The Vitruvian Woman - a poem for Halloween

                                                                      

                                                    

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/literature/poetry/poem-vitruvian-woman/ 

 

Click on the link above to see my latest publication on Cassandran Voices edited by Frank Armstrong who has been consistently supportive of my work since Daniel Wade introduced me to him some years ago. I'd like to express my appreciation to Frank and all of the other editors like him who remained loyal to me over the years, without editors like Frank Armstrong my writing would have never had a proper platform. These days, this has become more and more important. Maintaining consistency and being true to your own individual style is absolutely crucial, particularly today when censorship is a very special problem. I mean it was always an issue with me in my own c(o)untry, the Reublic of Ireland, I have always had problems getting published there. I still haven't had a single book, out of the several I have published elsewhere over the years, published in the Republic. Why is that? 

I have no real idea, really. I mean it's not as if I haven't tried over the years. Even as recently as last year, I was trying to find a publisher for my first novel, The Fetishist, and despite publishers praising the 'obvious' merits of my writing, they still passed when it came to publication. I mean, what can you say after forty years! I have obviously given up scratching my head about that one. But, one thing I can definitely say is that despite all the talk about so called modern Ireland, it still remains, at least to me, as one of the most repressive and particularly stifling places to live and write, which for me, don't get me wrong, is actually a good thing. Writers strive under repressive regimes, Stalin knew this. 

Am I comparing contemporary Ireland to the former Soviet Russia? Not at all, but what I am saying is that censorship and repression has always been a fundamental aspect of Irish life ever since I was a young man in my teens. The nineteen eighties, for God's sake, where among the most repressive times to live in this c(o)untry which is why I got the hell out of here as soon as the opportunity arose, which was back in 1989.  

Having spent the majority of the nineties travelling around Europe, and particularly in France where I lived for several years, to return to the Boom period of the Celtic Tiger was a truly phenomenal experience, and I wouldn't have missed experiencing at first hand the tremendous economic and social changes that we experienced over the last two decades and a half. However, culturally this place has gone to the proverbial dogs ridden as it is with ideology, particularly in the very narrow world of literature and poetry. I have enough experience now with over a decade of engagement with public readings, publications and festivals etc. to be able to voice an objective enough eye on the whole sham that is the so called art scene in the Republic of Ireland today. The above poem, Vitruvian Woman, which I dedicated to my wife Laura, says more than enough about a particularly woeful aspect of the arts here. I rest my case. 

Other news, not completely unrelated, I am currently putting together a Selected Poems with the title Nasty Jokes and the poems are all taken from the several collections already published and a few, such as the poem above, that have been taken from my latest collection The Rose Garden and which remains unpublished. 

The dates on the work are 1985 - 2015, which is a period of 40 years. That's a long time to spend doing a particular thing, in my case poetry. So, one thing that strikes me over the amount of work that I have done in all this time is that there is a very evident style that comes through, and humour is one of the key aspects of my poetry or verse. It is a very rare thing, you know, to be able to maintain humour consistently in your work. Of course, it's never really appreciated by the so called establishment, but then, I never got into poetry and the arts in general to become past of the establishment. Respectability has always been the death knell for the arts, yet, curiously it still remains a hugely enticing beast for a lot of the so called poets and artists that reside here. Whatever, let them have their respectability.  I'll plough on. 

 

Oh, another thing, I have been putting together chapters of The Heraclitean Principal , my fourth novel and which will finally tie up The Deplorables Trilogy of books which begins with The Fetishist. There is a novel competition held in London annually in the spring and if I have it finished by then, I will submit it. But, it may take me well into the summer to finish this most crucial of novels which will be mainly set in the eighties in Cork. 

 

There ya go now boi!

The Eternal Return - Paddy Kavanagh & Homer

    

                                                                       Eternal Return

 

 

My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about

Patrick Kavanagh.

O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth

And I can see those fucking potatoes,

The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan!

 

Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected

To this kind of shit?

