Bird in a Box

Wetwang Scarecrow Festival

Ethna MacCarthy, Poet

Beckett fact no. 97.

By way of a footnote to my discussion of Lyle Donaghy, I might also mention Ethna MacCarthy, whose name came up a few times in the discussion that followed my paper (and that of Graley Herron) the other day. Her part in inspiring Krapp’s Last Tape has long been known, not to mention her appearance as the Alba in Beckett’s earlier fiction. But the woman herself has also remain more than a little elusive. How serendipitous then, in thumbing through an Irish Times publication of 1944, Poems from Ireland, which includes Donaghy’s work, to find two poems by her, ‘Requiem’ and ‘Harlequin’. She has published poems, her contributor’s note tells us, in Hermathena, the Dublin Magazine, and the Farmer’s Gazette. Here is ‘Harlequin’:

My love is of the moon –
pale sequin and velvet cratered depths,
pure light and softest shaggy dark.
Like her he seeks the sun for warmth
to ramble the livid streets from dusk
and barter his tranquillity for tears,
and never knows how good he is
or tired, but fights the sordid strident day
till like a child he rests a little in my arms.
And then the fearful maturation of the light
lifts at his languid head. And so he goes,
to skim the scattered sequins from the pools.

‘The Celtic-Aristocratic-Classical Channel’: Lyle Donaghy and Samuel Beckett

Beckett fact no. 96.

Text of a short talk I gave the other day.

‘Enter again into the womb /(...) Descend into the dark cell’, wrote Lyle Donaghy in his 1927 poem Primordia Caeca. The theme of Beckett and the dark cell of his Irish beginnings has received generous attention in recent times, notably in Emilie Morin’s book Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness and Seán Kennedy’s edited essay collection, Beckett and Ireland. A significant shift to have occurred in recent years, I would suggest, is the abandonment of previous models of Beckett’s evolution that saw him achieving artistic maturity through the expedient of rejecting his Irish background. Writing of Beckett’s dealings with his poetic contemporaries in the 1930s, for instance, Seán Kennedy argues that ‘the evidence gleaned from Beckett’s immersion in the field (...) is not that he became modernist “despite” his Irish roots (...), but precisely because of them.’ The non serviam moment of ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ in 1934 is a good test case for this position, as critics first argued that Beckett had identified the small number of like-minded internationalists in 30s Irish poetry, then shifted their ground to stress the Irishness and well as the modernism of these writers (MacGreevy, Devlin and Coffey), before, most recently, questioning the extent of Beckett’s commitment to these writers and how much, if anything, they really had in common. A name peculiarly absent from these debates is Lyle Donaghy, whose work I have been researching with a view to publishing a Selected Poems. At a slight oblique angle to Revivalist culture though they were, the triumvirate of MacDevley, to resort to shorthand, at least formed a support network among themselves, with likeminded figures such as George Reavey offering critical validation. Donaghy’s literary friendships failed to find him a critical champion, and it is a telling symptom of his apartness that a posthumous tribute issue of the Ulster journal Rann devoted to him should consist entirely of reprinted poems, with not a word of reminiscence or appreciation. In this critical vacuum Donaghy’s reputation could only dissolve, which it duly did. It is always a bad sign when reference books cannot agree on a fact as basic as the year of an author’s death (Donaghy’s death is often listed as taking place in 1947, and Anthony Cronin dates it to 1942), but this is only one of numerous indignities suffered by Donaghy since his actual death in 1949. Who was Lyle Donaghy?

Lyle Donaghy is the most significant unread Irish poet of the 1930s and 1940s. He was born on 28 July 1902 in Larne, the eldest son of a Presbyterian minister, and was educated at Larne grammar school and Trinity College, Dublin, after which he became a schoolteacher. The chronology of his adult life is often mysterious, with even the Dictionary of Irish Biography struggling to flesh out the ‘elusive details of Donaghy’s personal life’. He was in London in 1930, but was back in Ireland shortly afterwards, living in Dublin and Wicklow. In Dublin, Donaghy was active in theatrical circles. In 1927 he produced Chekhov’s The Bear at the Abbey, for ‘The Anomalies’ theatre company, and in 1932 founded The Phoenix Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. An Irish Times report described this group as ‘experimental’ in aim and devoted to the evolution of a new national drama, as Donaghy hoped to demonstrate in a production of his own play ‘The Fall of Conchobar’, now lost; and thereafter the trail goes cold. In his poetry, meanwhile, Donaghy cast himself as a hybrid of the Gaelic and classical traditions, writing with skill and sensitivity of the natural world and ranging from the short lyric to the longer visionary sequence. He published in Eliot’s Criterion; two of his collections were published by the Yeats sisters’ Cuala Press; and he appeared (intermittently) in anthologies of the day, such as the Devin-Adair volume New Irish Poets (1949). Long before this date, marital and mental breakdown had complicated the picture, and on his death from tuberculosis on 4 May 1949 he was described in an Irish Times obituary as being ‘aged about 45 years’. The destruction of his papers after his death, possibly out of a fear of infection, set a precedent for the striking of Donaghy’s name from the record that followed.

