Icarus Vol. 67 No. 2 (2017)

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ICARUS MAGAZINE

VOLUME LXVII, ISSUE II

Trinity College Dublin © Trinity Publications 2017

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EDITORIAL ‘I thought I was supposed to reveal the shit from which, for me, poetry emerges.

But then I just got kinda tired of seeing the shit from which poetry emerges.

Hopefully no one will read this and, therefore, get the wrong idea.’

— Fred Moten ‘Whatever is going to happen is already happening Some people prefer “the interior monologue” I like to beat people up’ — Ted Berrigan An old teacher of mine once quoted Marianne Moore to us in a workshop— ‘poetry— I, too, dislike it.’ I think he meant it. I, personally, like poetry, all of it except the bad stuff. A question of emergence, or emergency. To stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. In Mos Def’s ‘Fear Not of Man’, he tells the listener that ‘people talk about hip hop like it’s some giant livin’ in the hillside / we are hip hop’. People, I think, talk about poetry like that too. Following Def, when you ask yourself where poetry’s going, ask yourself instead, ‘where am I going?’

I guess I have a very limited faith in art to address politics, the artistic act as inherently politically valuable. It’s not quietism; there’s barbarism, like Lyn Hejinian talks about, and there are political poems like Baraka writes them. Whose slow suicide is this anyway? ‘God give me the wisdom to know the difference.’

To adapt Jonathan Williams— ‘I’m not so hot / on art I just love / to make it’.

Thanks to Gill and Sean for the help. Thanks to Furry Lewis. Hi, Nath.

— Leo Dunsker & Will Fleming Icarus 67.2 (Hilary 2017) is proud to present work from both Catherine Walsh and Trevor Joyce. Icarus acknowledges Trinity Publications and the School of English, as well as Gemini International Ltd, for making this issue possible.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, Mandela House, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

Information concerning copyright and permissions can be found at www [dot] icarusmagazine [dot] com.

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CHIEF EDITORS

Leo Dunsker & Will Fleming EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER

Sean Pierson

Gillian Murtagh

CONTENTS Cover: Inseparable

Lost Lake

by NATHANAËL ROMAN

by KATE PALLIS

FEATURED: TREVOR JOYCE

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Auto Intro i.m. t.r.

Voluble Volucrary

One for Upstairs

4

by ALICE JORGENSEN

6

from final context

7

by ED SALLEY

The Coldest Place in the World

lost n found

by JAMES O’HARA

by ED SALLEY

9

#4, watertight

by MOLLY-MAY O’LEARY

12

27

From the Notebook of Once Modern Times

by CIARÁN O’ROURKE

31

The Beautiful Untogether

14

FEATURED: CATHERINE WALSH 34

Sometimes I Steal am Steel

material clusters

16

FEATURED: CATHERINE WALSH 41

I describe tv 17

W/O All of My Friends

by SEAN PIERSON

25

by SOPHIE FITZPATRICK

Collection

by SEAN PIERSON

24

show me any body

by MICHAEL NAGHTEN SHANKS 13

by SEAN PIERSON

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by BENJAMIN KEATINGE

My Doppelgängers

by JENNY MORAN

21

In the City of Ghosts 11

782386283795

by MOLLY-MAY O’LEARY

20

18

Contributors

44

Editors

47

Back Matter

48

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Auto Intro FEATURED: TREVOR JOYCE Some things that I heard or read as a child fascinated me, and I was told they were poems. Not long after that I began trying to write my own poetry, and I soon met a poet five years older than me, who made me read Ezra Pound, and Yeats, and T.S. Eliot.

What I wrote then was very conventional, but I gathered that poetry had a greater prestige than any other mode of writing, and that poets were licenced to do things with language that are not permitted to others.

Being a logical youth, I deduced from this that real poetry was important, and could do things ordinary language couldn’t. Otherwise, what reason could there be for such prestige and such licence? But I knew that I wasn’t either using or earning such privileges.

After about ten years, and a few books, I found myself bored and baffled, so I gave up publishing, and instead studied mathematics and worked in industry as a systems analyst.

