Chris Murray

Viva La Vida! by Frida Kahlo.

July 21st, 2008

Vive La Vida!

There are many images by the artist Frida Kahlo.They are full of light. She is all over the net, and on you-tube, there is a small film called The Real Frida – and I suppose her work is known to many people.

Poethead is about women’s art , poetry and image; and I found I had never used any of her images, though I have in other places with regard to Oaxaca and CAFTA, even with regard to our Halloween. The above image is ‘Vive La Vida’, it was painted just before her death, which occurred 11 days after the CIA take over of Guatemala. The last images of her show her clasping a peace dove banner at a blockade

She fully embraced her life in all her methods and modes of expression, song, photography, politics and little books, not least the paintings.

The best bio I have read is by Hayden Herrera and is (if I remember) simply entitled ‘Frida’, it is worth the read , though nothing would compare with the paintings.

There is a blog link to a good Frida Kahlo site in the blogroll on the left-hand column. There is also wiki on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera which can be accessed by just googling ‘Wiki’ : Frida Kahlo !!

Hayden Herrera, ‘Frida Kahlo, the Paintings’
Essays From Tula. Leo Tolstoy.

July 21st, 2008

I am a demon for sitting and transcribing when I cannot get my brain to do the work, or when there’s a big anxiety level. I have been reading recently around the religious issue, as many seem to be. One of the offshoots of globalisation appears to be bigger budgets so that men can wear their religious hearts on their sleeves. I find the lack of dignity, and noise level deeply enervating wherein the metaphysical and mystic hearts of our religions are enslaved to a mass communication.

Would not it be great if the leaders told everyone to go back to the books ?

” Bethink yourselves….,
that those in power and who support the old empty forms of religion should understand that what they support and preach under the form of religion is not only not religion but is the chief obstacle to man’s appropriating the true religion which they already know, and which above all can deliver them from these calamities. So that the only certain means of man’s salvation consists merely in ceasing to do that which hinders him from assimilating the true religion which already hides in his consciousness.”
A Saturday Woman Poet, Dvora Amir.

July 18th, 2008

How many Windows Does a Person Need

How many windows does a person need to open himself,
so he won’t be like Captain Nemo, trapped in the webs of length
and width coordinates
hunted by his world. Among navigation instruments, ” moving
within the moveable base”.
Closed in, as if saying let the world come through my porthole,
let it accustom itself to me.
And on his eyes he put patches made of glass to keep tears
from pouring to the light.
He too needed several windows to save his life.
A tiny slit, a teeny gate to look through, and from the inside out.
Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, in the closing darkness
he saw a sparkling pearl,
pressed up against the fish’s pupil like an old man to the
keyhole in his door.
He saw flowing water moving towards him, and knew: the fish as well as the
various creatures of the sea
like him live their lives in a trap,
and he heard his mouth telling his ears, I am alive.

by Dvora Amir, a poet from Jerusalem, she came to Israel from Poland. This poem is translated by Linda Zisquit.

‘The Philosopher and the Birds’ By Richard Murphy

July 15th, 2008

Leave some flowers at Rosroe for Richard Murphy RIP. Irish Times 30/31 January 2018

In Memory of Wittgenstein at Rosroe

A solitary invalid in a fuchsia garden
Where time’s rain eroded the root since Eden,
He became for a tenebrous epoch the stone.

Here wisdom surrendered the don’s gown
Choosing for Cambridge, two deck chairs,
A kitchen table, undiluted sun.

He clipped with February shears the dead
Metaphysical foliage. Old, in fieldfares
Fantasies rebelled though annihilated.

He was haunted by gulls beyond omega shade,
His nerve tormented by terrified knots
In pin-feathered flesh. But all folly repeats

Is worth one snared robin his fingers untied.
He broke prisons, beginning with words,
And at last tamed, by talking, wild birds.

Through accident of place, now by belief
I follow his love which bird-handled thoughts
To grasp growth’s terror or death’s leaf.

He last on this savage promontory shored
His logical weapon. Genius stirred
A soaring intolerance to teach a blackbird.

So before alpha you may still hear sing
In the leaf-dark dusk some descended young
Who exalt the evening to a wordless song.

His wisdom widens: he becomes worlds
Where thoughts are wings. But at Rosroe hordes
Of village cats have massacred his birds.

