Irish literary happening of 2015: The Bogman's Cannon

Loathe it, as a few careerist literary nerds here and there certainly do, or love it, as I - and many others - do, there isn't much denying that the advent of the alternative literary site The Bogman's Cannon has been the event of the year in Irish literary circles. 

The Bogman is unusual, not to mention revolutionary, in the way that it combines literarature and political criticism in an always lively manner. Many literary magazines like to claim that they are not afraid to offend the Establishment. Mostly, when such claims are made, it's either a lie, or at best an exaggeration. For your average state funded lit-mag there is always a line one will not be allowed to cross. For example, no state funded Irish literary magazine will ever run an article detailing what an atrocious Minister for The Arts Heather Humphreys has been, though everyone knows it's the truth.

Of course Heather will be gone soon, and there'll be another Minister to lick up to, for those with willing tongues. What separates The Bogman's Cannon from such slurpers is that not only is it prepared to offend establishments of all varieties, it actively sets out to offend those who need offending. It has also been a real stimulus for much needed debate. And it is not at all totalitarian; you don't have to agree with everything that's said in every article, poem, story, or video. 

The aforementioned careerist nerdlets hate The Bogman, and their hatred is similar to that felt by the Blairites in the British Labour Party for Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. They expected to easily inherit the Earth, but it's not turned out as straightforwardly as they imagined; history and politics appear to taking one of those violent turns. Like 1848, 1871, 1917, 1936, or 1968. And all such inheritances are open to challenge. Irish poetry now certainly has a left wing, and it of course has a right wing, though as in the British Labour Party, that right wing pretends to be something other than what it actually is. Such 'moderation' has always been with us. Though, thanks in part to the stimulus provided by The Bogman's Cannon, the 'moderate' critics of too much political poetry, and too much irreverence, are increasingly not the prevailing trend in Irish poetry.

2015 was a huge year. If someone had told me last January 1st that I would again be a member of the British Labour Party, and a supporter of the leader, I would have suggested that they see a psychiatrist urgently. Indeed, I would probably have phoned the psychiatrist of their behalf. Yet on Saturday, September 12th Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader of the British Labour Party by an overwhelming majority, and I voted from him, having re-joined the party as an overseas member. Twenty four years previously, to the day, on September 12th 1991, I was expelled from the British Labour Party because of my (then) membership of Militant and involvement in the anti-poll tax campaign. As part of the campaign to support to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership bid I put together, with the support of Portsmouth Labour Party member Darrell Kavanagh,  21 Poems: 21 Reasons For Choosing Jeremy Corbyn, an initiative The Bogman enthusiastically backed.

The revolution may not exactly be at hand, but things are not as they have been for the past quarter of a century or more. The 'moderates', or to call them by their proper name, the Right are now on the defensive both politically and culturally.

My main contribution to the cultural aspect of this revolt has been as The Bogman's Cannon's Satirist-in-Residence. I published about twenty poems on the site during 2015.

I am really looking forward to 2016 during which, as well as continuing to satirise those that need it for The Bogman, I will also be going to Dublin to do some canvassing for my friend Clare Daly in the Dublin Fingal constituency, as well as doing my bit to block Irish Water contractors entering the Corrib Park estate, one of the largest in Galway City, the only entrance to which is, as luck would have it, right outside our front door. Last August, along with four local women, I stood on the road in front of one of their vans at seven o'clock in the morning and, together, we held the line until more residents joined us and the contractors gave up. 2016 will no doubt see more such excitement. 

I already have a few new poems ready to go for The Bogman's Cannon, with which I am proud to be associated. Dave Lordan, the main driving force behind the site, deserves huge credit for what he's brought about. May it continue to inspire us, and to upset those who deserve to be upset.

After Tallaght 'Irish Liberal Foresees Own Enduring Relevance'

 

After the events in Tallaght last weekend, it's become clear that,  without people such as those pictured above, Ireland would very quickly slide into anarchy, Bolshevism, and Satanism.

My poem 'Irish Liberal Foresees Own Enduring Relevance' is about all that. It is written in the voice of a concerned person and is published today on Rabble.ie and on the Facebook page of Clare Daly TD. So you can read the poem here and here. 

Irish Air: Message from the CEO

 

My new poem 'Irish Air: Message from the CEO' is just published on the website of Clare Daly TD.

