Words on Fire
(i.m Bobby Sands who began Hunger Strike against the British Empire on March 1st 1981.) This is my body my pale body my hairy body my stinking body my body with its moles and leaks my body with its scars and sores and sweats my body with its itches and its aches my longing body […]
Read More THE HUNGER STRIKER SINGS HIS DEATH #bobbysandsFollowing on from current workshop with the designer Shane Sutton, Irish National Opera and the Civic are delighted to launch another series of weekly workshops taking place in March with the writer Dave Lordan. These workshops are perfect for any adults looking for something new and creative to try out in their evenings. Participation is […]
Read More FREE CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR ADULTS WITH THE CIVIC THEATRE AND THE IRISH NATIONAL OPERAOh it all might seem funny, between the exorcisms & the magic ointments, & to an extent it is. It’s funny but it’s also scary. It’s scary that the Examiner – normally the most trustworthy of the the Irish dailies – calls these gangsters nuns & refers to them as Sr in captions. In fact, […]
Read More Why are these walking chemical weapons allowed roam free in West Cork?Please find below pdf & word versions of my pamphlet On Being An Irish Working Class Writer Buy me a coffee @ paypal.me/DaveLordan Excerpt….. PART 1 On the same Easter Week of the 1916 rising, a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition was held in Dublin. Chaplin, well-known to be a socialist as well as the world’s […]
Read More On Being An Irish Working Class Writer – pamphletVOLUNTEER EDWARD O BRIEN AND THE HYPOCRISY OF PIRA COMMEMORATIONS. Following a campaign by Fine Gael and their media supporters, Sinn Fein have cancelled a commemoration for PIRA Volunteer Edward O Brien, who ‘accidentally’ suicide bombed a London Bus in 1994, killing himself and injuring several others. A massacre was narrowly avoided. There is simply […]
Read More VOLUNTEER EDWARD O BRIEN AND THE HYPOCRISY OF PIRA COMMEMORATIONS.NEW TEACHING ADVENTURE ❤️😊👇🏻 This morning I lead my first workshop of a six-week course in Storytelling & Local Folklore with Bray Area Partnership, which is free to participants as part of Co Wicklow’s Resilience program Stories & Lore keep alive what would otherwise irrevocably vanish from human memory & collective experience. This morning’s intro […]
Read More NEW TEACHING ADVENTUREAT OSCAR WILDE’S GRAVE Who stole the angel’s glory?Still, you’ve got the rarest grave in Pére Lachaise, Granite teeming with lipstick kisses,A shoal of petals in a mountain lake,A cloud burst of tropical fish,And taped to a withering rose there’s a note:Thank you for teaching me that I was good. I kiss the teacher tooFor […]
Read More AT OSCAR WILDE’s GRAVE #poetry #lgbtq #freedomBLACK TABLETS There are no black ones. There are speckled and striped, marbled and toned, stamped and engraved. There are yellows and purples and reds, whites and blues and maroons. Cylindrical greens, bullet shaped browns, blue UFO’s . Depending who’s asking the question I’ll call them the duchesses’ pearls, I’ll call them my coral medallions, […]
Read More BLACK TABLETS #meds #mentalillness #poetryHer name was Kate. She lived in Leap. She was rather posh. She had at least one horse. Horses are peculiar enough in that you find them at both ends of the social scale, kept by the highest & lowest orders of households. I had some friends in Clonakilty & around it who had horses, […]
Read More FIRST LOVE….#valentines #memoirThe hass came here by hair to this wee-poohlick of Earland by wine-air. Some har hangry. Some sleepings sand tart. Mostly iss they hokey. Edgar most older he iss the musical of Alicante and he play violin for the dead peoples in the cemetary See!! Iss true, why no? Iss really true really. See […]
Read More SPANISH ELEMENTARIES #TEFL #TEACHER #POETRYTmro the shakes on the laying of bricks& a smithereened mind no plus-pill will fix but now he’s Buddha x’ed with Aleister Crowley migrating spacetime, metamorphing the settee: blink it’s a longboat aflame on the Volga,blink again it’s a throne for an alien Pasha! Tmro is nothing but migraine and pukingand the lads all day […]
Read More THE SHAMAN OF CHARLESLAND #poem #drugsYes. I admit it. I’m one of those thunderin snowflakes You’re always gabbin on about. Sure, I’m only half a man Compared to you. I’m lightweight & I’m blown about All over the gaff. Fair enough. It’s as you say. No kind of warrior am I atall. I’’ll melt away in one degree of heat […]
Read More SNOWFLAKEA selection of recent Twitter posts showing the variety of what I do as a working poet. Writing, teaching, broadcasting, performing etc. Commissions welcome – if you need me for any of the above email dlordan@hotmail.com
Read More WHAT I DO AS A WORKING POETLORDAN’s LIT ON DISCORD I’ve set up a server on Discord to share, discuss, & teach literature & multimedia creativity. It’s a handier & more focused layout than Facebook & allows for higher quality participation. Invite link below – join in if you are interested. https://discord.gg/hwKnTTay
