Category Archives: Syndicated

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A Radical Mother Breaks the Silence on Financial Violence, Trauma and Being a Rugged Individual

by Karen Walasek Posted on June 3, 2013

Finan­cially induced trauma has con­sumed my life. It’s taken me a long time to rec­og­nize it, even though I have not been alone in this expe­ri­ence. Since the 2008 eco­nomic col­lapse finan­cially induced trauma has fueled untold per­sonal vio­lence against good peo­ple who have lost jobs, invest­ments, secu­rity, retire­ment, homes and lives. As an artist, […] Con­tinue read­ing →

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The Irish Language: Hard Questions, Harder Answers, and Hope Through the Words of a Poet

by Ger Killeen Posted on May 22, 2013
 One of the most thumbed-through of the books I own in the Irish lan­guage is a dic­tio­nary: An Irish-English Dic­tio­nary com­piled and edited by The Rev. Patrick S. Din­neen in 1904. I have other Irish-English dic­tio­nar­ies which are more use­ful to me than Dinneen’s, dic­tio­nar­ies that are printed in stan­dard Roman type, unlike Dinneen’s which retains the half-uncial let­ter­ing and unre­formed spelling in which Irish was writ­ten for cen­turies; dic­tio­nar­ies which have kept up with the times and can tell me the Irish words for “injec­tion mould” and “file trans­fer pro­to­col”; dic­tio­nar­ies laden with all the ser­vice­able, civil service-concocted words nec­es­sary for com­mu­ni­cat­ing the intri­ca­cies of the bureau­cratic machin­ery run­ning the mod­ern Irish state. These are all valu­able dic­tio­nar­ies in their own right and I depend on them almost daily. But I don’t love them the way I do Dinneen’s; I don’t take as much plea­sure in them; and they are not nearly as heart-breaking.

  I open Din­neen at ran­dom and my eyes are drawn to the word cair­ríneach which I’m told is the word used in West Kerry for “a frail scythe”. I flip on, and come across luch mean­ing “shreds of extra­ne­ous mat­ter in tal­low that is being melted down”. And fur­ther along there’s tothb­huarach “rushes pounded and pre­pared for the mak­ing of a spancel”.

Per­son­ally, I’ve never heard any­one in the present-day Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas of Ire­land which lie mostly along the North­west, West and South-West coasts, use any of these words in ordi­nary, every­day con­ver­sa­tion. They are among many hun­dreds, per­haps thou­sands of words which, though they have a dic­tio­nary exis­tence, are pass­ing or have passed from the liv­ing speech of native Irish speak­ers. These par­tic­u­lar words come from a world that was pre-industrial, iso­lated, and con­ser­v­a­tive in cus­tom and reli­gion; they lived on the tongues of peo­ple who farmed small­hold­ings of fairly poor land, of cattle-raisers and sheep-herders, of fish­er­men and car­pen­ters, of thatch­ers and far­ri­ers.  And they join whole classes of words that have gone silent in the speech of the Gaeltacht—the names of plants, of weather phe­nom­ena, of finely observed char­ac­ter traits. They join too the tra­di­tional songs, poems and sto­ries that are for­got­ten or half-forgotten by liv­ing peo­ple and have gone to their rest in the archives of the heroic col­lec­tors of folk­lore and lan­guage data.

 “To imag­ine a lan­guage”, says Wittgen­stein, “is to imag­ine a form of life”. And the form of life con­jured up from a sur­vey of Din­neen is so remote from the life of the present-day Gaeltacht, never mind the rest of Ire­land, that the lan­guage itself seems almost as alien as San­skrit. Long gone from the daily life of the Gaeltacht are the net weavers, the tai­lors, the cob­blers and the blade sharp­en­ers along with their rich hoards of spe­cial­ized craft ter­mi­nol­ogy. As far back as  1921 the great Blas­ketIs­land writer Tomás Ó Criomhthain took pride in the fact that a deal was struck at a mar­ket through the medium of Irish. “The farmer sold the big bul­lock through the lan­guage of his coun­try and the buyer bought it through the same lan­guage. Though I’m not rich I’d rather be lis­ten­ing to these two wor­thy men mak­ing a bar­gain in the lan­guage of my coun­try than have a pound of yel­low gold”, he says, adding that the young farmer who sold the beast used his prof­its to come to the Blas­ket to improve his Irish. “It’s a pity I don’t hear the same sort of thing from every fair”, laments Tomás who was undoubt­edly hear­ing the pass­ing of a world where the earthy ban­ter of a bullock’s sell­ing was now as likely to be in Eng­lish as it was in Irish, even in the Gaeltacht. As for our own day, you can for­get about any­thing as inef­fi­cient as the aonach, the mar­ket fair, Tomás was refer­ring to.  Bul­locks tagged and tracked by com­put­ers are shown and auc­tioned off in a mat­ter of min­utes, own­er­ship trans­ferred to and from farm­ers who know noth­ing of each other, hardly a word of real Eng­lish pass­ing their lips, let alone a word of real Irish.

 At this point now the sociologically-minded per­son might pro­duce a sheaf of woe­ful sta­tis­tics about the sta­tus of Irish as a spo­ken lan­guage, and depend­ing on her rela­tion­ship to an Ghaeilge might proph­esy its immi­nent dis­ap­pear­ance with the kind of equa­nim­ity his­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics reserves for Tochar­ian or Gaul­ish, or, might fall roman­ti­cally into the idiom of pure lament: “Mo mhíle trua, mo bhuairt, mo bhrón…” “Och, ochón!”  (My thou­sand pities, my grief, my sorrow…Alas, alas!)

 I, how­ever, am going to call to my side a dif­fer­ent spirit, one canny enough to under­stand how endan­gered the Irish lan­guage is, and yet one uncan­nily bold enough to try to turn the wake into a wed­ding. I’m going to take a look at a few poems of Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill, one of the fore­most con­tem­po­rary Irish lan­guage poets, and see what they might mean for us as learn­ers and speak­ers of Irish, see if there’s inspi­ra­tion and strength we can draw from them.

 To set a bit of con­text I want first, how­ever, to quote you some­thing writ­ten about 10 years ago by the very fine Irish poet Gréagóir Ó Dúill from an essay in Poetry Ire­land called ‘The Lan­guage Shift’ which he fol­lowed by a poem of the same name. In the essay Ó Dúill con­fessed, with a lot of obvi­ously sin­cere hand­wring­ing, that he was aban­don­ing, by and large, his Irish lan­guage writ­ing for Eng­lish. As a writer he says,

I do not think that my own expe­ri­ence is unique. I now find that, after eight col­lec­tions, a selected, two antholo­gies, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, a lit­er­ary biog­ra­phy and much editing,

review­ing and adju­di­cat­ing in Irish I have started to write in Eng­lish. I am still sort­ing out the rea­sons. One is the ero­sion of ide­ol­ogy, or the form of ide­ol­ogy which under­pinned my daily deci­sion to go on writ­ing in Irish. Mal­tese has more sta­tus even in the Gaeltacht area in which I spend most of my time. Another rea­son, more impor­tantly, is a recog­ni­tion that Eng­lish is my mater­nal lan­guage. A pro­fes­sional writer must see his or her mater­nal lan­guage as a key resource, and Eng­lish as a par­tic­u­larly rich one, a resource deserv­ing to be exploited. Eng­lish is also the mater­nal lan­guage of much of my actual and poten­tial market.

He then fol­lows state­ments such as this with a poem in Eng­lish ‘The Lan­guage Turn’

[Lis­ten to him read it here]   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBLlA4lLMyw

 Beside this I want to set the open­ing para­graph from an essay Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill wrote in 1995 in The New York Times Book Review called ‘Why I Choose To Write In Irish; The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’:

Not so long ago I tele­phoned my mother about some fam­ily mat­ter. “So what are you writ­ing these days?”, she asked, more for the sake of con­ver­sa­tion than any­thing else. “Oh, an essay for The New York Times,” I said as casu­ally as pos­si­ble. “What is it about?” she asked. “About what it is like to write in Irish,” I replied. There was a good few sec­onds’ pause at the other end of the line; then, “Well, I hope you’ll tell them that it is mad.” End of con­ver­sa­tion. I had got my come­up­pance. And from my mother, who was the native speaker of Irish in our fam­ily, never hav­ing encoun­tered a sin­gle word of Eng­lish until she went to school at the age of 6…Typical.

 But here’s a poem of Ní Dhomhnaill’s that might give us a whole dif­fer­ent take on what a writer might feel about work­ing in a lan­guage that even her own mother thinks it’s crazy to write in :

Féar Suaithin­seach  Mirac­u­lous Grass, trans. by Sea­mus Heaney

There you were in your pur­ple vestments

half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest

under your linen alb and cha­suble and stole:

and when you saw my face in the crowd

for Holy Communion

the con­se­crated host fell from your fingers.

I felt shame, I never

men­tioned it once,

my lips were sealed.

But still it lurked in my heart

like a thorn under mud, and it

worked itself in so deep and sheer

it nearly killed me.

Next thing then, I was laid up in bed.

Con­sul­tants came in their hundreds,

doc­tors and broth­ers and priests,

but I baf­fled them all: I was

incur­able, they left me for dead.

