Volume 67, Issue 2

 

Editorial

 

'I thought I was supposed to reveal the shit from which, for me, poetry emerges. But then I just got kinda tired of seeing the shit from which poetry emerges. Hopefully no one will read this and, therefore, get the wrong idea.'

—Fred Moten

'Whatever is going to happen is already happening
Some people prefer "the interior monologue"
I like to beat people up'

—Ted Berrigan
 

An old teacher of mine once quoted Marianne Moore to us in a workshop—'poetry—I, too, dislike it.' I think he meant it. I, personally, like poetry, all of it, except the bad stuff. A question of emergence or emergency. To stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. In Mos Def's 'Fear Not of Man', he tells the listener that 'people talk about hip hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside / we are hip hop'. People, I think, talk about poetry like that too. Following Def, when you ask yourself where poetry's going, ask yourself, 'where am I going?'
     I guess I have a very limited faith in art to address politics, the artistic act as inherently politically valuable. It's not quietism; there's barbarism, like Lyn Hejinian talks about, and there are political poems like Baraka writes them. Whose slow suicide is this anyway? "God give me the wisdom to know the difference." To adapt Jonathan Williams—"I'm not so hot / on art I just love / to make it".
     Thanks to Gill and Sean for the help. Thanks to Furry Lewis. Hi, Nath.
     —Leo Dunsker & Will Fleming

Icarus 67.2 (Hilary 2017) is proud to present work from both Catherine Walsh and Trevor Joyce. 

 

 

Auto Intro

Trevor Joyce

 

Some things that I heard or read as a child fascinated me, and I was told they were poems. Not long after that I began trying to write my own poetry, and I soon met a poet five years older than me, who made me read Ezra Pound, and Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

What I wrote then was very conventional, but I gathered that poetry had a greater prestige than any other mode of writing, and that poets were licenced to do things with language that are not permitted to others.

Being a logical youth, I deduced from this that real poetry was important, and could do things ordinary language couldn’t. Otherwise, what reason could there be for such prestige and such licence? But I knew that I wasn’t either using or earning such privileges.

After about ten years, and a few books, I found myself bored and baffled, so I gave up publishing, and instead studied mathematics and worked in industry as a systems analyst.

It wasn’t for nothing that James Joyce and Samuel Beckett chose not to live in Ireland. Since its formation, that Republic been a country ostensibly without socialism, without sex, atheism, or active women, and without very much in the line of culture. It was an easy country to live in if you colluded in the elision of history, and in the fictions of religion and nationalism.

I wanted to write a poetry that could reach beyond those convenient facades, and that could have a formal complexity like that of the great English and Irish poets of the seventeenth century, and of the classical Chinese poetry I had begun to read.

I resumed publishing with the volume, stone floods, in 1995. The following year, I was introduced to the “Alternative Poetry” movement at a conference in the USA, where I met Tom Raworth, along with many other anglophone poets who were not doing the conventional thing. At the beginning of January 2000, I gave up work as a systems analyst, and became a full-time poet.

I don’t like explaining what I do as a poet, because I don’t fully understand it myself. Often, I find that what I’ve said is wrong or only part of the truth, so I prefer always to let the poetry make its own way, and take care of itself. But since I now, very happily, find myself in the position of addressing a group of proven poetry lovers, to whom my work is entirely unfamiliar, it seems only polite to make some effort to bridge that gap.

My general tendency is to work at or just beyond the limit of my understanding. I compose or collect, modify, and combine words, phrases, sentences, lines, until I feel that the whole has crashed through from being merely fragments to being a meaningful utterance. If that meaning moves or engages me, then the work is complete; if it leaves me cold, then I ruin it again, removing, changing, and adding material until that first meaning is lost and another emerges, and then check again whether it works for me. This, as a mode of composition, I learned from the work of Paul Klee, whose stated aim was not to reproduce the visible, but to make visible.

