The Poetry Voice Podcast is 100!

Who would have thought we'd get this far?

And so to celebrate, two readings, both from Lady Godiva and Me as shameless self-promotion.
In the first voices from the modern city. Clicking on the link will take you to the reading

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/12/19/from-lady-godiva-and-me-the-modern-city



In the second Peeping Tom speaks.

www.liamguilar.com/the-poetry-voice/2019/12/19/peeping-tom-speaks-from-lady-godiva-and-me

A second edition of Lady Godiva and Me is available from Amazon, the Book Depository, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com 

Lady Godiva and Me is back in print

The naked lady rides again, with an accompanying cast of earls, churls, ranting preachers, shop girls migrants, factory workers skinheads and schoolboys.

A lightly revised second edition, available from Lulu, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

Slán

About ten to four on Saturday
he’d rise to leave, whistling his way
towards the bus stop, cane tapping time
as he rounded the corner, fading.
The ritual involved two silver coins
“for the kids”, left on the mantelpiece,
always like a novel afterthought.

His tidy reticence sometimes unbuttoned
in the smokers fug of family gatherings
venturing out on streams of quiet humour
and gentle verbal lunacy, the way his brothers
had tiptoed in the edges of the sea
before diving under breaking waves.
Masters of digression who defied irrelevance.

Courteous, solid, invisibly familiar.
“Old Men with perfect manners”
Survivors of gaslight, whose father drove
a horse drawn cart. On hand when needed
to help with the necessary, without asking
for praise or credit when the debt was called.
After such a life what memories?
Coming down the steps at Connelly station
The smell and then the noise of Dublin.
He pauses, shakes his head: It was great
the big city, (laughing) anything was big
after Bettystown.

Box Brownie photos
in an old shoe box? The cars date passing decades
as the trousers, hats and hairstyles
move towards the time for his departure.
But this is so untidy. And how he would have hated that.

"I'm so happy now Saint Patrick's day is over".

All together now:

I'm so Happy now Saint Patrick's day is over
And all the silly hats are thrown away
And all the plastic paddies have gone back into the clover
But I know they'll return another day.

(Saint Patrick's Dance in San Fernandao)

Although, we did have a good time. For once we played all night and weren't swamped by the noise of drunks telling irish jokes in fake accents.
But I can't connect it to the people I grew up with.

Stew

For Brendan, who told it this way:
There’s these two fellas, see
they’d come across after the war
he and his misses, and the friend.
They worked on the production line.
You know the kind of character
who drinks his tea and has his breakfast
while the misses cut him sandwiches.
When he came home from work,
his tea was always on the table,
he never knew or cared where it was coming from.

And then of course, she ups and dies.
That left him and his mate.
The two of them, without a clue!
But there’s this neighbour, down the road,
came across from Galway, in the fifties,
He put them straight.
Gave them tips for making stew.
And then the factory shut down.

I went there, once, After his misses died.
He said: You know, I’d like to top myself.
But if I did, they’d send me down below
and she’d be up above,. We’d never meet again.
I couldn’t stand that. I told him about tins.
There’s good stuff in them cans these days

Raceclassgender

Derrida talks about those moments of rupture when it’s suddenly possible to think about the unthought or the unthinkable… those moments when an issue becomes visible.

For me Race was invisible when I was growing up but I can pinpoint the moment when it suddenly reared its ugly head. I grew up surrounded by Irish voices. At home, at school, at mass. I knew I wasn’t Irish. I don’t even think it occurred to me as odd that my parents were paying taxes to a government that was using their money to pay soldiers to go hassle their relatives in Belfast.

But sometime in the seventies there was talk of “Sending the Irish Home”. I don’t remember if some tub thumping politician seriously suggested this or it was just one of those stories that circulate, prefixed with “they say…” But I do remember one evening my dad mentioning it. He was dismissive, it was obviously a stupid idea. (One of the great beauties of England is that ethnic cleansing is an obviously stupid idea. It wouldn’t be long before such ideas were touted in other countries, about other ethnic groups, and the stupidity of the idea was lost in the actual barbarity of its attempt.)

And that was the point of rupture.

I grew up in Coventry, I was born there. Home was a specific house beside a very specific park. When I wasn’t thinking I spoke with a west midlands accent. But if they sent my dad “home”, would my mum (who is English) be allowed to go with him? And if she didn’t (as if she wouldn’t) what would happen to my sister and me? If we went to Ireland we’d be foreigners, but then if they were sending “foreigners and their children” “home” were we actually native to England…????? Where exactly , if anywhere, did we belong?