Isn’t Life bad enough without having to force poetry

About bleeding potatoes down their bloody throats!

 

And then, just as I am almost in despair,

And I’m a bloody poet myself,

Her voice pipes up again, and she adds;

“Although, Epic isn’t half bad, at least he mentions Homer!”

 

I see again my reading of the poem through her eyes,

When I too saw the ancient importance ricocheting

In Paddy Boy, as she too recognised the importance of Homer

 And his epic take on Life.

Staring across the kitchen table at her,

With not a potato in sight,

I somehow saw the great blind ancient hovering above us

Monumentally human, whispering to us both

Across the infinite.

   

The Damned - after Baudelaire

                                                                          The Damned 

 

Delphine & Hippolyte

 

 

 Out of the pale clarity of the languishing lamps,

From the depth of the cushions impregnated with scents,

Hippolyte dreams of powerful caresses

 Raising the curtain on her young candour.

 

She searches, with a troubled eye lost in the tempest,

In her naivety with the sky at once distant,

Like a traveller turning their head

Towards the blue horizons exceeding the morning.

 

Through her absorbed eyes the languorous tears,

The desolate air, the stupor, the mournful volupté

Her vanquished arms outspread like two discharged guns,

Everything served, it would appear conforming to her fragile beauty.

 

Strong beauty than down on her knees before frail,

Superb, she inhales voluptuously

The wine of her triumph, and leans forward towards her,

As if to gather a gentle acknowledgement.

  

She searches in the eye of her pale victim

The mute canticle which pleasure sings,

And that infinite and sublime gratitude

Which dissimulates from the pupil like a great sigh.

 

“Hippolyte, dear heart, what say you of things?

Do you understand now that you should not offer

The sacred holocaust of your very first roses

To the violent winds that could decimate them?

 

My kisses are as light and as ephemeral

As those caresses that pass over the great transparent lakes,

And those of your lover plough up furrows

Like ploughshares ripping through the earth;

 

They pass over you like a heavy team

Of workhorses or oxen with pitiless hooves…

O Hippolyte, my sister! Turn your face to me,

Turn towards me, my sweet soul sister, my other half, my all!

 

Turn your eyes towards me full of azure and stars!

For one of those charming looks, divine balm,

Obscure pleasures can unfurl like so many sails

Lulling you into a dream without end!”

 

But Hippolyte, raising her young head responds:

“ I am not such an ingrate, and certainly do not repent,

But, Delphine, having said that, I suffer just as if I have

Eaten some terrible super and can’t sleep.

 

I feel some terrible dread bearing down upon me

And the dark ghost battalions fragment,

And wish to manoeuvre me into oscillating paths

Upon which a blood horizon secretly encroaches.

 

Have we both not committed some strange deed?

Explain to me, if you can, my trouble and fright ;

As I tremble with fear when you say to me: “ My Angel!”

And, yet, I feel my lips approaching yours.

 

Don’t look at me like that, I beseech you!

You whom I love like no one else, my elected sister,

Though you are nothing less than a beautiful trap

And the cause of my complete perdition.

 

Shaking her tragic mane, Delphine,

Stamping her feet like a tripod of iron,

With a fatal eye, responds with a despot’s voice :

“Before Love, who then dares to speak of Hell?

 

In the things of Love, who then would speak of Honesty!

Damned forever would the deluded dreamer be,

In their utter stupidity to be the first too

To fall into that sterile and unsolvable problem!

 

Those who would wish to unite such a mystic accord,

 Like the shade with the heat, the night with the day,

Will never heat their paralytic corpses

With the red sun that we call Love.

Go, if you want, and find some stupid fiancé:

Offer your virginal heart to his cruel embraces;

And, full of remorse and livid horror,

You’ll return to me with your stigmatised breasts…

 

We cannot here below be a slave to one sole Master!”

But the child, taken hold as if by some immense pain,

Suddenly cries out: “ I feel taking hold of my Being

A great abyss, and this abyss is my heart!

