Category: Poetry

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The Little Ministry

It’s just over 33 years now since the great Brazilian avant-garde poet Paulo Leminski was untimely taken from us. Perhaps it seemed at the time that he was a lightning flash in the sky, a sudden illumination swiftly darkened. After all, his entire published career lasted barely more than a decade before his death from cirrhosis in June 1989.

And yet that flash continues to live on the optic nerve of Lusophone lovers of poetry everywhere, burned into the collective psyche. This latest (mis)translation is one of so many of his poems which like the man himself, seem to maintain a presence long after their encounter.

The Little Ministry

(mis)translation of Adminimistério by Paulo Leminski

When the mystery comes

you will find me sleeping,

half-turned towards Saturday,

half-turned towards Sunday.

There is no sound or silence

when the mystery grows.

Silence is a senseless thing

that I never stop watching.

The mystery is, I think, something

more of time than space.

When the mystery comes back,

my sleep becomes so unfixed

that no fear in the world

could hope to sustain me.

Midnight, an open book.

Mosquitos and moths land

on the doubtful words.

Could it be the white of the page

resembles light solidified?

Who knows the scent of blackness

fallen there like remnants?

Or do the insects greet

the letters of the alphabet

as distant relations, family?

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The Whales are Returning to Kiev

For Ireland’s national poetry day, here’s a poem from a couple of years back with a Ukraine theme. It was from that moment in lockdown when everyone was cooing about nature returning. The first three or so stanzas – all of those things did actually happen.

It imagines not only a world without Ukraine but a world without us. And that’s where we’re headed if we can’t find a way to get past war. Not just this one, but all war.

On that cheery note, as promised here are some whales overhead, courtesy of Kiev’s Maxim Garifullin:



The Whales Are Returning to Kiev

The wolves returned to Pripyat

Once all the people had fled.

Now sheep stroll the streets in Atakum

And goats gambol through Llandudno.

Kangaroos colonise Adelaide,

And deer graze on the lawns of East London.

Fish and dolphins have fled back to Venice,

Peacocks strut proudly through New Delhi,

A puma prowled around Santiago,

And alligators crawl inside shopping malls.

Wild boar root for food in Ajaccio,

Monkeys fight on the road in Lompuri,

The coyotes now run San Francisco,

And a sealion was spotted in Buenos Aires.

The whales are returning to Kiev.

Herds of unicorn gallop through Paris.

Angels can be seen on the streets of Berlin.

And none of them miss us at all.

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Whatever happened to Michael Aspel?

Yes, I wrote a poem about Michael Aspel. No, I couldn’t tell you why if I tried. It just came to me.

I also didn’t mean for this to come out as sarky as it did. I never met the guy and he always seemed like a decent spud on the TV. It’s just that everything he did seems such a long time ago now. Probably he feels that more than I do.

Anyhow, it wasn’t personal. As a friend said to me, I could just as easily have used Wogan.

Aspel

Is this how it is, Mr Give us a Clue?

If we manage to make it to eighty-nine,

mostly forgotten, most of the time?

Guest starring on ‘Morecambe and Wise’,

digging drains, selling beds, sent away in the war,

doing a year in the King’s Rifle Corps,

having seven kids, and three or four wives –

you thrived when people still lived many lives.

But all that you did now reeks of before,

a lost age from back in the days of yore,

nights of Miss World and the Eurovision,

all that national bonding on television

when television was still the glue

that united us while you read the news.

Those dusty archives of video,

Crackerjack, Antiques Roadshow,

you sat on sofas, legs akimbo,

chatting to the starlets of the past,

forgotten now, youth gone so fast,

will we all be so outcast?

Is that how it is, Mr Give us a Clue?

If we manage to make it to eighty-nine,

mostly forgotten, most of the time?

If we do, will we be like you?

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If you knocked on my door now

From time to time, I (mis)translate poems from languages which I don’t speak, or at least, which I don’t speak well. I don’t claim that there’s any great artistic merit in this, but I enjoy doing it and there is some degree of effort, I promise. Anyhow, here’s the latest one.

Patrizia Cavalli is an Italian poet whose selected poems translates approximately as My Poems Won’t Change the World. I suspect neither will this (mis)translation. Nevertheless, her modesty is less appropriate than mine. Her poems are excellent and should be read by everyone.