So out you go, men,

out with the spades and scythes,

the hooks and shov­els and hoes.

Tackle the rubble,

cut back the bushes, clear off the rubbish,

the sappy growth, the whole strag­gle and mess

that infests my green unfor­tu­nate field.

And there where the sacred wafer fell

you will discover

in the mid­dle of the shoot­ing weeds

a clump of mirac­u­lous grass.

The priest will have to come then

with his del­i­cate fin­gers, and lift the host

and bring it to me and put it on my tongue.

Where it will melt, and I will rise in the bed

as fit and well as the young­ster I used to be.

 One way of read­ing this poem, obliquely enough, per­haps, is to see the ‘host’, ‘an abh­lainn bhean­naithe’ as the numi­nous body of the Irish lan­guage itself, a tongue fallen into the most unpro­pi­tious of cir­cum­stances, fallen out of the hands of offi­cial and offi­cious and hyp­o­crit­i­cal male-dominated cul­tural prac­tices. But here the lan­guage of humil­i­a­tion and pain, as Frank McGuin­ness has called it, is trans­muted into the lan­guage of cel­e­bra­tion, sen­su­al­ity, deli­cious deviancy. Why not, the sug­ges­tion seems to be, make some kind of a virtue out of lin­guis­tic mar­gin­al­ity, even trans­gres­sion? Why not go for broke in the faith­ful expec­ta­tion of mir­a­cle? And why not a woman poet to accom­plish it?

 It’s not that Ní Dhomh­naill is com­pletely san­guine about all this. In her New York Times arti­cle she talks about the cur­rent lan­guage sit­u­a­tion in Ireland:

At some level, it doesn’t seem too bad. Peo­ple are warm and not hun­gry. They are express­ing them­selves with­out dif­fi­culty in Eng­lish. They seem happy. I close my note­book with a snap and set off in the grip of that sud­den pang of despair that is always lurk­ing in the ever-widening rents of the lin­guis­tic fab­ric of minor­ity lan­guages. Per­haps my mother is right. Writ­ing in Irish is mad. Eng­lish is a won­der­ful lan­guage and it also has the added advan­tage of being very use­ful for putting bread on the table. Change is inevitable, and maybe it is part of the nat­ural order of things that some lan­guages should die while oth­ers prevail.

 And yet, and yet…

 And yet, and yet, indeed. On some level I some­times think we allow a cer­tain uncon­scious belief in absolute his­tor­i­cal deter­min­ism to color our views of future pos­si­bil­i­ties. The Irish lan­guage in a glob­al­ized eco­nomic sys­tem and a global iPod cul­ture, surely it’s all down hill from here?

 And yet, and yet… Frank O’Connor claimed that Gaelic cul­ture could be char­ac­ter­ized by “the back­ward look”, an Irish ten­dency to ret­ro­spec­tive antic­i­pa­tion, to look­ing at the past (not the present) as indi­ca­tor of the future. Of course it depends on where exactly you look. Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill some­times looks back, reaches back, into the amaz­ing Irish poetic tra­di­tion for tropes and hopes of the flow­er­ing of the vastly improb­a­ble. She has often men­tioned, for exam­ple, as one of her poetic fore­bears Eibh­lín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, the 18th Cen­tury poet who com­posed one of the great­est love poems and ele­gies in Irish ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, ‘The Lament for Art O Leary’. Com­posed at a time when Irish was on the verge of being aban­doned by large sec­tions of the pop­u­la­tion, this poem is a mir­a­cle of lyri­cal inten­sity, a fully real­ized sum­sump­tion of the entire Gaelic tra­di­tion of the caoineadh, the lament, and a mir­a­cle of sur­vival, liv­ing on well into the 19th cen­tury in the oral tra­di­tion of West Kerry, indeed all of Munster:

            Mo chara thú is mo thaithneamh!

            Nuair ghab­hais amach an geata

            D’fhillis ar ais go tapaidh,

            Do phó­gaís do dhís leanbh,

            Do phó­gaís mise ar bharra baise.

            Duraís, ‘A Eibh­lín, éirigh i d’ sheasamh

            Agus cuir do ghnó chun taisce

            Go luaim­neach is go tapaidh.

            Táimse ag fágáil an bhaile,

            Is ní móide go deo go gcasfainn.’

“My friend and my delight, when you went out the gate you came back quickly and kissed your two infants. You kissed me on the tips of my fin­gers and said ‘Eibh­lín, stand up and put your work aside fast and soon, for I am leav­ing home and I might never be returning.”

 Lis­ten to the echos of this (and much more) at the end of a poem called Dún ‘Strong­hold’ by Ní Dhomhnaill:

            Ach níl in aon ní ach seal

            i gcionn leathuaire

            pog­faidh tú mé i mbarra éadain

            is cas­faidh tú orm do dhrom

            is fág­far mé ar mo thaobh féin

            don leaba dhúbailte

            ag cuimh­neamh faoi scáth do ghuailne

            ná tioc­faidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

“Every­thing lasts but a moment. In half an hour you’ll kiss the top of my fore­head and you’ll turn your back to me, and I’ll be left on my own side of the dou­ble bed, remem­ber­ing in the shade of your shoul­ders that death will never come to me before my time.”

 With a poem like this we can be cer­tain that death will never come to the Irish lan­guage itself before its time, and there’s an energy and musi­cal­ity in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem that while full of lit­er­ary nuance is also full of the vigor of the spo­ken, every­day lan­guage. Any­one who has spent a night in a pub in Bal­ly­fer­riter or Spid­dal knows that spo­ken Irish has a vital, earthy, flu­ent exis­tence that really can’t be cap­tured in the “native speaker” sta­tis­tics such as those piled up in Reg Hindley’s book ‘The Death of the Irish Lan­guage’.  The num­bers game isn’t the whole story.

 Ní Dhomh­naill won­der­fully and humor­ously and bit­ingly catches some­thing of the con­tin­ued vital­ity of the spo­ken lan­guage and its impor­tance for lit­er­a­ture in a poem called ‘Claoninsint’,  lit­er­ally, ‘Indi­rect Speech’:

            Tá’s againn, a dúradar,

            cár chaithis an samhradh, a dúradar,

            thíos i mBun an Táb­hairne, a dúradar,

            cad a dhei­nis gach lá, a dúradar,

            chuais ar an dtráigh, a dúradar,

            níor chuais ag snámh, a dúradar.

            Canathaobh nár chuais ag snámh?

            Mar bhí sé rófhuar, a dúradar,

            rófhuar do do chnámha, a dúradar,

            do do chnámha ‘tá imithe gan mhaith, a dúradar,

            bod­har age sámh­nas nó age tea­s­pach gan dúchas

            gur deachair dhuit é a iom­par, a dúradar.

“We know, they said, where you spent the sum­mer, they said, down in Crosshaven, they siad, what you did every day, they said, you went to the beach, they said, you didn’t go swim­ming, they said. Why didn’t you go swim­ming? Because it was too cold they said, too cold for your bones, they said, for your bones that are turned to no good, they said,  not able to cope with hard­ship, with your unnat­ural high spir­its, it was hard for you to han­dle, they said.”

 Here and else­where in the work of Ní Dhomh­naill, and indeed in the work of many other Irish writ­ers who choose to be mad enough to con­tinue writ­ing in Irish, the corpse is cer­tainly sit­ting up and talk­ing back, even singing back. From the mar­gins, from the scarcely acknowl­edged gaps and dis­con­ti­nu­ities in the main­stream anglo­phone cul­ture in Ire­land, is com­ing a whole range of dis­courses that in refus­ing to shut up or be shut up opens up a pro­found ques­tion­ing of cul­tural val­ues and to some extent is pro­duc­ing, in lit­er­a­ture, at least, a kind of hybrid vigor as Eng­lish lan­guage Irish writ­ers try to take in the insights of such a cri­tique. Issues not only of lan­guage, but of gen­der, of col­o­niza­tion, of genre, of the social posi­tion of the writer—all these are informed and deep­ened by the prac­tice of poets like Ní Dhomhnaill.

 Cen­tral to it all are the prob­lems and oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sented by trans­la­tion. For many peo­ple in Ire­land and for the vast major­ity of Amer­i­cans inter­ested in Irish lit­er­a­ture it is through trans­la­tions that much of present day Irish lan­guage writ­ing becomes avail­able. Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill has actu­ally trans­lated some of her own work into Eng­lish, and a great num­ber of poets from Sea­mus Heaney to Eiléan Ní Chuil­leanáin to Medbh McGuck­ian to Paul Mul­doon have pro­duced often stun­ning ver­sions of her poems in Eng­lish. Mul­doon, in par­tic­u­lar, seems to have a sen­si­bil­ity that is con­gru­ent with Ní Dhomhnaill’s lit­er­ary play­ful­ness and lin­guis­tic caprice.

