My re-write of the 1916 Proclamation

My re-write of the 1916 Proclamation is published here and here. 

Enda Kenny has written a poem

You can read it here.

The Little Elections

My poem 'The Little Elections' is a tribute to the hugely inspiring local election campaign which is ongoing here in Ireland. Voting takes place on Friday, May 23rd. 

On the Galway Local Elections 2014 Facebook group, when I persisted in asking where candidates stood on abhortion, always a good one to put a flame under a discussion's bum, one commenter  put me right by telling me that I had no business gabbing on about  national issues. This is a local election in which an interest in dog droppings is, apparently, essential. And so the poem was born. 

It has been published today on three different websites today.

My poetic tribute to Pat Cox's ongoing linguistic genius

 

He is one of those great men that littler men (and indeed women) often try to bring down. Unlike your average gurrier in the street, former leader of Europe Pat Cox knows how to talk in big fancy sentences connected together by lots of semi-colons.

The former President of the European Parliament has been the subject of a certain amount of criticism from fringe elements for his role, as Chairman of the Board, in the great success that has been the first week of Limerick National City of Culture 2014.  

My poetic tribute to Pat Cox's ongoing linguistic genius, 'Pantoum for Limerick National City of Culture 2014', was yesterday published on poet Chris Murray's blog Poethead and also on Irish Left Review. 

There is no truth at all in the rumour being spread by some subversive elements on the internet that, shortly after he heard about this poem, Pat Cox was yesterday cautioned by Gardaí for trying to steal a pair of Pantoum from the lingerie department of the Childers Road branch of Dunnes Stores.

Another former leader of Europe reacts to news of Limerick National City of Culture's glorious first week.

Two poems on Irish Left Review: 'The Man Whose Middle Name Is Against' & 'What To Do With The Knowledge'

I have two poems just published on Irish Left Review.

'The Man Whose Middle Name Is Against' takes a subtle look at the psychopathology of an Irish anti-abhortion campaigner; while 'What To Do With The Knowledge' is about the secrets people try to keep.

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. 

The Constant Markievicz Conspiracy

 

On Thursday evening Tom D'Arcy of Direct Democracy Ireland appeared to make a bit of a gom of himself on the Nine O'Clock News. He revealed to a startled nation that Constant Markievicz was, contrary to popular belief, a man and didn't die in 1927 but was shot by the British on St. Stephen's Green on some unspecified date, which may or may not have been 1916. 

My poem Alternative History: Constance Markievicz Gets A Sex Change is published on Irish Left Review http://www.irishleftreview.org/2013/07/08/alternative-history-constance-markievicz-sex-change/

Rhona McCord, who works in a certain insitution on Dublin's Kildare Street, suggested that Tom D'Arcy's revised version of Irish History might be the subject of a poem. So, the poem is dedicated to Rhona. A person of the same surname, a James McCord, was one of the the Watergate burglers. The connections are obvious. David Icke, Jim Corr and members of Direct Democracy Ireland will draw their own conclusions...

Constant is picture below (before the sex change operation) when he was still a she and went by the name of Constance.

"Full-sized Life is a fictional story inspired by the Savita Halappanavar tragedy"

My wife and long term literary collaborator, Susan Millar DuMars (she's the good looking one in the photo in the post immediately below this) has a very timely short story just published on The Irish Left Review.

http://www.irishleftreview.org/2013/05/16/fullsized-life/

Susan says: "Full-sized Life is a fictional story inspired by the Savita Halappanavar tragedy. Please read and share!"

Savita Halappanavar died in October at University Hospital Galway, which is visible from our kitchen window, having been refused an abortion.

Poem In Which I Give James Reilly Some Constructive Suggestions

Dr. James Reilly, pictured, is currently experiencing what might be described as certain difficulties.

Yesterday, the following appeared in The Sunday Times:

“the Fine Gael health minister proposes a panel of two obstetricians and four psychiatrists - one of whom must be a perinatal psychiatrist – to assess a woman who is seeking an abortion on the grounds of suicide ideation…there are only three  perinatal psychiatrists in the country”.

This leaked announcement has, surprisingly enough, not been met with universal approval.

In my new poem 'Alternative Proposals', just published on Irish Left Review, I make some constructive suggestions as to other ways in which the esteemed Dr. Reilly might proceed.   http://www.irishleftreview.org/2013/04/22/alternative-proposals/

The poems has also been published today on Mick Wallace's website http://mickwallace.net/?p=2527

Mick Wallace poem

I have a new poem on Irish Left Review.