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An Introduction to Fire and Dust

I’m in this anthology, the distilled essence of Coventry’s legendary Fire and Dust poetry nights.

Spirit of Fire and Dust Anthology (also available for cash at F&D gigs, First Thurs at Cafe Morso)

I wouldn’t claim to have been the most regular attendee at their monthly events. Working full-time as a lecturer tends to get in the way of a rich and fulfilling social life, especially during marking time!

But I always felt welcome there, as indeed does everyone who has read their work at Fire and Dust. Unlike some poetry groups, F+D always fostered a very open, supportive and warm environment. It is the opposite of elitist, in other words.

However, that doesn’t equate to lower standards. Every event they ever ran had an excellent contemporary poet headlining, and the open mic sessions were astonishing in the range of different voices, bewilderingly eclectic at times as this anthology indicates, but always engaging, intriguing, thought-provoking and passionate.

I never saw anyone bored at Fire and Dust, and it remains one of the things I miss about England. And it’s proven to be a real incubator of talent too, with some pretty big names cutting their teeth there over the past near-decade.

So if you ever wondered how good the quality of contemporary poetry in the English West Midlands is, you should simply pop along, virtually or in person (they do both online and meatspace events now). Failing that, buying this anthology is the next best thing!

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Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon

I saw an old photograph of the road where my house is recently. It dated from sometime in the early 20th century, and featured a horsedrawn hearse with four formally-dressed funeral directors smoking while waiting outside a church for the funeral service to end. It captivated me, the life-in-death-in-life of it. Alas, I can no longer find it on the interwebs, but it evoked an era possibly contemporaneous with this one, from 1914.

Picture taken from a gallery posted online by BelfastLive.

Anyhow, it inspired a bit of verse, written for no good reason in an approximation of iambic pentameter.

Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon


Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon

Wait by the roadside, Tuesday afore noon,

Outside the wee redbrick church that was built

With money raised from parishioner guilt.


Magee and Muldoon, Molloy and Malone

Come from the New Lodge, the Ardoyne, the Bone

To bury, when time comes around at last,

The dearly departed of all North Belfast.


Muldoon and Molloy, Malone and Magee,

Smoking in black suits of conformity,

Won’t darken the door of the chapel at all.

They prefer the bar, or the grey snooker hall.


Malone and Magee, Muldoon and Molloy,

Scowl at the sunshine which they can’t enjoy.

Theirs is the burden and theirs is the curse

To hoist us on their shoulders and into the hearse

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Sidebar of Shame

I have a guilty confession to make. I like tabloids. I used to write for them, quite a few of them in fact. I know a lot of people consider them to be low-rent, inaccurate, trashy or otherwise less than praiseworthy, but I’ve always thought they had a certain irreverent joie-de-vivre.

It’s quite difficult to write news for tabloids actually. Plenty of tabloid journalists have taken jobs with more ‘respectable’ (and poorer-selling) publications, but you rarely see anyone move in the opposite direction. Why? Because it’s actually a lot easier to write 1200 words of polysyllabic prose about a complex set of incidents than it is to summarise things in a succinct and pithy 400 words that a 12 year old could comprehend.

Anyhow, of course tabloids can also be egregious. Their sins are legion, and there’s no need to repeat them all here. But as a society, we get the media we deserve, a media which due to market forces inevitably reflects back our own collective interests and values. Hence it is no surprise that the readers of the UK’s Daily Mail reflect many of the opinions to be found within the paper’s articles.

In fact, one might reasonably argue that their own opinions often go much further into potential objectionability. This too has an entertainment and information value of its own. I often like to dip into the comments below Daily Mail articles to get a sense of how and what Middle England is currently fulminating about.

So it occurred to me one day, today in fact, that comments found below the Mail Online’s legendary ‘Sidebar of Shame’ might add up to an interesting found poem, a kind of meta-opinion from Middle England, a sort of universal reaction to the river of news which brings them to comment.

Every line below is a verbatim and genuine comment, but each is in response to a completely different story. Together it adds up to … well, like the Daily Mail readers, you be the judge.

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Snow Poem

From time to time, I busy myself (mis)translating poems from languages that I do not speak. Tonight it is eight below zero outside. I expect we will have the white here in Cappadocia tomorrow, if not quite the Christmas.

So, it seemed appropriate to share this mistranslation from the great Turkish modernist poet Sezai Karakoç.

Happy Christmas, or Yule, or whatever midwinter festival you prefer, to one and all.

