Some Poetry

To me, poetry is like painting. Some of my poems are spontaneous, relying on my "intuition" for scan and rhyme (or not). Most of the poetry in the Wings of Gallanis is carefully crafted. Again, I was heavily influenced by Gaelic and Icelandic poetics in my construction of these poems. I wanted to stay away from traditional modes of English poetry, usually written in iambs with comfortable rhyming structures. In school, I could not have imagined the richness of "foreign" poetics, given that we were so limited by a bad study of ballads and sonnets.

I find the most appealing poetry (to write) is filled with alliteration and internal rhyme. The Celts were obsessed with internal alliteration almost to a fault. Again, I wish to stress that when I felt that meaning was more important than decoration, I always went with meaning. I wear poetics loosely and I do not feel my countrymen's obsession with the perfect form.

The challenge with this poem was first in the nature of Bradán, the Salmon. Many of the animals featured in the series come with a history of riddling, yet the salmon was the Gaelic image of wisdom, namely the wisdom of Druids. Legend has people eating of the flesh of a salmon who ate the nuts of a hazel tree and acquiring the language of beasts and a knowledge of all things. Because the salmon migrates to the ocean, I wanted to convey the myth of moving through different layers of knowledge. I also made the salmon into a form of ecstatic or poetical knowledge, knowledge in the form of riddles and question answers.

In form, I wanted to give the allusion to swimming. You will note that my alliteration is oral, so in reading keep it in mind that the poem is meant to be read aloud. In reading it aloud, one can hear the alliteration take on a phonetic form in the laterals and voiced w's and r's. In much of my poetry I also favor the trochee form rather than the iambic. The next poem is also written in more trochee, yet it has a very different feeling.

First of all, the poem is about the wolf, Faol. The wolf is one of the most complex creatures in all of Western Mythology. I gave my wolf the honor of having the song for the Queen of Night, the moon, interwoven into his own song. Faol was my first attempt at condemning much of Western religion that is anti-mother in the sense of being anti-change and anti-blood, death, life.

A critical part of the poem is the use of Gaelic twist rhyme, as I call it, where the internal part of a sentence gets turned upon itself to emphasize both differences and similarities in meanings. This poem has very complex rhyming and alliteration with many low and round vowels to mimic wolf howling. I have also tried to stay with words that were very Anglo-Saxon sounding. Anglo-Saxon uses many more long vowels than most other European languages. Danish is the only other language that still uses as many long and flat vowels. American English is an older form of English that uses this ancient phonetic.

Again, a working knowledge of phonetics allows the poet to use assonance in a way that rings "true" such as the rhyme "bonds of death" with "bones are shred" in which the long consonant in "bones" sounds worse than the soft "d" and unvoiced "th".

Whereas Bradán represents the riddles of the esoteric, Verres represents the riddle of love, romantic love, to be exact. Celtic mythology is filled with "impossible love" songs where one of the lovers must perform impossible tasks to rescue the loved one. This is often the case in Fairy Tales and in many legends. The riddle is always psychological, disguised in "real" tasks. Often the lover has changed shape or vanished from the visible world or has been captivated by a superior lover such as the Queen of Faerie.

This poem is traditional, based on a form of riddle song popular in the British Isles and in the folk music of the Southeastern United States. The Celtic quality is not in its structure, but rather in the Celtic love of mixed emotions where death and love are often intertwined. It is as if, as a people, the Celts celebrated the impossibility of anything being straight- forward, as if all paths were twisted around fate and ambivalence.

This poem's structure is a spiral, a traditional symbol of earth goddesses. If it were to be sung aloud, the tune would be the eerie Gaelic dissonance most accurately portrayed by the bagpipes. Again, this song was sung during the height of a celebration to mix the joy of the occasion with a memory of tragedy. For the Celts, death was a demonstration like most other displays from a people who loved the theatre of life. There was nothing more important to a Celt than the way in which things were done, dying as well.

This poem is an inside-out poem. The quality of Fiach's questioning is not searching as in the salmon, nor in facing the impossibility of the psyche like the boar, but in the raven's obsession with picking everything apart. Fiach is the ability to see through deception, yet also to wallow in self-deceit. He is mirrors and distortion and the desire to mix things around so that some other pattern might emerge. However, as the poem alludes, much of this questioning leads to a sacrifice of the ability to sense reality, a tearing apart which often tears up the world around.

