2017 was a big, if slightly peculiar, poetry year for me personally. My New & Selected Poems Song of Songs 2.0 was published by Salmon in April and launch at the Cúirt Festival. You can hear my talking to Kernan Andrews of The Galway Advertiser about the book here.
The book was launched at Cúirt by Dr.
Philip Coleman who had this to say:
"It is a
great pleasure to be here to say a few words to launch Kevin Higgins’ Song of Songs 2.0: New & Selected Poems,
but I do feel like a bit of an interloper talking about Kevin’s work here in
Galway, at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature…. I’m sure there’s
not much I can tell a Galway audience
about Kevin’s work and its importance – given the importance of this city and,
indeed, this festival to the development of his work over the years!
Quite
apart from his involvement with the festival over the years as a reader of his
own poems, Kevin’s work as a teacher of creative writing here in Galway has
helped many others to feature in prominent ways at Cúirt. Students of his have won the
Cúirt New Writing Prize, for example, and the Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam. As you
know, Kevin is also co-organiser of the hugely successful Over The Edge reading series here in Galway, which specialises in
promoting new writers. He also teaches poetry on the NUI Galway Summer
School programme and the NUIG BA Creative Writing Connect programme. This
evening, though, we are not here to celebrate and listen to the work of Kevin’s
students – as brilliant as they may be – but to welcome and applaud the
publication of Kevin’s New & Selected Poems, which
has been brought into the world by Salmon Poetry.
It is
appropriate, in fact, that we acknowledge and thank Jessie Lendennie and
Siobhán Hutson at Salmon for the amazing work they have done over there in
Knockeven by the Cliffs of Moher, not just in preparing Kevin’s New & Selected Poems for publication,
but for all they do, year in year out, to promote the art of poetry. Thank you,
again, Jessie and Siobhán: you have done a stunning job with this book, but we
wouldn’t have expected any less from you.
Now I
mentioned that Kevin is a teacher of poetry, like myself, but I did have to
stop and think for a minute when I read these lines from the poem called ‘My
Wishes For You’ from the New Poems section of the book:
That your son at Trinity
College
may graduate
to become a rogue
gynaecologist….
Because I
not only work but also live in Trinity, I wondered who the poor creature might
be walking around with such a hex on him – the curse of the poet! As I’m sure
you all know, the Irish poetic tradition has many fine examples of curses, and
this one used to be my favourite, by John Millington Synge, best known for his
plays but also a really fine poet. He wrote this poem, called ‘The Curse’, to
the sister of someone who disapproved of The
Playboy of the Western World:
Lord,
confound this surly sister,
Blight her brow
with blotch and blister,
Cramp her larynx,
lung, and liver,
In her guts a
galling give her.
Let
her live to earn her dinners
In Mountjoy with
seedy sinners:
Lord, this
judgement quickly bring,
And I'm Your
servant, J. M. Synge.
As I say, this used to be my favourite
Irish curse poem, until I read Kevin’s new poem ‘My Wishes for You’, which is a
masterpiece of this particular subgenre of poetry. Maybe Kevin will read it for
us later, but one of the key things about these curse poems is the fact that
they are both terribly nasty and, at the same time, extremely funny.
What happens when you combine
those two things – darkness and comedy? Some would say that these are the
essential ingredients of satire, and certainly when we think of the great
satirists throughout the history of western literature we can see that there is
something in this. From Horace to Jonathan Swift, and from H.L. Mencken to Melissa
McCarthy, the satirist claims our attention by making us laugh but in the same
gesture we will be disturbed by some image or idea that seems just too absurd,
too horrible, to countenance. At this moment, then, we take a kind of second
take on the world we think we already know, reconsider our sense of it,
re-evaluate our beliefs and opinions. Given all of this, then, it is no
surprise that the historian Diarmuid Ferriter has described Kevin Higgins as
‘Ireland’s most accomplished political poet and satirist’.