Snow Poem (mis)translated from Sezai Karakoç

When you look and see that it is snowing
You will understand the snow-gripped ground.
And when you find a fistful of snow on the ground
You will understand how snow can burn in snow.

When God rains down from the sky like snow,
When the hot snow touches your hot, hot hair
And when you bow your head,
Then you will understand this poem of mine.

This man or that man comes and goes,
And in your hands, my dream comes and goes.
A vengeance comes and goes in each forgiveness.
You will understand me when you understand this poem of mine.

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What Scátha Foretold

I asked some students who their favourite literary characters were. Cue a lot of Harry Potter. One asked me in return, first time it’s ever happened, oddly enough. So I said Scátha, as you do, and then had to explain who she was.

Scátha is a wise warrior woman who lives on the Isle of Skye. She trains Cú Chulainn, the hero of the Red Branch cycle of Irish mythology (and fails to stop him shagging and fighting of course.) She is also very weird and magical, and so before she bids him farewell, she foretells his bloody and violent future for him. A typical stubborn Ulsterman, he goes ahead and does it all anyway.

She crops up on the margins of the myths. The stories are about others, not her. But we sense her danger, her aloof isolation and her weary wisdom. In the Bronze Age cockfight that is the Red Branch cycle, she’s the alluring and frightening outsider, adept in all manner of arcane wisdom and power.

We have the poem wherein she tells Cú Chulainn’s fortune, the “Verba Scathaige”, and for decades I’ve meant to write a (very freeform) translation of it, set in Eighties Belfast, which I finally finished tonight and is below. I imagine, in one of Scátha’s timebending feats, reading it in a smoky Eighties Belfast bar, with a crackly PA playing “The Sickbed of Cú Chulainn” by the Pogues throughout.

I am Irish by birth and inclination, British as a result of colonial occupation. But my people were, are and always will be the Ulaid. We need another Scátha now of course, but we’re probably still too boneheaded to listen.

Scátha Foretells Trouble

Well, big lad, even if no one

dares lift their fist to you,

you’ll still face troubles

if they all gang up.

You’ll have to slap a few hard men,

do a few kneecaps down the entry,

shed some blood,

until all, all you can see is blood.

You’re gonna wreck the place, the lot of you,

blowing up buildings,

painting the walls,

the wreckage adorned with flags and emblems,

telling the names of who’s the real hard men around here.

What’ll you gain by it? Scundered when they rob your house

and get away with it?

They’ll come after you for weeks at a time. You’ll lose

everything.

You’re all on your own this time, big man.

They’ll need punishing properly.

A wee slap won’t suffice. It’ll take might,

armalite, a crack in the night.

There’ll be blood.

Your mates are all wasters, son. Just like

yer ma always said.

No less thieves than themmuns, you know.

No point gilding the lily here, mucker.

It’s going to hurt. Hurt and hurt again.

You’ll hurt bad.

Did I say it would hurt?

And they’ll get their own back, tit for tat,

until there’s neither tit nor tat left.

Not a word from you, with your red face

like a slapped arse!

You know you’ll hold your own, smacking one

hallion after another.

You’re the big fish in this wee pond.

You’re built for destruction, but everyone wants to hook the big fish.

It’s alright for you ganshes, but these people just want

some peace and quiet.

You never think

of the children, of the women. Too busy

bragging while they cry their eyes out.

Sooner or later, though,

it’s gonna be hospital food.

No one wins forever.

Youse and themmuns. Seriously.

It’s like watching

two bulls charging in a field. Would you not

give it up

and give all our heads peace?

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World Poetry Day 2021

Happy World Poetry Day. Even in the stasis of global lockdowns, poetry still transports anyone to any time or place, real or imagined, should they only ask. This poem terminates at Lalibela, Ethiopia, sometime in early 2011.


Tej

The dancers shrug off the world. Everything that moves here

moves from the shoulders down. We drink tej and compare with

Fanta Orange. Then dance with the dancers, clumsy, white with brown.


A thousand years past, faith slammed into the rock and kept

slamming. Mountains bore churches. More people came and keep

coming, flecking the hills with fires, life seeking purchase.


We drink tej in the smoke-filled hall and clap to drums,

our sore legs throbbing. Round the fire, dancers shrug off the world.

We drink more tej. They beckon to us, brown shoulders bobbing.