Amtrak: Washington DC to Huntington, West Virginia

A Poem by Kevin Higgins
 At Union Station hope is a t-shirt on sale

at seventy per cent off. Yesterday,

all the bow-tied barristers gathered

in the Hilton Hotel.

 At the end of the street

the man from JP Morgan told Congress

investors prefer trophy real estate:

Manhattan office blocks to houses

for the little people.

Out here, the tuxedo gives way

to the pick up truck. Red winter fields

dotted with cattle that will soon be

hamburgers; demolition yards

full of cars that were once

somebody’s dream.

Out here, the taxi drivers are all local

in tiny white towns, each of which

glowers on its mountain side

like a schoolmistress.

Out here, guys

who’d have been happy

to point you in the direction

of the hunting supplies store

if they hadn’t got

killed in whatever war.

KEVIN HIGGINS

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Seamus Heaney Irish poet dies.

Seamus Heaney

by Sean O'Torrain

Ireland's best known poet Seamus Heaney recently died. In my early days unless it was the transitional program set to music or rhyme I condemned it as garbage. Thankfully I grew out of that. I came to see the beauty of words and how they could be put together, came to respect wordsmith's. I think that Heaney was mainly a wordsmith. But a bit more-----a bit more because he could evoke images and emotions and truth in his works.

But what about the politics of his work?  I was and still remain unenthusiastic about him on this front. As far as I know he pretty much stood apart from the civil rights struggle which was consuming the best of the youth and workers and middle class in the late 1960's. And he lived in the middle of these people and was a Catholic peasant like many of them, so he did not have much excuse.  

I just re read his speech when he received the Nobel prize in1995. This worries me too. They did not give the Nobel to Joyce. But in his speech Heaney mentions Yeats again and again, a genius no doubt and also a recipient of the Nobel Prize. But how come he never mentioned Joyce. Not once. Not one single time. I believe it is in fact a great compliment to Joyce. Heaney could not reach the heights of Joyce, in my opinion the greatest writer so far. He could never even aspire to reach the heights of Joyce. He knew this but rather than mentioning Joyce in his speech and giving him his due he chose to ignore him. This diminishes Heaney significantly in my eyes.

I cannot get away from the feeling that Heaney lacks certain courage and this in turn results in the sharp harsh cutting edge of truth being missing in much of his work.

Why did he never mention Joyce in his Nobel acceptance speech? Joyce rises like a vertical cliff in

James Joyce

front of the poets and writers of his time and still does today. I feel that it is a test of writers and poets how they deal with Joyce. To ignore Joyce on that most important occasion of his career when he was accepting the Nobel prize as Heaney did in his speech seems to show a lack of courage, and a certain refusal to face up to the fact that he was not a Joyce, that the cliff was way to high and vertical for him and always would be. So better ignore him.

I am no Joyce expert and this is to put it mildly. But I am always surprised, unpleasantly, when I am back in Ireland and meet with writers and poets and they never mention Joyce. It is like they are afraid of him. It was either TS Eliot or Ezra Pound who said that he hated Joyce because nobody could ever write a novel or a piece of literature in the future without Joyce standing above them looking down. I think this is a factor which is very prevalent in Irish writers and writers in general. They will not acknowledge the top man so they chose in the main to ignore him. There are of course many, many exceptions to this rule and to these I apologize unconditionally. But I think this is a factor.

I am reading again The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I am homesick. It is the Modern Library publication. I am at pages 176 and 177 at the moment. What a brilliant exposition of the dialectic in all its splendor and glory and motion. That Joyce was the man.

There were a lot of dignitaries, that is bourgeois types, at Heaney’s funeral. This does not impress me. There were not too many at the funeral of Joyce. I think somebody from the British embassy, a few friends and a homeless man who kept asking who is being buried, who is being buried. Joyce would have like that one.

My Jack Russell is lying here looking up at me. His eyes tell me he wants to know what is going on, what I am thinking. I wish we could talk. Then we could hear the dialectic of the dog. It's bound to have the same principles, matter in motion, nothing moves in a straight line, movement through contradiction, everything has a beginning a middle and an end. No I have not been on the whiskey. I gave it up. The problem is I am still struggling to have the laugh on a regular basis.  

Sean.

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A poem on the 74th Anniversary of Trotsky's murder

          

                           

                                       You Are The Old Man In The Blue House

                                           
                                               after Bertrand M Patenaude

                                         Making impossible promises to yourself.

                                         Outdoors the cactus, the wolves.

                                         The hour of nowhere else to go.

                                         It’s a decade since the new god stamped

                                         your passport ‘invalid’.