The poem was, in a manner of speaking, commissioned by Rhona McCord, who works in Clare's office. Rhona sent me a message last week asking where my poem in support of the anti-water charges campaign was?

Well here it is.  

I dedicate it to Irish Water's CEO, John Tierney, god rest him.

TDs arrested at Shannon

I just got home from having lunch and gossip with the notorious Sarah Clancy, pictured here centre, to learn that the two people pictured either side of her - TDs Clare Daly & Mick Wallace - were this afternoon arrested at Shannon Airport for attempting to inspect what they believed to be two U.S. military aircraft. 

It has long been alleged that military equipment and 'rendition' prisoners on their way to very bad places are regularly transported through Shannon. I have a, well, complicated relationship with the anti-war movement. I just find it a bit hypocritical of some to loudly oppose torture and illegal invasions by the U.S. when you were enthusiastically for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or indeed anywhere else the Soviets chose to invade, and are sorry the Stasi are no longer there to torture those you think need torturing. It may be a minority, but a significant part of the anti-war movement is soft on tyrants, and by soft on tyrants I mostly mean soft on themselves. In the hearts of some 'peace activisits' there certainly lurk future Ceausescus. Then again, I would say that wouldn't I, because, as Cillian Gillespie of the Socialist Party used to like to say before the Party told him to shut up, I am a raving pro-war imperialist and, even, "an apologist for mass murderers". By "mass murderers" I think he meant Paul Wolfowitz. Poor Cillian. It can't be easy for him.  

Unlike too many others Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have no record of such secret worship of the interrogation methods of the East German secret police; or of endlessly downplaying facts inconvenient to their own side, such as the continued existence of George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan. Quite the reverse. Both have made enemies of those gurus on the Irish left who would, given the half chance, crown themselves Emperor. Whatever else can be said about Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, and some of the online commentary this afternoon has been predictably toxic, they probably have more courage between them than the entire rest of the Dáil put together. Reading much of the online commentary against them, I suspect that many of those venting are impotent males who these days can only achieve release by endlessly mowing the lawn. 

Finally, as well as having had lunch with the notorious Sarah Clancy this afternoon, I should declare a further interest, Clare Daly launched my book of essays, Mentioning the War, in Dublin in 2012, while the other, Mick Wallace, launched my recent poetry collection at the Cuirt Festival in April. 

Our Choice: Perhaps The Most Talked About Literary Event Of The Year

Galway Pro-Choice in association with Over The Edge 
presents ‘Our Choice’, 

an evening of poetry, fiction and music 

at Róisín Dubh on Wednesday, August 14^th starting at 7pm.

The event will be hosted be Aoibheann McCann. The participating writers are Celeste Augé, Ger Burke, June Caldwell, Sarah Clancy, Bernie Crawford, Susan Millar DuMars, Kate Ennals, Elaine Feeney, Lisa Frank & Susan Lindsay. There will be music by Sandra Coffey and a raffle. The purpose of the event is to raise funds for Galway Pro-Choice. There is no formal cover charge but there is a suggested donation of €5 per person.

The above mentioned event takes place tomorrow evening at Róisín Dubh. 

Over The Edge often organises special events during the Summer. Around this time of the year the fact that our programme of events is a little less intense than usual gives us the flexibility to do something a bit different.

In June 2008, we organised, with Galway Amnesty, a launch of the poetry anthology Poems from Guantánamo  – The Detainees Speak. There were readings of poems from the book by Rita Ann Higgins, Mary O Malley, Elaine Feeney, Sheikh Khaled (Imam of Galway Mosque), Stephen Murray, visiting South Carolina poet Charlene Spearen & Gary King. You can read more about the event here.

This event was, of its nature, one with a fairly overt political agenda: to draw attention to the gross abuses that have taken place at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Some would see it as an implicit criticism of the Irish Government's policy (ongoing) of allowing the U.S. military to use Shannon Airport as a stop off point for rendition flights. There is no doubt that flights taking prisoners, prisoners who have been charged with nothing and are on their way to be tortured at some uspecified destination have stopped off to refuel at Shannon.

A miniscule minority of those who attend our regular events may have privately taken exception to the fact that Over The Edge hosted this event. There has to be at least one person among our regular audiences who supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush. It would almost be disturbing if there were not. At the time, I wasn't exactly in love with the anti-war movement myself and was attacked online by one of their number whose opinion it was that a poem I had written indicated that I had morphed into a pro-imperialist dog. You can read more about all that here and here.

