Highly Recommended this week

A week of links, essays, and ideas which may interest the literary community:

Sunday 16th: Donald Hall on what he has learned from a lifetime of poetry readings.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/thank-you-thank-you-donald-hall-on-a-lifetime-of-poetry-readings.html

Monday 17th:  Theo Dorgan and the World Irish Community - with a message to the extended Irish community for the holiday season:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_UnKmTw_rU&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1

Tuesday 18th: Umit Singh Dhuga announced his policy on FB courtesy for The Battersea Review: 

https://www.facebook.com/BatterseaReview?fref=ts

 The particular post is given in full here: 

From The Battersea Review:

Please forgive me, as publisher and managing editor, to note (as though such a simple thing should need noting) that The Battersea Review neither engages in nor has much tolerance for myopia of any sort: if any writer out there feels resentment, then one ought to consider one's reasons intrinsic not extrinsic. That is my polite manner of imploring putative writers to visit a therapist before visiting and sullying the Facebook walls of others. Berate me all you wish, please, which I say with no degree of flippancy; but do not please turn your not quite risible derision nor acrimony upon my contributors. Now, why should I make such a statement as this? English phlegm customarily brings me a shrug of the shoulders and silence. However. Recent slanders against several of our authors worry me. I have put my money where my mouth is, to be perfectly blunt, in offering a magazine which costs my readers not one penny. The late Frederick Morgan of The Hudson Review, where I wrote a quarterly Music Chronical for several years, did well to teach me the value of loyalty and editorial honour. (If words such as loyalty and honour catalyse your allergens, then please think back on so simple a word as manners.) We at TBR strive to offer--again, gratis--the best poetry and the best critical prose which we can gather. Please do not abuse the gratis platform which I have hoped to offer as a means for unfettered ad hominem attacks. If you have something denigrating to say about our rosters, our works, our identity, what have you--please say so to me, and do not deface the faceboook walls and email boxes of contributors with vitriol. If your character has proclivity toward abuse, then by all means hurl your abuse toward me. Leave alone the generous writers who have made my vision for this magazine possible: viz., a vision which entails after my overhead no payment from readers and no payment for writers. Please refrain from abusing such a system as this which deemphasises the commodification of letters, broadly construed. And again, please do feel free to litter my mailbox with abuse: but leave alone the thoughtful writers who have helped me to actualise the idea of a literary quarterly which operates on trust, honour, and intelligent respect. If those terms strike you as unfashionable, then you have only me to blame. It is nonsense to think that we are entering the year 2013 and I am finding anti-Semitic sputterings so wantonly scattered.

Sincerely, USD

Wednesday 19th:  A sample of one of the many interesting ezines functioning today:

http://www.boneorchardpoetry.blogspot.ie/

Thursday 20th:  John W. Sexton opened a debate on the role of Poetry Ireland Review - which we hope will eventually provide more light than heat.

John W. Sexton:

As a reader and subscriber to Poetry Ireland Review I find that in all good conscience I cannot possibly promote it. The current issue is far too full of reprints and this is a trend continued by the current editor since his tenure began. As a poet who spends the little he has on new collections and journals I simply do not appreciate opening a new issue of a journal to discover poetry I have already seen and own. Reprinting poetry is the remit of the anthologies and is not the duty of a so-called “journal of record”. The duty of a journal of record is to record the poetries and approaches currently unpublished.

I am an avid reader of poetry in translation, but I make the same demands of it as I would of poetry in my first language. There are far too many pages of translated drivel in this issue. It takes space away from Irish poets who need this journal as a recording agency of the work currently done in Irish poetry. Many of the translations here do not earn their place.

The work in this current issue, sadly, is all of one register and fairly poor. It does not represent the multiplicity of approaches to poetry currently undertaken in this island. I know this because I’m reading widely in Irish poetry.

