Saturday, March 28, 2009

JOHNNY WAS

an be da hokey I was too and I never realised till years later twas Bobo Marley not Jake Burns words we were diggin but there we were me cousin Sean and me in the roundhouse or was it Hammersmith Odeon I can't remember but it was Londinium anyways and our ears bleedin from Stiff little Fingers and our heads buzzin and me feelin good in me new Sham 69 style leather Jacket (40 quid from the Kings Road )then this mighty spikey haired cockney Punk shouts 'One more time' 'one more time what ?' says I quizically but no one can hear me and the giant Cockney has me by the shiny new white lapel(just like Jimmy Pursey had on TOTP the week before) and is draggin me forward in a mass wave of skinny spikey bodies only he's on the stairs and I'm on the balcony overlooking a 20 ft drop to the exit below and before I know it I'm over the balcony's brass railin and headin for a split skulled embrace with the floor when me cousin grabs me by the ankles holdin tight and i puke coz I'm terrified and because I've had a few cans of Skol and a nip O whiskey and sumptin had to give in the tug O war and it turned out to be me loverly new leatherso jacket that was pulled offa me back and oer me head by the fist O the Cockerney into the writhin mass of surgin bodies never to be seen again and me train ticket and a tenner in the pocket.Feck.

Women are from Longford, Men are from Louth.

He says ,she says ,part one.

(She's going to Aldi.)

She says: Do you want anything?

He says: Yes. Get me 4 cans of Saint Etienne lager a bottle of white wine and a packet of BBQ flavour tortilla chips.

One hour later.

She says: Here's your beer and chips ,is this wine ok?

He says: Yeah, that's grand, thanks.


He says , she says, part two

(He's going to Aldi)

He says: Do you want anything ?

She says: yeah.

He says: What would you like?

She says: Somethin nice -surprise me.

He (groaning inwardly) says: What , some wine or something?

She says: Yeah.

He says: Would you like Red or white?

She says: Either, I don't mind.

He says: Right. Any snacks?

She says: Ok.

He says: What type?

She says: Nothin Junky , oh ,and not those awful BBQ tortillas you had last time!

He says checkin: Right so , bottle of wine and a healthy type of snack - no tortillas?

She says: Yeah.

One hour later.

He says: There you go ,nice bottle of red , not the cheap stuff and some olive breadsticks.

She says: Breadsticks? Breadsticks ? Didn't they have anything else?

He says: Not really just junky crisps and tortillas.

She says: Why didn't you get the tortillas then.

He (sphincter tightening almost imperceptibly) says: But you said you didn't want tortillas.

She says: Yeah, I know but that was before I knew you were getting me breadsticks, I mean breadsticks, perleeese.

He begins to say: But.....

She interupts: And Red wine!! You know I don't like red wine, together after all these years and you still don't know what I like and don't like!

He says; But you had (a little too much) red wine last week at Brendan's.

She says: Because that was a party -that's different, surely you know the difference?

He ( blood pressure rising rapidly) says: Well look , Aldi is closed now, but I could go to Tesco's and get whatever you want.

She says: No it's too late the nights ruined- I don't know why I ever married you.




Wednesday, March 25, 2009

FALLING BETWEEN THE STOOL PIGEONS

Poetry world

Always turning always spinning ,dizzy-making,
jump on,wide-eyed innocent, if you dare,
Devil may care, but that’s about all,
the thrill is the fall, my friend.
See it in their eyes another step nearer the glistering prize
It’s a bare knuckled Haiku
Three steps to heaven, perhaps immortality.
And what of the hopes of the ringside seat,
the outside looking in, the better view,
of the ego splattered canvas
showered in coins and plaudits and rubbed shoulders.
Have you heard me in the dim lit booths?
Welcome to our enlightened world,
there’s the bell, my friends ,dig the hole.
Get on, or get off the stage,
Don’t spoil our chance.
we are ‘ the poets ’ -we cannot wait

STOOL PIGEON

Looking at all the stools around me
I see none of them fit
I fall between them all.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

AND THE WINNER IS.......