Having read the articles at the links, you'll perhaps find it surprising that I didn't pen an irate letter to The Galway Independent in protest against the event I was myself facilitating.

Truth is, I saw it as part of Over The Edge's remit to organise occasional literary events which give expression to the political issues - be they global or local - which vex people in the way that some big political and social issues do.

No one objected to our doing this event. Of course many do not see this sort of thing as real politics. They take such events about as seriously as, in times gone by, the Labour Party leadership would take another passionate speech by Michael D. Higgins about right wing death squads in El Salvador. These are things that happen in the place my mother used to call "out foreign". The issue of abortion is rather different. Organising a literary event around this issue is seen as in some sense dangerous whereas the Guantánamo poetry anthology event was oh so safe.

It was inevitable that Over The Edge would organise something to highlight this issue the Summer after Savita Hallapanavar's death at University Hospital Galway, which is so close to our home that you can see it from our kitchen window.

I have myself published a number of related poems over the past few months. You can read The Euphemisms here, Alternative Proposals here and Irish Government Minister Unveils Monument To Victims of Pro-Life Amendment here. Susan also has a related story, Full-Sized Life, which is published here.

But we wanted to do something more, something to bring the Galway literary community together around this issue. And it's been a great success. We have had overwhelming support and there has been more interest in the Our Choice event than in any other single event we've organised in Over The Edge's ten year history.

I freely admit that I am far more personally supportive of the Pro-Choice cause than I ever was of the various anti-war campaigns. 

The first person who ever said to me that the 1983 anti-abortion amendment was a terrible idea, was my Mom, Mary Higgins. She had had chemotherapy for Hodgkins Disease a few years earlier. She said that it could be a danger to a women's life in that sort of situation. She wasn't a political person at all, really. But she got that one right. 

During the run up to that referendum we discussed the issue of abortion in religion class in The Bish. The teacher was a Mr. Hickey. I put my hand up and asked him: what about cases of rape or incest? A total silence fell over the room. Mr Hickey acted as if the question had never been asked and just moved on. Today, I'm a bit proud of the not yet 16 year old who asked that question. He didn't know much. But he asked the right question that day. 

This is a picture of me early the following year. I was chairing a Labour Youth public meeting on the issue of South Africa. With me in the picture are (standing) Nimrod Sejake, a then South African exile who, during his very interesting and most inspiring life, once shared a jail cell with Nelson Mandela. 

The man sitting immediately to my right is Emmett Farrell. Emmett was actively involved in establishing the first Family Planning Clinic in Galway City. You can read all about that in this wonderfully titled essay by Dr. John Cunningham of NUI Galway, Spreading VD All Over Connacht, which you can download here

http://www.nuigalway.ie/history/documents/rights_and_wrongs.pdf

Here is a quote from John Cunningham's essay which gives a flavour of what went on at the time:

“Frustrated by the lack of progress, three members of the GFPA [Galway Family Planning Association] identified with the libertarian left of the Labour Party took an initiative. UCG lecturers Pete Smith and Evelyn Stevens and engineering student Emmett Farrell decided to establish a stopgap postal service modelled on one operated by Family Planning Services (FPS) in Dublin, using Stevens's and Farrell's Ardilaun Road address. In April 1977 advertisements were placed in any local papers that would accept them offering condoms in exchange for 'donations'.

Responding to the claim that hundreds of letters had been received with 'absolutely no negative response', one Michael Heneghan urged Ardilaun Road residents to take action:

'There has already been a letter from the Pope, .. what does FPS need so that they'll get the word, a picket outside their house? But it is curious about Ardilaun Road, why aren't they protesting? It would be interesting to see their reaction if an itinerant family moved into no. 77.'

If Ardilaun Road residents did not respond to the taunts, certain others did. Emmett Farrell recalls being distracted from his studies by [Deirdre] Manifold's public rosary group, which convened in his front garden. And there was other pressure. The parents of one publicly identified member of the group, in a village distant from the Galway diocese, were visited by a priest, advised that their son 'was spreading VD all over Connacht' and reminded of their duty to persuade him to change his ways'."

Such fun. And these issues still have an ability to vex people in a way that, say, political prisoners in Chile having their fingernails pulled out never did. 