But hang on
a minute, what would a historian like Diarmuid Ferriter know about poetry? I am kidding, of course, but
only a little, because I think it is important – and this is the place to say
it – because I do not believe that Kevin Higgins should be categorised or
labelled solely as a ‘political poet’ or, indeed, as a ‘satirist’. There is
nothing wrong with those classifications, as such, but I want to celebrate
Kevin Higgins tonight as a poet,
first and foremost, who has dedicated himself to the art of poetry now for a
number of decades, as a teacher and as a critic, but first and foremost as a
writer himself of some of the most memorable and significant poems to have been
written by an Irish poet. The consistency of his commitment to his art may be
matched by the commitment he has made to politics, but when his political views
and allegiances have shifted his sense of the importance of poetry has stayed
true to its course. Song of Songs 2.0 will
give new readers of his work a clear sense of this because it provides a
generous selection of his work going back to The Boy With No Face (2005), Time
Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening
New Furniture (2010), and The Ghost
in the Lobby (2014). I very much hope that Salmon will keep these
individual volumes in print because in a selected poems there are always going
to be things left out, but we shouldn’t complain. Song of Songs 2.0 gathers work from each of Higgins’s published
volumes to date, including the pamphlets The
Ministry for Poetry Has Decreed (Culture Matters, 2016) and The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins (Nuascéalta,
2016).
The title of
Kevin’s book is bound to be discussed by reviewers and commentators, and I’d
like to say a few words about it here. As you all know, the ‘original’ Song of Songs is known by various
titles, including the ‘Song of Solomon’ and the ‘Canticle of Canticles’, and it
is found in the holy texts of both Christianity and Judaism. It is tempting to
say, then, that Song of Songs 2.0 is a
twenty-first century secular take on a spiritual classic. The poem ‘Song of
Songs 2.0’ certainly sends up the ancient piece, in a way, and it is full of
images that will be read, and heard, as instances of Kevin’s searing and dark
poetic comedy in performance. Consider, for example, these verses from the
original ‘Song of Songs’ (if we can speak of such a thing as an original of
that text):
Behold, thou art fair,
my love; behold, thou art fair; thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil; thy hair is as a flock of goats,
that trail down from mount
Gilead.
Thy teeth are like a
flock of ewes all shaped alike, which are come up from the washing; whereof all are paired, and none faileth among
them.
Thy lips are like a
thread of scarlet, and thy mouth is comely; thy temples are like a pomegranate split open behind thy veil.
Thy neck is like the
tower of David builded with turrets, whereon there
hang a thousand shields, all the armour of the mighty men.
That’s
great, all well and good – each to his or her own, and all that – but now
consider this:
How glorious your feet stuffed into
trainers
Oh lavatory attendant’s daughter.
The joints of your thighs pop
out like cuckoo clocks;
the work of a drunken assembly line
operative
on his last day at the factory.
This is
poetry at its darkest, envisioning our world in all of its stark brutality.
There is no room for romance or the sentimental here. Towards the end of the
poem the speaker says:
Let us get up early to the canal
by the chemical weapons factory
and see what dies there.
This is an
invitation to view the world in all its contemporary decay, where the solace of
religious or, indeed, secular, succour is no longer possible to attain – not
that it ever was. What is attainable, however, out of the bleakness of this
vision, is a new, more honest and more humane, form of understanding that
surpasses the surfaces of satire as mere entertainment.
In one of
the most important essays I know on the subject of poetry and politics,
‘Poetry, Politics and Dorothy Gone Horribly Astray’, Kevin Higgins writes:
If we don’t at least convince
ourselves that poetry can matter, then how on earth
can we expect to convince anyone else? The truth is poetry can sometimes play a role in actually
challenging people’s minds, by convincing
the reader (or listener) emotionally of an idea to which he or she may be intellectually opposed. If a
poem can win the ideologically hostile reader’s
heart, then his or her head will surely follow. Such a heightened experience of poetry can lead to a
transformed world view for the reader.
