally at death’s door:

‘The soldiers measure the distance
between being and non-being
with a tanks scope’
In ‘State of Siege’ Darwish shows how the poet’s art leans heavily under historical duress but continues to fly as a sign of hope to his besieged community. This is ‘The Butterfly’ s Burden’ of the title. Perhaps the great
‘To resist means to be certain of the well-being
of heart and testicles and of your chronic illness, the illness of hope’
In the last of the three books ‘Don’t apologise for what you’ve done’
Darwish continues and expands his lyric meditations on the menage a trois between the poet, hope and history. In the effusive opening lyric ‘Cadence chooses me’ Darwish informs us that:
‘Cadence chooses me, it chokes on me.
I am the violins regurgitant flow and not its player
I am the prescenc of memory.
the echo of things pronouces through me
then i pronounce’
What different people see as the function and aim of poetry is always rooted in material contexts. In Ireland poetry answers no urgent social need. Darwish, on the other hand, is responding to the overpowering need for someone who is definitively not a paid liar or lackey, and who shares in the general antagonism to the temporal Powers, to articulate the howling rages and sorrows just about everyone in the Middle-East must feel. No wonder Darwish feels that powerful forces beyond his control are flowing through him. This experience, of a poet being actually necessary to the moral and spiritual sustenance of a people has long been either unavailable to or unwanted by Irish poets, though its abscence was the subject of a great longing in Michael Hartnett’s luminous Inchicore Haiku.
In the end I would not like to try to describe the experience of reading Darwish as much as recommend it for those whose minds – and bodies- are open to exploring a poetry that, in its form and subject matter, its politics and its artfulness, its intentions and effects is genuinely and thrillingly different to what we are used to over here on our little island of peace and prosperity.

NUMBER FIVE

here’s one of my favourite poems of the moment. It’s from Susan Millar DuMars’ collection Big Pink Umbrella, which is reviewed here and on sale here

Number Five

Many people at Number Five

Will say there’s too many

at Number Five-

Cardiganned aunties in cruel beehives

will say there’s no room

in Number Five.

Grey faced uncles, barely alive

will say there’s no air

inside Number Five.

Sharp elbowed floozies, too drunk to drive

teeter and totter

around Number Five.

Six empty suits have only arrived

to smoke and pace

inside Number Five.

And one soft man with pallbearer eyes

misplaced his sweetheart

inside Number Five.

He searches each room for her feathery smile,

her cool soft arms that wait all the while

but he’s lost her, amongst the sad

and the vile

that crowd into Number Five.

And many people at Number Five

Will say there’s too many

At Number Five-

Shop worn Sallies crowd the drive,

babies on hips,

outside Number Five.

And young men turn old

and are sad to survive

the death of their purpose,

the dusk of their pride-

and they stumble on sadly, sadly alive

in the din of

Number Five.

-Susan Millar DuMars

In Our Blood Joe

SocialistWorkerIRL sent you a video: “In Our Blood (Tribute to Joe Strummer)”

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heh, check out upcoming single and video from my band radical picnic below- download shortly available on I-tunes dave lordan In Our Blood (Tribute to Joe Strummer) Radical Picnic’s tribute to punk legend Joe Strummer of The Clash. Radical Picnic salutes Joe Strummer for his musical, artistic and political inspiration to a generation. Fighting racism and oppression and speaking to the consciousness of an era in transition and all who believe in freedom. Lyrics by accomplished Poet, Dave Lordan inspired by Joe and the anti-capitalist movement

Love Circus by Stephen Murray

I’ll take you back to Praha,
place you on a Lily pad
in a pond with gilded carp
in the garden of a castle
with neither moat nor King
on a hill that wears
a tunic of forest
a crown of sky
I’ll be your dragonfly somewhat
buzzing about the whole thing
you’d be something like
the queen of smiles
looked after way loads
times one million
to the power of infinity
minus a breakdown
plus ten pillow fights
strawberries and ice cream
smoked salmon and scrambled eggs
champagne breakfasts
might let you beat me at
wrestling, tease you with tickles
and scribble on your face
for good measure.

I’d build you a tree house
or maybe we could live
on a boat with a dog
a Saint Bernard called Mike
a Datsun called John
or a Jack Russell called
Diana Princess of Wales.

You could drive the motorcycle
I’d sit in the sidecar.
People would say
‘Wow’
but we’d be like
‘Whatever, this is normal for us’
and that would be love.

