Chris Murray

‘Map’ by Katherine Duffy.

July 2nd, 2011

This poem, by Duffy is taken from the 1996 Poetry Ireland Review (PIR) issue 49. Ed, Liam Ó Muirthile.

Map.

Islands, lovingly described,
unfold.

Each day, from its catalogue
of wonders, we choose
the cockle strand, the puffing holes,
the temple of the four beautiful saints

and wander the ceathrúnas’
ancient longitude and latitude
of sea-weed rights ; piecemeal intimations
of a people’s pressing wish
to green the stone world.

We follow the coast –
line’s chequered fortune avidly,
eventful geology rendered decorative
as medieval pageantry. Crosshatched
cliffs joust with a stippled sea.

The man we rent our caravan from
knows the map-maker – an englishman
who speaks Irish – nach bhfuil sé sin
i gcoinnne an nádúir ? he asks,
only half-joking.

Anxious for dragons,
we slither to Poll na bPéist.
The map rustles,
governs our journeys gently .

by Katherine Duffy

a Curvimeter from Wiki
Affixing the Imprimatur, queer art and blasphemy in Cork.

June 26th, 2011

Wherein the definition of art and who gets the imprimatur?

I find myself at a loss regarding how the problem of blasphemy is being discussed in Cork. There has been no art-historical analysis of queer art, there has been little media reference to the issue of the 2006-2009 Defamation Bill, and discussion on one political site is limited to the idea that art should be subject to market-force and consumer popularity. Rather than to even attempt to deal with the paucity of discussion on this issue which is limited, unimaginative and striking in its poverty, I thought to look at the issue of leadership, or in this case, lack thereof.

There are two posts on Poethead concerned with this context in Irish censorship, specifically the use of blasphemy as a means of censoring art, I refer to the issue of visual art and blasphemy in the historic sense in relation to the Rouault controversy, an Irish historical precedent for art censorship based in the accusation of blasphemy.

The charge against that painter (a Fauvist catholic) was of ‘blasphemy and incompetence‘, his art was refused exhibition solely because the fledgling government of the Irish State judged an incompetence in his expression. In the case of the queer art of Alma Lopez the complaint of blasphemy is quite clearly sited in an accusation of blasphemy based in representation. The Irish Government had apparently dropped the pairing of blasphemy with incompetence, and in the new Defamation Bill (2006-2009) has sited the offense of blasphemy in the ability to generate outrage.

There has not been much development in how our previous Government (FF/GN) viewed visual arts, or indeed publication. Ireland has supported international moves to abolish Defamation of Religions law, whilst codifying national laws which create a criminal offence for blasphemy. The history of the 2006-2009 Defamation bill is here. The necessity for a referendum in Ireland on blasphemy is here detailed.

It is quite clear that one can no longer bandy about terms like blasphemy in the realm of the visual and literary arts as an accusation (based in the ability of the artist to generate community outrage) it now carries with it a criminalisation. What interests and concerns me in the Cork debacle is that two leaders, (a bishop and a political leader) should know better than to use terms for which the Fianna Fáil and Green Government were roundly and globally criticised in introducing a Bill which both had denied would affect the arts.

An accusation or complaint of blasphemy will continue to affect visual arts until the issue of censorship is fully and openly discussed. The fact that the word blasphemy was so blithely and ignorantly applied to visual art, in this case, the visual art of a gay woman, suggests to me that any discussion on blasphemy and the arts will not happen where it is supposed to happen , but on the airwaves by tub-thumping ill-educated commentators whose easy manipulation of emotive issues is wholly without context, either legal or art-historical.

This is how things are done in Ireland, the government will go to their holidays rather unconcerned at the lack of debate which pretty much reflects what happened in 2009 when the Defamation Bill was initially introduced.

CC > C Murray
‘Every Verse is a Child of Love’ by Marina Tsvetaeva.

June 25th, 2011

Every Verse is a child of love.

Every verse is a child of love,
A destitute bastard slip,
A firstling – the winds above –
Left by the road asleep.
Heart has a gulf, and a bridge,
Heart has a bless, and a grief.
Who is his father? A liege?
Maybe a liege, or a thief.

by Marina Tsvetaeva

I Know the Truth

I know the truth – forget all other truths!
No need for anyone on earth to struggle.
Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what will you say, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep beneath the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

“I know the truth” Tsvetaeva (1915). Translation by Elaine Feinstein.