It wasn’t for nothing that James Joyce and Samuel Beckett chose not to live in Ireland. Since its formation, that Republic been a country ostensibly without socialism, without sex, atheism, or active women, and without very much in the line of culture. It was an easy country to live in if you colluded in the elision of history, and in the fictions of religion and nationalism.

I wanted to write a poetry that could reach beyond those convenient facades, and that could have a formal complexity like that of the great English and Irish poets of the seventeenth century, and of the classical Chinese poetry I had begun to read.

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I resumed publishing with the volume, stone floods, in 1995. The following year, I was introduced to the “Alternative Poetry” movement at a conference in the USA, where I met Tom Raworth, along with many other anglophone poets who were not doing the conventional thing. At the beginning of January 2000, I gave up work as a systems analyst, and became a full-time poet.

I don’t like explaining what I do as a poet, because I don’t fully understand it myself. Often, I find that what I’ve said is wrong or only part of the truth, so I prefer always to let the poetry make its own way, and take care of itself. But since I now, very happily, find myself in the position of addressing a group of proven poetry lovers, to whom my work is entirely unfamiliar, it seems only polite to make some effort to bridge that gap.

My general tendency is to work at or just beyond the limit of my understanding. I compose or collect, modify, and combine words, phrases, sentences, lines, until I feel that the whole has crashed through from being merely fragments to being a meaningful utterance. If that meaning moves or engages me, then the work is complete; if it leaves me cold, then I ruin it again, removing, changing, and adding material until that first meaning is lost and another emerges, and then check again whether it works for me. This, as a mode of composition, I learned from the work of Paul Klee, whose stated aim was not to reproduce the visible, but to make visible.

One other thing which leaves my work at variance with most mainstream poetry is that I tend not to recognize the conventional boundaries which parse the everyday world. Instead of a world of definite objects populated by clearly drawn individuals, I choose to represent a world in which the ‘lines of force’ are as clearly delineated as the objects and agents they connect.

I choose, also, to trust my meaning to poetic form rather than to explicit statement. For me, then, it seems that my poetry should work like music, which can be received with pleasure, or at least interest, even though its explicit meaning may be obscure. If the themes are sufficiently memorable and well-articulated, however, I trust that meaning may later emerge from within the work.

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i.m. t.r. as if it had worn a furrow in the ver tical air down a narrow channel in the light a sweet cold rope played out seem ingly inces santly till now it’s gone bright ness he aled the on ly scar rem embrance

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Voluble Volucrary some then set about biting culls biting biting of their scouts their scouts sealed within a tenement room and it set out with battered bedsteads and some blankets both and too for roost several rickety old chairs which would not hurt to lose and there would strike would strike then cease to be a spell nervous always in the evening after dark would they return for fear in ordinary excess of light should any smoak them any smoak them out and so they lodged a great way distant off in busy parts where they made free in crepuscule with fond custodians and murmured mortimer soft mortimer the sleeping king to fright take food then from our hands they did and fingers touching shoulders heads and rifling goods and then they would insert themselves in such activities as cooking meals piano learning bathing and conversing long by phone spontaneously so we talked and whistled them and gestured kissing fingers snapped some practiced hard and uttered out new phrases every day and longer longer yet the mate of one dying it so reduced them both to otherwise for fear that they alone no male by them be brought to any scrape and they murmured more which laid down another layer of difficulty yet insetting characteristic sounds of other animates and even of machines

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most striking was their tendency to simulate continuous talk with mimicked phrases though odd single words as hi or fond good-bye were sounded still all phrases often recombined giving at times effect of a changed sense as one say that said frequently we’ll see you later and I’ll see you soon soon culled to just we’ll see and like a parent stern another hearing many times basic research basic research it iterated it but spliced with such other well-lovèd syllables as so basic research it’s true I guess that’s right

