Tom Paulin

Homage to Jackson Pollock, 1912-1956

I might be the real                 Leroy McCoy                 landsurveyor                 way out west...

Towards the end of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes observed that ‘the myth of the great French writer, the sacred depository of all higher values, has crumbled since the Liberation.’ In Ireland lately there has developed a liberating impulse to desacralise a national institution called YEATS and in a seminal pamphlet, ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’, the country’s most significant and influential critic, Seamus Deane, has criticised the way in which an acceptance of ‘the mystique of Irish-ness’ can involve readers in the ‘spiritual heroics’ of a Yeats or a Pearse. The result is a belief in ‘the incarnation of the nation in the individual’.

The release of putting off who and where we’ve come from, then meeting in this room with no clothes on – to believe in nothing, to be nothing.

Before you could reach out to touch my hand I went to the end of that first empty motorway in a transit van packed with gauze sacks of onions. I waited in groundmist by a hedge that was webbed with little frost nets; pointlessly early and...

Recently I received a somewhat smug letter from one of the editors of PN Review asking me to contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great Britain. The editor enclosed a statement entitled ‘A New Orthodoxy’ which listed certain ‘imperative tasks’. The sixth task was this: ‘To expose the absurdity of using literary criticism as an outlet for political frustrations.’ This paradoxical call for inactive action issues from a familiar form of conservative quietism, but it is important to remember that in certain other societies quietism and political frustration are not opposed attitudes or states of mind. In Miroslav Holub’s Czechoslovakia; the poet and the critic know that the act of writing is both necessary and absurd. This is the sharp, precise point of ‘Swans in Flight’, where the swans circle ‘and that means that Fortinbras’s army is approaching. That Hamlet will be saved and that an extra act will be played. In all translations, in all theatres, behind all curtains and without mercy.’ These lines allude both to Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet in Russia’ and to Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, and they wryly describe that fixed and determined social reality which constrains the poet who writes from inside the Eastern bloc. The laws of the state are like the rules which govern a tragic masterpiece – only naive optimists believe they can be changed to allow for a happy ending. But the irony is that in suggesting this Holub’s fatalism takes on a political edge and relevance. By expressing a frustration, the writer has taken a risk.’

after Heine

Your baggy lyrics, they’re like a cushion stuffed with smooth grudges and hairy heroes.

‘Me Mam’s Cremation’, ‘Me Rotten Grammar School’, ‘Ode to the Toffee-Nosed Gits Who Mocked My Accent’.

Now your whinges get taught in class and the kids feel righteous – righteous but cosy.