 

Like a volcano it consumes me, as profound as the void.

Nothing will satiate the whimpering monster,

Just like the thirst of the Eumenides cannot not be sated,

Yes, with torch in hand, your blood thus will burn.

 

Would that a great theatre curtain could separate the world,

And that our lassitude bring forth strength!

I want to annihilate myself in your profound gorge,

And find upon your breasts the appeasement of the tomb.”

 

Descend, descend, descend, lamentable victims,

Descend into the eternal pathway to Hell,

Plunge yourselves into the most profound gulfs where all crime,

Flagellated by a wind which does not come from the sky,

 

Buffets pel mell with the noise of a storm.

Crazed shadows, run, follow to the end all of your desires;

But never will you be able to appease your rage,

And the torment of the birth of all of your pleasures.

 

Never will there be a fresh light to illuminate your caves;

Not through the cracks the feverish misaims,

Filtering in through the licking flames by the light of the lanterns

To finally penetrate your body with their awful perfume.

 

The sterile asp of your mutual pleasures

Alters your thirst and preys upon your skin,

And the furious wind of your concupiscence

Makes your flesh rip like an old flag.

 

Far from the living, condemned and errant,

Through great deserts do you run like wolves;

Make your own destiny, disordered souls,

And try to escape the infinity that you bear within.

 

Hautefeuille - Halloween poem

 

                                                                                    

Hautefeuille

 

 

Catastrophe charged with the body's many diverse

Singular convulsions, a whole plethora of hybrid fantasies

Which stoked the fever of numerous generations,

And uncountable revolutions of the spirit, inflicting malaise!

 

Some would say that you were born under a bad sign, and quite literally;

The pallor setting numeral which sets all the triskaidekaphobists alight,

Gothic aspect also in the form of the turreted house;

You couldn’t make this stuff up!...

 

The habitat long since having been erased from memory,

And simply from the streets of your beloved Lutece,

The Lutece of Andromache and Le Cygne.

 

Andromache and the glistening swans, the delicate ballet

Gently floating down along the banks of La Seine…

The serpentine muscle of the glistening Seine! 

 

 

Saint Peter's Cathedral, Caen, 2025

 

                                                                                   

Saint Peter’s Cathedral

Caen, 2025

 

 

Passing the final hours in the city,

You enter through the great door of the cathedral,

Pass beneath the almost subterranean knaves,

Whose great petrified limbs interconnect like the canopy of a dark wood

 

Above you, then, man’s great enigmatic obsession for analogy

Continues… and walking slowly, respectfully,

You witness the phenomenon of all the Christian iconography,

Which you haven’t experienced in years.

 

Then, some images taken from a probe,

Some great lens which breached the impenetrable heavens

Only to steal snapshots of the absolute immensity of the cosmos;

 

The great spire suffered a direct hit during the events of 44,

Taking out also the old organ. Both have been reconstructed now,

Out from all the faceless, and nameless dead.

 

 

LESBOS - After Baudelaire

 

                                                                               

Lesbos

 

 

Mother of all Latin sports, and Greek volupté,

Lesbos, o the kisses joyously languishing,

Warm like the sun and fresh as melons

That ornament the days and nights with their glory;

Mother of all Latin sports and Greek volupté.

 

Lesbos, where the kisses are like cascades

Falling fearlessly onto the bottomless pits

And running, bleeding, giggling, jerking,

Storming secret the formulating depths;

Lesbos, where the kisses are like cascades.

 

Lesbos, where the Phyrnes are attracted to one another,

And where a sigh never falls without an echo,

Like in Paphos with only the stars admiring

So Venus has every right to be jealous of Sapho!

Lesbos, where the Phyrnes are attracted to one another.

 

Lesbos, land of warm nights languorous,

 Making out to their mirrors, sterile and voluptuous,

The girls with rabid eyes, their beloved bodies,

Caressing the ripe nubile fruit:

O Lesbos, land of warm nights voluptuous.

