Two Microcosmic Parisian Worlds - Yan Kouton & Christophe Bregaint

Yan Kouton, a Breton poet living and working in Paris, met up with me in L’Étiquette cave au vin on l’Isle Saint- Louis, just a few meters away from Quai d’Anjou where Baudelaire used to live when he was a very young man, when I was doing a reading to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Poet’s death. It is something I share with Yan, and other contemporary French poets such as Christophe Bregaint, a deep love of 19^th century French poetry. I see the influence of Baudeliare in both poet’s work, and it is a great thing to see. One of the main reasons why I log onto Facebook is so that I can hook up with them and translate some of their latest work. Both poets share a unique aesthetic which could be described as minimalist, though I prefer to call their style micro-poems.    

Here’s a taste of what they both do, transversions into English my own.

Poème par Yan Kouton

Dans sa traîne

Le brouillard

S’evertue

A te perdre

Ne pas reconnaître

Ce que l’on doit

Des émotions

Que l’on confond

Des regards

Que l’on évite

Des  villes

Que l’on oublie

On parle d’absolu

Mais c’est rien

C’est que dale

Des mots

Et de la chair

Ca vaut rien

A peine le temps

Que l’on passe

Un éclair vraiment

Invisible pour les autres

A subir

Poétiquement

Parait-il

Ce que l’on

Desire

Vraiment

Dans l’intervelle

C’est vivre

On the train

the fog

strives

to lose you

to not recognize

what you should

 emotions

which can confound

perspectives

we won't face

whole cities

we tend to forget

to speak in

absolutes

is to speak

of nothing

words

and flesh

it costs nothing

but the time

that it takes

a bolt

invisible to others

to suffer

is

poetry

apparently

so

what we desire

in the interim

is

to Live

 https://k-yk.blogspot.com/2019/11/dun-recours.html?fbclid=IwAR3anl603RzEkoc8qEUYpCJ0k6LV1m12BeN7S4G39P-z-CAlU9pvQHKlNIM

Poème par Christophe Bregaint

Vers des rives épuisées
Il y eut ces routes
Tuméfiées
Dont les visages sont devenus verdâtres 
Au fil du temps
Peu enclin à retenir les souvenirs des sillons des horizons consumés
A l’approche des côtes qui bordent les rivages de ces mers gonflées par les naufrages
Le vent reproche aux siècles le calme des silences des chemins
En déshérence
Dans l’espace sémantique des perspectives meurtries
Pas après pas
Comme la peau du ciel sent la mémoire de ce qui n’est plus
Qui dégouline sur les terres d’ombres
Qui rassemblent les affaires des empreintes d’une existence qui se marie
Avec l’avènement des ruines

Transversion of a poem by Christophe Bregaint

Towards the exhausted banks

There are these roads which tumefy

So that faces turn green

In time

Little inclined to return to the memories

Of furrows of consumed horizons

Approaching the coasts which break the banks

The sea swelling with waves

The wind reproaching the centuries

The calm of the silence of the paths

Dormant in the semantics of dead perspectives

Step by step

Like the skin of the sky which feels the memory

Of what is no longer there

Dripping onto the earth shadows

Which resemble the affair of traces

Of an existence which is wedded

To the advent of ruins

https://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/auteurs/christophe-bregaint/

Carmen - Francesca Banciu - Novelist, Poet and Editor at Levure Litteraire

I have known Carmen for some years now, another wonderful writer and editor who has championed my work in Levure Litteraire. 

Carmen lives, for me, the ideal writer's life. She rents a house in the Peloponnese where she writes before returning to her apartment in Berlin, when she has completed a book. She is immensely talented, and prolific. She left her country ( Romania ) to live in Berlin at a very early age, having just left school, and from there she has written a lot about her former home and her upbringing under communist rule. She is an exile, and she is highly political. She is fearless, and for this reason I have sent her numerous poems over the years to print in Levure.

Click on the links below to see some of the work that she has published.

  http://levurelitteraire.com/?s=peter+o%27+neill

 http://levurelitteraire.com/?s=carmen+francesca+banciu+

5Oth issue of A New Ulster - Reading with David Rigsbee and Michael J.Whelan

I have had a big history with A New Ulster, the poetry journal printed by Amos Greig, son of Dennis at Lapwing. I show up 31 times on the website of the publication. That's a lot of submissions printed... Amos has a background in history, and we both share very similar tastes in literature. It was always a pleasure chatting with him. Like his father, he too suffers due to ill health. That's something I have come to understand myself, so I have a lot of sympathy and compassion. Life's not easy, when you have added health complications...