One other thing which leaves my work at variance with most mainstream poetry is that I tend not to recognize the conventional boundaries which parse the everyday world. Instead of a world of definite objects populated by clearly drawn individuals, I choose to represent a world in which the ‘lines of force’ are as clearly delineated as the objects and agents they connect.

I choose, also, to trust my meaning to poetic form rather than to explicit statement. For me, then, it seems that my poetry should work like music, which can be received with pleasure, or at least interest, even though its explicit meaning may be obscure. If the themes are sufficiently memorable and well-articulated, however, I trust that meaning may later emerge from within the work.

 

i.m. t.r.



as if it
had worn
a furrow
in the ver
tical air


down a
narrow
channel
in the
light


a sweet
cold rope
played
out

seem
ingly
inces
santly

till now
it’s gone

bright
ness he
aled the on
ly scar rem
embrance

 

Voluble Volucrary



some then set about biting culls biting biting of their scouts
their scouts sealed within a tenement room and it set out
with battered bedsteads and some blankets both and too for roost
several rickety old chairs which would not hurt to lose
and there would strike would strike then cease to be a spell

nervous always in the evening after dark would they return
for fear in ordinary excess of light should any smoak them
any smoak them out and so they lodged a great way distant off
in busy parts where they made free in crepuscule with fond custodians
and murmured mortimer soft mortimer the sleeping king to fright

take food then from our hands they did and fingers touching
shoulders heads and rifling goods and then they would
insert themselves in such activities as cooking meals piano
learning bathing and conversing long by phone spontaneously so
we talked and whistled them and gestured kissing fingers snapped

some practiced hard and uttered out new phrases every day and longer
longer yet the mate of one dying it so reduced them both to otherwise
for fear that they alone no male by them be brought to any scrape
and they murmured more which laid down another layer of difficulty yet
insetting characteristic sounds of other animates and even of machines

most striking was their tendency to simulate continuous talk
with mimicked phrases though odd single words as hi or fond good-bye
were sounded still all phrases often recombined giving at times effect
of a changed sense as one say that said frequently we’ll see you
later and I’ll see you soon soon culled to just we’ll see and like a parent stern

another hearing many times basic research
basic research it iterated it but spliced
with such other well-lovèd syllables as so
basic research it’s true I guess that’s right

 

The Coldest Place in the World

James O'Hara



My car was always left running
by mistake however was that I turned it off
in the coldest place in the world

In a town that had in safety been carried forth
by the diamond trade after the collapse of the empire
a place where the people are still magnificently dressed

Stranded I ate frozen horse flesh with elbow macaroni
in the company of a most kind and generous family
At the pole of cold my legs being gripped
in an environment that was exhausting
where in their halos of Artic fur
I found the women beautiful

My saliva would freeze into needles
and draw blood from its pricks on my lips
my breath mist was heavy as of smoke
cold and laborious would take hold

The people here do not have a wounded pride

It is hard to make friendships with those who are in haste
with mitts to their faces and with so many who are drunk

Going to the bathroom does take a dash
burying the dead requires fire to warm the soil

I tried to cook a meal that I knew well as a thank you
but I did not know where to find basil

There are no vegetables here and work informs eating habits
which is often reindeer soup and hot black tea

In the place which in its language means warm springs
where the fish spend the winters in unfrozen water

Summer eventually comes I was told

 

