The Singed Wings Of ‘Icarus’ April 24, 2009
Posted by bazmcstay in Arts, College, Poetry.Tags: Ballsbridge, Barry McStay, Brendan Gildea, Conor McPherson, Derek Mahon, Dodder Waters, Frank McGuinness, Funding, Government, Icarus, Ireland, Literary Magazine, Louis MacNeice, Martin McDonagh, Michael Longley, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, Poem, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, The Abbey Theatre, The Arts, Trinity College Dublin
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Last year I had the privilege of being published in Icarus, Trinity College Dublin’s literary magazine, one which has a special affinity for poetry. Such luminaries as Derek Mahon and Michael Longley cut their stanzaic teeth in Icarus and it remains an honour to be printed on its pages. I was a little taken aback today when I received an email from the current editor of the magazine. I had submitted a piece and it has been shortlisted to appear in the next edition but I was informed that this was “reliant on funding”. Time and again, people in the arts are left standing with a begging bowl at the first sign of economic unrest. Be it the Abbey Theatre or a small student publication, each and every artistic outlet suffers from the constant affliction known as “not having enough money“.
Icarus goes to print only twice a year. It averages less than 50 pages. It is not printed on the highest quality paper but is an elegant publication and one with a fine history. To think that it may be a victim of the Recession is as unthinkable as the National Gallery closing its doors. Hyperbole? I don’t think so. It is the death of the small publications such as Icarus which are indicative both of the lack of attention to the art of poetry, especially, and a “who cares” approach to the artistic world. I’m a big fan of sport. I’m a big fan of television and the film industry. Yet while these get large government subsidies (which, granted, are also being cut in these times, but then again, everything is), poetry, one of Ireland’s premier exports, one of our greatest national assets is allowed to waste away. It gives a lie to our great literary history, our parading of Kavanagh and MacNeice, Heaney and Mahon, Longley and Muldoon and the rest as great Irish artists, great success stories, personified national pats-on-the-back, when we allow such little defeats to pass unnoticed.
Hopefully, Icarus will survive, despite its doomed moniker. Hopefully the arts will not be allowed to decay and die as sadly can happen in times such as these. Ireland is taking the sporting world by storm, notably in rugby and golf and sport will continue to be funded because of this. Yet some of the biggest names in the UK and Hollywood are Irish actors and Irish playwrights are among the elite – McPherson, McDonagh, McGuinness. But these successes abroad must not be taken to indicate great wisdom and care in the treatment of the arts at home, because the arts continue to be the soft target most easily wounded by cutbacks. And poetry is perhaps the biggest sufferer of all. Once the greatest of art forms, it is now overlooked and to our national discredit.
Anyway, here is the poem which was published in Icarus last year. I must thank Brendan Gildea, then the editor of the magazine, for taking the figary to allow my piece to pass into the great history of Icarus. It wasn’t a poem I had pinned my hopes on but he saw an ugly duckling beauty in it worth honouring. Hopefully, funding-permitting, I might have a second such honour in the near future.
Dodder Waters
The Dodder runs under Ball’s Bridge near my flat,
Widening, clambering over rocky shallows,
Shouting nonsense, falling into step towards Lansdowne.
Always seems a merry little river, flighty, sprightly,
Nothing doddery about it if you watch it go its way.
Last night – this morning, to be honest – I walk,
Still-warm, moon-bright, me-smiling secret walk,
I pause on the bridge to look into the river.
Cars pass with crumbling explosion;
I tune them out. Let current flow through my ears,
Carry me down, lovely, dark, stony, watery places.
With my view from the bridge, I see –
Rocks poke through, make out patterns:
Here street-lamp-lit patch, surface-deep, blaring up,
Splash of white-light, glinting prettily for anyone;
There, darker pool, somewhat deeper, somehow, now, visible.
Somehow, now, I see river-bed, pebbles, weeds
And rubbish. I wish for coins I can drop, splash, down,
Into lovely, dark, stony, watery, somewhat deeper places
Which seem much murkier but tell a clearer story.
Christmas Day December 25, 2008
Posted by bazmcstay in Advent, Personal Favourites, Poetry.Tags: Christmas, Lemon Zest And Breadcrumbs, New Year, Poem
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Nothing much needs to be said today. But don’t forget that Christmas spirit is simply human kindness focused on one day of the year – there’s no reason to restrict it to December 25th. And, while I don’t rate it very highly, here’s a wee poem of mine which I wrote 6 years ago while I was still in secondary school. It’s Christmas for me. Whatever Christmas is for you, enjoy it. Merry Christmas and God bless for the New Year.
Lemon Zest And Breadcrumbs – Christmas Eve 2000
I
Our jolly little gathering that eve:
My brother, just thirteen, and I, but two
Christmases older; our mother-always busy,
Always elegant, flitted gently like a butterfly
Around the cosy kitchen; her sister, my aunt,
Absorbed by my sibling’s side at the table.
Breadcrumbs and lemon zest; what else
Did they combine in that wonderful stuffing?
The rich flurry of those special smells,
Those which one only smells at Christmas,
Permeated the room and our eager noses.
II
The cat, wicked and wise, yawned;
She slunk stealthily, shadow-like, slipping
Up onto a chair at that small table.
She looked and smelled, but dared not touch
The fragrant ingredients of the imminent feast.
