Radio Silence

If you've read my Sean Duffy novels you'll know that, I, like Duffy, am a bit of a music obsessive. I like all kinds of music: classical, pop, rock, opera and my daughters have explained to me the differences between someone like Keisha (a hack) and Taylor Swift (apparently a rather good song writer). Last year an old friend of mine, Dan Stone, offered me the opportunity to write a piece for a new journal he was starting up called Radio Silence whose tag line is: Literature and Rock & Roll. In the inaugural Radio Silence I was very happy to do an essay on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks which I consider to be the best Irish pop album ever and one of the greatest albums of all time. I was also tickled to be sharing space in Radio Silence #1 with my old flat mate Alicia Stallings who was given a Macarthur 'Genius' grant in 2012 for her poetry and translations. Alicia wrote a lovely essay in RS#1 on her youth in Athens, Georgia when the scene around REM was starting to explode. 
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Radio Silence #1 evidently did well because Radio Silence #2 (that I got this week) is bigger, longer, more colourful and has a lot of heavy hitters inside: Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, David Remnick, Ray Bradbury et. al. I've written an essay for RS#2 on the Radiohead song "Creep" which begins thusly: 

One of the late comedian Patrice O’Neal’s most watched videos on YouTube is a short radio interview he gave on KITS San Francisco where he hilariously dissects Radiohead’s song Creep and wonders about the strange power Creep seems to have over white men of a certain age. He speculates that it digs deep into the confusion and angst of Caucasian males in America, perhaps mining some rich seam of inadequacy, helplessness and loserdoom. For O’Neal, Creep and the movie Fight Club are the holy grails of contemporary American Whiteness. Black men, O’Neal says, don’t react to Creep or Fight Club in this strange obsessive way, but for young white males these two cultural touchstones describe perfectly what it is to be a man in an increasingly complicated, gender neutral, multi-ethnic world.

I first saw Radiohead play Creep in September 1992 at The Venue Club in Oxford on the same night that parts of the music video for the song were shot. I wasn’t that impressed with the group, who I hadn’t heard of before, and who seemed to be rather posh boarding school boys completely out of step with the times. As many of us saw it back it then real music, authentic music, was the blue collar stuff we were hearing from Seattle bands such as Nirvana who had triumphantly closed the Reading Festival a couple of weeks previously. Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke came from different planets. Cobain was a homeless junkie who had lived under a bridge in Aberdeen, Washington, whereas it seemed that the worst thing that had ever happened to Yorke was a bad experience with the bleach bottle in the hairdressing salon...

You can read the rest and a lot of other great stuff in RS#2 available at all good book and magazine shops.

The Voice Of Poetry In The Conversation Of Mankind

Alicia Stallings

I've been thinking a lot about poetry over the last week or so. Attending that Sinead Morrissey poetry reading in Belfast probably started the ball rolling, although I've always been fascinated by poetry and the lives of the poets. As is standard Irish practice (or at least it was in my day) we began memorizing huge quantities of verse from the age of about 11 onwards, and tucked away in my head, are half a dozen Yeats poems as well Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Robert Frost, Auden etc. Like any sensible person I stopped memorizing poetry once I left high school but I started again a couple of weeks ago as a sort of new year's resolution. A poem a week for the year is my plan and so far I've given myself some relatively simple stuff that rhymes and is straightforward to remember:

Week 1: And The Days Are Not Full Enough - Ezra Pound (which I've reproduced below in full just to show you how easy this game is)


And the days are not full enough,
And the nights are not full enough,
And life slips by like a field mouse,
      Not even shaking the grass. 

Week 2. I Died For Beauty - Emily Dickinson
Week 3. Cut Grass - Philip Larkin
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Why memorise poems? Well it's fun for one thing. And poetry is an important way of looking at the world. I didn't study English literature in college but I did study philosophy and was impressed by the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott who wrote a famous essay entitled, The Voice Of Poetry In The Conversation Of Mankind, which was a sort of plea for the liberty of poets to pursue their vision and their method in a busy age of science and 'progress'. The essay isn't online anywhere that I can find but it's worth reading if you can find the book "Rationalism In Politics And Other Essays" where it appears.
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A few weeks ago an old friend of mine Alicia Stallings sent me her latest collection of poems called Olives. Alicia is the only professional poet that I know. She's won numerous prizes, including the prestigious Guggenheim "Genius" Fellowship. Olives is a beautiful collection of verse, sui generis, but perhaps influenced by the likes of Anne Carson and other neo classicists. Alicia was born in Athens, Georgia and lives in Athens, Greece which I imagine is as fine a place as any for a working poet. 
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I hope this little blogpost has got you thinking about poetry too. Why don't you try and memorize a short poem today? Trust me it's not difficult and you'll do yourself a world of good. You could even write some poems. (Don't worry if you can't think of anything, never forget what Roger Ebert said "the muse visits during the writing process not before.") If you want to read some good poetry nothing could be easier as most of the famous dead poets are online in various different places, here, for example. Of course you can get the Oakeshott, Stallings and Sinead Morrissey books at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk but maybe even better you could order them for your local library and let the librarians know that there is a section of the public still out there who recognize the importance of poetry in the great conversation of mankind. 

Tulips At Thanksgiving

Of course its Thanksgiving Weekend in America. I nearly forgot. Its high spring here in Australia. We had three days of ninety degree temperatures this week and then a humid rain yesterday and today. On my walk this morning I saw four cockatoos, several green parrots and a garden filled with tulips. It doesn't feel like Thanksgiving at all.
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Maybe you're already dreading the winter? I know how that feels after 8 years in Denver. But fear not, the Earth will spin on its ellipse and your spring will come.
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Meantime here's a lovely poem from an old flatmate of mine, Alicia Stallings, originally published in Poetry Magazine.

Tulips
by A.E. Stallings

The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,


Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,


Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.


The way they’re somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,


The one who can’t tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.