We’d have us a son
call him ‘Batman’
then that would make you
Batman’s mum
Batmum
you could give him love
I’d give him
a chip on his shoulder
just like his dad
he’d have his own
talk show before he can talk
celebrity babies
all goo goo’s and ga ga’s
and people would be like
‘amazing’
and we’d be like ‘yeah,
it is all a bit normal for us
do it all the time, why only this
morning we hopped on a plane
cooked an egg (runny but not snot)
threw it off
jumped out
in a straight jacket
ate runny eggs
gagged and bound
and hurtling to
the gathered ground at
500 miles per hour
it was easy
a breeze
had a quick nap on the way down
woke up in a flash
burst our binds
pulled a quick chord
opened a parachute
landed on the propellers of
a helicopter carrying
a runaway priest
and his centrefold girlfriend
span around 200 times
in one second
lost a shoe
found God
yawned a bit
and we were just
like whatever
this is normal for us’
and it was love
with a soundtrack
by Burt Bacharach and
people were be like
‘Oh my God
is that Morgan Freeman’s
voice narrating this love story?’
and we’d be like
‘Oh no, not him again
I think he’s stalking us
happens all the time
and if it’s not Morgan Freeman
it’s William bloody Shatner
stalkers the lot of them, pests
can’t wipe em off yer shoe’
then we’d settle back
into our old routine
of cloning sheep
to pass the time of day
barbecue a dolphin
ding dong
whose that at the door?
My oh my
it’s little Bo Peep
here you go love
help yourself
to a few of the aforementioned
newly cloned sheep
and then fuck off
for yourself because this
is a love story
not your Romeo
and Juliet more
your Bart Simpson
and Penelope Pitstop
then God would come down
and say
‘Oi, you two
here’s the universe
in a nutshell’
and we’d be like
‘is that it?
What an under whelming
overrated thing compared
to us, let’s go back to bed’
and that would be love
on a spinning wheel
amongst bursting balloons
and Catherine Wheels
beside a silver pig
singing Ave Maria
in German
to a tumble dryer
in a field of golden hay
as a cow jumps over
the moon
and we hold hands
share a kiss and say
‘whatever, seen it all
before, got the t-shirt
the other day after we got married
on the moon
and had a threesome
with E.T.’
We figured it all out
ages ago
we were fat acrobats
and serious clowns
in love’s circus
taming lions
jumping through
hoops of fire
somersaulting off of
trapezes disappearing into
an elephant’s arse
and then sawing each other in half
for loud cheers and laughter.
You know?
Relationship stuff.

EXCERPTED FROM THE PLAY CLOWN FACE

MORE AT http://www.myspace.com/poetron

We imagine the police, by William Wall

In the dark times, will there also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing

About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto to the ‘Svendborg Poems’

we imagine the police

cameras catching other people

doing things that irritate us

in their cars

this is the police state

of mind

as we shop in the late evening

in the supermarket

that never closes

not even for god

& we try to remember what we want

& we try to buy only what we need

& desire keeps getting in the way

we genuflect

before other people’s shopping

in aisles sacred

to the memory of home

cooking & detergent

& the kind of things your mother baked

& as we are occasionally electrocuted

by the metal

we begin to believe

that bread belongs to today

that there are different qualities of white

that there are no preservatives

that the meat

is prime

& the supermarket cares for us

& that every little helps

it is chip & pin

in the late evening

under the watchful eyes

we imagine

people using our cards

to buy things we would never buy

in places we have never been

on a day or days

without our express

permission

this is the police state

of mind

as we drive home in the night

with a car full of things

we scarcely believe are real

our past haunted by

kitchen paper rolls

cans of asparagus tips

stick & click LED lights

mosquito candles in case

we get global warming soon

disposable barbecues

fruit psychosis

& probiotic yoghurt

& canned salmonella

& thawing petits-pois

& lawn weed ‘n’ feed

& a nest box

& a special kind of notepaper

that has forget-me-nots

& a memory stick

& a device for opening

reluctant cardboard cartons

& a fold up tent

for when we fold our tent

& a wallet-full of promises

that there will still be shopping

no matter how dark the time

Email kirwall@eircom.net

www.williamwall.eu

Resisting War Crimes Is Not A Crime – Defend the Raytheon 9!

by Goretti Horgan – Derry Anti War Coalition

The Derry Anti War Coalition is calling on everyone who can to take the morning off work on Monday 19th May and come to the protest outside the Court in Belfast.It has been confirmed that the trial of Derry Anti War Coalition (DAWC) activists, the Raytheon 9, will start on Monday May19th, in the Laganside Courts in Belfast. The Raytheon 9 are charged with criminal damage and affray as a result of the non-violent direct action taken by DAWC on 9th August 2006 at the height of the Israeli assault on Lebanon.

There will be a mass protest outside the Court (opposite the Waterfront) from 9.30 to 10.30 on Monday 19th and every Monday morning as long as the trial continues. The DAWC feels we can’t ask people to protest on a daily basis, but those who can spare an hour would be very welcome inside the Court to show support. Also, we will be gathering outside the Court every morning at 10.00am and we would be delighted to see anyone who wants to come along for just five minutes, to cheer us on, read a poem, do a piece of street theatre or anything else.