Read More LORDAN’s LIT on DISCORDToday is BANDCAMP FRIDAY, when all proceeds from albums and audiobooks go straight to the artist. Why not purchase and enjoy one or two of my soundscaped audiobooks, and contribute towards costs of making more! Choose from sci-fi, psychedelic memoir, & poetry with a diference…. check out my store here
Read More BANDCAMP FRIDAY #fiction #memoir #poetry #audiobooksAfter the hours retracingBloody Sunday’s route with thirty thousand,from the Creggan Height right down to the basin of the Foyle,through all those ordinary, downtrodden, every-streets to Free Derry Corner.After the speeches, the clapping, the marching bands, the mourning,the silence, the wind in the flags; after the names were joined-Derry, Palestine, Afghanistan-time came for five to […]
Read More DRIVING HOME FROM DERRY (2002)bloodysunday #derry #Palestine #neverforget #solidarityFran glimpses Mac the Handsome for the last time from a packed 145 moving, in fits and starts, through traffic-choked Donnybrook. A Spring afternoon in 2009; it has just stopped drizzling & to avoid gawking at the passengers opposite him, Fran sleeves the human moisture from the window and, to see what he can see, […]
Read More THE ONLY REAL IRISH POET IN DUBLIN #truestory #MurderCase #irishwriters #irishpoets #irishspokenwordI’m going to be working on an opera! The Irish National Opera is going to create the world’s first ‘Virtual Reality Community Opera’, scripted by 14-18 year olds. I’m running four workshops as part of the project, which will generate the bedrock of writing from which a libretto will then be refined. Open to 14-18 […]
Read More OPERA WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR 14-18 yosIn the midst of the chaos my father and his friends decided to set up a roadblock at the entrance to the estate. After a quarter of an hour the police came along but they were fired at and they retreated in no time. They came back an hour later with many reinforcements but my […]
Read More Street Party #socialcollapse #chaos #truestoryThe motorcyclists were the first to attack, just as it was getting dark, just as the bats were beginning to whirl out of their daytime redoubts in the woods, diving and wheeling like Stukas in the grounds. Often, in the past, when things had been different, a bat had flown in through a window or […]
Read More THE WRITERS RETREAT #truestory #scandalDEFINITION OF A RUNNER #truestory #irishtaliban #seizechurchproperty #motherandbabyhomes Do you know what A Runner is in Ireland, where I’m from, in the year that I was born? A Runner is what the other children call a child, a boy or a girl,who keeps trying to run awayfrom the institution where they are being held prisoner […]
Read More DEFINITION OF A RUNNER #churchabuse #catholictalibanPlease join me tmro evening at link below for a live online reading of poems on the theme of religious oppression in Ireland that I have written over the last 3 decades. https://fb.me/e/UDcM7UFA
Read More FOR THE TUAM BABIES #poetry“If you cannot find your way& you live nowhere each dayDig your roots and culture man”Benjamin Zepheniah, Roots & Culture Following their comprehensive victory over the Spanish-Irish Alliance at Kinsale in 1601, assisted by the traitor Earl Donogh O Brien, the Crown forces wished to press home their advantage & turn rout into annihilation. They […]
Read More EXTERMINATE THE HARPERS AND THE BARDS – HEATHER HUMPHREYS’ NEW DECREE“When the racist imperialist John Milton, who believed the Gaelic Irish to be subhuman, wrote in the introduction to his great blank verse poem Paradise Lost that ‘rhyme is the relic of a barbarous age’ he was inadvertently alerting us to the effect that formal elements of art are determined by the needs, structures, and […]
Read More Deep Dive into Creativity & Class!Most Irish people of mine & preceding generations have an abiding love for Jack Charlton. In an era when we were, as a people, downtrodden & directionless & still very much under the heel of the bishop & the gombeen, he gave the ordinary people of Ireland pride & fighting spirit & something unambigously heroic […]
Read More THE BEATINGS #jackcharlton #memoriesAs rulers & media, motivated by profit over people, continue efforts to downplay & distract from covid19 & brainwash us all into crowded shops, pubs, restaurants, public transport, schools & workplaces, it’s important that the rest of us take stock of the real & developing situation with the disease. 1) The spread of Covid19 is […]
Read More NOW IS THE WRONG TIME TO TRUST OUR RULERS – NOW IS THE TIME FOR MUTINYGoldman Sachs, the investment bankers/pirates, released a report yesterday showing that mandatory mask-wearing in the US would save at least 5% of US GDP because of the huge effect it would have on preventing transmission of Covid19. 5 per cent of GDP is a significant figure – it could make the difference between a total […]
Read More US RULING CLASS THROWING FAR-RIGHT ALLIES OVERBOARD SO THEY CAN STAY AFLOAT?Congratulations to my friend & comrade Eileen Ní Fhloinn on her appointment to the Seanad. It is long overdue that a Traveller held such a position in national politics. I know that Eileen will not only be a strong & fearless voice in representing Travellers, but on behalf of all the oppressed & exploited in […]
