Go Down the "Rabbit Hole"!

Introducing my third full-length poetry collection, "Rabbit Hole"!

It marries the found poem with Gertrude Stein and deconstructs existing language to riff on the concept of the deterioration of language as signifier. Just as at the beginning of the 20th century there was the development of a concept that was at the time called New Morality (sin is a fallacy; do whatever feels good to you), so here in the beginning of the 21st century there is developing a concept that language itself need have no concrete meaning. Facts are in the mind of the beholder. The very fabric of reality as it has been known is unraveling. How we as humans communicate with our world, with other humans, even ourselves is fundamentally shifting. The ability to think and reason is changing. And while all that is serious in nature with consequences that have yet to be determined, this collection approaches it in a fun, almost mocking manner. This is Alice in Wonderland with language itself - you are Alice. As the poet, I am the Chesire Cat, you could say.

In his introduction to the book, George Fillingham writes: ""I want the reader to imagine a dream, a dream of the sort that is not quite a nightmare where the dreamer wakes in terror but rather a dream where the dreamer is led on from curiosity to curiosity, image to image, and, confused perhaps but no less surprised by the images, wakes with a head scratch and begins the day, thinking about the world as a much stranger place than when the reader laid down to sleep ... [In the poems where the language is more] extreme . . . the deconstruction of language . . . [mirrors] the shattered state of language today and the impossibility to understand discourse of any kind anymore. It is as if language itself is designed to disguise meaning rather than convey it."

Are you brave enough to go down the "Rabbit Hole"?

Available today on Createspace; Amazon and other merchants and channels within the week.

Review: "The Architecture of Chance" by Christodoulos Makris

Christodoulos Makris, The Architecture of Chance, (Wurm Press, 2015) 108 pages, poetry, $19.00 U.S.

Christodoulos Makris has established himself as one of the most important experimental poets working in Ireland today. The Architecture of Chance is his latest offering.

This is an exciting collection. Makris is fearless in his experimentation and is pushing poetry into whole new forms and realms of being. Most notable in this regard is "Chances Are", which he calls a mass collaboration poem. It appears in the collection as its HTML code. This poem can be found in application at 3am Magazine. It is a poem composed of every tweet that uses the word "chance" and updates in real time. Another boundary exploder is "From Something to Nothing" in which he took an informational text on the International Monetary Fund website and cycled it through several languages back and forth on Google Translate and turned the results into a poem that reveals much about the dynamics of language in the age of the internet. Given that Makris hails from Cyprus and has spent time in the United Kingdom while being based in Ireland, this experiment could be read as a commentary on the migrant experience.

Many of these poems are also political in nature. In "16 X 16" he writes: "I would have been a completely different person without the politics and a completely different writer." This is evident in poems like "Metro Herald's Advertorial Windbags Let Loose, 28-31 May & 4-7 June 2013"(which, as the title suggests, is a composition of adverts and editorials from Dublin's Metro Herald newspaper), "Civilisation's Golden Dawn: A Slideshow"(which contains pieces of speeches made by members of Greece's Golden Dawn party, whom Makris describes as neo-fascist), and "Public Announcement" (composed from the signs hanging in the Skerries public library on a certain day).

Others are slightly more domestic. Some are composed from emails or tweets sent back and forth in collaboration. One is composed from bits of conversations overheard around Dublin on a particular day. My personal favourite is "Heaney after Rauschenberg", which takes all the four letter words from Seamus Heaney's first collection Death of a Naturalist and places them in order of appearance. While soothingly familiar in vocabulary, it decenters Heaney's careful poetics almost completely, as if Heaney fell into a black hole when he died and this is all that is left of him in the universe. In that sense, it serves as an eerie, aching tribute of sorts - even as it seeks to shatter the comfortable traditionalism of  Heaney's legacy. Here is a brief excerpt:

"sick home hard blow baby pram when came hand tell they were away held hand hers with next went into room time left four foot four foot year

grey only from cows into like away iron gate into bank with from snug rise dead eyes used soon this they cock from left hand came came down this sake spat take your time more hole tree wild more said into mare hill back like that were that time ones that back when

dark fill dead cold like they line from some keep full tall soon back fish load from surf bend turf fear make they like clay seed shot seem they show good from bark feel roots pits live live wild land root died when lain days long clay with eyes died hard bird huts guts from like were with hope like land pits into sore stop they flop down take fill then cold

west mayo crew they from when with eyes like bone skin rose fell like they kept with beef men's then poor make food they like dogs that been hard when they with they were hope less next like dark once port ship free tart from good swim sink with zeal were

from that held arms came with have them word dead till"

This is definitely a book which requires the reader to "do the work" (Anna Strong), but the rewards are substantial. The break with Romanticism and traditional verse that began with the Modernist movement at the turn of the 20th century is spinning into free fall out of control as we become firmly entrenched in the 21st (much like society in general) and, like other experimental writers like him, Makris is making sure this is well represented in today's poetry. Only, he may be doing it better than most.