The above link is to Tsvetaeva’s Wikipedia page. This week news reports and statements suggest that Anna Politkovskaya‘s killer is now behind bars. Whilst researching and reminding myself of the small things that I did at the time of her death in 2006, like reading and connecting with the IWMF and publishing about violence against women writers and journalists, I came across some articles about poems, music and protests from those people effected by Politkovskaya’s writing. Interestingly Tsvetaeva’s work was read at the public protests and organically wound into musical tributes. I thought to publish two poems here as a type of memorial to two Russian women writers today.

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/waronterror/anna-politkovskayas-killer-finally-behind-bars/
A Note on Hannah Weiner’s ‘Book of Revelations’ at Jacket2 Magazine

June 18th, 2011
This post is related to yesterday’s introduction to Jacket 2, which is linked here. Jacket2 and writers like Afilreis use social-media and Twitter to disseminate serious poetics. I started to write about Hannah Weiner as an addendum to a wider article on Jacket 2 last week, but thought that I would do some more reading before concentrating on her work alone.

I really (really) like the Book of Revelations by Hannah Weiner , further to that I admire how J2 have presented the piece. The book was composed in 1989 and has been amassed into a virtual edition on the J2 site , by Marta L. Werner. There are seven hyperlinks running alongside the introduction to the text, which I link here.

An excerpt ( 34) from The Searchable Transcript follows :

“save all the surprises for you
tonight we can expect anarchy
in one moment I will tell you
forty nine people cannot stand
the beginning was a little bore
expect little help from midgets
in some sense all words travel
there must be no suspicion
dont ally yourself with imps”

Hannah Weiner , The Book Of Revelations

To create section 1 (from “forthcoming and absolutely” to “no one can eliminate a particle”), Rosenthal placed a steel straight edge on the page in sequenced parallels and grasped at the paper in the lower corner with her right hand, bearing down on the steel with her left and pulling upward to form straight rips with a slightly textured edge; to create section 2 (from “read more about it in the papers” to “absence of time between 5 and 7”), she used an X-Acto #2 fine point blade to slice concentric or nested angles or rectangles.”

I also thought, being in a generous type of sunlit-mood (at time of writing) to add a piece of the audio archive from PennSound !
- http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Weiner.php
- Everyone has their own tastes in poetry, and this blog is intended mostly to expand out the experience of poetry through linking and integrating online resources.
- I always hope my readers will go and explore a bit more, if they like what they see or hear here, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Weiner/Weiner-Hannah_01_Virgin_12-1978.mp3
The Book of Revelations, Hannah Weiner
Jacket 2 , ‘Poetry, arts, collaborative responses’.

June 17th, 2011
Here follows the J2 introduction for readers and word-workers ,

“Jacket2 publishes articles, reviews, interviews, discussions and collaborative responses, archival documents, podcasts, and descriptions of poetry symposia and projects. Not unlike a daily news forum, we will publish content as it is ready. Visit our index for an ongoing and comprehensive list of all J2 content.”

“Because of its Enlightenment associations with notions of genius and taste, poetry often can be read as an aesthetic and private discourse that resides beyond the realm of civil society. But I show how some poets after 1960 use poetry to shape discourse over controversial public topics, such as urban conservation; wars in Vietnam and Iraq; and civil rights. I argue, too, that civil discourse is always complicated by poesies, and that belief and desire are produced, engaged, expanded, or challenged in circulations of public texts, images, and performances.

These performative dimensions of public speech always carry tones, gestures, forms of acting out, contradictions, and self-corrections that contribute to new actions and capacities in others. The quote you have singled out to me suggests that poetry can show engaged citizens how to listen to, or respond to, public issues or actions. “
- from : http://jacket2.org/commentary/poetry-and-enactments-public-space
Imo the practicioners of poetry are already enacting quite interestingly upon the public and shared spaces of the internet, as discussed here at this Harriet Monroe institute doc. from the Centre for social-media.