The Beckett-Donaghy connection is as elusive as it is intriguing. Their association dates from at least 1930, when Beckett visited Donaghy in London. In a letter of 26 March 1936, Beckett describes to Arland Ussher walking with Jack Yeats by Stephen’s Green and quoting Donaghy’s ‘A Thought of Suicide’. On 7 July of the same year he tells Thomas MacGreevy of travelling to Glencree to visit Donaghy’s estranged wife Lilian, who was then living with Charlie Gilmore, brother of George Gilmore, founder of the Republican Congress (the poet’s son Kevin retains a cordial memory of these visits). Into the Light, Beckett tells MacGreevy, was ‘full of good things in what [Donaghy] believes to be the Celtic-Aristocratic-Classical channel’, though he deplored the preface with its ‘words like puissant and affiliations with F.R. Higgins’, always a Beckett bête noire. Donaghy’s Wicklow years were marked by solitude and mental distress, at a time when Beckett’s depression drove him into the same terrain, as he wrote to Mary Manning Howe on 30 August 1937 (‘I lie for days, on the floor, or in the woods, accompanied & unaccompanied...’). On 10 December 1937, Beckett reported to Mary Manning that ‘Donaghy is in Enniskerry, living in sin with his beard’, the Powerscourt Arms in Enniskerry being a favourite watering hole of Beckett’s on the return leg of his walks to Glencree. The difference between the two men’s plight was that 1937 was also the year of Beckett’s definitive flight from Foxrock to Paris, while Donaghy stayed where he was, sinking further into the mantic vortex of his two last books, Wilderness Sings (1942) and Wild Sun and Moon (1949).

The tiny print-runs of Donaghy’s books mean that many of these poems could hardly have been much more read in their day than they have been subsequently; in the words of the addendum to Watt, they have ‘never been properly born’. The place of publication of Wild Sun and Moon, Brockagh, is a mountain in Wicklow, where it seems Donaghy was then leading a semi-destitute existence. For the reader of Donaghy’s work exploring these long-out-of-print collections in Dublin’s National Library, there is the surprise of marginal communications in the author’s own hand: a prefatory note to ‘Sonnet’ in Wilderness Sings informs us of Donaghy’s composition of ‘a certain Philosophical Work in Two Volumes, called An-t-Slighe Cruithuighthe (Creation Path)’ only for a fountain-pen to upgrade that ‘two’ to ‘three’. No trace of this pantheist tract has survived.

I mentioned Wicklow, that county derided by Belacqua in More Pricks Than Kicks for its abundance of ‘breasts and pimples’. When Beckett set out from Cooldrinagh for a walk, he would regularly proceed to Glencullen and thence to Glencree, the long glacial valley overlooked by Prince William’s Seat, of sacred memory to Watt’s Mr Hackett, and from the north by the Lemass memorial on the Featherbed Mountain, as contemplated on their rambles by Mercier and Camier, a small gesture of patriotic memory of the kind that inspired the contemporaneous description (in ‘First Love’) of those rural sites where ‘nauseated time has dropped one of history’s ancient turds’, in the ‘Elysium of the roofless’ that was the Free State. ‘The lowest mountains here terrify me’, Beckett noted in 1932: ‘was reduced almost to incontinence by the calm secret hostility.’ He is ‘exhausted of meaning by the mountains’ in 1934, chained by them to the ‘oar of his fidgets’, as he announces in the midst of a disquisition on landscape and Cézanne. The Wicklow of Donaghy’s last years may have retained the aura of Synge’s melancholy essays a generation before, but more brashly modern influences were also in evidence. George Plant, IRA gunman and Church of Ireland renegade, stalked the hills until his arrest and execution in 1942 in one of the Free State’s most notorious court cases. German Abwehr agents parachuted into the country would make their way to Iseult Gonne’s cottage in remote Glenmalure, its address supplied to them by the Berlin-based novelist and amateur broadcaster Francis Stuart; some of these agents, including Herman Goertz, would find a permanent Wicklow resting place in the German war cemetery in Glencree. Here again then, the larger European picture is more actively at work in Ireland than a simplistic dichotomy of Ireland and elsewhere allows. If anything, the claustrophobia evident in those well-known lines from First Love, as in other works from this period such as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, not to mention Donaghy’s poetry spells out unmistakably the violent efforts required to impose its appearance of pastoral harmlessness on Irish society at the time.

Donaghy’s work displays a Revivalist patina round its edges, with a weakness for postures of ‘exorbitant loneliness’ and desire to commune with the ‘proud in beauty and the laurelled head’. An appreciative Irish Times review of Into the Light in 1934 put it in Little Chandleresque terms: ‘Call it the Gaelic note’. These poems’ pastoralist leanings are not all swooning daydreams of Tir-na-nÓg, however. As Beckett suggests in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, the long central poem of Primordia Caeca is a veritable Saison en enfer, with Blake’s prophetic books are an appreciable presence too; the sprawling long poems of his final books show an encyclopaedic ambition comparable to late Hugh MacDiarmid. The poem I wish to consider, ‘The Falcon’, is something different again. Raptors are a recurrent Donaghy motif, and the aforementioned mountain named as the place of publication of Wild Sun and Moon adjoins a lonely corrie, Lough Ouler, whose name translates as ‘eagle lake’. Something aloofly murderous patrols the ‘granite headland’, leaving a mess of carrion in its wake. Consider Malone Dies’ Sapo, who had ‘gull’s eyes’ and ‘loved the flight of the hawk’, fascinated by its ‘extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude’. Where Beckett’s vulture, from Echo’s Bones, ‘stoop[s] to the prone’ with food on its mind, Donaghy’s bird finds itself subject to the rending of a cruel trapping post, the handiwork, perhaps, of one of the pigeon-fanciers so abundant ‘in these islands’, as Beckett notes in ‘Recent Ireland Poetry’ [lines three and four of each of the following stanzas indented one tab: sorry still can’t format this properly]:

The slick numb gin beneath the trapping post
Corrodes the falcon’s limbs – those limbs
From which the choughs veered windily
Under the granite headland.