You can buy it at Amazon.

Contemporary Appalachian Poetry: Something Taken, Something Given - Three Book Reviews

Jessica D. Thompson, Bullets and Blank Bibles, (Liquid Paper Press, 2013),  32 pages, poetry, $6.00 U.S.

Roberta Schultz, Outposts on the Border of Longing, (Finishing Line Press, 2014),  32 pages, poetry, $12.00 U.S.

Marianne Worthington, Larger Bodies than Mine, (Finishing Line Press, 2006), 30 pages, poetry, $12.00 U.S. 

Appalachian poetry, like its culture, is changing fast. If you think you know what to expect from it, think again. The three books I am reviewing here are on the more traditional end of contemporary Appalachian poetry, but this is not the poetry that came from the region 100 years ago. And it is not the poetry to come in the very near future. Still, one over-riding principle remains for Appalachian poets - no matter how they choose to practice their art: "For something taken, something/must be given." ("Something Taken", Bullets and Blank Bibles, Jessica D. Thompson). 

When one's culture is in a rapid state of change, the urgent need is to reflect that instability while paying proper respect to what is passing. For some poets this means taking something - experimenting with radical new modes of expression in an effort to capture the mood of change and possibly form a language for what must inevitably follow. For other poets it means giving something - attempting to preserve some of what is passing. The three poets in this review are largely seeking to preserve the heritage and culture that is almost faded entirely into memory, that cozy, warm past that outsiders once derided and now seek out as tourists. 

Marianne Worthington is probably the most notable of the three for this patient homage. Her tipping of the hat in Larger Bodies than Mine consists of family portraits painted deftly from memory in careful metered lines. There is very little alliterative play here, but the preciousness of it renders it surprising and rich where it does occur. Most of her collection focuses on various grandmothers. Heaneyesque in many ways, her verse teeters on the thin line of over-sentimentality without slipping over. This is nostalgia on the tongue and in the mind. While the forms rely heavily on meter, she does not make the mistake of rhyming into sing-song.

Jessica D. Thompson writes of the rural setting and a little of family, but Bullets and Blank Bibles is not as polished. It retains a bluntness Worthington does not allow for, an anger biting subtly below the surface. One might call it simply Discontent. Take this line from the best poem in the volume ("Turquoise") as an example: "We measure our life by what we love/but settle for what we are given". That's Appalachian culture summed up in one neat little aphorism (Thompson is good at that). Compromise is everything in a region that both nurtures and murders, and that is something she knows well. As with Worthington, her verse depends much on meter, but she stretches it a bit. It's a little more fluid, slightly unhinged. Alliteration gets more time on the page. But the overall pace is kept appropriately slow, measured, and deliberate, like the passing of the seasons.

Enter Roberta Schultz' Outposts on the Border of Longing. Though I don't think she means to, she serves as a kind of mediator between the more traditional poets of Appalachia and the radical, avant garde. She too pulls mostly from memory for her subject matter (and not all of it is PC), but her style makes the end result feel less lyrical and more confessional. She deviates from variations on blank verse  more than the previous two and tries out forms less often used by the majority of poets on her side of the spectrum (striking example: "War: A Sestina"). Schultz does, unfortunately, indulge in a nauseating cuteness when she writes of her pet cat ("Be Careful What You Wish For"). For one horrifying moment, I thought I was judging an elementary school poetry contest! But then she recovers nicely with this anecdote as an explanation of her poetic philosophy:

"Night vision begins

at twenty minutes - 

ten minutes after most

of us reach for a switch,

flushing our faith with fear, 

leaving us night blind."

("Night Blind")

The encouragement here is explicit. Poetry is about intuition and insight, not the gathering of data or facts. This is even more true when the old modes of expression are rendered largely irrelevant by seismic cultural shifts. So we must allow ourselves to develop "night vision" and write from that.

While it is true that narrative, form, and meter remain strong components for these three poets, their work nevertheless contains powerful realisations that the old Appalachian ways are gone. Wistful and mournful, these poets clearly feel a keen sense of loss and separation from that which made them who they are. In doing so, they give something back to the culture that it is now missing from it. This serves as a needed balance to those contemporary Appalachian poets who take something by forging ahead to see what they can make of what comes next in the blinding light of the new unknown.  

(For full disclosure: this is an unpaid review. No good or services were received.)