Meanwhile, support for the Raytheon 9 is flooding in from across Britain and Ireland and as far afield as Australia, Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. The DAWC pamphlet on the Raytheon 9 has been translated into Spanish, which explains the sudden influx of solidarity from Latin America

Solidarity actions have taken place or are planned almost everywhere there is a Raytheon plant, but especially in the US. At the end of April, Raytheon Systems Ltd, (RSL) Glenrothes (Scotland was targeted by activists in solidarity with the Raytheon 9. The Scottish Raytheon plant was blockaded from 6.30 am till 2.45pm when activists, including one who uses a wheelchair, chained themselves to the front gate.

One of the Scottish anti-war activists, retired schoolteacher Irene Willis, 63 stated, “The actions of Raytheon Systems Ltd actions should be fully investigated. International Law holds a corporation liable when it knowingly supplies weapons that are used to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. Raytheon in Glenrothes manufacture the GPS-aided navigation system and control systems for the Paveway guided “bunker busting” bombs produced in the US and sold to Israel who used them in their war on Lebanon July/Aug 2006. Like people in Derry, we feel we have to oppose their presence here.”

There will be daily updates on the website during the trial www.raytheon9.org

Anyone who thinks they can help in any way should email resistderry@aol.com. There is a Raytheon 9 support group in Belfast to organise solidarity during the trial. It will try to provide accommodation for travelling supporters. Contact Gordon on 07742531617. For buses from Dublin, contact the IAWM office or Sara on 0872886646. For buses from Derry, contact Davy on 07521527208 or Goretti on 07973528772

INTERVIEW WITH A CHAMPION

Hey. Miceal Kearney’s one of the most inventive, versatile, and daring young poets I’ve come across in the last few years. He’s got a debut collection ‘Written at Work’ , coming out next month with Doire Press in Galway. Here’s an e-interview with the man himself:

You are the inventor of the critical term ‘arse-vomit’. Can you tell us what this term means and how you came to develop it?

Well, like a lot of poets, it was the magpie in me that came up with that term. I heard the brother use it first, in a different context to the way I use it. It’s from my poem ‘The First Church of the Slam’— ‘nobody likes arse-vomit, explains, the reasons why: keep to a minimum…’ I heard someone read a poem once; it was only eight lines, but he talked for ten minutes about the poem. Which completely killed the poem.

Performance poet, slam poet, sham poet, live poet…which one are you and why?

None of thee above: I’m just a poet. I’ve serious poems about the death of my Gran, funny poems about computers, poems about cats pissing in your shoes and about suicide bombers.
I submit to magazines, and if they are taken people read them. But if I get a reading, people come to hear my poems; and that’s it, as far as I’m concerned.

Have you felt the target of envy since you won the coveted Cuirt Slam last year?

The brother once ask me—“Do you go to the slams and the people there say: God not you”
But to answer the question, no.

What does it feel like to be the champion?

Nice.

How important was the live poetry scene in Galway to your technical development as a writer?

Very important. Without places like Over The Edge, Ruby Room and North Beach Slams, which not only to gives an excellent opportunity for poets to air their work. You also get to hear other poets work. Meet new people, exchange ideas…’what ya think of this….’ and such.
You can write forever, alone in your room but without the help and support of organisations and magazines; you won’t go far.

Some people say the live poetry scene is all about shagging, getting high, showing off and other sweeties in the goody-bag of human existence. How true is that?

The goody-bag of human existence: that’s an interesting term, do you get to fill the goody-bag
or is it handed to you and have to make do with what you pull out?
I suppose it’s like everything else: you’ll get that.

You’re not having any blurb on your book cover. How come?

To be honest, I don’t like them.

Where would you rather live- Galway, Amsterdam, Brighton or Ljubliana, and why?

Well now (wink, wink)…Galway. County Galway, in the town of the little oak (Ballinderreen)—
born, bred and hopefully die there. It’s my home and where my heart is.

How do you make God laugh?

By making myself laugh.

Tell us about your book now.

The book is titled ‘Written at Work’ It is my debut collection from Doire Press. It is about nature and the farm. The realities of farm life which can be cruel, beautiful and at times funny. Here are two examples—

‘The Calves Field’

In this place, among the moss and ferns,
a lot of my childhood is buried.
So, also, are the unlucky calves.

‘Delivered by Jack’

Then one random day these annoying little fuckers
are treated to a production of barnyard ballet;
where myself and Dad
pirouette and perform
the nutcracker.

The book, I feel, is one movement of a cycle, a journey from childhood to manhood, coupled with the changes along the way; both personal and how ‘that way of life’ has changed—

’Under a Sapling Beech’

…Common Agricultural Policies,
ALDI and arthritis have made redundant
the grey bucket that brought the spuds
into mother.

MIceál Kearney, 27, lives in the West of Ireland, working on the family farm. The eldest in a family of four. Writing poetry since 2001. Published in Ireland, England and America. Winner of the 2006 Cuisle, 2007 Baffle Bard and 2007 Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam’s. Short-listed twice for the 2007 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award.