LOng pause ,even longer pause....Mr Dominic Rivron. Many congratulations to him,his FREE copy of the double bumper issue of IOTA poetry magazine will be winging it's way to him shortly. As the only entrant into the competition the odds were marginally in his favour but nonetheles sMr River Run did very well to correctly identify the heads as,Brendan Behan (Bronze statue near cross guns bridge Dubbo) Samuel Beckett (graffitto on a wall London) and Oliver Cromwell (Death Mask Warwick Castle - no photography allowed in there, so keep it to yourselves ;)

Monday, March 23, 2009

MORE CLUES TO THE IOTA COMPETITION


They are all dead. Two of them were famous Irish writers one of them -CROMWELL! -wasn't.
Oh, and there may or may not be a (some) runner-up prize(s) or then again ,also, perhaps yeah!

SAD NEWS

From The Times
March 23, 2009
Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide

Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent

The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.
Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.
He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Dr Hughes’s death adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with morbid fascination for two generations.
Times Archive
1978: In search of Sylvia
Related Links
Obsession set limits on Sylvia Plath's poetry
Charity shop finds rare Plath poetry edition
He was only a baby when his mother died but she had already sketched out what he meant to her in one of her late poems.
In Nick and the Candlestick, published in her posthumous collection Ariel, she wrote: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.”
Later his father wrote of how, after Plath’s death, their son’s eyes “Became wet jewels,/ The hardest substance of the purest pain/ As I fed him in his high white chair”. Neither he, nor his sister nor their Poet Laureate father could ever fully escape the shadow cast by Plath’s suicide in 1963 and the personality cult that then sprang up around her memory.
Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.
In 1969 he suffered another terrible loss when his mistress gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide.
Plath’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip.”
Her turbulent marriage to Hughes became a modern myth, from their first meeting at Cambridge where he kissed the young American Fulbright scholar “bang smash on the mouth” and she bit his cheek so hard that it bled, through the whirlwind secret wedding all the way to its catastrophic ending.
Plath’s suicide in effect froze her children in time so that in the public memory they remained a one-year-old and a two-year-old lying in their cots, carefully sealed off from the gas leaking over their mother in the room next door.
Hughes did everything that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were teenagers.
Frieda Hughes reemerged into the public gaze in her twenties when her first children’s book was published. She has also been a successful artist, poet and newspaper columnist and has spoken and written about her parents and her own own struggles with depression, ME and anorexia.
Her brother never resurfaced in the same way, but his life had also moved on. A family friend said last night: “Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.”
Frieda Hughes was travelling to Alaska yesterday but said in a statement: “It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.”
He was an evolutionary ecologist who specialised in the study of stream fish and travelled thousands of miles across Alaska on research trips.
“His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.”
Shortly before his death, he left his post at the university to set up a pottery at home and “advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay”.
Although there is acceptance that depression can be inherited, there is no known suicide gene that could connect Dr Hughes's death to his mother’s.
Paul Farmer, the chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity, said: “Suicide is a much more complicated event than simply being a question of genetics, but there is some evidence that if a member of your family has taken their life there can be a higher risk of people doing the same. However, it is often absolutely to do with what’s happening in the here and now rather than any urge that is more deeply rooted.”
Dr Hughes’s parents split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic wife of another poet. The winter that followed was unrelentingly harsh. Struggling to get by on very little money as a single parent with two young children, Plath’s fragile mental state collapsed. She wrote many of her finest poems in a final burst of creativity and killed herself early one February morning.
Six years later Wevill, who had lived with Hughes and the children for much of the intervening period, also gassed herself. It was March 23, 1969 – 40 years ago today – and her death differed from Plath’s in one appalling respect: she had murdered four-year-old Shura in the process.
To the frustration of biographers, Hughes stayed silent about his own response to these events until almost the end of his life. Then, in 1995, he published half a dozen poems that he had written for Wevill, hidden among the 240 poems in his New Selected Poems.
In 1998 he finally unveiled in Birthday Lettersa series of 88 poems examining his life with Plath and his reaction to her death. Serialised in The Times,the poems recast his reputation from a man who had shown no apparent contrition for his wife’s fate into something far more complex.
In a letter to the poet Kathleen Raine he said he wished that he had published them earlier. “I might have had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life.”
Hughes dedicated Birthday Letters to his children. Unusually for a book of poetry, it became a runaway best-seller, shifting more than 150,000 hard-back copies in Britain alone. He did not live to see it awarded the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year award, as he died of cancer the previous October. It was Frieda, not Nicholas, who accepted the prize on his behalf.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