Breaking Things (Or How to Write Collage Poetry)

What is collage poetry? The idea is to take an existing text or texts and make it into something new.  The process is also called Unoriginality in studies of poetic movements and began in the 1990s almost as a direct consequence of the advent of the Internet and the growing uneasiness with Modern and Post-modern poetry tactics among the avant garde set. Most practicers of Unoriginality stumbled upon the concept independently, although some developed it within groups of writers. It seems like a simple enough concept to execute, leading many to disregard it as valid poetic practice - until such ones attempt it themselves. It is actually a complicated process that requires intense focus and a lot of trial and error to develop the skills of discernment needed to honour the original texts while reshaping the texts into something completely unfamiliar. It's also a wonderful way to explore the contested concept of authorship, because the words one is using belong to some one else and the final text of the collage poem cannot be guessed at by the poet assembling it until the reorganisation is complete. A collage poem is fun in the sense of wordplay and delving into the unknowable that the poet has only the most minimal control over, but it is hard work and slow-going.

To illustrate, I am going to use a simplified example of collage poetry work that I did as an assignment that the instructors called "Breaking Things" for a class I'm taking on Shakespeare. I started out with the text of the Bard's play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and two blog posts I had previously written related to the course which can be found farther down this page ("On First Lines" and "Comparison: 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'Layla and Majnun'"). First I selected a specific passage from the play to use, which is the conversation with Hermia about her father's selection of a husband for her. Instead of copying out the entire dialog, I left out her responses and chose specific lines that appealed to me due to their expression of a father's absolute authority over a daughter, possibly one of the most overtly serious moments in the comedy. Thus I copied this out on a sheet of paper:

"Be advised, fair maid.
To you, your father should be as a god,
One that composed your beauties, yea, and one
For whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it.
In this kind, wanting your father's voice,
The other must be held worthier.
Your eyes must with his judgement look.
Look you arm yourself
To fit your fancies to your father's will."

Lots of assonance in these lines to play with and it would be fun to dismantle this outdated notion of male dictatorship.

Then I proceeded to comb through the two blog posts for phrases which could be repurposed. Hence, on the same sheet of paper I copied this:

"virgin love
versus
consummation (or lack thereof)
love cannot exist without sex, but sex can exist without love
attain to the status of a lesser god
roams the wilderness
spouting poetry for
repetition
first lines are the spine on which all hangs
security cameras and spying eyes
choking like flame without air
somewhat mantic
poetry cannot survive
meandering masterpiece
the most primal of human needs
worn out subject - elementary thing -
much glorification of the giving and the taking of the maidenhead
amourous rites
hood my unmanned blood
love grow bold
no love at all"

Now that I had broken things, I was ready to reassemble them. This is where trial and error comes in. You must expect that the first attempt will not result in a finished poem. Usually these things take many drafts and can sometimes take years to work out. A person who writes collage poetry must be one who thrives on challenge. The work involved is the point as much as the finished product. In this example, however, it took me about three hours. You will notice that in reorganising, sometimes I broke the phrases down further and rearranged them into new phrases as well as rearranging the actual lines. I began, crossing off phrases as I reused them. This is first draft:

"much glorification of
elementary thing - most
primal thing cannot survive
as a god somewhat mantic
arm yourself your fancies
the spine on which all hangs
choking flame without air
virgin love grow bold
wilderness spouting repetition
by him imprinted
meandering masterpiece
be advised to leave the figure
or disfigure it in this kind
consummation (or lack thereof)
first lines are security cameras
spying eyes, love without
sex without love amourous rites
that composed whom you are
a form in wax within his
power: the other must beheld poetry
look you to fit unmanned blood roams
no love at all
with his judgement look
the giving and the taking
status of a lesser god
poetry for maidenhood"

I largely avoided punctuation or consideration for line breaks, etc. because at this point it didn't matter. At this stage, the goal is just to see what surprising new combinations can be made of the phrases. Look for juxtaposition and delightfully new, unlooked for ideas. Phrases I liked here are: "First lines are security cameras" and "your fancies/ the spine on which all hangs". There is no clear formation of meaning in this new text yet, but the suggestion is that the meaning will be highly sexual. That is not a route I wanted to go. Although Shakespeare is very candid and even rude in such matters, I wanted to focus on poetry itself as a way to better honour the common perception of Shakespeare's work. On to the second draft:

"As a god somewhat mantic
Much glorification of elementary thing
Arm yourself your fancies cannot survive
Wilderness spouting repetition by
Him imprinted meandering
Masterpiece, be advised to
Leave the figure or disfigure it
In this kind consummation (or lack thereof)
Virgin love grow bold with his
Judgement look the giving and the taking
No love at all the spine on which all hangs
That composed whom you are - a form
In wax within his power, look you to fit
Unmanned blood roams: the other
Must be held poetry, security cameras
First lines are spying eyes
Love without sex without love
Poetry a lesser god for maidenhood
Amourous rites choking without air
No consummation at all"

As you can see, on the second draft, I paid a little more attention to poetic devises, such as line breaks and further fractured and rearranged some phrases. I also inserted some personal stylistic preferences, such as extending line length and capitalising the first letters of lines. Here, I began to sense clearer meaning and that it was closer to my intention of a metapoetic reading. Encouraged, I forged ahead to what would be the final draft:

"Poetry"

As a god somewhat mantic,
Much glorification of elementary thing.
Arm yourself! Your fancies cannot survive
Wilderness spouting repetition, by him
Imprinted meandering masterpiece.
Be advised leave the figure or disfigure it
In this kind consummation
(Or lack thereof).
Virgin love grow bold with his judgement.
Look! The giving and the taking -
No love at all, the spine on which all hangs
That composed whom you are - a form
In wax within his power. Look you to fit.
Unmanned blood roams: the other must be held poetry.
Security cameras: first lines are spying eyes -
Love without sex without love.
Poetry a lesser god for maidenhood,
Amourous rites choking flame:
No consummation at all.