She, like us all, delighted in the time of year.
A robin, his breast as red as holly berries,
Appeared on the glinting, icy windowsill.
His inquiring face peered at us through the glass
As though waiting to be invited inside. A traveller,
Drawn by the light of our Christmas candle.
III
Midnight mass at the college drew us away
From our labours-“Midnight mass at nine?”
My brother always asked that. I said a reading.
Driving slowly along the peaceful country road,
We passed hedgerows, glistening, frosted, in the moonlight.
Stepping from the car on our return,
I felt compelled to pause and gaze skywards,
At the black sheet of night, sprinkled with starry specks,
Sown like seeds across the vastness of the sky.
The bright crescent moon, lying on its back
Smiled down at me from its heavenly post.
IV
Our tree stood proudly in the sitting room.
Its lights blinked at me, arrayed like the stars above.
I stood and stared, overjoyed by Christmastime.
I ran my fingers softly over the piano keys,
Quietly filling the air with tinkling music.
The cat now lay, curled before the still-warm hearth,
And I could smell lemon zest and breadcrumbs
And something else. I ran my eyes around the room:
The beautiful tree; the presents beneath it;
My gaze rested on the crib, upon the piano.
I wished the baby Jesus ‘Happy Birthday’.
The Poetic Me November 14, 2008
Posted by bazmcstay in Arts, Poetry.Tags: Barack Obama, College, Creative Writing, I, Life, Me, Metaphor, Poetry, Rhyme
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Ok, so it’s been a long time since I blogged, and for that I am sorry. No, please don’t beat me. I have simply been attempting to recover my sense of awareness. What sense of awareness? you say. Well, the sense of awareness that I have a college degree to earn by the end of this year, and a life to attempt to plot out beyond that.
I’m not convinced that previous sentence is entirely grammatically correct, a fact which does not bode well for my BA in English Literature.
Anyway, I have also been attempting to find a way to put into words exactly how delighted I was by the election of Barack Obama. The previous post kind of took lots of other people’s words, mashed up a bit of a collage and avoided having to express anything myself beyond the implications of this conglomeration. I’m still not able to go beyond “It’s wonderful”. I’m waiting for the inspiration to verbalise the inspiration of it all.
Usually, when I can’t express something to my satisfaction, I flee to the infinitely more pliable regions of poetry, where you can indirectly say whatever the hell you want to but can’t say directly. Ah, you say, there was bound to be a catch, he couldn’t be all politics and sport, he couldn’t be that cool. Poetry, it makes sense. Well, yeah, basically, I’m a coward – I hide meaning in rhymes. Like a closed book, you won’t get to see what’s inside, you’ll only get a flashy blurb which drops a few hints.
I dip in and out of reading poetry, and some resonates with me and some doesn’t. The poetry that resonates with me most is the poetry I write myself. Not because I’m conceited and think it’s literary gold, but because it captures moments and emotions which I felt and can feel again, which are released upon rereading the poem. Well, that’s the basic idea anyway – I think it’s practically impossible, but a great theory. Basically, I like poems for themselves, as beautiful pieces of writing, but I also like being able to understand poems and the poems I understand best are the ones I wrote myself. Na-na-na-na-na, I get it and you don’t.
Well, no, that’s not the point either. Because I like people to read the odd poem of mine now and again and to like them and to say those magic words “I really connected with it” – except that sounds so pretentious, so maybe the more magic words “It struck a chord with me” or “I feel that way sometimes too”. And they don’t know exactly everything behind the poem – they don’t have to. All they need is to find something in those words I have arranged which rings a bell for them.
I took a 6-week course in creative writing last year and was told by the lady running the course that “we need to eradicate that ‘I’ from your poems”. What? I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite heard that. (That’s three Is in one sentence, so she was clearly fighting a losing battle). What she explained to me was that the poet should not be so intrusive as to dominate a poem through constant Is and Mes. Metaphor, she enthused, it’s all about the metaphor.
Metaphor me arse.
Ok, not too poetic and not what I think at all. I loves a good metaphor, I does. But the thing is this. I don’t see any reason to expunge myself from what I write. Most of my poems are about me. Or things I did. Or things I saw. Or things I think. And if I want to express these things through a nice extended metaphor, fine. But if I want to be there, in the poem, while all these things are happening, that should be fine too. I’m a big believer in the power of storytelling, and if the best way – or, sometimes, the only way – to tell a story is to use that poetic Me, then nothing’s going to stop me telling it.
This all sounds terribly egocentric. Maybe it is. Actually, yes, it definitely is. All about me, me, me. But that’s what art often is – not that some of the scrawlings that vomit from my pen are art. But art needs an artist. Some of the best poems - and song lyrics too – are brimful of Mes and Is. And that doesn’t stop other people from “connecting” – after some period of buffering, presumably. But there are no cries of “out of the way, poet, I can’t connect with you there” or “if only this were completely metaphorical and bereft of the word I, then there might be a chance of an emotional spark being lit within me”.
I think most people have a Poetic Me – or I, more appropriately. Most people have a side to their personality that finds a certain wonder in unexpected snowfall, in spotting the Plough among the stars, in walking on the beach at sunset, in singing in the rain, in a kiss. Some people just hide it more than others. And some of us let it out for the occasional wander among the words of a poem. I’m not ready to see Me put down just yet.