FREE COPY OF IOTA MAGAZINE




In the next week or so I will be buying a copy of the double issue Iota poetry mag and they are giving away a free copy for every purchase.Here at the poeples benevolent republic of EEjit we believe in sharing and being kind to people especially old ladies.With this in mind as King of the republic (iknow that's a contradiction, but I'm boss and I can be what I like, right?)Iam holding a competition to win the free copy of this magazine.Alls ya haff to do is identify the 3 peopes pictured above or below or wherever the feck they end up.In the event of a tie or no-one correctly identifying all 3, all names of those who had a go(if any) will be put into plastic bottles and floated down the river,the first botle past the bridge will be ajudged winner.Should two or more bottles cross the finish line at the same time, the joint winners will be invited to a sword fight on the castle battlements,first contender to sever an opponents limb will win the prize.( NB, Killing an opponent will result inautomatic disqualification and the prize being awarded to the next-of-kin of the deceased.) All travel arrangements and medical bills must made ,and be paid for, at the contestants own expenseFree accommodation ,however,will be provided in the castle dungeons.Good luck to you all,may the best man /woman/hybrid win.Terms and conditions apply and offers may be changed addended or rescinded at my whim but in all likelyhood won't be.
Ps the third person above is perhaps a little harder to identify so a musical clue may be provided at my discretion. All hail king EEjit!

Thursday, March 12, 2009

NOT JUST TED, BUT WILLIAM BURROUGHS TOO

in a previous post 'words the poets nemesis' or some feckin thing look it here-

http://totalfeckineejit.blogspot.com/2009/02/language-is-poets-nemesis.html

I was just wafflin on as usual spewin any old shi that came into me head , just the flotsam and jetsam washing up on the barren shores of my desert island mind, or so ithought for I can see clearly now that I was in some kind of communication with Billy Burrows.Look what I came across out in Netsville.

William Burroughs: ' (I) feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.
The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms — this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color. We can translate word and letter into color — Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote “words” can be read in silent color. In other words, man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.'

I wonder what deado poet/writer will get in touch next?.I'd love it if Brendo Behan had a few words.(hope it's not Sam Bonkers Becko ,or Jim-Jingle- me-jangle-jewellery-jewellery-Joyceo,though, that would be barking ,man.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Radio disaster spells(possible) end of the world*

* source Guiney's book of bollix.
Sorry folks it should have been Elvo Costellis' 'Radio, radio' not Brucelossis Springtime's 'My hometown'
I heartily apologise to anybody who may possibly be affected by the end of the world.