The title used here is a working title. It was good enough for the assignment for which it was written. This final result is both metapoetic and I believe a fitting tribute to Shakespeare while creating something entirely fresh from his (and my) words with a 21st century feel.

On First Lines

The "Shakespeare In Community" class on Coursera.org opens by discussing briefly the first lines of Hamlet. But what of first lines?

 

It feels like a worn-out subject - an elementary thing - to consider first lines. Are they powerful? Yes. It is the ending any writer is aiming to have remembered, but usually it is the first line that everyone can quote verbatim.

 

Some of my favorites are:

 

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

 

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett) Never read this book, but that is profoundly true.

 

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) Finnegans Wake is a pure delight, beginning to end, is it not?

 

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested." —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell) This book haunts me every day.

 

"It was like so, but wasn't." —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995) Never read this book either, but that has to be the most intriguing opening line ever conceived. That could also be the most concise definition of poetry available.

 

But the one first line that is always mentioned first:

 

"Call me Ishmael." —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

 

That shouldn't be a first line success story. It tells you nothing. Sets you up for nothing. Is only mildly intriguing and not at all interesting. It's like opening a book with small talk. Even cashiers at check out registers have name tags but most people don't care to read them unless they intend to file a complaint. "Call me Ishmael."

 

So why does it succeed? Because names are at the most primal of human instincts and needs. In the Bible, the first assignment God gave to Adam (before creating Eve and therefore predating the commandment to "fill the earth") was that of naming the various creatures that co-inhabited Earth with him. Names are so deeply integral to our psyche that often we name our phones and other devices, even our cars. I know an extreme case where a man named each of his fingers. Herman Melville revealed his genius when he appealed to that by beginning his meandering masterpiece with "Call me Ishmael."

 

First lines are the spine on which all other hangs in literature. Shakespeare was keenly aware of that. So he opened Hamlet with "Who's there?" A call to attention that requires an instant answer. An action phrase to begin a play of action and deeply pregnant with all the paranoia and uncertainty that drives Hamlet all the way to its bloody conclusion. By the time he has a character utter "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark", the repetition of that paranoia is already stifling and choking like flame without air.

 

First lines are even more important in today's post post-modern poetry. It has been said that a poem must be composed entirely of first lines to keep a reader engaged all the way to the end. Hamlet's constant refrain of paranoia (beautifully illustrated in The Royal Shakespeare Company's production starring Patrick Stewart and David Tennant with the ever-present motif of security cameras and hidden spying eyes - "A rat! A rat!") seems to foreshadow this development. Some are put off by Shakespeare's dogged repetition; to me is seems somewhat mantic. He seems to be pointing to this time when the power of first lines has become so strong as to be everything, as to be poetry itself, when poetry cannot survive unless it be composed entirely of first lines.

 

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha"

(Originally published on Yahoo! Voices on January 14, 2010)

"The Song of Hiawatha" is one of the most beloved American classics and yet has been a little neglected recently by the literary community at large. Perhaps its pre-modern origins make it uninteresting as a modern study, or maybe it has simply become a text that is taken for granted? Who knows.

My mother found and gifted to me a 112 year old copy of this book. It was published within 50 years of the epic's first appearance in 1855. It is the Minnehaha Edition with illustrations published by Thompson & Thomas of Chicago in 1898. It is cloth-bound with what looks to have been at one time a beautiful gilded cover. It has a very short uncredited introduction and six pages of notes in the back. Otherwise, there is no scholarly material.

Longfellow was a poet of his time in many senses. One evidence of which is his careful attention to form and musicality within his work. Another was his choice of subject matter which he was at a opportune time in history to explore and record. What makes Longfellow stand out is the ease with which this book-length poem can be read. I am generally not inclined to read book-length poems because of their ungainliness. Poetry sustained over such a long stretch can tend to become cumbersome, dull, and difficult to follow. Not so "The Song of Hiawatha".

Such as the introduction and notes to this particular volume are, they do shed some light on Longfellow's sources for the material contained in "Hiawatha". The disadvantage of reading such an early edition is that these sources are stated as though generally known and accessible, which is not the case for the average modern reader who has not already made a scholarly study of the poem. These are stated this way: Schoolcraft's Algic Researches and other books, from Heckewelder's Narratives, from Black Hawk (one of the most famous Native American chiefs in U.S. history and who Longfellow associated with in Boston. Black Hawk died in 1838), and from the Ojibway chief Kahge-ga-gah-bowh, whom Longfellow entertained at his home.

