THIS SORRY SCHEME OF THINGS

THE POETRY OF ANTHONY WEIR

by

Frederik Wolff

Anthony Weir’s poems are different from any others written in English. There may be echoes of Yeats, Blake, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, perhaps even (faintly) of Donne and Swinburne, but he - a dedicated and lifelong Outsider, eschewing publishers, literary magazines all other Irish poets, and society in general - seems to be writing outside the tradition. There have been no dissident poets in Ireland until now.

Regarding himself as 'an atheist Untouchable, somewhere between Emily Dickinson, Nietzsche and William Blake' - and one of the last people in Ireland to heat his water for cooking and washing on a kettle over a fire - he claims that English poetry is dead. Not that it was ever exactly vibrant [he says], what with the clever less-than-profundities of Shakespeare, the arid sophistication of the pre-Romantics, and the risible posturings of the Romantics represented by a revered poem to a nightingale which in its second line denies that it is a bird. English poetry finally gave up the ghost in Eliot's Four Quartets, and the phenomenal success of 'Famous Séamus' Heaney is the numbingly-acceptable rattling of the same polished bones.

Perhaps the language – and tradition - that Weir should be writing in is Arabic or Persian. For his trenchancy recalls not only the great Omar Khayyám, who (along with Rilke and Yeats and the great Haiku-writers) is one of the greatest thinking poets of all time, but a great and noble Arabic tradition of dissent that few Westerners know about. Weir, as Entropic Poet is strikingly similar to the 10th century blind Syrian poet Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri – an intellectual, pessimist ascetic in the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, who despised most other poets because he considered them frivolous or fawning. This is the kind of correspondance which Vedic texts call Bandhu: a conjugation, a binding of concurring thought across the ages.

At the same time, Anthony Weir links up with the East European poets of the Cold War period. He refers, in Post-Millennium Maggot *, to his favourite modern poet, Vasko Popa, a Serb whose poetry is adult where modern English poetry is neotenous, self-regarding, frivolous, fawning, anecdotal and trivial. He is also impressed by post-war Finnish and Macedonian poetry, and quotes from the great exiled Romanian poet, Ion Caraion.

Although he has translated poetry from the Old Irish, his work has nothing to do with the self-indulgence of modern Irish writing, which he despises as "all crafty form and little content like the civilisation (98% smash-and-grab and 2% art) we are trapped in". He does not feel Irish, or even European, but Outsiderish, "ashamed to be human" – thus a 'transcendental-nihilist poet of entropy', a lone voice against the self-justification of the life-denying cultures that have overrun the world.

[*published in THE HELLS GOING ON, Dissident Editions 1999.]

___________

TWO POEMS
translated from the Arabic of
Abu al-'Alá' Al-Ma'arri
(Blind Baghdadi, 973-1057)
by Anthony Weir

BILL OF SALE

God help us! we've all sold our integrity
to a business in the hands of the Receiver.
We don't count as creditors to be paid
and will inevitably be cheated.
Yet, given a choice between this swindling enterprise
and a state of authenticity
we'd always back corruption over honesty.

THE COMET

The comet: has it nerves in its long tail
- or is it dead ? Is it sentient
or just a flaming rock ?

Some believe in life beyond the grave
while others say we're only bits of meat.

I'd say: let's not be ugly beings,
let's do what's beautiful -
for I know that Consciousness
near death repents its wizened skin
which started out so fresh - and may do so again.

Selfportrait-metamorphoto by Anthony Weir