Big Sur. Ooh Er Missus.

This is from EloiseMillar (mugshot - first left)

I've just spent two weeks in California, which, in spite of its airhead, granola-eating image, can only be described as a literary nerd's paradise. First there was Santa Monica and LA, home to Raymond Chandler and the setting for his Philip Marlowe series. Then Highway One and the Big Sur coast, favoured hangout of the Beats and home to Henry Miller.

..................

Dashiel Hammett holds a special place in my heart. Firstly, as much as anyone is, he's the "father" of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, a wise-cracking genre that I can't get enough of. As Raymond Chandler said, Hammett, with his taut prose and gritty settings, was the man who took "murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley"..blah blah blah.

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Ovid's response

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Unfortunately Eloise, i am an unemployable drunk, too poor and lacking any desire to travel to California and be with you, and also unable to fly due to an irrational fear of falling 30,000 feet to my death.

These two strikes mean i may never get to tramp the ghost trail of hardboiled dick fiction with you, and i must be content to soar to the skies in my imagination only. But i am with you in spirit Millar, thinking of you as i type, on my third bottle of Absinthe and tequila, searching the virtual cosmos for Love, seeking only to meet my soul mate.

Sam Jordison performed a few interesting dances with a certain linguistic aplomb and eloquence, for the Guardian bungs funding the road trip with his - possibly fictional - girlfriend; who seemed a somewhat incidental appendage in his deposits here, trapped in the car whilst sam went sniffing round loony bins and drinking with goulish alcoholics in premier suicide dives in spots across the broad and vast lands in which you are now his hack replacement.

I am not a Hammet devotee, much more the Chandler fan myself. He used to write on small yellow sheets you know Millar, to force himself to write in a way where every word jumped off the page. His thinking being that by reducing the size of the visual field on which to create, thus this literate goal would be effected.

And whilst being a native of that proud and great nation you are now in, Raymond spend his later childhood years and youth in London, with a dream of becoming a poet. But alas, the citadel of Bloomsbury was not welcoming of a colonial chap, as the minor talent of gatekeeper and self appointed most boring git of that era, Alfred E Houseman, was too stuck up to consider letting anyone other than toffie minded drones who constituted that depressingly weak poetical era, into the gang of lite-weight Edwardian verse-smiths who have left nothing of note for us; proving my contention that the ailing state of British poetry, has been in terminal decline for over a century.

And when his talent was outed - by this time a chronic alcoholic - Chandie was a washed up sham of a man whose gift had been dissolved in a lake of hard liquor, his genius gone, increasingly absent on the page after the love of his life Cissy, died and he descended into the hell of full time boozing.

Critically plauded by Auden and his mob, he came to London in a completely delusional state; ironically, being welcomed with open arms by the inheritors of the Bloomsbury set, who soon discovered what a shambolic handful Chandie had become, and a conspiracy of silence gathered to persuade him to piss of back to Cali.

Stephen Spender's missus playing the role of mother hen bitching about him behind his back, not having the bottle to tell him straight he was unwelcome and why didn't he do everyone a favour and just do one.

The usual British way of subterfuge and pretence; the literary protaganists preffering instead to enact a pantamine of byzantium proportion, rather than just tell the mentally unwell bum to sling his hook, and get it over with.

The reasons for this ignoble human trait are clear. The underhanded way in which a nation collectively behaves, sublimated into the wordy bores who have no real bottle when it comes to the crucial point when an honest address would save a lot of time and remove at a stroke the underhanded and longwinded theatrics, and instil in others a respect for the straight talk of these privelaged actory bores thinking they are Sir Larry and Johnnie G, rather than leave the lingering aftertaste of a shoddy and bitter set of events as the shabby memorial legacy of his time in London's literay salons.

Good luck with your quest Eloise. Only you can tramp the path the gods of Litearcy have prepared. Fear not the hobos and bums of Frisco, but face the day proud, carrying the trace of true Brythonic myth and bowl the bores over with your fresh English roseness, like Fergie did..

