KARL & DAVE GO TO HELL A new podcast on a mutual love of ours, William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Part of a larger work, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, The Proverbs emerged between 1790 & 93 as part of Blake’s intense theological and political engagement with the French Revolution, which greatly inspired him. […]

Read More Karl and Dave Go To Hell

20 years ago this July approximately 300 Irish activists joined in with demonstrations against the G8 in Genoa. The demos, taking place over three days, turned out to be something of a bloody street war between the leading political militants of a continental generation & the heavily-armed Italian security forces. That it could turn out […]

Read More GENOA & THE HOPES OF A GENERATION #g8 #g7 #genoa2001

“Lordan moves Irish poetry forward, looking at modern realities rather than the Platonic ideals many poets are still relying on. His poems are built using startling images, expert restraint and energetic lines. They wake you up, shake you, insist you pay attention.” Southword MEDIUM, my new collection, out in a few weeks, free audio/e-book. Order […]

Read More How to deal with bein stoned #resilience

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2021full name / name of organization: Dave Lordan & Michael O Sullivan email: osullivan@cuhk.edu.hk   What can a book on class & precarity written by artists and researchers achieve today? What actual or immanent overlaps & solidarities are there between ‘artists’ & the ‘precariat’? between part-time academics and the ‘precariat’? […]

Read More Class and Precarity in a New World Order: Writers and Artists Respond – CALL FOR PAPERS

“Lordan moves Irish poetry forward, looking at modern realities rather than the Platonic ideals many poets are still relying on. His poems are built using startling images, expert restraint and energetic lines. They wake you up, shake you, insist you pay attention.” Southword MEDIUM, my new collection, out in a few weeks, free audio/e-book. Order […]

Read More LOCKDOWN ANIMALS #downfall #darkage

Happy #pride month to all my friends & acquaintances in the LGBTQIA+ communities. I remember the 80s, when it was still a crime to be anything but straight-married with children. Straight-only Ireland was a deeply sick Ireland – the Ireland in which dumping babies in sewers was perfectly respectable, but holding hands with your true […]

Read More HAPPY #Pride2021

(For H.G) She rushes screaming from the sparkling sea the little girl all gone her father on all fours laying out the chicken,hummus, salad, olives, bread, drooping bellytender to the broiling sand warmth her two brothers start to kick a ball into the sun laughter soon as she finishes chapter 12 her older sister will […]

Read More LOVE #palestine #grief #apartheid #murdermostfoul

“Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. . . . Writing is a strange thing. . . . The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals […]

Read More LITERATURE & THE ANTHROPOCENE – Part 1

News reaches me from all corners of the land of people (who have by luck or pluck the 10k+ it takes) buying up second hand campervans with the intention of taking to the roads & staycationing in Ireland this summer. No surprise after us all being locked up in our limited zones for so long, […]

Read More THE CAMPERVANS ARE COMING #staycation #takedownthebarriers

‘What kind of monster is she who does not despair?’ Killian Turner, Berlin Notebooks (1982) As a thought experiment, imagine yourself in a mob of lemmings headed for the Cliffs of Moher. If it helps, imagine the other lemmings in the mob being everyone you have ever known on first name terms – classmates, workmates, […]

Read More Optimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of The Will.

This is how it starts: Assumption afternoon in eighty-six,  Martin A Cummins clacking high-heel homeward  towards that Inchadoney Crib they’ve slathered indoors black, exterior mauve,  in imitation of a rumour about Prince.  The sea in retreat behind the Island filling in the oncoming distance; its searing ridge,  its grassy, sparkling, quartzy flank, stone-wall-stitched and scarred by ditch… […]

Read More MARTIN/A CUMMINS APPEARS TO THE VIRGIN MARY. #trans #unique #truestory #selfborn #westcork #virginmary

One of the great things about poems is that they are so adaptable & lend themselves so easily to being translated into other mediums. I have been lucky to have lots of mine put to great use by other people & turned into songs, short film scripts, performance texts and so on. Following my poems’ […]

Read More I ONLY RUN IF THERE IS A OR A BULL OR A BATON CHARGE BEHIND ME MYSELF BUT HEH….