Though the legends that inspired "Hiawatha" are more or less common to the Native American populations and there are references within the poem to locations throughout the United States, "Hiawatha" largely concerns itself with the Ojibways (modern spelling: Ojibwe or Ojibwa) and much of the story takes place on the southern shores of Lake Superior in Michigan. Hiawatha himself is depicted as an Ojibway of supernatural origins.

There are many similarities in the action of this poem with other known legends and narratives of other cultures. In one part, Hiawatha takes a journey to settle the score with his father, the north-west wind, who jilted his mother who later died of heartbreak that, although told swiftly and briefly, echoes the Odyssey. There are also some similarity with Greek myths concerning stars, etc. Biblical narratives are also brought to mind when Hiawatha gets swallowed by a fish, wrestles an angel-like creature which gave corn its name, and whose friend is the strongest man ever to live and has only one weakness which is fatally exploited, etc.

What may be the most remembered moments of the epic are those involving Hiawatha's relationship with Minnehaha. She was of one of the Dacotah tribes (the notes tell us that those known as the Sioux are most likely meant here) which were longtime enemies of the Ojibways and Hiawatha's marriage to her brought peace between them for a time. Lines 1-5 and 15-20 of Chapter 10, in which Hiawatha and his grandmother Nokomis discuss marriage, are possibly the most quoted passages of the whole poem.

The singular beauty, musicality, and readability of the work may be most owing to the proliferation of Native American names and terms throughout. Except place-names, these are usually explained within the text of the poem as part of the form. For the names of locations, one usually has to refer to the notes in the back or to small clues left in the text and one's knowledge of U.S. geography.

There can be no doubt of the service that Longfellow rendered in preserving these legends in surprisingly accessible form for future generations and readers. It would be beneficial to see more scholarly papers written about "The Song of Hiawatha", from both the viewpoint of the "white" majority and especially from the viewpoint of Native Americans.

Legal Disclosure: The author of the message that directed you to this page has no material connection to any person, company, product, or service mentioned in that message. http://cmp.ly/0

Spoken Word Review: Ellyn Maybe's "Rodeo for the Sheepish"

(Originally published on Yahoo! Voices on April 16, 2012)

A friend of mine said I was brave. But we all know there's a thin line between brave and stupid, and sometimes it's hard to know the difference. When Ellyn Maybe 'liked' my Facebook page, without thinking, I offered to review her latest work "Rodeo For The Sheepish." Never mind that she is a giant in the world of poetry. And never mind that she has worked with the likes of Viggo Mortenson, performed at the Glastonbury Festival (the same year as U2), has her own band, The Ellyn Maybe Band, and eats little known poets like me for breakfast (in terms of accomplishments). Brave or stupid?

One thing I came armed with to this endeavor was a similar love of poetry and music. While much of the world sees them as the same (often using the same word for both in language), the U.S. seems singular in its need to debate the point. Are they the same? If not, which is the superior art form and why? Does it somehow degrade one or the other to suggest they are the same? There is a growing legion of poets and musicians who are answering by putting music and poetry together. Musicians provide the score of either original music or cover tunes to which poets read their work. The results can vary considerably.

Ellyn Maybe teamed up with Harlan Steinberger for musical composition and Tommy Jordan of Geggy Tah for vocals for her latest answer to that debate. The end result: "Rodeo For The Sheepish." I'll cut to the chase by saying straight out this is the best of the attempts to marry poetry and music I have heard thus far.

At first, the music strikes one as 1980s pop updated for a new generation. Listen more and it grows. All true art has the ability to grow and never stop. I soon found myself choreographing for it in my mind. What better compliment is there than that? And Maybe's poetry is a deceptively light tripping through 20th Century pop culture and bent social order. She describes with painful accuracy what it is like to be a woman in today's world and what it is like to be an artist.

For me, it really gets going in the second half of the album. Tracks like "Silvia Plath," "Room Part Two," and "People" make me come back again and again. There is a magic in those tracks - a witty turn of phrase and a compelling sense of rhythm in both the poetry and the music that reverberates through the soul. By far my favorite track, however, is "Being An Artist." It is humorous, both self-deprecating and self-glorifying at once, and an overwhelming chronicle of truth. The music is contagious, joyous, begs to be danced to. Who can resist drums like those?

When I first listened to the album, I felt a sense of disappointment. But like all truly good and challenging work, it grew on me into something fabulously unique and wonderful. The world is just a tiny little bit more joyous because this album was made.

Are music and poetry the same, or at least equal? I think Ellyn Maybe's "Rodeo For The Sheepish" answers a resounding yes! As for brave or stupid, maybe the not knowing is part of what makes life a work of art in and of itself.