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Molly-May O'Leary
 


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Metals and Treasures Buried

Underground Differentiate

Ferrous and Nonferrous

Tone Signals

Adjustable Sensitivity, Adjustable Discrimination

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My Doppelgängers

Michael Naghten Shanks



My doppelgängers are armed with fantasies like Pac-Man with his Ghosts.
My doppelgängers sashay through busy city streets, steering clear of slowerpaced
pedestrians the way politicians avoid questions. My doppelgängers
share some of my friends. My doppelgängers buy couscous from organic
markets — not because they like it, but because it’s expensive — leaving it
in the staffroom fridge, unopened and past its use-by date. My doppelgängers
trade petty tit for tat tweets about the moderate successes of their short
story collections. My doppelgängers tag themselves the shark in online
photos showing them swimming with dolphins. My doppelgängers make
goo-goo noises into their baby’s pram. My doppelgängers tell some of the
same lies I do. My doppelgängers went joyriding in 2002 and accidentally
killed a woman. My doppelgängers enjoy rainy days when, as a short person,
the pleasure of being a menace with an umbrella is as satisfying as the
wobble of a well-made jelly. My doppelgängers are in a happy and mutually
supportive loving relationship. My doppelgängers are cheating and waiting
to get caught. My doppelgängers have stopped reading, carefully placed the
book of poems back onto the shelf of the bookstore, sipped their takeaway
coffee, walked over to the second-floor window and admired the unseasonable
snow. My doppelgängers tell me to get out more. My doppelgängers tell
me to get out, refusing to acknowledge our resemblance.
 

 

Collection

Jenny Moran



for Laura McCormack

I heard there were no graveyards
outside the mausoleums
             picture-women                  perfect
in silk and wooden dreams.

RIP is for the civilised man
when the things of things he kept he leaves
to cover the top of the scrapheap.

He once said there were no graveyards
outside the mausoleums.
He was yelling it over the screaming:
over and under and ‘round the dead belles,
            but ding, ding, ding
these bells are ringing,
the flesh-made roads of sin     are speaking.
They say:
                         There are no graveyards
                         outside the mausoleums
            but it rings and it rings
and you still hear the screams,
all the RIPs voicing over pleas,
           the dead, dead, dead, dead ringing.

Once, you tried to block your ears deep
that your manicure stabbed the drum,
but you still heard the music weeping.

So you clogged some more and bled some more
of the stream that would never clot,
and clog-no-clot       clog-no-clot
because it’s not                       your blood
you live on.

You snuck out, then, dictionary in tow, to visit the mound of the ringing.

You were going to translate sound
muffled by packets of old spines
and new-frayed made in China.

You knew
there were words you didn’t understand underneath all
the furniture you owned;
the chromium corrosion of baby pictures, sparling felt.
            Everything you drowned in
                       “belonged to someone else”.

I found you dead in rubbish
outside a mausoleum,
under a grid of unprised, red hangers –
             not beautiful, not grotesque
             but quite still altogether –
walked away to the time
of a faint, growing ringing.

 

Sometimes I Steal am Steel

Sean Pierson

 

last night you called me hireling i just now found
the definition of the word; i’d like to abdicate
the title i’d like you to run circles around me
until we form a perfect union of which in which by which

i mean we can extol do you know what a love letter is?
because my body is made of amorous lead it expels ph
pshaw when i wake up i am occasionally from Wichita
i am occasionally from the city within my state where &

when i learned to be the copyist, i installed an atrium
in my room so i could see the ceiling; last night some guy
in grey cotton called your laconics industrious and
beautiful. last words are a currency that can’t be burnt

this is the closest to coinage i’ll ever come—you’re circumscribed
                                                                                                     by velvet.

 

I describe tv

Sean Pierson



I am my somnambulant process-
ion I do not understand in that
or this for which I cannot
provide a definition—a skill
I lied about in my application
for the position of spelling bee
judge—I’m so tried
tired from watching sports
when I am asleep
the weather is temperate
when I am famous I die
because I lose the ability to speak
when we’re 30 we’ll keep our babies
I’m not a good listener
when I marry I ought to marry
in a school
in a dining hall with lecterns
and busts and pre-cooked
lasagne cooked by my mother’s
mother forty years before

 

W/O All of My Friends

Sean Pierson



Malice
eats the sickly
sweet pears {whole, saccharine}
I reach you behind each line be-
hind spaces. I read text
all day I read
intent.

Intent
readings of my-
self-other- man. His sweet
windblown twigs and various cruc-
is hemmed by whited tiles
laid where malice
was soot.


I wash
myself to be-
come clean. I turn my nose
on which sits the pince-nez of an-
other into a crow.
I rewash my-
self prone.