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT PUBLIC FIGURES ARE SAYING ABOUT PALESTINE. To turn your back on Palestine is to turn your back on humanity. If your TD or councillor is silent in the face of the war crimes of Israeli Apartheid, they will be silent too when – & it is when, not if – catastrophe […]

Read More SILENCE ON PALESTINE IS SILENCE ON HUMANITY

(I was asked by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign to write a call out to help launch their anti-apartheid Boycott Campaign back in 2010, reprinted here) I am proud to be among the many Irish and Ireland-based artists from across creative disciplines who have chosen to publicly support the growing campaign of boycott against apartheid Israel. […]

Read More AN ARTIST”S PLEDGE TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL #boycottapartheid #palestinianlivesmatter

Read More 96FM Interview re #NoelRedding #WestCork #DeBarrasFolkClub

ONE YEAR IN AND IMMA TALKIN TO CLIFFS In which, a year into lock down, & driven daft by the isolation, feeling very down in myself, a 500 million year old cliff gives me a pep talk. Stand up, go on  ya little bollix says The Cliff sure look at me houlding tough in all […]

Read More ONE YEAR IN AND IMMA TALKIN TO CLIFFS #mentalhealth #lockdownpoetry #talkincliffsideblues

(I am a survivor of a teenage suicide attempt – while on ERASMUS student exchange in Greece in 1994. Below is the text of a radio essay I wrote for RTE Arena reflecting on my experience two decades later. PS lots of people are asking my permission to share – if you think its worth […]

Read More ON BEING A COPYCAT SURVIVOR OF SUICIDE #Darknessintolight #Darknessintolight2021

THE SHAMAN OF CHARLESLAND The Shaman of Charlesland is about a guy who takes DMT in the evenings, & builds houses in the mornings. It explores the radical disjunction between the world we live in, & the one we wish we lived in. It’s from my forthcoming book MEDIUM, which will be available free on […]

Read More THE SHAMAN OF CHARLESLAND #DMT #Construction #drugs #work #splitpersonality #God #aliens #hipsterbullshit

FOCUS ON THE NEGATIVE #poetry #darkmatter #clichéinversion Sometimes I like to invert a cliché & see what happens. Focus on The Positive is good advice much of the time. However, many things happen to humans & are done by humans which have no positive side, and to suggest they do is an evasion at best, […]

Read More FOCUS ON THE NEGATIVE #poetry #negativethinking #clichéinversion

As a child I lived outside from morning until nightfall, exploring & playing in a dreamy landscape of bog & marginal land full of unprofitable plants & animals & the kind of WestIrish characters who no longer exist. I loved sticks. And sticks are the first tool, & the first science. We humans are a […]

Read More STICKS #poetry #ruralchildhood #AntiCiv #NewBook

Today elites North and South of the border are gearing up to celebrate the centenary of partition, and expecting the rest of us to go along with it, or at least shut-up about what partition really means. Here, in the Manchester Guardian of 1921, is a succinct account of what we are asked to clap […]

Read More PARTITION – THE WOUND THAT NEVER STOPS BLEEDING #orangestate #partition #NI100 #Sectarianism

Due to habits picked up while working in a bakery as a teenager, I am an early riser. I hear the dawn chorus most mornings. Birds are singing dinosaurs, 150 million years working on their melodies & harmonies. No human music could ever come near. Humans appropriated music & song from birds, & then wiped […]

Read More ON THE BLIP – HUMAN GEOLOGY & THE PERSPECTIVE OF SUPRAHISTORICAL MATERIALISM.

55 years this week since Ali refused the Vietnam draft. He did so knowing he faced the ruination of his career & the possibility of a long jail sentence. He recieved a four year suspension at the height of his physical prime, sacrificing much glory & untold millions to show solidarity with people whose names […]

Read More MUHAMMED ALI & SHANNON WARPORT

Click link for a free album of soundscaped Yeat’s. For Poetry Day Ireland! Click link below. https://davelordan.bandcamp.com/album/into-the-twilight

Read More INTO THE TWILIGHT #PoetryDayIRL #newdirections

6 poem sampler from the forthcoming collection Medium, available soon in audio/e-book/print formats dlordan@hotmail.com to interview me or book a reading Praise for previous books: ‘Compelling & overwhelmingly brilliant – A masterpiece’ Thomas McCarthy, Aosdana ‘There are some of his poems I love to sing’ Christy Moore The most original, incendiary and impassioned voice writing […]

Read More BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES – poetry sampler #PoetryDayIrl

“Before you enter the city of Skibbereen, the tall new Poorhouse presents itself to the eye of the traveller; of the common model, being a bastard-Gothic edifice, with a profusion of cottage-ornée (is cottage masculine or feminine in French?)—of cottage-orné roofs, and pinnacles, and insolent-looking stacks of chimneys. It is built for 900 people, but […]

Read More NOTES ON THE LITERATURE OF HOMELESSNESS – TIME FOR THE BARDS TO RETURN TO THE BATTLEFIELD  #NationalPoetryMonth #PoemsforHomes #HomesForAll #HousingCrisis #Homelessness

I am for immediate legalisation & for a combination of nationalised & grant aided small-scale private & local producers, to ramp up cannabis production in Ireland, making prority use of marginal land in depressed rural areas. This will keep families on the land in vital areas for the conservation of our rural heritage, & provide […]

Read More Cannabis. My 4/20 Manifesto!