(Wittgenstein’s seat is marked by a small plaque in the National Botanic Gardens and generally inhabited by a lazy ginger Tom). The area of Rosroe at Killary Harbour is discussed briefly in the blog under ‘The Brightest Jewel’. Rosroe is a wild and beautiful place, with a hostel (sited now where he had stayed briefly) adorned on it’s periphery by fuchsia hedges and looking onto the small harbour at Killary.

from: Selected Poems by Richard Murphy.

Poetry Ireland and Writing Spaces

July 14th, 2008

The forum at Poetry Ireland and it’s sister site at Northern Ireland Poetry Boards provides a good space to try out new poems and get reaction to them. They are spaces for working writers who want to test ideas and have established themselves through light moderation and the efforts of the writers themselves.

I have put the links to the spaces on the right hand column :

i). Forum for Poets.
ii). Forum for Northern Poets.

The Poetry Forum is part of the Poetry Ireland Site which is also published in the righthand column of this page (as link), this leads to a Newsletter, Resources for poets and listings/reviews.

I am travelling round for the summer, as I do , with brief home stops between settings off, this is a poem I found in a garden and is not even at draft phase. There are twelve sections and it was written very quickly – which means it will end up in a folder.

Section 9-12: Aluine’s Garden.

‘Before the house and
the grass rolling to rocky shore,
a small ingress to rose’s bloom
and lawn of green.

Before the cloud-shrouded reek
Behind the house with fish in
the windows,
a forest of trees, a flitting child.

Before the house
a strip of mown grass quietly entrances.
Right down to bird’s flock at rocky shore
it seems butterflies play.

Before the mountain
Behind the house of gardens,
a row of trees.
Birds sing there.

‘Penelope of the Twentieth Century’ by Elisaveta Bagryana

July 8th, 2008

We are kneaded from the dregs of the past,
layered unknowingly in us through time.
It lends the violet or scarlet colour to our blood,
it gives the lighter or darker shading to our soul.

And look- is there an ossicle of my skull,
a rounding of my flesh, a fingernail,
a soaring of my soul, a surge of my heart-
without parents begat from the start of time?

Oh, the past! You- inevitable evil or good;
you- bright gift or burdening blackness-
a miser hoarding heaps of garbage and gold,
tireless, pitiless, sleepless archivist-

You exist despite protests or our will-power –
amassing old inventories in our hearts,
joining the balance sheets of our triumphs
and long lists of our loves and hates!

And we – covetors or creators of freedom-
we’re nothing but puppets in your hands:
we signal moving backwards and forwards,
we shout and fight, stumble and rise…

Oh these invisible and terrfiying threads,
which you snag then slacken yet never snap,
which manipulate our fates, and permanently bind us
to unborn offspring and dead progenitors!

With one leap into infinity I’d like
to snap off each knot-so as to glimpse,
free, separate-myself- my image,
with no past, no rank, no age, no name!

2.

I am not Penelope of ancient Greece-
humbly weaving then unpicking,
waiting twenty years for Odysseus-
while he loitered over land and sea,
lured by sirens to unknown islands,-
returning to me in his own good time,-
when the dog hardly knew him.

I don’t want to fade and flicker like an icon lamp
in the cell of a nun,
to melt away like a forgotten candle
into its barren flame,
to shed tears on an outstretched map
as if it were a shroud
to explore my thoughts for
latitudes and strange coves,
to fear every Eve on earth-
the pale cold northerner,
or the dark and fiery southerner…

No inventions satisfy me,
the endless cables, anntennae,
that ensnare air, earth, and sea,
so your terse telegrams tap out to me
your scattered love!

I want to feel it here, life-quickening,
with the most primitive discoveries-
the five senses given us with life-
like the last man upon this globe,
like the poorest creature on earth,
like the first and last woman!

3.

Oh, take me you countless roads,
winding serpents hissing in the sky,
and on earth, and at sea.

Take my uncalm and bright thirst
and from one end of the world to the other, take
them up and shake the oceans,

so that an ocean of human masses
could overflow its shores
and clean up the hearth of this earth,

to shake up the fortified,
ossified soulessness
of this century submerged in dark greed!

In the earthquake I will see- amid victorious thunder
and in a bolt that lights the whole sky-
man appear-the human – the creator.