 Though it’s through trans­la­tion that Ní dhomh­naill has gar­nered a large inter­na­tional read­er­ship, it prob­a­bly goes with­out say­ing that in poetry in par­tic­u­lar some­thing is always lost when it enters another lan­guage. In the case of Irish and its some­what endan­gered sta­tus it really mat­ters what it is that’s lost. I want to put before you a poem by Nuala called ‘Ceist na Tean­gan’, lit­er­ally ‘The Lan­guage Ques­tion’; here it is in Irish and even for those of you that have lit­tle or no Irish I’d ask you to lis­ten care­fully to the sounds and rhythms:

            Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh

            i mbáidín teangan

            faoi mar a leagfá naíonán

            i gcli­ab­hán

            a bheadh fite fuaite

            de dhuilleoga feileastraim

            is bitiú­man agus pic

            bheith cuim­ilte lena thóin

            ansan é a lea­gadh síos

            i measc na ngiolcach

            is coigeal na mban sí

            le taobh na habhann,

            féachaint n’fheadaraís

            cá dtab­har­faidh an sruth é,

            féachaint, dála Mhaoise,

            an bhfóir­fidh iníon Fhorainn.

[‘The Lan­guage Issue’ trans. by Paul Muldoon]

I place my hope on the water
in this lit­tle boat
of the lan­guage, the way a body might put
an infant
in a bas­ket of inter­twined
iris leaves,
its under­side proofed
with bitu­men and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bul­rushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not know­ing where it might end up;
in the lap, per­haps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

This is a bril­liant poem in Eng­lish, and my intent here is not at all to dis­par­age it on the level of lit­er­ary achieve­ment. But here is Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem in very lit­eral English:

            I set my hope floating

            in the lit­tle boat of the language

            like you’d lay an infant

            in a basket

            that would be woven together

            from iris leaves

            with bitu­men and pitch

            plas­tered on its bottom

            then to have laid it down

            among the reeds

            and fairy women’s distaff

            by the side of the river

            see­ing, you don’t know,

            where the cur­rent will take it

            see­ing, like the story of Moses,

            will Pharaoh’s daugh­ter save it

For all its poetic faults, this lit­eral ver­sion points up a cou­ple of things that got buried in Muldoon’s poem—the speci­ficity of the plant name coigeal na mban sí ‘fairy women’s distaff’ and the earthy solid­ity of the phrase ‘cuim­ilte lena thóin’ ‘rubbed or plas­tered on its bot­tom’, among oth­ers. I per­son­ally think, on the pure lin­guis­tic level, that’s a loss, that these are things I’d rather keep alive on what­ever tongue they’re trans­lated to, as they’re still alive on the Irish tongue.

 Any­way, as I reach the end of this talk, I real­ize that what­ever ques­tions I’ve raised here, I haven’t so much given answers to them as much as align myself with a series of hopes I find com­pellingly inter­linked in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill. Among them would be the hope that out of the mael­strom of post­moder­nity the viv­i­fy­ing dif­fer­ences of lan­guages, cul­tures, gen­ders and spir­i­tu­al­i­ties can retain their unique virtues with­out descend­ing into chau­vin­sim and exclu­siv­ity. Is it too much to hope for a rea­son­ably bilin­gual Ire­land a gen­er­a­tion from now?

We can hope any­way, on a day like today. How improb­a­ble is it that in Port­land, Ore­gon, scores of peo­ple have gath­ered to meet the Irish lan­guage? I give Nuala the last word. This is from her poem Feis:

            Osclaíonn rós istigh im chroí.

            Labhrann cuach im bhéal.

            Léimeann gear­rcach ó mo nead.

            Tá tóithín ag mac­nas i ndoimh­neas mo mhachnaimh.

            A rose opens in my heart.

            A cuckoo calls in my mouth.

            A fledg­ling leaps from my nest.

            A por­poise is play­ing in the depths of my thinking.

              
                    
[A Talk Given At MarylhurstUniversity’s Irish Lan­guage Day © Ger Killeen]

Con­tinue read­ing →

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The Irish Language: Hard Questions, Harder Answers, and Hope Through the Words of a Poet

by Ger Killeen Posted on May 22, 2013
 One of the most thumbed-through of the books I own in the Irish lan­guage is a dic­tio­nary: An Irish-English Dic­tio­nary com­piled and edited by The Rev. Patrick S. Din­neen in 1904. I have other Irish-English dic­tio­nar­ies which are more use­ful to me than Dinneen’s, dic­tio­nar­ies that are printed in stan­dard Roman type, unlike Dinneen’s which retains the half-uncial let­ter­ing and unre­formed spelling in which Irish was writ­ten for cen­turies; dic­tio­nar­ies which have kept up with the times and can tell me the Irish words for “injec­tion mould” and “file trans­fer pro­to­col”; dic­tio­nar­ies laden with all the ser­vice­able, civil service-concocted words nec­es­sary for com­mu­ni­cat­ing the intri­ca­cies of the bureau­cratic machin­ery run­ning the mod­ern Irish state. These are all valu­able dic­tio­nar­ies in their own right and I depend on them almost daily. But I don’t love them the way I do Dinneen’s; I don’t take as much plea­sure in them; and they are not nearly as heart-breaking.

  I open Din­neen at ran­dom and my eyes are drawn to the word cair­ríneach which I’m told is the word used in West Kerry for “a frail scythe”. I flip on, and come across luch mean­ing “shreds of extra­ne­ous mat­ter in tal­low that is being melted down”. And fur­ther along there’s tothb­huarach “rushes pounded and pre­pared for the mak­ing of a spancel”.

Per­son­ally, I’ve never heard any­one in the present-day Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas of Ire­land which lie mostly along the North­west, West and South-West coasts, use any of these words in ordi­nary, every­day con­ver­sa­tion. They are among many hun­dreds, per­haps thou­sands of words which, though they have a dic­tio­nary exis­tence, are pass­ing or have passed from the liv­ing speech of native Irish speak­ers. These par­tic­u­lar words come from a world that was pre-industrial, iso­lated, and con­ser­v­a­tive in cus­tom and reli­gion; they lived on the tongues of peo­ple who farmed small­hold­ings of fairly poor land, of cattle-raisers and sheep-herders, of fish­er­men and car­pen­ters, of thatch­ers and far­ri­ers.  And they join whole classes of words that have gone silent in the speech of the Gaeltacht—the names of plants, of weather phe­nom­ena, of finely observed char­ac­ter traits. They join too the tra­di­tional songs, poems and sto­ries that are for­got­ten or half-forgotten by liv­ing peo­ple and have gone to their rest in the archives of the heroic col­lec­tors of folk­lore and lan­guage data.

 “To imag­ine a lan­guage”, says Wittgen­stein, “is to imag­ine a form of life”. And the form of life con­jured up from a sur­vey of Din­neen is so remote from the life of the present-day Gaeltacht, never mind the rest of Ire­land, that the lan­guage itself seems almost as alien as San­skrit. Long gone from the daily life of the Gaeltacht are the net weavers, the tai­lors, the cob­blers and the blade sharp­en­ers along with their rich hoards of spe­cial­ized craft ter­mi­nol­ogy. As far back as  1921 the great Blas­ketIs­land writer Tomás Ó Criomhthain took pride in the fact that a deal was struck at a mar­ket through the medium of Irish. “The farmer sold the big bul­lock through the lan­guage of his coun­try and the buyer bought it through the same lan­guage. Though I’m not rich I’d rather be lis­ten­ing to these two wor­thy men mak­ing a bar­gain in the lan­guage of my coun­try than have a pound of yel­low gold”, he says, adding that the young farmer who sold the beast used his prof­its to come to the Blas­ket to improve his Irish. “It’s a pity I don’t hear the same sort of thing from every fair”, laments Tomás who was undoubt­edly hear­ing the pass­ing of a world where the earthy ban­ter of a bullock’s sell­ing was now as likely to be in Eng­lish as it was in Irish, even in the Gaeltacht. As for our own day, you can for­get about any­thing as inef­fi­cient as the aonach, the mar­ket fair, Tomás was refer­ring to.  Bul­locks tagged and tracked by com­put­ers are shown and auc­tioned off in a mat­ter of min­utes, own­er­ship trans­ferred to and from farm­ers who know noth­ing of each other, hardly a word of real Eng­lish pass­ing their lips, let alone a word of real Irish.

 At this point now the sociologically-minded per­son might pro­duce a sheaf of woe­ful sta­tis­tics about the sta­tus of Irish as a spo­ken lan­guage, and depend­ing on her rela­tion­ship to an Ghaeilge might proph­esy its immi­nent dis­ap­pear­ance with the kind of equa­nim­ity his­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics reserves for Tochar­ian or Gaul­ish, or, might fall roman­ti­cally into the idiom of pure lament: “Mo mhíle trua, mo bhuairt, mo bhrón…” “Och, ochón!”  (My thou­sand pities, my grief, my sorrow…Alas, alas!)

 I, how­ever, am going to call to my side a dif­fer­ent spirit, one canny enough to under­stand how endan­gered the Irish lan­guage is, and yet one uncan­nily bold enough to try to turn the wake into a wed­ding. I’m going to take a look at a few poems of Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill, one of the fore­most con­tem­po­rary Irish lan­guage poets, and see what they might mean for us as learn­ers and speak­ers of Irish, see if there’s inspi­ra­tion and strength we can draw from them.