When, following the big win- the real biggie-uncountable zeros after his name-he stands his friends an endless reservoir of stoutand decrees every churcha twenty-four-hour shebeen abolishes retching and reflux and coughsplugs the ancient flow of anal bleedingdecrees the removal of sleep from the brain and promises the people that noneneed ever stop drinking and smoking […]

Read More THE MAN WITH NO MASK #antifascist

The impressive fact that a quarter of all 69 year olds in the state registered for their Covid19 vaccination within an hour of the registration portal opening is very good news in terms of the state of mass conciousness in Ireland. It illustrates that the anti-science arguments of the far-right & of their media enablers […]

Read More THE UTTER FAILURE OF THE IRISH FAR RIGHT’s PANDEMIC STRATEGY.

If good people beat bad people,it serves them right; if bad people beat good people,the good people achieve glory; if good people beat good people,it is a misunderstanding; without beatings,you do not get acquainted; with beatings you no longer needto beat them. Translation of a quote from Jianq Qinq, who was Mao Zedong’s 4th Wife […]

Read More JIANG QING’s ADVICE TO YOUNG COMMUNISTS

The arrival of Philip in Hell triggered some troubling reflections on the part of the real Prince on the increasingly urgent matters of categorization & accommodation in his majestic domain. Charlemagne had already said Philip was not welcome in the section reserved for European royalty & their associated bad bastards. ‘No-one can stand the cnut […]

Read More RENOVATIONS IN HELL. #princephillip #tw

It happened as of a sudden that The Fish got totally fed up of the horizontal plane & decided trying out being An Upright Fish for a while. & if you saw The Upright Fish as it funnelled itself up from the utterdark of the lower depths through ever brightening ultramarine towards the open air […]

Read More THE UPRIGHT FISH

Out of the seven signatories to The Proclamation, five were Bardic artists. Pearse, Mcdonogh, Plunkett were poets of the bookish sort, Connolly wrote performance poems & ballads, Ceannt was a renowned on the Uillean Pipes – an instrument of poetic miltancy if ever there were one. It is no wonder then that The Proclamation is […]

Read More THE RISING OF THE BARDS

Return is the demonic opposite of resurrection. Whereas resurrection transforms, return repeats. Not once or twice, but indefinitely in a process which demeans existence – first as tragedy, second as farce, thereafter over & over as farcical tragedy. Human existence, as lived by humans in our day, is a succession of phenomenon we have already […]

Read More RETURN OR RESURRECTION?

WHAT happened to Christ on Holy Saturday as he lay dead between The Crucifixion & The Resurrection is known as The Harrowing of Hell. Christ descends into Hell, where all dead pre-christian humans since the beginning of time have been stored, to divide them into the damned and the saved and lead the Righteous in […]

Read More THE HARROWING OF HELL – why Panti Bliss is going to Heaven, & David Quinn is not.

There are four deaths recounted in the Bible in the story of Good Friday. Jesus own death. The implied death’s of Good & Bad, the two flanking thieves. & the suicide of Judas. Judas betrayed Jesus to the Jewish Priests & Elders on Spy Wednesday in return for 30 pieces of silver, & on Holy […]

Read More GOOD FRIDAY’S OTHER MARTYR – JUDAS

Read More Sara’s Badges #TransDayOfVisibility

A young Irish woman is making a name for herself as a sassy online outlaw in wake of endangering lives for a prolonged period on the motorways around Dublin. The tabloids have gone along with & encouraged the fast-developing show, & she is making a few bob out of an onlyfans account. Nowhere near as […]

Read More THE BALLAD OF THE OUTLAW GEMMA GREENE

“There were fairies in Ireland then, & I grew up there, thinking that fairy life was something that was inseparable from Irish life. Fairy stories would be told that were to me & to those around me as much realities of Irish life as are the stories that I now read in books called Realities […]

Read More THE VIRGIN MARY & THE WRECK OF THE GALLEON

The other day I passed an unfortunate person I used to know a few years ago on the live arts scene. They didnt recognise me or pretended not to – i don’t mind that, i often do that myself if I’m not in the form for people. Sometimes I wish everybody else would do it […]

Read More FAILURE AS AN ART FORM OF OUR TIMES

It is 1984 & I am 9 & in a small bedroom in my neighborhood belonging to my hero, alongside him & a few of his friends, who are all about 13. My hero is great at soccer & fighting, though he sometimes loses at both & always has a purple eye or a scabby […]

Read More THE BLOODING #childhood #initiation

Finished wankin.Out of everythin.Tossin & turnin& goofin on the Ket. Let’s go find a targeton the internet. Me ex detests me.Me kids won’t see me.Friends with no-one,& everyone wants me bet. Let’s go spray me brainshiton the internet. I do me own research.Click click click til I find what hurts,launch it on me profilelike a […]

Read More BOLLOCKSONARO AKA THE PAYTRIOT AKA THE RUBBER GOON AKA KETMAN21. #worldantiracismday