It was provoked by the reaction to the Mick Wallace V.A.T. issue.

http://www.irishleftreview.org/2012/06/13/anatomy-public-outcry/

Mick Wallace ran on the platform of 'A New Politics'. He was a T.D. for only 14 months when he co-sponsored (with Joan Collins and Clare Daly) the bill to legislate the the X-Case. It was the first attempt to legislate for abortion in Irish history. Seems like a new politics to me. Given that in the 20 years since the X-Case not a single T.D., not one, had the courage to attempt to legislate on this issue. Just saying.

After the Dublin launch, The Stinging Fly review

REVIEW by Philip Coleman in Summer 2012 issue of The Stinging Fly (Edited by Dave Lordan).

"Turning to more recent developments in Irish literary culture, in fact, it is useful to think of poets such as Kevin Higgins, Dave Lordan, Elaine Feeney, and Sarah Clancy as the inheritors of this extremely diverse and largely non-academic Southern Irish poetic culture over the last few years—a cultural context that has received significantly less critical consideration to date than its Northern Irish counterpart.

Kevin Higgins’ interest in the performative and political aspects of poetic practice certainly owes something to the combined efforts of writers such as Galvin and Durcan before him, and the public impulse of his work is reinforced by the essays and shorter prose pieces collected in Mentioning the War: Essays and Reviews, 1999-2011. As the title suggests, Higgins’ work—like Bardwell’s, in this respect—seeks to discuss things that are often not given broad or open coverage, and in this collection he writes with equal critical insight about literary as well as political matters, regardless of their current cultural status, currency, or standing. An essay on George Orwell is followed by a piece on Elaine Feeney, which in turn gives way to reviews of books about the corrupt banker Seán Fitzpatrick and the Corrib gas pipeline controversy. Literary criticism and political/social commentary appear side by side in a book that demonstrates Higgins’ clear commitment to the value of the written word. Indeed, the contents of Mentioning the War are drawn from a diverse array of publications, including literary magazines and periodicals in Ireland, the UK, Canada, and Australia, but also from publications such as The Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society and the Albanian newspapers Ndryshe and Shekulli, demonstrating both the high regard with which Higgins’ work is held internationally and the transnational range and reach of his interests.

In an essay on the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose, Joseph Brodsky wrote:

What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word’s specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk within an elevated state of mind. And what does the poet learn from prose? Not much: attention to detail, the use of common parlance and bureaucratese, and, in rare instances, compositional know-how (the best teacher of which is music). All three of these, however, can be gleaned from the experience of poetry itself (especially from Renaissance poetry), and theoretically—but only theoretically—a poet can get along without prose.

Kevin Higgins, like Leland Bardwell, is a poet first and foremost, but he did not need to write prose to learn the things flagged here by Brodsky. His essays, like his poems, attend with great care to relevant details, just as his political and cultural observations are often informed by actual experience and insight. As he puts it in an interview included in this collection but first published in 2009: ‘The writers I am always interested in are those who see everything in the world as their subject, and ruthlessly write the truth as they see it, come what may. Far better to do this than become a yes man or woman for this or that popular front.’ The breadth of topics discussed in Mentioning the War, coupled with Higgins’ intelligence and candour as a social, cultural, and literary critic, make this an indispensable volume, not just to readers interested in contemporary Irish poetry but to anyone interested in the current political, cultural and social climate. Including illuminating introductory pieces by Darrell Kavanagh and John Goodby, Mentioning the War reproduces some of the work published in Higgins’ earlier volume Poetry, Politics & Dorothy Gone Horribly Astray (Lapwing Press, 2006). Like Bardwell’s Different Kinds of Love, however, the pieces reprinted here retain all of the urgency of their earlier occasions. A poet may get along without prose, but no reader interested in the state of contemporary Irish poetry or culture can afford to ignore the interventions made by Bardwell and Higgins in these very different but immensely valuable prose collections."

The book was reviewed alongside the short story collection Different Kinds of Love (Dedalus Press) by Leland Bardwell.

Philip Coleman has previously written about my work in his extensive essay Against the Iron Railings of History: the poetry and some of the prose of Kevin Higgins which was published last August on Irish Left Review http://www.irishleftreview.org/2011/08/04/iron-railings-history-poetry-prose-kevin-higgins/