The Stinging Fly

 

 

The Stinging Fly

 

 

I

 

100 000 devout students bent over their desks

Before the emissaries of impossible uniformity.

Together they tragically attempt to fight against

The invisible tsunami which renders all of their efforts

Null and void, they who would tragically attempt to pursue

The elusive beast known as... originality! Outside the Creative Writing classes

The students drown themselves in whole seas of cappuccinos,

Lattes and espressos, all also quite tragically, wholly unoriginal,

Being merely American forms of the Italian originals –

Whole lives spent living around simulacra! Whoever heard of poets working

Together and being state funded, publishing their collective works

From the secure realm of a former executioner’s tower?

Some paradoxes are simply too rich to be properly appreciated.

I can hear the father of every father screaming;

“Get a real job you bums! Stop hanging around stately, ancestral homes!”

The students blush, they are like tourists chasing after

Abominable snowmen, originality being just as elusive.

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

To find your own voice you must first go through anatomical reinvention;

Grow a pair! Become Nietzschean, come very close

To experiencing death but don’t die of course, you idiots,

Come back and write about it, entertainingly.

The public, for some unknown reason, is quite old fashioned

And needs a good laugh, at your expense of course.

Imagine the world of holocausts unannounced or unheralded

Driving the motor of sprinkled gold cascading from the multiplicity

Of Steinways, playing Mozart’s stolen hordes?

Experience heartbreak, to the point of almost insanity.

Clean toilets, and while you’re at it explore the tiles

Like a camera would on the Hubble. Spend many years on foreign shores

Learning stranger tongues than your own and experience a rain of humiliation

As you do. But, more importantly, see the world anew.

For to be an actor, or poet, you must inhabit every role,

To be believable, and in order to be able to do so

You must bring to the role, or poem, experience,

Which entails a certain kind of imagination; merging the real world

With the unreal, as it were.

So, don’t just sit there sucking on that finely crafted writing tool,

Go to those bookshelves and rip up every spineless volume which you’ve ever

Contributed to.

( This poem was first published in A New Ulster )