Poethead is about serious poetry and is mostly dedicated to showing how serious an art-form it is. Mostly I believe that our governments do not understand its importance when it comes to funding and nurturing the literary arts .

Tomorrow, Hannah Weiner will be featured on Poethead in the Saturday Woman Poet section . I will be linking to her The Book of Revelations (J2) , and urging Poetry readers to take the time to explore her work and the work of the J2 site.

The Castle of the Pyrenees

Come to my summer house.
It’s damp floating over the sea,
But you can light a fire in any French Horn.
Eagles bring you there.

by Hannah Weiner

from, Hannah Weiner’s ‘The Book of Revelations’
- http://jacket2.org/article/notes-on-this-edition
- http://jacket2.org/galleries/book-revelations-diplomatic-transcript-gallery-view
How far ‘outside’ is the poetry of diaspora ?

June 10th, 2011
I often wonder at the definition of Outsider Poetry just a little bit, and have made allusions to the poetry of diaspora before now on this blog. Of course the poetry of alienation/diaspora, be it in the wake of cataclysm, war or economic circumstance is more than just that. The exilic condition forms a thread in world literature that we recognise historically in the poems of the dispossessed, that are so beautifully edited and collected in An Duanaire , for instance.

Blogs and websites dedicated to the dissemination of the poetry of nomadics, meanderings and exile are (and have been) online for a while, even if they comprise a marginalia. The PENs, Arvon, and UBUWEB amongst others consistently and brilliantly bring forward the voice of the diasporist. For instance, there are manifestos dedicated to the art of poetics grounded in the experience of the writer/artist available on multiple sites, and of course on the International PEN site, (TLRC)

My first experience of reading a diasporist manifesto was in 1995, when I bought The First Diasporist Manifesto by RB Kitaj, I was intrigued by his approach to his art and by the manifesto which served as the invisible architecture that underpinned his Tate retrospective. I thought to excerpt a short paragraph here to illustrate the condition, from the artist’s point of view.

‘Nationalism seems awful; it’s track record stinks, but patriotism doesn’t seem half bad. ————On the other hand, if people want their homelands, why not? Partitioned homelands seem better to me than killing each other. My own homeland, America , and my little one , England, offer such strong appearances of peace and freedom that the really odd and peaceful practice of painting spins out my own Diasporic days and years until I can’t sense any other way to go.’ ( By RB Kitaj)

The subject is evidently too great for this blog, thus I have decided to divide the topic into two, (possibly) three sections. I am not going to look at alienation yet, as the issue is highly complex and comprises but one element of outsider art. The fact that alienation is oft met with physical violence further complicates any advance on the problem. The danger for the reader is always to associate diasporism with alienation, when it is but one cause of dispossession and it’s related consequences for the narrative arts, including the translator’s art.

The subtext of this post is how far do we think outsider art is from our experience of reading books of poetics, I believe that the area dedicated to the translation and rights of the poets is no longer a marginalia. I see this on blogs and in debate, unfortunately this is not reflected in what publishers are producing, save in speciality areas such as the poetry societies. The fact that authors have noted that translation merits little in prize-awards , as recently mentioned in relation to the Booker Prize, suggests that the marginalisation occurs at the budgeting level, rather than at the level of popularity displayed by submissions to contests and online anthologies.

We are familiar, as mentioned above, with the poetry of exile – the exilic condition , from sources like An Duanaire, or even Ulysses , that novel is an exile’s song, a recreation of Dublin city in its minutiae by James Joyce, its quite an example of alienation poetry also !

I am adding in here an excerpt from Notes Towards a Nomadics Poetics, Pierre Joris blog:

The days of anything static – form, content, state – are over. The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. All revolutions have done just that: those that tried to deal with the state as much as those that tried to deal with the state of poetry.

Related Article links
Mallika Sengupta 1960-2011.

June 2nd, 2011
The death of Mallika Sengupta , poet, academic, feminist, and polemicist has been announced.

“Sengupta has consistently refused to be squeamish about mixing her activism with her art. As she tells poet, critic and translator Sanjukta Dasgupta in the interview included in this edition, “Ideology ruins poetry, but not always. Rather every poet has to face this challenge at some period of her life… I think a good poet can always insert ideology into poetry without destroying aesthetic conditions.”