 

 

 

Leave old Plato wrinkled with an austere eye;

You can receive your pardon from an excess of kisses,

Queen of this gentle empire, friendly and noble land,

 With so many refinements always so plentiful.

Leave old wrinkled Plato with an austere eye.

 

You extract your pardon from the eternal martyr,

Inflicted unceasingly on ambitious hearts

Who attract far from us the radiant smile

Interviewed vaguely on the border of the heavens!

You extract your pardon from the eternal martyr.

 

Which of the Gods dares to judge you, Lesbos,

And condemn your pale forehead to labour,

If the golden balance does not weigh with the deluge,

Have all the tears of the sea fallen in the streams?

Which of the Gods dares to judge you, Lesbos?   

 

Who among us wants the judgemental laws?

Virgins with sublime hearts, honour the archipelago,

Your religion like any other is august,

And love laughs in both Hell and the Heavens!

Who amongst us wants the judgemental laws?

 

For Lesbos, among everyone, chose me on this earth

To sing the secret of her virgin flowers,

And I fled childhood to be admitted into her dark mystery,

Unbridled laughter mixed with sombre tears,

For Lesbos, among everyone, chose me on this earth.

 

And since I have aged upon the summit of Leucate,

Like a sentinel with a sure and piercing eye,

Who watches night and day, tartan or frigate,

All of those forms that appear tantalisingly on the horizon;

And since I have aged upon the summit of Leucate,

 

To see if the sea is indulgent and good,

 Among the tears that the rock retains

One night brought Lesbos bound, who pardons,

The adored corpse of Sapho, who parted

To see if the sea is indulgent and good!

 

To the male Sapho, lover and poet,

Even more beautiful than Venus with his mournful pallor,

The azure eye vanquished by the black spotted eye

Circling the darkening regions marked by suffering;

To the male Sapho, lover and poet.

 

More beautiful than Venus erected for the world

Pouring all the treasures of serenity

And the reigning light of blond youth,

On the old ocean of her enchanted daughter;

More beautiful than Venus erected for the world.

 

For Sapho, who died on the day of her own blasphemy,

When, insulting the rite of the invented cult,

She made of her beautiful body the supreme pasture

With a brutal pride punishing impiety,

To she who died on the day of this blasphemy.

 

And since this time that Lesbos laments,

And despite the honours that she is given by the universe,

Every night intoxicated with cries and torment

 They are pushed towards the vast deserted deserts,

                                                       Ever since the time that Lesbos laments.    

The Giantess by Baudelaire Transversed and followed by a Paraphrase

 

                                                                                 

I have been working on a collection of poetry, believe it or not. I thought I had given up, my last published collection was published in France four years ago. Without a doubt it was the best thing that I ever produced in the 40 or so years that I have been engaged in the art, a mere 90 copies were published and after receiving but two reviews, both done by friends, it then disappeared onto my bookshelf and nothing more was heard about it. 

Such is the all common tale of the poet. So,  I decieded to turn my attention to prose and have spent the last few years writing novels, a trilogy in all and I will statrt a fourth in the summer, when I am on holidays once again. But, in the meantime, I started writing some sonnets much to my own surprise. I have been writing sonnets now for years. I love the form, it suits me. The fourteen lines can adequately explore any wealth of problem, before just as easily departing once again into the deep night. 

Baudelaire has been one of my major sources of influence, I grew up in France during the nineties and this experience has really set me apart from the majority of Irish writers who are writing today. It's a solitary exercise, but I wouldn't have it any other way. 

The purpose of the current post is to introduce the sonnet The Giantess. It's poem number X1X in Les Fleurs du Mal, appearing in the Ideals and Spleen section at the start of the book. This collection, for those of you who do not know me, is without a doubt the collection which has had the most lasting impact on me, and that is mainly to do with my sexuality. As a poet, like most artists, I am deeply masochistic and so strong women have always been my main source of inspiration and strenght. I grew up with the photography of Helmut Newton, for God's sake during the seventies and eighties. 

