NEW POEM 'Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat'

(Picture taken at meeting of Central Heating Committee of LITERATURE EIRE)

My latest poem 'Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat' is published on The Bogman's Cannon. May the Lord have no mercy at all on my soul, and Satan have his way with me for all eternity.

"As we approach the centenary of the Easter Rising, Kevin Higgins lets rip at the state of poetry and politics in Ireland"

A slightly shortened version of my article Poetically Charged Charged News Cycles, which first appeared shortly before Christmas in the U.S. based poetry magazine The Raintown Review was yesterday re-published under the new title of Poets, Presidents and Politics on the U.K. based left wing political-cultural website Culture Matters. Among many other things I discuss the "desperate rush on to find the next acceptable face of Irish poetry".

The article was originally commissioned by Quincy Lehr for The Raintown Review.

Not everyone who is mentioned favourably in this article agrees with its sentiments. However, it is my understanding that everyone who is criticised in it secretly agrees with everything I say about them.

Picture of slice of Black Forest gateau in memory of the slice of same now

President Michael D. Higgins bought me in 1982. Read article for significance.  

Stinging Fly magazine tries to get me assassinated

In a wide ranging article in the special 'In The Wake of The Rising' issue of The Stinging Fly magazine I am described as "likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland". Here I was, trying to keep a low profile and not offend anyone, and then they go and call me that. The bastards. 

Given the state of my my lungs, I had been hoping to at least live to see my fifty sixth birthday, and the 2023 celebrations to mark the centenary of Eoin O'Duffy's appointment as Garda Commissioner.

However, I now fully expect to be assassinated by some poet I've never heard of between now and next month's Cúirt Festival. In all probability I will be gunned down during the festival itself, one bright night in the House Hotel, by an insanely jealous, but little read, villanelle writer with an avant-garde haircut.

The weapon will likely be one borrowed earlier that day from an old Official IRA arms dump in the Cork North Central constituency.

"Unfashionable Ireland's dead and gone. It's buried with the Stickies' guns"

Speaking of The Sunday Independent, last Sunday the above mentioned Stinging Fly article got a mention in that paper's always hot and heavy pages. In his review, John Boland appears to take exception to the idea of me succeeding Seamus Heaney as the nation's most read living poet. I agree. It's a bloody disgrace. And a sign of the ongoing cultural decline against which men, and women, like John Boland of The Sunday Independent must continue to bravely fight the neccessary the fight.

According to his article, Boland had apparently never heard of me before, describing me as "someone called Kevin Higgins" which makes a nice change from this article which appeared in the same newspaper in October 2014. It's always good to be forgotten by people who previously seemed to know who you were. Perhaps John Boland knew who I was eighteen months ago but just doesn't know who I have become since. I often feel that way myself.

After my upcoming assassination at the end of April, I look forward to being forgotten entirely. 

UPDATE 
Garda Intelligence have been in touch to say that an online meeting of my potential assassins has in fact taken place. The usual gathering of the hairy-palmed brigade. The officer I spoke to did express some surprise though to see Mr Patrick Cotter, Director of the state funded Munster Literature Centre, openly involving himself in this sort of street level codology. I hope Mr Cotter didn't put that 'like' on there during office hours.