 

 

Lost Lake

Kate Pallis



every home will cave into the water on this lake
fall apart in the dark undercurrent of the shallows
abandoned houses will remain without the will to break

its tempting to think that there has been a mistake
that houses don’t break, with building codes to follow
every home will cave into the water on this lake

when the winds carry decisions most homes have to make
empty windows shake, but are safe from being swallowed
abandoned houses will remain without the will to break

half-rotted houses will become prime real estate
even with asbestos lurking in the splintered shadows
still, every home will cave into the water on this lake

the houses with swollen doors and expansion joints that ache
their fevers boarded up to suffocate the space, not to wallow
these abandoned houses will remain without the will to break
left in this barren landscape, a nightmare in its wake
I will cave into the water, leave myself, a body hollow
abandoned houses will remain without the will to break
every home will cave into the water on this lake

 

One for Upstairs

Alice Jorgensen

 

The AHIMSA committee (All-Humanity Interstellar Mission Steering Association) carefully discussed how they would communicate their aims both to the international community on earth and to unknown civilisations beyond the stars. This was not principally a scientific mission, though it would carry instruments and transmit observations back to waiting labs in Florida, Paris and Cologne. Instead, this was a beautiful, quixotic attempt to reach out beyond the confines of our planet to whoever out there might be ready to know us, at whatever unimaginable distance of years. Artists, thinkers and makers would offer their contributions to encapsulate, or at least sample, the beauty humanity could achieve.

“And representation,” said the Chairperson, “full representation is very important.” There was a murmur of agreement. “There’s a terrible danger the human race we project will be only the rich, white, male, straight, western human race. We have to seek out representatives of minorities. We must give them a voice.”

The resolution was passed and the Chief Administrative Officer assigned a number of her staff to the task of finding suitable people. They were to be given simple recording devices. Into those devices they could record whatever they wanted - songs, stories, or merely the sounds of their world. The technology was to be utterly transparent: easy to record into, even easier to play back. After all, the committee didn’t know how similar extra-terrestrial sound equipment would be to our own.

One who received a device was a homeless man called Jeff. Jeff was white, male, straight and western, but he was poor. And he was lonely: he’d been on the street fifteen years, and he’d seen friends die and he’d learned to keep his counsel. He knew where the police moved you on and where the best place to stash things was and which charities to avoid because they only wanted to take you over. He wondered about selling the device for drink – he didn’t do drugs, never had, a stupid vice that he’d never stoop to – but instead he decided to tell it his life story.

So he told it about his childhood, and his mom who’d struggled by on two jobs and a backbone of steel; his marriage, which had broken up when he lost his job; his house, which he’d lost when he lost his marriage; his room in a lodging house, which he’d never been properly able to pay for; his mate Sean, who’d taken care of him those first months on the streets and then been kicked in the head by some drunks and died in the corridor at ER; his mate Terence, who was a dude, the funniest guy alive, knew every trick in the book, could sell a man his own wallet and get paid extra for sheer charm, who’d disappeared one day, God knew where to. And he talked about the pain he got in his chest now and the cough at night and how you stayed warm with newspapers. And he recited the poem his mom had taught him, the one he’d never forgotten, about the Road Less Travelled By, and hell he’d done a lot of travelling on that road, none more. And when the smart lady came back with her straightened hair and her iPhone 7 he gave her the device and was glad that, at last, he had a voice and someone was going to listen.

The recordings were collected together and placed in a beautifully designed chrome box in the centre of the capsule. The schedule was tight – the process of gathering the materials had been slower and more inconvenient than expected – and a plan to duplicate all the data for a section of the AHIMSA website was quietly shelved. The rocket was launched at 07:31 on November 4th, 2016, to great acclaim. And it ascended into space and made its way into a billion billion miles of silence.