                                        Your fifty-ninth birthday is candied plums

                                        and two small orchestras.

                                        Out there your friends welcome

                                        bullets in the back of the head.

                                       An August storm batters the porch

                                       with the Chief Prosecutor’s words:

                                       Down with the vulture, these miserable hybrids

                                       of foxes and pigs!

                                       In your hand

                                       the pistol with not enough ammunition.

                                       You wait for you know not who

                                       to hug your skull and whisper.

                                       “Everything is finished”;

                                       indulge in just one more

                                       promise that won’t come true over

                                       the candied plums and two small orchestras

                                       in the hour of nowhere else to go.

                                       KEVIN HIGGINS 

The poem has also been translated into Spanish and the translation published in the online Mexican literary magazine Cuadrivio. 

Today is the 74th anniversary of the murder in Mexico City, by an agent of Soviet Military Intelligence, of the exiled co-organiser of the Russian Revolution.

Above is a poem I wrote a few years ago about Trotsky's last years. He wrote extensively about literary and artistic matters, co-authoring (with André Breton & Diego Rivera) a 'Manifesto For an Independent Revolutionary Art'.The poem originally appeared in The Galway Advertiser in 2009.

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The incredible beauty of human art.

This is a beautiful and powerful example of human art, the art of space, timing, concentration and discipline. It is not the crass vulgar art of the Madison Avenue kind, commodity art.  This woman is incredible, the discipline and concentration it takes to do this.  Fascinating.

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Johnny Depp: Victim of capitalism or a nutter?

It's late but I can't sleep. So I'm watching, or was watching this late nite (damn, I hate spelling it that way) show.  It's quite a famous show and I have to admit the three or four times I've watched it in 25 years, the guy has been quite funny.

But he had this Johnny Depp on.  I got more annoyed the more Depp opened his damn mouth or the camera focused on him. He had this ridiculous suit on and a lot of rings on his his right hand, then he acted all sort of intellectual like by appearing confused and disoriented when he spoke and he had some sort of tattoo on the back of his hand.

I have to admit I had a couple of wines but I turned to my companion and said, "This guys is a nutter."

She looked at me as she does when I say these things and I just walked out of the room heading toward the kitchen for some snacks.

I ended up here at the computer because I thought about this guy Depp and I thought of how he might be a great actor ( I liked him in Edward Scissorhands for example) but the money that controls the industry, in other words, art being a business, wrecks people like him as it does workers that work in a shoe factory. An obvious difference is that  Depp has a lot of money but he is a victim of the system much like a worker except hi is not as free.

"But wait", I said to myself, "I know lots of people with rings on every finger like that woman at Home Depot."

 "C'mon Richard" a voice quickly told me, "If  Johnny Depp sold the rings on his right hand he could feed an entire continent with the money."

True.

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The Austerity Mantra

Austerity Mantra

Everything must be on the table.
Your ninety seven year old granny
is no longer cost effective, would
benefit greatly from being brought face to face
with a compassionate baseball bat.
The figures speak for themselves and will
be worse by morning. The paraplegic
in his insanely expensive wheelchair
will have to crawl as God intended.
Here are the figures that won’t stop
speaking for themselves, this is the table
everything must be on. Yesterday my name was
Temporary Fiscal Adjustment.
Tonight, the insect in the radio calls me
The Inevitable. When the economist
puts his hand up, take care not to cough.
Everything’s on the table and
the table’s tiny. I’d send you a pillow
to hold hard over the child’s face
‘til the kicking stops, but at current rates
there’ll be no pillow. I am the unthinkable
but you will think me. Pack her mouth
with tea towels, hold down firmly
your old mildewed raincoat,
‘til there’s no more breath.
Tomorrow I’ll be known as
Four Year Consolidation Package.
Lock the cat in the oven and bake
at two hundred degrees centigrade.
Tie your last plastic bag over
your own head. The figures speak for themselves
and there is no table.

Kevin Higgins
Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967, and grew up in Galway City where he still lives. He is co-organiser of the highly successful Over The Edge literary events. His first collection of poems, The Boy with No Face, was published by Salmon in 2005. The Boy With No Face was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award and has recently gone to its second printing. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published by Salmon in 2008. He is the poetry critic of The Galway Advertiser and also regularly reviews for Books In Canada: The Canadian Review of Books. A collection of his essays and reviews, Poetry, Politics & Dorothy Gone Horribly Astray, was published by Lapwing in 2006. Kevin has read his work at most of the major literary festivals in Ireland and at a wide variety of venues and festivals in Britain, France and the United States. He won the 2003 Cúirt Festival Poetry Grand Slam and was awarded a literary bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2005. 

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