Sean O'Brien

The romance of the rusting railway lines; the weeds that grow beneath the iron bridge; the young lovers cognizant of their doom as the sun dips over a mythical subtopia near Preston - those seemed to be at the heart of the matter, at least the better matter.

I can believe just what you say about the criticism.

Cousin Coat

You are my secret coat. You're never dry.
You wear the weight and stink of black canals.
Malodorous companion, we know why
It's taken me so long to see we're pals,
To learn why my acquaintance never sniff
Or send me notes to say I stink of stiff.

But you don't talk, historical bespoke.
You must be worn, be intimate as skin,
And though I never lived what you invoke,
At birth I was already buttoned in.
Your clammy itch became my atmosphere,
An air made half of anger, half of fear.

And what you are is what I tried to shed
In libraries with Donne and Henry James.
You're here to bear a message from the dead
Whose history's dishonoured with their names.
You mean the North, the poor, and troopers sent
To shoot down those who showed their discontent.

No comfort there for comfy meliorists
Grown weepy over Jarrow photographs.
No comfort when the poor the state enlists
Parade before their fathers cenotaphs.
No comfort when the strikers all go back
To see the twenty thousand get the sack.

Be with me when they cauterise the facts.
Be with me to the bottom of the page,
Insisting on what history exacts.
Be memory, be conscience, will and rage,
And keep me cold and honest, cousin coat,
So if I lie, I'll know you're at my throat.

would you recommend sean o'brien?

Specific poems: we can discuss that.

iia. I love the end of this ugly poem though - 'fiction and the reading public' - a character, dexter, asks for books to read on death row so his friends give him 'fonda's workout book' and 'how to be a sucker' with the comment:

"Here Dex, these ought to shut you up,
Pretentious little fucker."

iib. this rhymes with p*t*rs*n's minister in 'the alexandrian library pt. 2' (??): "For fuck's sake son, get real." though there's a wobbly ambivalence in the o'brien poem: almost as if the hard stomp of the line ('fucker' unbalancing, and pulling away from the line, the plank bridge laid across by the 'little' fulcrum) is some sort of judgement some sort of agreement. which I'm not having. I'm not sure he's having it either, to be honest. am I allowed to talk like this? is this OK?

iii. apparently he thinks poetry is 'post-imaginative'. I'm not really sure what this means though.

iv. 'Hitler, that flag-waving cunt' -> 'Imagine life with nothing left/But Verdi and a wank' -> :-O -> 'o'brien often can't end a poem except by throwing in some explosion of some kind.'

v. his poems seem very coarse in that inarticulably-bad way that someone like irvine welsh or duncan mcclean both write. I'm not sure I have a problem with that or this though.

vi. he edited an anthology of poetry in response to the tuma one called 'the firebox'. derrida coined a phrase I stole in 'the tongue of fire.' I stole it when I wrote about raking through the cinders of my last relationship as a 'vocabulary of arson.' I like the cut of this jib.

vii. 'o'brien has written the definitive arse poem.' (alan munton)

viii. "Their present is nobody's business,/ So don't talk to them about nippers// Or fires in buckets, or windfalls:/ They go for your throat not your poems." !!!!!!!!!!

ix. !!!!! cf. viii.

viiic. "tourist information eyes/ (hateful finder's fee)/ guide lost./ Fuck you, Larkin!"

the visual rhyming of 'viaducts' with 'in-betweens' in line 7, too, is especially crafty. but are we bothered with craft?

I'm not too sure about the stuff (the paradox) on 'the end of summer' that never began; seems perhaps to reinstate, in earnest, that conservatism attacked by 'unimportant sunsets'. maybe I read too much into things, or too little.

I like this poem a lot, the pinefox, and am grateful you pointed it out. I'm half-tempted though to write a (half-joking; the other half: joking) short essay on words poets should avoid: lack, absence, ghosts, memory, haha!

