LXXIII. The Barrel of Hate - Transversion from The Crown of Pain - Les Fleurs du Mal

                                                                             

LXXIII. – The Barrel of Hate

Vengeance temporarily is distracted by a woman’s strong arms

Holding up the mythic Barrel of the Danaid’s,

Precipitating into the void of darkness

Bearing bucketloads of blood and all the tears of the dead.

The demons wove discreet holes into the veils covering the abyss

Where a thousand years of their sweat and effort have flown,

Wherein they would somewhere roam

Resuscitating the dead only to bleed them out again.

Hatred is like a drunk in the backroom of some bar

Who always senses a latent oncoming thirst

Multiplying like the Hydra-headed beast of Lerna.     

  

                                  But happy drinkers know and recognise their conqueror,

                  

                                       While all Hate is doomed to its lamentable faith

              

                                           Never knowing when to let sleeping dogs lie.

XLIX - The Poison - From Baudelaire's Crown of Pain - Fleurs du Mal - Transversion

XLIX. – The Poison

Wine can often redress the most sordid dive

With its miraculous luxury and re-invigorate,

 More so than any fabled gateway,

Through the alchemy of its reddish vapour

Like a Sun setting in the nebulous sky.

Opiates can broaden the expanse of any borders,

Further infuse the unlimited,

Deepen time, aid the voluptuary,

And further enhance the dark and mournful pleasures

Which the soul mirrors at full capacity.

But all of this is nothing compared to the poison which flows

From your eyes, your emerald eyes,

Those twin lakes which further unhinge one…

Causing my dreams to escalate in a screaming riot

To desalinate the bitter gulfs which encroach.

Again, all of this is nothing to the atrocious prodigy

Of the saliva parting from your lips,

 Through your parting kiss, remorselessly

Infecting to the point of a hallucinatory vertigo

The defective roulette played out on this tide of Death.

La Sorciere - Michelet, Nerval & Yan Kouton

Gerard de Nerval was another one of those incredibly talented 19th century French poets who have been such a resource for so many writers since. This morning I had a very nice surprise, the French poet and editor Yan Kouton published in Les cosaques sans frontiers a poem of mine written in French. I don't write too many in that language now, so this was a very nice surprise for me. Firstly that I should have been still able to write a poem worthy of publication in the language, and secondly that the poem's publication should provoke the following transversion on El Desdichado by Nerval. This is a famous poem, taken from Les Chimeres or Chimeras - which explains everything. I want to thank Yan for publishing my poem, see link below, and would like to dedicate this transversion, based very loosely on the original by Nerval to him. 


                                                                           Destiny

Transversion of a poem by Nerval

For Yan Kouton

I am in darkness, a widower, the inconsolable;

The Prince of Aquitaine in his ruined Tower

Whose sole star is dead, and whose luth now

Plays only melancholic dirges from a dark sun.

In the tomb of the night, you who would console me

Render to me rather the islands and the Sardinian Sea,

For they are the only consolation for this broken heart,

This trellis on which the bounteous rose still grows.

Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan… or Biron?

My memory is still corrupted with her virus,

Even while swimming in the grotto of the sirens.

Twice fjording the Archeron,

Jamming alongside Orpheus with his lyre,

                              All the sighs of the saints contained, and the cries of the damned.


 https://lescosaquesdesfrontieres.com/2019/12/27/la-sorciere/?fbclid=IwAR1zRy3nbVUBdkIhbr6fetAD5q-doXFpEPUxKyaoB3YHFVh30K9AEwQVH3M

In the Fields of Ephesus - the sonnet as form - and John Sexton

The sonnet is one of my favourite poetic forms, if you ever want to read a superlative essay on this most durable mode of poetic expression do have a look at the introductory essay to Dan Patterson's 101 Sonnets. 

Dante and Petrarch are the best places to start, for the forms origins. I would seriously recommend learning the Italian language, but while you're at it you may want to consult some fluent translations/transversions. Mark Musa's Canzonniere published by Indiana University Press, 1999, would be a great place to start. Musa won the keys to the city of Florence for his translations of Dante, so there you go!

