Great stuff from our President. I really like these lines, which sum of the hypocrisy of our champagne socialist political classes so well:
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John Cooper Clarke was on Arena with Sean Rocks there. Absolutely stone mad but very endearing. He’s going on a tour of Ireland with his new collection starting in Vicar St next week.
It’s a shame I wasn’t posting whenever Mary Oliver died in January, I would have marked it here. I am finding consolation in these words after all my little ponies fell over today:
The Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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The Irish are great lads for putting prairies in their poems
Never give all the heart.
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
W. B. Yeats
I’d say w.b. didn’t have much luck with the ladies
I could be wrong but I think he was more of a man’s man if you know what I mean.
Didn’t need have that unrequited love for your woman, and didn’t he give out about the lad who wiped his eye?
Yeats was a miserable bastard
There’s an inherent beauty in his life’s work that both endorses and contradicts your assertion though. It’s so obviously simple, so effortless that it renders any effort at criticising it a futile endeavour. Yet the misery through which he perceived the world was what enabled him create such descriptive beauty. Lying in the gutter looking at the stars, if you will.
That his work was force fed to us in school is a shame. We weren’t ready for it. I tip back to it every so often to see if i can see something with a more nuanced, experienced eye. To try appreciate it a bit more. Similarly with Gerard Manly Hopkins. Now he was a miserable bastard… but such jaw-dropping craft.
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He was immensely gifted and also an absolute dickhead.
I love his poems. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t a miserable cunt though. Always pining for something else or somewhere else.
Same with Kavanagh great poet, miserable cunt
Sure we all do a bit of that. Look at the Clare lads wanting to be Seamie Flanagan, wanting to be from Limerick. The miserable cunts.
Tank’s Poetry Corner
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
I’ve gradually come to the opinion that Lullaby by WH Auden is the greatest English language love poem of the 20th century. Given the scale of Auden’s artistic achievement the poem the public’s ignorance of the piece is remarkable. The poem discusses the potential for romantic love to transcend time and death and in that regard is thematically very similar to the love sonnets of Shakespeare. Auden’s confession of faithlessness in the first line is original however an adds an immediate and adult poignancy to proceedings. Ultimately the poem shows how perfect things can grow from imperfect origins.
Written in 1937, it’s notable that the most beautiful romantic statement by an English poet in the 20th century was inspired by an incident that the general public would typically view as the sleaziest type of sexual encounter that one can possibly have. Auden was a gay man who spent his life searching in vain for a partner. He was essentially a deeply traditional English man living at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence. The poem tells the story of a one-night-stand dogging encounter with a truck driver.
The lines, “fashionable madmen raise/ Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost, All the dreadful cards foretell, Shall be paid” is possibly a reference to the criminal justice situation at the time.
Auden was essentially a conservative bore who wanted only to get married to another dull Englishman and adopt children. That wasn’t possible in his time and he ended alone when he deserved much more. He would be delighted with how gay rights has become an establishment cause since his death.
To an outsider gay dogging with truck drivers is sleazy and ugly but for Auden such vaguely pathetic incidents were the only material he had onto which he could project his dreams. There is an important lesson here which goes far beyond gay rights. We are not in a position to judge other people’s lives.
Sure those 30’s oxbridge poets were riding the holes of each other. The truck driver was probably just a bit if rough entertainment. Louis macneice said he just couldn’t bring himself to join the gay set even, though there was serious social pressure to do so.
I see the poetry readers here still deluded as ever. 
if it don’t rhyme it’s just prose