Friday, March 6, 2009

There's a fly on the radio

Next week (March 9th-13th) stories from two anthologies from the stinging fly will be broadcast on RTE Radio One's The Book on One, as follows: Monday, March 9th "Soul Mate " by Viv McDade, read by Julie Sharkey (from Let's be Alone Together) Tuesday, March 10th "Avenging the Stilts Man" by Colin O' Sullivan, read by Frank Twomey (from These Are Our Lives) Wednesday, March 11th "Hen Night" by David Butler, read by Fiona McGarry (from These Are Our Lives) Thursday, March 12th and Friday, March 13th (in two parts, over two nights) "The Dog's Life" by Ragnar Almqvist, read by Liam Heffernan (from Let's Be Alone Together) The Book on One goes out every night after the 11pm news and sport. It will be possible to listen live on the internet - the show also has an archive of all the books it features. http://www.rte.ie/radio1/thebookonone/

Incidently the photo on the front cover of 'Let's be alone together' was taken by meself and is probably the best book cover in the world-ever-and that's official as in The Guineys book of bollix. More shockingly it was also one of the many images I lost in the Dell from Hell black Tuesday disaster of 2008 ,the biggest single disaster to strike Ireland since Keano walked out in Saipan *

* Sourced from The Guiney's book of bollix.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

A{POLOGY

Be da way I totallyfeckin apologise for the awful dirge of a song by Bryan , er , sorry no ,Ryan Adams, but i seem to have got myself locked into a thing where i have to post a song pertinent to the post and if i don't it will be the end of the world .Not metaphorically but literally! So yu can recognise the awkward position I was in.It stays , for now, but as soon as I change the post , it will be deleted. This was a public health notice from the health and safety board of the pepes rpubo Eejit

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

TED HUGHES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE


Yep ,it's true ,I think Teddy boy may be trying to communicate with me.I've always been a big fan of TH ,well i say always but in reality that's only the last few years since I developed an interest in writin stuff that is occasionally mistaken fer poetry .(All that glisters my friends) Anyway come here, listen, I had lost all appetite for writing , not a block exactly, worse, much worse -no desire to write at all and no regret or frustration at the loss.Then I started reading the letters of Ted Hughes again ,(700 pages in total and I had only got to about page 150 previously) when lo and behold ,inspired by the magic of the words ,the creative urge returned as if absorbed from the pages in some form of mystic osmosis. Now clearly Ted's powers aren't what they used to be, for my writing ,though restored ,was no better than before.Either that or the transmission from heavenly Ted to earthbound EEjit was losing it's effevescence through the ether.Now Ted was a great follower of Mythology and the occult and a great believer(and forecaster) of horoscopes and the ouija board , himself and Sylvia often looking for messages from' The Great Beyond' (No not the Navan Road) Clearly Ted needed a cypher, a channel, or some kind of medium to reach me and I think he may have chosen our dog , Molly the Collie.Highly intelligent animals ,like Molly, can sense spirits and even actually see ghosts.Have you ever seen a dog in a room just solidly staring at an apparently vacant space? Well know you know why! Anyway Molly has been exhibiting some unusual behaviour of late -for example there was a clatter of books on the floor in the west wing library on the third floor ,here in the castle ,and one of these books was 'Birthday letters' by Ted Hughes and molly continually licked this book alone whilst ignoring all others.She has also peed on a book by Germaine Greer.But the most extraordinary thing of all is that of her poo.Now in the EEjit family we have a history of studying poo long before that scotts lady on the telly.As I child we had a commode ,or shit-box as we used to call it, and Aunt Mary used to empty this out early every morning and pass comment about your bowel movements and the state of your health accordingly.As a matter of interest , she could also tell your fortune from your stool ,much like people used to do with tea leaves. Many's the great night we had here in the castle years ago when a few neighbours would call round for a game of cards and a bit of shit fortune telling. Anyway I always have a good look at Molly's poo to see her state of health and over the weeks the incredible and unmistakeable realisation slowly dawned on me that her poo was actually formed in the shape of letters of the alphabet and i was in fact receiving messages from the other world ! Clearly Molly was acting as some form of canine faecal ouija board.The first word of these poo messages was TED , clear as day.Since then her poo's have gone on to spell out THIS IS.. I can't wait for the next installment watch this space!
As for the 'poetry' I'm not sure i have the ability, the inclination ,the desire or heart for it at all ,in fact I sometimes wonder if I'm just going through the motions.