I think perhaps that a lot of younger poets today may feel intimidated by the form, and so perhaps stay away. The trick, like with anything, is to use your common sense. The way it is taught in schools does not help. Try to forget all about those ridiculous rhyming schemes, unless you're into that kind of thing.

Personally, I am only a fan of rhyme in Latin or Romance languages, such as Italian, French and Spanish. In English, rhyme sucks. Milton was a godsend, being one of the most vehemently opposed English poets to rhyme. His 'trick' was syntax, or prosody. Using slight alternating rhyme, combined with alliteration, and enjambment. Being a linguist, he was fluent in Latin, he loved manipulating word order. This is really the thing. The shock of unexpected, and so fresh linguistic collocations, and metaphor. This is what poetry for Milton was about. And look what he did!

Now, of course John Donne and William Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney are wonderful examples of good rhyme working in English. I have tried it too, I must admit. But that's a whole other story for another post.

Here is a sonnet, typical of mine, in which I use a basic iambic pentameter - that's a 5-5 syllable count, that's five stressed and five unstressed iambs to each line. Yes, I know. Counting iambs, not very exciting stuff. But, here's the thing. You need some kind of ruling, in meter, to confine the 'beast'. Freedom, after all, is a cage. Yes, I know, that sounds a little brutal, but such is life. What are you going to do!

I will be coming back to this topic, I'm sure. But in the meantime, here's a sonnet of mine, done in my own inimitable style ( study it) and which I dedicated to the Kerry based poet John Sexton who was kind enough to get me one of my first paid reading gigs down in my hometown of Cork when The Elm Tree first came out in 2014. The poem was first published in Abridged issue 29 (see link) and later appeared as part of The Trees of Ephesus section of More Micks than Dicks, published by Famous Seamus in 2017 -which sadly now is out of print.   

In the Fields of Ephesus

For John Sexton

The illuminations uncovered at Ephesus, the way

The light unfolds each leaf set against the cloud

Formations of Bruegel and Callot, further reveal

That nature too has memory in aesthetic.

Here in Ephesus we are not in Eden, I am reminded

Too that the apples are all gone. Under the boughs,

The year’s delicious harvest is indeterminate;

Fresh shit mixed with all manner of pain today,

Followed, possibly, by more Tom Morrow. Or,

Perhaps strawberries! Take a punnet and mind

Where you place your feet. Oh and by the way,

Don’t ask why there is a bearded lady crucified

Against the sky, flailed ceaselessly by Dominatrix,

Nor why too Vico’s giants hail Prometheus.

https://www.abridged.one/abridged-0-29-primal/

If you are unfamiliar with John's work check out the following link, The Offspring of the Moon would be a great introduction. Not that he needs any...   

https://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=298&a=244

The Elm Tree, Lapwing, 2014 - first full length collection

I was first published, to the best of my knowledge, by Maire Holmes who was the editor at The Galway Review at the time. This was in December 2012, see link below. So almost eight years ago now. Then, throughout 2013, I got as many poems published as I could so that I could approach a publisher with a book. I had numerous manuscripts to choose poems from: The Dark Pool, Dublin Gothic, More Micks than Dicks, Divertimento - The Muse is a Dominatrix...

Well, I got sections from each of these books published, and so I decided to group all of the published poetry from all five collections into a kind of selected poems, which is what I did, and I sent it to Lapwing in Belfast. A lot of the poems were being published by A New Ulster at the time, so it made sense. The Greig family, both Amos ( ANU ) and Dennis ( Lapwing ) have published so many poets here in Ireland, and on both sides of the boarder, as well as abroad.

Dennis Greig was wonderful, we put The Elm Tree together in a matter of days and before I knew it twenty or so promotional copies were in the post for me to distribute among well wishers and friends. I sent Ross Breslin from The Scum Gentry a copy to review ( see link below ) and Christine Murray of Poethead ( see link ) which they both did. And two very good reviews they are too.