Buy the CD/mp3 on Amazon.
Find Ellyn Maybe on FaceBook.

Legal Disclosure: the author received a review copy or a preview of a product, service, or topic mentioned in that message. http://cmp.ly/1

A Short Conversation with Poet Kit Fryatt

(Originally published on July 10, 2008 on Yahoo! Voices.)

I first met Kit Fryatt through Livejournal.com (I have since deleted my account there) when she wrote an entry regarding an event she attended at which Bono of U2 fame read and gave her thoughts on the whole affair. Being an avid U2 fan, I was highly entertained by that entry in which she was not at all pleased. Since we share a common love of poetry, we continue to correspond and I have learned much from her over the last few years. She is an unfailing support to me poetically. She is also a very good writer as well as teacher and has been published, among other numerous journals, in the Poetry Ireland Review. As a way to give back to her, I asked her for an email interview to be published here on AC (Associated Content, later Yahoo! Voices). Without further ado, here are the results of that interview:

S. R.: Where and when were you first exposed to poetry? How did you come to love it?

K. F.: I don't remember: the first poems I heard were nursery rhymes, probably. I remember laughing and laughing at a silly rhyme my father used to say: "Spring is sprung, the grass is riz / I wonder where the birdies is?" I never got tired of that. I have memories of writing poems on a paper napkin in a restaurant when I was 7. One began "A knight / In sight / On a horse / Of course", which I think has a certain modernist flair. I learnt poems by heart at an American school for military children in Izmir, Turkey. Rose Fyleman:

I think mice are rather nice,
Their tails are long, their faces small,
They haven't any chins at all.
Their ears are pink, their teeth are white,
They run about the house at night;
They nibble things they shouldn't touch,
and no one seems to like them much,
but I think mice are rather nice.

When we were still in Turkey, my mother brought home a copy of the New Golden Treasury, not Palgrave but a new selection chosen in the 70s by Edward Leeson. Books were a special event: even in Ankara, the capital, there were only a couple of bookshops that sold English-language books. There I found:

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springeth the wude nu,
Lhude sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth
Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, sing cuccu
Ne swik thu naver nu!
Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!

That's from the 13th century, and it's really just a slightly -- ever so slightly: note that farting buck -- more sophisticated version of my dad's rhyme. I had a cult of Old England going on at the time, despite or because of being surrounded by the remains of much more ancient cultures in Asia Minor, and I was hooked. I think rhyme and repetition hooks children into poetry, but it's a sense of the strangeness of language that keeps them reading.

S.R.: Which poets are the greatest influence on your work and why?

K.F.: Not for me to say, I think. Influence is a slippery thing. You might think a poet is heavily inflected by Auden or Yeats and I mightn't hear it at all. I've never tried consciously to imitate anyone, except in parodies, but I find I'm always unconsciously imitating. Sometimes imitating very bad stuff.

S.R.: Are there non-poetic influences, such as environment, other interests, etc.?

K.F. : Of course: anything and everything can be material. That said, the Irish bardic schools allegedly encouraged their pupils to compose indoors, in darkness. There's something to be said for sensory deprivation, too.

S.R.: As an academic, do you feel that is beneficial to poetry or not, and why?

K.F.: I'm lucky: I get a lot of pleasure out of close analysis. Sometimes a poem won't really ravish me until I've done the forensics on it. That's not true for many people I think, even some who end up studying English at university. Students often complain that they dislike "dissecting" a poem; a revealing metaphor, because they see the poem as a corpse to start with. I tell them it's not dissection; it's vivisection, except you can't hurt a poem by torturing it, luckily. As for poets making their living in the academy: poets need their patrons; always have.

S.R.: Give a brief anecdote of an experience in your life or at a literary function that has impacted you as a poet.

K.F.: I think all the experiences that have made an impact on me poetically are experiences of reading poems, which isn't very interesting to talk about. Literary events are usually the reverse of inspiring, though sometimes there is free wine. The poets I know personally -- I think I should like them as well if they weren't poets.

S.R. What is it that you most hope readers will take away from your work?

K.F.: Words. In their particular order.

S.R.: Are there any projects you are working on or ideas for future projects? What makes these appealing to you as a poet?

K.F.: I'm sending myself to poetic boot-camp for the summer. Formal exercises, that sort of thing. Starting over is always bracing.

S.R.: If you could could give an aspiring poet advice in only one sentence, what would it be?

K.F.: I *am* an aspiring poet! I saw this on a medieval mazard bowl in the Cloisters in New York: "Reason bade that I should write, think much and speak little".

S.R.: You are originally from Britain, I believe, but have also lived in
Ireland and Scotland. Would you consider yourself a British poet or an
Irish or Scottish one? How do you think that experiencing these
different perspectives has shaped you as a poet?

