rayz: Most of these boys wouldn't know how to read...
CJUnderwood: Actually, in my experience they do know how to read. They just don't,
and for good reason because beyond the purposes of enjoyment and
self-edification that reading serves for the dear writers and posters on
this blog, for most ordinary young men (and by ordinary I mean those
who don't have parents who are art dealers, stockbrokers, teachers and
high ranking company execs) reading serves no practical purpose. So they
just don't. I've been reading virtually non-stop since I was 16 (now
23) in preparation for and then when studying for my English Literature
degree; to be honest it's done nothing for me but give me a vocabulary
that makes me sound like a walking dictionary in casual conversation.
Since my father has been a mechanic for Volvo Construction Machinery for
the last thirty years, and all my friends come from similar stock, it
makes for some interesting if exasperating evenings in the local pub. If
I could have that time back and spend it playing football instead of
reading, I would gladly take it.
~
Ovid Yeats: I detect a lot of honesty on this thread, but the Love level is
hovering below buoyancy and sinking. Underwood, now you have revealed your
age, i am a lot closer to fixing a trace into your psyche as a lover
looking to infuse the affirmational buzz on the floe for those of us yet
to find their thought-fish and swim home in the mind to ones true
omphalos. That on these islands, or certainly, Ireland, the Well of Segais, is the source of anwyn and imbas,
or the ineffable literary poetic inspiration within our own
imagination. It is the dead that make us so. The anima mundi. Human
spirit and Greek world soul from which the poets of yore, that create
the foundation of the English language poetry tradition, spent their
time fishing for spoken song poems that are eternal and timeless.
Located
at the equidistant node of self-revelation and soul understanding
you alone possess, the polestar of rite and guidance one maps with as
they learn to dance thru music in time happening on the page as the
printed utterance of our source, and the sum of millions of once living
souls that randomly connected to create us and our brief flash of life
atop the sidhe pyramid of the dead that speak thru us. Or nae.
Ones life, as Milton's concurs with Amergin, is nought but fate, dán, and a poem itself. And although not all who write go on to become verse-smiths, all
literacy is essentially, poetic expression in various degrees of beauty
and eloquence. As it is ability and poetic knowledge that make a writer
so, and Morrison's deposit above is but one from many he will create in
his career with the keypad, and is lite and fluff.
However,
whilst it will never be the tipping piece that caused
Jonathan to win the imaginary Art correspondent of all time award, more
importantly than that, one detects that the raw psychic weight imbuing
this piece, the swirling abstract force of Johnnies mind which has been
delineated ontop the floe for our perusal and critical response, is one
of Love.
And i do not say this tongue in cheek or facetiously, as the piece
leaves us not facing a call to arms or to make a supremely subliminal
decision concerning the affairs of wo/men, but to be happy and go a bit
daft at the weekend, and as a young person Jonathan's mind will carry
little more than the wish to enjoy life, be it skinning up, boozing or
cruising.
Most senior bores on this rag talk with more skill at combining
words, attempting to paint the hard-working people of pen-craft, as being more imporatant than us
mere mortals, just because they write. But what they have not learnt,
and what Jon has, is to harness to the positive within, the Love not
hate.
Worse still, these armchair know-alls that would
have us believe their utterances carry the import of a greater gravitas,
beyond what words
appear on the page. The supreme Yeatsean selfishness of wondering if men
went out and shot other men as a result of your words.
But
whereas an argument can be raised for Yeats' arrogance, given the
particular circumstances in which his incoherent bundle of accident and
chance passed
itself off as the most important contemporary global poet composing with
the English language in bubbalin Dublin teworn, when in the fullness of
his poetic maturity - the other bores here on this forum have not
exhibited such obvious evidentiary support with our own letters, merely
the
petty tepid mores of secure middle-class hacks spouting off about what
we witness remotely and electronically.
Not experience in the brutal flush. The music
of what happens sung here by them without learning is absent and negative. Jon is singing of
the music that happens in his own life, however humble or easy it may seem to be fo us
dreamers pretending we are something we aren't, that mock, though we be the
same.
For what is Art but the supreme and terrible Love that is beyond all
ken and comprehension, the polar force of frozen stella scope and
mirrored in the omphalas of molecular proportion?
What Love came from this cold beauty is but the act of very
consciousness itself, live in the waking breath which guides us through
whatever form and state within the greater play and field of eternal
energy and bio-electro-magnetic flux human life is a derivitive of.
And i think it is important here to inject a note on which to draw
ones critical datum; the intellectual first sight and recording within,
what collection of pyschological proofing mechanisims one assembles as
they tread their divinely uiique path of Art.
The ineffable and literary something within that represents the
deepest valency furthest from quotidian consciousness in which the lower
emanations of existential reality presents itself to us whilst in our
waking form, before the womb reclaims us and we snap back and retreat to
shade, our brief rehearsal for cosmic fame continued as ghosts haunting
for peace.
And maybe perhaps for a portion of the phantasmagoria in
which to be of use to the diviners and prophets seeking to sway humanity
at the seance and dig which is the very life force of Art.
The casting of fools into an ever less remote unknown, should ones
practice have flowered in the sacred ground of whatever discipline one
claims to have trained in.
Mine is language. I am
training to be a professor of poetry, several more grades ahead of me. A
full time bore and
trainee saviour, street-corner rakehelly boy back from the pages time
forgot. And a three-quarter Mayo, quarter Cork soul trapped in the body
of a working-class Lancastrian spacer at the fame academy with fifteen
minutes to look
society directly in the eye and fear not, nor simper and beg ones
audience, but to ignore them and walk on air, as Seamus Heaney famously
wrote, in his poem The Gravel Walks;
and what, I suspect, may well be his epitaph, carved on some slate grey
stone of Ulster - and walk on with hope in your heart, against the
better judgement of others that would have you believe, they know better
and best of all about poetry and fíliocht.
For what is Art but acting the bollix and caring not what people think?
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