If you are interested in reading my poetry, The Elm Tree is probably the best place to start as it will give you a good sense of my scope; the book encapsulates extracts from six of my collections, most of which are out of print now. I am currently trying to find a publisher interested in reprinting the books which are now out of print, but until I do if you are interested in my writing please go to Lapwing ( see link below) who are now the only publisher currently selling my books.


 https://the-scum-gentry-alternative-arts.com/ross-breslin-poetry-review-elm-tree-peter-o-neill/


https://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/the-elm-tree-by-peter-oneill/


https://thegalwayreview.com/2012/12/16/five-poems-by-peter-o-neill/


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

Poem as King Tiger and Operation Citadel

                                 


I have always loved history, particularly WWII. Ever since I was a schoolboy I have been fascinated by this period. The first piece of writing I ever did was transcribing an entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica about the battle of El-Alamein. I became fascinated with Rommel, and the Third Reich. I remember one day my father came home from work and I had pictures of Hitler, Goering and Himmler up over my bed, as other boys would have football stars. The youthful appeal of uniforms and violence. Oh, if I had of been alive at the time in Germany I would, no doubt, have become a member of the Hitler Youth. But, you grow up, thank God!   

The following two poems were both published for the first time in Northern Ireland, the first Poem as King Tiger was published in A New Ulster, the editor there Amos Greig is also a big history buff. I had been reading a lot of Anthony Beevor and books about the Eastern Front. The battle of Kursk, for example, has often captured my imagination. Stalingrad too, of course. Beevor's account is simply wonderful. Epic history. But there are many compelling films to see on YouTube, as well. I love hearing the accounts of veterans, for example. I met one on my way home from France in 1995, it was the year after the 50th anniversary. He was a Canadian infantryman who had fought his way through Caen and up to Holland. You can only have respect for that generation, what they saw, what they lived through...

The second poem here, Prelude to Citadel was published in an anthology of poems to commemorate the holocaust. I deliberately sent them in a poem about Kursk. Not because I wanted to deny the relevance of what happened to the Jewish community in Europe, but to highlight other genocides which took place. As the war in the East was a war or genocide also, the figure of Russian dead dwarfs the figures of the Jewish holocaust. Not that it is a competition, but you simply want to remind people. The Nazis basically wanted to annihilate everyone who was not considered "Aryan".
There are, of course, a lot of references to all of this period of history with what is going on today. So called 'Strong' leaders, are back en vogue . Hence the post!

 Poem as King Tiger

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

                                                      Wislawa Szymborska

In order to withstand the fiction of eternity

The poem must be as resolute as the Final Solution.

It must be able to withstand the holocaust;

Stand up, like a flower of evil, to the most cynical inspection.

If it speaks of love it must do so

With the velocity of an 88mm canon.

Its heart must be as stalwart as a Maybach engine.

Its skin as thick so as to be able to deflect all armoured piercing.

The poet likened then to a Commander

Well versed in Clausewitz and The Nature of War,

Life being analogous with unending conflict.

Of course, choosing the right side to defend is key.

Images of all Panzer turning their turrets and reversing on Auschwitz,

Crushing the barbed wire, annihilating the real enemy.

Prelude to Citadel

Private Joachim Kleist stood up in his brown,

Pebbled leather jackboots, which had seen far

Better days. They had survived two Russian

Winters, but on looking at them in the

Summer light, he feared that neither they

Nor he could survive a third! It's true,

The army was being re-equipped with the

New Tiger tanks, more than a match for any Russian.

But, they were all too few, and too late.

Hadn't they already annihilated millions,

And still they still kept coming... The hordes!

Uneasily, he flung the cigarette

From him down the sun burnt hill. It lay

Smoking there were it had fallen. A sign of things to come.

 http://www.poetryni.com/poems-for-holocaust-memorial-day-2016.html

Le Bateau ivre/ The Drunken Boat Transversion

From 1989 to 1998, I spent the majority of my time living and working in France. So, I read a lot of French writers, particularly from the later part of the 19th century, while I was there. And, on returning to Dublin, I continued to do so. Being able to engage with writers like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Aloysius Bertrand, Jules Laforgue and Nerval, to name but a few, was a hugely important discovery for me, not only as a person, but also as a writer. 

One day, some years ago, I wanted to go out on a boat in my hometown of Skerries, here in North County Dublin. It was raining quite heavily, I remember, so that was that. I was working on the water section of Sker at the time. And then the idea came to me to transverse Rimbaud's great poem Le Bateau ivre. And I did, that very morning in one sitting. 

