SURREAL POEMS IN LIMERICK CITY LIBRARY

Mike Maguire, Manager of Limerick City Library (the Granary), will open proceedings.

Here are a few thoughts on Surrealism, and the use of surreal images in painting and poetry, which I hope will whet your appetite for the occasion! 

Baguettes instead of fair-weather clouds in the sky, a man in a bowler hat with a green apple hiding his face, a floating boulder, men in pinstriped suits falling like a shower of rain, a panoramic scene ensconced in the contours of a tree, as if one could see through the trunk: these are some of the images from the paintings of Magritte that I evoke in my poem in honour of the Belgian Surrealist painter. (The Speaking Trees, page 4).

    These images challenge our ordinary perceptions and sense of reality, indeed they have a lot in common with the state of dreaming, but at the same time they invite us to look at surprising aspects of the visible world. You see Magritte’s baguettes floating in the sky and have to admit that they bear an uncanny resemblance to those long clouds associated with fine weather, (the kind that appear at the beginning of an episode of the Simpsons!)

    Surrealism challenges our sense of reality by seemingly ridiculous associations: the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table is the example which the founder of official Surrealism, André Breton, offered in his Surrealist Manifesto. Surrealism challenges our sense of reality by seemingly ridiculous associations, which are like the secret logic of dreams. It claims to access the unconscious mind where feelings and memories are often hidden away from ordinary life.

     Poets as well as painters have often come up with images which are surreal. T.S. Eliot begins ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ with an image which is strikingly so:

    Let us go then, you and I,

    when the evening is spread out against the sky

    like a patient etherised upon a table.

    This image is certainly surreal and also challenging to the whole concept of poetry that was prevalent at the time. You have the first two lines leading you to expect a typically lyrical poem, but your expectation is exploded by the third line. This was not the kind of thing expected of poetry! It has nothing to do with a beautiful sunset, the calm of evening, instead it evokes illness, something not right, something out of kilter. In this case it evokes Prufrock’s unease with his own life, and maybe as well it expresses Eliot’s sense of being out of synch with the kind of poetry that was prevalent at the time.

NO FLOWERS IN MY HAIR AND NOT MUCH HAIR

IF YOU'RE GOIN' TO SAN FRANCISCO
BE SURE TO WEAR A FLOWER IN YOUR HAIR

Yes folks, We're off to San Fran to celebrate my 75th Birthday (I put 25th at first, surely a Freudian slip).
We'll spend a few days in the old Hippie Capital, then move on to Oakland, where I will take part in the famed Studio One monthly Series of Poetry Readings, curated by Casey McAlduff and Sheila Davies Sumner.
After that we will fly to Medford, Oregon, and be collected by the poet Allan Peterson, who read at Cuisle Limerick City International Poetry Festival a few years back. He will take us to be his guest in Ashland, where Bloomsbury Books will host a reading by me with music by Margaret.
Then it's back to San Francisco for a couple more days and back home.
By a curious coincidence, my two reading venues, Oakland and Ashland, chime in nicely with the title of the book from which I will be reading – The Speaking Trees.

The Speaking Trees is a chapbook published by SurVision Books, Dublin.

www.survisionmagazine.com

INTERVIEW WITH MEREDITH COLLINS

I'm interviewed by Meredith Collins at the interval during John Davies' Jizz Show in St George's, Kemptown, Brighton, where I read 'The Speaking Trees', the title poem of my new chapbook published last spring by SurVision Books. See text of poem in a previous blog. Chapbook available at
www.survisionmagazine.com

GIVE US ANOTHER POEM, THEY SAID

I received word by text message this morning that I can expect the delivery of six copies of my newly published chapbook The Speaking Trees between 4 and 5 pm today. The text says they will be delivered by 'your DPD driver Bulk'. I am looking forward to meeting Bulk and receiving from him my bulkhead of books.
The Speaking Trees is published by SurVision Books. Anatoly Kudryavitsky is the editor and presiding spirit of this new imprint, which espouses the surreal and the experimental in poetry.
In the words of Patrick Kavanagh:
Give us another poem, they said,
Or else we'll think your muse is dead.