Elisaveta Bagryana-Penelope of the Twentieth Century,Trans Brenda Walker, Valentine Borrisov, Belin Tonchev

Elisaveta Bagryana was born in Sofia in 1893 and died aged 98 in 1991. Published: Forest Books 1993
‘The Brightest Jewel’ by E. Charles Nelson and Dr. Eileen Mc Cracken

July 6th, 2008

1998 saw the bicentennial of our National Botanic Gardens, which started my first cycle of poems and images, some of which I exhibited in a group show called Ramus (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin). The gardens flourish with two of the houses now restored to their former glory, the Curvilinear Range and the Palm House; distinguished by the lolling cat, the connecting door into the fabulous orchid collection, and the little plate which commemorates Wittgenstein‘s seating place.

I am sure Wittgenstein had many places in Ireland, another one is located at the Fjord of Killary harbour where if one is lucky one can see rainbows nestling along the sides, usually in pairs. A small commemorative plate nestles there on a low wall at the site of the visitors youth hostel at Rosroe.

The Botanic Gardens share a boundary with the Huge citadel of Glasnevin Cemetery, where my brother lies in an unmarked grave, and that was the beginning of the poems. Glas Naíon translates into The Stream of the Infants. The River Tolka runs along the edge of the gardens and is nodded to by a huge Socrates who inhabits a niche just beyond the Japanese bridge.

So, there is lots of food for thought for the makers of images and poetry, generally small children are fascinated with the tame squirrel colony and the arching Yew walk. On many days the film-makers, sketchers and thinkers can be seen walking the boundaries and edges of the Gardens, it’s nice to see.

The History of the Herbarium and the Gardens are detailed in the excellent book mentioned at the beginning of this piece:

The Brightest Jewel, by Nelson/Mc Cracken 1987

The Victoria Lily is no longer there, the house she occupied is up for renovation, it included a ferns room and cacti. The cacti have been temporarily re-housed in the great palm house. The gardeners will gladly regale with tales of her fertility cycle and blushing when she returns. A small closed in area on the walk to the lily house has a section of Moore’s last Rose of Summer and stops many curious people in their tracks.

The Last Rose of Summer , by Thomas Moore
Protected: The journals of André Gide 1928-1939.

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‘ haec fecit’ by Iosaf MacDiarmada

July 1st, 2008

Haec Fecit

I find myself with schoolkids
answering dosser’s queries
be original I say and never
query that dodgy dossier.
The war brought Plagiarism
without “inverted commas”

A Limerick

O back in the days of yore
a scallywag feared what for
with a baitin by night
& an ungodly fright
sure the RA kept the peace in Donore.

A Ditty , By Ms Doyle:

War is very bad
and very very sad
too much blood
is very very mad
it makes me cry
Ow! Ow! Ow!
I cry.
too many words
too many men writing words
but it won’t make it go away.
But the war it won’t end
It won’t change the way it ought
Thank God I had that abortion
Somethings can be chosen
no matter what you’re taught.

©Iosaf MacDiarmada

The image is entitled ‘Eagle Communication‘, by Artist Leonard Baskin ; and is from his Raptors Folio.
‘Antigone’ by Ileana Mãlãncioiu

June 28th, 2008

A frozen hill, a white dead body
Left above ground by a people fallen in hard fight,
Starving dogs come to tear at the traitor snow
And another winter comes and tears it too.

Let a maiden appear, let her tread down the
commandment,
Let her drag that imaginary hill away from the dogs
And hide it as if it were a dear brother
At the same time as you all wash your hands

And you will let her go living into
The tomb in that unreal white
As in the time when the emperor lost the great
battle she mourned and gave burial to a hill.

by Ileana Mãlãncioiu, from After the Raising of Lazarus, trans, Eileen Ní Chuilleánain.

Ileana read quite recently in the Unitarian Church @ St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, along with Julia Piera Abad, Eileen Ní Chuilleánain (who translated the book from which this poem is taken After the Raising of Lazarus ). Other poems include; ‘My Sister as Empress‘, ‘Redemption‘ and ‘We Slept Beside the Mountain‘. Ileana lives in Bucharest and is of Romanian descent. She has suffered censorship including the culling of verse from her collection, Climbing the Mountain.