Three years ago, they printed their 50th issue. So, with the poets David Rigsbee ( USA ) and Michael J. Whelan ( Tallaght ), we decided to have a group reading to celebrate the occasion. The reading took place in Books Upstairs, I remember.

Click on the link below to able to see back issues of the magazine, there is a lot of my writing available there. Reviews, poems, even the odd essay and some translations of course...

 https://sites.google.com/site/anewulster/system/app/pages/search?scope=search-site&q=peter+o%27neill

  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/fame-awaits-for-karen-perry-s-girl-unknown-1.2862958

Dennis Greig & Lapwing Press, Belfast, Northern Ireland

To the best of my knowledge, these three collections, published by Lapwing Press in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, are the only books not out of print belonging to me. It is my understanding that the publisher, Dennis Greig, is suffering from health problems again. Here's hoping that his health picks up, his family must be worrying about him.

If you are interested in purchasing any of the works pictured above, click on the link below.

https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/peter-o-neill

Rules of Engagement - Michael J.Whelan ( Doire Press) - A Review

Rules of Engagement

Michael J.Whelan

Doire Press, 2019

(79 pages)

Michael Whelan’s second collection of poetry revisits old themes familiar to readers of Peacekeeper ( Doire Press, 2016). This should come as no surprise, as Whelan has not changed jobs in the last three years. He is still a member of the Irish Defence Forces, stationed out at Baldonnell Aerodrome where he is Keeper of the Irish Air Corps Military Aviation Museum & Collection. Baldonnell Aerodrome features a lot in Rules of Engagement. It acts as a locus for the poet to engage with the world. As in the poem Seeds of Imagination.

The love chase of the blackbirds

swoops at high velocity

through the twin-tails of the vampire jet,

between the wings of the Wright- flyer

and around the ears of tourists

who come to view

the history of aviation,

The irony is not lost on Corporal Whelan while he watches the pair of birds, caught up in their amorous flight, as they make their nests in a Leonidas engine, a great 693 lb monster which was used to power Bristol Bulldog biplanes during the interwar years. Indeed birds are a recurring motif in the collection, depending on their species they can evoke peace, as in the aforementioned poem, or war. Take the poem Sparrowhawk, for example.

The bones of a dead thing,

a skeletal crow

lay spread-eagled on the tailwing

of an old airplane

just inside the museum hangar door,

picked clean,

no blood,

no scattered feathers

though I discover them later

in other places,

no flesh except for the head.

These are the kind of introspective poems written by a man in mid-years, though from the vantage point of one who has seen active military service, and so has seen things that no ordinary citizen is privy to see.

I wondered what predator had done this

and then I felt the raptor swoop down,

touch my skull with his lethal talons,

watched it rise up on broad wings,

weave in and out, up and down

between the roof rafters and trusses

to rest on a high perch,

where it eyed my fascination.

Reading the poems in Rules of Engagement one is made very aware that the poet, who is also a historian, is very aware of the tradition that he belongs to. The names appear in the titles of some of the poems: Gallipoli, After the Great War, Patriot, Wilfred Owen’s Grave…graves figure a lot in the collection. As one would expect. And one can sense the deep frustration of the poet in some of the pieces. And in others the touch of history, such as in the short yet moving poem Golgotha dedicated to the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon.

At once I knew the resurrection

then far away the thudding of the guns.

In the clockwork of that battle

a silhouette came to me

bearing beams of timber across his breast,

walking with words of love

along the broken trench

to lay upon the floor of my Golgotha.

I know you, I said in the midst of the strafe,

Yes, you know me, he replied,

like war we have known each other forever.

Michael Whelan comes from a Christian tradition, so Christian imagery, as above, with ideas of brotherly love sit, as they must, rather contrastingly among the rather arbitrary violence and senseless barbarity that goes on around the poet who, while he observes the behaviour of the birds within the apparent calm and peaceful world of Baldonnell, must also reckon with the horrific scenes which still assail him and which he witnessed so many years ago while on active duty with the United Nations policing war zones in both Kosovo and the Lebanon. Take the poem One Free Exposure, for example.

Even now through the magnified rifle sights

the grey silhouettes seem so far away,

or maybe I want them to be,

the timber humans show themselves

briefly in the crosshairs,

each one about to be engulfed in a halo.

I cock my weapon and wait.

The damp ground saturates my elbows and knees,

a false reality, my face drips in the hazy air

as I close a cold eye, first pressure on the trigger finger,

all this drill, all this preparation.

I once closed an eye on a girl in a white

has/chem[1] suit from a thousand yards

as she plotted the dimensions of the war crime.