The Speaking Trees can be obtained directly from SurVision Books at www.survisionmagazine.com
or from Amazon.co.uk, Lulu or other websites.

Besides six favourites from my last collection, Life Monitor, the chapbook contains twelve poems which have not been collected in book form before and five of these are published here for the first time:

CONTENTS

Magritte
As Regards the Dark
The Lost Jockey
Please Hold
Gluttony
Carol*
Fairies*
Angel Hour*
Dead Recital**
Budapest Quartet*
An Interview with Ivan**
Man in Field Talking to Cows*
Head*
Old Possum's Stray**
The Speaking Trees
Dogbark Metaphysics**
Once Upon October*
Frost on a Snowy Evening**

* = poems uncollected before
** = poems unpublished before

THE TREES ARE SPEAKING AGAIN

ANATOLY KUDRYAVITSKY is a poet and novelist who has been working ceaselessly to introduce a wider spectrum of poetry to the Irish reading public. He is a champion of, among other poetic modes, Surrealism and the Haiku. He embraces and encourages innovation and experiment in poetic forms. He has translated several Irish poets into Russian, Russian poets into English, and in 2017 he edited and translated into English an anthology called The Frontier: 28 Contemporary Ukranian Poets. 

    These are just a few of the facts concerning Anatoly's prolific endeavours, as writer, poet, anthologist, critic, mentor, monitor, linguist: a Renaissance kind of fellow in the midst of our dumbed-down ethos. In a cultural and benign sense, he is a frontiersman.

    Following on the inauguration of SurVision Magazine in 2017, Anatoly's latest initiative on the cultural frontiers is a series of Chapbooks dedicated to Surreal/ Experimental poetry, and I am honoured and delighted to be among the first of the many authors on Anatoly's to-be-published list. The image above is from the front cover of my Chapbook The Speaking Trees. The second chapbook, the first to be published, is Humanity by the American poet Noelle Kocot.

    The Speaking Trees is a compendious selection of 19 of my poems from over the years, including poems already collected and poems published recently in magazines and in the anthology Poems of the Decade, as well as a number as yet unpublished.

    Copies of The Speaking Trees, Humanity and other titles in the New Poetics Series can be ordered at www.survisionmagazine.com

CONTENTS OF THE SPEAKING TREES 

Anatomy of the Copper Man

The Garden of Possible Futures

Rooney's Mouth

Magritte

As Regards the Dark

The Lost Jockey

Please Hold

Gluttony

Carol

Fairies

Angel Hour

An Interview with Ivan

Man in Field Talking to Cows

Head

Dogbark Metaphysics

Supermarket

Old Possum's Other Cat

The Speaking Trees

The Tree Outside My Window 

YOGHURT ALERT OR, THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

Here's a bit of harmless satire about the fate of a yoghurt called Snowy (or Sno)

 

YOGHURT ALERT

Sno thrived till Supermarket said one day:

Now Snowy, I’m afraid you’ll have to say

Hello with cash, in other words, to pay

what’s called Hello Money, if you’re to stay.

And there are Seven Snow-White Yoghurts keen

to supplant you, take your place as Yoghurt Queen.

And very cultured yoghurts they are, too,

maybe not better but as good as you

and ready to fork out the wampum. Who

knows any difference between one snow

and another, pines for last year’s snow?

Either you pay the dough we call HelIo,

or be frozen yoghurt if you answer No –

and I mean frozen out, not kept in freezers,

no longer in demand from gals or geezers.

And we’ll say Hello, money! when we see

all brands are equal in the buyer’s eye. 

In other words, if you’re gone, ma cherie,

Jill or Jack Soap will take the one that’s here,

won’t comb the town when a few small tubs are plenty.

Rejoicing in the perceived identity

of all yoghurts, including you, dear Sno,

I have to tell you that without Hello

Money to pay a sweetener, you must go.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll, 2018

THE SPEAKING TREES

(at Gatwick Airport, 02 May 2005)

On the May bank holiday of 2005, my wife, my son and myself were traveling home to Limerick from a friend's house in North London. I suggested that the journey to Stansted Airport would be much easier in a taxi, rather than lug our baggage, as we usually did, on the bus to Islington, and then the tube to Tottenham Hale, and finally the express train to Stansted.