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The Coldest Place in the World

by JAMES O’HARA My car was always left running by mistake however was that I turned it off in the coldest place in the world In a town that had in safety been carried forth by the diamond trade after the collapse of the empire a place where the people are still magnificently dressed Stranded I ate frozen horse flesh with elbow macaroni in the company of a most kind and generous family At the pole of cold my legs being gripped in an environment that was exhausting where in their halos of Artic fur I found the women beautiful My saliva would freeze into needles and draw blood from its pricks on my lips my breath mist was heavy as of smoke cold and laborious would take hold

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The people here do not have a wounded pride It is hard to make friendships with those who are in haste with mitts to their faces and with so many who are drunk Going to the bathroom does take a dash burying the dead requires fire to warm the soil I tried to cook a meal that I knew well as a thank you but I did not know where to find basil There are no vegetables here and work informs eating habits which is often reindeer soup and hot black tea In the place which in its language means warm springs where the fish spend the winters in unfrozen water Summer eventually comes I was told

Note: Thank you to Christian Storm.

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#4, watertight

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782386283795

by MOLLY-MAY O’LEARY

Metals and Treasures Buried Underground Differentiate Ferrous and Nonferrous Tone Signals Adjustable Sensitivity, Adjustable Discrimination Submergible Search Coil

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My Doppelgängers

by MICHAEL NAGHTEN SHANKS

My doppelgängers are armed with fantasies like Pac-Man with his Ghosts.

My doppelgängers sashay through busy city streets, steering clear of slowerpaced pedestrians the way politicians avoid questions. My doppelgängers share some of my friends. My doppelgängers buy couscous from organic markets — not because they like it, but because it’s expensive — leaving it in the staffroom fridge, unopened and past its use-by date. My doppelgängers trade petty tit for tat tweets about the moderate successes of their short story collections.

My doppelgängers tag themselves the shark in online photos showing them swimming with dolphins. My doppelgängers make goo-goo noises into their baby’s pram. My doppelgängers tell some of the same lies I do. My doppelgängers went joyriding in 2002 and accidentally killed a woman. My doppelgängers enjoy rainy days when, as a short person, the pleasure of being a menace with an umbrella is as satisfying as the wobble of a well-made jelly. My doppelgängers are in a happy and mutually supportive loving relationship. My doppelgängers are cheating and waiting to get caught. My doppelgängers have stopped reading, carefully placed the book of poems back onto the shelf of the bookstore, sipped their takeaway coffee, walked over to the second-floor window and admired the unseasonable snow. My doppelgängers tell me to get out more. My doppelgängers tell me to get out, refusing to acknowledge our resemblance.

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Collection

by JENNY MORAN

for Laura McCormack I heard there were no graveyards outside the mausoleums picture-women perfect in silk and wooden dreams.

RIP is for the civilised man when the things of things he kept he leaves to cover the top of the scrapheap.

He once said there were no graveyards outside the mausoleums.

He was yelling it over the screaming: over and under and ‘round the dead belles, but ding, ding, ding these bells are ringing, the flesh-made roads of sin are speaking.

They say: There are no graveyards outside the mausoleums but it rings and it rings and you still hear the screams, all the RIPs voicing over the pleas, the dead, dead, dead, dead ringing.

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Once, you tried to block your ears deep that your manicure stabbed the drum, but you still heard the music weeping.

So you clogged some more and bled some more of the stream that would never clot, and clog-no-clot clog-no-clot because it’s not your blood you live on.

You snuck out, then, dictionary in tow, to visit the mound of the ringing.

You were going to translate sound muffled by packets of old spines and new-frayed made in China.

You knew there were words you didn’t understand underneath all the furniture you owned; the chromium corrosion of baby pictures, sparkling felt.

Everything you drowned in “belonged to someone else”.

I found you dead in rubbish outside a mausoleum, under a grid of unprised, red hangers – not beautiful, not grotesque but quite still altogether – walked away to the time of a faint, growing ringing.

