2POETRYMICHAELMCALORAN
"The Zero Eye"
with poetry and poets, with art, it seems a veritable probability that in the "produce" of this art there are personal developments going on which affect this art and making it a "developmental" "work in progress" even if the art executed, in this instance fullblooded poetry, is expressed in a continuous stream of perfectly formed and inherently consistent isles of artistry, expression, expulsion even exorcism orexoticism. this is in my opinion highly the case with michael mcaloran's poetry and the steady produce of high quality immanently consistent collections of poems resulting also subsequently in this striking chromatography of books.
the books share one feature described in many styles,which alone already make michael mc aloran's poetry a force to reckon with not only within the cusp of irish poetry but perhaps even more so,within the modern poetry as how it is entamized now, how it is organized around its topics now. so one thing in particular stands out: these are not the books of "vanillapoetry" and heidi on the mountain with her fucking granddad. this is endtime-poetry, perhaps in a tradition of malcolm lowry, beckett, céline but set in the time now making his poetry the answer to those eschatologist writers and ending-searching at the desolatest fields, nonfields, destitute endworlds andinnersarcophagous' milieus, interstitial, physical and highly visceral"nonplaces" postmortem or roaming around and across these places of contemporary history of death or even actual stretches of societal death hidden either or ignored, nevertheless unoverseeable fields of dereliction, disdirection, despair and an empty searching to what is known to be nonexistent. (as persistent and where this doesn't matter anymore in absinthe hazes.)
the paradox now is that there always has been developmental aspects also in michael's work. yet within an "endpoetry" at some moment it is really "the end of the line" which seems to be exhumed. i believe this is the case with "The Zero Eye", michael’s latest, last, offering of intensely stylized poems. it is the culmination of the necropolises of our endworld, but not, as some perhaps safetywise would like to believe, a world to which we are still heading. no it is the world here and now and formulated with such acuitry, that it is unsettling and disturbing but also bizarrely veritable and an astute societal portrayal of the posthuman world into which our world NOW has grown.
what i want to do now still, kind of concluding, is to insert two pieces of text out of "The Zero Eye"and then come with a kind of stupefying conclusion of which i thought i would never have the fucking analysant brains for it to reach such lucid clustering contrivance: compression.
"the zero eye will ever be/ shape without form/ density of rind branded by sting of inescapable/ rots through unto/ until/ yet given to silence/ scatters breath of nocturne/ clasp of weight/ says nothing more of I/ clean break/ subtlety of design/ crafted in absence of voice/ here or there a nothing of/ claimed yet ever-fading/ yet silenced ever/ still yet/ breakage upon rock of night’s forever distance"
"in shed of flame that was never light/ better yes never of it/ bite down upon edge-solace of/ trade anguish for oblivion/ yet naught as ever/final as/ less or more/ ever was/ remnants of then or nothing left to/ no/ no breaking forth/ no never again/ let it/ decline of/ yes death of/ yet will not/ clings unto/ as if to say/ the zero eye/un-scattered none/ falls unto or not/ utters without pause for/"
here we have the writing on the edge, a topic of the specific poetic genre michael excells in yet not as "a trick" or "device" or profitist mock or vaudeville stance. it is clear this poetry really costs blood, sweat and tears and more modern perhaps alcohol, cocaine and cigarettes or otherwise psychotrope substances even if it is abstinence bc there is a kind of feverish absolvence at stake, at the stake.
then we reach the apex really and it is as well the description of infinity or and the aggregate of finality as a machine whirring at the surf but also in our fucking cities and the rests of our woods, here is an antiheidicodex as what adorno would call: "index falsii",or: the whole is unreal, as in a philosophical treatise on the world, as he also cited somene, in "minima moralia": "life doesn't live", here we have reached the endworld, ok possibly (alone much much further) beckett’s "endgame". our posthuman society as we see buster keaton hustle around in a prepostcataclysmic world in beckett’s film "film" where all is debris, hubris, rest of nazist capitalist communist autark islamist zelous clinical murderous afterclang of our sociuses: it is happened. this is what we wanted.
"(…text no/ this is not a/ this is not/ not this/ is/ a text not/ not this a/this/ this is not text/ not a text/ text not this is not/ a/ this/not a/ text no this is a/ not a text this/ this is not a/ this not a text is/ this not a/ not a this a text is not/ not/ not this/ a text/not a/ text not this is a/ this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text/ text no this is not a/ text no/ a text not this/ not a/ text not this is not a…ad infinitum)."
then to recapture a question somewhere in the beginning of this microdissertation:
"how is this poetry going to develop?". what L'Wren Scott did today, hanging herself in her million bucks NY home, friend of mick jagger, fashion designer, apparently with millions in debt. she hung on a silken shawl on the doorknob. she phoned her assistant around ten: "can you come?". and this assistant found her...after such radical theory poetry no, rather a poetry of abnegation more than absolvence.
michael and i had a conversation just now where he said:
"we need something, yes..."
--Aad de Gids
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