The chain lies still upon the rocks: the long
Keen eyes are lidded heavily – those eyes
Which only closed when the hot gorge
Had followed flight and stoop.

The gin teeth shut, now, on a bone-breadth,
But the iron-hurt beak is unfrenzied – that beak
From which the chough gore dropped
So often down ledge and ledge;

The rabbit bait dries from the bones – he shall not return
To his shapely mate, nor ascend with new
Sticks to the nest, nor chisel with wide wing
His steely joy.

‘Hunger, earth and sky’ will be reduced to ‘offal’ before the birds reascends, but the power of Donaghy’s poem, as with Beckett’s responds to a subtle logic of absence and belatedness. In ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ Wallace Stevens wondered which he preferred, ‘the beauty of inflections /Or the beauty of innuendoes, /The blackbird whistling /Or just after.’ Beckett’s and Donaghy’s poems are very much poems of afterwards, but all the more powerful for that. The ‘steely joy’ of Donaghy’s last line is a risus purus of pure posterity, echoing from the ‘no-man’s-land, Hellespont, or vacuum’ identified by Beckett as a prime hunting ground for his fabled rupture of the lines of communication.

Should we follow Donaghy into this inhospitable territory in search of further dispatches? Most certainly so, I would suggest. Literary history is all too often a raft of The Medusa rather than a lifeboat, its poets eyeing one another up beadily and braced for posterity’s push overboard. Strictly literary rather than sociological acts of retrieval can only go so far, and there is a sober pleasure to be derived from the utter defunctness of sub-Revivalist warblers mentioned in passing in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ such as Irene Haugh, R.N.D. Wilson and Pamela Travers. Others again such as Geoffrey and Blanaid Salkeld have more substance to them, and await their own appeal hearings for reprieve from the library special collections in which they now languish. But, as I have attempted to convey, Donaghy’s achievement goes well beyond special pleading. His work offers multiple rewards, both in itself and concomitantly for what it tells us about Beckett and our still-evolving sense of 1930s Irish poetry. It is work of substance and achievement, and deserves to re-enter the modern Irish canon and stay there.

Ohai

Ohai

Derek Mahon, New Collected Poems

I do this kind of thing so you don’t have to: really, I do. Getting my copy of Derek Mahon’s New Collected Poems in the post in the morning, the first thing I did was sit down with a copy of the old Collected Poems and his three volumes since then (Harbour Lights, Life On Earth and An Autumn Wind) and compare contents pages. From this I learned:

The poem most recently called ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ is now called ‘Carrowdore’; ‘De Quincey in Later Life’ is now ‘De Quincey at Grasmere’; ‘The Forger’ has gone missing; ‘Thinking of Inis Oírr in Cambridge, Mass.’ is now ‘Inis Oírr’; ‘How to Live’ has gone missing; ditto ‘Ovid in Love’; ditto ‘from The Drunken Barge’; ‘North Wind: Portrush’ is now ‘North Wind’; ‘Morning Radio’ is now ‘Radio Days’; ‘After Pasternak’ has gone missing; ‘Achill’ is now ‘Beyond the Pale’; ‘October in Hyde Park’ has gone missing; ditto ‘Night Drive’; ditto ‘An Orphan at the Door’; ditto ‘The Race’; ditto ‘Galatea’; ‘The Yaddo Letter’ is now ‘Yaddo, or A Month in the Country’; ‘The Hudson Letter’ (a whole book title, dagnabbit) is now ‘New York Time’; ‘The Yellow Book’ (a whole book title, double-dagnabbit) is now ‘Decadence’; ‘Night and Day’ has gone missing; ditto ‘Michelangelo’; ditto ‘A Dirge’; ditto ‘A Siren’; ditto ‘Stanzas for Mary Stuart’ [old Collected Poems ends]; no sign of ‘Lucretius on Clouds’ (Harbour Lights); ditto for ‘High Water’; ditto for ‘Langue d’Oc’; ditto for ‘A Game of Cards’; ditto for ‘The Enchanted Wood’; ‘Shorelines’ now ‘Sand Studies’; no sign of ‘Red Cloud’; ditto for ‘White Cloud’; ditto for ‘On the Beach’; ditto for ‘The Seaside Cemetery’; ditto for ‘Ariadne on Naxos’ (Life on Earth); ditto for ‘The Lady from the Sea’; ditto for ‘The Clifden Road’; ditto for ‘Sceilig Bay’ (from An Autumn Wind); ditto for ‘An Aspiring Spirit’; ditto for ‘Antrim Road’; ditto for ‘Romance’.

Which leaves the following new items: ‘Monochrome’, ‘Here in Tenerife’, ‘The One-Thirty’, ‘Shandon Bridge’, and ‘Dreams of a Summer Night’.

