Category Archives: Poetry
Big Read presents a star studded full 41 minute read of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’, featuring narration by the likes of Jeremy Irons, Tilda Swinton, Hilary Mantel, and Iggy Pop paired with artworks from Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge, Cornelia Parker, and Yinka Shonibare.
18th century literature? Relatable, you say?
…the first great work of English literature to speak to isolation and loneliness – and the possibility of redemption if we mend our ways.
Now for yiz.
Spooky Beure
at
Poetry Brothel Dublin tweetz:
Thrilled to have Niamh Beirne joining our @bloomsdayfest Midnight Mass, this Friday at @thechurch_ie! Niamh is a Dublin-based poet, performer and creative producer; the creative director and co-founder of @_PETTYCASH_ and 1/6 of Spooky Beure.
Tickets here.
Odious
at
Basic Forms
at
UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn
“You loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win” – Leonard Cohen
On Your Unsuitability for High Office
for Jeremy Corbyn
The minute they realise
you might succeed in changing
more than the occasional
light bulb in the new
old community centre,
where the anti-apartheid
meetings used to happen;
the late Lord Lambton
climbs out from between
two prostitutes and into
the next available issue
of the Daily Express
to urge votes for anyone
but you; Earl Haig
gets up from his grave
to bang the table and tell us
you’ve not successfully
organised enough death
to properly understand
Britain’s defence needs
in the twenty first century.
The Telegraph mutters
into its whiskers about your lack
of experience – how you never once
so much as successfully destroyed a bank;
as former comedians gather
in darkest Norwich and Lincolnshire
to speak of your beige zip-up jackets.
LBC Radio exclusively reveals your plan
to give each failed asylum seeker,
and anyone who’s ever
taken an axe to a child,
their own seat in
the House of Lords;
the same day, The Spectator
gives retired General
Franco space to expose your
long term associations
with known vegetarians
and Mexican importers
of fair trade coffee.
While on Radio Four’s Women’s Hour
the former editor of the News of The World
and Dame Myra Hindley agree:
the last thing this country needs
right now is you.
(Pic: REUTERS, Peter Nicholls)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3_2D_ErL_I
In the summer of 1952, sixty-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien encountered a tape recorder for the first time [and]…So enchanted was Tolkien with this novel technology that he proceeded to record himself reading much of his work over the years to come.
(Image: The One Ring)
The Day Stephen Donnelly Joined Foster and Allen
While gutless others shivered
alone in wardrobes of their own making,
debating whether to kill
by strangling, or have sexual intercourse with,
themselves;
you strode into our national crisis
stage left stylish
as a string quartet about to fiddle out
on viola, cello, Stradivarius
something by the late Benjamin Britten;
a set of implausibly perfect teeth attached
to what sounded like a brain.
Your intelligence so vast
you had to get the builders in
to extend the dome of your skull
to accommodate a Masters
degree from Harvard.
Not content to be the usual
slight disappointment, you reveal
yourself to be the thinking wing
of the Foster and Allen Party; politically flexible
as a cross-community Belfast brothel;
slick as rubbery bacon; aesthetically pleasing
as a Chicken Snack Box thrice reheated
before nine o’clock in the morning
or a third hand pair of trousers grown
pungent with badly digested cabbage;
but destined tonight to be wildly applauded
in darkest Arklow by those who’ll have
the shirts torn from their backs
when next the market crashes.
KEVIN HIGGINS