It was raining that day too. She had blood and guts,

lots of it, heart and brains and a notebook and pen.

Muck crept over her legs. I could follow thoughts processing

through her body – synaptic, impulse, energy, dismay.

I wanted to help but was glad in the end I didn’t have her skills

or permission to cross that ground, to still see those sights

she knew were coming, the faces she discovered

with both eyes wide open.

This poem is pivotal, it seems to me, as it highlights properly the poet’s dilemma; how to live with the horror, which has parallels in nature, and yet try to adhere to one’s Christian beliefs? I am reminded of the plight of Caravaggio, there was another who painted, almost uniquely scenes from both the Old and New Testament, placing himself at times in the great canvases, such as The Betrayal of Christ which hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, his face illuminated, as he observes the horror, while he holds up the light!  

With Rules of Engagement,  Michael J.Whelan remains consistent in both theme and treatment of subject matter as in his debut collection Peacekeeper, and although the memories of what he witnessed all those years are more chronologically distant to him, the memories are just as corrosive and haunting. Whelan, in this respect, is a man alone, at least certainly in his native Ireland. To hear him reading aloud these poems is always a deeply felt experience, as it is clear that the memories of certain past events are extremely painful for him to endure. In this, his writing, like all great art, burns as a lasting testament to his enduring will and power. A lesser man, or poet or artist, would have become hideously embittered, many years ago. Not so Michael J.Whelan. He is a wonderful presence to have on the contemporary poetry scene, for he follows a long standing literary tradition of which he is, although perhaps a little awe-struck by at times, a worthy contributor.

On a more personal note, I consider myself most fortunate to know him as a friend.

May his pen never falter.

Peter O’Neill

25/11/2019   

https://www.doirepress.com/writers/m_z/michael_whelan/

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[1] has/chem: hazardous chemical

Helen of Troy - new sonnet published in Fly on the Wall Press Magazine - Chaos

Sometimes, you can be very lucky and hit upon a good idea, and if you are really lucky you might even get it down on paper in a half sensible fashion... Well, you may even remain true, or perhaps realize the actual content as a thing of pure form... that is when you hit the jackpot; when content and form are so inseparable that they become almost indistinguishable... Well, that, did NOT happen here...But, almost... Another near miss then...

The Editor at Fly on the Wall Press Isabelle Kenyon was kind enough to see past the missed bits and to instead focus on the near hits... I am very happy with the first and the last lines, but as for the 12 in between.. Well, I'll let you judge for yourself. Oh, just a small matter... you'll have to pay for the magazine first... Scroll down to the link, if interested.

https://www.flyonthewallpoetry.co.uk/product-page/magazine-chaos

"Proust's creatures,"

Excited by the continuing possibilities my research into Comment c'est /How It Is are throwing up. I have been reading Proust again, commuting to and from work on the train during the week affords me the time, and a number of quotations from both Albertine disparue, and A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs made me think back to Cc/HII.

These ideas became more clarified in a discussion with a student of mine in the National Gallery yesterday, he has a PHD in Entomology- the study of insects. This evokes the very Socratic idea of logos, and the importance of discussion. For, sometimes by speaking our thoughts aloud it helps us to clarify what we mean...Anyway, by discussing some of the theories which my research has thrown up, (almost said 'my' theories (!) ) it helped me to clarify the direction where some of the ideas were going, and which involve the Estonian biophilosopher Jakob von Uexkull and his ideas on Umwelt. There have been a number of correspondences already between the Anglo-Irish playwright and novelist and the Estonian, most notably with the French choreographer Maguy Marin - see short clip on the link below.

All this preamble to also signal a series of poems taken from an old collection of mine, unpublished, The Gombeen appear in this month's bumper edition, in two volumes, of Live Encounters Poetry. See my poems under the title Ballybaa, which is a reference to Beckett's wonderful first novel in French Molloy - this book, by the way, is the one which convinced me I had to 'become' a writer.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pVc210o-eY

  https://liveencounters.net/2019/11/05/live-encounters-poetry-writing-volume-one-december-2019/

The Muddy Banks - Michael S. Begnal - Sabotage review

 Here's a short review I wrote of the above chapbook by the wonderfully talented Michael S. Begnal, it was published by Sabotage in 2016, shortly after the chapbook was published. See link below.

The Muddy Banks

Michael S. Begnal

Ghost City Press, Syracuse, NY, 2016.