K.F.: That's a big and dangerous question. I'm bound to offend someone. I was born in Iran, to British parents. I left when I was ten months old though -- no memories. I spent some time in the south of England, and then my parents travelled with me to Singapore and Turkey. Then I was at boarding school for a year before they finally came back when I was ten. I spent my teens in the south of England and moved to Ireland when I was 21. I've been spending a bit of time in Scotland over the last few months too. National identity -- whatever some critics may say -- I think is rarely to the forefront of a poet's mind when he or she is writing, and yet poetry turns out marked by the regional -- perhaps, rather than the national -- in all sorts of ways. Politically, I'm not a Unionist: I think the United Kingdom has come to a point now where it is no longer really sustainable. I would be happy to see an independent Scotland -- making the island of Ireland a single country has particular political and social difficulties which I think would have to be negotiated very carefully, but given that it's done equitably I think it would be desirable in the end. England and Wales will probably remain as a unit: an independent Wales isn't viable economically. The cultures of the British Isles have their distinct differences but they also share a lot. England is often (especially in Ireland) seen as a monolithic imperial nation, but it's actually very various. I see myself as English within a wider british culture. The small b is deliberate. I think the imperialist conception of Britain, along with English domination of the United Kingdom, should and will come to an end. English people often don't think about this stuff. Their relative power insulates them from it. Well, white English people. There's a very different usage of "British" by English people of colour, because they often feel that "English" is a racial as well as a national marker, whereas "British" is inclusive. I'd like to make my small-b britishness somehow cognate with that. Living in Ireland and Scotland has made me think about these things, which I mightn't have done otherwise -- they make their way into poems sometimes. Quite a lot of Hiberno-English gets into them too, and the odd Scots word which makes its way in via the Scottish ballads, which I love.


Wurm Im Apfel, a small press that Fryatt runs herself.
Find her on Goodreads.

A Brief Conversation with Irish Poet Michael O'Dea

(Originally published on July 10, 2008 on Yahoo! Voices.)

I contacted Michael first through his website. He humored a young aspiring, but somewhat shut-in, poet by agreeing to correspond with me via email. He has always been encouraging of my own writing, even while continuing to publish books of his own. Often he has been the objective reader I needed to get the most of my efforts. Valhalla: blue, as published in my book Following Hope (Xlibris, 2007), was one of those poems he helped to refine. During that process, my hard drive got a virus and I lost the poem. If not for O'Dea it would never have been published. However, he had a copy of the yet unfinished manuscript on his computer and was able to email it back to me, and thus he saved 2 1/2 years (or 3, if you count mental incubation time) worth of work from oblivion. I asked O'Dea for an interview via email to be posted here on AC (Associated Content, later Yahoo! Voices). These are the results of that interview:

S.R.: Where and when were you first exposed to poetry? How did you come to love it?

M.O.: English was my favourite subject in secondary school, I wrote a few bits and pieces back then; we had, for a while, a stunning-looking English teacher. I didn't start writing in earnest till my thirties when a friend suggested, from listening to my phraseology in speaking, that I should try writing poetry. My first attempts were published; I got cocky instantly and it was some time before others were published but I was hooked by then.

S.R.:. Which poets are the greatest influence on your work and why?

M.O.: Patrick Kavanagh is the biggest influence. He, being from rural Ireland and having the same Irish catholic upbringing, brings the same baggage with him. His territory is familiar to me. But he is a marvelous poet and caught better than any other the issues and atmosphere of twentieth century rural Ireland.

S.R.: Are there non-poetic influences, such as environment, other interests, etc.?

M.O.: Yes, so much of what I've passed through has been grist to that mill. I think the people and the countryside of Roscommon honed my sensibilities and my ear for language. Great art from the likes of Goya or Bacon has suggested the material time and time again as have musicians like Brian Eno whose soundscapes leave me free to roam like tumbleweed in a desert.

S.R.: Until recently, you were an organiser for the annual Rathmines Festival. What do you believe are the benefits and negatives of such events for poetry?

M.O.: Festivals events tend to be more casual than other arts-based events, and in festivals like the Rathmines Festival poetry readings are staged shoulder to shoulder with comedy, music, debate or whatever. As such they have the potential to reach an audience that would otherwise consider them to be too stuffy or high-brow. This is the audience poetry should be striving to reach.The biggest danger is that an hour of turgid poetry will kill them stone-dead in their seats, guaranteeing that neither they nor anyone they talk to will ever come within an ass's roar of a poetry reading again. It's vitally important that the poetry fits the audience.


S.R.: Give a brief anecdote of an experience in your life or at a literary function that has impacted you as a poet.

M.O.: There have been a number and I have referred to them during poetry readings or in the blog. An example I haven't referred to before happened when I read the following poem at a workshop.

Attitude.
Who owns the child
with the withered arm-wings,
who carries the mutation that weighs a tonne;
who, when the air is full of flight, hops
and hops and hops.

