Words on Fire
Margaret Atwood says that the origins of the writing personality lie in childhood, in a disposition to prefer living in the world of dreams and daydreams to living in the real world. Whether this is because one simply loves dreaming, or because your real world is too difficult a place, does not seem to matter […]
Read More OUTSIDE ALL CURRICULUMS – Teaching Teenagers Creative WritingI’m a middle-aged man born nearly 50 years ago who has been a socialist since my early teens. So I’m about a quarter the age of socialism itself. I have a lot of rural rebel heritage. Lordan’s played an important role in the Irish revolution’s most successful flying column – The 3rd West Cork Brigade, […]
Read More SOCIALISM AND COLLAPSEGreat to be invited to participate in the The Frederick Douglass Wexford Civil Rights Festival 2021 alongside Senator Eileen Flynn, Deirdre Wadding & Sindy Joyce & Jimi Cullen Mighty program – take a peek! And wexford is very cool it you are looking for a mid-winter trip! I will be performing some poetry on the […]
Read More HEADING TO WEXICO TO BREAK SOME CHAINSI 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. Compared to the imprisoned Palestinian people themselves and to those taking part in flotillas and other perilous anti-apartheid activities in Palestine our contribution and risk […]
Read More AN ARTIST’S PLEDGE TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL #standupforsally #BoycottApartheid #sallyrooneyThree traditionally anti-Irish and pro-apartheid UK propaganda outlets – the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times – have launched a co-ordinated campaign this morning against Irish novelist Sally Rooney due to her support for the widespread cultural boycott of Apartheid Israel – a stand she shares with thousands of other Irish artists of all stripes. […]
Read More STAND UP FOR SALLY ROONEY #BoycottApartheidThe pre-budget submissions from the opposition parties are somewhat pythonesque. They promise to fulfil all our needs and desires, and barely stop short of offering free space flights to the unemployed. The fewer seats you have in the Dáil and the less likely you are to ever hold power, the more you promise. That’s the […]
Read More PRE-BUDGET BULLSHIT FROM THE LEFT #salvagenotgrowthI wrote a novel once, back in 2009, when I lived in Mantova in Northern Italy. I had to do it to find out if i could write them, if i was a novelist as well as a poet. It took 9 months, maybe ten months, solid writing, maybe 20 hrs a week on avg. […]
Read More ON MY FAILURE AS A NOVELISTSinn Fein at 32%, ahead of FG at 22% & FF at 20% Solidarity-PBP are at 2% It is hard to see Sinn Fein going anywhere but up – all they have to do is sit back & enjoy the own-goal thrashing FFG will no doubt continue to give themselves. The prospect of a Sinn […]
Read More NOTES ON THE LATEST IRISH ELECTORAL POLL – implications for the far left.The late Michael McClure, a prolific American poet in the visionary tradition involved with The Beats, spent much of his time researching pre-history and writing about our fallen world in the light of pre-history. He was ahead of his time with regard to the critique of civilisation. Back in the 70s, during the first wave […]
Read More Have humans been bred for extinction? #apocalypsebiologyPlease find above e-book version of my latest collection Medium. Free to download but donations appreciated and you can send money here: paypal.me/DaveLordan Small number of signed, limited run hardcopies available – dlordan@hotmail.com Audiobook at xmas For permissions e-mail dlordan@hotmail.com
Read More Medium e-book #poetry #freebookPerforming my Lost Tribe of The Wicklow Mountains in Parnell Square as part of The Frank Harte Singing Festival, which this year celebrated the rebel songs of County Wicklow in a new singing movie called ‘Beyond the Pale’ Celebrating Wicklow’s history in traditional song. For more great Irish poems and songs performed by a whole […]
Read More BEYOND THE PALE – AT THE FRANK HARTE SINGING FESTIVALMedium, my collection published by Frontline Press over the summer, has sold out its print run, aside from a couple of dozen held back for readings. Thanks everybody who bought it! E-book up this week. An audio version coming soon. In the meantime check-out my many audiobooks here: https://davelordan.bandcamp.com Frontline Press’s next project will be […]
Read More Creativity Update #poetry #memoir #drama #documentary #songOver the years I have done hundreds of free gigs for left-wing orgs, homeless charities including serial rapist Anthony Flynn’s ICHH, campaign groups, squats, occupations etc, and roped dozens of other poets into doing same. I’ve done free gigs for trots, tankies, anarchists, republicans, ecosocialists. The whole lot, because I support the working class left […]
Read More CHARITY NO MORE? THE PREDICAMENT OF SAINT ANTHONY FLYNN #Anthonyflynn20 years after September 11th, it is becoming clearer than ever that the attacks were a huge strategic success for Al-Qaeda. They spectacularly accelerated both the decline of America power in the wide-world, and the political polarisation within the US itself. Two decades of bloody defeats in Iraq & Afghanistan has shown the world that […]