Samuel Beckett's transversions, and Seamus Heaney's 'impure translations', were hugely important to me in my own development as a Transverser. I see this work as an essential part of my job as a writer/poet. If you want to really read something, this is really the best way to go about it, as you must enter into the skin of the writer. 

This transversion originally was first published on the Deepwater Online Literary Journal based along the river Blackwater in my home County Cork. But they have since shut up shop, so I am making it available here on my blog again. It also appears in The Gladstone Readings Anthology published by Famous Seamus, in 2017. But I think that is out of print.

If you are interested in seeing the transversion in its original context, see Sker published by Lapwing in Belfast. See the link below.       

The Drunken Boat
After Arthur Rimbaud : 1854-1891

How I descended the impassive rivers
No longer guided by the haulers;
Red skins had taken them as targets
Nailing their colours naked to the masts.

Incoherent to the crews,
The importers of Flemish wheat and English cotton,
When the boatmen had finished unloading
The rivers let me go as I pleased.

Into the furious awakening of the tides,
I, the winter previous, deafer than the brain of a child,
I ran! And the peninsulas departed,
Without sounding out triumphant.

The tempest blessed my maritime bath,
Lighter than a cork I danced upon the waves,
What are known as rollers, vice drowned,
For ten nights spun, not missing the silly winks from the bouys.

Softer than the skin of children, the peal of flesh,
The Irish sea inundated my craft of pine,
And the stains of Moorish wine, and vomit,
Bathed me, having dispersed with all rudders and hooks.

And lo’ and behold, I came to bathe in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused in its milk of stars,
Devouring the azure plains- where float
The pale, bloated corpses of the drowned;

Who, holding the brining blue trumpet’s delirious
Rhythm, slowly throughout the rupture of the days,
Stronger than any alcohol, or infinite guitar,
Fermenting all the bitter tattoos of love!

I know the climes die in a flash, and the spouts,
Waves and current: I have known the evening,
And dawn exulted to be only peopled by crows.
And, at times, I have even seen what most men can only dream.

I have seen the ancient disc, stained in Aeschylean horror,
Descend, illuminating the congealed violets
Resembling those ancient satyrs
Whose watery robes tremble with the vicious spray.

And I have dreamed the night green into a dazzling snow,
With kisses merging slowly through the eye of the seas,
Tasted the sap circulating whose whereabouts is still unknown,
And in the aurora of the stupor, perceived a hymn in phosphorous.

I have followed, myself alone, like the herd
Of hysterics, the ripples of the cyclone on the assault of the reefs,
Without dreaming that the soles of the illuminating tides
Could muffle the full force of the oceans.

I have scaled, be it known to you, incredible Floridas,
Mixing the flower of panthers in the eyes of men!
Whole rainbows, extended like the snippets of brides,
Beneath the horizon of seas, and the awful troops.

I have witnessed the distillation of enormous tides, nets
Where lie rotting the corrupted Jonahs of the leviathan.
The systematic collapse of water handed over by the meek,
And the abyss keeps widening its jaws a cataract!

Glaciers, silver suns, floating pearls, and steaming embers!
Hideous groundings at the bottom of shitty gulfs
Where giant worms devour golden bugs,
And tortured elms emit dark Virgilian perfumes.

I should have liked to show children Eldorados,
The great Blue, Neptune, and his singing fish.
However, whole continents of plastic engulfed me,
Pushed onward by the turbulence of wind farms.

Sometimes, martyrized by poles and zones,
The sea, taken in spasms, revealed to me its
Plankton, and further subterranean depths,
And I dived with her, like with a woman kneeling...

Presque isle, tossing about overboard with the struggles
And the droppings of the marauding terns.
And I drifted, and between my fragile links
The drowned plunged sleeping, further retreating!

Now me, a lost boat on the hair of the bays,
Blown by the cyclone, birdless into the ether,
I with whom the monitors and the ships of industry
Could not have replenished the drunk carcass of still water.

