There is a Salmon-
pink cloud in the sky tonight,
gently dissolving.
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poetry
Some Kind of Bohemia
I’ve put this sampler together while I work on the new one. As I don’t write by the yard I have no idea when it will be ready. That’s the trouble and the joy of not knowing where a story is taking you until you get there.
I called this Some Kind of Bohemia because I like the sound of it. It contains samples from Drinking in the Park, The Company of Thieves, and Online Cupid, as well as links to the freebies, Teach Yourself to Live and Examine Your Zip.
Please feel free to share this with whomever you choose.
The photograph was taken by Jelena Demchenkova and is used with permission. You can find more of her work here.
Some day I might even write a real book with this title, but for now here is Some Kind of Bohemia.
Writing School
Coming home on the bus yesterday a poem filled my mind. That might be a dramatic way of putting it, but still…
The poem is called Hollowman and I wrote it in 1992. I was twenty-two and my writing was full of teenaged angst. In my teens I wrote about sex I wasn’t having and politics I didn’t understand. I started writing poetry when I was twenty-one and holding myself to a higher standard I thought if I used straightforward language it couldn’t be any good. I was part of a writers group, as a rule, when I read my work, the response was silence or a considered nodding of the head. The only, let’s call it verbal feedback, came when I joined a new group; I read out a new poem, a piece I was really proud of, and someone said, ‘That’s shit.’
A few years later living in London, I was going through all my poems, I had a couple of hundred, and decided it was time to find a publisher. I didn’t submit to magazines, I suppose I thought they would never accept my work. Instead I compiled 40 poems into a book which I called Buddy, Can You Spare Me and sent it off to Henry Rollins. I never heard anything back and a few months later I left London.
As I write I remembered before London, I submitted a manuscript to Gallery Books because they were the best poetry publisher in Ireland. I knew so little at the time that I had double spaced everything!
Hollowman
Screaming dream machines
Collide in ecstacy,
Dreams are there to dream
Dreams are there to realise.
The dance of the Hollowman
With a beauty trip
And an empty can.
In the sudden silent stillness
We see and feel the shake,
This attracts us
And repel us
And propels us
Into motion.
The Hollowman can dance
And his lips can move,
But his hands are empty.
——
My writing has changed now, and maybe within the next year I’ll have enough poems to start submitting to magazines.
As I said before, I can’t help thinking that if I ever become a famous writer the book will turn up and be widely overpraised or over criticised, depending on the critic.
Meanwhile, here’s the freebie, what I now think of as my student work.
Street Performance
An acrobat leaps
On Grafton Street
Sculpting the air
Sculpting memory
Kindling dreams.
First Draft
I thought it might be useful to chart the journey of a poem from first draft to abandonment. The poem I’ve chosen is as yet untitled. It’s a record of a happening (man!) out side the church in the photo. For those interested, the church is on Dawson Street in Dublin.
So here it is!
Untitled
An old Priest begging with sexy
Tunes bouncing from a speaker
Behind. He taps out the rhythm against
The side of his money box. His foot
Beats a different song
While his eyes remember.
Teach Yourself to Live (again)
I’ve gathered what I consider to be the best of the verses I wrote over the last few years and put them in this handy little PDF for you to download for free from my blog. The piece below feels unfinished, but that’s life!!
I don’t know if you’ve experienced problems with reading the version of this book I put on Scribd, but everytime I try to access it I get a message saying it’s been removed. It is still there, so I don’t know what’s going on.
Anyway, I’ve added this version to this blog, so download away and feel free to share..
Her Last Embrace
The Old Master sat by
Her bedside, their children
All gathered around, watching
The colours that come to claim
The living for the dead.
As all around and all within
Urged him not to lose
Her last embrace.
Dissolving into light
She set the past on him,
As he addressed a nakedness
He’d never known before,
As all of her memories escaping
Urged him not to lose
Her last embrace.
___
Here’s the link:
