Maintenant #61: Marcus Slease
I think this sense of transplanted Irishness can be very productive. The Joyce or Beckett line of Irishness. Joyce was my first love. The long poem novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. There are also the “impure” mixed Irish work of poets like Fanny Howe (American/Irish) and Maggie O’Sullivan (Irish/British), Tom Raworth (Irish/British) and Joseph Donahue (an American gnostic poet in the line of Duncan with strong Irish roots). The list goes on. Sometimes this can go too far of course. Like in America where so many folks seem hung up on genealogy and a search for origins. Irishness is a very popular choice/fad… Most of the work I have read seems to be in that high bardic elegiac landscape painting tradition. Looking back at loss. A one track emotion. It all feels false and flat and not true to the complexity of feeling and thinking and living in the world here and now. This is true of perhaps most of the official poetry coming out of Ireland. I quickly lost interest. I think most Irish poetry is stuck in the mire of identity (like it was for Joyce). A real straightjacket!
In the 61st of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the poet Marcus Slease.
Six Poems
I’ve got a little hill with little green men and green tanks
in the hills of Milton Keynes
a bottle of pop
&
a bumble bee
summer ’83
*****
Peter Tooth is delightfully
sane
(Jubilee Line. Wembley to Kings Cross)
*****
the boy scouts of America
yeeeeeeeee
still smiling into gorge
way to dry lake
to blow off bottle rockets
with little red white blue flags…
By Marcus Slease.
From Lapdance to Library
In the early 80s, the blue-rinse curtain-twitching old biddies of Westminster City Council legislated for the curtailment of Soho’s porn industry through the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act. 30 years on however, the council is now embracing it, hosting a talk between Paul Willetts, author of Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, […]
Shower
Once he entered the shower he felt released. It was simple; he didn’t need to make a decision on which knob to turn for the correct temperature. There was only one temperature with the gas disconnected and that was warm. The outside sun heated the underground pipes like lights do in a heated pool. He turned the knobs until it was enough. If he would make one last decision, it would be this one, to stay in the shower until they came to shut off the water along with the already turned off power and gas.
By Clark Theriot.