I have written before about the inlfunece of Baudelaire on the former 'King of Kink', as he used to be known as. What a boring world we live in now, looking back. Mediocrity spawned by sheer morality...! How the west has become such an altogther boring and tedious zone. 

Let's not go there, we were doing so well. 

Back to Baudelaire... Yes, the point I was trying to make about this wonderful sonnet is the hallucinatory quality of the vision. Baudelaire was a great smoker of Hashish, and this poem, The Giantess, has a wonderful hallucinatory fantasy that all men have when they are consumed by the vision of some woman with whom they have become obessed by. For women it must be equally the same. 

You meet someone and they start filling your head, Freud, I think described it as a form of madness. Baudelaire, the hashish smoker, would appear to be likening it to a stone when the hallucinatory aspect of the woman takes on the giant proportions in your mind and you see the very parts of her blown up in your mind rather like a pin up or a model on an advertising billboard on the street. Perhaps more closer to today, certain pornography platforms online use clearly the idea that Baudelaire is conjuring up here particularly when prmoting dominatrixes. These incredible giants dominate the men whom they simply dwarf in sheer size and scope. 

It is an incredible thought, imagining a poet in France in the 19th century having such an impact still on society today! Of course Baudelaire was a complete visionary. His work is still streets ahead in terms of style and vision than the awful content that you see being spawned particularly today when poetry has become so synonymous to ideological trends promoting diversity and other such lamentable platitudes which people in the west seem to have become completely obsessed with. 

The poetry collection that I have been at work on, The Rose Garden, is divided up into three parts. The first part, de Vowels and Maximum Extension have both been posted on this blog; scroll back if you are interested. Then part two is devoted to Denis de Rougemont and the troubadour poets of the 12th and 13th century when the notion of courtly love first appeared in Europe, and which is the origin of modern notions of romance today. 

Well, after completing this section, I will post some of the poems from this section on this blog at a later date, I had the brainwave to continue translating Baudelaire. One of my life long ambitions has been to translate Les Fleurs du Mal in its entirety. I am more than half way there now and this seemed like the perfect occassion. 

The Giantess

After Baudelaire

 

 

As long as Nature with her all powerful verve

Conceives monstrous prodigies daily,

I’d like to live beside a young giantess

Like a voluptuous cat at the feet of some Goddess.

 

How I’d love to see her body flower with soul

And give free reign to its terrible pursuits;

Guessing if the heart cradles a sombre flame

In the humid mists where pool her eyes!

 

I would run at my ease to explore her magnificent forms,

Climb up upon her enormous limbs

And in the summer months with the evil sun,

 

Ease into the tremendous plains of her opened country

 And nonchalantly nestle in the shade of her breasts

Like a peaceful hamlet at the foot of a mountain. 

Isn't it wonderful! I don't mean my transversion, I mean the poem itself... Well, I tried to imagine writing a poem in a similar vein, as it were. Like a POV. That is the term, after all, that we would use now, no doubt. So, here is the poem that I wrote after transversing the above by. 

Oh, a note for any Beckettians out there, what an accurdsed breed of failed fornicators...! I was inspired by a passage in The Unnamable, I think, in which he references the philosophy of Arnold Geulincx, the occasionalist philosopher that David Tucker has written so well about. Anyway, thought I'd throw that in to spanner up your skirts...! 

 

                                                                                                                                                       

 

 

 Colossus at Rhodes

 

 

 

Mountainous heights, the sky of hair…!

Bank then on the vast expanse of her plains;

The cool brownstone of her polished calves,

The burnished brilliance of the quartz in her eyes

Gleaming there in the mist engulfed pupils.

 

The bulbous pink carnation of her lips

A rosebud flowering its gentle surrender

Rolling back the armies of my own

Assault now into the fragrance of her

Cool heights; again skyward marvelling at the

 Celestial orchestrations of her hair,

Its downpouring torrents helmeting the head

Covering all thoughts in the clamp of its shield,

Encompassing the sheer genius of her smile.