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Sometimes I Steal am Steel

by SEAN PIERSON last night you called me hireling i just now found the definition of the word; i’d like to abdicate the title i’d like you to run circles around me until we form a perfect union of which in which by which i mean we can extol do you know what a love letter is? because my body is made of amorous lead it expels phpshaw when i wake up i am occasionally from Wichita i am occasionally from the city within my state where & when i learned to be the copyist, i installed an atrium in my room so i could see the ceiling; last night some guy in grey cotton called your laconics industrious and beautiful. last words are a currency that can’t be burnt this is the closest to coinage i’ll ever come—you’re circumscribed by velvet.

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I describe tv

by SEAN PIERSON I am my somnambulant procession I do not understand in that or this for which I cannot provide a definition—a skill I lied about in my application for the position of spelling bee judge—I’m so tried tired from watching sports when I am asleep the weather is temperate when I am famous I die because I lose the ability to speak when we’re 30 we’ll keep our babies I’m not a good listener when I marry I ought to marry in a school in a dining hall with lecterns and busts and pre-cooked lasagne cooked by my mother’s mother forty years before

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W/O All of My Friends

by SEAN PIERSON

Malice eats the sickly sweet pears {whole, saccharine} I reach you behind each line behind spaces. I read text all day I read intent.

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Intent readings of myself-other-man. His sweet windblown twigs and various crucis hemmed by whited tiles laid where malice was soot.

I wash myself to become clean. I turn my nose on which sits the pince-nez of another into a crow.

I rewash myself prone.

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Lost Lake

by KATE PALLIS every home will cave into the water on this lake fall apart in the dark undercurrent of the shallows abandoned houses will remain without the will to break its tempting to think that there has been a mistake that houses don’t break, with building codes to follow every home will cave into the water on this lake when the winds carry decisions most homes have to make empty windows shake, but are safe from being swallowed abandoned houses will remain without the will to break half-rotted houses will become prime real estate even with asbestos lurking in the splintered shadows still, every home will cave into the water on this lake the houses with swollen doors and expansion joints that ache their fevers boarded up to suffocate the space, not to wallow these abandoned houses will remain without the will to break left in this barren landscape, a nightmare in its wake I will cave into the water, leave myself, a body hollow abandoned houses will remain without the will to break every home will cave into the water on this lake

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One for Upstairs

by ALICE JORGENSEN The AHIMSA committee (All-Humanity Interstellar Mission Steering Association) carefully discussed how they would communicate their aims both to the international community on earth and to unknown civilisations beyond the stars. This was not principally a scientific mission, though it would carry instruments and transmit observations back to waiting labs in Florida, Paris and Cologne. Instead, this was a beautiful, quixotic attempt to reach out beyond the confines of our planet to whoever out there might be ready to know us, at whatever unimaginable distance of years. Artists, thinkers and makers would offer their contributions to encapsulate, or at least sample, the beauty humanity could achieve.

“And representation,” said the Chairperson, “full representation is very important.” There was a murmur of agreement. “There’s a terrible danger the human race we project will be only the rich, white, male, straight, western human race. We have to seek out representatives of minorities. We must give them a voice.”

The resolution was passed and the Chief Administrative Officer assigned a number of her staff to the task of finding suitable people. They were to be given simple recording devices. Into those devices they could record whatever they wanted - songs, stories, or merely the sounds of their world. The technology was to be utterly transparent: easy to record into, even easier to play back. After all, the committee didn’t know how similar extra-terrestrial sound equipment would be to our own.

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One who received a device was a homeless man called Jeff. Jeff was white, male, straight and western, but he was poor. And he was lonely: he’d been on the street fifteen years, and he’d seen friends die and he’d learned to keep his counsel. He knew where the police moved you on and where the best place to stash things was and which charities to avoid because they only wanted to take you over. He wondered about selling the device for drink – he didn’t do drugs, never had, a stupid vice that he’d never stoop to – but instead he decided to tell it his life story.