 

from final context

Ed Salley



(for Coinboy)


[...]

the night you left i dreamt
i fought
an ex’s dad
like they do in the UFC

as i dragged him down to earth in a chokehold
thru drool he spat familiar words of wisdom
“There’s no such thing as a free gaff.”

as if i’d soon forget it

 

 

lost n found

Ed Salley



at the ballet in bootcuts
you criminals can keep yr fucking trees
red razzle gotta hook in my mouth
an ordinary dragon tho smoke
breeds bad taste

abusing a lack of honest substance
another casualty of causal mindsets
chase hair o th dog
with trail of slug
days spent painting golden things maize

mam called me a catholic
ratios aside it was all too much
i demand trial by tractor chicken

 

In the City of Ghosts

Benjamin Keatinge



For Estela Eaton


There was sunlight on the esplanade
And coffee – Greek or Turkish –
Miracles of fish and retsina
In covered cafés, fresh as pine.

We roamed in a Sunday of wonder.
The gold-green aura of Eastern rites
Made the churches green, compassing, it seemed,
The stranger’s crescent moon, or candelabra.

                              ***

‘Salonika is beautiful, and Greek,’ I said,
‘But you are living in a city of ghosts.’
My friend, the waiter, is not convinced,
The ghosts, he says, have all gone home!

                              ***

This blithe assurance was lying all about
The older city, which we had come to view,
Sensing the other, within the new.
But spaces here had long been filled
With chosen artefacts in crisp museums
And nothing faltered as we walked along
The broken ramparts of old Solun.

                               ***

What trembling ghost now might plead his case
To resurrect the shadows of his spectred race?

 

show me any body

Sophie Fitzpatrick



i don’t know how to hide that I don’t know how aeroplanes work. i have several regrets


Lately I’ve wanted bad things to happen to me an awful lot. For example, yesterday whilst lolling on the couch I contemplated life if none of my family returned home. Then today, I thought about what I would be like if I was diagnosed with cancer, thinking about every moment like how I would be in hospital then fall asleep on the phone because I was so weak. This type of morbid fantasy isn’t unusual for me. I want bad things to happen to me. I have to remind myself that I’m grateful for such an easy life. I think I want pity or something. Mostly something to distract from a recent mistake, an excuse from it sort of. An escape from facing something that’s my fault by experiencing something that isn’t


Your partner might die soon, you might have a stroke and all you can do is literally wait it out. This is true for all people, but for me it’s a longer wait and I have purpose and achievements

[…]

Bitter man who wonders what is the point of his vocabulary if he can’t even use it to communicate with people?


What’s 3 more weeks, 2 more sentences of convincing? 
I usually imagine a different song without its drums over it from 00:07


Whatev Kevin
I’m actually waiting for someone to deplete my smugness by physically
hurting me.

Dick

Going to Career Guidance person today. Who knows what he will say. I’ll probably take the test and he’ll be like ‘you idiot’

 


Okay that wasn’t the point admittedly. So Heree we Goooo
Do I like him?
Undecided
Could I like him?


[…]

earlier today i had the red and white blanket over my head and i couldn’t breathe properly but i also couldn’t move at all so i couldn’t lift it off me and i was just sitting there wondering what to do trying to will myself to move but it wouldn’t work. i don’t know if that actually happened or if it was a dream, but i think if it actually happened then i would have been more panicked about the possibility of dying, which seemed quite huge at that point. so yeah slave morality and consequentialism. i don’t know if i will be functioning tomorrow


[…]


how can you sit around for hours doing this i guess you just go crazy
maybe i will type everything i know tonight
or maybe i will do that tomorrow
is my mind buzzing or is it just a hive mind
i feel really inadaquate i wasn’t going about an inferiority complex i hate
when other people have worlds tat im not in and i feel like they are in all
of my worlds, or that my worlds are just shit. gahhh
i don’t even know if i can cope with it. i need to get back my superiority
complex but not be obvious
about it.

 


i ate before the aftermath. beef club gets rough sex built on the stools they
made themselves


if i push someone out of me i might go for gold. my teeth are bad.
i think i gave birth to a black hole. the green man moans when his dog
walks itself


come here to me now
I’ll never hear the end of it
I’m so embarrassed



Moon
I cycle too !!