His collected translations and versions, Adaptations, accounts for most but not all of those absentees, but as with Mahon’s many previous selections from his own work there is no indication of which poems come from what book, and no notes. This I’m assuming is by authorial choice, not that I’m saying volumes like this should all sprouting bearing thickets of apparatus. There is an index of titles and of first lines, unlike in Collected Poems.

As for changes to the actual text of the poems, well, go find out for yourselves. Though I notice from the very first of the renamed poems I look at (‘Sand Studies’) that it boasts two stanzas not in the previous version...

There, happy now?

The Kingston, Wincolmlee

Some artwork I came across last night in a most obscure pub indeed, the Kingston in Wincolmlee – a pub obscure enough not to feature in Simon Mason’s otherwise exhaustive list of Hull pubs, which is saying something. This fresco represents the celebrated bare-knuckle fight of 1860 between Tom Sayers and John Camel Heenan, which ended in chaos when the ropes were cut and the public invaded the ring. Sayers had a colourfully doomed life, to judge from his Wikipedia page. The landlord in the Kingston was telling me about a boxing padre in Hull in days gone by, but his name escapes me, as things tend to do, the morning after.

Alabaster Effect Virgin Mary (Discontinued Line)

Rag and Bone

Headless Fifi

Don Merton (1939-2007), Friend O'Kakapos

As feats of conservation go, Don Merton’s is surely unique: he saved a species, the Chatham Island black robin, whose numbers had fallen to a single surviving breeding female. For more on how he did this see here. He was also at the centre of kakapo-conservation, a project that involved transporting that species en masse to the predator-free islands where they now live, and where their numbers have steadily risen. The bird in the photograph here is Richard Henry kakapo, the only surviving mainland Fiordland bird when he was discovered in 1985, and who was believed to be between 80 and 100 years old when he died recently. A one-minute’s skraark! of tribute, please, from any flightless parrots reading this.

Captain Gravill

Novels Must Have Scenes on Highways, Making Driving Seem Poetical and Magical

As travel reading on my recent hiatus-jaunt to Ireland I packed Steve Hely’s How I Became a Famous Novelist, a novel with a keen eye for the chortlesome japes to be had on the creative writing circuit. Its protagonist, Peter Tarslaw, is a rocket-propelled opportunist who decides to become a best-selling novelist in order to upstage his ex at her wedding. For Pete, writing is essentially a scam he explains to himself in a series of rules (‘Evoke confusing sadness at the end’, ‘Novels must have scenes on highways, making driving seem poetical and magical’, ‘At dull points include descriptions of delicious meals’, ‘Must include a murder’). Having studied the New York Times bestseller list, he draws up a list of potential bestsellers of his own on a sheet of paper he calculates is worth $32.5 million between royalties, movie rights and franchise fees, not to mention video game tie-ins. The ideas include ‘A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost eleventh commandment that changes everything’ and ‘Pharmaceutical companies are poisoning everyone’s brains’, though that last one, he realizes wasn’t his idea – it was something a homeless guy had shouted at him while stuffing newspapers into his shirt.

In tribute to Pete and his never-known-to-fail rules, I thought I might try riffing on his method with some bestseller ideas of my own.

The ghost of Princess Diana is desperate to make contact with her sons to warn them of a kidnap plot but can only communicate with them through the medium of Alphabetti Spaghetti.

A psychic from Brecqhou, one of the lesser-known Channel Islands, discovers she has the unique gift of becoming pregnant with the ectoplasmic aura of anyone who sneezes in her company.

A maverick policeman uncovers a huge Masonic conspiracy in Britain’s call centres to cause millions of people slightly higher than usual levels of minor inconvenience and irritation.

A maverick vampire novelist uncovers a conspiracy by the global publishing industry to encourage millions of people to write books of their own, in order to recycle the postage on their manuscript submissions on a secret Polynesian island whose currency is used postage stamps.

A maverick plumber from Stockton-on-Tees, on the run from a shady cabal of other maverick plumbers, also from Stockton-on-Tees, tries to break the story of maverick (non-Yellow Pages) plumbers in the mainstream media, only to discover just how high the power of maverick plumbers goes (all the way to the top).

A feisty private investigator and paragliding enthusiast from Tubbercurry exposes the national scandal of inconsistent county council car park charges across the Irish midlands.

A telegenic mycologist in the Cleveland area makes the chilling discovery that reading the Daily Mail every day of her life, as she has done for the last forty years, has turned her into a Tory-voting racist cretin, a fact she exposes to the public at large by writing cretinously racist letters to the Daily Mail.

A pig farmer from rural Ohio finds shocking evidence on television and in print media that at least two large political organizations are planning to take control of the United States after the next election in that country.

A put-upon middle-aged accountant rediscovers his joie de vivre by touring the water filtration plants of the Northamptonshire area, finding love with a sassy Bulgarian waitress and chasing the dream of opening a water filtration plant of his own.

A three-year-old child accidentally assassinates the president of the United States and, in the ensuing political crisis, also accidentally, becomes president.

And that’s probably enough ideas for bestsellers.

Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry

Much critical eatin’ and drinkin’ in Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton’s new CUP essay collection Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry. As follows:

‘Yeats and MacDiarmid are arguably far closer in ultimate stature than criticism, at least criticism as practised beyond Scotland, has realised.’ (Patrick Crotty)

‘[Herbert] Grierson’s rewriting of English literature [as editor of John Donne] stung Yeats into an Irish modernism and reinvented Christopher Murray Grieve as Hugh MacDiarmid.’ (Cairns Craig)

‘Instead of the heightened detachment – which should not be mistaken for “condescension” – of MacNeice’s third person, MacDiarmid starts at ground level, confused by a cencrastian overlap of walls as grey as the sea, putting the reader there with him as “we”, until roused to claim authority by an assertion of first-person omniscience that MacNeice cannily avoids.’ (John Kerrigan)

‘Alongisde the clarity of [Sorley MacLean’s] role in the desert (...) there came an understanding that there was no single location or standpoint of poetry of the war.’ (Peter Mackay)

‘The older Gaelic tradition is a primary source from which complex modern concerns can be illuminated with resonance, depth and wisdom.’ (Máire Ní Annracháin)

‘Whenever I hear a poet or anyone else proselytise on behalf of poetry, I cringe.’ (Douglas Dunn)

‘It is what poetry must do repeatedly, to listen to a native foreignness.’ (Robert Crawford)

‘Heaney demolishes the centre-margin binarism altogether, repositioning – and reconceiving – Beowulf in the process.’ (Hugh Magennis)

‘While Muldoon’s translations [of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill] feel like magic tricks, McGuckian’s feel like transmogrifications.’ (Eric Falci)

‘Cultural nationalism was itself a foreign import.’ (Christopher Whyte)

‘In the way that Carson has arranged First Language, Irish becomes (...) an originary language, and to write in English is to be thrown into translation and “alienation” (...). But he does this not to assert, or describe, the postcolonial scar, but rather to explore imaginatively the more universal structures of language use. The work is no longer preoccupied with the Irish/English binary, but rather how we all speak and write the language of the other.’ (Justin Quinn)

‘The sense of promise that Irish and Scottish place names hint at seems to be swiftly disappearing over the horizon.’ (Alan Gillis)

‘Poetry retains the right to disagree rather than agree not only its own terms and forms but also its subjects and places.’ (Aaron Kelly)

‘It could perhaps be argued that more recent critical engagements with concrete poetry and avant-garde aesthetics in Scottish studies have been overly imbued with the need to assert connections with Scottish literary tradition, as a way of “making safe.”’ (Eleanor Bell)

‘The opposite of Irish parochialism is not Irish modernism but the world.’ (DW)

‘Yet that [the addressees of Michael Longley’s verse letters] reacted tetchily rather than rallying to the call is, of course, part of the point and, ironically enough, a measure of how much the relationships are to be trusted: friendship is the sound basis for productive argument as against ideological deadlock.’ (Fran Brearton)

‘The knowledge that these are Tatyana Tolstoy’s own words confuses the issue of who is speaking, and for whom. Indeed, it asks whether it is ethical for McGuckian to speak “on behalf of” nineteenth-century women (or Mandelstam “for” his wife, as he records doing in his letter), and by implication for McGuckian’s poetry to represent a thing called “Women’s Poetry”, of which hers is one variety.’ (Leontia Flynn)

‘Then (as now) arguments about aesthetics and form struggled to disentangle themselves from literary nationalism, literary anti-nationalism, and confused blends of the two.’ (Edna Longley)

‘The real cost of living in civil society – to believer and non-believers alike – is the realisation that we do not have access to a higher order of understanding: there is no metaphysics, no superhuman, no channel of the divine.’ (Michael Brown)

Flamborough Head

Roundwood Bittern

Vartry Reservoir

Kilmainham

Lough Bray Upper

Mylesday, Palace Bar

Mylesday, The Palace Bar

Down With Creative Writing (Again)

Writing in P.N. Review on Geoffrey Hill’s inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor Poetry last November, Jeffrey Wainwright notes that:

Hill declared his scepticism towards Creative Writing courses, arguing that if there is someone ‘out there’ working at a pitch equal to the demands set by the history of poetry ‘she will know who she is’ without interference. In a cognate swipe at contemporary hustle and self-inflation, he announced that for the time of his incumbency as Professor of Poetry he would not be using the office to promote his own work in the university by readings or otherwise.

{Ends}

Without going all Diogenes-in-his-barrel over this, the ethics or otherwise of Creative Writing is something I have frequent reason to ponder. When I was a student, and still receiving a fairly Leavisite education, many people feared theory was going to destroy English studies. Theorists would declare Jane Austen were in fact all about the slave trade, lesbianism or the transcendental signifier, no matter what the author may have thought she was doing. How shocking! Whereas nowadays the thought of a postcolonial theorist who still wanted to read Jane Austen rather than take her off the course in favour of (insert name of ignominious stand-in here) will seem almost quaint, in many quarters. Yes, I witnessed my share of scraps and scrapes over the canon back in the 90s, over the emergence of Irish Studies as an academic subject, over whether Camille Paglia had committed a sexual assault on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and whether seminars on Beowulf should revolve around discussions of Derridean theory (answer: em, no). But what I have seen in more recent times (to hark back to Hill’s comments) is something else entirely: the replacement of the canon by the press release. The important writers are whoever has just won a prize or had a press release sent around about how important they are. Academics become panders, would-be go-betweens for the publishing industry, who – well, as if they care whether their writers have got a creative writing degree or not. Students do not know about literary history because they need not know, because the worldview that informs their courses has dispensed with, eviscerated it. There has to be a right way and a wrong way of doing Creative Writing (and of course there are still some righteous souls to be found, here and there...), but my instinct is that the wrong way has largely won, and what it has led to is not something I recognise as tertiary education, and I heartily wish it would go away and not come back. It is the death of the critical faculties, the death of the mind.