So he told it about his childhood, and his mom who’d struggled by on two jobs and a backbone of steel; his marriage, which had broken up when he lost his job; his house, which he’d lost when he lost his marriage; his room in a lodging house, which he’d never been properly able to pay for; his mate Sean, who’d taken care of him those first months on the streets and then been kicked in the head by some drunks and died in the corridor at ER; his mate Terence, who was a dude, the funniest guy alive, knew every trick in the book, could sell a man his own wallet and get paid extra for sheer charm, who’d disappeared one day, God knew where to. And he talked about the pain he got in his chest now and the cough at night and how you stayed warm with newspapers. And he recited the poem his mom had taught him, the one he’d never forgotten, about the Road Less Travelled By, and hell he’d done a lot of travelling on that road, none more. And when the smart lady came back with her straightened hair and her iPhone 7 he gave her the device and was glad that, at last, he had a voice and someone was going to listen.

The recordings were collected together and placed in a beautifully designed chrome box in the centre of the capsule. The schedule was tight – the process of gathering the materials had been slower and more inconvenient than expected – and a plan to duplicate all the data for a section of the AHIMSA website was quietly shelved. The rocket was launched at 07:31 on November 4th, 2016, to great acclaim. And it ascended into space and made its way into a billion billion miles of silence.

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from final context

by ED SALLEY ( for Coinboy)

[...] the night you left i dreamt i fought an ex’s dad like they do in the UFC as i dragged him down to earth in a chokehold thru drool he spat familiar words of wisdom “There’s no such thing as a free gaff.” as if i’d soon forget it

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lost n found

by ED SALLEY at the ballet in bootcuts you criminals can keep yr fucking trees red razzle gotta hook in my mouth an ordinary dragon tho smoke breeds bad taste abusing a lack of honest substance another casualty of causal mindsets chase hair o th dog with trail of slug days spent painting golden things maize mam called me a catholic ratios aside it was all too much i demand trial by tractor chicken

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In the City of Ghosts

by BENJAMIN KEATINGE For Estela Eaton

There was sunlight on the esplanade And coffee – Greek or Turkish – Miracles of fish and retsina In covered cafés, fresh as pine.

We roamed in a Sunday of wonder.

The gold-green aura of Eastern rites Made the churches green, compassing, it seemed, The stranger’s crescent moon, or candelabra. *** ‘Salonika is beautiful, and Greek,’ I said, ‘But you are living in a city of ghosts.’

My friend, the waiter, is not convinced, The ghosts, he says, have all gone home! ***

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This blithe assurance was lying all about The older city, which we had come to view, Sensing the other, within the new.

But spaces here had long been filled With chosen artefacts in crisp museums And nothing faltered as we walked along The broken ramparts of old Solun. *** What trembling ghost now might plead his case To resurrect the shadows of his spectred race?

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show me any body

by SOPHIE FITZPATRICK

i don’t know how to hide that I don’t know how aeroplanes work. i have several regrets

Lately I’ve wanted bad things to happen to me an awful lot. For example, yesterday whilst lolling on the couch I contemplated life if none of my family returned home. Then today, I thought about what I would be like if I was diagnosed with cancer, thinking about every moment like how I would be in hospital then fall asleep on the phone because I was so weak. This type of morbid fantasy isn’t unusual for me. I want bad things to happen to me. I have to remind myself that I’m grateful for such an easy life. I think I want pity or something. Mostly something to distract from a recent mistake, an excuse from it sort of. An escape from facing something that’s my fault by experiencing something that isn’t

Your partner might die soon, you might have a stroke and all you can do is literally wait it out. This is true for all people, but for me it’s a longer wait and I have purpose and achievements […]

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Bitter man who wonders what is the point of his vocabulary if he can’t even use it to communicate with people?

What’s 3 more weeks, 2 more sentences of convincing?

I usually imagine a different song without its drums over it from 00:07 Whatev Kevin I’m actually waiting for someone to deplete my smugness by physically hurting me.

Dick Going to Career Guidance person today. Who knows what he will say. I’ll probably take the test and he’ll be like ‘you idiot’

Okay that wasn’t the point admittedly. So Heree we Goooo Do I like him?