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Millar's response

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Hello Ovid Yeats - I'm not sure I enjoyed the comparison to Fergie but lovely stuff on Chandler! I think I prefer him, too, over all - if only for the higher density of wise-cracks ... As to Sam Jordison's girlfriend - that's me, and I'm definitely not fictitious..

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Ovid's response

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I knew it was you all along Eloise, due to my divining skills and magickal methods of drawing up the spiritual instructors from the true pool of Yeatsean Literacy. Certain phantasmagoria from the anima mundi i am not at liberty to reveal, brought an image of you to me as i teleplaned to frisco the night sam spent in the car, Sam was distraught about you and the parrot fella in Frisco, that night you left him in the car whilst galavanting with a drunken man old enough to be your father in law, and i got quite concerned about you for a bit, watching the events unfold in his flat between you as i hovered above in the fourth dimension.

But do not worry Eloise, i have not told sam what went on that night. Are you OK?

You aren't in Oxford under co-ercion at all, or because of sams aura going up a few notches now he has the bog book party to repel the advances of the hoardes of fictionistas who will hurl themselves at him come the big night of its launch?

Do not worry Eloise, as i told sam, you can spend your Grandy fees wisely, by coming here to Dublin, as for the unbelievabley reasonable price of 200 quid, you can have a brief but very professional session in my chamber of Love and Art, here in the bedsit. But bring your own candles, as the electricity has been disconnected, and please, feel free to bring some of your friends and colleagues.

I do special group rates on corporate ladies all nighter, every weekend, although it can get a bit wild; what with all the chaunting and communing with the spiritual powers of literary Dublin who choose to proffer forth the eternal wisdom only the heaviest of drinkers at the seance of life are lucky enough to be imbued with. I am getting the pyschic message that you are drawn to older men Eloise, which is only natural for a young lady of your natural gift, to seek out the sages and holy people.

Enjoy this stage of your being, in the thoroughly modern way of sampling as wide a range of experience as your desire wishes, for this will make you a more fully rounded women, and i wish you and sam well for the future and should you choose to setttle and set up life together within the framework of a civil union, please do not hesitate to invite me to the wedding.

Indeed, you can redress the current spiritual imbalance concernign Raymond and have me stay for an extended period, as a house guest and teacher to you both. I think this is an excellant idea Eloise, please tell sam to cancel the dates we arrranged with the three Brazillian supermodels we were thinking of trailing round the glamour circuit for our next collaborative book, or has he not told you of this yet?

He sensed you may not be entirely agreeable to this, but fear not for sam also told me about the various local difficulties he has and how understanding you are about it. But as i told him, there are enhancement products that can make at least some difference, and if it continues to be a cause of friction between you, an operation.

Good luck.

Hammet, yeah a great author..

Blaise Cendrars

This piece is from Lee Rourke (Mugshot - Second Left)

Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you...blah blah blah

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Ovid Yeats Response
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Dead As Doornails: A Memoir by Irish poet Anthony Cronin is a must read as well Rourke. He is hillarious, by far the funniest memoir i've read, as he tells it like it was between him, Beehan, Kavanagh and Flan O'Brien in post-war Dublin.

Basically he stopped boozing and dished the dirt in 1976, when Kavanagh's star was nowhere near the height it currently is, reserving most of his bile for Beehan.

Cronin is the real capo de capo of irish poetry, still going in his 80's. I saw him read a few Betjemen poems at last years anniversery in the Utinarian church in Dublin with Deggsie Mahon, and also several other times.

His voice is amazing, containing the psychic weight of all those drunken incidents and comedic events that littered his early years.

In his memoir he talks of being a poetry mag editor in London, with a professional reputation for being called in to demolish contemporary poets, and now and again a few dead ones who "were having a good posthumous run."

His prose style is not dissimilar to Cendrars. I don't know if you've read it but there is a 30 page pdf file at Paris Review of some 1950 interviews with him, published in 1966, and there are some great lines. He talks about poetry in a prescient way, a true original uncaring who thinks what and having an early career of poverty not unlike Cronins.