There, off my chest now (this is plenty, this is more than enough...).

Mylesday, The Palace Bar, 1 April, 2-6pm

Brian Ó Nualláin/Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles nagCopaleen/whatever his name was is a hundred this year. Having, like the inhabitants of Corcha Dorcha, long since taken the bád bán to pursue my career as a pratie-hoker in Siberia, I would normally look on as a lachrymose and sea-divided Gael when festivities like this occur. But no, I shall be there. The Palace Bar, 1 April 2-6. Dress code ‘Emergency chic’, I read.

Rummaging round the Mylesday site we find this:

Senator David Norris, Ireland’s top Joycean supremo, launched a bizarre and unprecedented broadside against the MylesDay celebrations.
Invited to attend the celebrations, he tersely replied:

“Thank you very much for your kind invitation to speak at your Myles Day on the 1st of April next. It sounds like a great idea and may I congratulate you on it. However while I would be interested in participating I have checked my diary and see that I am already engaged to take part in a series of events that day so will not unfortunately be able to attend.”

Continuing his amazing bad-tempered rant, the tight-lipped Bloom-boffin added:

“May I wish you the very best of luck with what I know will be a great success.”

{Ends}

The Brother for President! Pints of plain all round!

The Passenger

Text Scum

Badger Sett

Great Newsome Brewery Pump Clips/Labels

Does my post like thin in this (format)? Some labels from the enterprising and always eminently drinkable East Yorkshire brewery at Great Newsome. Maddeningly low-resolution but, still. A pricky back otchan is a hedgehog, needless to say. Full range available to peruse here. Quality ales all.

Old Hull

Atlas of Remote Islands

Lonely Island, where ‘The evacuation order came today. Pouring the water out. Turned off diesel. The station is...’ (illegible).

Bear Island, whose tallest peak can be found in the Miseryfjellet district.

Rudolf Island, ‘thus far and no further’.

St Kilda, where ‘eight-day sickness’ carried away two-thirds of newborn babies.

Ascension Island, one big desolate hub for spy satellites and intercontinental missile tracking systems.

Brava in the Cape Verde Islands, to whose silky chanteuse Mayra Andrade I say brava, bravissima.

Annobón, whose name in Pagalu means ‘parrot’.

St Helena, a witty palindrome for which exceeded Napoleon’s abilities, after his sterling efforts in Elba.

Trinidade, haunt of UFOs.

Bouvet Island, the mystery of whose empty boat will never be solved (who went there? why? where did they go?).

Tristan da Cunha, subject of a chapter in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Southern Thule, covered in ash and penguin guano but planted with a Union Jack somewhere amid the rubble of a derelict weather station.

Saint Paul Island, where a group of Bretons and Madagascans were sent to establish a spiny lobster cannery in the 1920s then abandoned when the company went bankrupt, spending six years there before the survivors were rescued.

South Keeling Islands, abode of hermit crabs.

Possession Island, where the river Styx flows into the sea.

Diego Garcia, whose black-skinned UK citizens were disgustingly made homeless to allow the construction of a US military base, in sharp contrast to the white-skinned UK citizens whose government went to war to defend their right to the Falklands.

Amsterdam Island, temporary home of porn-addled meteorologists.

Christmas Island, home to warring hundreds of millions of crabs and ants.

Tromelin, named for the Frenchman who rescued its abandoned shipwrecked slaves.

Napuka, or Disappointment Islands, with never a bite to eat or anything else to deflect a boatload of Portuguese sailors’ thoughts from cannibalism.

Rapa Iti, which mystically called, in a language he could never have learned, to a French boy half a world away, haunting his dreams: a call the boy, Marc Liblin, somehow contrived to answer, meeting a Rapan woman by the purest of chances and going to live there; an entirely unbelievable yet, it seems, true story.

Robinson Crusoe Island, where Alexander Selkirk was shipwrecked, rather than on (more naturally, wouldn’t you think) the nearby Alejandro Selkirk Island.

Howland Island, almost but never quite reached by the ill-fated Amelia Earhart.

Macquarie Island, paradise for penguins and petrels.

Fangataufa, where boom! go French hydrogen bombs.

Atlasov Island, whose ‘atlas of’ lends itself to a very obvious pun.

Taongi Atoll, grave of the Sarah Joe.

Norfolk Island, where, no, please, God no, please no, its convict inhabitants would yell, groan and cry.

Pukapuka, free love island.

Antipodes Island, discovered, abandoned.

Floreana, whose utopian German community in the 1930s got up to much murderous mayhem contributing to the extinction of the indigenous mockingbird.

Banaba, whose islanders practice exposure of the dead rather than burial, and were treated with barbaric cruelty by their Japanese occupiers during the war.

Campbell Island, site of a splendidly pointless scientific expedition in 1874 involving a trip all the way from France to see something that ended up being blocked by a cloud.

Pingelap, home of the colour-blind.

Easter Island, still treeless (you fools!).

Pitcairn Island, home of child rapists and enthusiastic blogger-defenders of child rapists.

Semisopochnoi, where the foxes are blue.