As I say, though, we have had a hugely positive response to this event. Below are messages of support from Rita Ann Higgins and Clare Daly T.D.

 

 

The front of the card on which Rita Ann sent her message of support. 

MESSAGE OF SUPPORT FROM CLARE DALY T.D.

“I am delighted to send a message of support to the Galway Pro-Choice literary fundraiser, organised in association with Over The Edge, which is being held at Róisín Dubh, Dominick Street , Galway this Wednesday, August 14th, from 7pm.

Women telling their own stories has, throughout history, often been an important catalyst for change. A good short-story, or novel, or poem has the power to change minds by making people realise that, in their deepest selves, they know that things as they are are tolerable no more.

It’s brave of Susan and Kevin to put their heads above the parapet politically by organising this event under the official banner of Over The Edge, despite the pressures which taking such a stand could bring down on them.

I salute the ten women writers who will take to the stage to support this best possible of causes; it is fitting that they should do so in the City in which Savita Hallapanavar lived and so unnecessarily died. If I could be there on the night, I absolutely would.”

For details of the event see the website 

http://www.overtheedgeliteraryevents.blogspot.ie/2013/07/galway-pro-choice-in-association-with.html
 

https://www.facebook.com/#!/ClareDalyTD?fref=ts

Poem In Search Of Good Home

Hannibal Lecter was a poetry fan. One of the items that can been seen in his cage in The Silence of The Lambs is a copy of the magazine Poetry (Chicago). It is one of the leading such magazines in the world and last year celebrated its hundredth anniversary.



I have published somewhere in the region of a couple of hundred poems in literary magazines since my first published poem appeared in Poetry Nottingham magazine in June, 1996. John Major was still Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Monica Lewinsky was busy not having sexual relations with that man, Mr Clinton. They were idealistic times.

Poetry magazines play a hugely important function, and will continue to do so. They are the place a new poet finds her or his first audience which, as T.S. Eliot once pointed out, is usually made up of other as yet unemerged poets.

These days, though, while I still do send poems to such magazines, I find that I am increasingly drawn to publishing poems in places that have a readership beyond what some call the literati. In the past couple of years I've regularly published poems on political websites, such as Irish Left Review, Harry's Place, Neoneocon, Socialist Unity and in newspapers, such as The Galway Advertiser, The Galway Independent and (even) The Irish Times. Last November my poem, 'The Euphemisms', was published on Clare Daly's website. In April, I had another poem published on a T.D;s website when Mick Wallace published my poem 'Alternative Proposals', in which I gave Minister for Health, James Reilly, some excellent advice.

Perhaps this is the beginning of my Ezra Pound phase and, over the next few years, I will slowly turn into a raving maniac more concerned with extremist politics than poetry. Claremorris poet and dramatist, John Corless, has recently expressed concern that this might in fact be the case. And he's probably right.

Whatever the outcome, I find that these days I aspire to be read by more than poets. I want the people who might agree with what I'm saying in the poems - this is the political and satirical poems I'm mostly talking about here - to have easy access to them. I also want those who won't like either what I'm saying, or the way I'm saying it, to also have access to the poems because I don't wish to deny either them (or myself) the dark pleasure of their eternal disapproval. Sadly, unlike Hannibal Lecter, most people do not subscribe to Poetry magazine.

Last week I put out a call on Facebook asking if there were any political or literary blogs that might be interested in publishing my poem 'What The Virgin At Knock Would Say If She Could Speak'. Roisín Peddle stepped up and published the poem on her excellent personal blog Random Descent. The poem was very quickly condemned as 'not poetry' by a foaming at the mouth member of Youth Defence, or at least a member of Youth Defence I will now forever imagine foaming at the mouth. This I considered a great success.   

In a similar vein, I am now looking for a home for my just finished and very topical poem: 'Irish Government Minister Unveils Monument To Victims Of The Pro-Life Amendment' [to the Irish constitution in 1983]. Like Bertolt Brecht's 'To Those Born Later' and Mayakovsky's 'At The Top Of My Voice' the poem looks forward to a tomorrow which can only be better than today and will, certainly, be infinitely better than all our dark abortion free Irish yesterdays.

Anyone interested in publishing the poem should email me at kphiggins@hotmail.com   

UPDATE the poem is now published here Clare Daly and here Pro-Choice Campaign Ireland

and here Referendum on the 8th Amendment NOW  and here Irish Student Left Online and also here Rabble.