I am adding in here some poems by Mallika Sengupta alongside some words by Poet Yashodhara Raychaudhuri,

“Mallika Sengupta’s voice has been one of the most prominent among the new breed of feminist poets of the 80s. Bengali poetry has seen its Kavita Singhas and Debarati Mitras of the 50s and 60s who have had minority status in poetry as women. Their voices were bold but were seen as exceptions among a mostly male bastion. Mallika belonged to a generation of educated, highly sophisticated young poets who were busy trying to erase the marks of their womenhood from the body of their poetry, and is in the company of at least 4-5 more woman poets. However, she made her mark early on with her discovery of a very strong and confident voice. and that way mallika’s diction was dramatic, and paradoxically ” masculine”, if one is allowed to use the word. Her selection of themes were conscious, depending on the theoretical basis of her sociological studies, and she was mature at the outset . However there was an evolution in her voice. Her poetry was initially full of imagery and play of language. But she developed her skills to write in a radically different way, she left subtlety for directness and immediate communication. Sometimes her poetry was criticised for its posterlike quality. Both KHana and “the husband’s black hands” belong to the same genre.

Mallika uses strong imageries here, and mostly categorical statements. the issues she wants to address are of the prime importance here. the second poem is more of a personalized experience , mediated through a clinical third eye precision. the social situation is always the first priority for Mallika, and “personal is political” here.

Mallikas Bangla renderings had very meticulously drafted metered phrases which are lost in translation. She knows where to stop, and how much to tell. the reader is taken on a stormy ride with her, with her relentless criticism of the status quo, the situation as it is.”

By Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri

Condolences to Albert Ashok and members of PEN West bengal who are feeling her absence most acutely at the moment, you have lost a wonderful activist, writer and person.

Mallika Sengupta RIP

WOMEN.COM

Today, on our Computer Day
Come let’s place our hand on the women.com button
This very own history of women
From illiteracy to women.com.
Once upon a time from this woman
You snatched the chance of reading the Vedas
All of you said women were just housewives
Men had the right to Sanskrit
Women’s language, the language of the Sudras was different.
After a thousand years when the girl
Prepared herself for a girls’ school
Bethune and Vidyasagar stood by her
All of you said
Women who read and write
Are bound to become widows.

Then when the woman entered the office space
Mother-in-law’s sullen face, and the husband was suspicious
All of you said
What’s the use of a family run with a wife’s money?
The woman had to fight the storms and tempests.
Inch by inch in the thousand years the woman
Has earned knowledge and power
Inside a fiery heart, tranquil outwardly
Today half the sky is in the woman’s palm
The world is an amlaki held in the woman’s fist
Just a touch of a button
One day you who had denied her knowledge of alphabets
In her hand today is the computer world.
© by Mallika Sengupta

The Husband’s Black Hands.

The moment she tucks in the mosquito net and goes
to bed, her husband’s black hands fumble after
the snakes and frogs of her body: “You’re hurting me!
Let go!” In anger, those black hands twist her breasts.
He says, “Listen here, Sweta, don’t be coy.
If ever I find even the evening star
gesturing to you, or making eyes,
I’ll see that you fall into a hellish pit.”
Sweta’s white thighs swing back and forth in space
clinging to the back, her husband’s black back.

© Mallika Sengupta (b.1960)/ Translated by Carolyne Wright and Paramita Banerjee

West Bengal PEN :
“Shelmalier” by Medb McGuckian

May 28th, 2011
Medb McGuckian

Shelmalier.

by Medb Mc Guckian.

“Looked after only by the four womb-walls,
if anything curved in the ruined city his last hour
it was his human hands, bituminous, while all laws
were aimed at him, returning to the metre of a star:
like a century about to be over, a river trying
to film itself, detaching its voice from itself,
he qualified the air of his own dying,
his brain in folds like the semi-open rose of grief.
His eyes recorded calm and keen this exercise,
deep-seated, promising-avenues, they keep their
…kingdom:
it is I who am only just left in flight, exiled
into an outline of time, I court his speech, not him.
This great estrangement has the destination of a
…rhyme.
The trees of his heart breathe regular, in my dream. “

from, The Making of a Sonnet, a Norton Anthology. Eds ,Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland. Published 2008.
- Bio link for Medb McGuckian http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/McGuckian.html
- The Dream Language of Fergus here : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/the-dream-language-of-fergus-medbh-mc-guckian/

Knowing the shape of your cell; women mystic writers

May 25th, 2011

Dedicated to the Irish Magdalene Women, whose government chose to ignore their plight at the UN Committee on Torture 23/05/2011.