Clipperton Atoll, good grief, what a story (smash him! smash his face in!).

Raoul Island, where the New Zealand insists on sending volunteers for year-long residencies, quite why I cannot make out, never mind what they do there.

Socorro Island, home to a large pig population despite the absence of fresh water.

Iwo Jima, the iconic photographic image of which was in fact staged.

St George Island, last redoubt of the now-vanished Arctic sea cow.

Tikopia, infanticide central.

Pagan, where ‘they say the volcano is not dangerous’ (not anymore they don’t).

Cocos Island, where they still ain’t found that treasure.

Takuu, where you’d better have a pair of wellies handy.

Laurie Island, where the ‘pride o’ oor land lies cauld in the clay’.

Deception Island, where fumaroles spew toxic gas.

Franklin Island, which commemorates a man who never went there and died in the frozen wastes of the other pole instead.

Peter I Island, where ‘there is nothing more to say’.

Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I have not visited and never will has to be one of the most delightful and beautiful things I have read in a long time.

I recommend this book.

Rallus Aquaticus

This (photo not taken by me) in honour of my first water rail, rallus aquaticus, spotted today in Watton, near Beverley.

Myles na gCopaleen, Meet John Malkovich

There is a business in Hull called Armadillo Self-Storage. I would have thought armadillos are already well stored inside that casing of theirs, but no, and what a nuisance they are, filing along Drypool and Witham on their way to a lock-in garage behind a gym and a takeaway. There is a Unicorn Trading Park further out the same road: insert zoological riff of your own inventing here, since one at a time is as much as I can manage. Trading outlets do have odd names though. Carpet Madness, for instance. I was there last weekend and am still reeling from the symptoms, which are endemic to the place (hence the name). I’m told pills can bring them under control, but some of the people I saw there quite patently weren’t taking their meds, let me tell you. Then there’s the Mattress King, still resisting all calls for an orderly transition to parliamentary democracy and switching the conversation to his appearance in Friends when the subject comes up. And Planet Wash, a foul science-fiction dystopian world peopled only by Polish men who want to sponge your car. Trust me, planet-wide economies cannot get buy on car-washing alone (I’ve tried). And then there’s Remnant Land on Hessle Road, ruled over by trussed-up bundles of carpet. The conversation is somewhat stilted after an hour or two, and that’s for sure.

But storage though, since I was talking about storage. Since I ran out of places to ran on my hand just the other Tuesday (whose telephone number is that?) I might as well use a blog post to store this hilarious Mylesian cutting, since I’m still ploughing my way through a lot of Myles at the moment. I turned it up in Carol Taaffe’s excellent Ireland Through the Looking Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, and Irish Cultural Debate:

On 1 April 1946, Myles na gCopaleen presented his readers with an unusually convoluted story, even by his own standards. ‘Ran into myself down town the other evening’, he reported, ‘in rare form... and doesn’t look my age at all.’ He accompanies himself into a pub where he finds ‘your truly’ standing at the counter. They all decide to head out to Sandyford; the driver of the cab, of course, being none other than ‘the present writer’: ‘Begob is this what you’re at now says my excellency to him no says he quick as a flash me real job is above in the Park receiving diginitiries and dhriving around in the landjue I oney do this in me spare time.’ The Myleses, inseparable before ‘the Split’, grate on each other’s nerves, one lecturing the other on careering round town ‘acting the maggot as per usual’ [and, snip!]

Did I ever tell you about the worst job I ever had, by the way? It was removing armadillos from Keats and Chapman’s arses. No wait, here’s me bus. That map of yours is looking a bit crooked, by the way, you might want to get that seen to. Cheers now!

Return of Keats and Chapman

Around the time that Chapman was becoming disillusioned with his friend Keats’s flock of dotterels, acquired for seven and six from a man in the Dandelion Market and put out to roost in their back garden, the birds redeemed themselves by showing an unexpected talent as gentlemen’s outfitters. Picking up the large quantities of thread and fabric that Keats liked to keep lying around the place in the garden, God only knows why, the birds would get to work and several hours later would have produced a dazzling array of formal neckwear. The products of their labours, it must be said, were not in the best of taste. The colour schemes were gaudy and the patterns in the ‘novelty’ genre beloved of salesmen on their way to office Christmas parties and other such occasions. Yet the public went wild for their designs, especially a garish green number known as the ‘Happy Leprechaun’. Why, even Eamon de Valera was spotted wearing one. Sitting in their kitchen one day, our heroes discussed these changes in gentlemen’s fashions. ‘All is changed, changed dotterelly’, observed Keats. ‘A terrible bow-tie is born’, agreed Chapman.

Roadsign Sticker Knows Something I Don't

This Kitteh Incorrectly Shelved

Thorganby

Pigeon Pie

Miller Lite Sucks

(Oops! typos now fixed.)

How embarrassing to contemplate the dose of the blog yips I’ve come down with. Some random jottings from a recent trip to the States by way of apology.

1) Taking one of those flights where next month’s crappy bargain DVD is playing on the back of the seats, I found myself painfully drawn into the world of a stinker called Morning Glory (no sniggers please), featuring Harrison Ford and Rachel McAdams. The point of the film is that grouchy old guy resents being on morning TV but eventually changes his mind, presumably out of some not-quite-articulated desire to BONE Rachel McAdams the minute he gets the chance, perhaps during a commerical break. But given that the flight was long enough for the film to go round four times, and the woman a few rows ahead of me decided to sit through it (asleep, I hope) every single time, I found myself unable to avert my gaze. Is that the awkward first date with boyfriend? The awkward first sex, except (phew, PG rating!) it gets averted by an urgent work message? The row with the boyfriend? And on it went for hours and hours. Whoever you are, please stop making these films.