He tells of returning from New York to Paris in 1912 and was asked about how well known he was at that point considering he had not published his first book:

"I was already known enough among poets to have mocked them and disturbed their assembliest at the Closerie des Lilas, at the Cafe Fleurs and the Procope....it was not good to be a young authentic among all those old glories on the tail end of symbolism, who all took themselves for sacred bards.."

Fantastically and refreshingly irreverant to the main bores of his day, and one of his most accurate utterances in this interview, which sums up the pathetic state of current british verse

"Poets don't seem to have fun anymore. What troubles me more than anything else these days is to see the seriousness with which they approach everything.."

Couldn't have said it better. Very apt in this time where the profession of poetry is nought much more than rent a pointless bore to hang around infant schools making cat sat on a mat poems, where most laughably plastic fakers who constitute 90% of tjose working in the verse "industry" start their careers today, as bought and paid for corporate-centric poets, their minds controlled and working along soley commercial lines, and many with gobs in full time straight faced block. And when the real thing appears, what happens?

Silence. The bores don't know how to handle it, the genuine poet who sees through their con and carries on laughing, unbought or in any suits pocket.

This poet will know s/he is the most genuine one by the silence of the other pretend bores who dare not challenge as the real poet has a giggle, for the purpose of learning of and creating verse; and as Cendrars said, he is:

"..not dealing with critics, with students of poetry, with historians, but with amatuer detectives who measure, mark, take fingerprints.." and can only gaze into the foreground as a bunch of timid fawns, their leaders lost, pretending to understand the real prophets and ending up blind alleys through their ignorance and boasts.

Good work, try and cheer up some of the sad acts in the mansion mate, please; it is getting embarresing now, like shooting fish in a barrel; knowing the career of 99% of all british poets is but the plaything of a man whose imagination and work ethic is clearly learning on the right route and proving they are on the wrong path..or at least a much less rewarding one poetically.

More Bores Sucking Off Potter

This piece is from Adam Chidell:

It's almost three days now since the new Harry Potter finally hit the bookshelves and critics and bloggers have begun to ask whether the final installment has lived up to the giant expectations.

Our own John Mullan thought it had none of the buoyancy of the early Potters and noted that sadly "JK Rowling's satirical zest is little in evidence." But at least "narrative drive has taken over - a good thing too."

Robert McCrum, with a little longer to think it over, wrote in the Observer:

"she's done it again. Defying the nay-sayers, Rowling has brought her series to a resoundingly satisfying conclusion with the words: 'All was well'."

Tibor Fisher is not the only one to find her wanting in the style department, remarking that:

"JK Rowling won't be vying for the title of the greatest stylist working in the English language." He also thought it lacking in humour, but seemed to enjoy her drawing on "heroic stereotypes from Achilles through to Christ." Blah blah blah..

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Ovid Yeats Response

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I thought the book was incredibly childish and - whilst understanding how 10 year olds may soil themselves in excitement over it - cannot understand how those of parental age became so orgasmic over - what is essentially - lite literate fiction aimed at kids.

And being an adult Love poet, whose mind orbits above the common herd of pretend intellectuals - salaried to tell us how difficult their life is as a blocked up hack - i found the infantile media love-in with this book, ridiculous in the extreme.

That men and women publically claiming to be professional adult commentators, one assumes with at least a modicum of expertise on the wider enobling purpose of literate Art; actually chose to herald its arrival with the literary equivalent of a weekend long chimps tea party, is beneath contempt or any serious comment from such established poets of my stature and reputation in the world of native english verse.

The only intellectual import one detects from the wreckage of this debacle - which i suspect originated with the controlling forces responsible for executing this woefully amatuer strategy on my blog - is a da da mentality even Tristan Tzara would have been thoroughly ashamed to be a part of. And this is the man who beleived his ridiculously childish behaviour was Art.