The strangest thing that I have found in Celtic literature is the lullaby that is filled with appalling violence. A traditional song both among White Trash and American Slaves was a song called "All the Pretty Little Ponies" which talks about ravens picking out the eyes of the pretty horses that the mother wants to give her child. Gaelic lullabys such as this make "Rock a Bye Baby" seem very innocent. This poem was based on a traditional Christmas lullaby where the mother sings of King Herod killing all the children. The song was so disturbing it made me think of the twisted way in which some people survive slavery in making that pain part of their tenderness. I have adapted the lyrics to the circumstances of the story.

This song appeals to the jaded senses of the Hawthorn in the book. She sees that the test of life is in the ability to keep the spirit free under oppressive circumstances. It's structure is traditional English with the abcb rhyming pattern common to English song. The only songwriter I have known that was this good at the juxtaposition of lyric and melody was Warren Zevon who mixed upbeat pop tunes with very perverse lyrics.

This was the most difficult poem I have ever written. I was impressed by the band, U2, because of Bono's traditional Gaelic internal word play style in songs like "The Longest Day". When I trained my chorus to do this poem for performance, it was difficult for them to understand that the meaning of the poem was in the phrasing as it was spoken.

As a language, Gaelic is most suited for this kind of "inside out" rhyming. Even more than Anglo-Saxon, German, and Latin, the Gaelic languages rely on word roots with hundreds of prefixes and suffixes to modify the form of the word without altering the basic gist. In order to mimic this style, I have taken advantage of English homonyms and older meanings to English words. This poem also demonstrates my love of Anglo-Saxon poetry where gerund verbs charge the poem with a rhythm that sounds very Nordic. I wanted to blend the two cultures into a poem that would have the charging sound of the Saga and the mental dexterity of the Ollamh.

Carria is the red stag, also known as the elk or wapiti in the United States. I have used many words for different deer in this poem to play with the images created from the synonyms of these words. This poem was my first attempt to do justice to a book Tracy and I read called "Thinking Animals" by Shepherd. Our languages are filled with references to animals and modified by their behaviors. The stag for me represented a horizon, and a call against domestication. In this poem, a deer hunt becomes a dirge for the loss of wilderness due to the expansion of man and the need for agriculture over woodlands.

The structure of this poem is the closest I have come to the playful Welsh form called cynghanedd. It is the most Gaelic of my poems and shows the structure of the Celtic mind in which all things are a mirror distorted. The earthy and playful nature of this poem is a tribute to Osar, the bear. The nature of this poem is that it is meant to be read aloud in a round as in the "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" song so that one can hear the mirror effect in the different positions of the phrases such as hearing "roots of rock, routes unlock" or "bones of earth, stones of birth, bones of strife, stones of life." In performance, it would be whispered by part of the chorus and shouted by some in alternation so that the entire poem was fragmented into ways that would have different meanings depending on what was heard at which time.

This poem was done in Trochee to emphasize the non-Latinate nature of the subject. Again, I have tried to stay to the Anglo-Saxon words with the hard vowels for strength. Because of the way in which eagles have always represented war and nationality in the West, I have used those images to reinforce the berserker nature of Havoc. Berserkers are a common image to Nordic and Gaelic mythology though not as common in the South.

The berserker image for the Celts was a particularly bloody one. Cuchulain was so far gone in berserker mode that he killed his best friend. Unlike many people, I do not see this image as unhealthy in its appropriate context. Yet, it is an image that belongs to a warrior society or a nomadic society and not to settled, agrarian communities where its destructive nature does not protect. As a teenager, I was suicidal and wrote the following line in my German class "Ich bin blind mit der Licht meiner Auferstehung, und ich kann nicht mein Tod sehen!", which, for me, explained how I felt about life. I think that all martyrs had this ability to be blinded by the glory of resurrection and ignorant of death. Most battle hymns now are dedicated to the tribe or the nation and not to individual martyrdom or victory. I sometimes think that there is something lost that we cannot allow ourselves the madness of bloodlust in some way that would be a balm to the spirit.

The last line is a "magical" phrase a way of rewriting one's entire personality when one is in a rut and after one has destroyed one's life to get out of that rut. The nature of the book is such that the heroine is pulled deeper and deeper into a psychological whirlpool until she is spat out at the end. This phrase is what it means to have been burned alive or "spat out". It is a way of transcending the psyche and creating a new mind, the offering of most spiritual studies.