Hope I don’t end up bitter in my
future or anyone else’s. It’s okay I
will just kill her


i felt betrayed in seminar 7, radio movie star
4.21 skeevy geezer. This is love and now it is not love. mugs. Essay docs.
being and time and guts


There comes a point when you
realise you’re not a kid
anymore and you can’t just be
eating chocolate all the time
-dad

 


Am I sitting down now


Am I sitting down yet

 

From the Notebook of Once Modern Times

Ciarán O'Rourke

 

(After Rubén Darío, 1867-1916)


Stay long enough in one place, –
dark-haired at morning, on a binge-blue road,

or still and slow as roses growing
in the rose-lit garden (your heart as slow),

in the gust of a doorframe, giving way
to dust and wind and the weight you put to it,

in the sweat of lust, in the rain of love,
at the beating rim of an eagle’s song, –

and the silhouettes you’d thought
were ghosts assemble, the metaphors

invade your flesh and vision,
translate the air to shallow breath …

Stay long enough in one place
and shadows lengthen, rumours sift,

and the hawk you watched for all your life
is neither bird nor prey, but here it sings:

life’s last hornet, dark as death,
honing close to kiss or sting.

             ~

The only way

is to know by motion:
to feel, to fuck,

to have no faith,
or nothing but.

To expand your lungs,
extend the list

of lips desired,
dreams possessed

(bow down to Whitman,
resist the rest).

To believe the brain
outlives the skull:

the shell retains
the ocean’s soul.

To embark, embibe,
envision verse,

collect it all
in laughter first.

To praise the symbol
with the fact –

the swan in a drift
of evening air,

guest of the world
and flying west.

To understand:
that the man alone

and stranded,
howling to the sun,

has always
been your future,

and you must move on.

 

The Beautiful Untogether

Featured: Catherine Walsh

 

 

there is a yellow notebook
if I could keep this simple
there might be a process
which could figure a task
sorted out from those items
in a spatially-exempt
refraction of implication

 

 

whether these individuals
condition an association
may be that spiral set
in its positive linear
control for efficacy removed
a wonderful sense of attention
common among colour orientation

 

 


these details as neuropsychological
rotations spanning any diagnosis
you’re ill city defined vouched the
expense of accuracy
what observed information
develops as consensus
ayed forwards frames of investigation

 

 


what underlies one question
may be attempted in varying
how to adjust flourishing
as honesty compelling
explorations meaning a dream
which is singular spirited replete
abstracts answers beyond ready ethics

 

 


tell me a friend a lover
can be so vivid you compel
those resolute pictures
motion with no looking back
can a. detheologise feeling
his readers keep seeing themselves
over anew in vividly compelling

 

 


write me a song these questions
of truce or trust this is not
how you deal with bullies
girls you are rapid reconcile
yourself to making the most of
place awareness what pragmaticism
get carried splintered to sparkings

 

 


or aspects of themselves prefer
not to dance to go out and play
hey you can collapse a sentence
phrases beat residually to
points of advance no such
meanings imagined is intent
requisite to a mechanical skill

 

 


instead there are happenings
merging those existences to
responsive patternings unable
to say or see this way forward
as angles bouncing ineptly
reading the iconic smell of smoke
meanders as neatly mapping dispersion

 

 


anyone can see derived from
style any one memory banks
on changes through history hitting
the reflected spot progressing
tensilely in as unmeasured an
enervation or exacerbation of
what stymied or stunned coalescence

 

 


experience beyond my lips is
slipped in later there is a
lovely component of identification
distinct as those complex abilities
removed from all impression
to subtyping in one altered
perspective lose your bearings

 

 


i can hear i can sense
i can hear a sequence of
sensations in an instant
linking experience these accidents
struck through non-chronology
keep going disillusionment
may be inherited responsibly

 

 


it was a day a thing called
may be faded restorations
to enchantment memorabilia
a whisper completely wipes
you out of your obligation
or does it become imagination
in a ritual setting apart

 