 To set a bit of con­text I want first, how­ever, to quote you some­thing writ­ten about 10 years ago by the very fine Irish poet Gréagóir Ó Dúill from an essay in Poetry Ire­land called ‘The Lan­guage Shift’ which he fol­lowed by a poem of the same name. In the essay Ó Dúill con­fessed, with a lot of obvi­ously sin­cere hand­wring­ing, that he was aban­don­ing, by and large, his Irish lan­guage writ­ing for Eng­lish. As a writer he says,

I do not think that my own expe­ri­ence is unique. I now find that, after eight col­lec­tions, a selected, two antholo­gies, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, a lit­er­ary biog­ra­phy and much editing,

review­ing and adju­di­cat­ing in Irish I have started to write in Eng­lish. I am still sort­ing out the rea­sons. One is the ero­sion of ide­ol­ogy, or the form of ide­ol­ogy which under­pinned my daily deci­sion to go on writ­ing in Irish. Mal­tese has more sta­tus even in the Gaeltacht area in which I spend most of my time. Another rea­son, more impor­tantly, is a recog­ni­tion that Eng­lish is my mater­nal lan­guage. A pro­fes­sional writer must see his or her mater­nal lan­guage as a key resource, and Eng­lish as a par­tic­u­larly rich one, a resource deserv­ing to be exploited. Eng­lish is also the mater­nal lan­guage of much of my actual and poten­tial market.

He then fol­lows state­ments such as this with a poem in Eng­lish ‘The Lan­guage Turn’

[Lis­ten to him read it here]   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBLlA4lLMyw

 Beside this I want to set the open­ing para­graph from an essay Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill wrote in 1995 in The New York Times Book Review called ‘Why I Choose To Write In Irish; The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’:

Not so long ago I tele­phoned my mother about some fam­ily mat­ter. “So what are you writ­ing these days?”, she asked, more for the sake of con­ver­sa­tion than any­thing else. “Oh, an essay for The New York Times,” I said as casu­ally as pos­si­ble. “What is it about?” she asked. “About what it is like to write in Irish,” I replied. There was a good few sec­onds’ pause at the other end of the line; then, “Well, I hope you’ll tell them that it is mad.” End of con­ver­sa­tion. I had got my come­up­pance. And from my mother, who was the native speaker of Irish in our fam­ily, never hav­ing encoun­tered a sin­gle word of Eng­lish until she went to school at the age of 6…Typical.

 But here’s a poem of Ní Dhomhnaill’s that might give us a whole dif­fer­ent take on what a writer might feel about work­ing in a lan­guage that even her own mother thinks it’s crazy to write in :

Féar Suaithin­seach  Mirac­u­lous Grass, trans. by Sea­mus Heaney

There you were in your pur­ple vestments

half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest

under your linen alb and cha­suble and stole:

and when you saw my face in the crowd

for Holy Communion

the con­se­crated host fell from your fingers.

I felt shame, I never

men­tioned it once,

my lips were sealed.

But still it lurked in my heart

like a thorn under mud, and it

worked itself in so deep and sheer

it nearly killed me.

Next thing then, I was laid up in bed.

Con­sul­tants came in their hundreds,

doc­tors and broth­ers and priests,

but I baf­fled them all: I was

incur­able, they left me for dead.

So out you go, men,

out with the spades and scythes,

the hooks and shov­els and hoes.

Tackle the rubble,

cut back the bushes, clear off the rubbish,

the sappy growth, the whole strag­gle and mess

that infests my green unfor­tu­nate field.

And there where the sacred wafer fell

you will discover

in the mid­dle of the shoot­ing weeds

a clump of mirac­u­lous grass.

The priest will have to come then

with his del­i­cate fin­gers, and lift the host

and bring it to me and put it on my tongue.

Where it will melt, and I will rise in the bed

as fit and well as the young­ster I used to be.

 One way of read­ing this poem, obliquely enough, per­haps, is to see the ‘host’, ‘an abh­lainn bhean­naithe’ as the numi­nous body of the Irish lan­guage itself, a tongue fallen into the most unpro­pi­tious of cir­cum­stances, fallen out of the hands of offi­cial and offi­cious and hyp­o­crit­i­cal male-dominated cul­tural prac­tices. But here the lan­guage of humil­i­a­tion and pain, as Frank McGuin­ness has called it, is trans­muted into the lan­guage of cel­e­bra­tion, sen­su­al­ity, deli­cious deviancy. Why not, the sug­ges­tion seems to be, make some kind of a virtue out of lin­guis­tic mar­gin­al­ity, even trans­gres­sion? Why not go for broke in the faith­ful expec­ta­tion of mir­a­cle? And why not a woman poet to accom­plish it?

 It’s not that Ní Dhomh­naill is com­pletely san­guine about all this. In her New York Times arti­cle she talks about the cur­rent lan­guage sit­u­a­tion in Ireland:

At some level, it doesn’t seem too bad. Peo­ple are warm and not hun­gry. They are express­ing them­selves with­out dif­fi­culty in Eng­lish. They seem happy. I close my note­book with a snap and set off in the grip of that sud­den pang of despair that is always lurk­ing in the ever-widening rents of the lin­guis­tic fab­ric of minor­ity lan­guages. Per­haps my mother is right. Writ­ing in Irish is mad. Eng­lish is a won­der­ful lan­guage and it also has the added advan­tage of being very use­ful for putting bread on the table. Change is inevitable, and maybe it is part of the nat­ural order of things that some lan­guages should die while oth­ers prevail.

 And yet, and yet…

 And yet, and yet, indeed. On some level I some­times think we allow a cer­tain uncon­scious belief in absolute his­tor­i­cal deter­min­ism to color our views of future pos­si­bil­i­ties. The Irish lan­guage in a glob­al­ized eco­nomic sys­tem and a global iPod cul­ture, surely it’s all down hill from here?

 And yet, and yet… Frank O’Connor claimed that Gaelic cul­ture could be char­ac­ter­ized by “the back­ward look”, an Irish ten­dency to ret­ro­spec­tive antic­i­pa­tion, to look­ing at the past (not the present) as indi­ca­tor of the future. Of course it depends on where exactly you look. Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill some­times looks back, reaches back, into the amaz­ing Irish poetic tra­di­tion for tropes and hopes of the flow­er­ing of the vastly improb­a­ble. She has often men­tioned, for exam­ple, as one of her poetic fore­bears Eibh­lín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, the 18th Cen­tury poet who com­posed one of the great­est love poems and ele­gies in Irish ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, ‘The Lament for Art O Leary’. Com­posed at a time when Irish was on the verge of being aban­doned by large sec­tions of the pop­u­la­tion, this poem is a mir­a­cle of lyri­cal inten­sity, a fully real­ized sum­sump­tion of the entire Gaelic tra­di­tion of the caoineadh, the lament, and a mir­a­cle of sur­vival, liv­ing on well into the 19th cen­tury in the oral tra­di­tion of West Kerry, indeed all of Munster:

            Mo chara thú is mo thaithneamh!

            Nuair ghab­hais amach an geata

            D’fhillis ar ais go tapaidh,

            Do phó­gaís do dhís leanbh,

            Do phó­gaís mise ar bharra baise.

            Duraís, ‘A Eibh­lín, éirigh i d’ sheasamh

            Agus cuir do ghnó chun taisce

            Go luaim­neach is go tapaidh.

            Táimse ag fágáil an bhaile,

            Is ní móide go deo go gcasfainn.’

“My friend and my delight, when you went out the gate you came back quickly and kissed your two infants. You kissed me on the tips of my fin­gers and said ‘Eibh­lín, stand up and put your work aside fast and soon, for I am leav­ing home and I might never be returning.”

 Lis­ten to the echos of this (and much more) at the end of a poem called Dún ‘Strong­hold’ by Ní Dhomhnaill:

            Ach níl in aon ní ach seal

            i gcionn leathuaire

            pog­faidh tú mé i mbarra éadain

            is cas­faidh tú orm do dhrom

            is fág­far mé ar mo thaobh féin

            don leaba dhúbailte

            ag cuimh­neamh faoi scáth do ghuailne

            ná tioc­faidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

“Every­thing lasts but a moment. In half an hour you’ll kiss the top of my fore­head and you’ll turn your back to me, and I’ll be left on my own side of the dou­ble bed, remem­ber­ing in the shade of your shoul­ders that death will never come to me before my time.”

 With a poem like this we can be cer­tain that death will never come to the Irish lan­guage itself before its time, and there’s an energy and musi­cal­ity in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem that while full of lit­er­ary nuance is also full of the vigor of the spo­ken, every­day lan­guage. Any­one who has spent a night in a pub in Bal­ly­fer­riter or Spid­dal knows that spo­ken Irish has a vital, earthy, flu­ent exis­tence that really can’t be cap­tured in the “native speaker” sta­tis­tics such as those piled up in Reg Hindley’s book ‘The Death of the Irish Lan­guage’.  The num­bers game isn’t the whole story.

 Ní Dhomh­naill won­der­fully and humor­ously and bit­ingly catches some­thing of the con­tin­ued vital­ity of the spo­ken lan­guage and its impor­tance for lit­er­a­ture in a poem called ‘Claoninsint’,  lit­er­ally, ‘Indi­rect Speech’:

            Tá’s againn, a dúradar,

            cár chaithis an samhradh, a dúradar,

            thíos i mBun an Táb­hairne, a dúradar,

            cad a dhei­nis gach lá, a dúradar,

            chuais ar an dtráigh, a dúradar,

            níor chuais ag snámh, a dúradar.