There is a wonderful similitude at work between the structure of the Point Bridge in the poem 1877 Point Bridge, which opens this chapbook, and the formal composition of the poem itself which is divided into three parts, each one made up of five verses made up of 6 lines, fashioned in iambic dimeters ( two metrical feet, one stressed one unstressed ) as opposed to pentametres, the ones used traditionally in sonnets and which are double the metrical length, so five stressed and correspondingly five unstressed. And, just to add to the fun, each third part of the poem has an additional half line thrown in for good measure, almost mimicking the poem itself;

and falls

the dead bridge

in this investment

Why do poets do this to themselves, and more to the point to us the readers? Because, form ( be it the substance which surrounds us, or which we find ourselves entrapped in; our own flesh and blood, the visible bridge in front of us, or whatever surrounding geography would seem to encompass us ) is the primal substance which makes up our very lives, and from which there is no escape. Freedom is a cage. The Nazis, with particularly gruesome humour, wrought it above the gates of Auschwitz; Arbeit macht frei – work sets you free! So, all formal structure must be seen in this light, and particularly in a work of literature, for purely ontological reasons. Thus, a poet or artist who insists on using complex formal structures is sending us out a moral sign that they are concerned only in the pursuit of actual freedom; the one which offers up deliverance uniquely in the work. In other words, as with anything which is worth while pursuing, there is a struggle involved, and which is twofold. Firstly, there is the struggle of the artist to render into coherent form some kind of statement by them, I am using the term statement in its very widest terms. This struggle is then met with the  struggle of those who come after, in this case the readers, in an attempt to comprehend what it is in fact the writer of the piece is attempting to achieve, if indeed anything! The impetus of pleasure, and pleasure alone, must not be ruled out, when considering the formal considerations taken into account, particularly when one can distinguish quite clearly, as in the case of the poems in this short work by Michael S. Begnal, the pleasure which the poet himself enjoys in the construction of their edifice.

What great portcullis-like

iron lattice-work towers

stood as cathedral spires

at both banks,

So opens the opening poem, the enjambment continuing on down until the 18^th line, punctuating finally the question:

what great steel beams

suspended the span

clocks in towers

high above barges of coal,

cables hanging down in

graded decreasing lengths,

down, then moving up again

to the towers of the black bridge?

The run on lines causing a freeze frame in the descriptor, echoing the visible 'bridge suspended in smoke and haze', and also perfectly freezing the creative movement of the mind of the artist/poet.

Of course, being an artist concerned with themes such as human freedom, yet working within the constraints of formal literary structures, Begnal allows himself enough room to diverge from the rigidity of counting iambs. He is, after all, a poet not a bean counter. So, the formal constraints, as with everything, must be understood metaphorically not literally, and this is when a truly democratic appreciation of the notion of freedom must be understood. Indeed, if art and literature have any great moral truth to impart on us, as some people would like to think that they have still, is it not exactly this; that when form and content are working in almost complete accordance with one another, as in the poem 1877 Point Bridge by Michael S. Begnal, then this is exactly the kind of exercise, through the formal structural play on the constraints, that the notion of flight is inserted.

Some’s sons set it

under sooty slopes,

there are forms underneath

only they are privy to,

Stumbling alliteration used as a further ploy to once again steady the reader to really read the craft of the phrasing. The very self-conscious nature of the style of the writing being in itself the game, which certain linguists would remind us is always a primal motivator for all children when they are learning language; pleasure, in a word! The babbling babble of Babel. Then pleasure becomes eroticised, as pleasure tends to invariably do, as in the final part of the poem.

Increased facilities for intercourse

and additional comforts

afforded by the erection

will undoubtedly restore good speedy

to former vitality, and

the point is enhanced

The moral tale of the poem being: as can be our lives, by such pleasurable pursuits! It’s a point all artists and poets have been making since time immemorial. Memory itself being perhaps the second motivator, after the pleasure principle, for these poems are thick with it, and once again this is an ontological question, concerning as it does the case of human identity. In this particular case, the poet's own and his relation with the city of Pittsburgh.

With The Muddy Banks, the poet Michael S. Begnal goes on to further explore some of the former denizens of his home city, including the poet Haniel Long, a poet whom Begnal has made a particular study of. [i] Long, a poet of the thirties who was a poet of engagement,  acts as a catalyst for the poet to explore contemporary issues in the US, eternal themes such as discrimination, poverty- both intellectual as well as financial- and the ever widening divide of those who have, and those who do not. Begnal’s poems are timely!   

http://sabotagereviews.com/2016/08/10/the-muddy-banks-by-michael-s-begnal/

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[i] Begnal, S. Michael: Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh’s Memoranda- Documentary Form and 1930’s Political Poetry, College Literature, Volume 42, No. 1, winter 2015, pp.139-166.