2) I notice Officer Dickhole is still on jaywalking duty, where I presume he has spent the six or seven years since I last got whistled at for trying to nip across between cars.

3) How odd to walk around the Lincoln Memorial and then Arlington Cemetery and find them deserted. The latter until a military funeral turned up, with coffin on horse-drawn tumbril, and emergency supplies of the flag everywhere I looked, in case of unexpected patriotism deficit. The graveyard is pleasantly rich in waxwings, cardinals and mocking birds, one of whom performed the trick of swallowing a berry then bringing it back up then swallowing it again. There also appear to be some historical noteworthies buried there.

4) The phrase ‘content farm’ has been bandied about a lot in the last few days, à propos the sell-off (sell-out) of the Huffington Post, but what the AWP book fair, and the system behind it, are if not a ‘content farm’, I don’t know.

5) American books still smell a lot nicer than British and Irish ones.

6) There is no real point in talking about a reading in the States by Eavan Boland, except to say: if every poem I wrote, and every introduction of every poem I was reading, led me back as repetitively as hers do Eavan Boland to yet another story about the ould sod, I would apply for Angolan citizenship, arrange for one of those memory wipes they have in Men in Black, or whatever it took. Whatever. It. Took.

7) I’ve always wondered whether those scrunched-up sections in Susan Howe books were the result either of a lifelong admiration for ditto in Peter Reading’s books or the result of a malfunctioning typewriter ribbon. But having now heard her read one out, I feel enlightened. It was like hearing That Time or some other late Beckett dramaticule.

8) SH misspelt the word ‘niece’ ‘neice’ when she inscribed a book for me. My theory is that this is down to the gravitational force of the spelling of Charles Sander Peirce’s name, given her interest in him. Am I right, I wonder. The reason why she was using the word ‘niece’ by the way is that I own a book that belonged to her uncle, Mary Manning’s brother John.

9) Stephen Dunn is such a decent chap. So well-adjusted and self-deprecating. I wouldn’t want to be his left-hand margin the day he goes nuts and launches into Language poet act-out mode for all that pent-up rage, before being tranquillised with a dart in the neck from Richard Wilbur or Billy Collins.

10) Why only one shouty disturbed guy outside the White House? I would have thought lots or none. Tattoos on face never a good idea unless a) auditioning for part of Queequeg in adaptation of Moby-Dick or b) trying to fit in in some of the rougher pubs on Hull estates.

11) As the name on her website would suggest, I am assuming poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil has business cards that read ‘You may call me Aimee Nez’.

12) Why is Tony Hoagland so embarrassing?

13) Irish poets in the States get the chance to rediscover themselves as born-again Irishmen/women. But what about Brits? Deprived of the ethnic route, what do they do but – in those rare cases where they are published over there – rise without trace (Glyn Maxwell)? Or get taken up, if they’re James Fenton, by Dana Gioia and his merry band of New Formalists?

14) Rae Armantrout gets lots of junk mail about funeral services, including offers to ‘Win a Cremation’.

15) Impressed yet again with the bizarre rituals of US news anchor banter, I would like, one day, to stage a pre-scripted conversation in a café/pub/other public space in the same style, to the optimal discomfort of all around me.

16) In that amusing book of hers, which I notice Granta have just brought out over here, Elif Batuman paints a convincing picture of a culture war between the MFA and the PhD in American academe. Attending the AWP (which is what I’m talking about here, by the way) left me no less sceptical about the institutionalisation of creative writing in American academe, and the victory for the MFA side of things it represents. For instance, there was a panel at which some writers from the Iowa program talked about, well, being writers from the Iowa program. But what a strange thing to do, I thought. Do academic critics sit around onstage and talk about ‘being’ academic critics (that insistence again on writing as a state of being: I am a writer)? For those on a lower rung of the greasy pole than the folk from Iowa, which was many, there was more of an accompanying need to justify or theorise the business of creative writing. But this did not notably overlap with a commitment to, or even any kind of acknowledgement of teaching literature, at all. In one hilarious paper I ended up walking out of, someone spoke at length of the need to study process rather than product, product meaning apparently the finished documents otherwise known as books, for which he seemed keen to substitute the study of, among other things, the physical movements of writers during the act of composition. Process, not product. No reference was made to any writers, to any writing whatever. I am not making this up. How institutions of higher education feel this kind of thing constitutes an advancement of learning I have no idea.

17) Forrest Gander remains my favourite farmyard-animal-based name for an American poet. And is also a fine poet. I was most moved by his reading of George Oppen’s ‘Psalm’, one of my favourite poems.

18) Dulles Airport is about on a par with Doncaster Railway Station for non-meat-based foodstuffs.

19) I also saw a sunbittern, though not the sun on his back (when wings are fully extended).

20) Miller Lite has to be the most embarrassing excuse for a beer on the planet.

21) Morning Glory sadly not showing on the return flight, but it did have a film about a runaway train, which unless stopped... unless stopped one, two, three times in a row over the course of the flight... (and, snip!)