As/Is







8.17.2015


Advice to the newly official poet, Doowred Nukcaj

Desmond's words as Ovid Yeats, 8 Jul 2007 15:37, comment on the Guardian Culture pages book-blog by Jonathan Morrison, How about a genuinely dangerous book for boys?

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?