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Wednesday, November 18, 2020

UCD BELFIELD METAPHYSICS: A RETROSPECTIVE - KEVIN KIELY




UCD Belfield Metaphysical:

A Retrospective

 

Kevin Kiely

Lapwing ( 80 pages)

 

I was pleasantly surprised to find the first title in the book Researching Venus and Furs and Psychopathia Sexualis in Kevin Kiely’s retrospective offering which was first published in 2017. I first came across Kiely’s writing on Facebook only some months ago and was immediately struck by the lyricism of some of his poetry, and of course wondered why I had never heard of him before. The opening sentence of Kevin’s Wikipedia entry clarified things for me however. ‘Kevin Kiely ( born 2 June 1953 ) is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright whose writings and public statements have met with controversy.’ This is all I need to know. So, to be very clear, in this review I am only concerned with the writing of Kevin Kiely as it appears in his book UCD Belfield Metaphysical: A Retrospective. I believe that I am perfectly placed to review the book, however belatedly, as I know next to nothing about the author except what I have read in his Wikipedia entry which frankly does not say much except that he has won a Fulbright scholarship in his time and lectured in a number of universities in the states and has edited a number of publications, writing profusely in many genres.

One of the reasons why I was so pleasantly surprised at finding the reference to Masoch and Venus in Furs is that normally it is a reference that most contemporary writers, not too mention Irish, would run from by a hundred miles, but not so Mr Kiely. Man of controversy, indeed! So, already my interest was piqued  and all of this on the very first page. Of course, I should justify now why I was so pleasantly surprised to find the name of Masoch, that bold tatoo printed like a talisman of all that is taboo, and I will. Subito. Well, firstly, most writers, if not all, are deeply masochistic individuals, and yet very few at least among  men would be ready to admit this. I am speaking now particularly of poets. When one thinks about it one would imagine that it would be self-evident, that poets, for the mots part, at least among men, would be deeply masochistic. And yet, why does one never read anything about it? There now, there’s a little modern- day conundrum. Of course, this fact, as fact it is, would in part explain the absolute death of any real debate in the public forum concerning the poetic art; Sex being a thing, since the rise of the new found feminism, that has almost disappeared from the realms of contemporary poetry, at least the stuff that is printed in the so called established journals. You only have to pronounce the words and you get an idea of how stuffy and boring contemporary poetry is in the most part. At least the stuff that gets promoted officially.

You know, I have a theory that one of the reasons why populism was allowed to become as popular as it did was because the arts became so emasculated in recent years due to the rise of that other fascism, yes the other twin pole which has had us all bouncing off the twin pillars of contemporary society – political correctness! A thought; to be truly radical these days is to be a moderate. Look at Joe Biden! The voice of moderation itself in a world that has become so polarised that a mere Tweet can set it alight.  

All of this preamble is quite pertinent to the present work.

Returning to Masoch, or at least Kiely’s poem about him, I notice that the poem is made up of thirteen verse in the form of paragraphs which are more prose then poem, filled with conjunctions and discourse markers of reason, reason having as much to do with poetry as a sock has to do with window cleaning, one could say! And, while my heart kind of dropped, as it has on so many occasions, as one is more often disappointed in life then not, my fears, which so readily sneaked up on me after such a promising beginning were then just as quickly dispelled with by the second poem When the City Becomes Metaphysical I ask the Question. For, after once again inserting a plethora of determiners, conjunctions and linkers ( this, and, so, as, and ) in but the first five lines, I suddenly smiled as I saw what Mr Kiely was up to…He was sailing his kite on the metaphysics of reason, by justly demanding from it as much as he could in turn pursue it, so that  reason, by being so duly encumbered, and so exhaustively so, had no other possible avenue to pursue, but to the actual heavens!

This trick reminded me of Beckett, and a wonderful essay written about him by the French thinker Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s essay L’épuisé (1992) , translated as The Exhausted , is one of the most illuminating short essays on Beckett’s mammoth incursion into contemporary consciousness by so singularly pursuing, according to Deleuze, the inexhaustible permutations of logic and reason and taking them to their ultimate limit; namely to the point of absolute exhaustion, having tried every single possible permutation. This is, after all, when you think about it, one of the key elements of Beckett’s humour. Think about the sequence of the stones in Molloy; the exchange of hats in Godot, and all the back and forth in the exchanges, point counter point between particularly the two tramps; the endless variations of thought and possibility in the novel Watt - a veritable piss-take of reason, one could say; to the innumerable numerical sequences elucidated in Comment C’est How It Is…Well, Kevin Kiely knows his Beckett and his Joyce, and metaphysics is part of the title.