It is obvious that Fear of true poetry and the prophets of Love seeking to spread the democracy of letters, is the primary impetus in the mind of the corporate yes-clowns who took the decision to saturate my blog with this rubbish free for all.

My flock of fans are the creme de le creme readers; several hundred of whom have sent me e mails complaining in the strongets possible terms about such a dereliction of duty and poor poetic thought, begging i trash whoever's responsible for their weekend of upset.

Every single correspondent voiced their discomfort at being totally ripped off and conned; left with the purile and pathetically childish, unprofessional and ultimately offputting aftertaste this embarrisingly corporate facism engendered.

Here is just one of the kinder mails i received from Outraged of Middle England

"Get lost Guardian. Find your own fans. Please do not try to hijack Ovid's blog in your attempt to draw in a dumbed down demographic of working class thicks who think Hello magazine is the ultimate in Aristocratic Literacy.."

This young lady, also sent me the photographic portfolio she is building up in her quest to become a poet, the poor deldued wretch has been fooled into thinking is the first step on her way to poetic enlightenment; after witnessing the gallery of professionally posed shots in the bores gallery here.

And apart from hurling herself at me in print in language i cannot re-print here due to being a gentleman, Ms X also begged that her numerous friends with literate aspirations be allowed a session with the current saviour of the pathetically dire dog of british verse, enclosing a substantial cash donation and the request i:

"..humiliate the hack-trolls on day release from whatever mental institute of stupid ideas the suit and skirted fakes attempting to pass themselves of as artists, the money centric editors, find these sad creatures receiving treatment in..".

Grow up Guardian. Harry is dead, boo bleddy hoo, get a life.

HP: Another Corporate Cheerleader.

This post is Nicholas Clee boring on the Guardian, again, sucking off JK.

We did not need to wait for the official announcement to know that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would become the fastest-selling book of all time. All the anticipation, all the pre-publication announcements, made the result a certainty.

But here it is, in figures: Nielsen BookScan, the official trade monitor, says that JK Rowling's seventh and concluding Harry Potter novel sold 2,652,656 copies on its first day of release. This beats the previous fastest-selling book of all time, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - which had beaten previous record holder Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which had beaten previous record holder Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Half-Blood Prince sold 1,869,505 on its day of release...blah blah blah (yawn)
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Ovid Yeats Response

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"For Bloomsbury, JK Rowling's publisher, this is a poignant moment."

Clee. Please don't make me think the Guardian employs any more amatuer intellectuals and pretend working class toffs - who laughably constitute the hack-force at Guardian mansions - than are currently, and bizzarely, employed for doing nought but boring my readers with their woefully childish attempt to hijack this blog from my client, the poetry professor Mr Yeats.

Poignancy? Do you have any qualifications at all which allow you to speak publically of literate Art?

Do you even possess the equivalent knowledge that comes with a girls' guide badge in the most basic of human philosophy?

A silly question, as this post contains absolutley no depth of intellect or originaity of tenor - at least none i can detect - and therefore am assuming was written whilst you were suffering some kind of mental trauma, caused by a temporary suspension of all your intellectual faculties.

That you mistake the comfortably unchallenged and dumbed down adult burkes who constitute the extremely childish brotherhood of HP weirdos, with anything other than a load of idiotic thicks who had a weekend of sheer pointlessness soiling themselves over a book for 10 year olds, leads me to this conclusion Clee.

That you attempt to fool us (but more probably yourself) that the forming into huddled masses by corporately hypnotised mongs who over fizz into a pathetic lather, leads the normal reader to assume you too have been sniffing some kind of labotomising faery dust yourself man.

Because lots of peoples lifes are so devoid and empty of all and any meaning they felt a compelling need to stand for hours on end ouside a book shop; does not mean Literacy occured in its purest and most poignant form Clee.