Many Irish poets, myself included, are receiving rejections to our submissions more or less on the same day. If I would to be cynical I’d say this is the “office day”. I have become cynical. The truth is, and this is irrefutable on the obvious evidence of the current editor’s four issues, that our submissions cannot possibly compete for space with reprints and already commissioned work. If there is no space for our work then do the honourable thing and close the submissions. You must get your house in order. Poetry Ireland Review does not represent the work carried out in poetry in this island. Do not think for one moment that it does. And, lest I am accused of being a poor poet, other Irish journals of quality have no problem taking my work, no matter how left-field I may currently be.

My subscription runs out with this issue. I will be renewing it sometime in the New Year because I believe in supporting my craft with my meagre pocket. But I sincerely hope this journal opens up and widens its remit. If not, it will choke Irish poetry and render it irrelevant. Most of the current issue is irrelevant.

Friday 21st: Neil Patrick Doherty sent us information on this new translation of A Long Day's Evening by Turkish Modernist, Bilge Karasu. 'This remarkable book considers agonizing internal struggles of faith among eighth-century Byzantine monks through the refracted, internalized prose of Joyce and Proust, giving them startlingly raw existential urgency.'

With an introduction and excerpt from the novel.

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100519980&fa=RelatedPress

Saturday 22nd: Poet John Ashberry: reading some of his work:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashbery.php

Sunday 23rd: The poet Linda Ibbotson sent us this:

http://visions2010.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/june-2012-poetry-is-a-sky-dark-with-wild-ducks-carl-sandburg-more/

Highly Recommended this Week:

Highly recommended 

this week includes:

Highly Recommended is a list of articles, reviews or pages, normally one per day, which our friends recommend.  We have some very brilliant friends - and consequentially, some brilliant links this week.

You may have to cut and paste the links to go to them… our blog skills are not as great as the links.

Sunday:

Djelloul Marbrook recommends:

Book Review of The Pilgrim Hawk, by Glenway Wescott | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature.

www.openlettersmonthly.com

The twisty boundaries of narrative reliability are at the heart of Ingrid Norton's discussion the neglected classic The Pilgrim Hawk as A Year 

Monday:

Recommended - without reservation - by Philip Nikolayev and the SAMUEL BECKETT PAGE. Take a look.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett

The Letters of Samuel Beckett is the first comprehensive edition of the letters of Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), providing access to primary sources now scattered in archives and private collections world-wide. Through The Letters, students, scholars, critics and theatre artists can...

Page: 238 like this.

Tuesday:  VALERIE SIRR interviews MARY MORRISSY - with some great insights and comments from Mary.

http://valeriesirr.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/interview-with-award-winning-writer-mary-morrissy/

Wednesday:  Djelloul Marbrook - recommends

http://atticusreview.org/the-pigeonhole-awaits/

The British poets Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) and A.S.J. Tessimond (1902 – 1962) were marginalized in their lifetimes, but champions in Claire Harman andHubert Nicholson are restoring them to the canon…..

Thursday:  

We thought we'd reintroduce the ideas of Roland Barthes on the death of the author, and Foucalt on the birth of the reader.   Philip Nikoyalev tells us that his 'The death of the Death of the Author' piece is coming out in the January edition of The Battersea Review.

http://literarism.blogspot.ie/2011/12/roland-barthes-death-of-author.html

 

Friday: - Friday the 14th December, 2012 - 

too devastating to post anything. 

Saturday:  - important links and information for poets. 

This is one link to keep. An up-to-date list of journals who accept poetry manuscripts:

http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/presses-with-open-readings-for-full-length-poetry-manuscripts/

Jewel - reviewed by John W. Sexton

           

Jewel 

by

Peadar O'Donoghue

Published by Salmon Poetry, 2012.

Reviewed by John W. Sexton.

This review first appeared in the 

REViVAL Literary Journal, Issue 24, Dec. 2012, 

and is reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

The democratisation of Irish Poetry has been a much sought-after state. The excluded constantly knocked at its gates, only to be sent away by the gatekeepers. But in recent times some of the gates have shown signs of forced entry.