 


remove the vine least those heavy
bunches take the roof down
politics shift realms as advice
coercion expediency
civic business withdraws its
horns completely life as power
(and apparently this line is a deliberate omission)

 

the material clusters

Featured: Catherine Walsh

 

In Form:


the material clusters
stranger           friction
art    reach                  opening an art
               in culture wars
    co-opting enthusiasm
passion in persistence
          practice
               in    culture wars
shrilling dogma
(credo en animatus)
insistence culture wars
affect run amok
amassing prevalences in
an emotional illiteracy
of emphatic impact
               in culture wars
a prevailing arts evocation
authenticates practices
in culture wars
the clothesline
the office desk
the bus stop
punctuate as interactions
connect in culture wars
art practising what
may be lived
spontaneously
each approach
an abuttement
retrieval    foray
             in culture wars
how art walks
actually tells us only
that it’s capable
of throwing shapes
or being thrown
in culture wars
art opens
unimagined
yet    imaginable
     apertures of
enjoyable communicative
      interaction
    nexus of interpretation
occurrences in which
experience as affect
experienced
in culture wars
out culture wars
change how thoughts
on the line
followed skew
simply the line taken
the mechanics of
holding
       in perspective
as an act of comparison
assembled through shifting
    experiential contextual
meshes of affect
     that is fact
to the person (in which)
and that result
as derivations
   of phenomena
     consequent
to actions made
   or occurred
which is sense
that sensory input
rides those pathways
nudges steers prevents
avoids catches lets go
as actions of decision making
through a mesh of affective information
choice in culture wars
barbaric ties dissemble
Barbaric Tales assemble
drum beat rolls
the everyday is not cognizant of the
extraordinary in ways which are
immediately comprehensible
then note disparities
find how it is to be uncomfortable
in a way which does not
connote problem solving productivity
a   stretch as to work with language
in an everyday world made hyper-visual
is to have to recognise the antecedent lines
from which we draw out of which we grow
away from which we move
towards which we muse
in order to return
that sense of attention
which is question
and answer asking
as making   art

 

Featured: Trevor Joyce


Trevor Joyce was born in Dublin in 1947, and lived in Mary Street and Church Street near the city centre until 1967. In that year he co-founded New Writers' Press with Michael Smith, his own first book being NWP's first publication. The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (NWP, 1976) was his last publication for almost twenty years, during which he took up work as a systems analyst in industry. Two volumes, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (NWP, 2001), and What's in Store (NWP/The Gig, 2007) collect his poetry up to that period. His Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2014) was followed by two translations from the English of Edmund Spenser, Rome's Wreck (Cusp Books, 2014) and Fastness (Miami University Press, forthcoming). He is a member of Aosdána. His 'Auto Intro' published in this issue was initially delivered on the occasion of his receiving the 2016 N. C. Kaser Prize for Poetry, Lana, South Tyrol, Feb 6th 2017.

 

Featured: Catherine Walsh

 

Catherine Walsh was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1964, has spent some time living and working abroad, and currently lives in Limerick. She co-edits hardPressed Poetry with Billy Mills. Her books include: Macula (Red Wheelbarrow Press, Dublin: 1986); The Ca Pater Pillar Thing and More Besides (hardPressed Poetry, Dublin, 1986); Making Tents (hardPressed Poetry, Dublin, 1987); Short Stories (North & South, Twickenham and Wakefield, 1989); Pitch (Pig Press, Durham, 1994); Idir Eatortha & Making Tents (Invisible Books, London, 1996); City West (Shearsman, Exeter, 2005); Optic Verve: A Commentary (Shearsman, Exeter, 2009) and Astonished Birds; Carla, Jane, Bob and James (hardPressed Poetry, Limerick 2012). Her work is included in a number of anthologies, including the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2001) No Soy Tu Musa (Ediciones Torremozas, Madrid, 2008), a bilingual Spanish/English anthology of Irish women poets. A section from ‘Barbaric Tales’ appears in the spring/summer 2016 edition of the Irish University Review. She was Holloway Lecturer on the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley for 2012/13 and was a research fellow with the Digital Humanities cluster at An Foras Feasa, Maynooth University during 2014/2015. Her books 'Barbaric Tales' and ‘The Beautiful Untogether’ are forthcoming. 