            Canathaobh nár chuais ag snámh?

            Mar bhí sé rófhuar, a dúradar,

            rófhuar do do chnámha, a dúradar,

            do do chnámha ‘tá imithe gan mhaith, a dúradar,

            bod­har age sámh­nas nó age tea­s­pach gan dúchas

            gur deachair dhuit é a iom­par, a dúradar.

“We know, they said, where you spent the sum­mer, they said, down in Crosshaven, they siad, what you did every day, they said, you went to the beach, they said, you didn’t go swim­ming, they said. Why didn’t you go swim­ming? Because it was too cold they said, too cold for your bones, they said, for your bones that are turned to no good, they said,  not able to cope with hard­ship, with your unnat­ural high spir­its, it was hard for you to han­dle, they said.”

 Here and else­where in the work of Ní Dhomh­naill, and indeed in the work of many other Irish writ­ers who choose to be mad enough to con­tinue writ­ing in Irish, the corpse is cer­tainly sit­ting up and talk­ing back, even singing back. From the mar­gins, from the scarcely acknowl­edged gaps and dis­con­ti­nu­ities in the main­stream anglo­phone cul­ture in Ire­land, is com­ing a whole range of dis­courses that in refus­ing to shut up or be shut up opens up a pro­found ques­tion­ing of cul­tural val­ues and to some extent is pro­duc­ing, in lit­er­a­ture, at least, a kind of hybrid vigor as Eng­lish lan­guage Irish writ­ers try to take in the insights of such a cri­tique. Issues not only of lan­guage, but of gen­der, of col­o­niza­tion, of genre, of the social posi­tion of the writer—all these are informed and deep­ened by the prac­tice of poets like Ní Dhomhnaill.

 Cen­tral to it all are the prob­lems and oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sented by trans­la­tion. For many peo­ple in Ire­land and for the vast major­ity of Amer­i­cans inter­ested in Irish lit­er­a­ture it is through trans­la­tions that much of present day Irish lan­guage writ­ing becomes avail­able. Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill has actu­ally trans­lated some of her own work into Eng­lish, and a great num­ber of poets from Sea­mus Heaney to Eiléan Ní Chuil­leanáin to Medbh McGuck­ian to Paul Mul­doon have pro­duced often stun­ning ver­sions of her poems in Eng­lish. Mul­doon, in par­tic­u­lar, seems to have a sen­si­bil­ity that is con­gru­ent with Ní Dhomhnaill’s lit­er­ary play­ful­ness and lin­guis­tic caprice.

 Though it’s through trans­la­tion that Ní dhomh­naill has gar­nered a large inter­na­tional read­er­ship, it prob­a­bly goes with­out say­ing that in poetry in par­tic­u­lar some­thing is always lost when it enters another lan­guage. In the case of Irish and its some­what endan­gered sta­tus it really mat­ters what it is that’s lost. I want to put before you a poem by Nuala called ‘Ceist na Tean­gan’, lit­er­ally ‘The Lan­guage Ques­tion’; here it is in Irish and even for those of you that have lit­tle or no Irish I’d ask you to lis­ten care­fully to the sounds and rhythms:

            Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh

            i mbáidín teangan

            faoi mar a leagfá naíonán

            i gcli­ab­hán

            a bheadh fite fuaite

            de dhuilleoga feileastraim

            is bitiú­man agus pic

            bheith cuim­ilte lena thóin

            ansan é a lea­gadh síos

            i measc na ngiolcach

            is coigeal na mban sí

            le taobh na habhann,

            féachaint n’fheadaraís

            cá dtab­har­faidh an sruth é,

            féachaint, dála Mhaoise,

            an bhfóir­fidh iníon Fhorainn.

[‘The Lan­guage Issue’ trans. by Paul Muldoon]

I place my hope on the water
in this lit­tle boat
of the lan­guage, the way a body might put
an infant
in a bas­ket of inter­twined
iris leaves,
its under­side proofed
with bitu­men and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bul­rushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not know­ing where it might end up;
in the lap, per­haps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

This is a bril­liant poem in Eng­lish, and my intent here is not at all to dis­par­age it on the level of lit­er­ary achieve­ment. But here is Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem in very lit­eral English:

            I set my hope floating

            in the lit­tle boat of the language

            like you’d lay an infant

            in a basket

            that would be woven together

            from iris leaves

            with bitu­men and pitch

            plas­tered on its bottom

            then to have laid it down

            among the reeds

            and fairy women’s distaff

            by the side of the river

            see­ing, you don’t know,

            where the cur­rent will take it

            see­ing, like the story of Moses,

            will Pharaoh’s daugh­ter save it

For all its poetic faults, this lit­eral ver­sion points up a cou­ple of things that got buried in Muldoon’s poem—the speci­ficity of the plant name coigeal na mban sí ‘fairy women’s distaff’ and the earthy solid­ity of the phrase ‘cuim­ilte lena thóin’ ‘rubbed or plas­tered on its bot­tom’, among oth­ers. I per­son­ally think, on the pure lin­guis­tic level, that’s a loss, that these are things I’d rather keep alive on what­ever tongue they’re trans­lated to, as they’re still alive on the Irish tongue.

 Any­way, as I reach the end of this talk, I real­ize that what­ever ques­tions I’ve raised here, I haven’t so much given answers to them as much as align myself with a series of hopes I find com­pellingly inter­linked in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomh­naill. Among them would be the hope that out of the mael­strom of post­moder­nity the viv­i­fy­ing dif­fer­ences of lan­guages, cul­tures, gen­ders and spir­i­tu­al­i­ties can retain their unique virtues with­out descend­ing into chau­vin­sim and exclu­siv­ity. Is it too much to hope for a rea­son­ably bilin­gual Ire­land a gen­er­a­tion from now?

We can hope any­way, on a day like today. How improb­a­ble is it that in Port­land, Ore­gon, scores of peo­ple have gath­ered to meet the Irish lan­guage? I give Nuala the last word. This is from her poem Feis:

            Osclaíonn rós istigh im chroí.

            Labhrann cuach im bhéal.

            Léimeann gear­rcach ó mo nead.

            Tá tóithín ag mac­nas i ndoimh­neas mo mhachnaimh.

            A rose opens in my heart.

            A cuckoo calls in my mouth.

            A fledg­ling leaps from my nest.

            A por­poise is play­ing in the depths of my thinking.

              
                    
[A Talk Given At MarylhurstUniversity’s Irish Lan­guage Day © Ger Killeen]

Con­tinue read­ing →

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Out of Ulro: Some thoughts on ‘The Declarable Future’ by Jennifer Boyden

by Ger Killeen Posted on April 25, 2013

Out of Ulro:Some thoughts on The Declar­able Futureby Jen­nifer Boy­den (Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin Press, 2013).

1.

 Near the end of a poem called ‘Night Pitch’ from Jen­nifer Boyden’s new col­lec­tion The Declar­able Future, the speaker, stum­bling through the house after mid­night, lurch­ing for­ward to the piti­less con­clu­sions of insomnia’s syl­lo­gisms, con­sid­ers her neigh­bors across the street. “I have to admit it”, she says, “the neigh­bors look like hell” (p.10). And this is no mere sar­donic slap at their arti­fi­cial water­falls and Toy­ota Sequoias; in their own way these peo­ple, like many peo­ple in the First World, are kept awake at night; they sense, how­ever obscurely, that “oceanic despair” which erodes the con­tours of their seem­ingly unex­am­ined sub­ur­ban lifestyle just as surely as it erodes the hard edges of the speaker’s own cer­tain­ties. They look like hell. We all look like hell. It means, in spite of all our eva­sions, we know that being awake is a symp­tom of a shared condition—being lost. But unlike Dante’s dark wood, the place of our lost­ness is a lit-up sim­u­lacrum of nature where we con­trol the dim­mer switch.
 What is so impres­sive about this poem, and so many of the poems in the book, is the deep sense of empathic alert­ness which attends the diag­no­sis of our con­tem­po­rary global malaise, an under­stand­ing that we are all in this together; there is in the work­ing of these poems a deter­mined effort to see and see through our mas­sively com­modi­tized, dena­tured and desacral­ized world, and an equal deter­mi­na­tion not to stop there: these poems com­mit them­selves to both the present anda future, a future where there’s a chance we might become authen­tic neigh­bors to each other and to the earth itself. So, even at their most melan­cholic these poems man­age to achieve a hard-won vic­tory over the temp­ta­tions of cyn­i­cism and despair—they prise open a space for an ethic of com­pas­sion, and some­times with a sur­pris­ing leaven of humor, coun­sel us as to the route of our going on.
 And The Declar­able Future makes large claims for poetry itself as a vital cul­tural force for nav­i­gat­ing our way out of the dan­ger­ous straits of the post­mod­ern con­di­tion.  Here is a poetry that is not con­tent to sim­ply describe an outer and inner world in the belief that such descrip­tion is a kind of self-authenticating inter­pre­ta­tion. Rather, Boyden’s poems,  with their gor­geous lan­guage, their par­a­bolic nar­ra­tives and bold asso­cia­tive leaps, are “think­ing poems”. Indi­vid­ual poems and the book as a whole unfold a set of philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments about knowl­edge, lan­guage, expe­ri­ence, and time; at the same time, these argu­ments exfo­li­ate from a sen­su­ous life-world which the poetry unveils as mar­vel­lously com­plex, ambigu­ous, unnerv­ing and per­plex­ing. Together, these poems make a claim on the very process of think­ing, enact­ing in a range of lan­guage reg­is­ters a move­ment of the embod­ied mind that acknowl­edges and goes beyond the lin­ear and the expos­i­tory, the vis­i­ble and the quantifiable.