See how the children littering the yard
launch like torn pages into careless flight.
Like gulls they hog the sunlight
while a sea wrinkles with worries far below.
This is the currency.

But who owns that child;
the child with the withered arm-wings.

I chose it to get the reaction of a friend of mine whose son is confined to a wheel chair. On hearing the poem she was very upset by the image and did not see that I was condemning the objectifying of people with physical disabilities. I was taken aback, and though I didn't change the poem, I am less convinced than previously that my choice of expression is correct.

S.R.: What is it that you most hope readers will take away from your work as a whole?

M.O.: I suppose the truth is I want their admiration but I am usually conscious of wanting to spread my left-leaning political message.

S.R.: You are currently working on an anthology that will showcase the work of poets from Roscommon. Could you tell us a bit about that and what your hopes for it are?

M.O.: Since the Mayo Anthology appeared there has been a number of similar publications around the country. I'm working on a literary (all forms) anthology of writers either born in or strongly associated with the county. These include Douglas Hyde, Percy French, John McGahern, William Wilde (Oscar's dad) and Oliver Goldsmith (a disputed birthplace). I'm expecting it to be a generous beautiful book, accessible, educational and entertaining. I'm also hoping that it's publication will be a boost to Roscommon writers writing currently and to that end have recommended that it's publication be accompanied by a series of readings/workshops.

S.R.: If you could give an aspiring poet advice in only one sentence, what would it be?

M.O.: In the developing years have someone you trust, who knows poetry, to squeeze the water out of your efforts.


Read Michael O'Dea's blog.
Michael O'Dea's Website.
Buy the Roscommon Anthology.

In Defense of Free Verse

(Originally published on Yahoo! Voices on March 6, 2010.)

Free verse was first used by French symbolist poets in the late 1800s. T. S. Eliot was among the first poets writing in English to adopt it and introduced it to the English- speaking world by its French term, vers libre. He and other Modern poets adopted it in reaction to the disorientation that resulted with the advent of World War I. Since then, it has become the most used form (yes, form) of Western poetry. Many poets employ it as their default mode of expression. Because so much of free verse has been poorly written in recent years, and because confessional poetry (which free verse is closely associated with) has long since fallen out of fashion, there is a movement in the poetry world at the moment that declares it dead, used up, even inferior. Many are almost fanatically advocating the return of form as the mode of choice for 21st century poets.

But the very existence of such an ideal reveals an ignorance concerning how poetry is being practiced today and what exactly free verse (vers libre) really is. This ignorance is rather surprising when one takes into account the over-emphasis on academic degrees, professorships, and lecture posts among contemporary poets- so much so that the casual observer and beginning poet may come to think these are required for one to be a true poet.

The argument in favor of a return to form ignores two facts. One, that a large portion of contemporary poets utilise both traditional forms and free verse throughout their various oeuvres. Two, that free verse (vers libre) is itself a poetic form and, after more than a century's use, might well be considered as a traditional form in Western literature.

As for that first point, one could easily pick up the Collected volumes of any number of well known poets publishing today and see the truth of it. Many of our most beloved poets do not limit themselves either to free verse or tradional forms alone, but freely and skillfully employ anything available to them.

As for the second point, it is true that many use free verse incorrectly and lazily. Many mistakenly believe that free verse means that the poem can have no structure at all. Many poems passed off as "free verse" amount to little more than prose poems with line breaks and even stanza breaks. Some of it cannot even be loosely considered as prose poems. It would be beneficial to remind some that sentences seperated by blank spaces on the page do not make those sentences poetry. In fact, free verse is very structured and requires some skill to write in a satisfactory manner. It is a form.

Perhaps the best example of what I'm trying to clarify is the work of T. S. Eliot himself: "The Waste Land". Anyone who has taken poetry classes in any college in the U. S. has had to dissect this poem. Look closely at it again. It is written in free verse (or as Eliot himself would have called it: vers libre). But what is it that makes it liberal or liberated as a form? You will quickly see that it is not a total lack of form. In fact, it is a potpourri of forms. And that is what free verse is: it uses what is commonly refered to as the traditional forms and slips in and out of them freely. Sometimes these parts rhyme and sometimes they don't. But never is there a moment in that poem where form does not exist. One piece may be blank verse, another a variation on a sonnet. It changes. It is fluid. It is living. But it is undeniably structured.

When one realises that free verse is actually a sort of tiny collection of forms, and thereby a form in its own right, the argument that one needs to turn one's back on it as poetry in order to return to form negates itself. The sentiment that it is used up also becomes unreasonable because the problem that has brought up that sentiment is misuse (or no use at all) of free verse brought on by a collective misunderstanding of what it is. In theory and in practice, there is no limit to the variation and possible manipulations of the free verse form, just as there is no limit to the variations and possible manipulations of the sonnet (and most of the other traditional) forms. How then could it be out-of-date, undesirable to use, and time to dicard it?