All of this was formulating while enjoying The Sunflowers now, the third poem in the collection, which positively flies into quiet lyricism – a poem evoking Van Gogh and Gauguin and their much celebrated bust up. But, it wasn’t until I turned the page and was confronted with the fourth The Foyle Flows Softly When She Sings Her Song that I started smiling like the proverbial Cheshire.

 

The memorial sky: invasive clouds are too near and hyphenate

the irises like cat’s eyes entranced: motorways are stars and

corridors in scales, convoys of traffic are so much glass, metal and

plastic and in each a phantom ghostly driver plays out the sonata

of speed and distances

 

Kiely aligns the statements like a brickie would bricks in a building site in Kilburn. They pile up and inevitably form a solid brick wall of poetic statements. Very few poets have the tenacity of thought to do so, such is Kevin Kiely’s schooling. So, now, somewhat akin to the passenger who has sunken into the backseat of a taxi on a Friday evening, giving up all thoughts of control, I sat back and prepared to finally enjoy the book and the unusual feeling of transportation that it was awakening in me. Most contemporary poetry, and poets I must admit, bore the pants off me for reasons already mentioned; I am not interested in their moral qualms, never have been. If I had of been, I would have returned to church many years ago. I want to be entertained, teased, and yes Rebecca Elson, sometimes even awed!

As well as intellect, lyricism is also in quite short supply, it would appear, and yet such is the stuff that one expects, nay, demands of poets, at least worthy of the name, and all true poetry. Rightly so, then, poetry is a damn illusive demon. Think about your life, seriously! How much poetry does it actually contain? Be truthful now? Well, you see how you’ve answered the question. It’s a rare thing, and that is how it should be. What then are all those creatures doing on social media then? Enough said.

 

So much missing prosaic terza rima sentinel of the shelves

there is not a bright grain on the photocopy, metaphors will fit

not fit, lame language, scratches of pen on train tickets, words on

the dull

 

White page desktop from pressed keys: through a portal of silver

fleece the aircraft banks to climb stairs of clouds, levels off –

the horizon’s walls are lit with streams of leaking light

 

the jolt that suggest speed beyond dials. The ache of longing:

take me away finally from all of this, take me home from each

day’s lost and found, the sulphur of solitude

 

The above taken from the title UCD Belfield Metaphysical. But the book doesn’t really get going until the section A Map of Melancholy. Everything to date was just a preparing, a softening up, one could say. At least stylistically. After the first 4 prose poem sections, blocks of paragraphs deconstructing, or perhaps more autopsying, the death of a romance; classical masochistic poetic despair, in short. In other words, the stuff that poets should be writing about, but for some reason don’t, anymore!

 

I tell you I have been within her sacred

grove and we shall not be burned like the combustibles when the

grey smoke of bitumen throbs among the vertebrae of flames and

the stench of hell, for to be touched by her is healing and in an

instant all pain, all death, all longing disappears and in her eyes

and voice is the resolution quest while in her kiss a true

home emerges for this earth that baffles and astounds, repels

and yet astonishes in its chant, fix your eyes on her gaze and this

is easily done ( 4 )

 

Then ‘Pont de Normande – 6 abandoned attempts in 788 words     no surrender to language poetry’ and something really interesting happens. The lines now become disjointed, fragmented – Kiely uses punctuation in the spirit of the modernists, loosely fixated, so that the text on either side of the page can converge, and poems apparently merge. For example;

 

                                                                                           TWO:

roadscape     hub        bridge                                             She walked late,    

circling                                                                                      cotton sheets drape night’s sleep

car after car                                                                        he followed –

                    procession of speed

motionless                                                                           loins veiled

                  spokes                                                               finger -pulse magnetic

                     Pont de Normandie                                        to her naked arm

Hub of an Oval Wheel                                                    and proud nippled breasts: Tarot Card.

 

I must say, I really enjoyed this section. It reminded me of the early poetry of Kiely’s contemporary Trevor Joyce, another poet who is habitually consigned to the marginals by the so called officialdom – who the hell needs the civil service involved in poetry anyway? ( That’s a good joke, by the way!)     

But also, I was reminded of Baudelaire and Proust who both used to live in Honfleur which crops up in the poem and to whom Kiely is respectful to. Berlin then crops up in reference to 42, the year when the world held its breath! All so mercifully out of Ireland, coming up for a bit of air, far away from the incestuous… I mean ancestral… home.

 

because I love her to the point of madness

 

I must accept then what I will

is not always in my grasp, not always

what can be controlled

 

I can rise higher than the trees

their arms and limbs in choral forests

above the sea cliffs

 

the depths and deeps of oceans

are floating continental islands

and every country

swaying with the earth’s axis

 

Keep on climbing Kevin, to the Metaphysics of the heavens.

 

 

Peter O’Neill

November 2020  



https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/kevin-kiely


 

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