The Elm Tree ( Lapwing, 2014) was my first full length collection of poems which was published 6 years ago now by Dennis Greig. Dennis went on to publish two more of my books The Enemy - Transversions from Charles Baudelaire ( 2015) and Sker the following year.
The Elm Tree is a funny one, as it is actually a selected poems which I put together by simply grouping all of the poems that I had had published at the time and which were taken from five other collections that up to that time had not been published. Four of those books have since been published, but are all unfortunately now out of print! Those books are The Dark Pool ( mgv2>publishing, 2015), Dublin Gothic ( Kilmog Press, 2015), Divertimento - The Muse is a Dominatrix ( mgv2>publishing, 2016) and finally More Micks than Dicks ( Famous Seamus, 2017). The other collection which features in The Elm Tree is Fingal an unpublished collection which has a few good poems in it but which I will probably never allow to be published. So, if you wish to get a sample of some of my work to date, do get a copy of The Elm Tree as it is very representative of my first real writing period spanning a time scale of almost 25 years.
I am saying this to you here on my blog which has seen almost 20 000 hits since I started it back in 2013. That's an impressive statistic for some pretty obscure independent poet who is struggling to find a publisher now in his middle years. A mid-career poet is the term used, I believe.
So, here's the latest news. I have just finished editing three new books this week. They are Tripping on the Real which is my latest collection. I started it back in March this year and it started out as my response to Covid 19, and there are a few pandemic poems. Three of them appeared in Pendemic and one will appear in Agenda I was informed by Patricia McCarthy some weeks ago. That was a nice bit of news. Agenda was famously started by Ezra Pound and William Cookson back in 1959 and went onto publish poets like Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, among others. So, I am very proud of this achievement. It is a kind of vindication of sorts, particularly when I was ignored by a local festival here in Skerries recently. Extraordinary, really. When you think that I launched two literary festivals myself in the town, and ran a series of readings in the local pub for almost two years running, and that two anthologies sprang from both these events... I don't know, what can you say! Best say nothing. It's irrelevant, but I had to mention it.
After reviewing Nina Kossman's Other Shepherds, I got the idea to put together a collection called Ideals and Spleen which is a collection of transversions that I made from the Spleen and Ideal section of Les Fleurs du Mal and some poems of my own which are to be read alongside the Baudelaire pieces. Its a cheeky idea, but it was a very interesting idea which was suggested to me by Nina's book. The editor of Poets and Traitors Press Val Vinoukur is currently looking at it. My feeling is that he'll probably pass on it, but that's alright. I may then submit it elsewhere, the main point is that I don't give up on the overall project Spleen and Ideal transversed in its totality in a bilingual edition with all my notes. That will be a 200 + pages edition. I'm 120 pages in, and have no idea how long it will take me to complete. Its not a race, you can't rush work like this.
Then, there is A Grammar of Being. This is the third book I finished editing this week which is my second selected poems, in a sense. Just like The Elm Tree, this book is put together with selections from numerous collections which were all written over the last five years, or so. Those collections are all unpublished, and comprise of Henry Street Arcade a bilingual book with translations into French by Yan Kouton. This is the first installment of my second 'Dublin Trilogy', the other two volumes being Merrion Square and Malus. I originally sent the first two books to a publisher here in Dublin and they were returned, no reason given as to why they wouldn't publish them. But, I know why. The books, heavily inspired by Baudelaire, run totally against the current brand of feminism which is endemic in the so called poetry industry here. The fact that a French poet and editor translated one whole book and published sections on his online site even offering to publish the whole book online speaks volumes while here, in good old Ireland, its considered a moral affront!
Of course, on reflection, I have a pretty good idea why I wasn't invited along to the Fingal Poetry festival. A few years ago, I was invited to participate at a public reading to 'celebrate' the official opening of The Boat House in Loughshinny, not far from where I live in Skerries. I had been a Writer in Residence there in 2016. It was supposed to be a very grand affair with the Lord Mayor of Fingal being present, along with all the poets and writers who had been in residence at the boat house, and then there were the representatives of Fingal Arts. Some very nice people, to be honest. Rory O'Byrne the County Arts Officer, and Sarah O'Neill his Deputy. I had had dealings with both of them in my time as Writer in Residence at The Boat House which I believe was the brainchild of Sarah, and so looked forward to reading my long poem mare nostrum taken from my Fingal book, which also features in A Grammar of Being by the way, which I dedicated to the late Seamus Heaney, by the way.
Anyway, to cut a long story short. When it came to my time to read out the poem, it was a Sunday afternoon and they had put a mobile stage up etc., I got up onto the stage and proceeded reading out the poem, which is quite violent - it describes an imaginary battle between Roman legionaries and local Celtic natives in graphic detail - a Roman is dismembered by an Irish warrior, for example, who happens to be a woman. Well, this is kind of curious...While reading out the long poem, right there in the small village of Loughshinny, with a lot of dignitaries and local people, an awful feeling of pointlessness came over me. This had never happened to be before at a reading, such a profound feeling of utter pointlessness, to such a degree that I actually abandoned the reading. Afterwards, the Lord Mayor approached me, I remember, and she told me that she liked violence in the novels of Colin Dexter, for example, but... I didn't quite catch or understand what she followed this statement with exactly. Nothing is ever said to you directly, in Ireland, you understand. Or. at least, very rarely. What she seemed to be implying was that such graphic descriptions of violence being described by an Irish writer were somehow unacceptable.
Voila!
Sweet mothering Jesus! James Joyce uses the word PARALYSIS on the very first page of Dubliners published over 100 years ago. Nothing has changed boys and girls, that is the overwhelming feeling I got that particular day. Nothing has actually changed, really, in over 100 years!
GOOD LUCK YOU GREAT PRETENDERS
https://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/the-elm-tree-by-peter-oneill/
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