1          Where should we meet but in this shabby park
2          Where the railings are missing and the branches black?
3          Industrial pastoral, our circuit
4          Of grass under ash, long-standing water
5          And unimportant sunsets flaring up
6          Above the half-dismantled fair. Our place
7          Of in-betweens, abandoned viaducts
8          And modern flowers, dock and willowherb,
9          Lost mongrels, birdsong scratching at the soot
10        Of the last century. Where should we be
11        But here, my industrial girl? Where else
12        But this city beyond conservation?
13        I win you a ring at the rifle range
14        For the twentieth time, but you've chosen
15        A yellow, implausible fish in a bag
16        That you hold to one side when I kiss you.
17        Sitting in the waiting-room in darkness
18        Beside the empty cast-iron fireplace,
19        In the last of the heat the brick gives off,
20        Not quite convinced there will be no more trains,
21        At the end of a summer that never began
22        Till we lost it, we cannot believe
23        We are going. We speak, and we've gone.
24        You strike a match to show the china map
25        Of where the railways ran before us.
26        Coal and politics, invisible decades
27        Of rain, domestic love and failing mills
28        That ended in a war and then a war
29        Are fading into what we are: two young
30        Polite incapables, our tickets bought
31        Well in advance, who will not starve, or die
32        Of anything but choice. Who could not choose
33        To live this funeral, lost August left
34        To no one by the dead, the ghosts of us.

2. I am puzzled by that final paradox: I don't know whether I should try to make more of it. I am glad you see it too. I don't know whether it connects with the sunsets.

3. I am bothered, with craft, believe it or not.

4. Perhaps also one can be bothered with, or by, lack of craft - one's own, or eg. SO'B's?

5. I wonder what he means by PARK, which seems to recur through that first volume.

6. You may be right about words to avoid: it's cos they are already too freighted and thus... don't carry real thought, just gestures at others' thought?

iii. OK, if we are to believe that each peom is a mnemonic for it's own remembrance. that is, then, that each peom is a commemoration then craft is important. I think. I was having some arguments recently with luka heronbone about the necessity of craft. I would have talked, for instance, about heaney's, say (as compared to muldoon, who we might get to) association of word to object: he uses the wispy fricatives' assonances to help get the feeling of wind rather than the image of wind, for example. and I would explain how I liked when one syllable nudged another which in turn helped further the argument of a peom, any peom. but luka was arguing that the job of the peot was the bare presentation of images. (he kinda slipped up a couple of days later when he posted a heavily enjambed poem on his page :P ) but I'm beside the point, right beside it: craft is important but it shouldn't be too important or you might end up the poet made by academics for their own dissection (muldoon? *gag*).

iiib. I lost my point along the way. if you find it... etc.

iv. what do you think he means by park? do you think it is an idea, say, like freaky trigger's idea of the pub? or similar.

I like a lot your Park / Pub comparison. That is, not exactly genius, but insight of a rare order.

And that's an order.

I mean: not a clear idea: not a logical idea: not really a concept: a hazy idea: a landscape of the mind. And he knew that that landscape would make, would fill or paint, a peom.

And he pulled it off, with rare... assurance (forget Craft, now). Yet a limit of this is that it becomes hard to say what he was really saying. All you can do is point to certain pictures. There is... sensitivity, without Sense?

I mean that the pome is not necessarily paraphrasable. I hope you'll not imagine I'm so dumb as to ignore the possibility that that's the whole point of poetry (JtN: All Poetry is Untranslatable). But one can come from other angles too - Empson's, for instance. There may be virtues in paraphrase, and its possibility. And I think that SO'B maybe loses those virtues, in winning a -- goldfish.

13 I win you a ring at the rifle range
14 For the twentieth time, but you've chosen
15 A yellow, implausible fish in a bag
16 That you hold to one side when I kiss you.
17 Sitting in the waiting-room in darkness
18 Beside the empty cast-iron fireplace,
19 In the last of the heat the brick gives off,
20 Not quite convinced there will be no more trains,
21 At the end of a summer that never began
22 Till we lost it

-- but, Don't Misunderstand Me.