Undecided Could I like him? […] earlier today i had the red and white blanket over my head and i couldn’t breathe properly but i also couldn’t move at all so i couldn’t lift it off me and i was just sitting there wondering what to do trying to will myself to move but

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it wouldn’t work. i don’t know if that actually happened or if it was a dream, but i think if it actually happened then i would have been more panicked about the possibility of dying, which seemed quite huge at that point. so yeah slave morality and consequentialism. i don’t know if i will be functioning tomorrow […] how can you sit around for hours doing this i guess you just go crazy maybe i will type everything i know tonight or maybe i will do that tomorrow is my mind buzzing or is it just a hive mind i feel really inadaquate i wasn’t going about an inferiority complex i hate when other people have worlds tat im not in and i feel like they are in all of my worlds, or that my worlds are just shit. gahhh i don’t even know if i can cope with it. i need to get back my superiority complex but not be obvious about it.

i ate before the aftermath. beef club gets rough sex built on the stools they made themselves if i push someone out of me i might go for gold. my teeth are bad. i think i gave birth to a black hole. the green man moans when his dog walks itself come here to me now I’ll never hear the end of it I’m so embarrassed 29

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Moon I cycle too !!

Hope I don’t end up bitter in my future or anyone else’s. It’s okay I will just kill her i felt betrayed in seminar 7, radio movie star 4.21 skeevy geezer. This is love and now it is not love. mugs. Essay docs. being and time and guts There comes a point when you realise you’re not a kid anymore and you can’t just be eating chocolate all the time -dad

Am I sitting down now Am I sitting down yet

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From the Notebook of Once Modern Times

by CIARÁN O’ROURKE (After Rubén Darío, 1867-1916)

Stay long enough in one place, – dark-haired at morning, on a binge-blue road, or still and slow as roses growing in the rose-lit garden (your heart as slow), in the gust of a doorframe, giving way to dust and wind and the weight you put to it, in the sweat of lust, in the rain of love, at the beating rim of an eagle’s song, – and the silhouettes you’d thought were ghosts assemble, the metaphors invade your flesh and vision, translate the air to shallow breath …

Stay long enough in one place and shadows lengthen, rumours sift,

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and the hawk you watched for all your life is neither bird nor prey, but here it sings: life’s last hornet, dark as death, honing close to kiss or sting. ~ The only way is to know by motion: to feel, to fuck, to have no faith, or nothing but.

To expand your lungs, extend the list of lips desired, dreams possessed (bow down to Whitman, resist the rest).

To believe the brain outlives the skull: the shell retains the ocean’s soul.

To embark, embibe, envision verse,

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collect it all in laughter first.

To praise the symbol with the fact – the swan in a drift of evening air, guest of the world and flying west.

To understand: that the man alone and stranded, howling to the sun, has always been your future, and you must move on.

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The Beautiful Untogether FEATURED: CATHERINE WALSH

there is a yellow notebook if I could keep this simple there might be a process which could figure a task sorted out from those items in a spatially-exempt refraction of implication

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whether these individuals condition an association may be that spiral set in its positive linear control for efficacy removed a wonderful sense of attention common among colour orientation

these details as neuropsychological rotations spanning any diagnosis you’re ill city defined vouched the expense of accuracy what observed information develops as consensus ayed forwards frames of investigation

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what underlies one question may be attempted in varying how to adjust flourishing as honesty compelling explorations meaning a dream which is singular spirited replete abstracts answers beyond ready ethics

tell me a friend a lover can be so vivid you compel those resolute pictures motion with no looking back can a. detheologise feeling his readers keep seeing themselves over anew in vividly compelling

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write me a song these questions of truce or trust this is not how you deal with bullies girls you are rapid reconcile yourself to making the most of place awareness what pragmaticism get carried splintered to sparkings

or aspects of themselves prefer not to dance to go out and play hey you can collapse a sentence phrases beat residually to points of advance no such meanings imagined is intent requisite to a mechanical skill