Free, smoking, mounting in violet plumes,
I who pierced a hole in the sky glowing like a wall
Bringing with him the exquisite preserve of good poets,
The lichens of the sun, and the snot of azure,

Who ran, charged with electric visions,
Escorted by black seahorses on crazed gang planks,
When all of the 4th of Julys collapsed little by little
The ultramarine climes and ardent funnels;

I who trembled, feeling the moans at fifty leagues
The rutting of the behemoths and the expansive maelstroms,
An eternal spinner in the motionless blue,
Who regrets Europe with her ancient ramparts!

I have seen sidereal archipelagos, and the islands
Where delirium climates abound are sailing:
Is it in those endless nights that you sleep in exile,
A million golden birds, o future vigour?

But, its true, I have cried too much! The dawns have become mediocre.
Every moon now is atrocious, and each sun is bitter.
Acrid love pumps me full of an unnerving apathy.
Christ, if I could get a rest! I need to see the sea.

If I were to envisage a sea for Europe, it would be a puddle
Black and cold, where the dusk is embalmed
And where a child huddled up in sadness, sails
A frail boat like a mayfly.

I can no longer, bathed in these waters, o tears,
Trail in the wake of the cotton porters,
Nor traverse the abomination of flags and flames,
Nor swim below the horrible glare of the pontoons.

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

XLVIII - The Flask - Transversion from Baudelaire's Crown of Pain ( Fleurs du Mal)

XLVIII. - The Flask

There are strong perfumes for which all matter

Is porous. You’d think they might penetrate the glass.

While opening some oriental casket

Whose lock grimaces and balks before crying out,

Or, in a deserted house in some old armoire  

Full of the acrid odour of time, blackened with soot,

Where you might find an old flask

In which pulses the soul of one still alive.

A thousand thoughts sleep, funerary crystals,

Gently trembling in the leaden darkness

Spreading their wings finding their essence,

Azure tinted, crystalized rose, burnished tears.

And so the memory stirs gathering voltage

From the troubled air; the eyes close; vertigo

Seizes the vanquished soul and pushes with both hands

Towards the obscure abyss of human miasms.

There terraced on the edge of a secular gulf

Where foul smelling Lazarus rips his shroud,

Mute in his awakening like the spectral corpse

Of a rancid love, charming and sepulchral

.

Like so, when I too become lost to memory

Among men, just like in the corner of some sinister

 Old armoire where someone last left me,

Like some decrepit, dirty, abject, dusty old vicious flask.

I will be your coffin, amiable pestilence.

A testament to your force and violence.  

Dear poison prepared by the angels, like liquor

Which gnawed at both the life and death of my heart.

The Clock - Transversion from Baudelaire

The Clock

Sinister God, frightening and impassive,

Your hands menace us with each utterance -“Remember!”

The vibrant pains in your heart full of fear,

Like a target, will soon murmur.

Vapourish pleasures abscond onto the fleeting horizon,

Like an usherette at the back of the theatre.

Every instant delicious snippets are being devoured

Accorded to each man and from every season.  

3650 times an hour, the micro-seconds whisper;

“Remember!” Rapid with their insect voices,

Now they say: I am already another time,

As they suck your life with their squalid hypodermics.

Remember! Souviens- toi! Prodigal! Esto memor!

( Their mechanical throats speak all languages )

The minute hands, which are playfully mortal,

 Are coasted in the most- flimsy patented gold.

Remember also that Time is an avid player

Who wins without cheating as it has no need being the Law.

The days decrease, the nights augment souviens toi!

The abyss is always thirsty, as the clepsydra leaks.

Now that the hour of divine hazard tolls

Oh august virtue, your virginal bride,

Or even the repentant  ( Oh, the last refuge!)

Will tell you: grow up you coward, before it is too late.

https://fleursdumal.org/poem/218

XXXIX - The Exquisite Cadaver - Transversion after Charles Baudelaire

I took the above selfie while a quarter way into The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire which was eventually published by Lapwing in Belfast, 2015. I was quite sick at the time, having been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis the year previous. I was not able to work, so bad had my condition become, and one way of keeping busy at home was translating-transversing Baudelaire.