2.

 For me, Boyden’s poetry is thor­oughly vision­ary in the strict Blakean sense. The Declarable Future imag­ines the uni­verse in terms of alle­gor­i­cal fig­ures whose par­tial visions are respon­si­ble for struc­tur­ing dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties of mean­ing. She gives us “the giant”, “the woman”, “the per­son with the loupe”, “the lost man”, fig­ures whose activ­i­ties and con­tention dra­ma­tize our present-day con­di­tion and our sal­va­tion. She gives us an I, a she , and a he with fully real­ized lives, full of pre­car­i­ous under­stand­ings; she gives us a we in a dance of reach­ing out to and with­draw­ing from each other; she gives us sky and clouds and water and trees; she gives us angels; she gives us the gods. Stripped of any grandiose mythol­o­giz­ing dic­tion, her poetry points us to a state anal­o­gous to what Blake called “the four­fold vision”.  What is this vision, and how does Jen­nifer Boy­den give us a ver­sion that is con­vinc­ingly con­tem­po­rary?
 In a let­ter to Thomas Butts, Blake wrote the fol­low­ing verses:
Now I a four­fold vision see.
And a four­fold vision is given to me;
Tis four­fold in my supreme delight
And three­fold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Sin­gle vision & Newton’s sleep!

 Boyden’s ver­sion of the sin­gle vision and Newton’s sleep  begins with “the per­son with the loupe”. In the shad­owy town where many of the book’s nar­ra­tives unfold, this fig­ure is the arbiter of what counts as knowl­edge: “For any­thing we needed to know, we were to ask / the per­son with the loupe.” (p.39) Nei­ther male nor female, the per­son with the loupe has a kind of dis­in­ter­est­ed­ness which ren­ders the world col­or­less in the process of being scru­ti­nized and ordered. The per­son with the loupe insists on the pri­macy of observ­able fact and deduc­tive rea­son, rea­son unin­formed by other human fac­ul­ties; Blake would describe this “sin­gle vision” as a form of blind­ness char­ac­ter­is­tic of nat­ural sci­ence as he knew it, and when we col­lec­tively assent to it we are party to the cre­ation of “Ulro”, a ster­ile world of mate­ri­al­ism, social atom­ism, and cyn­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of oth­ers,  “a plan­e­tary soci­ety of two-legged insects”, as Milosz once called it. Every gen­er­a­tion pro­duces its own Ulro, and Boyden’s is the world of eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter, the big con­se­quences of human-caused cli­mate change, and the related, more inti­mate con­se­quences of a homog­e­niza­tion dri­ven by commerce:

                See how one thing is already so like
                the other? The tabloid blondes, the small-town,
                one-block crops of Star­bucks, the Gap, TGIF,
                all pro­nounced good in this land of ours,
                these store­front win­dows where they force
                another tired bulb of desire. (p.68)

  One thing, how­ever, which gives a sub­tler inflec­tion to the fig­ure of the per­son with the loupe is the per­va­sive sense in this book that Boy­den deeply under­stands the impe­tus to such metic­u­lous obser­va­tion; it has much of value, but it can­not be an end in itself. She gets the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and sci­en­tism (mar­vel­lously dra­ma­tized in the poem ‘The Book of Var­i­ous Stud­ies’ p.33), and sees that there are some ways in which the poet’s acts of imag­i­na­tion are con­gru­ent with those of sci­ence at its best. The per­son with the loupe says

                Each cal­en­dar day is a square
                the size of all the oth­ers. (p.40)

 And we should be uneasy when we hear this:

                But the days we recall best seemed oth­er­wise: some shifted long
                while oth­ers shad­owed fast. (p.40)

  How­ever, towards the end of the book, in an eerie poem called ‘The Per­son With The Loupe Con­firms The Chil­dren’, where chil­dren are taken off by a con­voy of trucks and later returned,

                                                The per­son with the loupe
                called out their names from mem­ory,
                and we were grate­ful for this, as the list had gone miss­ing,
                and no one else was sure of how to know them. (p.88)

 Knowl­edge and, later, under­stand­ing can start from here, but it is only a start and it can be blind to other kinds of expe­ri­ence which are deci­sively con­sti­tu­tive of our human­ity. If  “The loupe can­not see dreams: they do not exist.” (p.46) But we know they do, that they are another door of per­cep­tion, and we have to be on the alert for those places where the sin­gle vision wavers:

                The birds have proven more dif­fi­cult,
                as they seem to exist but get both near and far.
                The loupe is still turn­ing one way
                and then another to deter­mine the whether–
                ness of birds.

                This takes some time, which we are grate­ful for,
                as until it is declared we will be free to wonder.

3.

 It is the fig­ure of “the lost man” which catches the pecu­liar dilem­mas and para­doxes of liv­ing vir­tu­ally any­where at the begin­ning of the 21st cen­tury; but, equally it is the lost man who in rec­og­niz­ing his lost­ness asserts the pos­si­bil­ity of frail, con­fused human beings dis­en­tan­gling  them­selves from the disaster-producing, hyper-abstract sys­tems that struc­ture our rela­tion­ships with each other and the earth. The lost man knows things in a way that the per­son with the loupe can­not know and his exis­tence is impen­e­tra­ble to the vision of the loupe: when the two meet in “our town”, the lost man seems drunk to the inhab­i­tants, and when the per­son with the loupe is summoned,

                Who is he, we asked the per­son with the loupe.
                You assume he exists, the per­son with the loupe replied. First
                have him stick out his tongue. But inside
                the man’s mouth flapped an empti­ness
                we waited to under­stand.
                There is noth­ing here, said the per­son with the loupe,
                I can­not work with this.

 The lost man, in fact, is a way out of the sin­gle vision, unas­sim­i­l­able to the ter­ri­ble geom­e­try of Ulro, which is why he is lost in the first place. Since I’ve been using Blakean terms (and here Blake’s fig­ure of Los comes quickly to mind) it’s easy for me to con­ceive of the lost man as Boyden’s ver­sion of a process of imag­i­na­tive restora­tion which could bring us to what Blake called “organiz’d inno­cence”, a mature, adult inno­cence forged in the fires of expe­ri­ence.  And it is a process—Boyden’s lost man doesn’t rep­re­sent some facile oppo­site of the per­son with the loupe (though he ishis “con­trary”); just as the lat­ter is a begin­ning state (flawed but use­ful), so the lost man, while achiev­ing  a gen­uinely wider vision, has his own limi­ti­a­tions which need to be tran­scended too; tran­sience and the ephemeral are prob­lems for him.
 What does the lost man know? The lost man knows the truths about the world which are revealed in imag­i­na­tion. He knows there is a time for dark­ness unsul­lied by arti­fi­cial light when imag­i­na­tion can pro­vide its own illu­mi­na­tion of a world more mul­ti­form and strange than most sus­pect. And

The lost man under­stands the prob­lem with the body
is that it exists. He has seen
that though the body is our own, it can be removed from us.

When he can see his body, it is what he is reduced to.
When it dis­ap­pears, he owns where it might arrive.
Trees sweep stars into lit­tle bun­dles.
Grasses rise impos­si­bly from the burn.

His chil­dren had slept with a light on
so their bod­ies would stay where they left them.  (p.55–56)

  In the every­day world the lost man’s imag­i­na­tive agility can be dis­qui­et­ing, uncanny, even prophetic, because the uncon­scious fan­tasies embed­ded in things and lan­guage are always present to him, need­ing inter­pre­ta­tion.  In ‘The Lost Man Inter­prets A Code’ when the speaker’s hus­band drops a knife on his toe there has to be some­thing more going on, it has to mean something:

                My husband’s toe, I say, is injured.
                The lost man nods anx­iously, wants to play along, looks
                for a cor­re­lat­ing sig­nal to key the code by.
                My hus­band moans in the kitchen, point­ing down. Ah–
                the lost man winks to let me know he’s got it:
                my hus­band is point­ing down. There­fore,
                toe meanswhatever-is-under-the-floor.
                Bleed­ing has yet to be estab­lished.
                The lost man awaits the clue. (p.77)

  A lesser poet might have remained enam­oured of her own smart psy­cho­log­i­cal satire, but Boy­den lets us fall through the floor­boards when the poem takes a darker turn and we sud­denly see, as the lost man in all of us sees, what really lies beneath the sur­face of our domes­tic discourse:

                We should have seen the onslaught of these times com­ing:
                when the guard pat­ted down my three-year old
                at the air­port; when the peo­ple in the break rooms
                of infor­ma­tion extrac­tion stopped dis­cussing
                whether the sound this time was more like the scrap­ing
                of a chicken or the detan­gling of a root;
                when the lead­ers couldn’t recall. (p. 78)