Song of Songs 2.0 presents
the reader with arresting and often disturbing representations of the self and
the world on almost every page, but its greatest achievement may be in forcing
us to think again about what poetry can do, what it is for, and what role it
may have in helping us to negotiate the terrifying times that lie ahead.
If you have not read Kevin
Higgins’s poems, now, more than ever, may be the time to read them. Song of Songs 2.0 provides a brilliant,
timely introduction. There’s been a lot of talk in the media recently about
things being launched. The North Koreans have been having fun launching their
missiles, while the Americans keep threatening to launch theirs against them,
all the while continuing to practice their own missile launching skills week in
week out in other parts of the world. The launching of a poetry book may seem
insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I believe, like Kevin Higgins,
that poetry matters because it can challenge and sometimes change people’s
minds about themselves and the world they live in. It is a real pleasure, then,
to launch Song of Songs 2.0, but the
real work of its launching will happen when the poems get out into the world,
when you read and hear them read, and begin to think about the things they are
saying for yourselves. In this regard poems may be more powerful than the most
sophisticated weaponry. Congratulations, Kevin. Long may you and your work
thrive."
However, as the man says:
The c
omments sections on the batch of poems I published during the year on
Broadsheet.ie, a new outlet for me, are also worth a
look.
During 2017 I was invited to regularly contribute poems to two left of centre sociopolitical websites based in the U.K -
The Pileus and
The Platform - and subsequently published several poems there.
I also published poems on
Culture Matters, in
The Morning Star,
The Irish Times (
twice), The Stinging Fly special homelessness issue, the Chichester Festival's Poetry & All That Jazz, the U.K. based Red Poets #23,
North West Words, The Galway Advertiser,
Spontaneity,
Anomaly Lit, Light Journal (USA),
Clare Daly TD's website,
Socialist Unity, ROPES, Crannóg, Skylight 47,
Caja De Resistincia (Spain),
Scum Gentry Alternative Arts and Media,
Poethead (edited by Chris Murray), and elsewhere.
In August my
New & Selected Poems was reviewed on
RTE Radio One's Arena Arts programme, and later in the month - in what must surely go down as one of the more hilarious moments in Irish poetry broadcasting - a poem from it,
My Wishes For You, was broadcast on the same programme.
In September my new poem '
Sarcoid Years' - about my chronic lung condition - was published in
The Irish Times, with an accompanying
article. This poem apparently led to hopes in certain quarters that I might be about to die. But sadly it wasn't to be.
In the past month
John McAuliffe reviewed my
New & Selected Poems in
The Irish Times (alongside books by
David Wheatley and
Paul Muldoon);
Poetry Ireland made my tribute to
Robert Mugabe their
Poem of The Month on their
website; The Irish Times republished my Brexit poem '
Exit' and
RTE's Arena programme broadcast my poem '
The Art of Political Rhetoric'. These last four led to grave concern in certain quarters that the Irish literary establishment might finally be grasping me to its bosom.
It's understood this possibility led a few to consider suicide. But sadly it wasn't to be.
In the last days before Christmas the book received the following generous mentions:
"With endlessly colorful wit, Irish poet and satirist Kevin Higgins
offers an assortment of new and selected poems that rip into life and
politics with teeth or, at least, dentures. Bursting with bathos as he
riffs off of Wordsworth, Milton, and Burns or turning to absurdity the
psalmic similes in the title poem, Higgins s verse revels in pastiche
and political irreverence." --
World Literature Today
"In Ireland,
Kevin Higgins launched his
Song of Songs 2.0: New & Selected Poems, published by
Salmon Poetry
and gives us a selection from his 4 previous collections as well as new
poems. Knee deep in the political, sometimes brutally savage and often
very funny, Kevin’s work over the years has kept me entertained." -
StephenByrne.org
p.s. over the next week or so I will post my ideological review of the year. If you're worried, then you absolutely should me. In fact if I were you I wouldn't sleep a wink the next several nights.