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instead there are happenings merging those existences to responsive patternings unable to say or see this way forward as angles bouncing ineptly reading the iconic smell of smoke meanders as neatly mapping dispersion

anyone can see derived from style any one memory banks on changes through history hitting the reflected spot progressing tensilely in as unmeasured an enervation or exacerbation of what stymied or stunned coalescence

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experience beyond my lips is slipped in later there is a lovely component of identification distinct as those complex abilities removed from all impression to subtyping in one altered perspective lose your bearings

i can hear i can sense i can hear a sequence of sensations in an instant linking experience these accidents struck through non-chronology keep going disillusionment may be inherited responsibly

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it was a day a thing called may be faded restorations to enchantment memorabilia a whisper completely wipes you out of your obligation or does it become imagination in a ritual setting apart

remove the vine least those heavy bunches take the roof down politics shift realms as advice coercion expediency civic business withdraws its horns completely life as power (and apparently this line is a deliberate omission)

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the material clusters FEATURED: CATHERINE WALSH In Form: the material clusters stranger friction art reach opening an art in culture wars co-opting enthusiasm passion in persistence practice in culture wars shrilling dogma (credo en animatus) insistence culture wars affect run amok amassing prevalences in an emotional illiteracy of emphatic impact in culture wars a prevailing arts evocation authenticates practices in culture wars the clothesline the office desk the bus stop punctuate as interactions connect in culture wars art practising what may be lived spontaneously 41

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each approach an abuttement retrieval foray in culture wars how art walks actually tells us only that it’s capable of throwing shapes or being thrown in culture wars art opens unimagined yet imaginable apertures of enjoyable communicative interaction nexus of interpretation occurrences in which experience as affect experienced in culture wars out culture wars change how thoughts on the line followed skew simply the line taken the mechanics of holding in perspective as an act of comparison assembled through shifting experiential contextual meshes of affect that is fact to the person (in which) 42

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and that result as derivations of phenomena consequent to actions made or occurred which is sense that sensory input rides those pathways nudges steers prevents avoids catches lets go as actions of decision making through a mesh of affective information choice in culture wars barbaric ties dissemble Barbaric Tales assemble drum beat rolls the everyday is not cognizant of the extraordinary in ways which are immediately comprehensible then note disparities find how it is to be uncomfortable in a way which does not connote problem solving productivity a stretch as to work with language in an everyday world made hyper-visual is to have to recognise the antecedent lines from which we draw out of which we grow away from which we move towards which we muse in order to return that sense of attention which is question and answer asking as making art 43

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CONTRIBUTORS FEATURED: TREVOR JOYCE Trevor Joyce was born in Dublin in 1947, and lived in Mary Street and Church Street near the city centre until 1967. In that year he co-founded New Writers’ Press with Michael Smith, his own first book being NWP’s first publication. The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (NWP, 1976) was his last publication for almost twenty years, during which he took up work as a systems analyst in industry. Two volumes, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (NWP, 2001), and What’s in Store (NWP/The Gig, 2007) collect his poetry up to that period. His Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2014) was followed by two translations from the English of Edmund Spenser, Rome’s Wreck (Cusp Books, 2014) and Fastness (Miami University Press, forthcoming). He is a member of Aosdána. Delivered on receiving the 2016 N.C. Kaser Prize for Poetry, Lana, South Tyrol, Feb 6th 2017. His ‘Auto Intro’ published in this issue was initially delivered on the occasion of his receiving the 2016 N.C. Kaser Prize for Poetry, Lana, South Tyrol, Feb 6th 2017.