“Some of the issues that are raised and looked at in the Ryan report and that have been raised in relation to the Magdalene laundries relate to a very distant, far-off time,” said Mr Aylward in his initial response to the committee’s questions and observations.”

(Seán Aylward, Irish Govt Rep to the UN Committee on Torture 2011).

I have alluded before now on this blog to four women writers in particular who embraced the mystic, or quasi-mystic traditions, their names are familiar to regular readers, Marguerite of Porete, Barbro Karlén, Mirjam Tuominen and Simone Weil. I wrote about some of Weil’s themes last week here .

These women writers wrote from the prison of the body and of the intellect in a manner that is unrivalled, and should be celebrated but instead it is mostly apocryphal in its hiddenness.

I have often wondered at the shape and constitution of apocryphon, given that nothing that is ever part of the collective consciousness of humanity can be entirely obliterated and indeed often tends to re-emerge in a surprising manner. To take an example from art history for instance, wherein the pattern-books that constituted the architectural language of cathedrals often led to a generalised iconography. Popular sentiment refused the destruction or partial obliteration of some iconographies, thus the new and the old were cast together in a tension not always apparent to the eyes of the participant in ceremony of religious worship, but nonetheless present.

It is impossible to completely obliterate what was in essence an integral part of our societies, though there are faces hacked from statuary or black-marks on books or public records that tend to add poignancy to choices that were made. Most often an incorporation occurred, wherein that which had been cast away became transformed and emerged differently.

Literary incorporation is no different to art-historical, what Marguerite of Porete wrote ( before her inquisition and eventual murder) in Le Miroir des simples ames aneaties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour has been consciously referenced by John Moriarty in What the Curlew Said, and subconsciously tapped into in Joyce’s Anna Livia soliquoy from Finnegan’s Wake. What comes from an identical archetype source, in this case dissolution, does not disappear because it inconveniences those who do not have time to read with attention. This includes ignoring the voicing of women’s experiences, including those our society would rather forget, Vis our history of the sexual repression of women.

“Being completely free and in command of her sea of peace the soul is nonetheless drowned and loses herself through God- with him and in him. She loses her identity, as does the water from a river-like the Ouse or the Meuse- when it flows into the sea. It has done it’s work and can relax in the arms of the sea, and the same is true of the soul. Her work is over and she can lose herself in what she has totally become: Love. love is the bridegroom of her happiness enveloping her wholly in his love and making her part of that which is. This is a wonder to her and she has become a wonder. Love is her only delight and pleasure.”

Marguerite Porete , from Le Miroir des simples ames aneaties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour

Mirjam Tuominen wrote of war and of torture but her name is eclipsed by those of her post WWII contemporaries, as Weil’s is eclipsed by Paschal’s. The experience of the anchorite, the woman tithed, or the female prisoner of torture is absent from the literary canon by stint of the greatness we perceive in the male voice, though both wrote on the same theme but from a differing perspective. I have dedicated this post to the Irish Magdalene women , who were incarcerated by their society in the hope that they will use their voices again to tell of what happened to them in the institutions, in their own voices.

It interests me that we often reject and neglect the voices of the societally victimised and instead favour the putting of words into their mouths by the mostly male artistic and political establishment. I expect they like to add insult to injury by attempting to rationalise crimes through a relentless and gendered tone of empty propriety.

Edit : 06/02/2013

Why is imprisonment and denial of motherhood hidden, why are the words of the victims of an Irish version of Purdah ignored , traduced or treated with political ignorance ? The depth of current Governmental ignorance is a cause for deep shame.

Map.

Wherein the definition of art and who gets the imprimatur?

Every Verse is a child of love.

© Mallika Sengupta (b.1960)/ Translated by Carolyne Wright and Paramita Banerjee

Shelmalier.

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