Read More SAVE YOUR TEARS FOR TMROS ATROCITIES INSTEAD #9eleven #September11The Arctic dissolves, quicker and quicker, in the human heatwave, hotter and hotter. This is a catastrophe for Arctic animals before it is one for humans, the last of the animals, the most animal animal of them all. As a result, an Arctic walrus, hu-named Wally, loses its bearings, and turns up in West Cork, […]
Read More THE RUBBERNECKERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD #WallyTheWalrus #westcork #climatecatastropheIf there’s one thing miracles are good for, it’s business. Without miracles, the likes of Knock, Fatima, & Lourdes would be run-down small towns at best. Perhaps they would have disappeared altogether, as many similiar little places have over the centuries – when they had no miracles to keep them going. Instead, they are popular […]
Read More THE MOVING STATUES AND THE MIRACLE OF THE CHIP VAN #virginmary #feastoftheassumptionSix week online (zoom) autumn evening course, kicking off Tuesday 21st of September. The course is a deep-dive into the history & variety of world poetry, with an emphasis on making poetry a beneficial part of your life. It is for anyone interested in poetry whether or not they write it & consists of live […]
Read More NEW AUTUMN EVENING COURSE – EXPLORING POETRYLast week the Irish Government, through the office of the Attorney General, changed the law retrospectively in order to get its second-in-command, already under criminal investigation for corruption, off the hook. Whatever moral authority FFG had left has now vanished. We are clearly ruled by criminals and criminal accomplices. But their political control of the […]
Read More WITH FFG IN FOR THE LONG HAUL, WHAT NOW FOR THE LEFT?I met a 50 year old lady last week who wasn’t taking the vaccine because ‘it would take away my freedom’. Now, I do believe people should be free to choose to take the vaccine or not take it. I also believe people should be free to stab themselves in the eye with a knitting […]
Read More THE FREEDOM OF EEJITS #FarRight #antivaxx #freedom( In memory of Carlo Giuliani, murdered by paramilitary police on speed) #CarloGiuliani #genoa2001 #acab A hundred yards behind usthe Mediterranean heaves its wasteagainst a limestone barricade.Condoms, nappies, bottle tops,diesel cans and tamponsrising to mock our gas stung eyeslike the unlearned lessons of past mistakes. Rumours sicken our panic,spreading through the campas fast as microbesthrough […]
Read More Convergence Centre Genoa. Friday 21 July 2001 #CarloGiuliani #genoa2001 #acabI’m interviewed by Aisling Meath in The Echo about ‘Revelations’, my contribution to The 32, the smash hit anthology of Irish Working Class Voices. Revelations is about my experience of the Clonakilty Busking Festival of 1988, when a convoy of New Age Travellers turned up to liberate us from the priests! Pretty wide-ranging interview, including […]
Read More Ain’t no poor relation…#The32 #workingclassliterature“He used to play the old melodeon and the fiddle in the old days and he used to cater for all sorts of hooleys and American Wakes and the fair at Spancil Hill and he went to America…” “Robbie McMahon, traditional singer and storyteller, on Michael Considine.” Michael Considine was born at home in Spancil […]
Read More IT BEING ON THE 23rd of JUNE – notes on Michael Considine. #spancilhillFATHERS.Human families come in many varieties, not only in the here & now, but over the millennia too. The idea of a ‘Father’ has not always been with us, & what it is and does when it is around was and is various.Some anthropologists think – & it makes sense to me – that for […]
Read More FathersDA, THE MELODEON for Joe Lordan Of quavers and keys Da haven’t a notion But still an’all he plays the melodeon. He can white-puddin the moon Beamish the ocean Fry seventeen eggs and play the melodeon. Ignorin gales and floods and coastal erosion He climbs up Saint Fin Barre’s and plays the melodeon. He hammers […]
Read More DA, THE MELODEON #FathersDayKARL & 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 Hell20 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 #resiliencedeadline 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 #darkageHappy #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 1News 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 #virginmaryOne 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 HUMANITYWhen I was a monk or whatever it is that I was for a breeze in the big wooded days out the west there was only one book which I portioned aloud to myself on a Sunday, cud-chewed the rest of the week. For art and characters I lay on the moss-swaddled slab of a […]
Read More WHEN I WAS A MONK #AntiCiv #silence #God #nature(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 #palestinianlivesmatterONE 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 #Darknessintolight2021THE 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 #hipsterbullshitFOCUS 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 #clichéinversionAs 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 #NewBookToday 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 #SectarianismDue 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 WARPORTClick 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