Maintenant #74: Ailbhe Darcy
I set out, pretentiously, arrogantly, wanting to be an Irish poet — a poet who would have something to say to and for the people I grew up among. I set out on my travels partly in search of experiences that would give me the breadth and depth of insight necessary to have that something to say. But then there are those two models for the voyage, Odysseus and Abraham. You might set out thinking that you’re Odysseus, that you’re going to gather the wisdom and carry it triumphantly home. But you might turn out to be Abraham: you never get home, or when you do get home, it’s so changed that you hardly recognise it. Worse, it hardly recognises you.
In the 74th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Irish poet Ailbhe Darcy.
What’s Happening?
Antonello Branca‘s 1967 documentary (via UbuWeb).
Three Poems
beloved in this city-not-your-city. Your palms passed over
pointed railings, stroked the leaves of suburban hedges,
a rosary you can’t visit on my skin, here, at the centre.
Mouthstrung, we contemplate the surfaces of all things,
two stone monkeys playing pool in the stone face
of a building, for the want of other things.
By Ailbhe Darcy.
Maybe You Should Start Again
Saporta’s book was, along with Cortazar’s Hopscotch, one of the first modern pieces of what Espen Aarseth has called “ergodic literature”, i.e. literature that requires effort (other than turning pages) on the part of the reader to traverse the text. Saporta’s book is often seen as a proto-hypertext novel, of importance to writers of later hypertext cybernovels, such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story. Visual Editions have stressed this aspect or extension of the formal implications of the text by including an introduction by Google and Youtube creative director Tom Uglow, who pretty poetically calls the unbinding of the pages of the book an “uninnovation” and says “if the story doesn’t capture you, maybe you should start again.”
Colin Herd reviews Marc Saporta‘s Composition No. 1.