Return the ring.

I have not read any O'Brien except the piece above, which I find to be OK but not great. I suspect the 'industrial girl' has been done better and more romantically by M Jagger and B Springsteen. Or shouldn't we mix our forms?

The park idea is decent. Perhaps he should be writing about Pubs, though.

Talk of Paterson has reminded me of the fact that I was given a volume of his for my last birthday, and have still not got round to it. I rarely get round to much. I will start now.

Uncannily, the first poem is about a pub! Perversely, it is an empty one! What does this signify?

It's true about Jagger (!!! in a way - but who remembers?) and the Boss (but that reminds us, that's AMERICA - should we be, not, mixing our continents?), but you are right: probably we should not be mixing our forms.

'The Empty Pub' = cousin to 'The Empty Dancehall' by a band whose singer's cousin is an occasional ilxor.

No-one ever talks of 'kitchen sinks' in America, for a start.

I wish I were able to find empty pubs so readily.

ia. "if we are to believe that each peom is a mnemonic for it's own remembrance."

ib. "What has happened to the lost art of memorizing poetry? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English language "by heart"? In his introduction, Ted Hughes explains how we can overcome the problem by using a memory system that becomes easier the more frequently it is practised. The collected 101 poems are both personal favourites and particularly well-suited to the method Hughes demonstrates."

[iz. a companion piece: By Heart]]

Perhaps it was warm, it's now hot, it's heating, further..

Perhaps it is I am cooling it down.

I know some pomes, by heart, but not Shakespeare's, Heaney's (no? maybe), Muldoon's, or Hughes's, though we may get to him (good - we will. We Will?).

Cozen, I just had another look at your list of to-avoids: lack, absence, memory, ghosts.

It strikes me that all are quite abstract words - and that what they fall foul of is (a descendant of?) the Imagist 'Go in fear of abstractions'. (I once fell foul of that phrase meself [there], when I said that Imagism was about... abstraction!!)

Yet, can we trust that Imagist prejudice, or legacy? Or do we think that it... a raison? Are we working with our... intuitions, or with a bunch of values that might be criticizable?

Don't Misunderstand Me. I still think that those words are dubious, for a peom.

Perhaps, in a way, it is?

I think his pome about THE HEDGEHOG is remarkable!

An example starting point is: what does 'The Park By The Railway' say, in other words?

If you are bored by 'The Park By The Railway', already (but - we have only just got to know it!), then we could try it on 'The Hedgehog' instead.

I have these two, sat in front of me.

'The Hedgehog' by Muldoon is indeed remarkable - not least for the fact that it contains the line

'The hedgehog shares its secret with no one.'

and some months ago I wrote a very simple, probably bad short song with the lines

'I don't know what secrets you're keeping / Tightly in your room like a hibernating hedgehog'

before ever encountering this pome.

But perhaps The Secrets Of The Hedgehog is the oldest riddle in own.

I don't have the Muldoon with me. Can you put it on, for instance, this thread?

I think it's guid.

"The Hedgehog", Paul Muldoon

1          The snail moves like a
2          Hovercraft, held up by a
3          Rubber cushion of itself,
4          Sharing its secret

5          With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
6          Shares its secret with no one.
7          We say, Hedgehog, come out
8          Of yourself and we will love you.

9          We mean no harm. We want
10        Only to listen to what
11        You have to say. We want
12        Your answers to our questions.

13        The hedgehog gives nothing
14        Away, keeping itself to itself.
15        We wonder what a hedgehog
16        Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

17        We forget the god
18        Under this crown of thorns.
19        We forget that never again
20        Will a god trust in the world.

Perhaps this is too obvious to say.

I have been thinking about the paraphrase of Park / Railway too. I will post it later, unless you beat me to it. It will not thrill.

re. (this) Muldoon, something about the... play, the hedging, the coyness and silliness - these are part of what I like.

huh?

not enough mention has been of prima's posts though; however much I'm not sure I disagree with them.