Poignancy is a human trait, usually appearing in real life tales, such as when a soldier gets shot at the very moment his missus - 1000's of kilometers distant - is having it away with a local philanderer who had enough sense to pretend he is a conscientious objector, total physical coward, gay or clinically inasane; rather than be thick enough to go fight poor men he doesn't know or have any grudge with, except the manufactured and mediatised electronic one blokes on the telly have in their quest to be billionaires themselves. Men he has never met, and who do not go within 1000 miles of the action unless protected by an army of artillery and concrete.

Human irony with an overlay of sorrow and deep sadness, is what the word poinancy suggests to the prophet of Literacy Clee, and you try to import this word - in a pathetic attempt to imbue a faceless corporation concerned only with deforestation and making large sums of money - with some kind of human quality, is beyond absurd and ventures into the realm of total meaningless hack speak. A mouthpiece of billionaires. What a sell out.

The human shareholders who execute the rape of forests in the active pursuit of making the weather more unstable, are - in the main - rich people who do not love harry as the mugs who line their pockets do - the hypnotised robots doing as they are instructed via remote control - but soley for his cash value to them, and i assure you they couldn't give a monkeys about the daft gits dressed up as wizzards in the pissing down rain.

Indeed, being honest Clee, they probably think the same as me, that they are patsies and mugs and no doubt had a right laugh taking the piss out of them at the weekend.

However, being a tiny gagged cog in this machine, one can only suspect you undertake any humilation on behalf of those controlling what you write, and whipping up the level of enthusiasm displayed.

And that you try to pass off this massive money making exercise for the benifit of Bloomsbury shareholders - in the most insidious kind of con in this age of great war lies and atmospheric change - indicates to me that you are probably beyond saving.

As the poet closest to the founding ethos of the Manchester Guardian, here holding the only line against this wave of infantile writing from ex-colleagues who are now total acquiescent yes-clowns Clee, unable to distinguish Literacy from sheer naked commercialism, gives me a warm glow as i ascend to heaghts of eloquence the joke-hacks here can only weep buckets of green tears about as they go about their criminally titled "careers."

A Town Called Ovid: Colorado

This post is from Sam Jordison has been on a six month road trip across America, and Ovid has been teasing him rotten.

The flat eastern half of the state of Colorado is as drab as its mountainous western half is beautiful. At least, that's what I surmised from driving over it last week. For hundreds of miles the only landmarks were grain towers and the only variety on the road surface came in the form of skid marks where other similarly bored drivers must have fallen asleep and lost control of their vehicles. To save myself (and more importantly my girlfriend, who was sitting in the passenger seat) from a similar fate, I eventually elected to pull over for some food and coffee. My decision was considerably aided by the fact that the first sign I saw accompanied by the all important knife and fork symbol was for a town with the splendid name of Ovid...blah blah blah

Ovid Yeats response:

All must change, as nothing can die, for the soul
traversed wherever Will wishes it to. Here and there
living in what body i choose, and switching
from feral to human, existence never ceasing..

Introduction to Book 15 Metamorphoses - Ovid Yeats translation.

~

In a one hick town in Colorado, the tender hack Sam - undertaking a road trip for the greater good of Art with his paramour - found the source of his literate elixir, and stumbled by accident into the material reality of Ovid.

Sam reached this unexpected terminus by error itself, as he floored the gas, thinking of suicide and searching for the ghosts who committed it, and yet still; leading to a poetic allignment and enlightenment which surely signals the Alnwick bore has finished cruising the tarmac and should set the lady he has had cooped up for so many long hot months in his car, free? ~ Let both the American Francis Fitzgeralds guide me sam, F. Scott and Bobby K's spirit is here to instruct and wind you up to a jealous rage mah son.

How is your girlfiend?

Discounting the very real chance that you are lying, I see she managed to tear herself away from the parrot man then? If she wants to talk with a real Love poet when the romance levels are low between you sam; please do not hesitate to point her my way for a session. It's only 200 quid for a brief lay on of hands and for me to speak with her, in the effort to cheer her up so she will find you less..erm i mean more attractive.