The rumour died away. The question remains.

And it drives "Talking Nothing to the Stone", the second poem in Lady Godiva and Me. The answer offered there:

I know this place but wouldn't call it mine
Mine is the space between the rising and the falling foot.

works on a good day.

My Place

Row after row of terraced houses, obdurate, patient. The little gardens attempt the personal, resist the rubbish, the graffiti, the drunken louts who rip the heads off roses and leave them where they fall.

Chinchua Achebe tells a story about how, while studying English literature in Nigeria, one of his class mates suddenly jacked up and objected to the savages in the book they were reading. It was not, he argued, an accurate picture of him or his relatives. Achebe realises that the funny tribal savages in the book who he doesn't find funny, are supposed to be his people. And he knows they aren’t.

I’ve just had a similar reaction doing my homework and reading up on Marxist criticism. I suddenly realized “the working classes” and “the masses” weren’t theoretical abstractions but those men who used to drink tea and smoke in the front room. The patient bemused faces in the smoke watching Liam Groves and I attempt a world record for the time it took to clear one frame off a snooker table at the Chrysler Working Men’s club, those same men and women who worked hard and scrambled to save, whose best ideal was a two week break at Bognor bloody Regis, deck chair on the beach, kids playing in the sand and if you were really lucky, it didn’t rain…(my Dad’s version of this heaven was a deck chair, shade and a book). The annual trip to the Blackpool lights. Skeggy, Brighton. Coach trips to...

And the theorist talking about what’s good for the working classes. What they should be reading. How they should be addressed.

Bollocks.
Like those educators preaching a hermeneutics of suspicion.

I’m so glad I grew up before people worried too much about ideology in education. At school no one said: you are mostly the sons of working class migrants, derided and distrusted ethnic minorities, marked by religious beliefs that cut you off from the powerbrokers. You have no need for art because it might infect you with values that are not yours.
Go home to your little working class fox hole and when you get to fifteen you can leave school and tighten wheel nuts on the production line. Or we’ll pay you to go “interact” with your relatives in Northern Ireland as part of a three year stint in the infantry.

Bollocks.
They said: here it is, the past and all its treasures, the literature of the world, (well, English mostly but this is England and we are offering you what we have, not what we stole). It’s yours for the taking;if you want to work for it.

The books revealed that not everyone thought and felt the same way as the people around me. That was liberating thought number one. Liberating thought number two, the books suggested there was a world beyond the city limits and it was waiting to be explored: straight out of Coventry and all the way to Samarkand, via America, Europe, Australia, Indonesia… theorise that one.

Dan Gerous and E. Mergency seek the Mad Ness Monster

I grew up with Dan Gerous, that well known French Canadian outlaw and his friend E. Mergency. There was also Fatty Gew and Cal Iber. The Mahogany Gas Pipes I never understood (Until I read Last Night’s Fun), and the Stew Barbed Wire and Rhubarb was confusing.

A love of verbal play:

If you mean to insinuate that I will tolerate such diabolical insolence from a such a miserable specimen of anatomy as yourself, you are wrongly governed by a misapprehension of false ideas;

and a delight in nonsense:

One Fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight
Three blind men to seek their way
Four dumb men to shout hoorary!
A legless Donkey walking by
Kicked the blind man in the eye
Knocked him through a nine inch wall
Into a dry pond and drowned them all.

(although to be honest, the last four lines of the above have always seemed sinister).

It’s tempting to ascribe the word play to the Anglo-Irish tradition, point an accusing finger at Joyce, and god knows they were all great talkers when they got going, fine story tellers, masters of the digression, but you can also trace the pleasure in verbal nonsense through English culture too; think Shakespeare, Lewis Carol, the Two Ronnies:

Lady Olivia swept down the grand staircase in her ball gown and then she dusted the china.

and those wonderful, awful music hall puns:

I say I say I say. My Wife’s gone on holiday to the West Indies
Jamaica
No, she went of her own accord.

Or the Goons:

How do I get out of here. The door is locked.
Turn the nob on your side
I haven’t got a nob on my side!

But I think that it’s partly the migrant’s revenge. Unable to escape the normalizing effects of English, with all its class and racial assumptions built into syntax and diction and accent, you could at least shrug it loose occasionally by turning it back on itself and underlining its own absurdities.
Nonsense in children is play; nonsense in adults is subversion or madness. But it’s a Dan Gerous game. If you can imagine the legless donkey walking by, you're not far from Mad Ness(That little known scotish loch):
“If I should return during my absence keep me here until I come back”. (Quoted in David Cooper: ”The Language of Madness”.)