"love is the lover's coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon -
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love's something we share; but we're always wrong."

'My Love' (née 'A Lover's Discourse', cf. its initial few sections with these lines' conclusion.)

OK, the opposition of goldfish and ring represents a stagnation of choice, in some way. well, not a stagnation in animation but a stagnation in animation. i.e. there never was a choice (so choice never moved through the present tense in terms of action) but there was a believed choice (so it moved through the present in terms of idea.) so the choice of goldfish is the attempted refutation of the classical: the overthrow of the symbol so the line becomes jokingly hence: the goldfish. but paterson's on the money in 'My Love' becomes love is a discourse of delusion (or rather dillusion) and isn't properly shared. sharing is a matter of choice: I choose to share with you my fig and greek yoghurt marriage: thus we can't choose in love properly: we can't choose (Choose) at the level of the idea but merely at the level of the symbol which doesn't affect our standing. I don't know... anymore. sorry, I'll stop. thinking.

interject any time.

but

cozen you play along with o'brien here; in agreeing love cannot be shared you include industrial girl as if her 'choice' had already not been made, or gestured to at least. like i said b4 there's a greater dualism here, i see the pome ending as

32 Of anything but choice. Who could not choose
33 To live this funeral, lost August left
34 To no one by the dead, the ghosts of us
35 ...? [watching her still delighting at goldfish in bag]

because yes of course love as symbol ideal is a common delusion, but the perfect ring > perfect circular > 3. 'industrial pastoral our circuit' (the ghost blah blah poetic ideals) > and machines (sentient?) are millions of parallel circuits, millions of little beliefs that make a whole move >>> Myth, and Love. is there really ever such a diff between animation and imagination? o'brien talks of 'where the railways ran before us' but it's the Park By The Railway, it still exists, and there remain exits for the day tripper. o brien knows this too but refuses to acquiesce this time, speaks for her as We and dominates over her doubts or rather her happy careless surety like i said b4;

21 At the end of a summer that never began
22 Till we lost it, we cannot believe
23 We are going. We speak, and we've gone.

he sees the exits here, the realities of transcience, not poetic wordy transciencies designed to pickle ('consecrations') but real scary implausible silly goldfish ones ones, and see he's

20 Not quite convinced there will be no more trains

there are no poets only poems 'member.

what a wordy way to say don't try it.

‘Maps misread (distort) social territories realities. The central argument of de Sousa Santos’ chapter 8 is that laws are literally maps. That is laws are ruled distortions or misreadings of social territories and thus share this characteristic with poems. The critical grounding of this theory of correspondence is Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic creation: the so-called ‘anxiety of influence’. Strong poets learn to protect themselves from anxiety by "misreading" their predecessors. This creative misprision relies on embedded co-ordinates, an establish reading, within a text. Misreading then is another form of the derivé, if a touch weaker. By ‘going off the beaten path’ they create new routes across the map. This is a depressingly passive form of creation: another system theory once again in line with Weber’s idea that system cannot be destroyed, that the seeds for system’s defeat (‘replication) are sown within the system itself: the green flat plains of the map bereft of A-roads or motorways is still a map. If I were to write a second review of de Sousa Santos’ book my primary theme would be that of hope.’)

I received your mail today, pf, thank you. it's apposite, of course, but I'll leave it out right now.

what did you write about maps? do you like my (santos'?) ideas about maps and poems as ruled distortions of reality. I've read you on rules, I wonder if you'll agree at all.

note i took down: "astrology vs astrography"

I am glad. Really. On both counts!

He keeps saying things like "Do you all understand what I'm TALKING ABOUT? ... cos I'm not sure that *I* do...".

Thanks, for posting.

I am off, again.

He seems to change little with the years!

'it's been a while, it's gone long again'

is new word order the new thing?