 

Sophie Fitzpatrick


Sophie doesn't spend her days. Sophie doesn't believe that one can spend. Folks, Sophie doesn't believe anything at all.

 

Alice Jorgensen


Alice Jorgensen lectures on Old and Middle English literature in the School of English, TCD. She has recently begun to write short fiction.

 

Benjamin Keatinge


Benjamin Keatinge is a graduate of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He has co-edited France and Ireland in the Public Imagination with Mary Pierse (Peter Lang, 2014) and Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey with Angus Woods (Irish Academic Press, 2010) and he has published several essays and reviews on modern and contemporary Irish poetry in Irish University Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Studi Irlandesi, Estudios Irlandeses, and elsewhere. He is currently editing a volume of essays on Richard Murphy titled Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy which is due to be published by Cork University Press. From 2007 to 2016 he worked as Assistant/Associate Professor of British and Irish Literature at South East European University, Macedonia and he has traveled widely in the Balkans. His poetry has previously appeared in College Green and Kore Broadsheets.

 

Jenny Moran


Jenny Moran is a fourth year student of English and co-editor of nemesis, Trinity’s feminist journal.

 

Michael Naghten Shanks
 

Michael Naghten Shanks lives in Dublin. In 2016 he was named as one of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Rising Generation’ poets and was shortlisted for the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Year of the Ingénue (Eyewear Publishing, 2015) is his debut poetry pamphlet.

 

James O'Hara


James Desmond O’Hara grew up in the Kingdom of Kerry and was educated at Saint Brendan’s College near the shore of Loch Léin. His career has been as an hotelier and business manager with the following work associations: Venice Simplon Orient Express, Savoy Hotel and Claridges, London, Hotel Bel Air, Los Angeles, “21” Club, New York, Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative, South Dakota. Pueblo of Tesuque and Pueblo of Picuris, Northern New Mexico, and Mount Juliet Estate, Ireland. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

Molly-May O'Leary


Molly is a fourth-year philosophy student of Trinity College.

 

Ciarán O'Rourke


Ciarán is a PhD student with the School of English. His poetry has appeared in a number of publications, including Earthlines, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, The Moth, The Well Review, and others.

 

Kate Pallis


Kate Pallis is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. Wallis received a Bachelor’s degree in English, Writing, and Irish Studies from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, where she worked as an Editor and Feature Writer for The Bridge: A Student Journal of Fine Arts.

 

 

Nathanaël Roman


Still here.

 

Ed Salley


Ed Salley is a fourth year student of English. One third of Twitter handle @jakelatent on Twitter dot com. S/o to Fionn, the best third of Twitter handle @jakelatent on Twitter dot com.

 

Editorial Team

 

Editor: Leo Dunker


Leo Dunsker is a fourth-year student in the School of English at Trinity. He is also a Chair of the DU Metaphysical Society and the rector of Cave Writings. He was born and raised in upstate New York. He is currently writing an undergraduate dissertation on Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. 

Editor: Will Fleming


Will Fleming is a fourth-year student of English and philosophy. His poetry has appeared in Icarus, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and The Quill. He is from Wicklow.

Public Relations Officer: Gillian Murtagh


Gillian Murtagh is a fourth-year student of English. She is also editor of Radius in The University Times. She is from Dublin.

Editorial Assistant: Sean Pierson


Sean Pierson is a first-year student of English and philosophy. He once worked as a marketing intern at a medical device company and his work has appeared in Icarus and the short-lived Pocketknife. He is from Massachusetts.

 

Acknowledgements and Copyright

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, Mandela House, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

Copyright remains with the author of each piece. Authors grant Trinity Publications an irrevocable licence to publish their work both online and in print.

Chief Editors: Leo Dunsker and Will Fleming
Public Relations Officer: Gillian Murtagh
Editorial Assistant: Sean Pierson