Me and my big mouth! – We met a tailback on the motorway which delayed us an hour, had a near accident with a motorbike because the cab driver was trying to help us make up time, and missed our plane.

I lost my passport: I left it on a counter as we discussed our dilemma with an impervious Ryanair functionary, and when I went to pick it up again, it had mysteriously disappeared. We had to book a new flight from Gatwick and cross London with its bank holiday crowds. By now, tempers were flaring, recriminations were flying (Why didn't we do what we have always done?), and we boarded a train for Gatwick in stony silence. Luckily, my driving license was still accepted as ID at that time. 

As I was boarding the plane, I caught a sudden glimpse of a bunch of trees on the edge of the airport. They seemed to be waving at me. 

This experience became the genesis of 'The Speaking Trees', a poem I worked over for years afterwards, leaving it and coming back to it again, until I finally published it in my collection, Life Monitor, in October 2009.

I read it in St George's Church, Kemptown, Brighton, last Friday night to a packed audience which were attending a performance of Jizz – poems from his eponymous new collection by John Davies – assisted in his bringing the work to thespian vibrancy by musician Helen Lundt and dancers Harriet Morris and Rosa Firbank. I was one of the guest performers in the second half of the show, along with my wife traditional Irish musician Margaret Farrelly, poet and publisher Kate Gale, and rock musician Pete Howells.

Much of the audience surprised me by being highly amused at the poem, in which the trees on the edge of the airport speak to me of the need to keep calm, take it easy, chill out, meditate transcendentally, get a life. And I suppose that the reading, more than twelve years after the event, could be taken as a case of 'Some day we'll look back on all this and laugh.' I hadn't been particularly struck by the surreal humor of the poem until the audience helped me to see it.

THE SPEAKING TREES
(Gatwick, 2nd May 2005)

We have troubles, say the trees, but we don’t worry.
We’re a green stripe on the edge of a grey airport
after your bad day at the office. We’re a shout
in your eye, an outburst of arboreal cheer.
Ours is a different time-scale: we’re content
to hold tight here while you rush to and fro.
We haven’t too much sympathy for the edgy:
there’s something keeps us singing on the edge
of existence or an airport. We offer perspective
by our comportment, which is quite other.
Soon – any moment now – you will lift your head
and the sight of us will put proportion on
the day’s troubles, help you become more rooted
in the sense that moving creatures may be so.
We are the leafy Yes in your day of No
endured where speed spins all colours to a grey
community. But we will slow you down
when we enter your head. Your thoughts will stop darting,
though you’ll still be able to shake an arm about.
You may wave at us if you like – pretend
you are waving at friends, it could be true.
What’s about to happen, when you meet our gaze,
could very properly be called a greeting.
We are the masters of mobility
because we have learned to move while staying put, 
and we feel we are ideally placed
here on the rim of vision to supply you
with a sustaining image. We’re afraid
you have become deaf to the cheering of trees,
you are out of touch with your branches and leaves.
You could also do with understanding time,
how to behave within it. This is not done well
by searching feverishly among pockets
for your ticket. You have far too many pockets.
Between departure lounge and boarding steps,
we’d love to tell you of those other steppes,
the grasslands of the great indifference.
In a few more seconds, when you notice us,
you’ll know that nothing matters much – the state
of the finances, the meltdown at the office,
tailbacks, missed departures, engineering works.
We could say the same thing more starkly in winter
but we feel that you need a touch of colour
in how the message is phrased: something green
catches your eye although it’s going nowhere,
and a quality you thought extinct still lives;
in a language fallen out of use, it speaks
of surprises and potentials in yourself,
the strength to let go and find unlikely comfort
in a stand of trees on a grey airport’s edge.

Look now - and don’t be ashamed to wave at us
as you show your boarding card to the hostess.
When you sit and shut your eyes on all the stress,
you’ll fall into our dance of rootedness.

From Life Monitor (Three Spires Press 2009)

(The entire Jizz performance can be seen on You Tube by Googling JIZZ BRIGHTON)