Peadar O’Donoghue is a poet who, in barely two years, has literally come out of nowhere. He makes no secret of the fact that he is struggling with poetry, yet he is at the same time the founder editor of a much admired journal: The Poetry Bus. His success stems largely from blogging and from his quirky and likeable presence on Facebook. He is the quintessential e-poet, agitating for web-based poetry, badgering poets to contribute to his mad notions, from Poetrygeists to Lovegeists. He is the wise-cracking guru of the excluded poet. Under his Messiahship the democratisation of poetry appears to loom.

Jewel opens with its title poem, one that begins in drunkenness and closes with the poet urinating into the Liffey. At first glance the poem appears brutish: a man, pissed on drink, pisses from a bridge off the open street. But the piece is far more subversive, operating as it does as an act of anti-Muse. In the poem the river attempts a seduction:

          With undulating, warm, open arms of green

          

          she calls to me in clamshells of desire.

The response from the author is base: “and bursting for a leak, / I express myself, / let fly the floodgates, / a stream of pee to the pea green below”.

This book is by no means finely wrought; it has the marks of having been pulled by the nails from the heart and mind. And O’Donoghue’s mind is often troubled; what inspires him is a political anger and societal frustration: “School made me hollow, / taught me that I knew nothing”. Jewel is a sort of jamboree bag of quotable lines; the more one reaches into it, the more ragged its structure becomes, until all the gems of its contents poke through its thin membrane. Reading it is to pull it apart, and to be slightly pulled apart by it. It forces the reader to engage, critique; but in a way that is creative in favour of the book itself. As frail as it may often seem, Jewel improves with each read, strangely regenerating itself.

An anti-Muse, or, more specifically, an anti-Aisling, haunts the poems throughout this collection. Many of the poems are about poetry, but the tone is often self-mocking:

          

This is the sensible shoe – well heeled,

          

complimenting the weekend wax jacket of authority.

          

This poem is a Golden Labrador, The Sunday Times,

          

a bay-windowed Victorian semi,

          

a neatly pressed shirt for the office on Monday.

          

(This is a Controlled Poem)

The collection natters on in the head of the reader like a wise drunk, while the poet compiles his “list for lesser days” in a poetry of subtly-voiced regrets:

          

I was reaching for things out of reach,

          

for unlimited words to make sense of me

          

(Starfish on the Beach)

Time and space are often conflated; the past and the present merge, solid objects metamorphose into other things; place becomes fluid, metaphors pass through us from the beacon of the mind. Our heads are done in.

The cover of this book is the calmest part; this is telling, for it is a photograph by the author himself, an accomplished and widely-published photographer. Photography is often the art of stillness, and can even initiate peacefulness. Language, on the other hand, is never still; and O’Donoghue has language bubbling up from the deeps of him. Photography is his consolation; but poetry is his martyrdom:

          

Thinking takes you out of your depth,

          

Thought is a poetry death-wish 

          

(The Man Whose Head Exploded)

It is fortunate that Salmon saw fit to publish him. One wonders what the others would have made of him. Probably nothing, for many of the other major publishers are riskless and dull; dim lighthouses surrounded in their own fog, bright only in a kind of memory of light.

Through the current night of Irish poetry we glimpse Peadar O’Donoghue, waving his kaleidoscopic lantern; telling us everything will be all right, but also telling us that he’s fucked for sure. Cracked as he is, he may actually offer us safe passage. Only time will tell. In the meantime we’ll follow, curious enough to trust him.

John W. Sexton is the author of four previous poetry collections, the most recent being Vortex (Doghouse, 2005) and Petit Mal (Revival Press, 2009). His fifth collection, The Offspring of the Moon, is due from Salmon Poetry in spring 2013. Under the ironic pseudonym of Sex W. Johnston he has recorded an album with legendary Stranglers frontman, Hugh Cornwell, entitled Sons Of Shiva, which has been released on Track Records. He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.

Review originally published in

REViVAL Literary Journal,

Issue 24,December 2012.