It must be a bit tough travelling all day with a bog book author, you and your girlfriend in search of the real Ovid's eloquence. You attempting to steal his crown. And i'm sure when your book comes out, we can all have a laugh slagging it off. However i'm sure things will work out between you two and me in the long run when your love decides to save up for a few sessions with me. Maybe you could pay her to come and visit me at work in the Love chamber where i divine with ghosts, uneedful of tramping across America like a hobo, running out of kudos and cash as the rivals steal your patch on home turf. Appropriate the Guardian blog for a grander, more pure Literacy of Love sammie.

~

Not unlike the exiled love poet you imitate sam - as the template for your seduction technique on the page - making remote Love to a stable of desperate women eager to escape the drudge of their current relationships in a gilded mansion where Ovid is poet in residence to the rag bag laughable lot of career trolls and tender hearted maidens. Most of whom are poetically confused, unnerved and yet compelled to hurl themselves at him; and you have discovered the first truth of poetic composition - though somewhat later in your, admittedly much less successful career as a man who the muses chose not to sing a song of full time Love to for the benifit of attracting only the most dysfunctional of wimmin to his lair.

And in your quest to locate and be bathed in this eternal pool of continual romance by the sisterhood of goddesses - whose Love for my poetical mind bestows upon their chosen champ, sweet airs and gems of poetic beauty which trip effortlessly from his honey soaked tongue - you discover sam, that one is the instrument of prophecy. Nought but a tool of the absent hack-goddess in heavenly HQ, dilligently feeding the fibres of literate life and controlling the torque in your essential thread of fate; spun by Clotho from distaff to spindle, learning to divine from a prophet and main Guardian bore at his mansion, where we all spool at Lachesis behest, and are cut to silence; snipped by the most unforgiving Moirae of all - Atropos - the she of shee of sidhe, who chooses the manner of ones passing, and whose shears - like knowledge and love - can come in the moment least expected.

The many numerous episodes within your epic drive and subsequent drivel i have been following as part of the greater flux in which i am the agitating grain; under the watchful command of ones mother of memory, Mnemosyne; i can trace back to your initial post i read, O Alnwick sheep whisperer.

And it is irrelevant if this was your first deposit here on my blog, as what's important is that it was the virgin post the Moirae instructed my eye to apprehend, as the saviour and chief executive of their ailing british poetry lore. In the first flush of spring, you had Fitzgerald in your sights as the man you were obssessing over; when you attended the mental hospital in search of his wife's ghost, and now, as predicted, your journeys end has ceased, at Ovid. Perfect poetry sam, for i am Ovid and speak the real Fitzgerald way, and am the current living repository of all serious Geraldine lore.

~

In 1329 Maurice Fitzgerald was created the first Earl of Desmond in Munster.


Eight generations previously another Maurice, the son of Gerald of Windsor and his wife, the Welsh Princess Nesta, "Brood mare of the Normans" was born in 1100, and came to Ireland with Strongbow, in 1170, 6 years before his death. Maurice liked to spout a possibly fictional claim, aired wholesale, that his flesh also traced back to the Gherardini nobility, the famous Florence aristocrats. After dying in 1176 his son - Gerald - took the helm, and his son - Maurice - by this time Sir Maurice Fitzgerald, Justiciar of Ireland and Lord of Offaly, reigned after him, and their Geraldine estates expanded in direct relation to their ambition and skill at intercourse with the world back then.

This Hiberno-Norman dynasty grew, until five generations later Maurice, great great great grandson to the Maurice who came with Strongbow, was made the first earl of desmond, and by the time his grandson, the third earl Gerald FitzGerald was born, a complete reversal of identity had been completed. A much more strung out version of your road trip. But whereas yours is measured in tarmac miles and various mental hospitals and places of suicide, the Earls of Desmond is calibrated on the pages time forgot, where fact and fiction compete to contend in the text i write here on my blog.