FEATURED: CATHERINE WALSH Catherine Walsh was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1964, has spent some time living and working abroad, and currently lives in Limerick. She co-edits hardPressed Poetry with Billy Mills. Her books include: Macula (Red Wheelbarrow Press, Dublin: 1986); The Ca Pater Pillar Thing and More Besides (hardPressed Poetry, Dublin, 1986); Making Tents (hardPressed Poetry, Dublin, 1987); Short Stories (North & South, Twickenham and Wakefield, 1989); Pitch (Pig Press, Durham, 1994); Idir Eatortha & Making Tents (Invisible Books, London, 1996); City West (Shearsman, Exeter, 2005); Optic Verve: A Commentary (Shearsman, Exeter, 2009) and Astonished Birds; Carla, Jane, Bob and James (hardPressed Poetry, Limerick 2012). Her work is included in a number of anthologies, including the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2001) and No Soy Tu Musa (Ediciones Torremozas, Madrid, 2008), a bilingual Spanish/ English anthology of Irish women poets. A section from ‘Barbaric Tales’ appears in the spring/summer 2016 edition of the Irish University Review. She was Holloway Lecturer on the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley for 2012/13 and was a research fellow with the Digital Humanities cluster at An Foras Feasa, Maynooth University during 2014/2015. Her books ‘Barbaric Tales’ and ‘The Beautiful Untogether’ are forthcoming.

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CONTRIBUTORS SOPHIE FITZPATRICK Sophie doesn’t spend her days. Sophie doesn’t believe that one can spend. Folks, Sophie doesn’t believe anything at all.

ALICE JORGENSEN Alice Jorgensen lectures on Old and Middle English literature in the School of English, TCD. She has recently begun to write short fiction.

BENJAMIN KEATINGE Benjamin Keatinge is a graduate of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. From 2007 to 2016 he worked as Assistant/Associate Professor of British and Irish Literature at South East European University, Macedonia and he has traveled widely in the Balkans. His poetry has previously appeared in College Green and Kore Broadsheets.

JENNY MORAN Jenny Moran is a fourth year student of English and co-editor of nemesis, Trinity’s feminist journal.

JAMES O’HARA James Desmond O’Hara is from the Kingdom of Kerry. His career has been as a hotelier and business manager in Ireland and in the US. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

MOLLY-MAY O’LEARY Molly is a fourth-year philosophy student of Trinity College.

CIARÁN O’ROURKE Ciarán is a PhD student with the School of English. His poetry has appeared in a number of publications, including Earthlines, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, The Moth, The Well Review, and others.

KATE PALLIS Kate Pallis is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Trin45

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CONTRIBUTORS ity College, Dublin. Pallis received a Bachelor’s degree in English, Writing, and Irish Studies from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, where she worked as an Editor and Feature Writer for The Bridge: A Student Journal of Fine Arts.

MICHAEL NAGHTEN SHANKS Michael Naghten Shanks lives in Dublin. In 2016 he was named as one of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Rising Generation’ poets and was shortlisted for the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Year of the Ingénue (Eyewear Publishing, 2015) is his debut poetry pamphlet.

NATHANAËL ROMAN Still here.

ED SALLEY Ed Salley is a fourth year student of English. One third of Twitter handle @jakelatent on Twitter dot com. S/o to Fionn, the best third of Twitter handle @jakelatent on Twitter dot com.

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EDITORS Editor: LEO DUNSKER Leo Dunsker is a fourth-year student in the School of English at Trinity. He is also a Chair of the DU Metaphysical Society and the rector of Cave Writings.

He was born and raised in upstate New York. He is presently writing a dissertation on Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Editor: WILL FLEMING Will Fleming is a fourth-year student of English and philosophy. His poetry has appeared in Icarus, Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and The Quill. He is from Wicklow.

Public Relations Officer: GILLIAN MURTAGH Gillian Murtagh is a fourth-year student of English. She is also editor of Radius in The University Times. She is from Dublin.

Editorial Assitant: SEAN PIERSON Sean Pierson is a first-year student of English and philosophy. He once worked as a marketing intern at a medical device company and his work has appeared in Icarus and the short-lived Pocketknife. He is from Massachusetts.

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Find us online at: www [dot] icarusmagazine [dot] com

We are currently in the process of expanding our archival consciousness. If you are a former editor yourself (or believe that you might have some useful information or interesting stories), please reach out to Leo at: icarusmagarchive [at] gmail [dot] com

© Paul Masson

‘You know what I did this morning?

I played the voice of a toy. [...] I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.’

(Orson Welles)

Thanks again to Nath.

Happy Birthday, Peanuts.

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