  In this stanza we find a vital under­stand­ing of our con­di­tion and we see how cru­cially that under­stand­ing  is depen­dent on a phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage itself. Poetry sets itself in fierce oppo­si­tion to any idea of lan­guage as merely the trans­mis­sion and recep­tion of infor­ma­tion: that would be to imprison one­self in the small world of the per­son with the loupe, where every­thing is unprob­lem­at­i­cally what it is, all con­cepts are clear and dis­tinct, and words oper­ate like labels. And con­comi­tant with this sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of lan­guage is the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the world, of our­selves, of our expe­ri­ences, of the ani­mals and plants, of things. Our sim­i­les and metaphors are door­ways to our deep­est under­stand­ings of the world; given the con­di­tion the world finds itself in right now it is dis­tinctly pos­si­ble we’re “on a walk that took a bad turn / onto a very long road.” (p.28)
 Many of these themes come together, or bet­ter, col­lide in what to me is the most bril­liant poem in the book, ‘Which Par­ti­cle The Par­ti­cle’, where Boy­den med­i­tates on the tiny pos­si­bil­ity that the Large Hadron Col­lider could pro­duce “strangelets” which the­o­ret­i­cally could con­vert all mat­ter into strange mat­ter. “A flipped switch and—poof—One­ness. Just like that.” (p.61) The sar­donic humor around instant at-oneness which seems to be what many peo­ple want (“Oth­er­wise the plas­tic Bud­dhas and grass-like mats wouldn’t be / sell­ing so fast…” p.61) flashes darkly in this poem which nakedly puts on dis­play and wor­ries its way through the pecu­liar post­mod­ern inflec­tions we’ve given to death and love, fate and choice, tech­nol­ogy and self. So many dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives today con­spire to dehu­man­ize us, as though the con­tin­gency of exis­tence is a new kind of sec­u­lar orig­i­nal sin of which we will be purged by Botox and Super­col­lid­ers. Boy­den says, wait. What’s that mon­i­tory whis­per you hear in your daugh­ter puz­zling over death in a Dylan Thomas poem, in your father’s ill­ness, in the cool lan­guage of sci­en­tists who just might con­vert the world to one big uni­form strange lump? It’s the sus­pi­cion that what keeps us truly human is what we can’t cal­cu­late, the dis­crete “this­ness” of our spe­cific lives and every­thing in them. We might have a chance if we are able to allow things to be them­selves, to change our rela­tion­ship of con­trol, to let them speak with their own spe­cific elo­quence. “Cousins”, Boy­den writes in the book’s title poem, “is it pos­si­ble / we have mis­un­der­stood the mud?” (p.27) I’d say it’s certain.

4.

  The Lost Man Leaves A Will is the book’s final poem. Our only gen­uinely moral choice in a bro­ken his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion where we can’t go on is pre­cisely to go on. We need courage and will, we need to build a kind of dif­fi­cult think­ing which dwells in the place of our own undo­ing, and by dwelling there restores the con­nec­tions we have cut. If there is to be a future that isn’t a plas­tic waste­land we have to live on the side of the leaves, the water, the deer, the very small­est, uncon­sid­ered things:

                To the worms, my thanks. I ask you to make me rich
                within your­selves: you stayed. While the earth
                was flee­ing itself, I named you, and you answered
                to the place of my nam­ing, and remain. (p.97)

 The poetry of The Declar­able Future lives here.

© Ger Killeen

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Out of Ulro: Some thoughts on ‘The Declarable Future’ by Jennifer Boyden

by Ger Killeen Posted on April 25, 2013

Out of Ulro:Some thoughts on The Declar­able Futureby Jen­nifer Boy­den (Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin Press, 2013).

1.

 Near the end of a poem called ‘Night Pitch’ from Jen­nifer Boyden’s new col­lec­tion The Declar­able Future, the speaker, stum­bling through the house after mid­night, lurch­ing for­ward to the piti­less con­clu­sions of insomnia’s syl­lo­gisms, con­sid­ers her neigh­bors across the street. “I have to admit it”, she says, “the neigh­bors look like hell” (p.10). And this is no mere sar­donic slap at their arti­fi­cial water­falls and Toy­ota Sequoias; in their own way these peo­ple, like many peo­ple in the First World, are kept awake at night; they sense, how­ever obscurely, that “oceanic despair” which erodes the con­tours of their seem­ingly unex­am­ined sub­ur­ban lifestyle just as surely as it erodes the hard edges of the speaker’s own cer­tain­ties. They look like hell. We all look like hell. It means, in spite of all our eva­sions, we know that being awake is a symp­tom of a shared condition—being lost. But unlike Dante’s dark wood, the place of our lost­ness is a lit-up sim­u­lacrum of nature where we con­trol the dim­mer switch.
 What is so impres­sive about this poem, and so many of the poems in the book, is the deep sense of empathic alert­ness which attends the diag­no­sis of our con­tem­po­rary global malaise, an under­stand­ing that we are all in this together; there is in the work­ing of these poems a deter­mined effort to see and see through our mas­sively com­modi­tized, dena­tured and desacral­ized world, and an equal deter­mi­na­tion not to stop there: these poems com­mit them­selves to both the present anda future, a future where there’s a chance we might become authen­tic neigh­bors to each other and to the earth itself. So, even at their most melan­cholic these poems man­age to achieve a hard-won vic­tory over the temp­ta­tions of cyn­i­cism and despair—they prise open a space for an ethic of com­pas­sion, and some­times with a sur­pris­ing leaven of humor, coun­sel us as to the route of our going on.
 And The Declar­able Future makes large claims for poetry itself as a vital cul­tural force for nav­i­gat­ing our way out of the dan­ger­ous straits of the post­mod­ern con­di­tion.  Here is a poetry that is not con­tent to sim­ply describe an outer and inner world in the belief that such descrip­tion is a kind of self-authenticating inter­pre­ta­tion. Rather, Boyden’s poems,  with their gor­geous lan­guage, their par­a­bolic nar­ra­tives and bold asso­cia­tive leaps, are “think­ing poems”. Indi­vid­ual poems and the book as a whole unfold a set of philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments about knowl­edge, lan­guage, expe­ri­ence, and time; at the same time, these argu­ments exfo­li­ate from a sen­su­ous life-world which the poetry unveils as mar­vel­lously com­plex, ambigu­ous, unnerv­ing and per­plex­ing. Together, these poems make a claim on the very process of think­ing, enact­ing in a range of lan­guage reg­is­ters a move­ment of the embod­ied mind that acknowl­edges and goes beyond the lin­ear and the expos­i­tory, the vis­i­ble and the quantifiable.

2.

 For me, Boyden’s poetry is thor­oughly vision­ary in the strict Blakean sense. The Declarable Future imag­ines the uni­verse in terms of alle­gor­i­cal fig­ures whose par­tial visions are respon­si­ble for struc­tur­ing dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties of mean­ing. She gives us “the giant”, “the woman”, “the per­son with the loupe”, “the lost man”, fig­ures whose activ­i­ties and con­tention dra­ma­tize our present-day con­di­tion and our sal­va­tion. She gives us an I, a she , and a he with fully real­ized lives, full of pre­car­i­ous under­stand­ings; she gives us a we in a dance of reach­ing out to and with­draw­ing from each other; she gives us sky and clouds and water and trees; she gives us angels; she gives us the gods. Stripped of any grandiose mythol­o­giz­ing dic­tion, her poetry points us to a state anal­o­gous to what Blake called “the four­fold vision”.  What is this vision, and how does Jen­nifer Boy­den give us a ver­sion that is con­vinc­ingly con­tem­po­rary?
 In a let­ter to Thomas Butts, Blake wrote the fol­low­ing verses:
Now I a four­fold vision see.
And a four­fold vision is given to me;
Tis four­fold in my supreme delight
And three­fold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Sin­gle vision & Newton’s sleep!

 Boyden’s ver­sion of the sin­gle vision and Newton’s sleep  begins with “the per­son with the loupe”. In the shad­owy town where many of the book’s nar­ra­tives unfold, this fig­ure is the arbiter of what counts as knowl­edge: “For any­thing we needed to know, we were to ask / the per­son with the loupe.” (p.39) Nei­ther male nor female, the per­son with the loupe has a kind of dis­in­ter­est­ed­ness which ren­ders the world col­or­less in the process of being scru­ti­nized and ordered. The per­son with the loupe insists on the pri­macy of observ­able fact and deduc­tive rea­son, rea­son unin­formed by other human fac­ul­ties; Blake would describe this “sin­gle vision” as a form of blind­ness char­ac­ter­is­tic of nat­ural sci­ence as he knew it, and when we col­lec­tively assent to it we are party to the cre­ation of “Ulro”, a ster­ile world of mate­ri­al­ism, social atom­ism, and cyn­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of oth­ers,  “a plan­e­tary soci­ety of two-legged insects”, as Milosz once called it. Every gen­er­a­tion pro­duces its own Ulro, and Boyden’s is the world of eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter, the big con­se­quences of human-caused cli­mate change, and the related, more inti­mate con­se­quences of a homog­e­niza­tion dri­ven by commerce:

                See how one thing is already so like
                the other? The tabloid blondes, the small-town,
                one-block crops of Star­bucks, the Gap, TGIF,
                all pro­nounced good in this land of ours,
                these store­front win­dows where they force
                another tired bulb of desire. (p.68)