I kind of grew up in France during the nineties, having moved there first to Paris, where I spent five years, and then moving south to Bordeaux. So France, and French culture, became incredibly important to me. I suppose this is what sets me apart from other writers in Ireland. Whereas they would mostly be relying on W.B. Yeats or Seamus Heaney as principle sources of influence, Baudelaire was my go to poet.

After finally finishing The Dark Pool, a book which took me over 15 years to write, I felt I had to try and translate him. I owed him so much, after all in that book I had tried to transpose Baudelaire's 19th century aesthetic onto 21st century Dublin, and it had worked. After this experiment I was totally able to concur with Slajov Zizek, when Russia annexed the Crimea, that we were actually living once again in the 19th century. Baudelaire's poetry feels so right for the times, the appalling abuse of power and violence which one sees everywhere. Just look to the recent elections in the UK and the rise of populism, might is right once again. This is Vico, the cyclical nature of empires, what he would call in his Scienza nouva the heroic age.

Baudelaire is one of the few poets who injected the spleen of his times into his poetry, he was one of the first to totally seize on the negative side, totally, and to use it as a poetic force, or power, and the results are still as unsettling as they were when Les Fleurs du Mal was first published back in the mid to late 19th century. 

In my transversions of his work, I wanted to give a contemporary spin to his work. So I brought in Francis Bacon, Heidegger the holocaust and other such phenomenon that I thought would not be too far out of place. In fact Bacon's reworkings of Velasquez and Van Gogh were my inspiration, rather than any other writer. I wanted to experience the same freedom of violent expression. I was so tired of reading trite platitudes typically associated with Anglo-Saxon poetry. I was so tired of the hypocrisy. Hence the anger and frustration, to be harnessed like a force. 

For example, who has not experienced the anger of being the jilted lover? The rage of jealousy, when Love turns poisonous? When one merely experiences Hate when one formerly felt Love? These are the extremely powerful emotions that Baudelaire wanted to tap into, the reverse side of the mirror. It was an incredible experience working on this book, finally I had to abandon it. But, I still come back to him. One day, perhaps in another ten years, I hope to publish my complete transverions of Les Fleurs du Mal.        

XXXIX. – The Exquisite Cadaver

Remember the ideal object which you discovered

That beautiful summer morning, Dear soul:

By way of the path where you found that exquisite

Cadaver lying on a bed of pebbles,

Her legs in the air, like some old tart,

Burning and stewing in poisons,

Her belly slit, almost nonchantly,

Pouring forth all manner of noxious gasses?

The sun burns down on the decomposing

Body, as if searing a steak,

Rendering back a hundred- fold to Mother Nature,

What she herself had first conjoined.

And the sky looks upon the superb carcass

As it would upon a flower of Evil,

The rigor mortis encroaching to such a point

That the very earth around it has been scorched.

Great Blue Bottles swarm in convoys,

Buzzing out of the gaping cave, Cyclopean...

While a treacle of feasting larvae thickly drip,

Making of the stain a macabre Persian carpet.

The process of decomposition rose before me,

Falling in waves, and which I perceived in a kind of

Pointillism, so that, wave-borne,

The corpse seemed to come alive and multiply before me!

This alternate universe was announced in atonal chords,

And hit me with all the fever of a jungle humidity,

Or, like the sporadic grains, scattered by a winnower,

Whose rhythmic movements spun me in a dervish.

The effaced shapes and forms were as if but a dream

From a preliminary sketch, slow to arrive,

And which the artist, not being able to rely on memory,

Had then to resort to the magnetism of specific photographs.

Behind the rocks an unnerved dog

Looked at us both with a ravenous eye,

Trying to deduce the auspicious minute

When he could rip apart some rotting flesh from the bones.

-          And yet, You now would appear to be not so dissimilar to this horror,

This putrid infection,

At one time Star de mes yeux,

You my one time, all consuming passion!

Yes! After the last rites have long ago been pronounced upon us,

O You, my once graceful Queen,

When will you now, in your own time,

Wallow with these bones upon the grass?

So, my great Beauty! Whisper then to the vermin

How you will cherish their kisses,

While I guard for eternity this sublime image,

Of all of our decomposing Love.

To order a copy of The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire click on the link below.

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