For the eight generational tramp through the records of their dynasty, in the great and proud history of this island, reveals a complete transference of mindset and allegience from one culture to another. No longer was the Norman tongue, mode and more primary, but Goidelic; and is found to be at the full of its change in 1370 with the third earl, Gearóid Iarla - Earl Gerald. Gearald was the first professional bardic poet from this tribe of wannabees and fakers prepared to ouface Self and re-invent, as Ovid so eloquently sings and Martin beautifully translates, with a precision and deftness of touch, beyond cliche and blurbspeak, forcing itself into the readers' mind:

"..just as soft wax easily takes on a new shape,
unable to stay as it was or keep the same form,
and yet is still wax, I preach that the spirit is always
the same even though it migrates to various bodies."

Indeed the Geraldine gaelic nobility are the prime reason for another famous piece of latin text

Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis - more irish than the irish.

A term used for the Norman nobility who the island psychopomp culture gods ushered to a terminus where the core of identity is soft plastic, melded by an invisible force of wet druidic web, the famous féath fíadha - mist of invisibility that a thread of time, chance and accident interweaved to transmogrify as the official voice of American poetic royalty; in both Bobby and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Gearóid's most famous poem, also finds its honest lilt and unkinked echo in both Ovid and Yeats; for it's title suits perfectly my task in hand today at work on my blog space here:

Mairg adeir olc ris na mnáibh - Speak not ill of womenkind.

This was his most famous poem, written during the summer of 1370, at the time of Gerald's imprisonment by Brian of Thomand. But that is an aside to the main labotomy sam; for Gearld was a shape-shifter whose wife caught him in the act, practicing magickal rite in his roundtower, and was forever doomed to carry a terrible secret of poetic eternity to her grave, and beyond, as the very light of ones utterance with which i speak today sam.

But it is not the wife of Gerald who is remembered in the prophecy attached to this forebear of the Kenneddy clan, but the Munster goddess, Aine; with whom he was conducting an affair behind his wifes back, until she caught him in de flagrento with the phantom queen in his study. And after his sudden disappearance in 1390, local lore predicted he will arise from the depths of an underwater cave in the horse-shoe shaped Lough Gur at the base of Knockadoon Hill in county Limerick sam, to ride forth on a silver-shod steed and re-claim the crown of Desmond, Deas Mhuman - S Munster, and saving Ireland in the process of saving the embarressingly defunct mungrel of british verse.

But that is not the immediate task in hand today at work sam, as part of my duty here today is to attempt to address a number of very serious concerns i have about your potential for misogynist literacy here on my blog. Indeed your behaviour since your time in the psychiatric hospital, where you actively attempted to hear the voice of ghosts, with your supposed girfriend with you, is cause for a fear i have for your girlfriends well being.

Your, frankly odd and highly weird behaviour - it can be safely surmised - has been nought but the chasing of spirits, in a variety of locations, which have been literately portrayed in a register where poetical gravitas is almost attained, yet never quite realised. Certainly to my eye as a critic and Love poet seeking only to make sure that the lady in your life is with you of her own volition and not under duress, or for sheer economic reasons.

On behalf of numerous readers who have sent me e mails outlining ther fears for this young lady, the editor has asked me to speak with your girlfriend and ask her if she is being coerced against her will into spending many long weeks in a car with a man who seems somewhat - not mentally ill sam - but certainly obsessed with dispair, death and dead people generally.

Thus far we have had to endure numerous tales of where people went insane and committed suicide, which - if not a conscious decision on your part - certainly causes me a degree of concern as a Love poet seeking only global harmony and the freedom to speak to your girfiend in person. To check she's OK.

This is no reflection on you personally sam, but merely a very minor professional courtesy, and not something i would insist on, if it were not for your clear obsession with writers committing suicide. And it is because your editor is concerned for this young woman's overall mental health - being squeezed in at close quarter with someone who seems, frankly sam, somewhat on the edge of lunacy - that i speak with you today at her request, on this very important concern. But aside from that, this is the most eloquent yet you talented git, and i will leave you with some of my namesakes verse, re-rendered by American poet Charles Martin.. spirit I will be

Borne up to soar beyond the distant stars,
Immortal in the name I leave behind..