  One thing, how­ever, which gives a sub­tler inflec­tion to the fig­ure of the per­son with the loupe is the per­va­sive sense in this book that Boy­den deeply under­stands the impe­tus to such metic­u­lous obser­va­tion; it has much of value, but it can­not be an end in itself. She gets the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and sci­en­tism (mar­vel­lously dra­ma­tized in the poem ‘The Book of Var­i­ous Stud­ies’ p.33), and sees that there are some ways in which the poet’s acts of imag­i­na­tion are con­gru­ent with those of sci­ence at its best. The per­son with the loupe says

                Each cal­en­dar day is a square
                the size of all the oth­ers. (p.40)

 And we should be uneasy when we hear this:

                But the days we recall best seemed oth­er­wise: some shifted long
                while oth­ers shad­owed fast. (p.40)

  How­ever, towards the end of the book, in an eerie poem called ‘The Per­son With The Loupe Con­firms The Chil­dren’, where chil­dren are taken off by a con­voy of trucks and later returned,

                                                The per­son with the loupe
                called out their names from mem­ory,
                and we were grate­ful for this, as the list had gone miss­ing,
                and no one else was sure of how to know them. (p.88)

 Knowl­edge and, later, under­stand­ing can start from here, but it is only a start and it can be blind to other kinds of expe­ri­ence which are deci­sively con­sti­tu­tive of our human­ity. If  “The loupe can­not see dreams: they do not exist.” (p.46) But we know they do, that they are another door of per­cep­tion, and we have to be on the alert for those places where the sin­gle vision wavers:

                The birds have proven more dif­fi­cult,
                as they seem to exist but get both near and far.
                The loupe is still turn­ing one way
                and then another to deter­mine the whether–
                ness of birds.

                This takes some time, which we are grate­ful for,
                as until it is declared we will be free to wonder.

3.

 It is the fig­ure of “the lost man” which catches the pecu­liar dilem­mas and para­doxes of liv­ing vir­tu­ally any­where at the begin­ning of the 21st cen­tury; but, equally it is the lost man who in rec­og­niz­ing his lost­ness asserts the pos­si­bil­ity of frail, con­fused human beings dis­en­tan­gling  them­selves from the disaster-producing, hyper-abstract sys­tems that struc­ture our rela­tion­ships with each other and the earth. The lost man knows things in a way that the per­son with the loupe can­not know and his exis­tence is impen­e­tra­ble to the vision of the loupe: when the two meet in “our town”, the lost man seems drunk to the inhab­i­tants, and when the per­son with the loupe is summoned,

                Who is he, we asked the per­son with the loupe.
                You assume he exists, the per­son with the loupe replied. First
                have him stick out his tongue. But inside
                the man’s mouth flapped an empti­ness
                we waited to under­stand.
                There is noth­ing here, said the per­son with the loupe,
                I can­not work with this.

 The lost man, in fact, is a way out of the sin­gle vision, unas­sim­i­l­able to the ter­ri­ble geom­e­try of Ulro, which is why he is lost in the first place. Since I’ve been using Blakean terms (and here Blake’s fig­ure of Los comes quickly to mind) it’s easy for me to con­ceive of the lost man as Boyden’s ver­sion of a process of imag­i­na­tive restora­tion which could bring us to what Blake called “organiz’d inno­cence”, a mature, adult inno­cence forged in the fires of expe­ri­ence.  And it is a process—Boyden’s lost man doesn’t rep­re­sent some facile oppo­site of the per­son with the loupe (though he ishis “con­trary”); just as the lat­ter is a begin­ning state (flawed but use­ful), so the lost man, while achiev­ing  a gen­uinely wider vision, has his own limi­ti­a­tions which need to be tran­scended too; tran­sience and the ephemeral are prob­lems for him.
 What does the lost man know? The lost man knows the truths about the world which are revealed in imag­i­na­tion. He knows there is a time for dark­ness unsul­lied by arti­fi­cial light when imag­i­na­tion can pro­vide its own illu­mi­na­tion of a world more mul­ti­form and strange than most sus­pect. And

The lost man under­stands the prob­lem with the body
is that it exists. He has seen
that though the body is our own, it can be removed from us.

When he can see his body, it is what he is reduced to.
When it dis­ap­pears, he owns where it might arrive.
Trees sweep stars into lit­tle bun­dles.
Grasses rise impos­si­bly from the burn.

His chil­dren had slept with a light on
so their bod­ies would stay where they left them.  (p.55–56)

  In the every­day world the lost man’s imag­i­na­tive agility can be dis­qui­et­ing, uncanny, even prophetic, because the uncon­scious fan­tasies embed­ded in things and lan­guage are always present to him, need­ing inter­pre­ta­tion.  In ‘The Lost Man Inter­prets A Code’ when the speaker’s hus­band drops a knife on his toe there has to be some­thing more going on, it has to mean something:

                My husband’s toe, I say, is injured.
                The lost man nods anx­iously, wants to play along, looks
                for a cor­re­lat­ing sig­nal to key the code by.
                My hus­band moans in the kitchen, point­ing down. Ah–
                the lost man winks to let me know he’s got it:
                my hus­band is point­ing down. There­fore,
                toe meanswhatever-is-under-the-floor.
                Bleed­ing has yet to be estab­lished.
                The lost man awaits the clue. (p.77)

  A lesser poet might have remained enam­oured of her own smart psy­cho­log­i­cal satire, but Boy­den lets us fall through the floor­boards when the poem takes a darker turn and we sud­denly see, as the lost man in all of us sees, what really lies beneath the sur­face of our domes­tic discourse:

                We should have seen the onslaught of these times com­ing:
                when the guard pat­ted down my three-year old
                at the air­port; when the peo­ple in the break rooms
                of infor­ma­tion extrac­tion stopped dis­cussing
                whether the sound this time was more like the scrap­ing
                of a chicken or the detan­gling of a root;
                when the lead­ers couldn’t recall. (p. 78)

  In this stanza we find a vital under­stand­ing of our con­di­tion and we see how cru­cially that under­stand­ing  is depen­dent on a phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage itself. Poetry sets itself in fierce oppo­si­tion to any idea of lan­guage as merely the trans­mis­sion and recep­tion of infor­ma­tion: that would be to imprison one­self in the small world of the per­son with the loupe, where every­thing is unprob­lem­at­i­cally what it is, all con­cepts are clear and dis­tinct, and words oper­ate like labels. And con­comi­tant with this sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of lan­guage is the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the world, of our­selves, of our expe­ri­ences, of the ani­mals and plants, of things. Our sim­i­les and metaphors are door­ways to our deep­est under­stand­ings of the world; given the con­di­tion the world finds itself in right now it is dis­tinctly pos­si­ble we’re “on a walk that took a bad turn / onto a very long road.” (p.28)
 Many of these themes come together, or bet­ter, col­lide in what to me is the most bril­liant poem in the book, ‘Which Par­ti­cle The Par­ti­cle’, where Boy­den med­i­tates on the tiny pos­si­bil­ity that the Large Hadron Col­lider could pro­duce “strangelets” which the­o­ret­i­cally could con­vert all mat­ter into strange mat­ter. “A flipped switch and—poof—One­ness. Just like that.” (p.61) The sar­donic humor around instant at-oneness which seems to be what many peo­ple want (“Oth­er­wise the plas­tic Bud­dhas and grass-like mats wouldn’t be / sell­ing so fast…” p.61) flashes darkly in this poem which nakedly puts on dis­play and wor­ries its way through the pecu­liar post­mod­ern inflec­tions we’ve given to death and love, fate and choice, tech­nol­ogy and self. So many dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives today con­spire to dehu­man­ize us, as though the con­tin­gency of exis­tence is a new kind of sec­u­lar orig­i­nal sin of which we will be purged by Botox and Super­col­lid­ers. Boy­den says, wait. What’s that mon­i­tory whis­per you hear in your daugh­ter puz­zling over death in a Dylan Thomas poem, in your father’s ill­ness, in the cool lan­guage of sci­en­tists who just might con­vert the world to one big uni­form strange lump? It’s the sus­pi­cion that what keeps us truly human is what we can’t cal­cu­late, the dis­crete “this­ness” of our spe­cific lives and every­thing in them. We might have a chance if we are able to allow things to be them­selves, to change our rela­tion­ship of con­trol, to let them speak with their own spe­cific elo­quence. “Cousins”, Boy­den writes in the book’s title poem, “is it pos­si­ble / we have mis­un­der­stood the mud?” (p.27) I’d say it’s certain.

4.

  The Lost Man Leaves A Will is the book’s final poem. Our only gen­uinely moral choice in a bro­ken his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion where we can’t go on is pre­cisely to go on. We need courage and will, we need to build a kind of dif­fi­cult think­ing which dwells in the place of our own undo­ing, and by dwelling there restores the con­nec­tions we have cut. If there is to be a future that isn’t a plas­tic waste­land we have to live on the side of the leaves, the water, the deer, the very small­est, uncon­sid­ered things:

                To the worms, my thanks. I ask you to make me rich
                within your­selves: you stayed. While the earth
                was flee­ing itself, I named you, and you answered
                to the place of my nam­ing, and remain. (p.97)

 The poetry of The Declar­able Future lives here.

© Ger Killeen

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