Read More GO ON EILEEN!!!!The original phony war was a period of relative calm & peace at the outbreak of WW11, between September 1939 & May 1940, when very little fighting was done. The impact of being at war was not felt by most people. Most people thought a peace deal would be worked out pretty soon & everything […]
Read More The Phony War Will Soon Be OverA new paper in Nature, written by a team of Irish based archaeologists using latest methods, has added immensely to our understanding of the monumental period in Irish pre-history. In Newgrange, built around 3200 years ago was buried a God-king, son of an incestous union, & member of a small elite which ruled Ireland for […]
Read More NEWGRANGE DISCOVERIES REWRITE LITERARY HISTORY TOOBack by popular demand, the legendary Words Allowed workshop for teenage writers returns to the festival in 2020 for the tenth year in a row. Please note that participants must be aged between 14 and 17 at the time of the workshop.Designed to build the creative confidence and expressive ability of teenagers with an interest […]
Read More ONLINE CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR TEENAGERS for €65The Arts are not considered important enough to have their own section in the programme for government. Instead they are included alongside Justice, Online Safety, & Sport in a section entitled ‘Mission: Building Stronger & Safer Communities’. Most artists, I presume, will be surprised that FFGREEN consider them in the same category as Judges, Prison […]
Read More GASLIGHTING FOR BEGINNERS – Some Remarks on the ARTS in The Programme For Government.For 15 million years or so the role of the Primate/Hominid Genus, of which Homo Sapiens is the latest & possibly last iteration, had one job to do on Planet Earth – to defecate often and widely. In the interlocking system that is the earthly biosphere, we & ancestors were meant to be a simple […]
Read More Poetry, Shit, & The Metabolic RiftIn America, as in so many other countries, police stations are sanctuaries for the worst kind of criminals, including a huge ammount of serially violent & serial-killer cops. In Ireland, for example, the main job of the Gardai for many decades was to kidnap the infants & children of the poor & of Travellers & […]
Read More THE AMERICAN RISING IS JUST AND ITS SUCCESS IS OUR SUCCESSHere’s my contribution to last nights campaigning meeting on the Arts hosted by People Before Profit, also featuring Emmett Kirwan, Jesse Jones, Alana Daly Mulligan, Bressie & others. Watch it at https://www.facebook.com/peopleb4profit/videos/1121761028216906/?vh=e&d=n
Read More STAND UP FOR THE ARTSLost Tribe of The Wicklow Mountains #1798 This week marks the 222nd anniversary of the great rising of the United Irishmen against the cruel & barbarous British Empire. This poem was inspired by events in the aftermath of our defeat, when a small group of Partisans took to the Wicklow Mountains to continue the struggle. […]
Read More Lost Tribe of The Wicklow Mountains #1798Snowflakes – A Poem by Dave Lordan Written after I got called a snowflake on the internet by some right wing troll. I was quite flattered, as of course a snowflake means a person with a conscience, but also it’s an insult that is usually thrown at people much younger than me! It’s such a […]
Read More SNOWFLAKESIt has taken Sinn Feīn 13 years to repent for a slur cast by a senior party official against a youngster who was beaten to death by a gang of bloodthirsty thugs. On the other leg, it has taken the FFG party, by way of their propaganda department in RTE, 13 years to uncover the […]
Read More No-one is smelling of roses. Everyone is smelling of corpses.The Black & Tans were part of an international phenomenon of right-wing and fascist governments using irregular & paramilitary forces against left wing people’s revolts all over Europe. In Italy these became Mussolini’s blackshirts. In Germany they became Hitler’s Brownshirts. They locked up the commies, the jews, the gays, the artists… The descendants of the […]
Read More HOW NOT TO BE A BLACK AND TAN TODAYChristy Moore’s sung version of my poem Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains, first released on the album Lily in 2016, features on the soundtrack of the new sports documentary- Coming Home – Ag Teacht Abhaile. “Paddy O’Leary was raised on a dairy farm in County Wexford, Ireland, and grew up playing on the local […]
Read More SOUNDTRACK OF THE WICKLOW MOUNTAINSAbove is the sad tale of two irish ‘natives’, long-ago broken into warring little pieces by poverty and oppression, verbally assaulting and inciting hatred against a person of colour going about their job. The bulk of the 150 or so strong fascist mob at the Dail last week was made up of people like these. […]
Read More THE IVORY COAST FREEDOM PARTY AT IT AGAIN“Poet Dave Lordan’s Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains was published over three years ago. I’ve been reading it again lately, and remembering the pleasure I felt at my first encounter with the work. It is serious material, beautifully finished and balanced. The poems are really compelling and overwhelmingly brilliant; a real talent from West […]
Read More THOMAS MCCARTHY OF AOSDANA REVIEWS MY POETRY